The sky in Rancy is the same as in Detroit, a smoky soup that bathes the plain all the way to Levallois. Cast-off buildings bogged down in black muck. From a distance the chimneys, big ones and little ones, look like the fat stakes that rise out of the muck by the seaside. And inside it’s us.
You need the courage of a crab at Rancy, especially when you’re not as young as you used to be and you know you’ll never get away. There at the end of the streetcar line a grimy bridge spans the Seine, that enormous sewer which displays everything that’s in it. Along the banks, on Sunday and at night, men climb up on the piles of garbage to take a leak. Flowing water makes men meditative. They urinate with a sense of eternity like sailors. Women never meditate. Seine or no Seine. In the morning the streetcar carries away its crowds to get themselves compressed in the Metro. Seeing them all fleeing in that direction you’d think there must have been some catastrophe at Argenteuil, that the town was on fire. Every day in the gray of dawn it comes over them, whole clusters cling to the doors and handrails. One enormous rout! Yet all they’re going to Paris for is a boss, the man who saves you from starvation. The cowards, they’re scared to death of losing him, though he makes them sweat for their pittance. For ten years you stink of it, for twenty years and more. It’s no bargain.
Plenty of bitching and beefing in the streetcar, just to get into practice. The women gripe even worse than the kids. If they caught somebody without a ticket, they’d stop the whole line. It’s true that some of those women are already stinko, especially the ones headed for the market at Saint-Ouen, the semibour-geoises. “How much are the carrots?” they ask long before they get there, to show they’ve got money to spend.
Compressed like garbage in this tin box, they cross Rancy, stinking good and proper especially in the summer. Passing the fortifications, they threaten one another, they let out one last shout, and then they scatter, the Métro swallows them up, limp suits, discouraged dresses, silk stockings, sour stomachs, dirty feet, dirty socks. Wear-ever collars as stiff as boundary posts, pending abortions, war heroes, all scramble down the coal-tar and carbolic-acid stairs into the black pit, holding their return ticket which all by itself costs as much as two breakfast rolls.
The nagging dread of being fired without ceremony, something (accompanied by a tight-lipped reference) that can happen to a tardy worker any time the boss decides to cut down on expenses. Never-dormant recollections of the “Slump,” of the last time they were unemployed, of all the newspapers they had to buy for the want ads, five sous a piece … the waiting in line at employment offices … Such memories can strangle a man, however well protected he may seem in his “all-weather” coat.
The city does a good job of hiding its crowds of dirty feet in those long electric sewers. They won’t rise to the surface again until Sunday. You’d better stay indoors when they emerge. Just one Sunday watching their attempts to amuse themselves will permanently spoil your taste for pleasure. Around the Métro entrance, near the bastions, you catch the endemic, stagnant smell of long drawn-out wars, of spoiled, half-burned villages, aborted revolutions, and bankrupt businesses. For years the ragpickers of the “Fortified Zone” have been burning the same damp little piles of rubbish in ditches sheltered from the wind. Half-assed barbarians, undone by red wine and fatigue. They take their ruined lungs to the local dispensary instead of pushing the streetcars off the embankment and emptying their bladders in the tollhouse. No blood left in their veins. When the next war comes, they’ll get rich again selling rat skins, cocaine, and corrugated-iron masks. For my practice I had found a small apartment at the edge of the “Zone,” from which I had a good view of the embankment and the workman who’s always standing up top, looking at nothing, with his arm in a big white bandage, the victim of a work accident, who doesn’t know what to do or what to think and hasn’t enough money to buy himself a drink and fill his mind.
Molly had been right, I was beginning to understand her. Study changes a man, puts pride into him. You need it to get to the bottom of life. Without it you just skim the surface. You think you’re in the know, but trifles throw you off. You dream too much. You content yourself with words instead of going deeper. That’s not what you wanted. Intentions, appearances, no more. A man of character can’t content himself with that. Medicine, even if I wasn’t very gifted, had brought me a good deal closer to people, to animals, everything. Now all I had to do was plunge straight into the heart of things. Death is chasing you, you’ve got to hurry, and while you’re looking you’ve got to eat, and keep away from wars. That’s a lot of things to do. It’s no picnic.
