Death on the Installment Plan (3 page)

She bursts into lamentations. She’s a monster in every way, her looks are awful and her work is awful. She’s an obligation. I’ve had her on my neck since I was in England. She’s the fruit of a promise. Our acquaintance goes way back. It was her daughter Angèle in London who made me swear to look after her forever. I’ve looked after her all right. That was my vow to Angèle. It dates back to the war. Besides, come to think of it, she knows what she knows. Okay. Supposedly she’s tight-lipped, but she remembers … Angèle, her daughter, was quite a number. It’s amazing how ugly a mother can get. Angèle came to a bad end. I’ll explain if I’m forced to. Angele had a sister, Sophie, a big tall screwball, she’s settled in London. And Mireille, the little niece, is over here. She has the combined vices of the whole family, she’s a real bitch … a synthesis.

When I moved from Rancy to Porte Péreire, they both tagged along. Rancy has changed, there’s hardly anything left of the walls or the Bastion. Big black scarred stones; they rip them out of the soft ground like decayed teeth. It will all go … the city swallows its old gums. The bus —the P.O.
bis
they call it now—dashes through the ruins like a bat out of hell. Soon there won’t be anything but sawed-off dung-colored skyscrapers. We’ll see. Vitruve and I used to argue about our troubles. She always claimed she’d been through more than I had. That isn’t possible. Wrinkles, yes, she’s got more. There’s no limit to the amount of wrinkles people can get: the loathsome traces that the good years dig in their flesh. “Mireille must have put your papers away.”

I leave with her and escort her out to the rue des Minimes. They live together, near the Bitrounelle chocolate factory, in a joint that calls itself the Hôtel Méridien.

Their room is an inconceivable mess, a junk shop full of miscellaneous articles, mostly underwear, all very flimsy and cheap.

Madame Vitruve and her niece both do it. They have three douche bags fully equipped and a rubber bidet. They keep it all between the beds; there’s also an enormous atomizer that they’ve never succeeded in getting to work. I wouldn’t want to be too hard on Vitruve. Maybe she has had more trouble than I have. That’s what makes me control myself. Otherwise, if I were sure, I’d lick the hell out of her. She used to keep the Remington in the fireplace; she hadn’t finished paying for it. So she said. I don’t pay her too much for my typing, I’ve got to admit that … sixty-five centimes a page, but it mounts up in the end … especially with big fat books.

When it comes to squinting, though, I never saw the like of Vitruve. It was painful to look at her.

That ferocious squint gave her an air when she laid out the cards … tarots. She sold the little ladies silk stockings … and the future too, on credit. When she puzzled and pondered behind her glasses, she had the wandering gaze of a lobster.

Her fortune-telling gave her a certain influence in the neighborhood. She knew all the cuckolds. She pointed them out to me from the window, and even the three murderers—”I have proof.” I’d also given her an old blood-pressure contraption and taught her a little massage for varicose veins. That added to her income. Her ambition was to do abortions or to get involved in a bloody revolution, so everybody would talk about her and the newspapers would be full of it.

I’ll never be able to say how she nauseated me as I watched her rummaging through that junk pile of hers. All over the world there are trucks that run over nice people at the rate of one a minute … Vitruve gave off a pungent smell. Redheads often do. It seems to me that there’s an animal quality in redheads; it’s their destiny: something brutal and tragic; they’ve got it in their skin. I could have laid her out cold when she went on about her memories in that loud voice of hers … She had hot pants, and it was hard for her to do much about it. Unless a man was drunk and it was very dark, she didn’t have a chance. On that point I was sorry for her. I myself had done better in the way of amorous harmonies. That, too, struck her as unjust. When the time came, I’d have almost enough put by to settle my accounts with death … I had my esthetic savings. What marvelous ass I’d enjoyed, I’ve got to admit it, as luminous as light. I had tasted of the Infinite.

She had no savings, that goes without saying. To earn her keep and get a little enjoyment on the side, she had to take a customer by surprise or corner him when he was too tired to resist. It was hell.

