ear I was to leave
for Dijon where I had been offered a trivial post as exchange professor of
English, one of those Franco-American amity arrangements which is supposed
to promote understanding and good will between sister republics. Fillmore
was more elated than I by the prospect -- he had good reason to be. For me it
was just a transfer from one purgatory to another. There was no future
ahead of me; there wasn't even a salary attached to the job. One was
supposed to consider himself fortunate to enjoy the privilege of spreading
the gospel of Franco-American amity. It was a job for a rich man's son.
The night before I left we had a good time. About dawn it began to snow: we
walked about from one quarter to another taking a last look at Paris.
Passing through the Rue St. Dominique we suddenly fell upon a little square
and there was the Eglise Ste. Clotilde. People were going to mass. Fillmore,
whose head was still a little cloudy, was bent on going to mass too. "For
the fun of it!" as he put it. I felt somewhat uneasy about it; in the first
place I had never attended a mass, and in the second
place I looked seedy and felt seedy. Fillmore, too, looked rather battered,
even more disreputable than myself; his big slouch hat was on assways and
his overcoat was still full of sawdust from the last joint we had been in.
However, we marched in. The worst they could do would be to throw us out.
I was so astounded by the sight that greeted my eyes that I lost all
uneasiness. It took me a little while to get adjusted to the dim light. I
stumbled around behind Fillmore, holding his sleeve. A weird, unearthly
noise assailed my ears, a sort of hollow drone that rose up out of the cold
flagging. A huge, dismal tomb it was with mourners shuffling in and out. A
sort of ante-chamber to the world below. Temperature about 55 or 60
Fahrenheit. No music except this undefinable dirge manufactured in the
sub-cellar -- like a million heads of cauliflower wailing in the dark. People
in shrouds were chewing away with that hopeless, dejected look of beggars
who hold out their hands in a trance and mumble an unintelligible appeal.
That this sort of thing existed I knew, but then one also knows that there
are slaughterhouses and morgues and dissecting rooms. One instinctively
avoids such places. In the street I had often passed a priest with a little
prayer book in his hands laboriously memorizing his lines. Idiot, I
would say to myself, and let it go at that. In the street one meets with all
forms of dementia and the priest is by no means the most striking. Two
thousand years of it has deadened us to the idiocy of it. However, when you
are suddenly transported to the very midst of his realm, when you see the
little world in which the priest functions like an alarm clock, you are apt
to have entirely different sensations.
For a moment all this slaver and twitching of the lips almost began to have
a meaning. Something was going on, some kind of dumb show which, not
rendering me wholly stupefied, held me spellbound. All over the world,
wherever there are these dim-lit tombs, you have this incredible
spectacle -- the same mean temperature, the same crepuscular glow, the same
buzz and drone. All over Christendom, at certain stipulated hours, people in
black are grovelling before the altar where the priest stands up
with a little book in one hand and a dinner bell or atomizer in the other
and mumbles to them in a language which, even if it were comprehensible, no
longer contains a shred of meaning. Blessing them, most likely. Blessing the
country, blessing the ruler, blessing the firearms and the battleships and
the ammunition and the hand grenades. Surrounding him on the altar are
little boys dressed like angels of the Lord who sing alto and soprano.
Innocent lambs. All in skirts, sexless, like the priest himself who is
usually flat-footed and nearsighted to boot. A fine epicene caterwauling.
Sex in a jock-strap, to the tune of J.-mol.
I was taking it in as best I could in the dim light. Fascinating and
stupefying at the same time. All over the civilized world, I thought to
myself. All over the world. Marvelous. Rain or shine, hail, sleet, snow,
thunder, lightning, war, famine, pestilence -- makes not the slightest
difference. Always the same mean temperature, the same mumbo-jumbo, the same
high-laced shoes and the little angels of the Lord singing soprano and alto.
Near the exit a little slot-box -- to carry on the heavenly work. So that
God's blessing may rain down upon king and country and battleships and high
explosives and tanks and aeroplanes, so that the worker may have more
strength in his arms, strength to slaughter horses and cows and sheep,
strength to punch holes in iron girders, strength to sew buttons on other
people's pants, strength to sell carrots and sewing machines and automobiles,
strength to exterminate insects and clean stables and unload garbage cans and
scrub lavatories, strength to write headlines and chop tickets in the subway.
Strength ... strength. All that lip-chewing and horn-swoggling just to
furnish a little strength!
