Death on the Installment Plan (5 page)

“After the battle King Krogold, his knights, his pages, his brother the archbishop, the clerics of his camp, the whole court, went to the great tent in the middle of the bivouac and dropped with weariness. The heavy gold crescent, a gift from the caliph, was nowhere to be found … Ordinarily it surmounted the royal dais. The captain entrusted with its safekeeping was beaten to a pulp. The king lies down, tries to sleep … He is still suffering from his wounds. He wakes. Sleep refuses to come … He reviles the snorers. He rises. He steps over sleepers, crushing a hand here and there, leaves the tent … Outside he is transfixed with the cold. He limps, but still he makes his way. A long file of wagons rings the camp. The sentries have fallen asleep. Krogold moves along the deep trenches that defend the camp … He talks to himself, he stumbles, recovers his balance just in time. Something is glistening at the bottom of the ditch, an enormous blade. It trembles … A man is there, holding the glittering object in his arms. Krogold leaps, overturns him, pins him down, it’s a common soldier, and slits his throat like a pig with his short sword. ‘Glug, glug!’ the thief gurgles through the hole. He drops everything. It’s all over. The king bends down, picks up the caliph’s crescent. He climbs out of the ditch. He falls asleep in the mist … The thief has had his just deserts.”

About that time the crash came and I almost got fired from the clinic. Gossip again.

I heard about it from Lucie Keriben, who had a dress shop on Maidenform Boulevard. Lots of people came to her shop and they gossiped a good deal. She let me in on some pretty rotten rumors. So vicious in fact that it couldn’t have been anybody but Mireille … I wasn’t mistaken. Pure calumny of course. She was spreading it around that I had been organizing orgies with some of my female patients in the neighborhood. Really lousy stuff … Secretly Lucie Keriben was kind of glad to see me having a little trouble … She was jealous.

So I wait for Mireille to come home, I hide in the Impasse Viviane, where I knew she’d have to come by. I wasn’t making enough money yet to go off and write full time … I was still good for another hitch of bad luck. I was in a foul humor. I see her coming … she passes in front of me. I give her a kick in the seat that sends her sailing off the sidewalk. She gets my meaning, but she won’t talk. She wanted to see her aunt first. The little bitch wouldn’t come clean. I couldn’t get a word out of her.

She’d spread all that gossip to get me worried … then I’d hurry up and give them what they were after. Violence was no use. Especially with Mireille, it only made her more spiteful than ever. She wanted to get married. To me or somebody else. She was fed up with factories. At sixteen she’d already worked in seven of them in the western suburbs.

“No more job,” she’d announce. At the Goody Gum-drops English candy factory she’d caught the director getting sucked off by an apprentice. What a place! For six months she tossed dead rats into the big sugar vat. At Saint-Ouen she’d been snagged by a forelady, who’d taken to swotting her in the washroom. They had walked off the job together.

Mireille knew all about capitalism before she even began to menstruate. At the free camp in Marty-sur-Oise there had been fingerplay, fresh air, and rousing speeches. She had developed nicely. On Federates’ Day,
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she was an honor to the settlement house, it was she who brandished Lenin on a pole from La Courtine to Père-Lachaise. The way she came swaggering down the street … the cops were flabbergasted. And with those luscious legs she had the whole boulevard horning out the
International.

The little pimps at the dance hall where she hung out didn’t realize what a number they had on their hands. She was still a minor and scared of the vice squad. For a while she tagged along with Robert, Gégène, and Gaston. But they were building up to a mess of trouble … She would be their downfall.

I could expect just about anything from Vitruve and her niece, especially Vitruve; she knew too much about me not to make use of it some day.

I appeased them with money, but the kid wanted more, she wanted the whole works. When I tried to get around her with affection, it looked mighty suspicious to her. I’ll take her out to the Bois, I said to myself. She’s got a grudge against me. I’ve got to do something to catch her interest. I had my plans for the Bois, I’d tell her a nice story, I’d flatter her vanity.

“Ask your aunt,” I say. “You’ll be home before midnight … Wait for me at the Café Byzance.”

So there we go.

