through the fentsand slits, the somnolence, the drugged whiteness. the
grill of the Luxembourg,the tangled boughs, the snores and groans, the green
slats, the strumand tinkle, the points of the stars, the spangles, the
jetties, theblue and white striped awnings that she brushed with the tips of
herwings.
    In the blue ofan electric dawn the peanut shells look wan and crumpled;
along thebeach at Montparnasse the water lilies bend and break. When the
tideis on the ebb and only a few syphilitic mermaids are left stranded inthe
muck. the Dome looks like a shooting gallery that's been struckby a cyclone.
Everything is slowly dribbling back to the sewer. Forabout an hour there is
a deathlike calm during which the vomit is moppedup. Suddenly the trees
begin to screech. From one end of the boulevardto the other a demented song
rises up. It is like the signal that announcesthe close of the exchange.
What hopes there were are swept up. The momenthas come to void the last
bagful of urine. The day is sneaking in likea leper. . . .
    One of the thingsto guard against when you work nights is not to break
your schedule; if you don't get to bed before the birds begin to screech
it's uselessto go to bed at all. This morning, having nothing better to do.
I visitedthe Jardin des Plantes. Marvelous pelicans here from Chapuhepecand
peacocks with studded fans that look at you with silly eyes. Suddenlyit
began to rain.
    Returning toMontparnasse in the bus I noticed a little French woman
opposite mewho sat stiff and erect as if she were getting ready to preen
herself.She sat on the edge of the seat as if she feared to crush her
gorgeoustail. Marvelous, I thought, if suddenly she shook herself and from
herdernere there sprung open a huge studded fan with long silkenplumes.
    _At the Cafede 'Avenue. where I stop tor a bite, a woman with a swollen
stomachtries to interest me in her condition. She would like me to go to
aroom with her and while away an hour or two. It is the first time Ihave
ever been propositioned by a pregnant woman: I am almost temptedto try it.
As soon as the baby is born and handed over to the authoritiesshe will go
back to her trade, she says. She makes hats. Observing thatmy interest is
waning she takes my hand and puts it on her abdomen.I feel some-  thing
stirring inside. It takesmy appetite away.
    I have neverseen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender.
As soon asa woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the
loose.In America she'd starve to death it she had nothing to recommend
herbut a mutilation. Here it is different. A missing tooth or a nose
eatenaway or a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural
homelinessof the female, seems to be regarded as an added spice, a stimulant
forthe jaded appetites of the male.
    I am speakingnaturally of that world which is peculiar to the big cities,
the worldof men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by
themachine _ the martyrs of modern progress. It is this mass of bones
andcollar buttons which the painter finds so difficult to put flesh on.
    It is only later,in the afternoon, when I find myself in an art gallery
on the Rue deSeze, surrounded by the men and women of Matisse, that I am
drawn backagain to the proper precincts of the human world. On the threshold
ofthat big hall whose walls are now ablaze. I pause a moment to recoverfrom
the shock which one experiences when the habitual gray of the worldis rent
asunder and the color of life splashes forth in song and poem.I find myself
in a world so natural, so complete, that I am lost. Ihave the sensation of
being immersed in the very plexus of life, focalfrom whatever place,
position or attitude I take my stance. Lost aswhen once I sank into the
quick of a budding grove and seated in thedining room of that enormous world
of Balbec. I caught for the firsttime the profound meaning of those interior
stills which manifest theirpresence through the exorcism of sight and touch.
Standing on the thresholdof that world which Matisse has created I
re-experienced the power ofthat revelation which had permitted Proust to so
deform the pictureof life that only those who, like himself, are sensible to
the alchemyof sound and sense, are capable of transforming the negative
realityof life into the substantial and significant outlines of art. Only
thosewho can admit the light into their gizzards can translate what is
therein the heart. Vividly now I recall how the glint and sparkle of
lightcaroming from the massive chandeliers splintered and ran blood,
fleckingthe tips of the waves that beat monotonously on the dull gold
outsidethe windows. On the beach,

    masts and chimneysinterlaced, and like a fuliginous shadow the figure of
Albertine glidingthrough the surf. fusing into the mysterious quick and
prism of a protoplasmicrealm, uniting her shadow to the dream and harbinger
of death. Withthe close of day. pain rising like a mist from the earth,
sorrow closingin, shuttering the endless vista of sea and sky. Two waxen
hands lyinglistlessly on the bedspread and along the pale veins the fluted
murmurof a shell repeating the legend of its birth.