In the meantime I wasn’t getting many patients. It takes time to get started, people said to comfort me. At the moment the patient was mostly me.
Nothing, it seemed to me, can be gloomier than La Garenne-Rancy when you’ve got no patients. No doubt about it. You shouldn’t think in a place like that, and I’d come, from the other end of the earth what’s more, precisely to think at my ease. Wasn’t I in luck! Stuck-up simpleton! Black and heavy it came over me … No joke, and it stayed with me. There’s no tyrant like a brain.
Below me lived Bézin, the little junk dealer. Whenever I stopped outside his door he said to me: “You got to choose, doctor! Play the races or drink, it’s one or the other! … You can’t have everything! … I prefer my apéritif! I don’t care for gambling …” His favorite apéritif was gentiane-cassis. Not a bad natured man ordinarily, but unpleasant after a few drinks … When he went to the Flea Market to stock up, he’d stay away for three days, his “expedition” he called it. They’d bring him back. And then he’d prophesy:
“I can see what the future will be like … An endless sex orgy … With movies in between … You can see how it is already …”
On those occasions he could see even further: “I also see that people will stop drinking … I’ll be the last drinker in the future … I’ve got to hurry … I know my weakness …” Everybody coughed in my street. It keeps you busy. To see the sun you have to climb up to Sacré-Coeur at least, because of the smoke.
From up there you get a beautiful view; then you realize that way down at the bottom of the plain it’s us and the houses we live in. But if you try to pick out any particular place, everything you see is so ugly, so uniformly ugly, that you can’t find it. Still further down it’s always the Seine, winding from bridge to bridge like an elongated blob of phlegm.
When you live in Rancy you don’t even realize how sad you’ve become. You simply stop feeling like doing anything much. What with scrimping and going without this and that, you stop wanting anything.
For months I borrowed money right and left. The people were so poor and so suspicious in my neighborhood that they couldn’t make up their minds to send for me before dark, though I was the cheapest doctor imaginable. I spent nights and nights crossing little moonless courtyards in quest of ten or fifteen francs.
In the morning there was such a beating of carpets the whole street sounded like one big drum. One morning I met Bébert on the sidewalk; his aunt, the concierge, was out shopping, and he was holding down the lodge for her. He was raising a cloud from the sidewalk with a broom.
Anybody who didn’t raise dust at seven o’clock in the morning in those parts would get himself known all up and down the street, as an out-and-out pig. Carpet beating was a sign of cleanliness, good housekeeping. Nothing more was needed. Your breath could stink all it liked, no matter. Bebert swallowed all the dust he raised in addition to what was sent down from the upper floors. Still, a few spots of sunlight reached the street, but like inside a church, pale, muffled, mystic.
Bebert had seen me coming, I was the neighborhood doctor who lived near the bus stop. Bébert had the greenish look of an apple that would never get ripe. He was scratching himself, and watching him made me want to scratch too. The fact is I had fleas myself, I’d caught them from patients during the night. They like to jump up on your overcoat, because it’s the warmest and dampest place available. You learn that in medical school. Bébert abandoned his carpet to come and say good morning. From every window they watched us talking.
If you’ve got to love something, you’ll be taking less of a chance with children than with grownups, you’ll at least have the excuse of hoping they won’t turn out as crummy as the rest of us. How are you to know?
I’ve never been able to forget the infinite little smile of pure affection that danced across his livid face. Enough gaiety to fill the universe. Few people past twenty preserve any of that affection, the affection of animals. The world isn’t what we expected. So our looks change! They change plenty! We made a mistake!
And turned Into a thorough stinker in next to no time! Past twenty it shows in our face! A mistake! Our face is just a mistake.
“Hey, doctor,” Bébert sings out. “Is it true that they picked up a guy on the Place des Fętes last night. Throat cut open with a razor. You were on duty, weren’t you? Is it true?”
