Journey to the End of the Night (29 page)

Suddenly the Negro began to jiggle and hop. Something had come over him. I was his new friend, and he was determined to stuff me full of cakes and load me with cigars. Finally, with infinite precautions, he removed a round, leaden object from a drawer.

"The bomb!" he cried furiously. I retreated.
"Liberia! Liberia!"
he shouted exultantly. He put it back where it belonged and spat again, superbly. What emotion! What jubilation!

His laughter, that gut sensation, infected me. Why not? A little thing like that, I said to myself, doesn't mean a thing. When Lola finally got back from her errands, she found us in the living room, plunged in smoke and laughter. She pretended not to notice. The Negro quickly made himself scarce. She took me to her room. I found her sad, pale, and trembling. Where could she have been? It was getting late. The time of day when Americans are at a loss because the pulse of life around them has gone into slow motion. Every second car is back in the garage. It's the time for half-confidences. But to benefit by it you've got to hurry. To put me in the mood she questioned me, but the tone she took when asking certain questions about the life I'd been leading in Europe stuck in my craw. She made it quite clear that she thought me capable of every kind of beastliness. That hypothesis didn't make me angry, it only embarrassed me. She had a good idea that I'd come to ask her for money, and that in itself created a natural animosity between us. Such feelings verge on murder. We stuck to commonplaces, and I did my level best to avoid an out and out quarrel. She asked among other things about my sexual escapades, wanting to know if, somewhere in the course of my bummings around, I hadn't abandoned a child she could adopt. A bug that had got into her. She was obsessed with the idea of adopting a child. She thought rather naively that a tramp like me must have sired clandestine families all over the world. She was rich, she confided, and not having a child to devote herself to was more than she could bear. She had read every available book on child care, especially the ones that go into a lyrical swoon about motherhood, those books that cure you, if you really assimilate them, of all desire to copulate for ever and ever. Every virtue has its contemptible literature.

Since she wanted to sacrifice herself exclusively for a "little creature," I was out of luck. All I had to offer her was a big creature and one who struck her as too disgusting for words. Poverty doesn't draw unless it's properly presented, swathed in imagination. Our conversation languished. "Look, Ferdinand," she finally suggested, "we've had enough talk. I'm going to take you across town to see my little protege. I enjoy looking after him, but his mother drives me crazy ..." It was a strange time to be visiting. In the car on the way, we talked about her catastrophic Negro.

"Did he show you his bombs?" she asked. I owned that he had put me through that ordeal.

"He's a maniac, Ferdinand, but not dangerous. He fills his bombs with my old bills ... Years ago in Chicago he had his day ... He belonged to a dangerous secret society for black emancipation ... Horrible people, to judge by what he's told me ... The police broke up the gang, but he still has a weakness for bombs ... He never puts explosives in them ... The spirit of the thing is enough for him ... He's really an artist ... He'll be a revolutionary as long as he lives. But I keep him, he's an excellent servant. And all things considered, he's probably more honest than the ones who aren't revolutionaries ..." And she came back to her adoption mania.

"It's really too bad you haven't a little girl somewhere. A dreamy nature like yours is no good at all for a man, but it would be fine for a woman ..."

The rain poured down, closing the night around our car as it glided over the long band of smooth concrete. Everything was hostile and cold to me, even her hand, which I was holding tight in mine all the same. Everything came between us. We pulled up in front of a house that looked very different from the one we had just left. In an apartment on the second floor a little boy of about ten was waiting for us with his mother. The furniture had pretensions to Louis XV, and the cooking smells of a recent meal were still in the air. The child jumped up on Lola's lap and kissed her affectionately. The mother also seemed very fond of Lola. While Lola was talking to the child, I managed to take the mother into the next room.

When we came back, the boy was performing for Lola's benefit a dance step he had just learned at the Conservatory. "He'll need a few more private lessons," Lola observed, "then I may introduce him to my friend Vera at the Globe Theater. I wouldn't be surprised if the child had quite a future ahead of him." After these kind, encouraging words the mother thanked her tearfully and profusely. At the same time she accepted a small wad of green dollars, which she tucked away in her bosom like a love letter.

