Death on the Installment Plan (21 page)

His aunt whopped the hell out of him too, especially when he peed in bed, terrible lickings, he described them in detail. Mine were nothing in comparison … He wanted me to go to the Palais-Royal with him, he wanted to show me the whores, he spoke to them, so he claimed. He had some sparrows too that would even fly down on his bread. But I couldn’t go. I had to go straight home. My father had sworn he’d have me locked up in La Roquette if he caught me bumming around.

On the subject of women, my father was a holy terror … if he suspected me of wanting to see what it was like, he flew into a ferocious temper. It was enough that I jerked off. He brought it up every day on the slightest pretext. He was suspicious of little André … He had the instincts of the common people … He was a hoodlum’s kid … With me it was entirely different, I had respectable parents and I shouldn’t ever forget it, I was reminded every night when I got home from Berlope’s, so tired I couldn’t see straight. I’d get an old-time thrashing if I dared to talk back! … I’d better not keep bad company! I already had too many foul habits that I’d picked up God knows where … If I listened to little André, I’d be sure to end up a murderer. My father could swear to it. Actually he regarded my loathsome vices as a part of his misfortunes, of the terrible troubles that fate had heaped on him …

I did have terrible vices, it was undeniable, it was awful. That’s the truth. He didn’t know how to go about saving me … And I didn’t know how to go about making amends … Some children are simply untouchable.

Little André smelled bad, his smell was more acrid than mine, the smell of really poor people. He smelled up the whole stockroom. His aunt cropped his hair short with her own scissors, he looked like a lawn with a single tuft left in front.

With all the dust he breathed in, the snot in his nose turned to putty … it was stuck tight … His favorite pastime was prying out a chunk and quietly eating it. Since we blew our noses with our fingers in the middle of all the blacking and boogers and numbers, we ended up looking like niggers.

Little André handled about three hundred boxes a day … His eyes were always dilated from trying to see in that attic. He kept his pants on with strings and safety pins.

Now that I was doing the dumbwaiter work, he stopped coming in through the salesrooms. That was better for him, it spared him a lot of rough treatment. He came in through the court, slipped past the caretaker’s lodge, and went up the outside stairs … If there were too many numbers, I’d stay late and help him. After hours I was able to take my shoes off.

When we wanted to shoot the shit, we had it pretty nice. On account of his nose we slipped into a little nook between two beams, sheltered from the drafts.

André was lucky with his feet, he had stopped growing. Two of his brothers were still living with another aunt in Les Lilas. His sisters were with his old man in Auber-villiers … His father read all the gas meters in the region … He hardly ever saw him, he didn’t have time.

Sometimes we showed each other our pricks. Besides, I told him what was going on downstairs in the salesrooms, the guys who were going to be fired, because some were always getting the ax … That was how those punks spent their time … getting each other fired by spreading stories … vicious lies … We’d also talk about the different methods of getting a look at a customer’s ass when she sat down for a minute.

Some of those errand girls were pretty wicked … Sometimes they’d put their feet up on a stool just to give you a view of their ass. Then they’d toddle away with a big grin … One of them showed me her garters as I was passing … And made sucking noises at me … I went upstairs to tell little André about it … We speculated … What would her crack be like? Was it very runny and what color? yellow? red? did it burn? And her legs … the top part? We made sounds too with our tongues and saliva, we imitated the kissing routine … Even so we knocked off twenty-five to thirty pieces an hour. Little André taught me the trick with the pin, which is the main thing to know when you’re smoothing out the ends of the pieces … on the selvedge … the little rim of the satin. One on each side … that’s where you stick them … You’ve got to be careful not to mess up the smooth side … You’ve got to wash your hands first. It’s a real art.

At home they realized I wasn’t going to last long at Berlope’s, that I hadn’t started out right … Lavelongue would run into Mama around the neighborhood when she was out shopping. He’d always make some nasty remark. “Ah, madame, that little boy of yours, he’s not a bad sort, but what a scatterbrain! … Ah, how right you were! … His head just isn’t screwed on right! … I really don’t know what we’ll be able to do with him! … Everything he touches, he knocks it over! … Ah la la! …”

It was all a pack of lies … lousy injustice … I knew it perfectly well. I wasn’t so innocent anymore! He told all those stinking lies so I’d go on working for nothing! … He took advantage of my parents … Let them go on feeding me! … He ran me down so he wouldn’t have to pay me … There was nothing I could do about it … If I’d complained, they wouldn’t have believed me … they’d only have yelled louder …

