Journey to the End of the Night (30 page)

Still, you resist; it's hard to despise your own substance, you'd like to stop all this, give yourself time to think about it and listen without difficulty to your heartbeat, but it's too late for that. This thing can never stop. This enormous steel box is on a collision course; we, inside it, are whirling madly with the machines and the earth. All together. Along with the thousands of little wheels and the hammers that never strike at the same time, that make noises which shatter one another, some so violent that they release a kind of silence around them, which makes you feel a little better.

The slow-moving little car full of hardware has trouble passing between the machine tools. Gangway! The workers jump aside to let the hysterical thing through. And the clanking fool goes on between the belts and flywheels, bringing the men their ration of servitude. It's sickening to watch the workers bent over their machines, intent on giving them all possible pleasure, calibrating bolts and more bolts, instead of putting an end once for all to this stench of oil, this vapor that burns your throat and attacks your eardrums from inside. It's not shame that makes them bow their heads. You give in to noise as you give in to war. At the machines you let yourself go with the two three ideas that are wobbling about at the top of your head. And that's the end. From then on everything you look at, everything you touch, is hard. And everything you still manage to remember more or less becomes as rigid as iron and loses its savor in your thoughts.

All of a sudden you've become disgustingly old.

All outside life must be done away with, made into steel, into something useful. We didn't love it enough the way it was, that's why. So it has to be made into an object, into something solid. The Regulations say so.

I tried to shout something into the foreman's ear, he grunted like a pig in answer and made motions to show me, very patiently, the simple operation I was to perform forever and ever. My minutes, my hours, like those of the others, all my time, would go into passing linchpins to the blind man next to me, who had been calibrating these same linchpins for years. I did the work very badly from the start. Nobody reprimanded me, but after three days of that first job, I was transferred, already a failure, to pushing the little trolley full of washers that went jolting along from machine to machine. At one machine I left three, at another a dozen, at still another only five. Nobody spoke to me. Existence was reduced to a kind of hesitation between stupor and frenzy. Nothing mattered but the ear-splitting continuity of the machines that commanded all men.

At six o'clock, when everything stops, you carry the noise away in your head. I had enough noise to last me all night, not to mention the smell of oil, as if I'd been given a new nose and a new brain for all time.

By dint of renunciation I became, little by little, a different man ... a new Ferdinand. It took several weeks. But then the desire to see people came back to me. Naturally not the factory hands, they were mere echoes and smells of machines like myself, lumps of flesh convulsed with vibrations. I wanted to touch a real body, a pink body made of soft, quiet life.

I didn't know a soul in that city, least of all any women. Finally, after a good deal of trouble, I obtained the vague address of a "house," a clandestine brothel, at the north end of town. On several evenings in a row, after work, I strolled around the neighborhood on reconnaissance. The street was like any other, though maybe a little cleaner than the one where I lived.

I located the house in question, it had a garden around it. To get in, you had to move quickly so the cop on duty nearby wouldn't notice. That was the first place in America where I was received without brutality, amiably in fact, for my five dollars. And what beautiful young women, well rounded, bursting with health and graceful strength, almost as beautiful, come to think of it, as the ones at the Laugh Calvin.

And these, at least, you could come right out and touch, I couldn't help myself. I got to be a regular customer. It used up all my pay. When night came, I needed the erotic promiscuity of those splendid, welcoming creatures to restore my soul. The movies were no longer enough, that mild antidote was powerless to fight the physical horror of the factory. To survive, I needed lecherous tonics, drastic elixirs. In that house I didn't have to pay much, they gave me friendly terms, because I brought the girls a few little refinements from France. Except on Saturday night, then there was no time for refinements, business boomed, and I had to make way for baseball teams on a spree, magnificently vigorous young bruisers, to whom happiness came as easily as breath.

While the baseball teams were at it, I, likewise in high spirits, would sit alone in the kitchen, writing my short stories. I'm sure those athletes' enthusiasm for the ladies of the establishment didn't measure up to my own slightly impotent fervor. Confident in their own strength, those baseball players were blase about physical perfection. Beauty is like drink or comfort, once you get used to it, you stop paying attention.

