Death on the Installment Plan (4 page)

” ‘There is no softness or gentleness in this world, Gwendor, but only myth! All kingdoms end in a dream …’

” ‘O Death, give me a little time … a day or two. I must find out who betrayed me …’

” ‘Everything betrays, Gwendor … The passions belong to no one, even love is only the flower of life in the garden of youth.’

“And very gently Death gathers up the prince … He has ceased to resist … His weight has left him … And then a beautiful dream takes possession of his soul … The dream that often came to him when he was little, in his fur cradle, in the Chamber of the Heirs, close to his Moravian nurse in the castle of King René …”

Gustin’s arms dangled between his legs.

“Well, how do you like it?” I asked him.

He was on his guard. He wasn’t too eager to be rejuvenated. He resisted. He wanted me to explain the whole thing to him, the whys and wherefores. That’s not so easy. Such things are as frail as butterflies. A touch and they fall to pieces in your hands and you feel soiled. What’s the use? I didn’t press the matter.

In going on with my Legend I might have consulted some sensitive soul … well versed in fine feelings … in all the innumerable shadings of love …

I prefer to manage on my own.

Sensitive souls are often impotent. They need to be whipped. There’s no getting away from it. Anyway, let me describe King Krogold’s castle:

“… A great monster cowering in the heart of the forest, vast crushing hulk, hewn out of the rock … kneaded from bilging foulness, credences edged with friezes and redans … dungeons upon dungeons … from the distant seashore the crests of the forest ride in to break like waves against the outer walls …

“The lookout, wide-eyed for fear of being hanged … Higher … still higher … On the summit of More-hande, on the tower of the Treasure House, the banner flaps in the gale … It bears the royal arms. A snake beheaded, bleeding at the neck. Traitors, beware! Gwendor has paid for his crime… .”

Gustin was done in. He was dozing. In fact, he was sound asleep. I locked up his medicine cabinet. “Let’s get out of here,” I said to him. “We’ll take a walk by the Seine. It’ll do you good.” He didn’t want to move. I kept at him and he finally agreed. I suggested a little café on the other side of the Île aux Chiens. When we got there, he fell asleep again in spite of the coffee. Not a bad idea, I admit. It feels pretty good in those bistros around four o’clock … Three artificial flowers in a tin vase. The riverfront is deserted. Even the old soak at the bar is beginning to accept the idea that the
patronne
won’t listen to him any more. I leave Gustin alone. The next tugboat is sure to wake him. The cat jumps off the old woman’s lap and comes over to sharpen his claws.

The way Gustin turns up his hands when he sleeps, it’s easy to read his future. A man’s whole life is in his palms. With Gustin it’s the life line that’s prominent. With me it’s luck, the fate line. My chances of long life don’t look too good. I wonder when it will be. I’ve got a furrow at the base of my thumb … Will it be an arteriole bursting in my encephalon? Or in the central gyrus? … Or in that little convolution of the third ventricle? … Metitpois often used to point out that spot in the morgue … A stroke is a tiny little thing … A little break in the gray mass, no bigger than a pinprick … But the soul has passed through, carbolic acid and all … Unfortunately it might turn out to be a neoplasm of the rectum … I’d give a lot for the arteriole … Your health! … Metitpois was a real master. We used to spend whole Sundays poking around in the grooves … investigating the different ways of dying … That fascinated the old man … He wanted to get an idea of how it would be. He personally hoped for a nice cozy flooding of both heart ventricles at once when his time came … He was laden with honors! …

“The most exquisite deaths, remember that, Ferdinand, are those that attack us in our most sensitive tissues …” He had a precious, elaborate, subtle way of talking, like the men of Charcot’s day. His prospecting of the Rolandic, the third ventricle, and the gray nucleus didn’t do him much good … in the end he died of a heart attack, under circumstances that were anything but cozy. An attack of angina pectoris that lasted twenty minutes. He held out for a hundred and twenty seconds with his classical memories, his resolutions, the example of Caesar … But for eighteen minutes he screamed like a stuck pig … his diaphragm was being ripped out, his living guts … a thousand open razors had been plunged into his aorta … He tried to vomit them out at us … I’m not exaggerating. He crawled out into the living room … He damn near hammered his chest in … He bellowed into the carpet … in spite of the morphine … You could hear him all over the house and out in the street … He ended up under the piano. When the cardiac arterioles burst one by one, it’s quite a harp … it’s too bad nobody ever comes back from angina pectoris. There’d be wisdom and genius to spare.

