-- all these abstract deaths
which involved a bloodless sort of agony. Now and then they would compliment
me on being alive, but in such a way that I felt embarrassed. They made me
feel that I was alive in the nineteenth century, a sort of atavistic remnant,
a romantic shred, a soulful pithecanthropus erectus. Boris especially
seemed to get a great kick out of touching me: he wanted me to be alive so
that he could die to his heart's content. You would think that all those
millions in the street were nothing but dead cows the way he looked at me and
touched me. But the letter ... I'm forgetting the letter ...
"The reason why I wanted you to commit suicide that evening at the
Cronstadts', when Moldorf became God, was that I was very close to you then.
Perhaps closer than I shall ever be. And I was afraid, terribly afraid, that
some day you'd go back on me, die on my hands. And I would be left high and
dry with my idea of you simply, and nothing to sustain it. I should never
forgive you for that."
Perhaps you can visualize him saying a thing like that! Myself it's not
clear what his idea of me was, or at any rate, it's clear that I was just
pure idea, an idea that kept itself alive without food. He never attached
much importance, Boris, to the food problem. He tried to nourish me with
ideas. Everything was idea. Just the same, when he had his heart set on
renting the apartment, he wouldn't forget to put a new washer in the toilet.
Anyway, he didn't want me to die on his hands. "You must be life for me to
the very end," so he writes. "That is the only way in which you can sustain
my idea of you. Because you have gotten, as you see, tied up with something
so vital to me, I do not think I shall ever shake you off. Nor do I wish to.
I want you to live more vitally every day, as I am dead. That is why, when I
speak of you to others, I am just a bit ashamed. It's hard to talk of one's
self so intimately."
* * *
You would imagine perhaps that he was anxious to see me, or that he would
like to know what I was doing -- but no, not a line about the concrete or the
personal, except in this living-dying language, nothing but this little
message from the trenches, this whiff of poison gas to apprise all and
sundry that the war was still on. I sometimes ask myself how it happens that
I attract nothing but crack-brained individuals, neurasthenics, neurotics,
psychopaths -- and Jews especially. There must be something in a healthy
Gentile that excites the Jewish mind, like when he sees sour black bread.
There was Moldorf, for example, who had made himself God, according to
Boris and Cronstadt. He positively hated me, the little viper -- yet he
couldn't stay away from me. He came round regularly for his little dose of
insults -- it was like a tonic to him. In the beginning, it's true, I was
lenient with him; after all, he was paying me to listen to him. And though I
never displayed much sympathy I knew how to be silent when it involved a
meal and a little pin money. After a while, however, seeing what a masochist
he was, I permitted myself to laugh in his face now and then; that was like a
whip for him, it made the grief and agony gush forth with renewed vigor. And
perhaps everything would have gone smoothly between us if he had not felt it
his duty to protect Tania. But Tania being a Jewess, that brought up a moral
question. He wanted me to stick to Mlle. Claude for whom, I must admit, I had
a genuine affection. He even gave me money occasionally to sleep with her.
Until he realized that I was a hopeless lecher.
I mention Tania now because she's just got back from Russia -- just a few
days ago. Sylvester remained behind to worm his way into a job. He's given up
literature entirely. He's dedicated himself to the new Utopia. Tania wants me
to go back there with her, to the Crimea preferably, and start a new life. We
had a fine drinking bout up in Carl's room the other day, discussing the
possibilities. I wanted to know what I could do for a living back there -- if
I could be a proof-reader, for example. She said I didn't need to worry about
what I would do -- they would find a job for me as long as I was earnest and
sincere. I tried to look earnest, but I only succeeded in looking pathetic.