By seven o’clock the good little workers have gone home. The women are doing the dishes, the males are tied up in radio waves. That’s when Vitruve abandons my beautiful book and goes out in pursuit of her livelihood. She pads from landing to landing with her slightly damaged stockings and her crummy lingerie. Before the crash she managed to get along, what with credit and the way she terrified her customers, but today the identical crap is given away at street fairs to stop the gripes of losers at the shell game.

That’s unfair competition. I tried to tell her it was all the fault of the Japanese. She didn’t believe me. I accused her of doing away with my wonderful Legend on purpose, even of throwing it in the garbage …

“It’s a masterpiece,” I added. “We’ve got to find it.”

That handed her a laugh. We rummaged through the pile of merchandise.

Finally her niece came in. She was very late. Christ Almighty, what a rear end. That ass of hers was a public scandal. Her pleated skirt helped to bring it out … A rounded accordion. The unemployed are desperate, sex-starved; no dough to take a girl out with … They were good and mad. “What about giving me some of that ass!” they’d shout at her. Square in her face as she comes through the hall. It’s rough always getting a hard-on for nothing. The youngsters with finer features than the rest feel entitled to it, they expect life to coddle them. It wasn’t until later that she began to go down and hustle … after no end of calamities … For the present she was just having fun.

She didn’t find my beautiful Legend either. She didn’t give a damn about “King Krogold” … the only one who cared was myself. Her school of life was the Petit Panier, a dance hall near the Porte Brandon, just before the railroad.

They didn’t take their eyes off me when I got mad. In their opinion I was a champion creep. A stick-in-the-mud, jerk-off intellectual, and so on. But now, surprisingly enough, they were scared I’d clear out. If I had, I wonder what they’d have done. I have no doubt that the aunt thought about it plenty. Lord, the winning smiles they treated me to when I began to talk about a change of air …

In addition to her amazing ass, Mireille had romantic eyes and a bewitching look, but a hefty nose … a beezer. That was her cross. When I wanted to humiliate her a bit, I’d say: “No kidding, Mireille, you’ve got a nose like a man …” But she was good at telling yarns, like a sailor. She made up all sorts of things, at first to amuse me, later to make trouble for me. I like to hear a good story. That’s my weakness. She went too far, that’s all. I got violent in the end, but she certainly deserved the thrashings I gave her, and if I’d killed her, she’d have deserved that too. She finally admitted it. The fact is I was pretty generous … I socked her for good reason. Everybody said so … at least the ones who were in the know.

I’m not being unfair to Gustin Sabayot when I say that he didn’t knock himself out with his diagnoses. He got his ideas from the clouds.

The first thing he did when he stepped out of his house in the morning was to look up at the sky. “Ferdinand,” he’d say, “today it’s going to be rheumatism, one case after another. You want to bet?” He read that in the heavens. He was never very far off, because he had a thorough knowledge of the climate and the human temperament.

“Aha! a bit of hot weather after a cold spell. That calls for calomel, take my word for it. There’s jaundice in the air. The wind has changed … From north to west. From cold to rain … That means two weeks of bronchitis … There’s no point in their even getting up. If I were in charge, I’d make out my prescriptions in bed … After all, Ferdinand, when they come to see us, all they do is gab … For doctors who get paid by the call there’s some point in it … but for us? … on a monthly salary … what’s the use? … I could treat them without stepping out of the house. Damn pests. I don’t have to see them. They wouldn’t wheeze any more or less. They wouldn’t vomit any more, they wouldn’t be any yellower or redder, or paler, or less idiotic … That’s the way it is and nobody’s going to change it!” That’s how Gustin felt about it, and he was damn right.