    In every poemby Matisse there is the history of a particle of human
flesh which refusedthe consummation of death. The whole run of flesh, from
hair to nails,expresses the miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in
its thirstfor a greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into
hungryseeing mouths. By whatever vision one passes there is the odor and
thesound of voyage. It is impossible to gaze at even a corner of his
dreamswithout feeling the lift of the wave and the cool of flying spray.
Hestands at the helm peering with steady blue eyes into the portfolioof time.
Into what distant corners has he not thrown his long, slantinggaze? Looking
down the vast promontory of his nose he has beheld everything_ the
Cordilleras falling away into the Pacific, the history of theDiaspora done
in vellum, shutters fluting the froufrou of the beach,the piano curving like
a conch, corollas giving out diapasons of light,chameleons squirming under
the book press, seraglios expiring in o-ceansof dust, music issuing like
fire from the hidden chromosphere of pain.spore and madrepore fructifying
the earth, navels vomiting their brightspawn of anguish. . . . He is a
bright sage, a dancing seer who, witha sweep of the brush, removes the ugly
scaffold to which the body ofman is chained by the incontrovertible facts of
life. He it is. if anyman today possesses the gift, who knows where to
dissolve the humanfigure, who has the courage to sacrifice an harmonious
line in orderto detect the rhythm and murmur of the blood, who takes the
light thathas been refracted inside him and lets it flood the keyboard of
color.Behind the minutiae, the chaos, the mockery of life. he detects
theinvisible pattern; he announces his discoveries in the
metaphysicalpigment of space. No searching for formulae, no crucifixion of
ideas,no compulsion other than to create. Even as the world goes to
smashthere is one man who remains at the core. who becomes more solidly
fixedand an chored, more centrifugalas the process of dissolution quickens.
    More and morethe world resembles an entomologist's dream. The earth is
moving outof its orbit, the axis has shifted; from the north the snow
blowsdown in huge knife-blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the
transversesutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn belt the
fetalworld is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch by inch the deltas
aredrying out and the river beds are smooth as glass. A new day is dawning,a
metallurgical day. when the earth shall clink with showers of brightyellow
ore. As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows blurred; osmosis
there still is, and here and there articulation, but at theperiphery the
veins are all varicose, at the periphery the light wavesbend and the sun
bleeds like a broken rectum.
    At the very hubof this wheel which is falling apart, is Matisse. And he
will keep onrolling until everything that has gone to make up the wheel has
disintegrated.He has already rolled over a goodly portion of the globe, over
Persiaand India and China, and like a magnet he has attached to himself
microscopicparticles from Kurd, Baluchistan, Timbuktu. Somaliland. Angkor,
Tierradel Fuego. The odalisques he has studded with malachite and
jasper,their flesh veiled with a thousand eyes, perfumed eyes dipped in
thesperm of whales. Wherever a breeze stirs there are breasts as cool asjelly,
white pigeons come to flutter and rut in the ice-blue veins ofthe Himalayas.
    The wallpaperwith which the men of science have covered the world of
reality is fallingto tatters. The grand whorehouse which they have made of
life requiresno decoration! it is essential only that the drains function
adequately.Beauty, that feline beauty which has us by the balls in America,
isfinished. To fathom the new reality it is first necessary to dismantlethe
drains, to lay open the gangrened ducts which compose the
genitourinarysystem that supplies the excreta of art. The odor of the day is
permanganateand formaldehyde. The drains are clogged with strangled embryos.
    The world ofMatisse is still beautiful in an old-fashioned bedroom way.