They don't want to see sad faces, in Russia; they want you to be cheerful,
enthusiastic, light-hearted, optimistic. It sounded very much like America to
me. I wasn't born with this kind of enthusiasm. I didn't let on to her, of
course, but secretly I was praying to be left alone, to go back to my little
niche, and to stay there until the war breaks out. All this hocus-pocus about
Russia disturbed me a little. She got so excited about it, Tania, that we
finished almost a half dozen bottles of vin ordinaire. Carl was
jumping about like a cockroach. He has just enough Jew in him to lose his
head over an idea like Russia. Nothing would do but to many us off --
immediately. "Hitch up!" he says, "you have nothing to lose!" And then he
pretends to run a little errand so that we can pull off a fast one. And while
she wanted it all right, Tania, still that Russia business had gotten so
solidly planted in her skull that she pissed the interval away chewing my ear
off, which made me somewhat grumpy and ill at ease. Anyway, we had to think
about eating and getting to the office, so we piled into a taxi on the
Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, just a stone's throw away from the cemetery, and off
we whizzed. It was just a nice hour to spin through Paris in an open cab, and
the wine rolling around in our tanks made it seem even more lovely than
usual. Carl was sitting opposite us, on the strapontin, his face as
red as a beet. He was happy, the poor bastard, thinking what a glorious new
life he would lead on the other side of Europe. And at the same time he felt
a bit wistful, too -- I could see that. He didn't really want to leave Paris,
any more than I did. Paris hadn't been good to him, any more than it had to
me, or to anybody, for that matter, but when you've suffered and endured
things here it's then that Paris takes hold of you, grabs you by the balls,
you might say, like some lovesick bitch who'd die rather than let you get out
of her hands. That's how it looked to him, I could see that. Rolling over the
Seine he had a big foolish grin on his face and he looked around at the
buildings and the statues as though he were seeing them in a dream. To me it
was like a dream too: I had my hand in Tania's bosom and I was squeezing her
titties with all my might and I noticed the water under the bridge and the
barges and Notre Dame down below, just like the post-cards show it, and I was
thinking drunkenly to myself that's how one gets fucked, but I was sly about
it too and I knew I wouldn't ever trade all this whirling about my head for
Russia or heaven or anything on earth. It was a fine afternoon, I was
thinking to myself, and soon we'd be pushing a feed down our bellies and what
could we order as a special treat, some good heavy wine that would drown out
all this Russia business. With a woman like Tania, full of sap and
everything, they don't give a damn what happens to you once they get an idea
in their heads. Let them go far enough and they'll pull the pants off you,
right in the taxi. It was grand though, milling through the traffic, our
faces all smudged with rouge and the wine gurgling like a sewer inside us,
especially when we swung into the Rue Laffitte which is just wide enough to
frame the little temple at the end of the street and above it the
Sacre-Coeur, a kind of exotic jumble of architecture, a lucid French idea
that gouges right through your drunkenness and leaves you swimming helplessly
in the past, in a fluid dream that makes you wide awake and yet doesn't jar
your nerves.
x x x
With Tania back on the scene, a steady job, the drunken talk about Russia,
the walks home at night, and Paris in full summer, life seems to lift its
head a little higher. That's why perhaps, a letter such as Boris sent me
seems absolutely cock-eyed. Most every day I meet Tania around five o'clock,
to have a Porto with her, as she calls it. I let her take me to places I've
never seen before, the swell bars around the Champs-Elysees where the sound
of jazz and baby voices crooning seems to soak right through the mahogany
woodwork. Even when you go to the lavabo these pulpy, sappy strains
pursue you, come floating into the cabinet through the ventilators and make
life all soft soap and iridescent bubbles. And whether it's because
Sylvester is away and she feels free now, or whatever it is, Tania certainly
tries to behave like an angel. "You treated me lousy just before I went
away," she says to me one day. "Why did you want to act that way? I never
did anything to hurt you, did I?" We were getting sentimental, what with the
soft lights and that creamy, mahogany music seeping through the place. It
was getting near time to go to work and we hadn't eaten yet. The stubs were
lying there in front of us -- six francs, four-fifty, seven francs,
two-fifty -- I was counting them up mechanically and wondering too at the same
time if I would like it better being a bartender. Often like that, when she
was talking to me, gushing about Russia, the future, love, and all that
crap, I'd get to thinking about the most irrelevant things, about shining
shoes or being a lavatory attendant, particularly I suppose because it was
so cosy in these joints that she dragged me to and it never occurred to me
that I'd be stone sober and perhaps old and bent ... no, I imagined always
that the future, however modest, would be in just this sort of ambiance,
with the same tunes playing through my head and the glasses clinking and
behind every shapely ass a trail of perfume a yard wide that would take the
stink out of life, even downstairs in the lavabo.
