Journey to the End of the Night (46 page)

Which goes to show that we can't do without our pleasures for so much as a second, and that it's very hard to be really unhappy. Life is like that.

The grieving old woman and I parted outside the Galeries. She was on her way to Les Halles to unload carrots. She'd been plodding the vegetable trail and so had I, the same. But I was drawn to the Tarapout.[76] It's plunked down on the boulevard like a big luminous cake. And people come to it from all directions, in a frantic hurry, like grubs. They emerge from the night with wide-open eyes, all ready to stock up on images. The ecstasy that never ends. It's the same people as in the Métro. But here outside the Tarapout they're happy, same as in New York they scratch their bellies at the box office, secrete a little change, and rush, happy and resolute, into the glaring apertures. There was so much light on the people, on their movements, globes, and garlands of light, that it practically undressed them. You couldn't have talked about anything personal in that lobby, it was the exact opposite of night.

Rather dazed myself, I went to a cafe nearby. At the table next to mine, when I looked up, who should I see but Parapine, my onetime professor, having a beer with his dandruff and all. We get together. There have been big changes in his life. It takes him ten minutes to tell me about them. No laughing matter. Professor Jaunisset had been so mean to him, had so persecuted him that he, Parapine, had been obliged to leave, to resign, and give up his laboratory. And then the mothers of the little girls at the Lycée had waylaid him at the gates of the Institute and beaten him up. Scandal. Investigation. Trouble. At the last moment, thanks to an ambiguous advertisement in a medical journal, he had managed in the nick of time to secure another paltry means of support. Nothing much, of course, but down his alley and not fatiguing. The job was based on an ingenious application of Professor Baryton's recent theories concerning the role of the cinema in the education of cretin children. A significant step forward in the exploration of the unconscious. The latest thing. The talk of the town.

Parapine took his special patients to the Tarapout, because it was so modern. He picked them up at Baryton's rest home in the suburbs, and after the show took them back again?

dazed, glutted with visions, safe, happy, sound, and wonderfully modernized. That was all he had to do. Once they were seated in front of the screen they needed no supervision. A perfect audience. Everybody was happy. The same film ten times in a row would have delighted them. They were without memory. Continuous surprise?what a joy! Their families were delighted. So was Parapine. So was I. We chortled with well-being and drank beer after beer to celebrate the material reinstatement of Parapine in the modern world. We'd stay there, we decided, until two in the morning, until after the last show at the Tarapout, then we'd pick them up and hurry them back to Dr. Baryton's establishment at Vigny-surSeine by cab. A good deal. Delighted to see each other, we started talking just for the pleasure of exchanging fantasies, first about our travels and then about Napoleon, who cropped up in connection with Moncey on the Place Clichy. Everything becomes a pleasure when two people want nothing more than to get on together, because then you finally feel free. You forget your life, that is, you forget all about money.

One thing leading to another, we even thought up some funny things to say about Napoleon. Parapine knew the history of Napoleon well. It had fascinated him in secondary school back in Poland, he told me. Parapine had been properly educated, not like me. So Parapine told me that during the retreat from Russia Napoleon's generals had a hell of a time stopping him from going to Warsaw to get himself sucked off just once more by the Polonaise of his heart. That was Napoleon all over, even in the midst of the worst reverses and calamities. Absolutely irresponsible! Think of his Josephine! He was her eagle, but it made no difference! Ants in his pants, come hell and high water! If you've got a taste for wine and women, nothing can stop you. And we all have it, that's the sad part. That's all we think about! In the cradle, at the cafe, on the throne, in the toilet. Everywhere! Everywhere!

Our peckers! Napoleon or not! Cuckold or not! Pleasure first! To hell, says the Great Defeated One, with those four hundred thousand fanatics, emberesina'd[77] to the gills ... as long as old 'Polion gets one last squirt! What a swine! Never mind! Life is like that!

That's how everything ends. In absurdity. Long before the audience, the tyrant is bored with the play he's acting. When he's good and sick of secreting delirium for the benefit of the public, he goes and gets laid. When that happens, he's washed up. Destiny drops him in two seconds flat! His fans have no objection to his massacring them with might and main!