There isnot a ball bearing in evidence, nor a boiler plate, nor a piston,
nora monkey wrench. It is the same old world that went gaily to the Boisin
the pastoral days of wine and fornication. I find it soothing andrefreshing
to move amongst these crea-

    tures with live.breathing pores whose background is stable and solid as
light itself.I feel it poignantly when I walk along the Boulevard de la
Madeleineand the whores rustle beside me, when just to glance at them
causesme to tremble. Is it because they are exotic or well-nourished? No.it
is rare to find a beautiful woman along the Boulevard de la Madeleine.But in
Matisse, in the exploration of his brush, there is the tremblingglitter of a
world which demands only the presence of the female tocrystallize the most
fugitive aspirations. To come upon a woman offeringherself outside a urinal,
where there are advertised cigarette papers,rum. acrobats, horse races,
where the heavy foliage of the trees breaksthe heavy mass of walls and roofs,
is an experience that begins wherethe boundaries of the known world leave off.
In the evening now andthen. skirting the cemetery walls, I stumble upon the
phantom odalisquesof Matisse fastened to the trees, their tangled manes
drenched withsap. A few feet away. removed by incalculable eons of time.
lies theprone and mummy-swathed ghost of Baudelaire, of a whole world that
willbelch no more. In the dusky corners of cafes are men and women withhands
locked, their loins slatherflecked;
    nearby standsthe garym with his apron full of sous, waiting patiently
forthe entr'acte in order to fall upon his wife and gouge her. Even asthe
world falls apart the Paris that belongs to Matisse shudders withbright,
gasping orgasms, the air itself is steady with a stagnant sperm,the trees
tangled like hair. On its wobbly axle the wheel rolls steadilydownhill;
there are no brakes, no ball bearings. no balloon tires. Thewheel is falling
apart, but the revolution is intact. . . .

    Out of a clearsky there comes one day a letter from Boris whom I have
not seen formonths and months. It is a strange document and I don't pretend
to understandit all clearly. "What happened between us _ at any rate, as far
as Igo _ is that you touched me. touched my life, that is, at the one
pointwhere I am still alive: my death. By the emotional flow I went
throughanother immersion. I lived again, alive. No longer by reminiscence,as
I do with others. but alive. "
    That's how itbegan. Not a word of greeting, no date, no address. Written
in a thin,pompous scrawl on ruled paper torn out of a blank book. "That is
why.whether you like me or not _ deep down I rather think you hate me _you
are very close to me. By you I know how I died: I see myself dyingagain: I
am dying. That is something. More than to be dead simply.That may be the
reason why I am so afraid to see you: you may have playedthe trick on me,
and died. Things happen so fast nowadays. "
    I'm reading itover, line by line, standing by the stones. It sounds
nutty to me, allthis palaver about life and death and things happening so
fast. Nothingis happening that I can see. except the usual calamities on the
frontpage. He's been living all by himself for the last six months,
tuckedaway in a cheap little room _ probably holding telepathic
communicationwith Cronstadt. He talks about the line falling back, the
sector evacuated,and so on and so forth, as though he were dug into a trench
and writinga report to headquarters. He probably had his frock coat on when
hesat down to pen this missive, and he probably rubbed his hands a fewtimes
as he used to do when a customer was calling to rent the apartment."The
reason I wanted you to commit suicide ..." he begins again. Atthat I burst
out laughing. He used to walk up and down with one handstuck in the tail
flap of his frock coat at the Villa Borgh-ese, orat Cronstadt's _ wherever
there was deck space, as it were _ and reeloff this nonsense about living
and dying to his heart's content. I neverunderstood a word of it, I must
confess, but it was

    a good show and.being a Gentile. I was naturally interested in what went
on in thatmenagerie of a brainpan. Sometimes he would lie on his couch full
length,exhausted by the surge of ideas that swept through his noodle. His
feetjust grazed the bookrack where he kept his Plato and Spinoza -- he
couldn'tunderstand why I had no use for them. I must say he made them
soundinteresting. though what it was all about I hadn't the least idea.
SometimesI would glance at a volume furtively, to check up on these wild
ideaswhich he imputed to them _ but the connection was frail, tenuous. Hehad
a language all his own. Boris, that is, when I had him alone; butwhen I
listened to Cronstadt it seemed to me that Boris had plagiarizedhis
wonderful ideas. They talked a sort of higher mathematics, thesetwo. Nothing
of flesh and blood ever crept in;
    it was weird,ghostly, ghoulishly abstract. When they got on to the dying
businessit sounded a little more concrete; after all. a cleaver or a meat
axhas to have a handle. I enjoyed those sessions immensely. It was thefirst
time in my life that death had ever seemed fascinating to me --all these
abstract deaths which involved a bloodless sort of agony.Now and then they
would compliment me on being alive, but in such away that felt embarrassed.
