Journey to the End of the Night (56 page)

We of the staff always had to be on our guard when passing the lunatics in the corridors. Madmen are more prone to murder than ordinary people. We got into the habit of turning our backs to the wall when they passed, prepared to give them a good kick in the groin at the slightest suspicious move. Watching you out of the corners of their eyes, they pass on. Madness apart, we understood each other perfectly.

Baryton deplored the fact that none of us played chess. Just to please him, I had to take it up.

During the day he distinguished himself by an active petty chicanery that made life in his entourage extremely fatiguing. Every morning some new and abysmally practical idea would spring from his brain. One day he decided to replace our rolls of toilet paper with folded folios, and we were obliged to ponder and waste a whole week with contradictory resolutions. Finally we decided to wait for the sales at the department stores. The next futile bother had to do with flannel vests: should they be worn over or under the shirt? ... And what was the proper way to administer Epsom salts? ... Parapine evaded these subintellectual controversies by stubborn silence.

In the end, inspired by boredom, I told Baryton about many more adventures than my travels had ever provided. My stock was exhausted. From then on it was up to him to fill in the conversational vacuum with his niggling pros and cons. Of which there was no end. He had defeated me by exhaustion. And I had no such defense as Parapine's total indifference. In spite of myself I had to answer him. I couldn't hold myself back from bickering with him for hours on end about the relative merits of cocoa and coffee ... He was bewitching me with foolishness.

We'd start in again about something or other, about elastic stockings for varicose veins, about optimum faradic currents, or the treatment of cellulitis in the region of the elbow ... It got so that I'd jabber about anything under the sun in line with his tastes or recommendations, like a human talking machine ... He would keep abreast or just ahead of me in those infinitely idiotic meanderings. He saturated me with conversation for all eternity. When Parapine heard us embark on quibbles as long as the noodles we were eating, he'd guffaw to himself and sputter the boss's Bordeaux all over the tablecloth. But peace to the memory of Monsieur Baryton., the bastard. In the end I got rid of him. But what genius it took!

The frothier of the female patients entrusted to my care gave me a hell of a time ... When it wasn't cold showers, it was catheters ... Their little vices and perversions, their big apertures that always had to be kept clean ... One of our young inmates regularly earned me a reprimand from the boss ... She'd wreck the garden by pulling up flowers, that was her mania, and I didn't care for the boss's observations ...

"The betrothed," they called her, she was an Argentine, physically not bad at all, but as for her head, she had only one idea, she wanted to marry her father. One by one she picked all the flowers in the garden and stuck them in the big white veil that she wore day and night, wherever she went. Her family, who were religious fanatics, were dreadfully ashamed. They hid their daughter from the world and her idea with her. According to Baryton, she had succumbed to the absurdity of too strict and rigid an upbringing. The unbending morality of her parents had exploded in her head, so to speak.

At dusk we'd read the roll call at great length and send the boarders to their quarters. Then we'd make the rounds of the rooms, mostly to stop the more agitated ones from masturbating too frantically before falling asleep. You have to watch closely and keep them in check on Saturday night, because the families come visiting on Sunday and it's bad for the reputation of the establishment if they find the patients masturbated white. All that reminded me of Bébert and the antimasturbation syrup. I administered quantities of that syrup in Vigny. I had kept the formula and ended by believing in it. The concierge at the rest home kept a little candy shop with her husband, a big bruiser who was called in now and then when an inmate got violent.

And so life and the months went by, pleasantly enough all in all, and we'd have had nothing to complain about if Baryton hadn't suddenly conceived another of his big ideas. He had no doubt been wondering for quite some time if it mightn't be possible to make more and better use of me for the same money. And he finally found the answer. One day after lunch he came out with his idea. First he had them dish up a whole salad bowl full of my favorite dessert, strawberries and cream. Already my suspicions were aroused. And true enough, I had no sooner downed the last strawberry than he attacked.

