Journey to the End of the Night (9 page)

For absolutely nothing, the idiots! I say it and I'll say it again! I've proved it! The one thing that counts is life! In ten thousand years, I'll bet you, this war, remarkable as it may seem to us at present, will be utterly forgotten ... Maybe here and there in the world a handful of scholars will argue about its causes or the dates of the principal hecatombs that made it famous ... Up until now those are the only things about men that other men have thought worth remembering after a few centuries, a few years, or even a few hours ... I don't believe in the future, Lola ..."

When she heard me flaunting my shameful state like that, she lost all sympathy for me ... Once and for all she put me down as contemptible, and decided to leave me without further ado. It was too much. When I left her that evening at the hospital gate, she didn't kiss me. Evidently the thought that a condemned man might have no vocation for death was too much for her. When 1 asked her how our pancakes were doing, she did not reply. On my return to the dormitory, I found Princhard at the window with a crowd of soldiers around him. He was trying out a pair of dark glasses on the gas light. The idea, he explained, had come to him last summer at the seashore, and since it was summer now, he was planning to wear them next day in the park. That park was enormous and exceedingly well policed by squads of vigilant orderlies. The next day Princhard insisted on my going for a walk on the terrace with him to try out his beautiful glasses. A blazing afternoon beat down on him, defended by his opaque lenses. I noticed that his nose was almost transparent at the nostrils and that he was breathing hard.

"My friend," he confided, "time is passing and it's not on my side. My conscience is immune to remorse, I have been relieved, thank God, of those fears ... It's not crimes that count in this world ... people stopped counting them long ago ... What counts is blunders ... And I believe I've made one ... that's absolutely irremediable ..."

"Stealing canned goods?"

"Yes, just imagine ... I thought I was being so clever ... My idea was to abstract myself from the battle and return, disgraced but still alive, to peace, as one returns, exhausted, to the surface of the sea after a long dive ... I almost succeeded ... but this war, undoubtedly, has been going on too long ... So long that cannon fodder disgusting enough to disgust the Patrie is no longer conceivable ... She has begun to accept every offering, regardless of where it comes from, every variety of meat! Today there's no such thing as a soldier unworthy to bear arms and, above all, to die under arms and by arms ... They're going, latest news, to make a hero out of me! ... How imperious the homicidal madness must have become if they're willing to pardon? no, to forget!?the theft of a can of meat! True, we have got into the habit of admiring colossal bandits, whose opulence is revered by the entire world, yet whose existence, once we stop to examine it, proves to be one long crime repeated ad infinitum, but those same bandits are heaped with glory, honors, and power, their crimes are hallowed by the law of the land, whereas, as far back in history as the eye can see? and history, as you know, is my business? everything conspires to show that a venial theft, especially of inglorious foodstuffs, such as bread crusts, ham, or cheese, unfailingly subjects its perpetrator to irreparable opprobium, the categoric condemnation of the community, major punishment, automatic dishonor, and inexpiable shame, and this for two reasons, first because the perpetrator of such an offense is usually poor, which in itself connotes basic unworthiness, and secondly because his act implies, as it were, a tacit reproach to the community. A poor man's theft is seen as a malicious attempt at individual redress ... Where would we be? Note accordingly that in all countries the penalties for petty theft are extremely severe, not only as a means of defending society, but also as a stern admonition to the unfortunate to know their place, stick to their caste, and behave themselves, joyfully resigned to go on dying of hunger and misery down through the centuries for ever and ever ... Until today, however, petty thieves enjoyed one advantage in the Republic, they were denied the honor of bearing patriotic arms. But that's all over now, tomorrow I, a thief, will resume my place in the army ... Such are the orders ... It has been decided in high places to forgive and forget what they call my momentary madness, and this, listen carefully, in consideration of what they call the honor of my family. What solicitude! I ask you, comrade, is it my family that's going to serve as a strainer and sorting house for mixed French and German bullets? ... It'll just be me, won't it? And when I'm dead, is the honor of my family going to bring me back to life? ... I can see how it will be with my family when these warlike scenes have passed ... as everything passes ... I can see my family on fine Sundays ... joyfully gamboling on the lawns of a new summer ... while three feet under papa, that's me, dripping with worms and infinitely more disgusting than ten pounds of turds on the Fourteenth of July, will be rotting stupendously with all my deluded flesh ... Fertilize the fields of the anonymous plowman? that is the true future of the true soldier! Ah, comrade! This world, I assure you, is only a vast device for kidding the world! You are young! Let these minutes of wisdom be as years to you! Listen well, comrade, and don't fail to recognize and understand the tell-tale sign, which glares from all the murderous hypocrisies of our Society: 'Compassion with the fate, the condition of the poor ...' I tell you, little man, life's fall guys, beaten, fleeced to the bone, sweated from time immemorial, I warn you, that when the princes of this world start loving you, it means they're going to grind you up into battle sausage ... That's the sign ... It's infallible. It starts with affection. Louis XIV, at least, and don't forget it, didn't give a hoot in hell about his beloved people. Louis XV ditto. He smeared his asshole with them. True, we didn't live well in those days, the poor have never lived well, but the kings didn't flay them with the obstinacy, the persistence you meet with in today's tyrants. There's no rest, I tell you, for the little man, except in the contempt of the great, whose only motive for thinking of the common people is self-interest, when it isn't sadism ... It's the philosophers ... another point to look out for while we're at it ... who first started giving the people ideas ... when all they'd known up until then was the catechism! They began, so they proclaimed, to educate the people ... Ah! What truths they had to reveal! Beautiful! brilliant!