We were moving about from one spot to another, surveying the scene with
that clearheadedness which comes after an all-night session. We must have
made ourselves pretty conspicuous shuffling about that way with our coat
collars turned up and never once crossing ourselves and never once moving
our lips except to whisper some callous remark. Perhaps everything would
have passed off without notice if Fillmore hadn't insisted on walking past
the altar in the midst of the ceremony. He was looking for the exit, and he
thought while he was at it, I suppose, that he would take a good squint at
the holy of holies, get a close-up on it, as it were. We had gotten safely by
and were marching toward a crack of light which must have been the way out
when a priest suddenly stepped out of the gloom and blocked our path. Wanted
to know where we were going and what we were doing. We told him politely
enough that we were looking for the exit. We said "exit" because at the
moment we were so flabbergasted that we couldn't think of the French for
exit. Without a word of response he took us firmly by the arm and, opening
the door, a side door it was, he gave us a push and out we tumbled into the
blinding light of day. It happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that when we
hit the sidewalk we were in a daze. We walked a few paces, blinking our eyes,
and then instinctively we both turned round; the priest was still standing on
the steps, pale as a ghost and scowling like the devil himself. He must have
been sore as hell. Later, thinking back on it, I couldn't blame him for it.
But at that moment, seeing him with his long skirts and the little skull cap
on his cranium, he looked so ridiculous that I burst out laughing. I looked
at Fillmore and he began to laugh too. For a full minute we stood there
laughing right in the poor bugger's face. He was so bewildered, I guess, that
for a moment he didn't know what to do; suddenly, however, he started down
the steps on the run, shaking his fist at us as if he were in earnest. When
he swung out of the enclosure he was on the gallop. By this time some
preservative instinct warned me to get a move on. I grabbed Fillmore by the
coat sleeve and started to run. He was saying, like an idiot: "No, no! I
won't run!" -- "Come on!" I yelled, "we'd better get out of here. That guy's
mad clean through." And off we ran, beating it as fast as our legs would
carry us.
On the way to Dijon, still laughing about the affair, my thoughts reverted
to a ludicrous incident, of a somewhat similar nature, which occurred during
my brief sojourn in Florida. It was during the celebrated boom when, like
thousands of others, I was caught with my pants down. Trying to extricate
myself I got caught, along with a friend of mine, in the very neck of the
bottle. Jacksonville, where we were marooned for about six weeks, was
practically in a state of siege. Every bum on earth, and a lot of guys who
had never been bums before, seemed to have drifted into Jacksonville. The
Y.M.C.A., the Salvation Army, the fire houses and police stations, the
hotels, the lodging houses, everything was full up. Complet
absolutely, and signs everywhere to that effect. The residents of
Jacksonville had become so hardened that it seemed to me as if they were
walking around in coats of mail. It was the old business of food again. Food
and a place to flop. Food was coming up from below in trainloads -- oranges and
grapefruit and all sorts of juicy edibles. We used to pass by the freight
sheds looking for rotten fruit -- but even that was scarce.
One night, in desperation, I dragged my friend Joe to a synagogue, during
the service. It was a reformed congregation and the rabbi impressed me
rather favorably. The music got me too -- that piercing lamentation of the
Jews. As soon as the service was over I marched to the rabbi's study and
requested an interview with him. He received me decently enough -- until I
made clear my mission. Then he grew absolutely frightened. I had only asked
him for a hand-out on behalf of my friend Joe and myself. You would have
thought, from the way he looked at me, that I had asked to rent the
synagogue as a bowling alley. To cap it all, he suddenly asked me
point-blank if I was a Jew or not. When I answered no, he seemed perfectly
outraged. Why, pray, had I come to a Jewish pastor for aid? I told him
naively that I had always had more faith in the Jews than in the Gentiles. I
said it modestly, as if it were one of my peculiar defects. It was the truth
too. But he wasn't a bit flattered. No, siree. He was horrified. To get rid
of me he wrote out a note to the Salvation Army people. "That's the place
for you to address yourself," he said, and brusquely turned away to tend his
flock.
The Salvation Army, of course, had nothing to offer us. If we had had a
quarter apiece we might have rented a mattress on the floor. But we hadn't a
nickel between us. We went to the park and stretched ourselves out on a
bench. It was raining and so we covered ourselves with newspapers. Weren't
there more than a half hour, I imagine, when a cop came along and, without
a word of warning, gave us such a sound fanning that we were up and on
our feet in a jiffy, and dancing a bit too, though we weren't in any mood
for dancing. I felt so goddamned sore and miserable, so dejected, so lousy,
after being whacked over the ass by that half-witted bastard, that I could
have blown up the City Hall.