"Ferdinand," he says. "I've been wondering if you mightn't consent to give my little girl Aimee a few English lessons ... What do you say? ... I know you have an excellent accent ... And in English a good accent is what counts, don't you think? ... You see, Ferdinand, without wishing to flatter you, I know how obliging you are ..." He had caught me off balance. "Why, certainly, Monsieur Baryton," I said. It was agreed then and there that I'd give Aimee her first English lesson the very next morning. And others followed, one after another, for weeks ...

Those English lessons marked the beginning of a thoroughly murky, dubious period, during which event followed event at a rhythm quite different from that of ordinary life. Baryton insisted on attending the lessons I gave his daughter, every one of them. In spite of my conscientious efforts, poor little Aimee made no headway in English, none at all. She had no interest whatever in discovering what all these new words might mean. In fact she wondered what we nasty men wanted of her that made us insist so on her remembering their meanings. She didn't cry, but she was very close to it. She'd have been a lot happier if we had left her alone to manage what little French she already knew, the difficulties and facilities of which were quite sufficient to keep her busy all her life. But her father didn't see it that way, not at all.

"You must grow up to be a modern young woman, my dear," he kept insisting. That was supposed to comfort her. "I, your father, have lost a good deal by not knowing enough English to handle my foreign patients ... Come come, don't cry, my darling! ... You'd do better to listen to Monsieur Bardamu, who's so patient, so kind, and when you're able to say 'the' with your tongue the way he has shown you, I'll buy you a beautiful nickel-plated bicycle ..."

But Aimée had no desire to say "the" or "enough," none whatever ... It was the boss who said "the" and "rough" in her place, and that wasn't all he learned in spite of his Bordeaux accent and his mania for logic, which is really no help in English. This went on for a month, two months. As the father's passion for learning English developed, Aimée had less and less need to struggle with the vowels. Baryton monopolized me. In fact he took up all my time, he never let me go, pumped all my English out of me. Since his room was next to mine, I could hear him first thing in the morning, converting his whole private life into English as he dressed.
"The coffee is black ... My shirt is white ... The garden is
green ... How are you today, Bardamu?"
he would shout through the partition. He soon acquired a taste for the most elliptical forms of the language.

With that perversion he took us a long way ... Once he had made contact with great literature, there was no stopping him ... After eight months of such abnormal progress, he had refashioned himself almost completely along Anglo-Saxon lines. In this way he managed to get me completely disgusted with him. Twice in a row.

Little by little we had come to leave little Aimée out of the conversation almost entirely, in other words, in peace. She was quite content to go back to her clouds. She'd never learn English, and that was that. Baryton would learn it all.

Winter returned, and with it Christmas. The travel agencies were advertising return trips to England at bargain prices ... While walking on the boulevards, accompanying Parapine to the movies, I'd notice those advertisements ... I even went in and asked about the prices. Then at table, in the course of the conversation, I dropped a word or two to Baryton. At first my bit of information didn't seem to interest him. He let it pass. I thought he'd forgotten all about it, but then one evening he himself brought it up and asked me to bring him a folder when I had a chance.

Between two English literature sessions, we often played Japanese billiards or
bouchon
in one of the isolation rooms situated just above the concierge's lodge and equipped with good iron bars.

Baryton excelled in games of skill. Parapine regularly challenged him to play for drinks and as regularly lost. We spent whole evenings in that improvised little game room, especially in the winter when it was raining, so as not to mess up the chief's big drawing rooms. Sometimes an excitable patient would be put in the same little room for observation, but not very often.

While Parapine and the boss were matching their skills at bouchon on the carpet or on the floor, I would amuse myself, if you want to call it that, trying to experience the same sensations as a prisoner in his cell. That was one sensation I had never known. If you really want to, you can work up friendly feelings toward the few people who pass through those suburban streets. At the end of the day, your heart goes out to the bit of movement created by the streetcars, bringing back docile clusters of office workers from Paris. Their débâcle ends at the first bend in the street, right after the grocery store. Then they flow quietly into the darkness. You've barely had time to count them. But Baryton seldom let me daydream at my leisure. In the middle of his game of
bouchon
,[92] he'd come to life with some ridiculous question.