They visited the brothel mostly to make whoopee. Often they'd end up having terrible fights. The police would burst in and take them all away in little trucks. Toward Molly, one of the lovely girls there, I soon developed an uncommon feeling of trust, which in frightened people takes the place of love. I remember her kindness as if it were yesterday, and her long, blond, magnificently strong, lithe legs, noble legs. Say what you like, the mark of true aristocracy in humankind is the legs.

We became intimate in body and mind, and took walks around town for a few hours every week. She was comfortably off, since she took in about a hundred dollars a day in the cathouse, while I made barely ten at Ford's. The lovemaking she did for a living didn't tire her in the least. Americans do it like birds.

In the evening, when I'd finished pushing my little delivery wagon around, I'd meet her after dinner and force myself to put on a cheerful face. You've got to be cheerful with women, in the beginning at least. A vague desire came over me to suggest things we could do, but I hadn't the strength. She understood the industrial blues, she was used to factory workers.

One evening, just like that, a propos of nothing, she presented me with fifty dollars. First I looked at her. I didn't dare. I thought about my mother and what she'd have said. And then it came to me that my mother, poor thing, had never given me that much. To please Molly, I went right out with her dollars and bought a lovely tan "four-piece" suit, which was what they were wearing that spring. They had never seen me arrive at the cathouse looking so natty. The madame played her big phonograph just to teach me how to dance. Later Molly and I went to the movies to break in my new suit. She asked me on the way if I was jealous, because the suit made me look sad and so did not wanting to go back to the factory. A new suit always throws you off. She gave my suit passionate little kisses when nobody was looking. I tried to think of something else.

What a woman my Molly was! What generosity! What a body! What fullness of youth! A feast of desires! And then I was worried again. Was this pimping?

To make matters worse, Molly pleaded: "Don't go back to Ford's. Get yourself a little job in an office ... as a translator, for instance ... That's the thing for you ... You like books ..." Her advice was kindly given, she wanted me to be happy. For the first time somebody was taking an interest in me, looking at me from the inside so to speak, taking my egoism into account, putting herself in my place, not just judging me from her point of view like everyone else.

If only I had met Molly sooner, when it was still possible to choose one road rather than another. Before that bitch Musyne and that little turd Lola crimped my enthusiasm. But it was too late to start being young again. I didn't believe in it anymore. We grow old so quickly and, what's more, irremediably. You can tell by the way you start loving your misery in spite of yourself. Nature is stronger than we are, no two ways about it. She tries us in one particular mold, and we're never able to throw it off. I had started out as the restless type. Little by little, without realizing it, you begin to take your role and fate seriously, and before you know it, it's too late to change. You're a hundred-percent restless, and it's set that way for good.

Very lovingly Molly tried to keep me with her, to dissuade me ... "Life can be just as pleasant here as in Europe, Ferdinand. We won't be unhappy together." And in a sense she was right. "We'll invest our savings ... We'll buy a little business ... We'll be like other people ..." She said that to quiet my scruples. Plans for the future. I agreed with her. I was even rather ashamed of all the trouble she was taking to hold me. I was very fond of her, but I was even fonder of my vice, my mania for running away from everywhere in search of God knows what, driven, I suppose, by stupid pride, by a sense of some sort of superiority.

I was afraid of hurting her. She understood and anticipated my concern. She was so nice that I finally told her about the mania that drove me to clear out of wherever I happened to be. She listened to me for days and days while I held forth, laying myself disgustingly bare, fighting with phantasms and points of pride, and she never lost patience, far from it. She only tried to help me get over my foolish and futile anxiety. She didn't quite get the point of my ravings, but she always took my part against my phantoms or with them, whichever I preferred. She was so gentle and persuasive that I grew accustomed to her kindness and took it almost personally. But I felt that I was beginning to cheat on my so-called destiny, my
raison d'ętre
as I called it, and stopped telling her everything that passed through my mind. I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.