They made me feel that I was alive in thenineteenth century, a sort of
atavistic remnant, a romantic shred, asoulful Pithecanthropus erec-tus.
Boris especially seemed to get a greatkick out of touching me;
    he wanted meto be alive so that he could die to his heart's content. You
would thinkthat all those millions in the street were nothing but dead cows
theway he looked at me and touched me. But the letter ... I'm forgettingthe
letter. . . .
    "The reason whyI wanted you to commit suicide that evening at the
Cronstadts'. whenMoldorf became God, was that I was very close to you then.
Perhaps closerthan I shall ever be. And I was afraid, terribly afraid, that
some dayyou'd go back on me, die on my hands. And I would be left high and
drywith my idea of you simply, and nothing to sustain it. I should
neverforgive you for that. "
    Perhaps you canvisualize him saying a thing like that! Myself it's not
clear what hisidea of me was, or at any rate. it's clear that I was just
pure idea,an idea that kept itself alive without food. He never attached
muchimportance, Boris, to the food problem. He

    tried to nourishme with ideas. Everything was idea. Just the same, when
he had his heartset on renting the apartment, he wouldn't forget to put a
new washerin the toilet. Anyway, he didn't want me to die on his hands. "You
mustbe life for me to the very end, " so he writes. "That is the only wayin
which you can sustain my idea of you. Because you have gotten, asyou see.
tied up with something so vital to me, I do not think I shallever shake you
off. Nor do I wish to. I want you to live more vitallyevery day, as I am dead.
That is why, when I speak of you to others,I am just a bit ashamed. It's
hard to talk of one's self so intimately."
    You would imagineperhaps that he was anxious to see me, or that he would
like to knowwhat I was doing _ but no, not a line about the concrete or the
personal,except in this living-dying language, nothing but this little
messagefrom the trenches, this whiff of poison gas to apprise all and
sundrythat the war was still on. I sometimes ask myself how it happens thatI
attract nothing but crackbrained individuals, neurasthenics,
neurotics,psychopaths _ and Jews especially. There must be something in a
healthyGentile that excites the Jewish mind, like when he sees sour black
bread.There was Moldorf, for example, who had made himself God, accordingto
Boris and Cronstadt. He positively hated me. the little viper _ yethe
couldn't stay away from me. He came round regularly for his littledose of
insults _ it was like a tonic to him. In the beginning, it'strue, I was
lenient with him; after all. he was paying me to listento him. And though I
never displayed much sympathy I knew how to besilent when it involved a meal
and a little pin money. After a while,however, seeing what a masochist he was,
I permitted myself to laughin his face now and then; that was like a whip
for him. it made thegrief and agony gush forth with renewed vigor. And
perhaps everythingwould have gone smoothly between us if he had not felt it
his duty toprotect Tania. But Tania being a Jewess, that brought up a moral
question.He wanted me to stick to Mile. Claude for whom, I must admit, I
hada genuine affection. He even gave me money occasionally to sleep withher.
Until he realized that I was a hopeless lecher.
    I mention Tanianow because she's just got back from Russia _ just a few
days ago. Sylvesterremained behind to worm his way into a job. He's given up
literatureentirely. He's dedicated

    himself to thenew Utopia. Tania wants me to go back there with her, to
the Crimeapreferably, and start a new life. We had a tine drinking bout up
inCarl's room the other day discussing the possibilities. I wanted toknow
what I could do for a living back there _ if I could be a proofreader,for
example. She said I didn't need to worry about what I would do _they would
find a job for me as long as I was earnest and sincere. Itried to look
earnest, but I only succeeded in looking pathetic. Theydon't want to see sad
faces in Russia; they want you to be cheerful,enthusiastic, lighthearted.
optimistic. It sounded very much like Americato me. I wasn't born with this
kind of enthusiasm. I didn't let on toher, of course, but secretly I was
praying to be left alone, to go backto my little niche, and to stay there
until the war breaks. All thishocus-pocus about Russia disturbed me a little.