"How do you say 'impossible' in English, Ferdinand?"

When it came to improving his English, he was insatiable. With every ounce of his native imbecility he aspired to perfection. No approximations or concessions for him. But then luckily events took a turn which brought me deliverance.

In the course of our readings in the history of England, I saw that he was losing some of his assurance and even the greater part of his optimism. As we were feeling our way into the Elizabethan poets, his mind and personality underwent great though imponderable changes. At first I found it hard to believe, but in the end I, like everyone else, was obliged to see Baryton as he had become, in truth a pitiful spectacle. His mind, formerly razoredged to the point of severity, had begun to wander, leading him into incredible, interminable digressions. Little by little, he developed the habit of daydreaming for hours on end, he'd be right there in his Institute, before our very eyes, and his thoughts would be off in the distance ... Though he had long and decisively repelled me, I felt a certain remorse at seeing him go to pieces like that. I felt partly responsible for his decline ... I felt that his spiritual confusion had something to do with me ... So much so that one day I suggested interrupting our study of literature, on the pretext that a break would give us time and leisure to renew our documentary sources ... He wasn't fooled by my feeble ruse. His response was a friendly but categorical refusal ... He was determined to carry on with the discovery of spiritual England under my guidance ... Just as he had begun ... What could I say? ... I acquiesced. He was afraid the hours of life remaining to him might not suffice for complete success ... In short, though I feared the worst, I was obliged to pursue our dismal academic peregrination to the best of my ability.

The fact is that Baryton was no longer himself. The persons and things around us became fantasmagoric and slow, losing their importance and even the colors they had formerly worn for us, and taking on a dreamlike, ambivalent softness ...

Baryton had come to concern himself only occasionally and more and more languidly with the administrative details of his own establishment, though it was his life work and for over thirty years the object of his literally passionate interest. He now relied entirely on Parapine to manage the administrative end. The increasing confusion of his mind, which he still tried to conceal in public, soon became obvious to us, a physical reality. One day Gustave Mandamour, a policeman we knew in Vigny because we sometimes employed him for certain heavy work, and undoubtedly the least discerning person I have ever come across though I've known many of his kind, asked me if the boss hadn't received some terrible news ... I did my best to reassure him, but without conviction. Baryton had lost his interest in gossip and chitchat, All he wanted was not to be disturbed on any pretext whatever ... At the very beginning of our studies we had perused, too quickly to his way of thinking, Macaulay's compendious
History of England
, a seminal work in sixteen volumes. At his command and under quite alarming conditions, we went back to it. Chapter by chapter.

It seemed to me that Baryton was more and more dangerously contaminated by meditation. When we came to that merciless passage where the Pretender Monmouth disembarks on the blurred shores of Kent ... Where his venture starts revolving around itself ... Where Monmouth the Pretender no longer knows exactly what he's pretending to ... Or what he wants to do ... Or what he has come here for ... Where he starts telling himself that he'd be glad to beat it ... but he doesn't know where to or how ... when defeat rises up before him ... in the pale dawn ... When the sea carries his last ships away ... When for the first time Monmouth starts thinking ... then likewise the lowly Baryton couldn't get to the end of his own decisions ... He read and reread that passage and mumbled it over again ... Overwhelmed, he closed the book and came over and lay down beside us. For a long time, with half-closed eyes, he ran through the whole text from memory, and then in his English accent, the best among the Bordeaux accents I had given him to choose from, he recited it again ...

Face to face with Monmouth's adventure, where all the pitiful absurdity of our puerile and tragic nature discloses itself in the mirror of Eternity, Baryton was seized with vertigo. Only the merest thread had attached him to our common lot, and now that thread snapped ... From that moment on, I can say without exaggerating, he ceased to be one of us ... He'd had it ...