After the Porte Dauphine she was already in a better humor. She liked the swanky neighborhoods. At the Hôtel Méridien it was the bedbugs that got her down. When she picked up a little boyfriend and had to take her slip off, the marks made her feel ashamed. They all knew it was bedbug bites … They were all familiar with the liquids and the stuff you burn … Mireille’s dream was a room without bugs … If she had cleared out then, her aunt would have had her brought back. She relied on her for the dough she brought in, but there was also a little pimp, Bébert from Val-du-Grâce, who had the same ideas. He ended up on snow. He’d been reading the
Journey
…

As we were approaching the Cascade, I began to get confidential …

“I know you’ve got a boyfriend in the post office who gets a kick out of letting you whip him …”

She was too happy to put on airs or beat about the bush. She told me all about it. But when we got to the Pré Catalan, she was afraid to go on, the’ darkness frightened her. She thought I was taking her into the woods to beat her up. She felt in my pockets to see if I had a rod. I didn’t have a thing. She felt my pecker. On account of the passing cars, I suggested we go over to the island where we could talk more at our ease. She was a slut, she had a hard time coming and danger appealed to her. The youngsters rowing on the lake lost control, got tangled in the branches, cursed, tipped, and ruined their little lanterns.

“Listen to the ducks gagging in the diluted urine!”

“Mireille,” I say, once we were settled. “I know you’re a champion liar … one thing you don’t trouble your head about is the truth …”

“Go on,” she says. “If I were to repeat a tenth of what I heard …”

“Okay,” I say, “you can turn that off … I’m full of indulgence for you … I’d even call it weakness. Not on account of your body … or your face or your nose … What attracts me is your imagination … I’m a voyeur. You tell me dirty stories … And I’ll tell you a beautiful legend … Is it a bargain? … fifty-fifty … you’ll be getting the best of it …”

That appealed to her. She liked talking business … I filled her in … I guaranteed there’d be plenty of princesses, yards and yards of genuine velvet, brocade to the very linings, furs and jewels … beyond imagining … we were in perfect agreement about the setting and even the costumes. And then at last our story started in:

“We are in Bredonnes in Vendée … The city is making ready for a tournament …

“Here come the courtiers in fine array … naked wrestlers … mountebanks … their coach rides by … plowing through the crowd … Pancakes frying … three knights in damascened armor … they have come from far away… . from the South … from the North … their bold challenges ring out …

“Here comes Thibaud the Wicked, a troubadour … at daybreak he reaches the city gate along the towpath. He is weary and footsore … He has come to Bredonnes in quest of haven and shelter … and to seek out Joad the Dissembler, the sheriff’s son, to remind him of a sinister affair, the murder of an archer in Paris, near the Pont aux Changes, in their student days …

“Thibaud enters the city … At Sainte-Geneviève ferry he flatly refuses to pay the fee … he comes to blows with the ferryman … The archers appear … they overpower him and drag him away … Here he is, bound hand and foot, foaming at the mouth, in tatters, dragged before the sheriff. He struggles furiously, and flings the ugly story in his face …”

The tone appealed to Mireille, she wanted more. We hadn’t got along so well in a long time. Finally it was time to go home.

There were only a few couples left on the paths. Mireille was all cheered up. She wanted to catch them in the act. We abandoned my beautiful Legend for a furious discussion about whether what women really wanted was to shack up with each other … Mireille, for instance, wouldn’t she like to lay her girl friends a little? … goose them maybe? … especially the dainty little ones, the gazelles … what with those athletic haunches of hers … that sumptuous ass …

“What about dildoes?” she remarked. “Sure, that’s why we watch. Why we look so hard when girls are having fun. To see if they won’t grow one … So they can tear each other to pieces, the bitches. So they can rip each other’s guts out. And bleed all over the place. So all their rottenness can come pouring out of them! …”

My sweet little Mireille was well informed. She followed my little show perfectly … I thought Fd better warn her: “If you repeat one word of this in Rancy, I’ll make you eat your shoes!” And I grabbed hold of her under the gas lamp. I could already see the triumphant look on her face. I could feel it in my bones that she was going to tell the whole world that I had behaved like a beast … in the Bois de Boulogne! I began to see red … To think that she’d taken me for a ride again. I give her a good smack. She grins. Defiantly.