“Do you think they’re sick? … They moan … they belch … they stagger … they fester … You want to clear them out of your waiting room? On the double? Even the ones who damn near suffocate every time they cough? … Offer them a free pass to the movies … or a free drink across the street … you’ll see how many you’ve got left … If they come around and bother you, it’s mostly because they’re bored. On the day before a holiday you never see a soul … Mark my words, the trouble with those poor bastards isn’t their health, what they need is something to do with themselves … they want you to entertain them, cheer them up, fascinate them with their belches … their farts … their aches and pains … they want you to find explanations … fevers … rumblings … new and intriguing ailments … They want you to get interested, to expatiate … that’s what you’ve got your diplomas for … Ah, getting a kick out of his death while he’s busy manufacturing it: that’s Man for you, Ferdinand! They cling to their clap, their syphilis, their T.B. They need them. And their oozing bladders, the fire in their rectums. They don’t give a damn. But if you knock yourself out, if you know how to keep them interested, they won’t die until you get there. That’s your reward. They’ll come around to the bitter end.” When the rain slanted down between the chimneys of the power plant, he’d say: “Ferdinand, this is sciatica day … If I don’t get ten cases today I’ll send my parchment back to the dean!” But when the soot came back at us from the east, which is the driest quarter, over the Bitrounelle chocolate factory, he’d crush a smudge against his nose and say: “I’ll be buggered if the lungers don’t start bringing up clots before the night is out. Damn it all, they’ll wake me up a dozen times …”

Sometimes in the late afternoon he’d make things easier for himself. He’d climb up the ladder to the enormous cabinet where the samples were kept. And he’d start distributing medicines directly, free of charge, and absolutely without formality. “Hey you, Stringbean, you got palpitations?” he’d say to some sloven. “No.” “Haven’t you got a sour stomach? … A discharge? … Sure you have. Just a little? Well then, take some of this, you know where, in two quarts of water … it’ll do you a world of good! … How about your joints? Don’t they ache? … No hemorrhoids? And how about your bowels? … Here are some Pepet suppositories. Worms too? You think so? Well, here are some wonder drops … Take them before you go to bed.”

He suggested something from every shelf … There was something for every disorder, every symptom, every obsession … Patients are amazingly greedy. As long as they’ve got some slop to put in their mouths, they’re satisfied, they’re glad to get out. They’re afraid you might call them back.

With his Santa Claus act I’ve seen Gustin reduce to ten minutes a consultation that would have taken hours if handled conscientiously. But I myself had nothing to learn in that line. I had my own system.

I wanted to talk to him about my Legend. We’d found the first part under Mireille’s bed. I was badly disappointed when I reread it. The passage of time hadn’t helped my romance any. After years of oblivion a child of fancy can look pretty tawdry … Well, with Gustin I could always count on a frank, sincere opinion. I tried to put him in the right frame of mind.

“Gustin,” I said. “You haven’t always been the mug you are today, bogged down by circumstances, work, and thirst, the most disastrous of servitudes … Do you think that, just for a moment, you can revive the poetry in you? … are your heart and cock still capable of leaping to the words of an epic, sad to be sure, but noble … resplendent? You feel up to it?”

Gustin stayed where he was, half dozing on his step-ladder, in front of his samples and the wide-open medicine cabinet. Not a word out of him, he didn’t want to interrupt me.

“It’s the story,” I informed him, “of Gwendor the Magnificent, Prince of Christiania … Here we are … He is breathing his last … as I stand here talking to you … his blood is pouring from a dozen wounds … Gwendor’s army has just suffered a terrible defeat … King Krogold himself caught sight of him in the thick of the fray … and clove him in twain … Krogold is no do-nothing king … He metes out his own justice … Gwendor had betrayed him … Death comes to Gwendor and is about to finish his job … Get a load of this:

“The tumult of battle dies down with the last glow of daylight … The last of King Krogold’s guards vanish in the distance. The death rattles of a vast army rise up in the shadows. Victors and vanquished give up their souls as best they can … The silence stifles their cries and moans, which become gradually weaker and less frequent …

“Crushed beneath a heap of his followers, Gwendor the Magnificent is still losing blood. At dawn Death stands before him.

” ‘Hast thou understood, Gwendor?’

” ‘I have understood, O Death. I have understood since the beginning of this day … I have felt in my heart, in my arm as well, in my friends” eyes, even in the step of my charger, a slow, sad spell akin to sleep … My star was failing in thine icy grip … Everything began to leave me! O Death! Great is my remorse! Endless my shame … Behold these poor corpses! … An eternity of silence will not soften my lot …’