Quiet Days in Clichy (6 page)

“But what did the mother have to say?”

“The
mother
! Did you have a good look at her? She was not only beautiful, she was divine. Joey, the moment I set eyes on her I fell in love with her. She hardly said a word the whole time. At the end she said to me: ‘Monsieur, we will not press the case against you, on condition that you promise us never to attempt to see Colette again. Is that understood?' I hardly heard what she said, I was so confused. I blushed and stammered like a boy. If she had said, ‘Monsieur, you will please come with us to the police station,' I would have said, ‘
Oui, Madame, à vos ordres
' I was going to kiss her hand, but then I thought that might be going too far. Did you notice the perfume she used? That was . . .” He reeled
off some
marque
with a number, as if I should be impressed. “You don't know anything about perfumes, I forgot. Listen, only women of breeding use perfumes like that. She could have been a duchess or a marquise. Too bad it wasn't the mother I picked up. By the way, this will make a good ending for my book, what?”

A very good ending, I thought to myself. As a matter of fact, he did write the story some months later, and it was one of the best things he ever did, especially the passage about Proust and
Faust
. All the time he was writing it he raved about the mother. He seemed to have forgotten about Colette completely.

Well, this episode was hardly over when the English girls appeared on the scene, and then the grocery girl who was crazy to learn English, and then Jeanne, and between times the hat check girl, and now and then a tart from the impasse just behind the Café Wepler—from the trap, as we called it, because to get by that little alley at night on the way home was like running the gauntlet.

And then came the somnambulist with
the revolver, which had us on tenterhooks for a few days.

Early one morning, after we had sat up all night polishing off some Algerian wine, Carl broached the idea of taking a hurried vacation for a few days. There was a large map of Europe hanging on my wall which we examined feverishly to see how far we might go with the limited funds at our disposal. We thought at first of going to Brussels, but on second thoughts we abandoned the idea. The Belgians were uninteresting, we agreed. For about the same fare we could go to Luxembourg. We were quite drunk, and Luxembourg seemed like just the right place to go to at six o'clock in the morning. We didn't pack any valises; all we needed were our tooth-brushes, which we forgot in the scramble to catch the train.

A few hours later we crossed the border and stepped into the lacquered, upholstered train which was to take us to the
opéra bouffe
country which I for one was very eager to see. We arrived towards noon, sleepy and dazed. We had a heavy lunch, washed down with the wine of the country,
and tumbled into bed. About six o'clock we roused ourselves and ambled outdoors. It was a peaceful, fat, easy-going land, with sounds of German music everywhere; the faces of the inhabitants were stamped with a sort of cow-like bliss.

It was no time before we had made friends with Snow White, the leading attraction of a cabaret near the station. Snow White was about thirty-five, with long flaxen hair and animated blue eyes. She had been there only a week and was already bored. We had a couple of highballs with her, waltzed her around a few times, treated the orchestra to drinks, all of which came to a phenomenally ridiculous sum, and then we invited her to dinner. A good dinner in a good hotel came to something like seven or eight francs apiece. Snow White, being Swiss, was too dumb, or too good-natured, to hold out for money. She had only one thought in mind—to get back to work on time. It was dark when we left the restaurant. We wandered instinctively towards the edge of the town and soon found an embankment, where we tumbled her over and gave her what's what. She
took it like a cocktail, begging us to call for her later in the evening; she would dig up a friend whom she thought we would find attractive. We escorted her back to the cabaret, then set out to explore the town more thoroughly.