The strange thing is it never spoiled me trotting around to the swell bars
with her like that. It was hard to leave her, certainly. I used to lead her
around to the porch of a church near the office and standing there in the
dark we'd take a last embrace, she whispering to me "Jesus, what am I going
to do now?" She wanted me to quit the job so as I could make love night and
day; she didn't even care about Russia any more, just so long as we were
together. But the moment I left her my head cleared. It was another kind of
music, not so croony but good just the same, which greeted my ears when I
pushed through the swinging door. And another kind of perfume, not just a
yard wide, but omnipresent, a sort of sweat and patchouli that seemed to come
from the machines. Coming in with a skinful, as I usually did, it was like
dropping suddenly to a low altitude. Generally I made a beeline for the
toilet -- that braced me up rather. It was a little cooler there, or else the
sound of water running made it seem so. It was always a cold douche, the
toilet. It was real. Before you got inside you had to pass a line of
Frenchmen peeling off their clothes. Ugh! but they stank, those devils! And
they were well paid for it, too. But there they were, stripped down, some in
long underwear, some with beards, most of them pale, skinny rats with lead in
their veins. Inside the toilet you could take an inventory of their idle
thoughts. The walls were crowded with sketches and epithets, all of them
jocosely obscene, easy to understand, and on the whole rather jolly and
sympathetic. It must have required a ladder to reach certain spots, but I
suppose it was worth while doing it even looking at it from just the
psychological viewpoint. Sometimes, as I stood there taking a leak, I
wondered what an impression it would make on those swell dames whom I
observed passing in and out of the beautiful lavatories on the
Champs-Elysees. I wondered if they would carry their tails so high if they
could see what was thought of an ass here. In their world, no doubt,
everything was gauze and velvet -- or they made you think so with the fine
scents they gave out, swishing past you. Some of them hadn't always been such
fine ladies either; some of them swished up and down like that just to
advertise their trade. And maybe, when they were left alone with themselves,
when they talked out loud in the privacy of their boudoirs, maybe some
strange things fell out of their mouths too; because in that world, just as
in every world, the greater part of what happens is just muck and filth,
sordid as any garbage can, only they are lucky enough to be able to put
covers over the can.
As I say, that afternoon life with Tania never had any bad effect upon me.
Once in a while I'd get too much of a skinful and I'd have to stick my
finger down my throat -- because it's hard to read proof when you're not all
there. It requires more concentration to detect a missing comma than to
epitomize Nietzche's philosophy. You can be brilliant sometimes, when you're
drunk, but brilliance is out of place in the proof-reading department.
Dates, fractions, semi-colons -- these are the things that count. And these
are the things that are most difficult to track down when your mind is all
ablaze. Now and then I made some bad blunders, and if it weren't that I had
learned how to kiss the boss's ass, I would have been fired, that's certain.
I even got a letter one day from the big mogul upstairs, a guy I never even
met, so high up he was, and between a few sarcastic phrases about my more
than ordinary intelligence, he hinted pretty plainly that I'd better learn
my place and toe the mark or there'd be what's what to pay. Frankly, that
scared the shit out of me. After that I never used a polysyllabic word in
conversation; in fact, I hardly ever opened my trap all night. I played the
high-grade moron, which is what they wanted of us. Now and then, to sort of
flatter the boss, I'd go up to him and ask him politely what such and such a
word might mean. He liked that. He was a sort of dictionary and time-table,
that guy. No matter how much beer he guzzled during the break -- and he made
his own private breaks too, seeing as how he was running the show -- you could
never trip him up on a date or a definition. He was born to the job. My only
regret was that I knew too much. It leaked out now and then, despite all the
precautions I took. If I happened to come to work with a book under my arm
this boss of ours would notice it, and if it were a good book it made him
venomous. But I never did anything intentionally to displease him; I liked
the job too well to put a noose around my neck. Just the same it's hard to
talk to a man when you have nothing in common with him; you betray yourself,
even if you use only monosyllabic words. He knew god-damn well, the boss,
that I didn't take the least bit of interest in his yams; and yet,
explain it how you will, it gave him pleasure to wean me away from my dreams
and fill me full of dates and historical events. It was his way of taking
revenge, I suppose.