unprecedented truths! And the people were dazzled! That's it! they said. That's the stuff!

Let's go and die for it! The people are always dying to die! That's the way they are! 'Long live Diderot!' they yelled. And 'Long live Voltaire!' They, at least, were first-class philosophers. And long live Carnot,[18] too, who was so good at organizing victories!

And long live everybody! Those guys at least don't let the beloved people molder in ignorance and fetishism! They show the people the roads of Freedom! Emancipation!

Things went fast after that! First teach everybody to read the papers! That's the way to salvation! Hurry hurry! No more illiterates! We don't need them anymore! Nothing but citizen-soldiers! Who vote! Who read! And who fight! And who march! And send kisses from the front! In no time the people were good and ripe! The enthusiasm of the liberated has to be good for something, doesn't it? Danton wasn't eloquent for the hell of it. With a few phrases, so rousing that we can still hear them today, he had the people mobilized before you could say fiddlesticks! That was when the first battalions of emancipated maniacs marched off! ... the first voting, flagmatic suckers that Dumouriez[19] led away to get themselves drilled full of holes in Flanders! As for Dumouriez himself, who had come too late to these new-fangled idealistic pastimes, he discovered that he was more interested in money and deserted. He was our last mercenary. The free-gratis soldier ... was something really new ... So new that when Goethe[20] arrived in Valmy, Goethe or not, he was flabbergasted. At the sight of those ragged, impassioned cohorts, who had come of their own free will to get themselves disemboweled by the King of Prussia in defense of a patriotic fiction no one had ever heard of, Goethe realized that he still had much to learn. This day,' he declaimed grandiloquently as befitted the habits of his genius, 'marks the beginning of a new era!' He could say that again! The system proved successful ... pretty soon they were mass-producing heroes, and in the end, the system was so well perfected that they cost practically nothing. Everyone was delighted. Bismarck, the two Napoleons, Barrès,[21] Elsa the Horsewoman.[22] The religion of the flag promptly replaced the cult of heaven, an old cloud which had already been deflated by the Reformation and reduced to a network of episcopal money boxes. In olden times the fanatical fashion was: 'Long live Jesus! Burn the heretics!' ... But heretics, after all, were few and voluntary ... Whereas today vast hordes of men are fired with aim and purpose by cries of: 'Hang the limp turnips! The juiceless lemons! The innocent readers! By the millions, eyes right!' If anybody doesn't want to fight or murder, grab 'em, tear 'em to pieces! Kill them in thirteen juicy ways. For a starter, to teach them how to live, rip their guts out of their bodies, their eyes out of their sockets, and the years out of their filthy slobbering lives! Let whole legions of them perish, turn into smidgens, bleed, smolder in acid?and all that to make the Patrie more beloved, more fair, and more joyful! And if in their midst there are any foul creatures who refuse to understand these sublime truths, they can just go and bury themselves right with the others, no, not quite, their place will be at the far end of the cemetery, under the shameful epitaphs of cowards without an ideal, for those contemptible slugs will have forfeited the glorious right to a small patch of the shadow of the municipal monument erected by the lowest bidder in the central avenue to commemorate the reputable dead, and also the right to hear so much as a distant echo of the Minister's speech next Sunday, when he comes around to urinate at the Prefecture and sound off over the graves after lunch ..."