Even a poor little punk like André was making thirty-five francs a month. They couldn’t exploit him any worse. My father tortured his imagination about my future … where could they send me? He was at his wits’ end … I was no good for office work … Probably even worse than he was … I had no education at all … If I failed in business, it was the end … Right away he was at half-mast … He clamored for help … And yet I tried … I worked up enthusiasm … I got to work hours ahead of time … I was the last to leave … And even so they disapproved of me … I was always fouling things up … I was in a panic … Everything I did was wrong …

If you haven’t been through that you’ll never know what obsessive hatred really smells like … the hatred that goes through your guts, all the way to your heart …

Nowadays I’m always meeting characters who complain, who bristle with indignation … They’re just poor bastards that aren’t getting anywhere … jerks … dinner-table failures … that kind of rebellion is for weak sisters … they didn’t pay for it, they got it for nothing … They’re drips.

Where did they get it from? … no place … the
lycée
maybe … It’s a lot of talk, hot air. Real hatred comes from deep down, from a defenseless childhood crushed with work. That’s the hatred that kills you. There’ll be more of it, so deep and thick there will always be some left, enough to go around … It will ooze out over the earth … and poison it, so nothing will grow but viciousness, among the dead, among men.

Every night when I came home, my mother asked me if I hadn’t been given notice … She was always expecting the worst. At supper we talked about it some more. The subject was inexhaustible. Would I ever earn my living? …

With all that kind of talk I couldn’t stand looking at the bread on the table. I was afraid to ask for any. I hurried through the meal. That drove my mother crazy, though she was a quick eater too.

“Ferdinand! You’re doing it again. You don’t even see what you’re eating. You gulp it all down without chewing. You bolt your food like a dog. And the way you look! You’re transparent! You’re green! … How do you expect to get any good out of your food! We do all we can for you! But you just waste your food.”

Little André had a certain amount of peace in the stockroom. Lavelongue hardly ever went up. As long as he painted his numbers, nobody bothered him much.

André loved flowers, invalids often do. He brought them in from the country and stuck them in bottles … He decorated all the rafters with them … One morning he even brought in an enormous bunch of hawthorn … The others saw him coming in … They couldn’t stand it … They talked about it so much in front of Lavelongue that he went up in person to have a look … He bawled hell out of André and threw the whole bundle out in the court …

Downstairs in the big showrooms they were all bastards, especially the shipping clerks; I’ve never known such stinkers, such a slimy lot of fishwives … They had nothing to think about but making packages.

One of these characters was Magadur, a big tall guy in the Paris shipping department … he was the worst bastard imaginable. He went to work on André and turned him against me … They often came in together from the Porte des Lilas … He told him all kinds of crap to poison him against me … It was easy, André was very impressionable. All alone in his corner, for hours on end in the stockroom, he was always mulling things over. All you had to do was hand him a line and get him worried … Once he was started, nothing could stop him … Any cock-and-bull story would do it … I come in and find him all in a dither.

“Is it true, Ferdinand?” he asks me. “Is it true? That you want to take my job?”

His attack took me by surprise … I was flabbergasted … I couldn’t understand … He went on …

“Aw, go on! Save your breath. Everybody in the store knows all about it. I was the only one that didn’t suspect … I’m a sap, that’s all!”

He was always pretty pale, now he turned yellow; he he always looked horrible with his snot and the gaps in his teeth … when he got excited you couldn’t stand to look at him … his face all covered with impetigo, the stubble on his head, the way he smelled … I couldn’t bring myself to say anything … I was too much ashamed for him …

I’d a thousand times rather have been fired on the spot than have him suspect me of wanting to take his job … But then where would I go? That was a big decision to make … Much too big for me … All I could do was hang on, do my damnedest, try to clear myself … I tried to put him straight. But that bastard Magadur had really rubbed it in.

After that he didn’t trust me at all. He never showed me his prick anymore. He was afraid I’d go and tell on him. He went to the crapper by himself to smoke in peace. He never even mentioned the Palais-Royal anymore …

Between two trips to the eighth floor, hauling all the bundles, I collapsed under the mansard roof. I took off my shoes and my coat and waited for it to pass …

André pretended not to see me, he had a copy of
Illustrated Adventure Stories
. He read it all by himself. He spread it out on the floor … If I spoke to him even at the top of my lungs, he pretended not to hear me. He brushed in his numbers. Everything I could say or do made him suspicious. In his opinion I was a traitor. If he were ever to lose his job, he had often told me, his aunt would give him such a licking he’d end up in the hospital … That was the story. I’d known it all along … But even so I couldn’t stand having him take me for a rat.

