Journey to the End of the Night (33 page)

I learned these things little by little from them and other people and some from Bébert's aunt. When I knew them a little better, they themselves told me about the terror that had haunted them all their lives, the fear that their only son, who was in business, might find himself in difficulties. For thirty years that ugly thought had more or less kept them awake nearly every night. The boy had set himself up in the feather business! The ups and downs of feathers in the last thirty years are almost unimaginable. Perhaps there's no worse, no more unstable business in all the world than feathers.

Some businesses are so shaky that no one would think of borrowing money to put them back on their feet, but there are others where the question of a loan keeps coming up almost constantly. When it occurred to them, even now that the house was paid for, that their son might approach them for a loan, the Henrouilles stood up from their chairs, looked at each other, and went red in the face. What would they do if that happened? They would refuse. Their minds had been made up from the first to turn down all requests for a loan ... Because of their principles and so as to have a nest egg waiting for him, a legacy, a house, an inheritance. That was their way of thinking. There was no nonsense about their son, but in business it's so easy to go wrong ...

When they asked me for my opinion, it was the same as theirs.

My own mother was in business; her business had never brought us anything but misery, a little bread and a lot of trouble. So naturally I was down on business. I had no difficulty in understanding the perils facing the boy, the risk involved in a loan he might be forced to envisage if hard pressed. I needed no explanations. For fifty years old man Henrouille had been a petty clerk in a notary's office on the Boulevard Sébastopol. He knew how fortunes can go to rack and ruin, and told me some hair-raising stories about it. Beginning with his own father, whose bankruptcy had prevented Henrouille from studying to be a teacher on leaving school and obliged him to go right into clerking. You remember things like that. Well, now that their house was bought and paid for and they didn't owe a single sou, they had nothing to worry about on the security side. They were both sixty-five. Just then Henrouille became aware of a strange ailment, or rather, he'd felt it for a long time but hadn't thought about it because there was still the house to be paid for. Once that was all settled and signed, he began to dwell on his strange trouble?dizzy spells and a whistling as of steam in both ears.

About that time he began buying the newspaper, because then they could afford it. And in the paper he saw an advertisement describing exactly what he felt in his ears. He bought the medicine it recommended, but it didn't do his ailment a bit of good; on the contrary, the whistling seemed to get worse. Maybe just from thinking about it. They finally decided on a visit to the dispensary. "It's high blood pressure," the doctor told them. Those words came as a shock. But his new obsession came at just the right time. He had worried about the house and his son's bills for so many years that they had left a kind of hole in the tissue of fears that had gripped him body and soul for forty years and raised him to the same pitch of anguished trepidation every time a bill came due. Now that the doctor had spoken of blood pressure, he listened to the pressure beating against his ears from deep inside. He'd get up out of bed to feel his pulse and stand motionless beside his bed, feeling a faint quaver run through his body at every heart beat. All this, he said to himself, was his death. He had always been afraid of life, and now he attached his fear to something different, to death, to his blood pressure, just as for forty years he had attached it to the peril of not being able to finish paying for the house.

He had always been just as unhappy, but now he had quickly to find a good new reason for being unhappy. That's not as easy as it sounds. Just saying: "I'm unhappy" won't do. You've got to prove it, to make absolutely sure. That's all he wanted: to be able to state a good substantial motive for his fear. According to the doctor, his blood pressure was twenty-two. Twenty-two is something. The doctor had taught him to find the way to his own death.

Their son in the feather business hardly ever came to see them. Once or twice around New Year's, no more. There wasn't much point in his coming anymore. His father and mother had nothing left to lend. So he hardly ever turned up.