She got so excited aboutit, Tania, that we finished almost a half dozen
bottles of vin ordinaire.Carl was jumping about like a cockroach. He has
just enough Jew in himto lose his head over an idea like Russia. Nothing
would do but to marryus off _ immediately. "Hitch up! " he says, "you have
nothing to lose!"And then he pretends to run a little errand so that we can
pull offa fast one. And while she wanted it all right, Tania, still that
Russiabusiness had gotten so solidly planted in her skull that she pissedthe
interval away chewing my ear off, which made me somewhat grumpyand ill at
ease. Anyway, we had to think about eating and getting tothe office, so we
piled into a taxi on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet, justa stone's throw away
from the cemetery. and off we whizzed. It was justa nice hour to spin
through Paris in an open cab. and the wine rollingaround in our tanks made
it seem even more lovely than usual. Carl wassitting opposite us, on the
strapontin, his face as red as abeet. He was happy, the poor bastard,
thinking what a glorious new lifehe would lead on the other side of Europe.
And at the same time he felta bit wistful, too _ I could see that. He didn't
really want to leaveParis, any more than I did. Paris hadn't been good to him,
any morethan it had to me. or to anybody, for that matter, but when you've
sufferedand endured things here it's then that Paris takes hold of you.
grabsyou by the balls, you might say. like some lovesick bitch who'd
ratherdie than let you get out of her hands. That's how it looked to him,I
could see that. Rolling over the Seine he had a big foolish grin onhis face
and he lookedaround at the buildings and the statues as though he were
seeing themin a dream. To me it was like a dream too: I had my hand in
Tania'sbosom and I was squeezing her titties with all my might and I
noticedthe water under the bridges and the barges and Notre-Dame down
below,just like the post cards show it, and I was thinking drunkenly to
myselfthat's how one gets fucked, but I was sly about it too and I knew
Iwouldn't ever trade all this whirling about my head for Russia or heavenor
anything on earth. It was a fine afternoon. I was thinking to myself,and
soon we'd be pushing a feed down our bellies and what could we orderas a
special treat, some good heavy wine that would drown out all thisRussia
business. With a woman like Tania, full of sap and everything.they don't
give a damn what happens to you once they get an idea intheir heads. Let
them go far enough and theyll pull the pants off you,right in the taxi. It
was grand though, milling through the traffic,our faces all smudged with
rouge and the wine gurgling like a sewerinside us, especially when we swung
into the Rue Laffitte which is justwide enough to frame the little temple at
the end of the street andabove it the Sacre-Coeur, a kind of exotic jumble
of architecture, alucid French idea that gouges right through your
drunkenness and leavesyou swimming helplessly in the past, in a fluid dream
that makes youwide awake and yet doesn't jar your nerves.
    With Tania backon the scene, a steady job, the drunken talk about Russia,
the walkshome at night, and Paris in full summer. life seems to lift its
heada little higher. That's why perhaps, a letter such as Boris sent meseems
absolutely cockeyed. Most every day I meet Tania around five o'clock,to have
a Porto with her, as she calls it. I let her take me to placesI 've never
seen before, the swell bars around the Champs-Elysees wherethe sound of jazz
and baby voices crooning seems to soak right throughthe mahogany woodwork.
Even when you go to the lavabo these pulpy,sappy strains pursue you, come
floating into the cabinet through theventilators and make life all soap and
iridescent bubbles. And whetherit's because Sylvester is away and she feels
free now, or whatever itis, Tania certainly tries to behave like an angel.
