Journey to the End of the Night (44 page)

When I questioned them, they stood there in front of me, smiling like servants, but they didn't like me, mostly because I was helping them, but also because I wasn't rich, and having me for a doctor meant they were being treated free of charge, which is never flattering for a sick person, even if he is hoping for a pension. No slander would have been too great for them to spread behind my back. Most of the doctors in the neighborhood had cars, I didn't, and to their way of thinking my walking was a kind of infirmity. If anyone gave them the slightest encouragement, something my colleagues were always glad to do, they'd avenge themselves, or so it seemed, for all my kindness, for my devotion and readiness to help. Which is perfectly normal. Nevertheless the time passed. One evening when my waiting room was almost empty, a priest came in to see me. I didn't know that priest, I almost showed him the door. I didn't like priests, I had my reasons, especially since the time they'd shanghaied me at San Tapeta. But hard as I tried to place this one, searching my mind for something definite to reproach him with, the fact is that I'd never seen him before. Still, he must, like me, have gone about quite a lot in Rancy by night, he lived nearby. Maybe he avoided me on his rounds. I thought it over. Maybe somebody had told him I didn't like priests. You could see that by the weaseling way he started his spiel. One thing is sure?we had never jostled each other around the same sickbeds. He had been officiating, he told me, at a church nearby for the last twenty years. Plenty of parishioners, but not many who paid. A kind of beggar, come to think of it. We had that much in common. The soutane he was wearing struck me as a most uncomfortable sort of drapery for plodding through the muck of the Zone. I said as much. I went so far as to stress the extravagant discomfort of such a garment.

"You get used to it," he said.

The impertinence of my remark didn't put him off, he became more affable than ever. Obviously he had something to ask of me. His voice seldom rose above a certain confidential monotone which, or so at least I imagined, came from his calling. While he was cautiously preambling, I tried to form a picture of all he did each day to earn his calories, all his grimaces and promises, pretty much like my own ... And then, to amuse myself, I imagined him all naked at his altar ... It's a good habit to get into: when somebody comes to see you, quick, reduce him to nakedness, and you'll see through him in a flash, regardless of who it is, you will instantly discern the underlying reality, namely, an enormous, hungry maggot. It's good sleight-of-the-imagination. His lousy prestige vanishes, evaporates. Once you've got him naked, you'll be dealing with nothing more than a bragging, pretentious beggar, talking drivel of one kind or another. It's a test that nothing can withstand. In a moment you'll know where you're at. There won't be anything left but ideas, and there's nothing frightening about ideas. With ideas nothing is lost, everything can be straightened out. Whereas it's sometimes hard to stand up to the prestige of a man with his clothes on. Nasty smells and mysteries cling to his clothes.

This Abbé had very bad teeth, decayed, discolored, ringed with greenish tartar, in short, a fine case of alveolar pyorrhea. I was going to talk to him about his pyorrhea, but he was too busy telling me things. The things he was telling me kept squirting against the stumps of his teeth under the impulsion of a tongue, no movement of which escaped me. In a number of spots the edges of his tongue were bruised and bleeding.

This kind of meticulous observation was a habit, you might say a hobby, of mine. When you stop to examine the way in which words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation. That corolla of bloated flesh, the mouth, which screws itself up to whistle, which sucks in breath, contorts itself, discharges all manner of viscous sounds across a fetid barrier of decaying teeth?how revolting! Yet that is what we are adjured to sublimate into an ideal. It's not easy. Since we are nothing but packages of tepid, half-rotted viscera, we shall always have trouble with sentiment. Being in love is nothing, it's sticking together that's difficult. Feces on the other hand make no attempt to endure or to grow. On this score we are far more unfortunate than shit; our frenzy to persist in our present state?that's the unconscionable torture. Unquestionably we worship nothing more divine than our smell. All our misery comes from wanting at all costs to go on being Tom, Dick or Harry, year in year out. This body of ours, this disguise put on by common jumping molecules, is in constant revolt against the abominable farce of having to endure. Our molecules, the dears, want to get lost in the universe as fast as they can! It makes them miserable to be nothing but "us," the jerks of infinity. We'd burst if we had the courage, day after day we come very close to it. The atomic torture we love so is locked up inside us with our pride.

Since I was silent, stunned by the thought of these biological ignominies, the Abbé, thinking he had me in his pocket, assumed a benevolent, almost familiar manner. With infinite precautions he broached the subject of my medical reputation in the neighborhood. My reputation, he gave me to understand, might have been better if I had taken a very different course at the start, during the first few months of my practice in Rancy.

"Don't forget, my dear doctor, that the sick are basically conservative ... As you must doubtless know, they live in fear that heaven and earth will fail them ..." In other words, I should have made my peace with the Church from the start. That was his eminently practical as well as spiritual conclusion. Not a bad idea. I was careful not to interrupt him but waited patiently for him to come to the point of his visit. The weather couldn't have been gloomier or more confidential. It was so vile, so coldly and emphatically vile, it gave you the feeling that if you went out you'd never see the rest of the world again, that the world would have melted away in disgust.

My nurse had finally brought her case histories up to date, every last one. She had no excuse whatever for staying there listening to us. So she left us, but miffed, slamming the door behind her, and plunged into a furious downpour.

In the course of our conversation this priest told me his name, Abbé Protiste he called himself. Between exercises in evasiveness, he informed me that he and Madame Henrouille had for some time been taking steps with a view to getting the old woman and Robinson, the two of them together, into an inexpensive religious institution. They were still at it. Looking closely at this Abbé Protiste, I might have taken him for a salesman in a department store, maybe even a section manager, wet, greenish, and many times dried. There was something really plebeian in the humility of his insinuations. In his breath, too. When it comes to breath, I never go wrong. There was a man who ate too fast and drank white wine.

Madame Henrouille, he told me as a starter, had called on him at the presbytery soon after the incident so see if he could help them out of the mess they had got themselves into. In telling me that, he seemed to be looking for excuses, explanations, as if he were ashamed of his part in the affair. There was really no need of putting on airs on my account. I knew the lie of the land. He was simply joining us in the night, that's all. That was his lookout. Little by little, what with the money involved, this priest had developed an extraordinary crust. That too was his lookout! Since my dispensary was steeped in silence and night had settled on the Zone, he lowered his voice to a whisper, wanting to confide in me alone. But whisper or not, everything he said struck me as monstrous and intolerable, probably because of the quiet all around me, which seemed to be full of echoes. Or were they only in my head? "Hush!" I kept wanting to say in the intervals between his words. I was so frightened my lips trembled a little, and at the end of his sentences I made myself stop thinking.

Now that he had joined us in our terror, the priest didn't quite know how to go about following the four of us in the darkness. A small group. He wanted to know how many of us were already mixed up in the affair. And where we were headed. So that he too, hand in hand with his new friends, might direct his steps toward the goal we would have to reach all together or not at all. We were all in the same boat now. The priest would have to learn to walk in the dark like the rest of us. He was still unsteady on his pins. He asked me what he should do to keep from falling. He didn't have to come if he was afraid. We'd get to the end together, and then we'd know what we'd been looking for in our adventure. That's what life is, a bit of light that ends in darkness.

But on the other hand, maybe we'd never know, maybe we wouldn't find anything. That's death.

The essential for the moment was to grope our way carefully. At the point we had got to we couldn't go back. We had no choice. Their lousy justice with its Laws was everywhere, at the bend of every corridor. Madame Henrouille was holding the old woman's hand, her son and I were holding theirs and Robinson's as well. We were all in it together. I explained all that to the priest without delay. And he understood.

Like it or not, I told the Abbé, in our present situation it wouldn't do us a bit of good to be noticed and exposed by the passers-by, I made that very clear. If we met anybody, we should pretend to be just taking a walk. Those were the instructions. Act natural. So now the Abbé knew the ins and outs, he understood. He gave me an ardent handshake. Naturally he too was scared to death. A beginner. He hesitated, he floundered like an innocent. At that point there was neither road nor light, and in their place only words of caution, which we passed back and forth but didn't greatly believe in ourselves. The words people say to reassure each other at times like that fall on empty air. The echo sends back nothing, you've walked out on Society. Fear says neither yes nor no. Fear swallows up everything we say, everything we think.

