Journey to the End of the Night (36 page)

Before that clandestine birth, the family had lived in the Filles du Calvaire quarter, they had lived there for years. If they exiled themselves to Rancy, it wasn't for the pleasure of it, it was to hide, to get themselves forgotten, to disappear.

As soon as it became impossible to conceal the pregnancy from the neighbors, they decided to leave their Paris neighborhood to avoid all comments. A removal for honor's sake. In Rancy they didn't need the respect of their neighbors. In the first place no one knew them in Rancy, and in the second place the municipal government was known all over France for its abominable politics; not to mince words, they were anarchists, thugs. In that kind of community public opinion is of no account.

The family had punished themselves voluntarily, cutting themselves off from all their old relations and old friends. Their tragedy was complete. Nothing more to lose, so they said. Declassed. When you're determined to lose your name, you go among the common people. They found no fault with anyone. They merely tried to discover by feeble little acts of rebellion what Destiny could have had in mind the day it had played them such a dirty trick. Living in Rancy gave the daughter only one consolation, but that was a big one. Now she could talk freely to all and sundry about "her new responsibilities." In deserting her, her lover had awakened a passion for heroism and singularity that had lain dormant in her nature. As soon as she felt sure that she would never for the rest of her days lead the same sort of life as most women of her class and background, and that she would always be in a position to invoke the tragedy of a life ruined by her very first love, she adjusted with alacrity to the great disaster that had befallen her and, all things considered, the ravages of fate became tragically welcome. She glorified in her unmarried-mother act. In the dining room, as her father and I went in, the economy lighting stopped at half-tints and faces appeared only as pale spots, blobs of flesh mumbling words that hung suspended in a penumbra heavy with the smell of old pepper that all heirloom furniture exudes. The child, lying swaddled on his back in the middle of the table, let me palpate him. To begin with, I pressed the wall of his abdomen, ever so carefully and slowly, from the navel to the testicles, and then still very gravely I auscultated him.

His heartbeat was like a kitten's, sharp and nervous. Then the child had enough of my exploring fingers and began to yell as children can do at that age, incredibly. That was too much. Since Robinson's return I'd been feeling very funny in body and mind, and the little innocent's screams made an abominable impression on me. What screams! Heavens above, what screams! I was at the end of my rope.

Another idea must have helped to provoke my idiotic behavior. In my exasperation, I couldn't stop myself from blurting out all the rancor and disgust I had been holding in for too long.

"Hey," I said to that little bellower, "don't be in such a hurry, you little fool, you'll have plenty of time for bellowing! Never fear, you little idiot, there'll be time to spare. Save your strength. There'll be enough misery to melt your eyes and your head and everything else if you don't watch out!"

The grandmother gave a start:

"What are you saying, doctor?" I repeated simply:

"There will be plenty!"

"What?" she asked in horror. "Plenty of what?"

"You have to understand!" I said. "You have to understand. You're always having things explained to you! That's the whole trouble! Try to understand! Make an effort!"

"What will be left ... What's he saying?" they all three asked one another. The daughter

"with the responsibilities" made a strange face and started emitting prodigiously long screams. Here was a marvelous occasion for a fit, and she wasn't going to miss it. She meant business. She kicked! She choked! She squinted horribly! I'd done it all right! You should have seen her! "Mama, he's mad!" She bellowed so hard she almost choked. "The doctor's gone mad! Mama, take my baby away from him!" She was saving her child. I shall never know why, she began in her agitation to take on a Basque accent. "He's saying such awful things!
Mameng!
... He's insane! ..."

They snatched the baby out of my hands as if they were rescuing him from the flames. The grandfather, who had been so deferential only a short while ago, unhooked an enormous mahogany thermometer from the wall, it was as big as a club ... And he pursued me at a distance to the door, which he slammed violently behind me with a big kick. Naturally they took advantage of the incident not to pay for my call ... When I found myself back on the street, I wasn't exactly pleased with what had happened. Not so much because of my reputation, which couldn't have been worse in the neighborhood than people had already made it with no help from me, as because of Robinson, from whom I had hoped to deliver myself with my outburst of frankness, to find the strength never to see him again by deliberately creating a scandal, by stirring up this hideous scene with myself.