But from the end of the garden someone was calling Princhard. The head physician had sent his orderly to get him on the double.

"Coming," Princhard cried. He had barely time enough to hand me the draft of the speech he had been trying out on me. A ham if there ever was one.

I never saw Princhard again. He had the same trouble as all intellectuals?he was ineffectual. He knew too many things, and they confused him. He needed all sorts of gimmicks to steam him up, help him make up his mind.

It's been a long time ... since that night when he went away. But I remember it well. Suddenly the houses at the end of our park stood out sharply, as things do before the night takes hold of them. The trees grew larger in the twilight and shot up to the sky to meet the night.

I never made any attempt to get in touch with Princhard, to find out if he had really "disappeared," as they kept saying. But it's best if he disappeared. While the war was still on, the seeds of our hateful peace were being sown. A hysterical bitch, you could see what she'd be like just by watching her cavorting in the dance hall of the Olympia. In that long cellar room, you could see her squinting out of a hundred mirrors, stamping her feet in the dust and despair to the music of a Negro-JudeoSaxon band. Britishers and Blacks, Levantines and Russians were everywhere, smoking and bellowing, military melancholies lined up on the red plush sofas. Those uniforms that people are beginning to find it hard to remember were the seeds of the present day, of something that is still growing and that won't become total shit for a while yet, but will in the long run.

Every week, after spending a few hours at the Olympia, warming up our desires, a few of us would go calling on our friend Madame Herote,[23] who kept a lingerie, glove, and bookshop in the Impasse des Bérésinas[24] behind the Folies Bergère, a covered passage that isn't there anymore, where little girls brought little dogs on leashes to do their business. We went there to grope for our happiness, which all the world was threatening with the utmost ferocity. We were ashamed of wanting what we wanted, but something had to be done about it all the same. Love is harder to give up than life. In this world we spend our time killing or adoring, or both together. "I hate you! I adore you!" We keep going, we fuel and refuel, we pass on our life to a biped of the next century, with frenzy, at any cost, as if it were the greatest of pleasures to perpetuate ourselves, as if, when all's said and done, it would make us immortal. One way or another, kissing is as indispensable as scratching. My mental state had improved, but my military situation was still uncertain. I had leave to go out now and then. Anyway, the name of our lingerie lady was Madame Herote. Her forehead was low and so narrow that at first you felt uneasy in her presence, but her lips were so smiling and voluptuous that after a while you didn't see how you could get away from her. Under a surface of staggering volubility and unforgettable ardor, she concealed a set of simple, rapacious, and piously mercantile aims.

In a few months she piled up a fortune, thanks to the Allies and thanks above all to her uterus. Her ovaries had been removed; to put it plainly, she had been operated for salpingitis the year before. That liberating castration had made her fortune. Gonorrhea in a woman can be providential. A woman who spends her time worrying about pregnancy is a virtual cripple, she'll never go very far.

Old men and young men thought, and so did I, that love was easily and cheaply available in the backrooms of certain lingerie-bookshops. That was still true some twenty years ago, but today a lot of things aren't done anymore, especially some of the most agreeable. Every month Anglo-Saxon puritanism is drying us up a little more, it has already reduced those impromptu backroom carousals to practically nothing. Now marriage and respectability are the thing.

In those days, for the last time, there was still freedom to fuck standing up and cheap, and Madame Herote put it to good use. One Sunday an auction room appraiser with time on his hands sighted her shop and went in; he's still there. He was slightly gaga, and gaga he remained, but nothing more. Their happiness aroused no interest in the neighborhood. In the shadow of the newspapers with their delirious appeals for ultimate patriotic sacrifices, life went on, strictly rationed, larded with precautions, and more trickily resourceful than ever before, Those are the heads and tails, the light and shade, of the same coin. Madame Herote's appraiser invested money in Holland for his better-informed friends, and for Madame Herote as well once they became intimate. Her stock of neckties and brassieres and almost-chemises attracted customers of both sexes and brought them back time and time again.