The result was that I developed a bit of a neurosis. As soon as I hit the
air I became extravagant. It wouldn't matter what the subject of
conversation happened to be, as we started back to Montparnasse in the early
morning, I'd soon turn the fire-hose on it, squelch it, in order to trot out
my perverted dreams. I liked best talking about those things which none of
us knew anything about. I had cultivated a mild sort of insanity, echolalia,
I think it's called. All the tag-ends of a night's proofing danced on the
tip of my tongue. Dalmatia -- I had held copy of an ad for that
beautiful jewelled resort. All right, Dalmatia. You take a train and
in the morning your pores are perspiring and the grapes are bursting their
skins. I could reel it off about Dalmatia from the grand boulevard to
Cardinal Mazarin's palace, further, if I chose to. I don't even know where
it is on the map, and I don't want to know ever, but at three in the morning
with all that lead in your veins and your clothes saturated with sweat and
patchouli and the clink of bracelets passing through the wringer and those
beer yams that I was braced for, little things like geography, costume,
speech, architecture don't mean a god-damn thing. Dalmatia belongs to a
certain hour of the night when those high goings are snuffed out and the
court of the Louvre seems so wonderfully ridiculous that you feel like
weeping for no reason at all, just because it's so beautifully silent, so
empty, so totally unlike the front page and the guys upstairs rolling the
dice. With that little piece of Dalmatia resting on my throbbing nerves like
a cold knife-blade I could experience the most wonderful sensations of
voyage. And the funny thing is again that I could travel all around the
globe but America would never enter my mind; it was even further lost than
a lost continent, because with the lost continents I felt some mysterious
attachment, whereas with America I felt nothing, nothing at all. Now and
then, it's true, I did think of Mona, not as of a person in a definite aura
of time and space, but separately, detached, as though she had blown up into
a great cloud-like form that blotted out the past. I couldn't allow myself
to think about her very
long; if I had I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange. I had
become so reconciled to this life without her, and yet if I thought about
her only for a minute it was enough to pierce the bone and marrow of my
contentment and shove me back again into the agonizing gutter of my
wretched past.
For seven years I went about, day and night, with only one thing on my
mind -- her. Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to
her we would all be Jesus Christs to-day. Day and night I thought of her,
even when I was deceiving her. And now sometimes, in the very midst of
things, sometimes when I feel that I am absolutely free of it all,
suddenly, in rounding a corner perhaps, there will bob up a little square, a
few trees and a bench, a deserted spot where we stood and had it out, where
we drove each other crazy with bitter, jealous scenes. Always some deserted
spot, like the Place de l'Estrapade, for example, or those dingy, mournful
streets off the Mosque or along that open tomb of an Avenue de Breteuil
which at ten o'clock in the evening is so silent, so dead, that it makes
one think of murder or suicide, anything that might create a vestige of
human drama. When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great
void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep,
black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or
sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing
back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.
How many thousand times, in walking through the streets at night, have I
wondered if the day would ever come again when she would be at my side: all
those yearning looks I bestowed on the buildings and statues, I had looked
at them so hungrily, so desperately, that by now my thoughts must have
become a part of the very buildings and statues, they must be saturated with
my anguish. I could not help but reflect also that when we had walked side
by side through these mournful, dingy streets now so saturated with my dream
and longing, she had observed nothing, felt nothing: they were like any
other streets to her, a little more sordid perhaps, and that is all. She
wouldn't remember that at a certain corner I had
stopped to pick up her hairpin, or that, when I bent down to tie her laces,
I remarked the spot on which her foot had rested and that it would remain
there forever, even after the cathedrals had been demolished and the whole
Latin civilization wiped out forever and ever.
Walking down the Rue Lhomond one night in a fit of unusual anguish and
desolation, certain things were revealed to me with poignant clarity.