Here's what I figured: by my little experiment I'd see how much of a stink it's possible to kick up at one throw. The trouble with scenes and tantrums is that you're never finished, you never know how far you'll be forced to go in your frankness ... What people are still hiding from you ... And what they'll show you some day ... if you live long enough ... if you go far enough into the heart of their cock-and-bull stories ... The whole business would have to be started all over again.

I, too, just then, was in a hurry to hide. I started for home by way of the Impasse Gibet, then I took the Rue Valentines. It was quite a distance. Time to change my mind. I headed for the lights. On the Place Transitoire I met Péridon the lamp lighter. We exchanged a few innocent remarks. "On your way to the movies, doctor?" he asked me. That gave me the idea. A good one, I thought.

The bus gets you there quicker than the Métro. After that shameful incident I'd have been glad to leave Rancy for good if I'd been able to.

When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.

In spite of everything it was just as well that I went back to Rancy next day, because of Bébert, who fell sick just then. My colleague Frolichon had just gone off on his vacation. Bébert's aunt hesitated, then she asked me to take care of her nephew after all, probably because I charged less than any other doctor she knew.

It was after Easter. The weather was looking up. The first south winds were passing over Rancy, the ones that blew all the soot from the factories down on our windowpanes. Bébert was sick for weeks and weeks. I went to see him twice a day. The neighborhood people would wait for me outside the lodge, pretending to be just passing by, and on the doorsteps of their houses. It gave them something to do. People would come a long way to find out if he was better or worse. The sunshine has too many things to pass through; it never gives the street anything better than an autumn light full of regrets and clouds. People gave me lots of advice in connection with Bébert. The fact is, the whole neighborhood took an interest in his case. Some thought well, others poorly, of my intelligence. When I went into the lodge, a critical, rather hostile, and most of all crushingly stupid silence set in. The lodge was always full of the aunt's cronies, it smelled strongly of petticoats and rabbit piss. Each had her own favorite doctor, who was cleverer and more learned than any other. I presented only one advantage, but one that's hard to forgive, I charged hardly anything. A free-gratis doctor is bad for the reputation of a patient and his family, however poor they may be.

Bébert wasn't delirious yet, he had just lost all desire to move. He was losing weight by the day. A bit of yellow, flabby flesh still clung to his bones and quivered from top to bottom every time his heart beat. He'd got so thin in over a month of illness that his heart seemed to be all over his body. He'd look at me with a lucid smile when I came to see him. Sweetly he ran a temperature of 102, then of 103, and there he lay with a pensive look on his face for days and weeks.

After a while Bébert's aunt had shut up and stopped bothering us. She had said everything she knew. That took the wind out of her sails, so she'd go and blubber in one corner of her lodge after another. Grief had come to her when she ran out of words, and she didn't seem to know what to do with it. She'd try to wipe it off with her handkerchief, but it came back in her throat all mixed with tears, and she'd start all over again. She'd get it all over her and manage to be a little dirtier than usual. That would upset her and she'd cry out: "Oh dear!

Oh dear!" That was all. She had cried so much she was exhausted, her arms would fall to her sides, and she'd stand there in front of me, absolutely bewildered. But then after all she'd go back into her grief and give herself a jolt and start sobbing again. These comings and goings in her misery went on for weeks. I couldn't dispel the feeling that this illness would end badly. It was a kind of malignant typhoid that baffled all my efforts, baths, serum, dry diet, vaccines ... Nothing helped. I did everything I could think of ... all in vain. Bébert was going, being carried away irresistibly, smiling all the while. He was high up, balanced on top of his fever, and I was down below making a fool of myself. Naturally a lot of people were advising the aunt, pressing her to fire me in no uncertain terms and call in another, more imposing and more experienced doctor in a hurry. The incident of the girl "with the responsibilities" had gone the rounds and been liberally commented on. The whole neighborhood was gargling with it.

But since the other doctors, once informed of the nature of Bébert's illness, showed no eagerness to take the case, I was kept on in the end. As long as Bébert had fallen to my lot, my colleagues figured, I might as well see him through.