It took me longer to get to know Madame Henrouille; she had no fears, not even the fear of her own death, which she couldn't conceive of. She only complained of old age, but without really thinking about it, just to be like other people, and about the high cost of living. Their life's labor was behind them. The house was paid for. To speed up the final payments she'd even taken to sewing buttons on waistcoats for one of the department stores. "The amount of buttons you've got to sew on for five francs, you wouldn't believe it!" she'd say. And delivering her work on the bus, she rode second class and things were always happening. One afternoon a woman had bumped into her. Madame Henrouille had given her a piece of her mind. The woman was a foreigner, the first and only foreigner Madame Henrouille had ever spoken to.

The walls of the house had kept good and dry in the old days when there was still air circulating around them, but now that there were tall apartment buildings next door, everything oozed and trickled with humidity, even the curtains had a musty smell. Once the house was really theirs, Madame Henrouille had been all smiles for a whole month, as blissful as a nun after communion. In fact she was the one who had suggested:

"Look, Jules, suppose we buy a newspaper every day, now we can afford it!" Just like that. She had thought of her husband, she had looked at him. But then she looked around her and after a while she thought of his mother, her mother-in-law Henrouille. At that the daughter-in-law went suddenly serious again, the way she had been before they finished paying for the house. That thought brought them back to square one, it meant they would have to go on saving for the old woman, her husband's mother, whom the two of them never mentioned to each other or to anyone outside.

She lived at the far end of the garden with an accumulation of old brooms, old chicken crates, and the shadows of buildings. Her home was a low shed, from which she seldom emerged. Just getting meals in to her was a long complicated business. She wouldn't admit anyone to her antrum, not even her son. She was afraid of being murdered, so she said. When the daughter-in-law thought of embarking on a new course of savings, she first said a few words to her husband to sound him out: Why, for instance, wouldn't they send the old woman to St. Vincent's Convent where the Sisters took care of feeble-minded old women like her. The son said neither yes nor no. He was busy with something else at the moment, those sounds in his ears that never stopped. What with thinking about that abominable whistling and listening to it, he'd convinced himself that it would prevent him from sleeping. And true enough, instead of falling asleep, he'd listen to his whistling, drummings, and hummings?a new torture that kept him busy day and night. He had all those noises inside him.

Little by little, though, his anxiety wore itself out, and there wasn't enough left to keep him busy all by itself. So then he and his wife started going back to the market at Saint-Ouen. Everyone said it was the cheapest for miles around. They'd leave home in the morning, and it took them all day, because of all the figures they added up and the discussions they'd have about the prices of things and the money they might have saved by buying one thing rather than another ... Back home at about eleven that night, they'd be seized again by the fear of being murdered. That fear hit them regularly, especially the wife. He was more concerned with the sounds in his ears, he'd cling to them desperately at that hour when the street was perfectly still. "I'll never be able to sleep!" he'd repeat to himself out loud to increase his terror. "You can't imagine!"

But she never tried to understand what he meant, or to imagine why this buzzing in his ears should trouble him so. "You hear me when I speak, don't you?" she'd ask him.

"Yes," he'd say.

"Well, then you're all right! ... And it would make more sense to start thinking about your mother who's been costing us a fortune what with prices going up every day ... And the stink in that shack of hers!"

The cleaning woman came in for three hours a week to do the washing, she was the only visitor they had had for years. She also helped Madame Henrouille to make her bed. Every time they had turned the mattress in the last ten years, Madame Henrouille, wanting it to be repeated all over the neighborhood, had told the cleaning woman in the loudest voice she could manage: "We never keep money in the house!" Just as a precaution, to discourage thieves and prospective murderers.

Before going up to their room together, they would close all the doors and windows with great care, each checking up on the other. Then they'd go out in the garden to make sure the mother-in-law's lamp was still burning. A sign she was still alive. She consumed quantities of oil. She never put her lamp out. She, too, was afraid of murderers and afraid of her son and daughter-in-law. In all the twenty years she'd been living there she had never opened her windows summer or winter and never let her lamp go out.