"You treated me lousyjust before I went away, "she says to me one day. "Why
did you wantto act that way? I never did anything to hurt you, did I? "

    We were gettingsentimental, what with the soft lights and that creamy,
mahogany musicseeping through the place. It was getting near time to go to
work andwe hadn't eaten yet. The stubs were lying there in front of us -
sixfrancs, four-fifty, seven francs, two-fifty _ I was counting them
upmechanically and wondering too at the same time if I would like it
betterbeing a bartender. Often like that. when she was talking to me.
gushingabout Russia. the future, love, and all that crap, I'd get to
thinkingabout the most irrelevant things, about shining shoes or being a
lavatoryattendant. particularly I suppose because it was so cosy in these
jointsthat she dragged me to and it never occurred to me that I'd be
stonesober and perhaps old and bent. . . no, I imagined always that the
future,however modest, would be in just this sort of ambiance, with the
sametunes playing through my head and the glasses clinking and behind
everyshapely ass a trail of perfume a yard wide that would take the stinkout
of life, even downstairs in the lavabo.
    The strange thingis it never spoiled me trotting around to the swell
bars with her likethat. It was hard to leave her, certainly. I used to lead
her aroundto the porch of a church near the office and standing there in the
darkwe'd take a last embrace, she whispering to me "Jesus, what am I goingto
do now? "She wanted me to quit the job so as I could make love nightand day;
she didn't even care about Russia any more, just so long aswe were together.
But the moment I left her my head cleared. It wasanother kind of music. not
so croony but good just the same, which greetedmy ears when I pushed through
the swinging door. And another kind ofperfume. not just a yard wide, but
omnipresent, a sort of sweat andpatchouli that seemed to come from the
machines. Coming in with a skinful,as I usually did, it was like dropping
suddenly to a low altitude. GenerallyI made a beeline for the toilet _ that
braced me up rather. It was alittle cooler there, or else the sound of water
running made it seemso. It was always a cold douche, the toilet. It was real.
Before yougot inside you had to pass a line of Frenchmen peeling off their
clothes.Ugh! but they stank, those devils' And they were well paid for it.
too.But there they were. stripped down. some in long underwear, some
withbeards, most of them pale, skinny rats with lead in their veins.
Insidethe toilet you could take an inventory of their idle thoughts. The
wallswere crowded with sketchesand epithets, all of them jocosely obscene,
easy to understand, andon the whole rather jolly and sympathetic. It must
have required a ladderto reach certain spots, but I suppose it was worth
while doing it evenlooking at it from just the psychological viewpoint.
Sometimes, as Istood there taking a leak. I wondered what an impression it
would makeon those swell dames whom I observed passing in and out of the
beautifullavatories on the Champs-Elysees. I wondered if they would carry
theirtails so high if they could see what was thought of an ass here.
Intheir world, no doubt, everything was gauze and velvet _ or they madeyou
think so with the fine scents they gave out, swishing past you.Some of them
hadn't always been such fine ladies either; some of themswished up and down
like that just to advertise their trade. And maybe,when they were left alone
with themselves, when they talked out loudin the privacy of their boudoirs,
maybe some strange things fell outof their mouths too; because in that world,
just as in every world,the greater part of what happens is just muck and
filth, sordid as anygarbage can. only they are lucky enough to be able to
put covers overthe can.
    As I say, thatafternoon life with Tania never had any bad effect upon me.
Once ina while I'd get too much of a skinful and I'd have to stick my
fingerdown my throat _ because it's hard to read proof when you're not
allthere. It requires more concentration to detect a missing comma thanto
epitomize Nietzsche's philosophy. You can be brilliant sometimes,when you're
drunk, but brilliance is out of place in the proofreadingdepartment. Dates,
fractions, semicolons _ these are the things thatcount. And these are the
things that are most difficult to track downwhen your mind is all ablaze.
Now and then I made some bad blunders,and if it weren't that I had learned
how to kiss the boss's ass, I wouldhave been fired, that's certain. I even
got a letter one day from thebig mogul upstairs, a guy I never even met. so
high up he was. and betweena few sarcastic phrases about my more than
ordinary intelligence, hehinted pretty plainly that I'd better learn my
place and toe the markor there'd be what's what to pay. Frankly, that scared
the shit outof me. After that I never used a polysyllabic word in
conversation;
    in fact. I hardlyever opened my trap all night. I played the high-grade
moron, whichis what they wanted of us. Now and then, to

    sort of flatterthe boss. I'd go up to him and ask politely what such and
such a wordmight mean. He liked that. He was a sort of dictionary and
timetable,that guy. No matter how much beer he guzzled during the break _
andhe made his own private breaks too, seeing as how he was running theshow
_ you could never trip him up on a date or a definition. He wasborn to the
job. My only regret was that I knew too much. It leakedout now and then.