None whatever! That's nothing! They forgive him a hundred percent! What they won't forgive is when he starts boring them all of a sudden. Good work is tolerated only when hammed up! Epidemics stop only when the microbes get disgusted with their toxins. Robespierre was guillotined because he kept saying the same thing, and what did for Napoleon was over two years of Legion-of-Honor inflation. That lunatic's headache was having to supply half of sedentary Europe with a longing for adventure. An impossible job. It killed him.

Whereas the cinema, that new little factotum of our dreams, can be bought, hired for an hour or two like a prostitute.

Nowadays people are so bored that artists have been posted everywhere as a precaution. People are bored even in the houses where artists have been installed, with their overflow of emotion, their sincerities tumbling from floor to floor till the doors rattle. Each one of them is out to throb more outrageously and passionately, to abandon himself more intensely than his neighbor. Nowadays they decorate the crappers and slaughterhouses and pawnshops, and all that to entertain you, to cheer you up, to distract you from your Fate. Just plain living, what a drag! Life is a classroom, and boredom is the monitor, always keeping an eye on you, you have to look busy at all costs, busy with something fascinating, otherwise he comes and corrodes your brain. A day that's nothing more than a lapse of twenty-four hours is intolerable. Like it or not, a day should be one long, almost unbearable pleasure, one long coitus.

Disgusting thoughts of this kind come to you when you're crazed by necessity, when a desire for a thousand other things and places is squeezed into each one of your seconds. Robinson, too, in his way, was harried by the infinite before his accident, but now he was through, or so I thought.

Seeing we were quietly settled at the cafe, I talked, I told Parapine everything that had happened since our last meeting. He understood things, even my kind, and I confessed to him that I had broken my medical career by leaving Rancy so cavalierly. That was the only way to put it. It was no joke. Under the circumstances I couldn't dream of going back to Rancy. Parapine agreed.

While we were talking thus pleasantly, confessing as it were, the Tarapout had an intermission, and all in a heap the movie house musicians came over to the bistrot. So we all had a drink together. Parapine was well known to the musicians.

In the course of the conversation, it came out that a pasha was needed for the stage show. A silent part. The guy who'd played it before had left without notice. Yet it was a good part, and well paid. Not at all strenuous. And in addition, let's not forget, charmingly surrounded by a sumptuous flock of English dancing girls, thousands of precise and agile muscles. Just my line and just what I needed.

I smirked and smiled and waited for the manager to make me an offer. In other words, I applied for the job. Since it was late and they hadn't time to go looking for another actor at the Porte Saint-Martin,[78] the manager was delighted to have me right on the spot. It saved him shoe leather. Me too. He barely looked at me. In fact he took me then and there. And put me to work. It might have bothered them if I'd limped, but even there I'm not so sure ...

Penetrating the lovely warm padded basement of the Tarapout, I found a veritable hive of perfumed dressing rooms, where the English girls, while waiting for their number, passed the time romping suggestively and swearing. Overjoyed to have reconnected with my bread and butter, I hastened to make friends with my easy-going young colleagues. They welcomed me charmingly. Angels. Discreet angels. Besides, it's pleasant to be neither confessed nor despised. That's England for you.

The Tarapout was raking it in. Even backstage all was luxury, well-being, legs, lights, soaps, and sandwiches. I believe the sketch we appeared in was set in Turkestan. It was a pretext for choreographic monkeyshines, musical contortions, and violent drumming. My part was slight but essential. Puffed up with gold and silver, I had some difficulty at first in finding a place to stand in among so many unstable lamps and doodads, but I got used to it, and thus displayed to my best advantage, I had nothing to do but daydream under the opalescent spotlights.

For a good fifteen minutes twenty cockney bayaderes knocked themselves out with song and bacchanalian dance, supposedly to convince me of the reality of their charms. I'd have been satisfied with less. It seemed to me that going through that routine five times a day was a lot to expect of a poor girl. Those girls never weakened, they waggled their bottoms implacably, with the slightly boring energy typical of their race, the unflagging persistence of an ocean liner, plowing its way through endless seas ...