The next morning, in order to get even with these hospitable sons of
bitches, we presented ourselves bright and early at the door of a Catholic
priest. This time I let Joe do the talking. He was Irish and he had a bit of
brogue. He had very soft, blue eyes, too, and he could make them water a bit
when he wanted to. A sister in black opened the door for us; she didn't ask
us inside, however. We were to wait in the vestibule until she went and
called for the good father. In a few minutes he came, the good father,
puffing like a locomotive. And what was it we wanted disturbing his likes at
that hour of the morning? Something to eat and a place to flop, we answered
innocently. And where did we hail from, the good father wanted to know at
once. From New York. From New York, eh? Then ye'd better be gettin' back
there as fast as ye kin, me lads, and without another word the big, bloated
turnip-faced bastard shoved the door in our face.
About an hour later, drifting around helplessly like a couple of drunken
schooners, we happened to pass by the rectory again. So help me God if the
big, lecherous-looking turnip wasn't backing out of the alley in a
limousine! As he swung past us he blew a cloud of smoke into our eyes. As
though to say -- "That for you!" A beautiful limousine it was, with a
couple of spare tires in the back, and the good father sitting at the wheel
with a big cigar in his mouth. Must have been a Corona-Corona, so fat and
luscious it was. Sitting pretty he was, and no two ways about it. I couldn't
see whether he had skirts on or not. I could only see the gravy trickling
from his lips -- and the big cigar with that fifty cent aroma.
All the way to Dijon I got to reminiscing about the past. I thought of all
the things I might have said and done, which I hadn't said or done, in the
bitter, humiliating moments when just to ask for a crust of bread is to
make yourself less than a worm. Stone sober as I was, I was still smarting
from those old insults and injuries. I could still feel that whack over the
ass which the cop gave me in the park -- though that was a mere bagatelle, a
little dancing lesson, you might say. All over the States I wandered, and
into Canada and Mexico. The same story everywhere. If you want bread you've
got to get in harness, get in lock-step. Over all the earth a gray desert, a
carpet of steel and cement. Production! More nuts and bolts, more barbed
wire, more dog-biscuits, more lawn-mowers, more ball-bearings, more high
explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more tooth-paste, more
newspapers, more education, more churches, more libraries, more museums.
Forward! Time presses. The embryo is pushing through the neck of the
womb, and there's not even a gob of spit to ease the passage, A dry,
strangulating birth. Not a wail, not a chirp. Salut au monde! Salute
of twenty-one guns bombinating from the rectum. "I wear my hat as I please,
indoors or out," said Walt. That was a time when you could still get a hat to
fit your head. But time passes. To get a hat that fits now you have to walk
to the electric chair. They give you a skull cap. A tight fit, what? But no
matter! It fits.
You have to be in a strange country like France, walking the meridian that
separates the hemispheres of life and death, to know what incalculable
vistas yawn ahead. The body electric! The democratic soul! Flood-tide!
Holy Mother of God, what does this crap mean? The earth is parched and
cracked. Men and women come together like broods of vultures over a stinking
carcass, to mate and fly apart again. Vultures who drop from the clouds like
heavy stones. Talons and beak, that's what we are! A huge intestinal
apparatus with a nose for dead meat. Forward! Forward without pity,
without compassion, without love, without forgiveness. Ask no quarter and
give none! More battleships, more poison gas, more high explosives! More
gonococci! More streptococci! More bombing machines! More and more of
it -- until the whole fucking works is blown to smithereens, and the earth with
it!
Stepping off the train I knew immediately that I had made a fatal mistake.
The Lycee was a little distance from the station; I walked down the main
street in the early dusk of winter, feeling my way towards my destination.
A light snow was falling, the trees sparkled with frost. Passed a couple of
huge, empty cafes that looked like dismal waiting rooms. Silent, empty
gloom -- that's how it impressed me. A hopeless, jerk-water town where mustard
is turned out in carload lots, in vats and tuns and barrels and pots and
cute-looking little jars.
The first glance at the Lycee sent a shudder through me. I felt so undecided
that at the entrance I stopped to debate whether I would go in or not. But
as I hadn't the price of a return ticket there wasn't much use debating the
question. I thought for a moment of sending a wire to Fillmore, but then I
was stomped to know what excuse to make. The only thing to do was to walk in
with my eyes shut.