In a little café, where an old woman sat playing the zither, we ordered some wine. It was a rather melancholy place, and we were soon bored stiff. As we were about to leave, the proprietor came over and handed us his card, saying that he hoped we would call again. While he was talking, Carl handed me the card and gave me a nudge. I read it. It said, in German, “Café-free-of-Jews.” Had it read “Café-free-of-limburger,” it could not have struck me as more absurd. We laughed in the man's face. Then I asked him, in French, if he understood English. He said yes. Where-upon I said: “Let me tell you this—though I'm not a Jew, I look on you as an idiot. Haven't you anything better to think of? You're sound asleep . . . You're wallowing in your own shit.
Do you understand that
?” He looked at us bewilderedly. Then Carl began, in a French that would have done
credit to an Apache. “Listen, you fucked-out piece of cheese,” he began. The man started to raise his voice. “Pipe down,” said Carl threateningly, and he made a move as if to throttle the old fool. “I'll say just two words to you:
you're an old cunt. You stink
!” With that he was seized with one of his apoplectic fits of laughter. I think the man had the impression that we were mad. We backed out slowly, laughing hysterically and making grimaces at him. The idiot was so slow-witted, so perplexed, that all he could do was collapse on a chair and mop his brow.

Up the street a little distance we ran across a sleepy-looking policeman. Carl went up to him respectfully, doffed his hat, and, in an impeccable German told him that we had just left the Judenfreies Café where a brawl had started. He urged him to hurry because—here he lowered his voice—the proprietor had taken a fit, he was apt to kill someone. The officer thanked him in his officious, sluggish way and trundled off in the direction of the café. At the corner we found a cab; we
asked to be driven to a big hotel which we had spotted earlier in the evening.

We remained in Luxembourg three days, eating and drinking to our heart's content, listening to the excellent orchestras from Germany, observing the quiet, dull life of a people which has no reason to exist, and which in fact does not exist, except as cows or sheep exist. Snow White had introduced us to her friend, who was from Luxembourg and a cretin to the backbone. We talked about making cheese, needlework, country dances, coal mining, exporting and importing, about the royal family and the little ailments which seized them now and then, and so forth. One day we spent entirely in the Valley of the Monks, the Pfaffenthal. A thousand years' peace seemed to reign over this somnolent vale. It was like a corridor which God had traced with his little finger, a reminder to men that when their insatiable thirst for blood had been appeased, when they had become weary of strife, here they would find peace and rest.

To be truthful, it was a beautiful, or
derly, prosperous, easy-going sort of world, everyone full of good humor, charitable, kindly, tolerant. Yet, for some reason, there was a rotten odor about the place. The odor of stagnation. The goodness of the inhabitants, which was negative, had deteriorated their moral fiber.

All they were concerned about was to know on which side their bread was buttered. They couldn't make bread, but they could butter it.

I felt thoroughly disgusted. Better to die like a louse in Paris than live here on the fat of the land, thought I to myself.

“Let's go back and get a good dose of clap,” I said, rousing Carl from a state of near torpor.

“
What
? What are you talking about?” he mumbled thickly.

“Yes,” I said, “let's get out of here, it stinks. Luxembourg is like Brooklyn, only more charming and more poisonous. Let's go back to Clichy and go on a spree. I want to wipe the taste of this out of my mouth.”

It was about midnight when we arrived in Paris. We hurried to the newspaper
office, where our good friend, King, ran the racing column. We borrowed more francs of him and rushed off.

I was in a mood to take the first whore that came along. “I'll take her, clap and all,” thought I. “Shit, a dose of clap is something, after all. Those Luxembourg cunts are full of buttermilk.”

Carl wasn't quite so keen about contracting another dose of clap. His cock already felt itchy, he confided. He was trying to think who could have given it to him, if it was the clap, as he suspected.

“If you've got it, there's no great harm in getting it again,” I remarked cheerily. “Get a double dose and spread it abroad. Infect the whole continent! Better a good venereal disease than a moribund peace and quiet. Now I know what makes the world civilized: it's vice, disease, thievery, mendacity, lechery. Shit, the French are a great people, even if they're syphilitic. Don't ever ask me to go to a neutral country again. Don't let me look at any more cows, human or otherwise.”

I was that peppery I could have raped a nun.

It was in this mood that we entered the little dance hall where our friend, the hat check girl, hung out. It was only a little after midnight, and we had plenty for a little fling. There were three or four whores at the bar and one or two drunks, English, of course. Pansies, most likely. We had a few dances and then the whores began to pester us.