Why struggle, waiting is good enough, since everything is bound to end up in the street. Basically, only the street counts. Why deny it? It's waiting for us. One of these days we'll have to make up our minds and go down into the street, not one or two or three of us, but all. We stand on the brink, we simper and fuss, but never mind, the time will come. Interiors are no good. As soon as a door closes on a man, he begins to smell and everything he has on him smells too. Body and soul, he deteriorates. He rots. It serves us right if people stink. We should have looked after them. We should have taken them out, evicted them, exposed them to the air. All things that stink are indoors, they preen themselves, but they stink all the same.

Speaking of families, I know a pharmacist on the Avenue de Saint-Ouen who had a marvelous sign in his window, a lovely advertisement: One bottle (price three francs) will purge the whole family. Isn't that great! They all belch! ... and shit together, familywise. They hate one another's guts, the essence of home life, but no one complains because after all it's cheaper than living in a hotel.

Which brings us to hotels. A hotel is more unsettled, less pretentious than an apartment, you don't feel so guilty. The human race is never free from worry, and since the last judgment will take place in the street, it's obvious that in a hotel you won't have so far to go. Let the trumpeting angels come, we hotel dwellers will be the first to get there. In a hotel you try not to attract too much notice. It doesn't do a bit of good. As soon as you shout too loud or too often, they put their finger on you. Pretty soon, the way sound carries from room to room, you'll almost be afraid to piss in the washbasin. So naturally you improve your manners, the way officers do in the navy. Heaven and earth can start quaking from one minute to the next, we'll be prepared, it won't faze us, for already, just colliding in the hotel corridors, we beg and obtain pardon ten times a day.

I'd advise you to familiarize yourself with the toilet smell of everyone on your floor; it comes in handy. It's hard to harbor illusions at a rooms-by-the-month hotel. The guests don't cut much of a figure. They journey discreetly through life from day to day, the hotel is a ship that's rotting and full of holes, and they know it.

The one I moved to was patronized mostly by students from the provinces. As soon as you set foot on the stairs, it smelled of breakfast and old cigarette butts. At night you could recognize the place from a distance, because of the flame of gray light over the door and the gap-toothed gilt letters hanging from the balcony like an enormous dental plate. A monstrous lodging machine, distempered by sordid goings-on.

We'd pay one another visits from room to room. After years of crummy undertakings in the world of practical affairs, of so-called adventures, I was back again with students. Their desires were still the same, intense and putrid, neither more nor less insipid than in the old days when I'd left them. The people had changed, but the ideas were the same. They still went at more or less regular hours to the other end of the neighborhood to nibble bits of medicine, odds and ends of chemistry, a pill or two of law, and heaps of zoology. The war, in passing over their age group, hadn't changed a thing, and if out of sympathy you took an interest in their dreams, they led you straight to their fortieth birthday. These young men gave themselves twenty years, two hundred and forty months of dogged thrift, in which to achieve happiness.

Their notions of happiness and success were conventional images, but carefully drawn. They saw themselves at the last square, surrounded by a small but incomparably precious family. Yet they would seldom have looked at this family. What for? One thing a family isn't meant for is to be looked at. And a father's distinction and happiness consist in kissing his family ?his poetry?without ever looking at it.

By way of novelty, they'd have motored to Nice with their dowered bride and possibly have adopted the use of checks for making payments. As for the shameful reaches of the soul, they would no doubt have taken their wife to a whorehouse one evening. No more. The rest of their world would be shut up in their daily papers and guarded by the police. Staying at that flea-bitten hotel made my friends a trifle shameful and irritable for the moment. The young bourgeois student feels that he's being punished, and since it's taken for granted that he can't start saving yet, he drowns his sorrow in Bohemia and more Bohemia, in coffee-house despair.

At the beginning of each month we went through a short but acute fit of eroticism, the whole hotel shook with it. We washed our feet. An erotic expedition was arranged. Money orders arrived from the provinces, and that is what made up our minds. I might have obtained just as good coituses from my English chorus girls at the Tarapout, and free of charge at that, but thinking it over, I rejected the easy way because of the complications and the rotten jealous little pimps who were always hanging around backstage, waiting for the girls.