It happened that M. le Proviseur was out -- his day off, so they said. A
little hunchback came forward and offered to escort me to the office of M.
le Censeur, second in charge. I walked a little behind him, fascinated by
the grotesque way in which he hobbled along. He was a little monster, such
as can be seen on the porch of any half-assed cathedral in Europe.
The office of M. le Censeur was large and bare. I sat down in a stiff chair
to wait while the hunchback darted off to search for him. I almost felt at
home. The atmosphere of the place reminded me vividly of certain charity
bureaus back in the States where I used to sit by the hour waiting for some
mealy-mouthed bastard to come and cross-examine me.
Suddenly the door opened and, with a mincing step, M. le Censeur came
prancing in. It was all I could do to suppress a titter. He had on just such
a frock coat as Boris used to wear, and over his forehead there hung a bang,
a sort of spitcurl such as Smerdiakov might have worn. Grave and brittle,
with a lynx-like eye, he wasted no words of cheer on me. At once he brought
forth the sheets on which were written the names of the students, the hours,
the classes, etc., all in a meticulous hand. He told me how much coal and
wood I was allowed and after that he promptly informed me that I was at
liberty to do as I pleased in my spare time. This last was the first good
thing I had heard him say. It sounded so reassuring that I quickly said a
prayer for France -- for the army and navy, the educational system, the
bistrots, the whole goddamned works.
This fol-de-rol completed, he rang a little bell, whereupon the hunchback
promptly appeared to escort me to the office of M. l'Econome. Here
the atmosphere was somewhat different. More like a freight-station,
with bills of lading and rubber stamps everywhere, and pasty-faced clerks
scribbling away with broken pens in huge, cumbersome ledgers. My dole of
coal and wood portioned out, off we marched, the hunchback and I, with a
wheelbarrow, towards the dormitory. I was to have a room on the top floor,
in the same wing as the pions. The situation was taking on a humorous
aspect. I didn't know what the hell to expect next. Perhaps a spittoon. The
whole thing smacked very much of preparation for a campaign; the only things
missing were a knapsack and rifle -- and a brass slug.
The room assigned to me was rather large, with a small stove to which was
attached a crooked pipe that made an elbow just over the iron cot. A big
chest for the coal and wood stood near the door. The windows gave out on a
row of forlorn little houses all made of stone in which lived the grocer, the
baker, the shoemaker, the butcher, etc. -- all imbecilic-looking clodhoppers.
I glanced over the rooftops towards the bare hills where a train was
clattering. The whistle of the locomotive screamed mournfully and
hysterically.
After the hunchback had made the fire for me I inquired about the grub. It
was not quite time for dinner. I flopped on the bed, with my overcoat on,
and pulled the covers over me. Beside me was the eternal rickety night table
in which the piss pot is hidden away. I stood the alarm on the table and
watched the minutes ticking off. Into the well of the room a bluish light
filtered in from the street. I listened to the trucks rattling by as I gazed
vacantly at the stove pipe, at the elbow where it was held together with
bits of wire. The coal chest intrigued me. Never in my life had I occupied a
room with a coal chest. And never in my life had I built a fire or taught
children. Nor, for that matter, never in my life had I worked without pay.
I felt free and chained at the same time -- like one feels just before
election, when all the crooks have been nominated and you are beseeched to
vote for the right man. I felt like a hired man, like a jack-of-all-trades,
like a hunter, like a rover, like a galley-slave, like a pedagogue, like a
worm and a louse. I was free, but my limbs were shackled. A democratic soul
with a free meal ticket, but no power of locomotion, no voice. I felt like a
jelly-fish nailed to a plank. Above all, I felt hungry. The hands were
moving slowly. Still ten more minutes to kill before the fire alarm would go
off. The shadows in the room deepened. It grew frightfully silent, a tense
stillness that tautened my nerves. Little dabs of snow clung to the
window-panes. Far away a locomotive gave out a shrill scream. Then a dead
silence again. The stove had commenced to glow, but there was no heat
coming from it. I began to fear that I might doze off and miss the dinner.
That would mean lying awake on an empty belly all night. I got
panic-stricken.