Whether it was that I had so often walked this street in bitterness and
despair or whether it was the remembrance of a phrase which she had dropped
one night as we stood at the Place Lucien-Herr I do not know. "Why don't you
show me that Paris," she said, "that you have written about?" One thing I
know, that at the recollection of these words I suddenly realized the
impossibility of ever revealing to her that Paris which I had gotten to
know, the Paris whose arrondissements are undefined, a Paris that has
never existed except by virtue of my loneliness, my hunger for her. Such a
huge Paris! It would take a lifetime to explore it again. This Paris, to
which I alone had the key, hardly lends itself to a tour, even with the best
of intentions; it is a Paris that has to be lived, that has to be
experienced each day in a thousand different forms of torture, a Paris that
grows inside you like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away
by it.
Stumbling down the Rue Mouffetard, with these reflections stirring in my
brain, I recalled another strange item out of the past, out of that
guide-book whose leaves she had asked me to turn but which, because the
covers were so heavy, I then found impossible to pry open. For no reason at
all -- because at the moment my thoughts were occupied with Salavin in whose
sacred precincts I was now meandering -- for no reason at all, I say, there
came to mind the recollection of a day when, inspired by the plaque which I
passed day in and day out, I impulsively entered the Pension Orfila and
asked to see the room Strindberg had occupied. Up to that time nothing very
terrible had befallen me, though I had already lost all my worldly
possessions and had known what it was to walk the streets in hunger and in
fear of the police. Up to then I had not found a single friend in Paris, a
circumstance which was not so much depressing as bewildering, for
wherever I have roamed in this world the easiest thing for me to discover
has been a friend. But in reality, nothing very terrible had happened to me
yet. One can live without friends, as one can live without love, or even
without money, that supposed sine qua non. One can live in Paris -- I
discovered that! --on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment -- perhaps
the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the
end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. I had time and sentiment
enough to spare to peep into other people's lives, to dally with the dead
stuff of romance which, however morbid it may be, when it is wrapped between
the covers of a book, seems deliciously remote and anonymous. As I was
leaving the place I was conscious of an ironic smile hovering over my lips,
as though I were saying to myself "Not yet, the Pension Orfila!
Since then, of course, I have learned what every madman in Paris discovers
sooner or later -- that there are no ready-made infernos for the tormented.
It seems to me I understand a little better now why she took such huge
delight in reading Strindberg. I can see her looking up from her book after
reading a delicious passage and, with tears of laughter in her eyes,
saying to me: "You're just as mad as he was ... you want to be
punished!" What a delight that must be to the sadist when she discovers her
own proper masochist! When she bites herself, as it were, to test the
sharpness of her teeth. In those days, when I first knew her, she was
saturated with Strindberg. That wild carnival of maggots which he revelled
in, that eternal duel of the sexes, that spiderish ferocity which had
endeared him to the sodden oafs of the northland, it was that which had
brought us together. We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was
I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I could
not recognize the world. When I found myself loose the music had ceased; the
carnival was over and I had been picked clean ...
After leaving the Pension Orfila that afternoon I went to the library and
there, after bathing in the Ganges and pondering over the signs of the
zodiac, I began to reflect on the meaning of that inferno which Strindberg
had so mercilessly depicted. And, as I ruminated, it began to
grow clear to me, the mystery of his pilgrimage, the flight which the poet
makes over the face of the earth and then, as if he had been ordained to
re-enact a lost drama, the heroic descent to the very bowels of the earth,
the dark and fearsome sojourn in the belly of the whale, the bloody struggle
to liberate himself, to emerge clean of the past, a bright, gory sun-god
cast up on an alien shore. It was no mystery to me any longer why he and
others (Dante, Rabelais, Van Gogh, etc., etc.) had made their pilgrimage to
Paris. I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the
hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here,
at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most
impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here
that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new
meanings, one for every white hair. One walks the streets knowing that he
is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold,
indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers. Here all boundaries fade
away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughter-house that it is.
The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down
tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing. The air is chill
and stagnant, the language apocalyptic. Not an exit sign anywhere; no issue
save death. A blind alley at the end of which is a scaffold.
