In a little café, where an old woman sat playing the zither, we ordered some wine. It was a rather melancholy place, and we were soon bored stiff. As we were about to leave, the proprietor came over and handed us his card, saying that he hoped we would call again. While he was talking, Carl handed me the card and gave me a nudge. I read it. It said, in German, “Café-free-of-Jews.” Had it read “Café-free-of-limburger,” it could not have struck me as more absurd. We laughed in the man’s face. Then I asked him, in French, if he understood English. He said yes. Where-upon I said: “Let me tell you this—though I’m not a Jew, I look on you as an idiot. Haven’t you anything better to think of? You’re sound asleep . . . You’re wallowing in your own shit. Do you understand that?” He looked at us bewilderedly. Then Carl began, in a French that would have done credit to an Apache. “Listen, you fucked-out piece of cheese,” he began. The man started to raise his voice. “Pipe down,” said Carl threateningly, and he made a move as if to throttle the old fool. “I’ll say just two words to you: you’re an old cunt. You stink!” With that he was seized with one of his apoplectic fits of laughter. I think the man had the impression that we were mad. We backed out slowly, laughing hysterically and making grimaces at him. The idiot was so slow-witted, so perplexed, that all he could do was collapse on a chair and mop his brow.
Up the street a little distance we ran across a sleepy-looking policeman. Carl went up to him respectfully, doffed his hat, and, in an impeccable German told him that we had just left the Judenfreies Café where a brawl had started. He urged him to hurry because—here he lowered his voice—the proprietor had taken a fit, he was apt to kill someone. The officer thanked him in his officious, sluggish way and trundled off in the direction of the café. At the corner we found a cab; we asked to be driven to a big hotel which we had spotted earlier in the evening.
We remained in Luxembourg three days, eating and drinking to our heart’s content, listening to the excellent orchestras from Germany, observing the quiet, dull life of a people which has no reason to exist, and which in fact does not exist, except as cows or sheep exist. Snow White had introduced us to her friend, who was from Luxembourg and a cretin to the backbone. We talked about making cheese, needlework, country dances, coal mining, exporting and importing, about the royal family and the little ailments which seized them now and then, and so forth. One day we spent entirely in the Valley of the Monks, the Pfaffenthal. A thousand years’ peace seemed to reign over this somnolent vale. It was like a corridor which God had traced with his little finger, a reminder to men that when their insatiable thirst for blood had been appeased, when they had become weary of strife, here they would find peace and rest.
To be truthful, it was a beautiful, or derly, prosperous, easy-going sort of world, everyone full of good humor, charitable, kindly, tolerant. Yet, for some reason, there was a rotten odor about the place. The odor of stagnation. The goodness of the inhabitants, which was negative, had deteriorated their moral fiber.
All they were concerned about was to know on which side their bread was buttered. They couldn’t make bread, but they could butter it.
I felt thoroughly disgusted. Better to die like a louse in Paris than live here on the fat of the land, thought I to myself.
“Let’s go back and get a good dose of clap,” I said, rousing Carl from a state of near torpor.
“What? What are you talking about?” he mumbled thickly.
“Yes,” I said, “let’s get out of here, it stinks. Luxembourg is like Brooklyn, only more charming and more poisonous. Let’s go back to Clichy and go on a spree. I want to wipe the taste of this out of my mouth.”
It was about midnight when we arrived in Paris. We hurried to the newspaper office, where our good friend, King, ran the racing column. We borrowed more francs of him and rushed off.
I was in a mood to take the first whore that came along. “I’ll take her, clap and all,” thought I. “Shit, a dose of clap is something, after all. Those Luxembourg cunts are full of buttermilk.”
Carl wasn’t quite so keen about contracting another dose of clap. His cock already felt itchy, he confided. He was trying to think who could have given it to him, if it was the clap, as he suspected.
“If you’ve got it, there’s no great harm in getting it again,” I remarked cheerily. “Get a double dose and spread it abroad. Infect the whole continent! Better a good venereal disease than a moribund peace and quiet. Now I know what makes the world civilized: it’s vice, disease, thievery, mendacity, lechery. Shit, the French are a great people, even if they’re syphilitic. Don’t ever ask me to go to a neutral country again. Don’t let me look at any more cows, human or otherwise.”
I was that peppery I could have raped a nun.
It was in this mood that we entered the little dance hall where our friend, the hat check girl, hung out. It was only a little after midnight, and we had plenty for a little fling. There were three or four whores at the bar and one or two drunks, English, of course. Pansies, most likely. We had a few dances and then the whores began to pester us.
It’s amazing what one can do publicly in a French bar. To a putain anyone who speaks English, male or female, is a degenerate. A French girl doesn’t degrade herself in putting on a show for the foreigner, any more than a sea-lion becomes civilized by being trained to do tricks.
Adrienne, the hat check girl, had come to the bar for a drink. She sat on a high stool with her legs spread apart. I stood beside her with an arm around one of her little friends. Presently I had my hand up her dress. I played with her a little while and then she slid down off her perch and, putting her arms around my neck, stealthily opened my fly and closed her hand over my balls. The musicians were playing a slow waltz, the lights dimmed. Adrienne led me to the floor, my fly wide open, and, holding me tight, she shifted me to the middle of the floor where we were soon packed like sardines. We could hardly move from the spot, the jam was so thick. Again she reached into my fly, took my pecker out, and placed it against her cunt. It was excruciating. To make it more excruciating, one of her little friends who was wedged next to us, brazenly caught hold of my prick. At this point I could hold back no longer—I squirted it into her hand.
When we drifted back to the bar, Carl was standing in a corner, crouched over a girl who seemed to be sagging to the ground. The barman looked annoyed. “This is a drinking place, not a boudoir,” he said. Carl looked up in a daze, his face covered with lip rouge, his tie askew, his vest unbuttoned, his hair down over his eyes. “These aren’t whores,” he muttered, “they’re nymphomaniacs.”
He sat down on the stool with his shirt tail sticking out of his fly. The girl began buttoning his fly for him. Suddenly she changed her mind, ripped it open again and, pulling his pecker out, bent over and kissed it. This was going a little too far, apparently. The manager now sidled up to inform us that we would have to behave differently or beat it. He didn’t appear to be angry with the girls; he simply scolded them, as if they were naughty children.
We were for leaving then and there, but Adrienne insisted that we wait until closing time. She said she wanted to go home with us.
When we finally called a cab and piled in, we discovered that there were five of us. Carl was for shoving one of the girls out, but couldn’t make up his mind which one. On the way we stopped to buy some sandwiches, some cheese and olives, and a few bottles of wine.
“They’re going to be disappointed when they see how much money we have left,” said Carl.
“Good,” said I, “maybe they’ll all desert us then. I’m tired. I’d like to take a bath and tumble into bed.”
As soon as we arrived I undressed and turned on the bath water. The girls were in the kitchen spreading the table. I had just gotten into the tub, and begun soaping myself, when Adrienne and one of the other girls walked into the bathroom. They had decided that they would take a bath too. Adrienne quickly slipped out of her things and slid into the tub with me. The other girl also undressed, then came and stood
beside the tub. Adrienne and I were facing each other, our legs entwined. The other girl leaned over the tub and started playing with me. I lay back in the luxuriously hot water and allowed her to twirl her soapy fingers around my cock. Adrienne was playing with her cunt, as if to say—“All right, let her play with that thing a little while, but when the time comes I’ll snatch it out of her hand.”
Presently the three of us were in the tub, a sandwich in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. Carl had decided to shave. His girl sat on the edge of the bidet, chatting and munching her sandwich. She disappeared for a moment to return with a full bottle of red wine which she poured down our necks. The soapy water quickly took on the hue of permanganate.
By this time I was in a mood for anything. Feeling a desire to urinate, I calmly proceeded to pee. The girls were horrified. Apparently I had done something unethical. Suddenly they became suspicious of us. Were we going to pay them? If so, how much? When Carl blithely informed them that he had about nine francs to distribute, there was an uproar. Then they decided that we were only joking—another bad little joke, like peeing in the bathtub. But no, we insisted that we were in earnest. They swore they had never heard the likes of it; it was simply incredible, monstrous, inhuman.
“They’re a couple of dirty Huns,” said one of the girls.
“No, English. Degenerate English,” said the other.
Adrienne tried to mollify them. She said she had known us for a long time and that we had always acted like gentlemen with her, an announcement which sounded rather strange to my ears considering the nature of our relations with her. However, the word gentlemen connoted nothing more than that we had always paid cash for her little services.
She was trying desperately to retrieve the situation. I could almost hear her think.
“Couldn’t you give them a check?” she begged.
At this Carl burst out laughing. He was about to say we had no check book when I interrupted him, saying: “Sure, that’s an idea . . . we’ll give each of you a check, how’s that?” I went into Carl’s room without another word and got out an old check book of his. I brought him his beautiful Parker pen and handed it to him.
At this point Carl displayed his astuteness. Pretending to be angry with me for having uncovered his check book and for meddling in his affairs, he said:
“It’s always like this.” (In French, of course, for their benefit.) “I’m the one who always pays for these follies. Why don’t you hand out your own checks?”
To this I replied as shamefacedly as I could that my account was dry. Still he demurred, or pretended to.
“Why can’t they wait until tomorrow?” he asked, turning to Adrienne. “Won’t they trust us?”
“Why should we trust you?” said one of the girls. “A moment ago you pretended you had nothing. Now you want us to wait until tomorrow. Ah, no, that doesn’t go with us.”
“Well, then, you can all clear out,” said Carl, throwing the check book on the floor.
“Don’t be so mean,” cried Adrienne. “Give us each a hundred francs and we won’t speak about it any more. Please!”
“A hundred francs each?”
“Of course,” she said. “That’s not very much.”
“Go ahead,” I said, “don’t be such a piker. Besides, I’ll pay you back my half in a day or two.”
“That’s what you always say,” Carl replied.
“Cut the comedy,” I said, in English. “Write out the checks and let’s get rid of them.”
“Get rid of them? What, after giving them checks you want me to throw them out? No sir, I’m going to get full value for my money, even if the checks are no good. They don’t know that. If we let them off too easy they’ll smell a rat.
“Hey, you!” he shouted, waving a check at one of the girls. “What do I get for this? I want something unique, not just a lay.”
He proceeded to distribute the checks. It looked comical, handing checks around in the raw. Even had they been good, the checks, they looked phony. Possibly because we were all naked. The girls seemed to feel the same way, that it was a phony transaction. Except for Adrienne, who believed in us.
I was praying they’d put on an act rather than force us to go through with the “fucking” routine. I was all in. Dog tired. It would have to be a tall performance, on their part, to make me work up even the semblance of a hard-on. Carl, on the other hand, was behaving like a man who had genuinely doled out three hundred francs. He wanted something for his money, and he wanted something exotic.
While they were talking it over among themselves I climbed into bed: I was so far removed, mentally, from the situation, that I fell into a reverie about the story I had begun days ago and which I intended to resume writing on waking. It was about an axe murder. I wondered if I should attempt to compress the narrative and concentrate on the drunken murderer whom I had left sitting beside the headless body of the wife he had never loved. Perhaps I would take the newspaper account of the crime, telescope it, and begin my own rendition of the murder at the point, or moment, when the head rolled off the table. That would fit in nicely, I thought, with the bit about the armless, legless man who wheeled himself through the streets at night on a little platform, his head on a level with the knees of the passers-by. I wanted a bit of horror because I had a wonderful burlesque up my sleeve which I intended to use as a wind up.
In the brief interval of reverie allotted me I had regained the mood which had been broken days ago by the advent of our somnambulistic Pocahontas.
A nudge from Adrienne, who had made a place for herself beside me, roused me. She was whispering something in my ear. Something about money again. I asked her to repeat it, and, in order not to lose the thought which had just come to me, I kept repeating to myself—“Head rolls off table—head rolls off . . . little man on wheels . . . wheels . . . legs . . . millions of legs. . .”
“They would like to know if you wouldn’t please try to dig up some change for a taxi. They live far away.”
“Far away?” I repeated, looking at her vacantly. “How far away?” (Remember—wheels, legs, head rolls off . . . begin in the middle of a sentence.)
“Ménilmontant,” said Adrienne.
“Get me a pencil and paper—there, on the desk,” I begged.
“Ménilmontant . . . Ménilmontant. ..” I repeated hypnotically, scrawling a few key words, such as rubber wheels, wooden heads, corkscrew legs, and so on.
“What are you doing?” hissed Adrienne, tugging at me violently. “What’s the matter with you?
“Il est fou” she exclaimed, rising from the bed and throwing up her hands in despair.
“Où est l’autre?” she demanded, looking for Carl.
“Mon Dieu!” I heard her say, as though from afar, “Il dort.” Then, after a heavy pause: “Well, that beats everything. Come, let’s get out of here! One is drunk and the other is inspired. We’re wasting time. That’s how foreigners are—always thinking of other things. They don’t want to make love, they want to be titillated . . .”
Titillated. I wrote that down, too. I don’t remember what she had said in French, but whatever it was, it had resuscitated a forgotten friend. Titillated. It was a word I hadn’t used for ages. Immediately I thought of another word I only rarely used: misling. I was no longer sure what it meant. What matter? I’d drag it in anyway. There were lots of words which had fallen out of my vocabulary, living abroad so long.
I lay back and observed them making ready to leave. It was like watching a stage performance from a box seat. Being a paralytic, I was enjoying the spectacle from my wheelchair. If one of them should take it into her head to throw a pitcher of water over me, I wouldn’t stir from the spot. I’d merely shake myself and smile—the way one smiles at frolicsome angels. (Were there such?) All I wanted was for them to go and leave me to my reverie. Had I had any coins on me I would have flung them at them.
After an aeon or so they made for the door. Adrienne was wafting a long distance kiss,
a gesture so unreal that I became fascinated by the poise of her arm; I saw it receding down a long corridor where it was finally sucked through the narrow mouth of a funnel, the arm still bent at the wrist, but so diminished, so attenuated, that it finally resembled a wisp of straw.
“Salaud!” shouted one of the girls, and as the door banged shut I caught myself answering: “Oui, c’est juste. Un salaud. Et vous, des salopes. Il n’y a que ça. N’y a que ça. Salaud, salope. La saloperie, quoi. C’est assoupissant.”
I snapped out of it with a “Shit, what the hell am I talking about?”
Wheels, legs, head rolling off . . . Fine. Tomorrow will be like any other day, only better, juicier, rosier. The man on the platform will roll himself off the end of a pier. At Canarsie. He will come up with a herring in his mouth. A Maatjes herring, no less.
Hungry again. I got up and looked for the remnants of a sandwich. There wasn’t a crumb on the table. I went to the bathroom absent-mindedly, thinking to take a leak. There were a couple of slices of bread, a few pieces of cheese, and some bruised olives scattered about. Thrown away in disgust, evidently.
I picked up a piece of bread to see if it were eatable. Someone had stamped on it with an angry foot. There was a little mustard on it. Or was it mustard? Better try another piece. I salvaged a fairly clean piece, a trifle soggy from lying on the wet floor, and slapped a piece of cheese on it. In a glass beside the bidet I found a drop of wine. I downed it, then gingerly bit into the bread. Not bad at all. On the contrary, it tasted good. Germs don’t molest hungry people, or inspired people. All rot, this worrying about cellophane and whose hand touched it last. To prove it, I wiped my ass with it. Swiftly, to be sure. Then I gulped it down. There! What’s to be sorry about? I looked for a cigarette. There were only butts left. I selected the longest one and lit it. Delicious aroma. Not that toasted sawdust from America! Real tobacco. One of Carl’s Gauloises Bleues, no doubt.