Her son kept his mother's money, a small pension. He took care of it. They left her meals outside the door. They kept her money. Not a bad arrangement. But she complained about the arrangement, and that wasn't all; she complained about everything. She'd shout through the door at anybody who approached her shack. The daughter-in-law would try to pacify her: "It's not our fault if you're getting old. All old people get the same pains ..."

"Old yourself! You slattern! You scum! It's you that's killing me with your filthy lies!" She denied her age ferociously. And through her door she battled irreconcilably against the evils of the whole world. She rejected the fatalities and compromises of the life outside as a base imposture. She refused all contact with such things, she wouldn't hear of them. "It's all a pack of lies!" she'd scream. "You made it up!"

She defended herself bitterly against everything that happened outside her hovel and rejected all temptation to compromise or be reconciled. She was sure that if she opened the door hostile forces would burst in, grab her, and finish her off once and for all.

"They're sly nowadays!" she would scream. "They have eyes all around their heads and mouths all the way down to their assholes and then some, all to tell lies with ... It's them all over ..."

She had the gift of gab, she had picked it up as a girl, peddling bric-a-brac at the Temple Market with her mother ... She harked back to the days when the common people hadn't yet learned to listen to themselves growing old.

"If you won't give me my money I'm going out to work!" she'd shout at her daughter-inlaw. "Hear, you slut? I'm going out to work, I want to work!"

"But grandmother, you're not strong enough!"

"Oh! I'm not strong enough! Try and get in here and you'll see if I'm not strong enough!" So one more time they left her barricaded in her shack. But they were dead set on my seeing the old woman, that's what I'd come for. It took some doing before she let us in. To tell the truth, I couldn't quite see what they wanted of me. It was the concierge, Bébert's aunt, who had told them what a nice doctor I was, so kind and considerate ... They asked me if I couldn't give her some medicine to keep her quiet ... But what they (especially the daughter-in-law) wanted even more was for me to get the old woman committed once and for all. After we'd knocked for a good half hour, she suddenly flung the door open, and there she was in front of me with her watery red-rimmed eyes ... But there was a look in those eyes that danced merrily over her gray, shrunken cheeks, it caught your attention and made you forget the rest; it gave you a feeling in spite of yourself of lightness and pleasure, a feeling of youth that you tried instinctively to hold on to.

That bright look lit up everything in the darkness around her with a youthful joy, a frail but pure delight that we no longer have at our command. Her voice, which cracked when she screamed, gave her words a cheery ring when she consented to talk like other people, it made her phrases and sentences hop skip and jump as brightly as you please, the way people were able to do with their voices and the things around them in the days when not being able to sing or tell a story properly was looked upon as stupid, shameful, and sick. Age had covered her, like a sturdy old tree, with smiling branches.

Grandma Henrouille was merry; discontented and filthy, but merry. The destitution in which she had lived for more than twenty years had not marked her soul. Her dread, on the contrary, was the outside world, as though cold, horror, and death could come to her only from that direction and not from within. She evidently feared nothing from within, she seemed absolutely sure of her mind, as of something undeniable, acknowledged, and certified, once and for all.

And to think that I had been chasing mine halfway around the world.

They called the old woman "mad"; that's easy to say. She hadn't set foot outside her den more than three times in the last twelve years, and that's all there was to it. She may have had her reasons ... She was afraid of losing something ... She wasn't going to tell them to people like us, people who were no longer inspired by life.

Her daughter-in-law brought up her commitment project again. "What do you say, doctor?

Don't you think she's mad? ... We can't get her to go out anymore! ... It would do her good to get out now and then! ... Oh yes, grandmother, it would do you good! ... Don't say it wouldn't! ... It would do you good ... I assure you!" The old woman shook her head. She shut herself in, stubborn and savage, when that kind of pressure was put on her ...

"She won't let us take care of her ... She'd rather relieve herself in the corners ... It's cold in her shack, and there's no fire ... We really can't let her go on like this ... Don't you agree, doctor, that we can't ... ?"