Journey to the End of the Night (47 page)

Since we read several pornographic magazines at our hotel, we knew the ropes and addresses needed for getting fucked in Paris. You have to admit that addresses are fun. You let yourself be tempted ... even I, who had known the Passage des Bérésinas and traveled and experienced no end of complications in the pornographic line, never seem to have exhausted the hope of intimate revelations. Where the ass is concerned, there's always a residue of curiosity. You say to yourself that the ass has nothing more to tell you, that you haven't one more minute to waste on it, and then you start in again just to make absolutely sure that the subject is exhausted, you learn something new about it after all, and that suffices to launch you on a wave of optimism.

You pull yourself together, you think more clearly than before, you start hoping again even if you'd given up hope altogether, and inevitably you revert once more to the ass, the same old story. Indeed, there are always, at all ages, discoveries to be made in the vagina. So one afternoon three of us from the hotel set out in search of an inexpensive piece. It was quick work, thanks to the connections of Pomone,[79] who operated an agency in the Batignolles quarter for every kind of erotic arrangement or combination that anyone could desire. His books were full of offers at all prices. This providential man officiated without ostentation of any kind at the back of a court; his exiguous premises were so poorly lit that you needed as much tactile sense and gift of dead reckoning to find your way as in an unfamiliar urinal. Your nerves would be unsettled by the layers of curtain you had to part before reaching the procurer, who was always to be found seated in an artificial confessional twilight. Because of that dim light, to tell the truth, I never really managed to get a good look at Pomone, and though we had long conversations and even worked together for a time, though he made me all sorts of propositions and confided any number of sensitive secrets, I should be quite incapable of recognizing him today if I met him in hell. I remember only that the furtive enthusiasts in the sitting room, waiting their turn for an interview, always behaved correctly, never any familiarity between them, in fact they were as reserved as if they'd been waiting for some eccentric dentist who disliked noise and didn't care much for light either.

I made the acquaintance of Pomone through a medical student. The student cultivated him as a means of making a bit of extra money out of his cock, because, you see, the lucky bastard was gifted with a monumental penis. He and his amazing equipment would be hired to bring animation into little intimate gatherings in the suburbs. The ladies made a great fuss over him. especially those who wouldn't have believed that anyone could have "such a big one." Overwhelmed young girls would dream and rave. In the police records our student figured under the alarming pseudonym of Belshazzar![80]

The watting customers seldom strike up a conversation. Suffering exhibits itself; pleasure and the needs of the flesh hang their heads in shame.

Say what you please, it's a sin to be a lecher and poor. When Pomone heard about my situation and my medical past, nothing could stop him from telling me about his suffering. A vice was wearing him out. It consisted in "touching" himself continuously under his desk, while conversing with his customers, hunters afflicted with an itching perineum. "It's my work, you see! How do you expect me to control myself ... with all the horrors they tell me, the swine! ..." In short, his customers tempted him to vice, like those obese butchers who can't help gorging themselves on meat. In addition, I believe his bowels were constantly inflamed as a result of a malignant fever originating in his lungs. And the fact is that he was carried off fay tuberculosis a few years later. He was also exhausted in a different sense by the chatter of his pretentious lady customers, always cheating, always making up ridiculous stories about nothing or about their sexual apparatus, the like of which, to hear them talk, you wouldn't find if you ransacked all four corners of the earth. What the men wanted most and what had to be found for them was mostly consenting and admiring partners for their erotic wrinkles. Incredible the quantities of love those men had to share, as much as Madame Herote's customers. A single morning's mail would bring the Pomone Agency enough unsatisfied love to extinguish all the wars in the world forever. But these deluges of sentiment never went beyond the ass. The more's the pity. His desk disappeared beneath that mass of passionate banalities. In my desire to know more, I decided to help him for a while in classifying that vast epistolary ragout. Just as with neckties or diseases, he explained, you grouped them according to types, the lunatics on one side, the masochists and sadists on another, the flagellants over here, the ones looking for a "governess" on a different page, and so on. It's not long before your amusement becomes a chore. We've been expelled from Paradise all right! No doubt about that! Pomone was of the same opinion with his moist hands and his everlasting vice, which gave him pleasure and remorse at the same time. After a few months I knew enough about his business and himself. My visits became less frequent.

At the Tarapout they continued to regard me as quite acceptable, a quiet, punctual super, but after a few weeks of calm, my customary ill luck sought me out from an unusual quarter, and I was obliged to abandon my work as a super and resume my miserable journey. Seen in perspective, those days at the Tarapout were only a sort of forbidden and insidious port of call. Admittedly, I was always well dressed during those four months, once as a prince, twice as a centurion, one day as an aviator, and well and regularly paid. At the Tarapout I ate enough to last me for years. I led the life of a coupon clipper without the coupons. Treachery! Disaster! One night, I don't know why, they changed our number. The scene of the new sketch was the London Embankment. My misgivings were immediate, our little English girls were expected to sing, off key and ostensibly on the banks of the Thames at night, while I played the part of a policeman. A totally silent role, walking up and down in front of the parapet. Suddenly, when I'd stopped thinking about it, their singing grew louder than life itself and steered fate in the direction of calamity. While they were singing, I couldn't think of anything but all the poor world's misery and my own, those tarts with their singing made my heart burn like tuna fish. I thought I'd digested it, forgotten the worst! But this was the worst of all, a song that couldn't make it ... And as they sang, they wiggle-waggled, to try and bring it off. A fine mess, all of a sudden we were knee deep in misery ... No mistake! Mooning about in the fog! Their lament was dripping with misery, it made me grow older from minute to minute. Panic oozed from the very stage set. And nothing could stop them. They didn't seem to understand all the harm their song was doing us all ... They laughed and flung out their legs in perfect time, while lamenting their whole life ... When it comes to you from so far, with such sureness of aim, you can't mistake it and you can't resist.

Misery was everywhere, in spite of the luxurious hall; it was on us, on the set, it overflowed, it drenched the whole earth. Those girls were real artists ... Abject misery poured out of them, and they made no attempt to stop it or even understand it. Only their eyes were sad. The eyes aren't enough. They sang the calamity of existence, and they didn't understand. They mistook it for love, nothing but love, the poor little things had never been taught anything else. Supposedly, they were singing about some little setback in love. That's what they thought! When you're young and you don't know, you mistake everything for love trouble ...

Where I go ... where I look ...

It's only for you ... ou ...

Only for you ... ou ...

That's what they sang.

It's a mania with the young to put all humanity into one ass, just one, the dream of dreams, mad love. Maybe later they would find out where all that ended, when their rosiness had fled, when the no-nonsense misery of their lousy country had engulfed them, all sixteen of them, with their hefty mare's thighs and their bobbing tits ... The truth is that misery already had the darlings by the neck, by the waist, they couldn't escape. By the belly, by the breath, by every cord of their thin, off-key voices.

Misery was inside them. No costume, no spangles, no lights, no smile could fool her, delude her about her own, misery finds her own wherever they may hide; it just amuses her to let them sing silly songs of hope while waiting their turn ... Those things awaken misery, caress and arouse her ...

That's what our unhappiness, our terrible unhappiness comes to, an amusement. So to hell with people who sing love songs! Love itself is misery and nothing else, misery lying out of our mouths, the bitch, and nothing else. She's everywhere, don't wake her, not even in pretense. She never pretends. And yet those English girls went through their routine three times a day, with their backdrop and accordion tunes. It was bound to end badly.

I didn't interfere, but don't worry, I saw the catastrophe coming.

First one of the girls fell sick. Death to cuties who stir up calamity! Let 'em croak, we'll all be better off! And while we're at it, don't hang around street corners near accordion players, as often as not that's where you'll catch it, where the truth will strike. A Polish girl was hired to take the place of the sick one in their act. The Polish chick coughed too, when she wasn't doing anything else. She was tall and pale, powerfully built. We made friends right away. In two hours I knew all about her soul, as far as her body was concerned, I had to wait a while. This girl's mania was mutilating her nervous system with impossible crushes. Naturally, what with her own unhappiness, she slid into the English girls' lousy song like a knife into butter. Their song began very nicely, like all popular songs it didn't seem to mean a thing, and then your heart began to droop, it made you so sad that listening to it you lost all desire to live, because it's true that everything, youth and all that, comes to nothing, and then you started harking to the words, even after the song was over and the tune had gone home to sleep in its own bed, its honest-to-goodness bed, the tomb where everything ends. Two choruses, and you felt a kind of longing for the sweet land of death, the land of everlasting tenderness and immediate foggy forgetfulness. As a matter of fact their voices were foggy too.

All of us in chorus repeated their plaint, reproachful of everybody who was still around, still dragging their living carcasses from place to place, waiting along the riverbanks, on all the riverbanks of the world, for life to finish passing, and in the meantime doing one thing and another, selling things to other ghosts, oranges and racing tips and counterfeit coins ... policemen, sex fiends, sorrows, telling each other things in this patient fog that will never end ...

Tania was the name of my new pal from Poland. Her life at the moment, I gathered, was one compact frenzy, because of a little forty-year-old bank clerk, whom she had known since Berlin. She wanted to go back to Berlin and love him in spite of everything and at all costs. She'd have done anything to get back to him.

She pursued theatrical agents, those promisers of engagements, to the ends of their pissy stairways. While waiting for answers that never came, those rotters pinched her buttocks. But she was so totally enthralled by her faraway love that she hardly noticed their manipulations. This state of affairs hadn't prevailed for a week when disaster struck. For months she had been loading Destiny with temptations, like a cannon. Flu carried off her marvelous lover. The news came to us one Saturday afternoon. Disheveled and haggard, she dragged me to the Gare du Nord. That in itself was nothing unusual, but in her frenzy she clamored at the ticket window, insisting that she had to be in Berlin in time for the funeral. It took two station-masters to dissuade her, to get her to understand that it was much too late.

In the state she was in, I couldn't think of leaving her. She was intent on her tragedy, and still more intent on exhibiting it to me in full flood. What an opportunity! Love thwarted by poverty and distance is like a sailor's love; no two ways, it's irrefutable and sure fire. In the first place, when you're unable to meet too often, you can't fight, which is that much gained. Since life consists of madness spiked with lies, the farther you are from each other the more lies you can put into it and the happier you'll be. That's only natural and normal. Truth is inedible.

Nowadays, for instance, it's easy to talk about Jesus Christ. Did Jesus Christ go to the toilet in front of everybody? It seems to me his racket wouldn't have lasted very long if he'd taken a shit in public. Very little presence, that's the whole trick, especially in love. Once Tania had been thoroughly assured that there was no possible train to Berlin, we made up for it in telegrams. At the Bourse[81] post office, we composed an extremely long one, because we didn't know whom to address it to. We didn't know anybody in Berlin except the dead man. From that moment on, there was nothing we could do but exchange words about the dead man's death. Words helped us to walk around the Bourse two or three times. Then we had to do something to soothe Tania's sorrow, so we strolled slowly up toward Montmartre, garbling words of grief.

On the Rue Lepic you start meeting people on their way to the top of the city in search of merriment. They're in a hurry. When they get to Sacré-Coeur, they look down at the night, a big dense hollow with houses piled at the bottom,

On the little square we went into the cafe that looked the least expensive. By way of consolation and gratitude Tania let me kiss her wherever I pleased. She also liked to drink. Tipsy merrymakers were already asleep on the benches around us. The clock at the top of the little church started striking the hours and more hours, and on and on. We had reached the end of the world, that was becoming obvious. We couldn't go any further, because further on there were only dead people.

The dead began on the Place du Tertre, two steps away. From where we were it was easy to see them. They were passing over the Galeries Duf ayel,[82] to the east of us. Even so, you've got to know how to find them?namely, from inside with your eyes almost closed, because the electric signs with their great copses of light make it very hard to see the dead, even through the clouds. I realized at once that these dead had Bébert with them. Bébert and I even gave each other the high sign, and then not far from him I saw the pale girl from Rancy, she had finally finished aborting, this time her guts had been taken out of her, and we, too, signaled to each other.