"I'd be rather pleased with that little boy," said Lola, once we were outside, "but I have to put up with the mother at the same time, and I don't care for mothers who are too sharp for their own good ... Besides, the kid is too depraved ... That's not the sort of attachment I want ... What I long for is a purely maternal feeling ... Do you understand me, Ferdinand?" When it comes to making a living, I can put up with anything, it's not a matter of intelligence, I just know I have to adapt.

She couldn't stop talking about her desire for purity. A few streets further on she asked me where I was planning to sleep that night and took a few more steps beside me. I said that if I didn't get hold of a few dollars I wouldn't be sleeping anywhere.

"All right," she said. "Come home with me. I'll give you a little change, then you can go where you please."

She was determined to put me out into the night as soon as possible. The usual thing. Always getting shoved out into the night like this, I said to myself, I'm bound to end up somewhere. That's some consolation. "Chin up, Ferdinand," I kept saying to myself, to keep up my courage. "What with being chucked out of everywhere, you're sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night." After that it was very cold between us in her car. The streets we passed threatened us with all the armored silence of their infinitely towering stone, with a kind of suspended deluge. A city lurking in ambush, an unpredictable monster, viscous with asphalt and rain. At last we slowed down. Lola went in ahead of me.

"Come up," she said. "Follow me."

Her living room again. I wondered how much she'd part with to get this business over with and be rid of me. She took some banknotes out of a small handbag she had left on the table. I heard an enormous rustling of crumpled bills. Great moments! In the whole city there was no other sound. But I was so embarrassed that I asked her?I don't know why and it was most out of place?for news of her mother whom I had forgotten.

"My mother is ill," she said, turning around and looking me full in the face.

"Where is she now?"

"In Chicago."

"What's wrong with her?"

"Cancer of the liver ... I've put her in the hands of the finest specialists in town ... They're costing me a fortune, but they'll save her. They promised."

More and more details of her mother's condition in Chicago poured out of her. Her feeling for her mother made for familiarity, and in spite of herself she appealed to me for comfort. I had her where I wanted her.

"And you, Ferdinand, you believe they'll cure her, don't you?"

"No," I said briskly and firmly. "Cancer of the liver is absolutely incurable." At that she went deathly pale. The bitch, that was the first time I'd ever seen anything disconcert her.

"But Ferdinand, the specialists assured me she'd recover! They guaranteed it! They gave it to me in writing! They're great doctors, Ferdinand ..."

"For cash, Lola, there will always be great doctors ... luckily ... I'd do the same for you myself if I were in their place ... And so would you, Lola ..." Suddenly what I was saying struck her as so incontrovertible, so obvious that she couldn't even put up a fight.

For once, maybe for the first time in her life, she lost her nerve.

"But Ferdinand, don't you realize how terribly you're hurting me? ... I love my mother, didn't you know that I love her?"

Glad to hear it! Good grief! Who the hell cares whether she loves her mother or not!

Lola was sobbing in her emptiness.

"Ferdinand, you're a worthless monster!" she shouted in a rage. "You're wicked! Wicked!

Saying awful things like that is just your cowardly way of avenging yourself for the rotten situation you're in ... And I just know you're doing my mother a lot of harm by talking that way!"

In her despair I sniffed vestiges of the Coue method.[59]

Her fury didn't frighten me as much as that of the officers on the
Admiral Bragueton
, who'd wanted to annihilate me to give the bored ladies a kick.

I watched Lola closely as she was calling me every name in the book, and it gave me a certain feeling of pride to observe that by contrast the more she insulted me the more my indifference, no, my joy, increased. We're nice people deep down.

"Now," I figured, "she'll have to give me at least twenty dollars to get rid of me ... Maybe even more ..."

I took the offensive: "Lola, lend me the money you promised or I'll sleep here, and you'll hear me repeat all I know about cancer, its complications, its hereditary character, because you know, Lola, cancer is hereditary, and don't forget it!"

As I developed and refined on the details of her mother's case, I saw Lola blanch, weaken, crumple before my eyes. "Oh, the bitch!" I said to myself. "Keep a good hold on her! For once you've got the good end! ... Don't let her off the line! You won't find such a good one in a hurry! ..."

She was beside herself. "Here!" she screamed. "Take it! Take your hundred dollars and get out and never come back, hear, never! ... Out! Out! Out! You beast!"