Nor does it help at times like that to stare wide-eyed into the darkness. It's horror wasted, that's all. The night has taken everything, even the light of our eyes. It has drained us. Even so, we have to join hands or we'll fall. Day people can't understand us. Between them and us stands our fear, which will weigh on us until this thing ends one way or another and we can get back together, in death or life, with the other motherfuckers of this world. For the moment the Abbé had only to help us and find things out in a hurry, that was his job. Actually that's what he had come for, to knock himself out finding a home as quickly as possible, first for Grandma Henrouille and then for Robinson, with the nuns in the provinces. He thought such an arrangement possible, and so did I. Except we'd have to wait months for a vacancy, and we were sick of waiting. We were fed up.

The daughter-in-law was quite right, the sooner the better. They should beat it and good riddance! So Protiste came up with another scheme which, I agreed on the spot, seemed most ingenious. Best of all, it would mean a commission for both of us, the priest and me. The arrangement was to go into effect almost immediately, and I'd have my own little part to play. It consisted in persuading Robinson to go south, to give him a bit of friendly but firm advice.

Not knowing either the bottom or the underside of Protiste's scheme, I ought perhaps to have expressed certain reservations, tried to protect my friend a little ... Because the scheme Abbé Protiste put forward was indeed pretty wild. But we were all so harried by circumstances that our chief concern was haste. I promised everything they asked, to help and to keep my mouth shut. Ticklish situations of this kind seemed to be nothing new to this Protiste, and something told me that he would make things a lot easier for me. But where were we to begin? We'd have to arrange for Robinson to leave quietly for the South. How would Robinson feel about the South? Not to mention leaving with the old woman, whom he had come very close to murdering ... I'd insist ... That's all! ... He'd simply have to, for all sorts of reasons, not all of them very good, but sound, yes, sound ...

The job that had been found for Robinson and the old woman in the South was certainly weird. In Toulouse. A beautiful city Toulouse! We'd be seeing Toulouse! We'd go visit them down there. I promised I'd go to Toulouse as soon as they were settled in their lodgings and their work and all.

Then, thinking it over, it bothered me a little that Robinson should be leaving so soon, but at the same time I was glad, mostly because for once I was making a bit of real profit on the deal. A thousand francs they were giving me. It was all settled. All I had to do was work up Robinson's enthusiasm for the South, convince him that there was no better climate for damaged eyes, that he'd be blissfully well off down there, and that all things considered he was pretty damn lucky to get off so easily. That ought to do it.

After five minutes of rumination along these lines, I myself was steeped in conviction and prepared for a decisive interview. Strike while the iron is hot, that's my opinion. After all, he'd be no worse off down there than here. Protiste's idea, when I thought it over, seemed perfectly reasonable. You've got to admit it, those priests know how to bury the worst scandals.

All things considered, the deal being offered Robinson and the old woman wasn't so bad. If I wasn't mistaken, it was some sort of mummy show. The mummies were in the cellar of some church, and tourists could visit them for a fee. A fine business, Protiste assured me. I almost believed him, and that made me a little jealous. It's not every day that you can get the dead to work for you.

I locked up the dispensary and started resolutely through the sludge with the priest, heading for the Henrouilles. This was really something new. A thousand francs' worth of hope! I had changed my mind about the priest. When we got to the house, we found the Henrouilles, man and wife, with Robinson in his room on the second floor. But what a state Robinson was in!

"So there you are!" he screeches frantically as soon as he hears my steps on the stairs.

"There's something going on! I can feel it! ... Tell me the truth!" he gasps. He starts sniveling before I can say a word. The Henrouilles are making signs while he appeals to me for help: "A pretty mess!" I say to myself. "They're in too much of a hurry ... Always have been! ... They've broken it to him cold! Without preparation!