All that is commonplace. But Molly was gifted with angelic patience and had an unshakable belief in "vocations." For instance, her younger sister at the University of Arizona had been smitten with a craze for photographing birds in their nests and wild animals in their dens. So to enable her to study that astonishing specialty, Molly regularly sent this photographer sister of hers fifty dollars a month.

A really unbounded heart, containing something sublime, convertible into cash and not phony like mine and so many others. Molly would have liked nothing better than to take a financial interest in my dotty career. Though at times I struck her as pretty well off the beam, she thought my convictions real and not to be discouraged. She offered me an allowance and only asked me to draw up a little budget. I couldn't make up my mind to accept. A last vestige of delicacy prevented me from banking any further, from speculating, on her really too noble and kindly nature. And that's how I deliberately got myself in bad with Providence.

I was so ashamed of myself that I even made a feeble attempt to go back to Ford's. Nothing came of my heroic little gesture. I got as far as the factory gate but at that liminil point I froze. The thought of all those machines whirring as they lay in wait for me demolished my feeble work impulse once and for all.

I stationed myself outside the glass front of the main power plant, that multiform giant which roars as it pumps something or other God knows where and brings it back again through a thousand gleaming pipes as intricate and menacing as lianas. One morning as I stood there in drooling contemplation, my Russian taxi driver came by. "Hey, you old rascal," he says to me. "You've been fired! ... It's been three weeks since you showed up ... They've already put a machine in your place ... I warned you ..."

"At least," I said to myself, "that finishes it ... No need to come back ..." And I beat it back to town. On the way home I dropped in at the Consulate to ask if by any chance they'd had news of a Frenchman by the name of Robinson.

"Oh yes!" said the consuls. "Yes indeed! He's been in here to see us twice, with false papers what's more ... Actually he's wanted by the police! Do you know him? ..." I let it go at that.

After that I expected to meet Robinson any minute. I felt it in my bones. Molly was as kind and affectionate as ever. Once she felt sure I was planning to go away for good, she was even nicer than before. There was no point in being nice to me. Often on Molly's free afternoons we took trips to the outskirts.

Bare little hills, clumps of birches around tiny little lakes, people here and there reading dingy magazines under a sky heavy with leaden clouds. Molly and I avoided elaborate confessions. She knew the score. She was too sincere to say much about her grief. She knew what went on inside, in her heart, and that was enough for her. We kissed. But I didn't kiss her properly as I should have, on my knees if the truth be known. I was always partly thinking about something else at the same time, about not wasting time and tenderness, as if I wanted to keep them for something magnificent, something sublime, for later, but not for Molly and not for this particular kiss. As if life would carry away everything I longed to know about it, about life in the thick of the night, and hide it from me, while I was expending my passion in kissing Molly, and then I wouldn't have enough left, I'd have lost everything for want of strength, and life?Life, the true mistress of all real men?would have tricked me as it tricks everyone else.

We went back to the crowds, and then I'd leave her outside her house, because the customers would keep her busy all night until early morning. While she was taking care of them, I can't deny I was sad, and my sadness spoke to me so plainly of her that I felt she was with me even more than when she really was. I went to the movies to kill time. After the show, I'd board a streetcar going this way or that way and tour around in the night. After two o'clock flocks of timid passengers would get on, a type you seldom see before or after that hour, always pale and sleepy, in docile groups, bound for the suburbs. With them you could go a long way. Much further than the factories, to vague housing developments, little streets of shapeless bungalows. On pavements sticky with the small rain of dawn the daylight glistened blue. My streetcar companions vanished along with their shadows. They closed their eyes on the day. It was hard to make those specters talk. Too tired. They didn't complain, not at all, they were the men who cleaned stores and more stores during the night, and all the offices in the city, after closing time. They didn't seem as anxious as we day people. Maybe because they'd sunk to the very bottom of things. One of those nights when I'd taken still another streetcar and we'd got to the last stop and everybody was quietly getting off, I thought I heard someone calling me by name: