Journey to the End of the Night (57 page)

Late that night he asked me to join him in his directorial office ... At that point I expected him to communicate some monumental decision, my immediate dismissal, for instance ... Not at all ... On the contrary, the decision he had arrived at was entirely favorable to me. Believe it or not, I was so unaccustomed to being surprised by good news that a tear or two escaped me ... Baryton chose to interpret my emotion as sadness. That reversed the roles, and he began to comfort me ...

"Will you doubt my word, Ferdinand, if I assure you that it took far more than courage on my part to resolve to leave this Institute? ... I, whose sedentary habits are known to you. I, a man on the brink of old age, whose whole career has consisted of long, tenacious, scrupulous verification of innumerable slow or sudden inspirations? ... In the space of a very few months, I have come to abjure all that ... It seems hardly believable ... Yet here I am, body and soul, in such a state of detachment, of exultation ... Ferdinand!
Hurrah
, as you say in English! My past has ceased to exist! I shall be reborn, Ferdinand! Neither more nor less! I am going away! Oh, kind friend, your tears are powerless to attenuate the definitive disgust I feel for everything that has kept me here for so many lackluster years ... Enough! I can bear it no longer! I repeat, I am going away! Fleeing! Escaping!

True, I am torn! I know it! I bleed! I can see it! And yet, Ferdinand, not for anything in the world, do you hear me, Ferdinand? Not for anything would I turn back! ... Even if I had dropped an eye somewhere in this muck, I would not come back to pick it up! That's the long and the short of it! Do you doubt my sincerity now?"

I doubted nothing whatsoever. Baryton was unquestionably capable of anything. Besides, I am sure that in the state he had worked himself up into, any contradiction on my part would have been fatal to his reason. I left him alone for a little while. But then, on second thought, I tried to influence him just a little, risked a last attempt to bring him back to us ... by means of a slightly transposed, amiably oblique ... argument ...

"I beg you, Ferdinand, abandon all hope of my going back on my decision! It is irrevocable, I tell you! You will give me no end of pleasure by never speaking of it again ... For the last time, Ferdinand, do you wish to please me? At my age, I know, a sense of mission is most unusual ... That's a fact ... But when it comes, it's irremediable ..."

Those were his very words, almost the last he uttered. I cite them verbatim.

"Perhaps, my dear Monsieur Baryton," I nevertheless ventured to break in. "Perhaps in the end this sort of impromptu holiday you are preparing to take will be nothing more than a rather romantic episode, a welcome diversion, a happy intermezzo in the course of your undoubtedly somewhat austere professional activity ... perhaps after tasting a different life ... more varied, less banally methodic than the life we lead here, then perhaps you will simply come back to us, pleased with your journey, surfeited with the unforeseen ... And then, quite naturally, you will resume your place at our head ... proud of your recent acquisitions ... refreshed in a word, and henceforth, no doubt, prepared to accept, to look with indulgence upon the daily monotony of our laborious routine ... An older and a wiser man! If you'll forgive me, Monsieur Baryton, for putting it that way ..."

"Oh Ferdinand, you flatterer! ... Somehow you still manage to touch my masculine pride, which, I discover, remains sensitive, exigent in fact, despite all my weariness and past trials ... No, Ferdinand! With all your ingenuity you cannot in one moment make the abominably hostile and painful essence of our whole striving look benign to me. And moreover, Ferdinand, the time for hesitation is past, it is too late to turn back! ... I have been drained, I admit it, I shout it from the rooftops, Ferdinand: drained! stultified! defeated! by forty years of prudent paltriness! ... That is far too much! What I aim to do? You want to know? ... No reason why I shouldn't tell you, you, my last friend, you who have been willing to take a disinterested part in the sufferings of a defeated old man ... What I want, Ferdinand, is to try and lose my soul, as you might try to lose a mangy dog, your stinking dog, the companion who disgusts you, and to get far away from him before you die ... To be alone at last ... At peace ... Myself ..."

"But, my dear Monsieur Baryton, I have never, in any of your words, caught an inkling of the violent despair whose uncompromising demands you have suddenly revealed to me. I am amazed! On the contrary, your daily remarks still strike me as perfectly pertinent ... All your spirited, fruitful suggestions ... Your splendidly judicious and methodical medical treatments ... I would search your daily actions in vain for any sign of depression, of defeat ... Really and truly, I discern nothing of the kind ..." But for the first time since I'd known him, Baryton derived no pleasure from my compliments. He went so far as to dissuade me, quite amiably, from pursuing the conversation in a laudatory vein.

"No, my dear Ferdinand, I assure you ... True, your last professions of friendship have given my last moments here an unhoped-for sweetness, and yet with all your kindness you cannot reconcile me to the memory of a past which overwhelms me and which this place stinks of ... At any cost and, do you hear? under any conditions, I am determined to go away ..."

"But Monsieur Baryton, this institution, what will we do with it? Have you thought of that?"

"Yes, of course I've thought of it, Ferdinand ... You will take over the management for as long as I'm away, that's all! ... Haven't you always had excellent relations with our clientele? They will gladly accept you as director ... Everything will be splendid, you'll see, Ferdinand ... Parapine, since he can't abide conversation, will take care of the mechanical end, the apparatus, the laboratory ... He has a way with those things ... So everything's in the best of order ... And you know, I've stopped believing that anyone's presence is indispensable ... Even on that score, you see, my friend, I've changed considerably ..." True enough, he was unrecognizable.

"But aren't you afraid, Monsieur Baryton, that your departure will provoke malicious comments on the part of your competitors in the region? ... In Passy, for instance? In Montretout? ... In Gargan-Livry? All those people around us ... Always keeping an eye on us! ... Those indefatigably treacherous colleagues! ... What construction will they put on your noble voluntary exile? ... What will they call it? An escapade? How do I know?

Mischief? Flight? Bankruptcy? ...

That eventuality had no doubt given him occasion for long and painful reflections. It still troubled him, and he turned pale before my eyes at the thought of it ... His daughter, Aimée, our little halfwit, was in for a pretty rough time. He was entrusting her to the care of an aunt in the provinces, a total stranger if the truth be known. So, once his private affairs had been settled, Parapine and I would only have to look after his interests and property as best we could. Adrift in a ship without a captain!

After all he had told me, I thought it permissible to ask him which way he was heading in his quest for adventure ...

"To England, Ferdinand!" he replied, without batting an eyelash. So much had happened to us in so short a time, I thought we'd have trouble digesting it, but it was clear that we'd have to adapt quickly to our new mode of life. The very next day Parapine and I helped him with his luggage. The passport with all its little pages and visas startled him somewhat. He had never seen a passport before. But while he was at it, he'd have liked to apply for a few spares. We managed to convince him that this was impossible.

One last time he stumbled over the question: should he take hard collars or soft collars away with him and how many of each? This problem, still undecided, brought us almost to train time. All three of us jumped into the last streetcar for Paris. Baryton took only a small suitcase, intending to travel light and preserve his mobility wherever he went. On the platform he was impressed by the noble elevation of the car steps on the international trains. Hesitating to mount those majestic structures, he contemplated the car as though gazing at a monument. We helped him a little. Having taken a second-class ticket, he made a comparative, practical, and cheerful observation: "First is no better," he said. We shook hands with him. The time was at hand. The whistle blew, and the train pulled out on the dot with an enormous jolt and crashing of steel, abominably mutilating our farewells. He had barely time to say: "Good-bye, boys!" and his hand broke loose, carried away from ours ...

Then his hand was waving in the smoke, rushing through the noise, already in darkness, further and further down the rails, white ...

In a way we weren't sorry to see him go, but all the same the house seemed very empty without him.

In the first place, the way he'd gone made us sad, in spite of ourselves so to speak. It wasn't natural. After such a blow we wondered what might happen to us.

But we didn't have time to wonder very long. Only a few days after we'd taken Baryton to the station, I'm informed that there's someone asking to see me personally in the office. Abbé Protiste.

So I tell him the news, and what news! Especially the way Baryton had run out on us to go gallivanting around in the septentrional regions ... When Protiste heard that, he couldn't get over it, and when it finally sank in, the altered situation meant only one thing to him, namely, the advantage I could derive from it. "Such trust on the part of your director," he kept saying over and over, "strikes me as the most flattering sort of promotion, my dear doctor."

I tried to calm him down, but once launched he persisted in his view of the matter and predicted that the most glorious of futures lay in wait for me, a magnificent medical career, as he put it. I couldn't stop him.

Nevertheless, though with considerable difficulty, we finally got back to serious matters, that is, to the city of Toulouse, whence he had arrived only the day before. Of course I gave him his turn to speak and tell me all he knew. I even pretended to be astonished, nay, stupefied, when he told me about the old woman's accident.

"What?! What's that?!" I interrupted. "Dead? Heavens above! When did this happen?" Little by little, he had to come clean.

Without telling me in so many words who had pushed the old woman down her little staircase, he said nothing to deter me from guessing ... It seems she hadn't had time to say boo.

We understood each other ... It was a good job, handled with care. This time he had done for her ... He hadn't botched his second try.

Luckily everyone in the neighborhood had thought Robinson was still stone-blind. So they hadn't suspected anything more than an accident, a very tragic one to be sure, but quite understandable when you thought it over, given the circumstances, the old woman's age and the time of day, the late afternoon when she must have been tired ... Just then I had no desire to hear more. He had told me plenty.

But it wasn't so easy getting the Abbé to change the subject. The thing was on his mind. He kept coming back to it, apparently in the hope that I'd make some kind of slip and give myself away ... Nothing doing! He could keep trying ... So after a while he gave up and contented himself with talking about Robinson and his health ... His eyes ... In that department he was much better ... But his morale was still low. In fact his morale was terrible! In spite of the kindness and affection the two women never stopped showing him ... he never stopped complaining about his own hard lot and life in general. It didn't surprise me to hear Protiste telling me all that. I knew Robinson. He had a lowdown, ungrateful nature. But I distrusted the Abbé even more ... I didn't say a word while he was talking to me. All his confiding didn't get him anywhere.

"I must admit, doctor, that your friend, in spite of a material life that has become pleasant and easy and the prospect of a happy marriage, has disappointed all our hopes ... Once again he is succumbing to the same fatal penchant for escapades, the perverse impulses you detected in the past? ... What do you think of those tendencies of his, my dear doctor?" In short, if I got the drift, Robinson's only thought was to drop everything. At first his fiancee and her mother were angry, then they were stricken with grief. That's what Abbé

Protiste had come to tell me. All this was rather upsetting, and for my part I made up my mind to hold my tongue and steer clear of these people's little family affairs at all costs ... After an abortive interview we parted at the streetcar stop, rather coolly to tell the truth. Not at all easy in my mind, I went back to the rest home.

Only a short time after this visit, we had our first news of Baryton. From England. A few postcards. He wished us all "good health and good luck." After that a few vapid lines from one place and another. A card with no message on it informed us that he had gone to Norway, and a few weeks later there was a somewhat reassuring telegram: "Good crossing!" From Copenhagen.

As we had foreseen, the chief's absence provoked the most vicious comment in Vigny and environs. It seemed best for the future of the Institute that we should provide the patients and our colleagues round about with only the barest minimum of information regarding the reasons for this absence.

Months passed, months of extreme caution, dull and silent. Among ourselves we stopped mentioning Baryton altogether. To tell the truth, thinking about him made us feel rather ashamed.

And then it was summer again. We couldn't spend all our time in the garden supervising the patients. To prove to ourselves that we had some freedom in spite of it all, we ventured as far as the banks of the Seine, just to get out.

After the embankment on the far shore, the great plain of Gennevilliers begins, a beautiful expanse of gray and white, with chimneys softly outlined in the dust and mist. Right beside the towpath you'll see the bargemen's bistrot. It guards the entrance to the canal. The yellow current comes pushing against the lock.

For hours on end we'd look down at all that, and off to the side at the long swamp, the insidious smell of which reaches as far as the motor road. You get used to it. That muck was so old, so worn out by the river floods that it had no color left. Sometimes on summer evenings when the sky went pink and sentimental the mud would take on a kind of gentle look. It was there on the bridge that we'd listen to the accordion music they'd play on the barges while waiting at the lock gates for the night to be over so they could pass through to the river. Especially the ones coming down from Belgium are musical, they have color all over, green and yellow, and clotheslines full of shirts and drawers and raspberry-colored slips, puffed up by the wind as it leaps and gusts into them.