“Say, André,” I said to him at my wits’ end. “You ought to know I don’t want to get you fired …”

He still didn’t answer, he went on mumbling over his pictures … He read to himself out loud … I took a look to see what it said … It was the story of King Krogold … I knew the story well … I’d always known it … since Grandma Caroline … She’d taught me to read with it … All he had was one old number …

“Say, André,” I said. “I know the whole story by heart. I know how it goes on …” He still didn’t answer. But I was getting somewhere … I’d caught his interest… He didn’t have the next number …

“Here’s how it goes,” I said, grasping at the opportunity. “All the people of Christiania … the whole city … have taken refuge in the church … in the cathedral, under the vaulting, it’s four times as big as Notre-Dame … They all go down on their knees … in there … Are you listening? … They’re afraid of King Krogold … They pray to heaven for forgiveness for having meddled in the war … for having protected Prince Gwendor … the traitor … They don’t know where to go … There are a hundred thousand of them in the church … Nobody dares to leave … They’re so scared they don’t even know their prayers … They mumble a lot of gibberish … Old people, merchants, young people, mothers, priests, cowards, little children, beautiful dames, the archbishops, the constables, they’re all shitting in their pants … They all lie flat in a heap … A terrible jumble … All grunting and moaning … The situation is so desperate they’re even afraid to breathe … They entreat … they implore … that King Krogold won’t burn the whole place … but only the suburbs a little … that he won’t burn everything to punish them … they’re attached to their market, the granaries, the weighing house, the presbytery, the courthouse, the cathedral … St. Christiania … the most magnificent in the whole world! Nobody knows where to put himself … they’re so cowed … how to disappear …

“And then from down below, from beyond the walls, an enormous din is heard … It’s King Krogold’s advance guard … the clatter of heavy armor on the drawbridge … Ah, yes, they’re coming all right! And the horsemen of his escort … King Krogold is at the gates … he rises up in his stirrups … The jangling of a thousand suits of armor is heard … The knights crossing the suburb of St. Stanislas … The enormous city seems deserted … There’s nobody in the king’s path … Here comes the train of servants … The gate isn’t wide enough … The wagons will never get through … They rip down the high walls on both sides … Everything comes tumbling down … Wagons, legions, barbarians, rush through, catapults, elephants with upraised trunks pour in through the breach … In the city everything is silent, frozen … Belfries … convents … houses … market stalls … Nothing stirs …

“King Krogold has stopped on the first steps of the parvis … Around him his twenty-three mastiffs mount the steps, yelping and leaping … His pack is famous for their prowess in hunting the bear and the aurochs … they’ve torn whole forests to pieces … from the Elbe to the Carpathians … In spite of the tumult Krogold hears the sound of hymns … sung by that dense, hidden, harried crowd beneath the vaulting … their prayer … The vast doors swing on their hinges … And Krogold sees them all seething and writhing before him … In the depths of the shadow … Can the whole people be in hiding? … He fears treachery … He doesn’t go in … The organs rumble … Their thunder pours out through the triple porch … Defiance! … This city is disloyal! … And always will be! … He orders the provost to clear the church at once … Three thousand henchmen storm in, bruising and battering … chopping and mauling … The crowd gives way, regroups around them … squashes against the doors … gathers in the aisles … The ruffians are sucked in … They charge and charge again … they aren’t getting anywhere … Still in his saddle, the king waits … His charger, a huge, shaggy beast, paws the ground … The king is devouring a great big hunk of meat, a leg of mutton; he bites into it, he buries his fangs in it … He tears it to pieces, he’s awful mad … What’s this? No headway? … The king hoists himself up in his stirrups again … He’s the biggest bruiser of them all … He whistles … He calls … He gathers his mastiffs around him … He brandishes his big hunk of meat over his crown … He chucks it way out … into the darkness … It falls in the middle of the church … in the middle of the cowering mass … The whole pack bounds forward, howling … they spring up everywhere … leaping at throats … tearing … crunching … The panic is terrible … The yapping grows louder … The whole terrified flood pours out the doors … pushing … scrambling … a torrent, an avalanche … all the way to the drawbridges … They’re dashed against the walls … Between the lances and the wagons … The king’s path is open … The whole cathedral is his … He spurs his horse … He enters … He orders all to be silent … the dogs . . the people … the organ … the army … He rides another two lengths … He’s passed the three porches … Slowly he unsheathes … his enormous sword … He makes a big sign of the cross with it … And then he hurls it away … far, far … It lands in the middle of the altar! … The war is over … His brother the bishop approaches … He falls on his knees … He sings his Credo …”