We’d done enough meditating, it would soon be time for the venereal patients. That was at La Pourneuve, out past La Garenne. We worked together there. Just as I had foreseen, a tugboat whistle blew. It was time for us to be going. The venereal clinic was quite a place. While waiting for their injections, the clappers and syphilitics got acquainted. There was embarrassment at first, then they got to enjoy it. As soon as it was dark in the winter, they’d rush out to meet near the slaughterhouse down the street. Those people are always in a terrible hurry. They’re afraid that sweet little erection won’t come back. Mother Vitruve had figured it all out on her way to see me … The youngsters with their first dose … it makes them melancholy, it really gets them down … She used to wait for them at the exit … Motherly tenderness was her act … touching sympathy …”It burns pretty bad, doesn’t it, boy? I know how it is … I’ve nursed them … I’ve got an amazing kind of herb tea … Why don’t you come home with me, I’ll make you some …” Two or three cups of coffee and the kid would come across. One night there was a terrible shambles down by the wall, an Algerian with a hard-on like a horse was buggering a little baker’s boy for the hell of it, right near the night watchman’s cabin. The watchman, who was an old hand at watching, took it all in … first the kid sighed, then he whimpered, and then he began to howl. He writhed and struggled, there were four of them holding him … Even so he got away and ran into the old man’s cabin for protection. And the watchman locked the door.

“He got himself finished off. Believe it or not,” said Vitruve. “I could see the watchman through the blinds. The two of them were at it. Birds of a feather if you ask me.”

She didn’t believe in sentiments. She took the lowest view and she was right. To get to La Pourneuve you had to take the bus. “You can spare five minutes,” Gustin said. He wasn’t in any hurry. We sat down in the bus shelter, the one before the bridge.

It was right there on the riverfront, at Number 18, that my parents went broke in the winter of ‘92. That was a long time ago. Their business was “Notions, Flowers, Feathers.” There was only one shop window and all they had in it was three hats. The Seine froze over that year. I was born in May. The springtime—that’s me. I suppose it’s our fate, but you get sick of growing old, of seeing everything around you change, the houses, the numbers, the streetcars, the hairdos. Short dresses, creased hats— who cares?—the horseless carriage, the future belongs to aviation—it’s all the same! It’s all a drain on your attention. I don’t feel like changing anymore. There are plenty of things I could complain about, but I’m stuck with them. I’m a mess, but I adore myself as much as the Seine stinks. The day they remove the hook-shaped lamp post from the corner by Number 12, I’ll be very sad. Man is temporary, I know that, but we’ve already temporized enough for my money.

There come the barges … Nowadays each one has a heart of its own. It thuds loud and sullen in the echoing darkness of the arches. Enough of that. I’m falling apart. I’ll stop complaining. But don’t let them pile on any more. Things seem pretty crummy, but if they could carry us away with them, we’d die of poetry. In a way that wouldn’t be bad. Gustin agreed with me about all those endearing little things, except that he looked to the bottle for forget-fulness. Why not? … There was always a little beer and nostalgia in his Gallic moustache.

At the venereal clinic we used to mark vertical bars on a big sheet of paper as we went along … That was all there was to it. A red stroke: Salvarsun. Green: mercury. And so on. The rest was routine … All we had to do was pump the juice into their buttocks or the bend of their arms … It was like larding a roast. Green! … Arm! Yellow … get those pants down! … Red! … Both buttocks … Another one in the ass! … Ditto! Bismuth! Blue! Dripping vein! Swine! Get those pants on! … Swab that arm! … The rhythm was merciless. Batches and batches of them … Endless lines … Limp cocks … pricks … dripping peckers … oozing. Festering… Starched sheets, as stiff as cardboard! Clap! … Queen of the world! The ass is its throne! Heated summer and winter! …

Sometimes the poor bastards are good and worried … but after a while they start passing each other sucker’s remedies and screwing harder than ever … as long as Julienne doesn’t notice … They’ll never come back … lying to us … howling for joy … urethra full of razor blades! Prick split in two! Cock in mouth. Get that crack ready!