It's amazing what one can do publicly in a French bar. To a
putain
anyone who speaks English, male or female, is a degenerate. A French girl doesn't degrade herself in putting on a show for the foreigner, any more than a sea-lion becomes civilized by being trained to do tricks.

Adrienne, the hat check girl, had come to the bar for a drink. She sat on a high stool with her legs spread apart. I stood beside her with an arm around one of her little friends. Presently I had my hand up her dress. I played with her a little while and then she slid down off her perch and, putting her arms around my neck, stealthily opened my fly and closed her hand over my balls. The musicians were playing a slow waltz, the lights dimmed. Adrienne
led me to the floor, my fly wide open, and, holding me tight, she shifted me to the middle of the floor where we were soon packed like sardines. We could hardly move from the spot, the jam was so thick. Again she reached into my fly, took my pecker out, and placed it against her cunt. It was excruciating. To make it more excruciating, one of her little friends who was wedged next to us, brazenly caught hold of my prick. At this point I could hold back no longer—I squirted it into her hand.

When we drifted back to the bar, Carl was standing in a corner, crouched over a girl who seemed to be sagging to the ground. The barman looked annoyed. “This is a drinking place, not a boudoir,” he said. Carl looked up in a daze, his face covered with lip rouge, his tie askew, his vest unbuttoned, his hair down over his eyes. “These aren't whores,” he muttered, “they're nymphomaniacs.”

He sat down on the stool with his shirt tail sticking out of his fly. The girl began buttoning his fly for him. Suddenly she changed her mind, ripped it open again and, pulling his pecker out, bent over and
kissed it. This was going a little too far, apparently. The manager now sidled up to inform us that we would have to behave differently or beat it. He didn't appear to be angry with the girls; he simply scolded them, as if they were naughty children.

We were for leaving then and there, but Adrienne insisted that we wait until closing time. She said she wanted to go home with us.

When we finally called a cab and piled in, we discovered that there were five of us. Carl was for shoving one of the girls out, but couldn't make up his mind which one. On the way we stopped to buy some sandwiches, some cheese and olives, and a few bottles of wine.

“They're going to be disappointed when they see how much money we have left,” said Carl.

“Good,” said I, “maybe they'll all desert us then. I'm tired. I'd like to take a bath and tumble into bed.”

As soon as we arrived I undressed and turned on the bath water. The girls were in the kitchen spreading the table. I had just gotten into the tub, and begun soaping
myself, when Adrienne and one of the other girls walked into the bathroom. They had decided that they would take a bath too. Adrienne quickly slipped out of her things and slid into the tub with me. The other girl also undressed, then came and stood beside the tub. Adrienne and I were facing each other, our legs entwined. The other girl leaned over the tub and started playing with me. I lay back in the luxuriously hot water and allowed her to twirl her soapy fingers around my cock. Adrienne was playing with her cunt, as if to say—“All right, let her play with that thing a little while, but when the time comes I'll snatch it out of her hand.”

Presently the three of us were in the tub, a sandwich in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. Carl had decided to shave. His girl sat on the edge of the
bidet
, chatting and munching her sandwich. She disappeared for a moment to return with a full bottle of red wine which she poured down our necks. The soapy water quickly took on the hue of permanganate.

By this time I was in a mood for anything. Feeling a desire to urinate, I calmly
proceeded to pee. The girls were horrified. Apparently I had done something unethical. Suddenly they became suspicious of us. Were we going to pay them? If so, how much? When Carl blithely informed them that he had about nine francs to distribute, there was an uproar. Then they decided that we were only joking—another bad little joke, like peeing in the bathtub. But no, we insisted that we were in earnest. They swore they had never heard the likes of it; it was simply incredible, monstrous, inhuman.

“They're a couple of dirty Huns,” said one of the girls.

“No,
English
. Degenerate English,” said the other.

Adrienne tried to mollify them. She said she had known us for a long time and that we had always acted like gentlemen with her, an announcement which sounded rather strange to my ears considering the nature of our relations with her. However, the word gentlemen connoted nothing more than that we had always paid cash for her little services.