An eternal city, Paris! More eternal than Rome, more splendorous than
Nineveh. The very navel of the world to which, like a blind and faltering
idiot, one crawls back on hands and knees. And like a cork that has drifted
finally to the dead center of the ocean, one floats here in the scum and
wrack of the seas, listless, hopeless, heedless even of a passing Columbus.
The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of the world, the
charnel-house to which the stinking wombs confide their bloody packages of
flesh and bone.
The streets were my refuge. And no man can understand the glamor of the
streets until he is obliged to take refuge in them, until he has become a
straw that is tossed here and there by every zephyr that blows. One passes
along a street on a wintry day and, seeing a dog for sale, one is moved to
tears. While across the way, cheerful as a cemetery, stands a miserable hut
that calls itself "Hotel du Tombeau des Lapins." That makes one laugh, laugh
fit to die. Until one notices that there are hotels everywhere, for rabbits,
dogs, lice, emperors, cabinet ministers, pawnbrokers, horse-knackers, and so
on. And almost every other one is an "Hotel de l'Avenir." Which makes one
more hysterical still. So many hotels of the future! No hotels in the past
participle, no subjunctive modes, no conjunctivitis. Everything is hoary,
grisly, bristling with merriment, swollen with the future, like a gumboil.
Drunk with this lecherous eczema of the future, I stagger over to the Place
Violet, the colors all mauve and slate, the doorways so low that only dwarfs
and goblins could hobble in; over the dull cranium of Zola the chimneys are
belching pure coke, while the Madonna of Sandwiches listens with cabbage ears
to the bubbling of the gas tanks, those beautiful bloated toads which squat
by the roadside.
Why do I suddenly recollect the Passage des Thermopyples? Because that day a
woman addressed her puppy in the apocalyptic language of the
slaughter-house, and the little bitch, she understood what this greasy slut
of a midwife was saying. How that depressed me! More even than the sight of
those whimpering curs that were being sold on the Rue Brancion, because it
was not the dogs which filled me so with pity, but the huge iron railing,
those rusty spikes which seemed to stand between me and my rightful life. In
the pleasant little lane near the Abattoir de Vaugirard (Abattoir
Hippophagique), which is called the Rue des Perichaux, I had noticed here
and there signs of blood. Just as Strindberg in his madness had recognized
omens and portents in the very flagging of the Pension Orfila, so, as I
wandered aimlessly through this muddy lane bespattered with blood, fragments
of the past detached themselves and floated listlessly before my eyes,
taunting me with the direst forebodings. I saw my own blood being spilled,
the muddy road stained with it, as far back as I could remember, from the
very beginning doubtless. One is ejected into the world like a dirty little
mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be
so. Each one is travelling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with
good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles
toward the exit sign, and such a panic is there, such a sweat to
escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled into the mud and their
cries are unheard.
My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and
for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad,
bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure,
wasted effort. Passing under the viaduct along the Rue Broca, one night
after I had been informed that Mona was ill and starving, I suddenly
recalled that it was here in the squalor and gloom of this sunken street,
terrorized perhaps by a premonition of the future, that Mona clung to me
and with a quivering voice begged me to promise that I would never leave
her, never, no matter what happened. And, only a few days later, I stood on
the platform of the Gare St. Lazare and I watched the train pull out, the
train that was bearing her away; she was leaning out of the window, just as
she had leaned out of the window when I left her in New York, and there was
that same, sad, incrustable smile on her face, the last-minute look which is
intended to convey so much, but which is only a mask that is twisted by a
vacant smile. Only a few days before, she had clung to me desperately and
then something happened, something which is not even clear to me now, and
of her own volition she boarded the train and she was looking at me again
with that sad, enigmatic smile which baffles me, which is unjust, unnatural,
which I distrust with all my soul. And now it is I, standing in the shadow
of the viaduct, who reach out for her, who cling to her desperately and
there is that same inexplicable smile on my lips, the mask that I have
clamped down over my grief. I can stand here and smile vacantly, and no
matter how fervid my prayers, no matter how desperate my longing, there is
an ocean between us; there she will stay and starve, and here I shall walk
from one street to the next, the hot tears scalding my face.