Just a moment before the gong went off I jumped out of bed and, locking the
door behind me, I bolted downstairs to the courtyard. There I got lost. One
quadrangle after another, one staircase after another. I wandered in and out
of the buildings searching frantically for the refectory. Passed a long
line of youngsters marching in a column to God knows where; they moved along
like a chain-gang, with a slave-driver at the head of the column. Finally I
saw an energetic-looking individual, with a derby, heading towards me. I
stopped him to ask the way to the refectory. Happened I stopped the right
man. It was M. le Proviseur, and he seemed delighted to have stumbled on
me. Wanted to know right away if I were comfortably settled, if there was
anything more he could do for me. I told him everything was O. K. Only it
was a bit chilly, I ventured to add. He assured me that it was rather
unusual, this weather. Now and then the fogs came on and a bit of snow, and
then it became unpleasant for a while, and so on and so forth. All the while
he had me by the arm, guiding me towards the refectory. He seemed like a
very decent chap. A regular guy, I thought to myself. I even went so far as
to imagine that I might get chummy with him later on, that he'd invite me to
his room on a bitter cold night and make a hot grog for me. I imagined all
sorts of friendly things in the few moments it required to reach the door of
the refectory. Here, my mind racing on at a mile a minute, he suddenly shook
hands with me and, doffing his hat, bade me good night. I was so bewildered
that I tipped my hat also. It was the regular thing to do, I soon found out.
Whenever you pass a prof, or even M. l'Econome, you doff the hat. Might pass
the same guy a dozen times a day. Makes no difference. You've got to give
the salute, even though your hat is worn out. It's the polite thing to do.
Anyway, I had found the refectory. Like an East Side clinic it was, with
tiled walls, bare light, and marble-topped tables. And of course a big stove
with an elbow-pipe. The dinner wasn't served yet. A cripple was running in
and out with dishes and knives and forks and bottles of wine. In a corner
several young men conversing animatediy. I went up to them and introduced
myself. They gave me a most cordial reception. Almost too cordial, in fact.
I couldn't quite make it out. In a jiffy the room began to fill up; I was
presented from one to the other quickly. Then they formed a circle about me
and, filling the glasses, they began to sing....
"L'autre soir l'idee m'est venue Cre nom de Zeus d'enculer un pendu;
Le vent se leve sur la potence, Voila. mon pendu qui se balance, J'ai du
l'enculer en sautant, Cre nom de Zeus, on est jamais content.
"Baiser dans un con trop petit, Cre nom de Zeus, on s'ecorche le vit;
Baiser dans un con trop large, On ne sail pas oil l'on decharge;
Se branler etant bien emmerdant, Cre nom de Zeus, on est jamais content."
With this, Quasimodo announced the dinner. They were a cheerful group, les
surveillants. There was Kroa who belched like a pig and always let out a
loud fart when he sat down to table. He could fart thirteen times in
succession, they informed me. He held the record. Then there was Monsieur le
Prince, an athlete who was fond of wearing a tuxedo in the evening when he
went to town; he had a beautiful complexion, just like a girl, and never
touched the wine nor read anything that might tax his brain. Next him sat
Petit Paul, from the Midi, who thought of nothing but cunt all the time; he
used to say every day -- "a partir de jeudi je ne parlerai plus de
femmes." He and Monsieur le Prince were inseparable. Then there was
Passeleau, a veritable young scallywag who was studying medicine and who
borrowed right and left; he talked incessantly of Ronsard, Villon and
Rabelais. Opposite me sat Mollesse, agitator and organizer of the
pions, who insisted on weighing the meat to see if it wasn't short a
few grams. He occupied a little room in the infirmary. His supreme enemy was
Monsieur l'Econome, which was nothing particularly to his credit since
everybody hated this individual. For companion Mollesse had one called Le
Penible, a dour-looking chap with a hawk-like profile who practised the
strictest economy and acted as money-lender. He was like an engraving by
Albrecht Durer -- a composite of all the dour, sour, morose, bitter,
unfortunate, unlucky and introspective devils who compose the pantheon of
Germany's medieval knights. A Jew, no doubt. At any rate, he was killed in an
automobile accident shortly after my arrival, a circumstance which left me
twenty-three francs to the good. With the exception of Renaud who sat beside
me, the others have faded out of my memory; they belonged to that category of
colorless individuals who make up the world of engineers, architects,
dentists, pharmacists, teachers, etc. There was nothing to distinguish them
from the clods whom they would later wipe their boots on. They were zeros in
every sense of the word, ciphers who form the nucleus of a respectable and
lamentable citizenry. They ate with their heads down and were always the
first to clamor for a second helping. They slept soundly and never
complained; they were neither gay nor miserable. The indifferent ones whom
Dante consigned to the vestibule of Hell. The upper-crusters.