Here’s case history Number 34, timid little white-collar worker with dark glasses, wise guy. Every six months he goes to the Cour d’Amsterdam and gets a dose on purpose, so as to expiate by the rod … he pisses his razor blades into the little halfwits he meets through the ads … It’s his way of saying his prayers, as he puts it. Number 34 is nothing but one big microbe. Here’s what he wrote in our toilet: “I’m the terror of all cunts … I’ve buggered my big sister … I’ve had it twelve times.” He’s a punctual customer, quiet, well behaved, and always glad to be back.

That’s our bread and butter. It’s not as bad as working on the railroad.

When we got to La Pourneuve, Gustin said: “Say, Ferdinand, just now … while I was dozing, don’t try to tell me different, you read the lines of my hand … Well, what did you see?”

I knew what was worrying him: his liver. It had been sensitive around the edges for a long time, and lately he’d been having awful nightmares … He was building up to a cirrhosis. In the morning I heard him throwing up in the sink … I told him it was nothing, why upset him? The damage was done. The main thing was that he should keep his jobs.

At La Jonction he’d landed his job in the welfare bureau soon after taking his degree. Thanks to a little abortion, that’s the long and the short of it … the girl friend of a city councillor who was very conservative at the time … Gustin had just set himself up next door, he was poor as a churchmouse. It had come off smoothly, his hand hadn’t begun to shake. The next time it was the mayor’s wife. Another triumph! … Out of gratitude they had appointed him charity doctor.

In the beginning everybody had liked him in his new job. And then all of a sudden they didn’t like him … they were sick of his mug and everything about him … they couldn’t stand him. So they did everything in their power to make life miserable for him. They ran him down, accusing him of everything imaginable, of having dirty hands, of getting his doses wrong, of not knowing which drugs were poisonous … of bad breath … of wearing buttoned shoes … When they’d tormented him so much he was ashamed to be seen in the street and after threatening a thousand times to fire him like a fart, they changed their minds and began to tolerate him for no good reason, except that they were sick of regarding him as a punk… .

All the filth, the envy, the vexation of the district had put its mark on his map. He’d suffered all the gall and rancor of the pen-pushers in his clinic. The hangovers of the 14,000 alcoholics of the district, the gastric catarrhs, the excruciating stoppages of the 6,422 cases of clap that he wasn’t able to cure, the ovarian pangs of the 4,376 menopause cases, the querulous anxiety of 2,266 sufferers from high blood pressure, the irreconcilable contempt of 722 bilious headaches, the persecution mania of 47 tapeworm owners, plus the 352 mothers of children with worms, and the nondescript mob, the vast horde of masochists with manias of every kind, the eczema patients, the albuminous, the diabetic, the fetid, the palsied, the vaginous, the useless, the “too muches,” the “not enoughs,” the constipated, the repentant queers, whole shipments of murderers had been flowing over his face, cascading under his glasses morning and afternoon for thirty years.

At La Jonction he lived right in the middle of the shit-house, directly over the X-ray room. He had his three-room apartment, and it was a good solid stone building, not a plywood box like nowadays. But to hold your own against life you need dikes ten times higher than in Panama and little invisible sluices. He’d been living there since the Exposition, the big one, since the happy days of Argenteuil.

Now there were big
“buildings”
all around the place.

Occasionally Gustin would still attempt a little distraction … He’d bring in a little cutie, but that didn’t happen too often. His great sorrow came back to him as soon as any sentiment started up … after the third meeting. He preferred to drink … There was a bistro across the street with a green front and a banjo player on Sundays. It was handy for the French fries, the girl really knew how to make them. The rotgut burned his innards … For my part, I haven’t even tried to drink since I’ve had that buzzing in my ears day and night. It knocks me out, it makes me look like I had cholera. Gustin auscultates me now and then. He doesn’t tell me what he thinks either. That’s the one thing we’re discreet about. I’ve got my troubles too, I have to admit it. He knows my case, he tries to cheer me up: “Go on, Ferdinand, go ahead and read, I’ll listen to the damn thing. Not too fast, though. And cut out the gestures. It wears you out and it makes me dizzy.”