It is that sort of cruelty which is embedded in the streets, it is
that which stares out from the walls and terrifies us when suddenly
we respond to a nameless fear, when suddenly our souls are invaded by a
sickening panic. It is that which gives the lampposts their ghoulish
twists, which makes them beckon to us and lure us to
their strangling grip; it is that which makes certain houses appear
like the guardians of secret crimes and their blind windows like the empty
sockets of eyes that have seen too much. It is that sort of thing, written
into the human physiognomy of the streets which makes me flee when overhead
I suddenly see inscribed "Impasse Satan." That which makes me shudder when
at the very entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is written: "Mondays
and Thursdays tuberculosis; Wednesdays and Fridays syphilis."
In every Metro station there are grinning skulls that greet you with
"Defendez-vous centre la syphilis!" Wherever there are walls, there
are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the approach of cancer. No
matter where you go, no matter what you touch, there is cancer and syphilis.
It is written in the sky; it flames and dances, like an evil portent. It has
eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead thing like the moon.
* * *
I think it was the fourth of July when they took the chair from under my ass
again. Not a word of warning. One of the big mucky-mucks from the other side
of the water had decided to make economies; cutting down on proofreaders
and helpless little dactylos enabled him to pay the expenses of his
trips back and forth and the palatial quarters he occupied at the Ritz.
After paying what little debts I had accumulated among the linotype
operators and a good-will token at the bistrot across the way, in
order to preserve my credit, there was scarcely anything left out of my
final pay. I had to notify the patron of the hotel that I would be
leaving; I didn't tell him why because he'd have been worried about his
measly two hundred francs.
"What'll you do if you lose your job?" That was the phrase that rung in my
ears continually. Ca y est maintenant! Ausgespielt! Nothing to
do but get down into the street again, walk, hang around, sit on benches,
kill time. By now, of course, my face was familiar in Montparnasse; for a
while I could pretend that I was still working on the paper. That would make
it a little easier to bum a breakfast or a dinner. It was Summer time and
the tourists were pouring in. I had schemes up my sleeve for mulcting them.
"What'll you do ... ?" Well, I wouldn't starve, that's one thing. If I
should do nothing else but concentrate on food that would prevent me from
falling to pieces. For a week or two I could still go to Monsieur Paul's and
have a square meal every evening; he wouldn't know whether I was working or
not. The main thing is to eat. Trust to Providence for the rest!
Naturally, I kept my ears open for anything that sounded like a little
dough. And I cultivated a whole new set of acquaintances -- bores whom I had
sedulously
avoided heretofore, drunks whom I loathed, artists who had a little money,
Guggenheim prize men, etc. It's not hard to make friends when you squat on a
terrasse twelve hours a day. You get to know every sot in
Montparnasse. They cling to you like lice, even if you have nothing to offer
them but your ears.
Now that I had lost my job Carl and Van Norden had a new phrase for me:
"What if your wife should arrive now?" Well, what of it? Two mouths to feed,
instead of one. I'd have a companion in misery. And, if she hadn't lost her
good looks, I'd probably do better in double harness than alone: the world
never permits a good-looking woman to starve. Tania I couldn't depend on to
do much for me; she was sending money to Sylvester. I had thought at first
that she might let me share her room, but she was afraid of compromising
herself; besides, she had to be nice to her boss.
The first people to turn to when you're down and out are the Jews. I had
three of them on my hands almost at once. Sympathetic souls. One of them was
a retired fur merchant who had an itch to see his name in the papers;
he proposed that I write a series of articles under his name for a Jewish
daily in New York. I had to scout around the Dome and the Coupole searching
for prominent Jews. The first man I picked on was a celebrated
mathematician; he couldn't speak a word of English. I had to write about the
theory of shock from the diagrams he left on the paper napkins; I had to
describe the movements of the astral bodies and demolish the Einsteinian
conception at the same time. All for twenty-five francs. When I saw my
articles in the newspaper I couldn't read them; but they looked impressive,
just the same, especially with the pseudonym of the fur merchant attached.
I did a lot of pseudonymous writing during this period. When the big new
whorehouse opened up on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, I got a little
rake-off, for writing the pamphlets. That is to say, a bottle of champagne
and a free fuck in one of the Egyptian rooms. If I succeeded in bringing a
client I was to get my commission, just like Kepi got his in the old days.