All I could do was go to the bistrot now and then and phone various doctors in the Paris hospitals, with whom I was more or less acquainted, and ask those sage, widely respected luminaries what they would do if faced with a case of typhoid like the one that was driving me mad. They all gave me excellent, ineffectual advice, but all the same it pleased me to hear them making an effort free of charge for the benefit of the unknown child I had taken under my wing. After a while you start taking pleasure in the merest trifles, the small consolations life deigns to give us.

While I was busying myself with such subtleties, Bébert's aunt was collapsing on every chair and staircase in the house; she'd emerge from her daze only to eat. But she never missed a meal. Her neighbors wouldn't have let her forget. They watched over her. They stuffed her between sobs. "It'll keep your strength up!" they declared. She even began to put on weight.

Speaking of Brussels sprouts, the smell rose to orgiastic heights at the peak of Bébert's illness. It was the season. Everyone was making her presents of Brussels sprouts, ready cooked and steaming hot. "It's true," she was glad to admit, "they give me strength. And besides, they make me urinate."

Before bedtime, because of the doorbell, so as to sleep lightly and hear the very first ring, she'd fill herself full of coffee. That way the tenants wouldn't wake Bébert by ringing two or three times. Passing by the house in the evening, I'd go in to see if maybe it was all over. She'd speculate out loud: "Don't you think it may have been the rum and camomile tea he drank at the fruit store the day of the bicycle race that made him sick?" That idea had been plaguing her from the start. The stupid fool.

"Camomile!" Bébert murmured faintly, an echo submerged in his fever. Why try to tell her different? I'd go through the two or three professional motions she expected of me, and then I'd go and face the night, not at all pleased with myself, because, like my mother, I could never feel entirely innocent of any horrible thing that happened. About the seventeenth day I decided that it might not be a bad idea to drop in at the Joseph Bioduret Institute[68] and ask them what they thought about a typhoid case of this kind. Maybe they'd give me a bit of advice or recommend some vaccine. That way, if Bébert were to die, I'd have done everything possible, tried everything, however out of the way, and then perhaps I wouldn't feel eternally guilty. At about eleven o'clock one morning I arrived at the Institute near La Villette at the other end of Paris. First they sent me wandering through laboratories and more laboratories, looking for a man of science. There wasn't a soul in those laboratories at that hour, neither laymen nor men of science, only various objects in wild disorder, the gutted bodies of small animals, cigarette butts, chipped gas jets, cases and jars with mice suffocating inside them, retorts, bladders, broken stools, books, dust, and more cigarette butts, which, mingled with the effluvia of the urinals, made up the prevailing smell. Since I was early, I thought while I was at it, I'd go and visit the tomb of that great scientist, Joseph Bioduret, which was right there in the basement of the Institute, in with the gold and marble. A bourgeoiso-Byzantine fantasy in the best of taste!

The collection was taken on your way out of the crypt, and the guard was grumbling because someone had slipped him a Belgian coin. In the last half-century the shining example of this Bioduret had led any number of young people to choose the scientific career. And the scientific career had produced as many failures as the Conservatory. After a certain number of years of failure, scientists turn out to be pretty much alike. In the mass graves of the great débâcle a Doctor of Medicine is as good as a "Prix de Rome." The only difference is that they don't take the bus at exactly the same time of day. That's all. I had to wait quite a long while in the garden of the Institute, a combination of prison yard and city square, with flowers carefully lined up along malignantly decorated walls. At last some underlings began to turn up. Several, dragging their feet listlessly, were carrying provisions from the nearby market in large shopping bags. Then, in small, unshaven, whispering groups, the men of science came sauntering through the gate, more slowly and diffidently than their humble assistants, and dispersed down different corridors, scraping the paint off the walls as they passed. Gray-haired, umbrella-carrying schoolboys, stupefied by the pedantic routine and intensely revolting experiments, riveted by starvation wages for their whole adult lives to these little microbe kitchens, there to spend interminable days warming up mixtures of vegetable scrapings, asphyxiated guinea pigs, and other nondescript garbage.