From the thickets and copses, from all sides, people run out to watch us, by twos and fours, in droves. All brandishing their cocks. The ladies have their skirts hiked up front and back. The brazen, the loose, and the cautious …

“Attaboy, Ferdinand!” the whole lot of them shout. What a noise! It rose up out of the woods. “Give her the works. Clout her! Sock her!” Naturally all that encouragement made me rough.

Mireille begins to shriek and run. I run after her. I knock myself out. I give her some wicked kicks in the rear end. They land with a dull thud. Hundreds of Ranelagh sex-fiends come running up, they collect by the prickloads in front of us, they pull up from behind …

The grass is full of them, thousands are pouring down the drive. More and more of them come stepping out of the darkness … The women’s dresses are in tatters, tits torn and dangling … little boys without pants … they knock each other down, trample each other, toss each other up in the air … some are left dangling from the trees … along with smashed-up chairs … An old bag, English, comes along in a little car and sticks her head out the window so far it almost falls off … she was beginning to get in my way. Never had I seen eyes so full of happiness. “Hurray! Hurray!” she shouts without even stopping her car. “Great stuff! You’ll crack her ass open. You’ll send her sky-high. You’ll knock the eternity out of her. Hurray for Christian Science!”

I ran still faster. I ran faster than her car. I gave it everything I had, I was dripping with sweat. As I charged, I thought of my job … I’d be sure to lose it. That gave me the chills: “Mireille! Have pity! I adore you! Will you wait for me, you damn slut! Will you listen to me?”

When we got to the Arc de Triomphe, the whole crowd began to whirl like a merry-go-round. The whole mob was chasing Mireille. The square was littered with corpses. The living were tearing off each other’s pricks. The Englishwoman was toting her car over her head at arm’s length. Hurray, hurray! She knocks over a bus with it. The traffic is blocked by three files of Mobile Guards with shouldered rifles. All for our benefit. Mireille’s dress flies away. The Englishwoman flings herself on the kid, claws at her breasts … trickling, pouring, red all over. We fall, we writhe all together, we strangle each other. Pure bedlam.

The flame under the Arc de Triomphe rises, rises higher, breaks, scatters through the sky … The whole place smells of smoked ham … Then Mireille whispering in my ear, speaking to me at last: “Ferdinand, my darling, I love you! … I admit it, you have wonderful ideas!” The flames rain down on us, everyone picks up a big chunk … We stuff them sizzling and whirling into our flies. The ladies put on bouquets of fire … We fall asleep inside each other.

Twenty-five thousand policemen clear the Place de la Concorde. It was too much for us inside each other. It was too hot. There was smoke coming out. It was hell.

My mother and Vitruve in the next room were worried, they kept coming and going, waiting for my fever to go down. An ambulance had brought me home. I had collapsed on top of a sewer grating on the Avenue Mac-Mahon. The bicycle cops had found me.

Fever or not, I always have such a buzzing in both ears that it can’t get much worse. I’ve had it since the war. Madness has been hot on my trail … no exaggeration … for twenty-two years. That’s quite a package. She’s tried a million different noises, a tremendous hullabaloo, but I raved faster than she could, I screwed her, I beat her to the tape. That’s how I do it. I shoot the shit, I charm her, I force her to forget me. My great rival is music, it sticks in the bottom of my ear and rots … it never stops scolding … it dazes me with blasts of the trombone, it keeps on day and night. I’ve got every noise in nature, from the flute to Niagara Falls … Wherever I go, I’ve got drums with me and an avalanche of trombones … for weeks on end I play the triangle … On the bugle I can’t be beat. I still have my own private birdhouse complete with three thousand five hundred and twenty-seven birds that will never calm down … I am the organs of the Universe … I provide everything, the ham, the spirit, and the breath … Often I seem to be worn out. My thoughts stagger and sprawl … I’m not very good to them. I’m working up the opera of the deluge. As the curtain falls, the midnight train pulls into the station … The glass dome shatters and collapses … The steam escapes through two dozen valves … The couplings bounce sky-high … In wide-open carriages three hundred musicians soused to the gills rend the air, playing forty-five bars at once …