One night I brought Van Norden; he was going to let me earn a little money
by enjoying himself upstairs. But when the Madame learned
that he was a newspaper man she wouldn't hear of taking money from him; it
was a bottle of champagne again and a free fuck. I got nothing out of it. As
a matter of fact, I had to write the story for him because he couldn't think
how to get round the subject without mentioning the kind of place it was.
One thing after another like that. I was getting fucked good and proper.
The worst job of all was a thesis I undertook to write for a deaf and dumb
psychologist. A treatise on the care of crippled children. My head was full
of diseases and braces and work-benches and fresh air theories; it took
about six weeks off and on, and then, to rub it in, I had to
proof-read the god-damned thing. It was in French, such a French as I've
never in my life seen or heard. But it brought me in a good breakfast every
day, an American breakfast, with orange juice, oatmeal, cream, coffee, now
and then, ham and eggs for a change. It was the only period of my Paris
days that I ever indulged in a decent breakfast, thanks to the crippled
children of Rockaway Beach, the East Side, and all the coves and inlets
bordering on these sore points.
Then one day I fell in with a photographer; he was making a collection of
the slimy joints of Paris for some degenerate in Munich. He wanted to know
if I would pose for him with my pants down, and in other ways. I thought of
those skinny little runts, who look like bell-hops and messenger boys, that
one sees on pornographic post-cards in little book-shop windows
occasionally, the mysterious phantoms who inhabit the Rue de la Lune and
other malodorous quarters of the city. I didn't like very much the idea of
advertising my physog in the company of these elite. But, since I was
assured that the photographs were for a strictly private collection, and
since it was destined for Munich, I gave my consent. When you're not in your
home town you can permit yourself little liberties, particularly for such a
worthy motive as earning your daily bread. After all, I hadn't been so
squeamish, come to think of it, even in New York. There were nights when I
was so damned desperate, back there, that I had to go out right in my own
neighborhood and panhandle.
We didn't go to the show places familiar to the tourists,
but to the little joints where the atmosphere was more congenial, where we
could play a game of cards in the afternoon before getting down to work. He
was a good companion, the photographer. He knew the city inside out, the
walls particularly; he talked to me about Goethe often, and the days of the
Hohenstaufen, and the massacre of the Jews during the reign of the Black
Death. Interesting subjects, and always related in some obscure way to the
things he was doing. He had ideas for scenarios too, astounding ideas, but
nobody had the courage to execute them. The sight of a horse split-open like
a saloon door, would inspire him to talk of Dante or Leonardo da Vinci or
Rembrandt; from the slaughter-house at Villette he would jump into a cab and
rush me to the Trocadero Museum, in order to point out a skull or a mummy
that had fascinated him. We explored the 5th, the 13th, the 19th and the
20th arrondissements thoroughly. Our favorite resting places were
lugubrious little spots such as the Place Nationale, Place des Peupliers,
Place Contrescarpe, Place Paul-Verlaine. Many of these places were already
familiar to me, but all of them I now saw in a different light owing to the
rare flavor of his conversation. If today I should happen to stroll down
the Rue du Chateau-des-Renders, for example, inhaling the fetid stench of
the hospital beds with which the 13th arrondissement reeks, my
nostrils would undoubtedly expand with pleasure, because, compounded with
that odor of stale piss and formaldehyde, there would be the odors of our
imaginative voyages through the charnel house of Europe which the Black
Death had created.
Through him I got to know a spiritual-minded individual named Kruger, who was
a sculptor and painter. Kruger took a shine to me for some reason or other;
it was impossible to get away from him once he discovered that I was willing
to listen to his "esoteric" ideas. There are people in this world for whom
the word "esoteric" seems to act as a divine ichor. Like "settled" for Herr
Peeperkorn of the Magic Mountain. Kruger was one of those saints who
have gone wrong, a masochist, an anal type whose law is scrupulousness,
rectitude and conscientiousness, who on an off day would knock a man's teeth
down his throat without a qualm. He seemed to think I was ripe to move on to
another plane