"Won't you kiss me all the same, Lola ... Come on! We're still friends, aren't we?" I suggested, to see how far I could go in disgusting her. At that point she took a revolver out of a drawer, and she wasn't joking. The stairs were good enough for me, I didn't even ring for the elevator.

That good solid fight restored my taste for work and picked up my morale. The next day I took the train to Detroit., where, I'd been assured, it was easy to get hired and there were lots of little jobs that were well paid and didn't take too much out of you. The passers-by spoke to me the way the sergeant had spoken to me in the forest. "You can't go wrong," they said. "Just follow your nose."

And true enough I saw some big squat buildings all of glass, enormous dollhouses, inside which you could see men moving, but hardly moving, as if they were struggling against something impossible. Was that Ford's? And then all around me and above me as far as the sky, the heavy, composite, muffled roar of torrents of machines, hard, wheels obstinately turning, grinding, groaning, always on the point of breaking down but never breaking down.

"So this is the place!" I said to myself ... "It's not very promising ..." Actually, it was worse than everywhere else. I went closer, up to a door where it was written on a slate that men were wanted.

I wasn't the only one waiting. One of the men cooling their heels told me he had been there, on the same spot, for two days. The poor sucker had come all the way from Yugoslavia for this job. Another dead beat spoke to me, he said he'd decided to work just for the fun of it?a nut, a phony.

Hardly anybody in that crowd spoke English. They eyed each other distrustfully like animals who had often been beaten. They gave off a smell of urinous crotches, like in the hospital. When they spoke to you, you kept away from their mouths, because in there poor people smell of death.

Rain was falling on our little crowd. The files of men stood compressed under the eaves. People looking for work are very compressible. What he liked at Ford's, an old Russian in a confiding frame of mind told me, was that they didn't care who or what they hired. "But watch your step," he added for my instruction, "don't get uppity, because if you get uppity they'll throw you out in two seconds and in two seconds you'll be replaced by one of those mechanical machines that he always keeps on hand, and it's no soap if you try to get back!" That Russian spoke good Parisian, because he'd been a taxi driver for years, but then he'd been fired because of some cocaine business in Bezons, and in the end he'd staked his cab in a game of
zanzi
with a fare and lost it.

It was true what he told me, that they took on anybody at all at Ford's. He hadn't lied. I had my suspicions, though, because down-and-outers like that tend to be off their rockers. There's a degree of destitution when the mind doesn't always stay with the body. It's too uncomfortable. What's talking to you is practically a disembodied soul. And a soul isn't responsible for what it says.

Naturally they stripped us stark naked for a starter. The examination was given in a kind of laboratory. We filed slowly past. "You're in terrible shape," said the medical assistant the moment he laid eyes on me, "but it doesn't matter."

And me with my worry about being turned down because of my African fevers in case they chanced to palpate my liver! Not at all, they seemed delighted at the cripples and weaklings in our batch.

"For the kind of work you'll be doing here," the doctor assured me, "your health is of no importance."

"Glad to hear it," I said. "But you know, doctor, I'm an educated man, I even studied medicine at one time ..."

At that he gave me a dirty look, I saw that I'd put my foot in it again, to my detriment.

"Your studies won't do you a bit of good around here, son. You're not here to think, you're here to make the movements you're told to. We don't need imaginative types in our factory. What we need is chimpanzees ... Let me give you a piece of advice. Never mention your intelligence again! We'll think for you, my boy! A word to the wise." Lucky for me that he warned me. It was just as well that I should know the manners and customs of the house. I'd already made enough stupid blunders to last me at least ten years. From then on I was determined to pass for a quiet little drudge. When we had our clothes back on, we were sent off in slow-moving files, hesitant groups, in the direction where the stupendous roar of machinery came from. Everything trembled in the enormous building, and we ourselves, from our ears to the soles of our feet, were gathered into this trembling, which came from the windows, the floor, and all the clanking metal, tremors that shook the whole building from top to bottom. We ourselves became machines, our flesh trembled in the furious din, it gripped us around our heads and in our bowels and rose up to the eyes in quick continuous jolts. The further we went, the more of our companions we lost. In leaving them we gave them bright little smiles, as if all this were just lovely. It was no longer possible to speak to them or hear them. Each time three or four of them stopped at a machine.