It was the custom after dinner to go immediately to town, unless one was on
duty in the dormitories. In the center of town were the cafes -- huge, dreary
halls where the somnolent merchants of Dijon gathered to play cards and
listen to music. It was warm in the cafes, that is the best I can say for
them. The seats were fairly comfortable, too. And there were always a few
whores about who, for a glass of beer or a cup of coffee, would sit and chew
the fat with you. The music, on the other hand, was atrocious. Such music! On
a winter's night, in a dirty hole like Dijon, nothing can be more harassing,
more nerve-racking, than the sound of a French orchestra. Particularly one of
those lugubrious female orchestras with everything coming in squeaks and
farts, with a dry, algebraic rhythm and the hygienic consistency of
tooth-paste. A wheezing and scraping performed at so many francs the hour --
and the devil take the hindmost! The melancholy of it! As if old Euclid had
stood up on his hind legs and swallowed Prussic acid. The whole realm of Idea
so thoroughly exploited by the reason that there is nothing left of which to
make music except the empty slats of the accordion, through which the wind
whistles and tears the ether to tatters. However, to speak of music in
connection with this outpost is like dreaming of champagne when you are in
the death-cell. Music was the least of my worries. I didn't even think of
cunt, so dismal, so chill, so barren, so gray was it all. On the way home the
first night I noticed on the door of a cafe an inscription from the
Gargantua. Inside the cafe it was like a morgue. However,
forward!
I had plenty of time on my hands and not a sou to spend. Two or three hours
of conversational lessons a day, and that was all. And what use was it,
teaching these poor bastards English? I felt sorry as hell for them. All
morning plugging away on John Gilpin's Ride, and in the afternoon
coming to me to practise a dead language. I thought of the good time I had
wasted reading Vergil or wading through such incomprehensible nonsense as
Hermann und Dorotea. The insanity of it! Learning, the empty
bread-basket! I thought of Carl who can recite Faust backwards, who
never writes a book without praising the shit out of his immortal,
incorruptible Goethe. And yet he hadn't sense enough to take on a rich cunt
and get himself a change of underwear. There's something obscene in this
love of the past which ends in bread-lines and dug-outs. Something obscene
about this spiritual racket which permits an idiot to sprinkle holy water
over Big Berthas and dreadnoughts and high explosives. Every
man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.
Here was I, supposedly to spread the gospel of Franco-American amity -- the
emissary of a corpse who, after he had plundered right and left, after he
had caused untold suffering and misery, dreamed of establishing universal
peace. Pfui! What did they expect me to talk about, I wonder? About
Leaves of Grass, about the tariff walls, about the Declaration of
Independence, about the latest gang war? What? Just what, I'd like to know.
Well, I'll tell you -- I never mentioned these things. I started right off the
bat with a lesson in the physiology of love. How the elephants make
love -- that was it! It caught like wildfire. After the first day there were
no more empty benches. After that first lesson in English they were standing
at the door waiting for me. We got along swell together. They asked all
sorts of questions, as though they had never learned a damned thing. I let
them fire away. I taught them to ask still more ticklish questions. Ask
anything! -- that was my motto. I'm here as a plenipotentiary from the
realm of free spirits. I'm here to create a fever and a ferment. "In some
way," says an eminent astronomer, "the material universe appears to be
passing away like a tale that is told, dissolving into nothingness like a
vision." That seems to be the general feeling underlying the empty
bread-basket of learning. Myself, I don't believe it. I don't believe a
fucking thing these bastards try to shove down our throats.
Between sessions, if I had no book to read, I would go upstairs to the
dormitory and chat with the pions. They were delightfully ignorant of
all that was going on -- especially in the world of art. Almost as ignorant
as the students themselves. It was as if I had gotten into a private little
madhouse with no exit signs. Sometimes I snooped around under the arcades,
watching the kids marching along with huge hunks of bread stuck in their
dirty mugs. I was always hungry myself, since it was impossible for me to
go to breakfast which was handed out at some ungodly hour of the morning,
just when the bed was getting toasty. Huge bowls of blue coffee with chunks
of white bread and no butter to go with it. For lunch, beans or lentils with
bits of meat thrown in to make it look appetizing. Food fit for a chain-gang,
for rock-breakers. Even the wine was lousy. Things were either diluted or
bloated. There were calories, but no cuisine. M. l'Econome was responsible
for it all. So they said. I don't believe that, either. He was paid to keep
our heads just above the water line. He didn't ask if we were suffering from
piles or carbuncles; he didn't inquire if we had delicate palates or the
intestines of wolves. Why should he? He was hired at so many grams the plate
to produce so many kilowatts of energy. Everything in terms of horse power.
It was all carefully reckoned in the fat ledgers which the pasty-faced clerks
scribbled in morning, noon and night. Debit and credit, with a red line down
the middle of the page.
Roaming around the quadrangle with an empty belly most of the time I got to
feel slightly mad. Like Charles the Silly, poor devil -- only I had no Odette
Champsdivers with whom to play stink-finger. Half the time I had to grub
cigarettes from the students, and during the lessons sometimes I munched a
bit of dry bread with them. As the fire was always going out on me I soon
used up my allotment of wood. It was the devil's own time coaxing a little
wood out of the ledger clerks. Finally I got so riled up about it that I
would go out in the street and hunt for firewood, like an Arab. Astonishing
how little firewood you could pick up in the streets of Dijon. However,
these little foraging expeditions brought me into strange precincts: Got to
know the little street named after a M. Philibert Papillon -- a dead musician,
I believe -- where there was a cluster of whorehouses. It was always more
cheerful hereabouts; there was the smell of cooking, and wash hanging out to
dry. Once in a while I caught a glimpse of the poor half-wits who lounged
about inside. They were better off than the poor devils in the center of
town whom I used to bump into whenever I walked through a department store.
I did that frequently in order to get warm. They were doing it for the same
reason, I suppose. Looking for someone to buy them a coffee. They looked a
little crazy, with the cold and the loneliness. The whole town looked a bit
crazy when the blue of evening settled over it. You could walk up and down
the main drive any Thursday in the week till doomsday and never meet an
expansive soul. Sixty or seventy thousand people -- perhaps more -- wrapped in
woolen underwear and nowhere to go and nothing to do. Turning out mustard by
the carload. Female orchestras grinding out The Merry Widow. Silver
service in the big hotels. The ducal palace rotting away, stone by stone,
limb by limb. The trees screeching with frost. A ceaseless clatter of wooden
shoes. The University celebrating the death of Goethe, or the birth, I don't
remember which. (Usually it's the deaths that are celebrated.) Idiotic
affair, anyway. Everybody yawning and stretching.
Coming through the high driveway into the quadrangle a sense of abysmal
futility always came over me. Outside bleak and empty; inside, bleak and
empty. A scummy sterility hanging over the town, a fog of book-learning.
Slag and cinders of the past. Around the interior courts were ranged the
class rooms, little shacks such as you might see in the North woods, where
the pedagogues gave free rein to their vices. On the black-board the futile
abracadabra which the future citizens of the republic would have to spend
their lives forgetting. Once in a while the parents were received in the big
reception room just off the driveway, where there were busts of the heroes
of antiquity, such as Moliere, Racine, Corneille, Voltaire, etc., all the
scarecrows whom the cabinet ministers mention with moist lips whenever an
immortal is added to the waxworks. (No bust of Villon, no bust of Rabelais,
no bust of Rimbaud.) Anyway, they met here in solemn conclave, the parents
and the stuffed shirts whom the State hires to bend the minds of the young.
Always this bending process, this landscape gardening to make the mind more
attractive. And the youngsters came too, occasionally -- the little sunflowers
who would soon be transplanted from the nursery in order to decorate the
municipal grassplots. Some of them were just rubber plants easily dusted
with a torn chemise. All of them jerking away for dear life in the
dormitories as soon as night came on. The dormitories! where the red lights
glowed, where the bell rang like a fire-alarm, where the treads were
hollowed out in the scramble to reach the educational cells.
Then there were the profs! During the first few days I got so far as to shake
hands with a few of them, and of course there was always the salute with the
hat when we passed under the arcades. But as for a heart-to-heart talk, as
for walking to the corner and having a drink together, nothing doing. It was
simply unimaginable. Most of them looked as though they had had the shit
scared out of them. Anyway, I belonged to another hierarchy. They wouldn't
even share a louse with the likes of me. They made me so damned irritated,
just to look at them, that I used to curse them under my breath when I saw
them coming. I used to stand there, leaning against a pillar, with a
cigarette in the corner of my mouth and my hat down over my eyes, and when
they got within hailing distance I would let squirt a good gob and up with
the hat I didn't even bother to open my trap and bid them the time of the
day. Under my breath I simply said: "Fuck you, Jack!" and let it go at that.
After a week it seemed as if I had been here all my life. It was like a
bloody, fucking nightmare that you can't throw off. Used to fall into a coma
thinking about it. Just a few days ago I had arrived. Nightfall. People
scurrying home like rats under the foggy lights. The trees glittering with
diamond-pointed malice. I thought it all out, a thousand times or more.
From the station to the Lycee it was like a promenade through the Danzig
Corridor, all deckle-edged, crannied, nerve-ridden. A lane of dead bones, of
crooked, cringing figures buried in shrouds. Spines made of sardine bones.
The Lycee itself seemed to rise up out of a lake of thin snow, an inverted
mountain that pointed down toward the center of the earth where God or the
Devil works always in a strait-jacket grinding grist for that paradise which
is always a wet dream. If the sun ever shone I don't remember it. I remember
nothing but the cold greasy fogs that blew in from the frozen marshes over
yonder where the railroad tracks burrowed into the lurid hills. Down near
the station was a canal, or perhaps it was a river, hidden away under a
yellow sky, with little shacks pasted slap-up against the rising ledge of
the banks. There was a barracks too somewhere, it struck me, because every
now and then I met little yellow men from Cochin-China -- squirmy, opium-faced
runts peeping out of their baggy uniforms like dyed skeletons packed in
excelsior. The whole god-damned medievalism of the place was infernally
ticklish and restive, rocking back and forth with low moans, jumping out at
you from the eaves, hanging like broken-necked criminals from the gargoyles.
I kept looking back all the time, kept walking like a crab that you prong
with a dirty fork. All those fat little monsters, those slab-like effigies
pasted on the facade of the Eglise St. Michel, they were following me down
the crooked lanes and around corners. The whole facade of St. Michel seemed
to open up like an album at night, leaving you face to face with the horrors
of the printed page. When the lights went out and the characters faded away
flat, dead as words, then it was quite magnificent, the facade; in every
crevice of the old gnarled front there was the hollow chant of the nightwind
and over the lacy rubble of cold stiff vestments there was a cloudy
absinthe-like drool of fog and frost.
Here, where the church stood, everything seemed turned hind side front. The
church itself must have been twisted off its base by centuries of progress
in the rain and snow. It lay in the Place Edgar-Quinet, squat against the
wind, like a dead mule. Through the Rue de la Monnaie the wind rushed like
white hair streaming wild: it whirled around the white hitching posts which
obstructed the free passage of omnibuses and twenty-mule teams. Swinging
through this exit in the early morning hours I sometimes stumbled upon
Monsieur Renaud who, wrapped in his cowl like a gluttonous monk, made
overtures to me in the language of the 16th century. Falling in step with
Monsieur Renaud, the moon busting through the greasy sky like a punctured
balloon, I fell immediately into the realm of the transcendental. M. Renaud
had a precise speech, dry as apricots, with a heavy Brandenburger base. Used
to come at me full tilt from Goethe or Fichte, with deep base notes that
rumbled in the windy corners of the Place like claps of last year's
thunder. Men of Yucatan, men of Zanzibar, men of Tierra del Fuego, save me
from this glaucous hog-rind! The North piles up about me, the glacial fjords,
the blue-tipped spines, the crazy lights, the obscene Christian chant that
spread like an avalanche from Aetna to the Aegean. Everything frozen tight as
scum, the mind locked and rimed with frost, and through the melancholy bales
of chitterwit the choking gargle of louse-eaten saints. White I am and
wrapped in wool, swaddled, fettered, ham-strung, but in this I have no part.
White to the bone, but with a cold alkali base, with saffron-tipped fingers.
White, aye, but no brother of learning, no Catholic heart. White and
ruthless, as the men before me who sailed out of the Elbe. I look to the sea,
to the sky, to what is unintelligible and distantly near.
The snow under foot scurries before the wind, blows, tickles, stings, lisps
away, whirls aloft, showers, splinters, sprays down. No sun, no roar of
surf, no breaker's surge. The cold north wind pointed with barbed shafts,
icy, malevolent, greedy, blighting, paralyzing. The streets turn away on
their crooked elbows; they break from the hurried sight, the stem glance.
They hobble away down the drifting lattice-work, wheeling the church hind
side front, mowing down the statues, flattening the monuments, uprooting
the trees, stiffening the grass, sucking the fragrance out of the earth.
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