despite all the precautions I took. If I happenedto come to work with a book
under my arm this boss of ours would noticeit, and if it were a good book it
made him venomous. But I never didanything intentionally to displease him; I
liked the job too well toput a noose around my neck. Just the same it's hard
to talk to a manwhen you have nothing in common with him; you betray
yourself,even if you use only monosyllabic words. He knew goddamn well, the
boss,that I didn't take the least bit of interest in his yarns; and
yet.explain it how you will, it gave him pleasure to wean me away from
mydreams and fill me full of dates and historical events. It was his wayof
taking revenge. I suppose.
    The result wasthat I developed a bit of a neurosis. As soon as I hit the
air I becameextravagant. It wouldn't matter what the subject of conversation
happenedto be, as we started back to Montpar-nasse in the early morning,
I'dsoon turn the fire hose on it. squelch it. in order to trot out my
perverteddreams. I liked best talking about those things which none of us
knewanything about. I had cultivated a mild sort of insanity, echolalia.I
think it's called. All the tag ends of a night's proofing danced onthe tip
of my tongue. Dalmatia _ I had held copy on an ad forthat beautiful jeweled
resort. All right, Dalmatia. You takea train and in the morning your pores
are perspiring and the grapesare bursting their skins. I could reel it off
about Dalmatia from thegrand boulevard to Cardinal Mazarin's palace, further,
if I chose to.I don't even know where it is on the map, and I don't want to
know ever,but at three in the morning with all that lead in your veins and
yourclothes saturated with sweat and patchouli and the clink of
braceletspassing through the wringer and those beer yarns that I was braced
for,little things like geography, costume, speech, architecture don't meana
goddamn thing. Dalmatia belongs to a certain hour of the night whenthose
high gongs are snuffed out and the court of the Louvre seems

    so wonderfullyridiculous that you feel like weeping for no reason at all,
just becauseit's so beautifully silent, so empty, so totally unlike the
front pageand the guys upstairs rolling the dice. With that little piece of
Dalmatiaresting on my throbbing nerves like a cold knife blade I could
experiencethe most wonderful sensations of voyage. And the funny thing is
againthat I could travel all around the globe but America would never
entermy mind; it was even further lost than a lost continent, because
withthe lost continents I felt some mysterious attachment, whereas
withAmerica I felt nothing at all. Now and then, it's true, I did thinkof
Mona, not as of a person in a definite aura of time and space, butseparately,
detached, as though she had blown up into a great cloudlikeform that blotted
out the past. I couldn't allow myself to think abouther very longi if I had
I would have jumped off the bridge. It's strange.I had become so reconciled
to this life without her. and yet if I thoughtabout her only for a minute it
was enough to pierce the bone and marrowof my contentment and shove me back
again into the agonizing gutterof my wretched past.
    For seven yearsI went about, day and night, with only one thing on my
mind _ her.Were there a Christian so faithful to his God as I was to her we
wouldall be Jesus Christs today. Day and night I thought of her, even whenI
was deceiving her. And now sometimes, in the very midst of things,sometimes
when I feel that I am absolutely free of it all, suddenly,in rounding a
corner perhaps, there will bob up a little square, a fewtrees and a bench, a
deserted spot where we stood and had it out, wherewe drove each other crazy
with bitter, jealous scenes. Always some desertedspot, like the Place de
'Estrapade, for example, or those dingy, mourn-.ful streets off the Mosque
or along that open tomb of an Avenue de Breteuilwhich at ten o'clock in the
evening is so silent, so dead, that it makesone think of murder or suicide,
anything that might create a vestigeof human drama. When I realize that she
is gone. perhaps gone for ever.a great void opens up and I feel that I am
falling, falling, fallinginto deep, black space. And this is worse than tears,
deeper than regretor pain or sorrow; it is the abyss into which Satan was
plunged. Thereis no climbing back. no ray of light, no sound of human voice
or humantouch of hand.
    How many thousandtimes, in walking through the streets at