Pierre had all but fainted in the heavenly sensation of the penetrating warmth. He was overwhelmed by a sweet half-sleep; he soaked in it like a hot bath after a long journey.
He was brought to his senses by a voice battering itself long and persistently on the wickets of his consciousness. Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. Once more, the same view. He pricked up his ears:
“Don’t you recognize me, Pierre?”
Someone was insistently, violently trying to wrench his head out from under the soft eiderdown of slumber. Pierre struggled to wriggle away from the voice, to let it blow past like a man driven by a bullish alarm clock from the virginal undergrowth of sleep, but trying in vain to dig back into his warm, vespertine, tropical foliage. The voice glided somewhere above him, like a great bird at first oblivious to its prey, then turning a wide arc and swooping back as sudden as a knockout punch:
“Aren’t you seeing Jeannette anymore?”
Pierre opened his eyes wide. The monotonous whimper of the player piano. Heavy, big-breasted angels paraded around the room like a hypnotic slow-motion film. One of these, entirely naked, her hair in a bun, was crouched on the edge of the couch, obstinately staring at Pierre.
“Don’t you recognize me? I used to be a good friend of Jeannette’s. We used to go to the pictures together. Remember, you’d always buy us candy?…”
Leaning over memory’s booth like a stubborn fairground spectator, Pierre rummaged in the sawdust inside him, sometimes finding the sparkling pinpoints of scattered recollections.
Who was this nagging fly, struggling to bring him back to a reality he’d forever abandoned? Could it be just a trick of his imagination, still addled by earthly reminiscences? Then it would surely be enough to burrow deeper into the magical pillow of the all-cleansing slumber washing over him like the tide.
But the meddlesome fly kept buzzing:
“I’m sure you’re wondering how I got here. My God, it’s so simple. I’ve never had any luck. I couldn’t find a sugar daddy. It’s not so easy to dress yourself and survive off two hundred francs a month. It’s not the same if your boyfriend’s as good as Jeannette’s. I never had any luck. I got my health card. The warehouse threw me out on the second day, of course. I had to try working the street, but it’s not as easy as it seems. The summer was okay, but when it started to rain… I get sick too easily. I caught a cold… I spent time in the hospital. When I got better, I came here. The work’s not so tough. It’s always warm. I earn less, but the pay is steady. Ten francs per guy, the house takes seven. They give us meals. It’s a living. One day you earn more, the next day less, it depends on your luck. The day before yesterday, for example, I had fifteen guys – that’s forty-five francs. Of course, you don’t get that much every day. The work’s a bit exhausting, but you get every third day off. Are you going already? Won’t you stay just a while longer? I wanted to ask what Jeannette’s up to. Isn’t she your girlfriend anymore?”
Pierre stood from the couch all of a sudden and sluggishly put on his cap. The spring leapt up with a twang, setting the whole mechanism back in motion. It felt as though Pierre had poked the soap bubble surrounding him, and it suddenly burst.
The bouncing, breakneck lament of the Pianola. A dozen naked, perspiring girls turned around the room in quick orbits, adorned with cheap and tawdry bows. A few others were noisily cajoling some red sergeants into buying them beer. Smoke, tumult, and stifling air.
At a few tables: lavishly dressed ladies in the company of gentlemen with shiny shirtfronts. Rather than drink their beer, the men generously preferred to give it to the girls swarming their table and happily admire their acrobatic skills. One of the guests would place a franc on the table and a girl would try to pick it up with only her genitals, without using her hands. The women in furs smiled approvingly.
Digging his three francs out of his pocket and leaving them on a saucer, Pierre shoved his way through to the door and, without responding to the affable farewell from the majestic Buddha-matron at the cash register, scuttled out to the street.
A fine drizzle was falling, punctuated by the distant blinking of stars. Over the frozen pool of the sky the Great Bear was shaking its shiny fur coat after its evening bath, and the chilly spray flew down to Earth.
IV
Jeannette still wasn’t home. Her old shrew of a mother, who had always cast a disparaging eye on her daughter’s relationship with poor Pierre, one evening slammed the door in his face, claiming that Jeannette had moved out.
The city rumbled as always, an eternal ebb and flow. Inexhaustible crowds of people flooded into the street – fat, bloated men with necks of salami. Any one them might have slept with Jeannette, maybe the night before, maybe only a few minutes ago. Any one them could have been the man he was searching for in this aimless pursuit. With manic determination, Pierre stared into the faces of passersby, struggling to find some trace in them, the minutest convulsion remaining from an evening of delight spent with Jeannette. His keen nostrils took in the smells of clothing, trying to catch the scent of Jeannette’s perfume, the subtle fragrance of her tiny body.
Jeannette wasn’t there; she wasn’t anywhere.
And yet she was everywhere. Pierre clearly saw and recognized her in the silhouette of every girl accompanied by her lover from the front door of every hotel, riding alongside in a taxi, disappearing suddenly into the nooks of the first gateway she happened to notice. A thousand times he ran, furiously shoving aside the pedestrians forever standing between her and him in an impenetrable wave. He always arrived too late.
Days turned into days in a monotonous play of shadow and light.
After barren weeks of wandering, he had abandoned the search for work.
For many days he had been carrying a greedy, sucking hunger in his belly as a mother does a fetus, lifting nausea into his throat and dissolving a leaden tiredness throughout his body.
The contours of objects sharpened as though outlined with pencil, the air became rarified and transparent under the bell jar of the urban sky. The houses swelled and became pliable, squishing unexpectedly into one another, only to stretch once more into an improbable and absurd perspective. People wore scrubbed and indistinguishable faces. Some had two noses, others two pairs of eyes. Most had two heads at the ends of their necks, one strangely crammed onto the other.
One evening the tide chucked him from the Montmartre boulevards and thrust him against the glass frontage of a grand music hall. A gigantic fiery windmill slowly turned its blades on their axis, summoning the ludicrous Don Quixotes of pleasure from the endless avenues of the world. The windows of the surrounding houses glowed with the bright-red embers of the unquenchable fever burning within.
It was time for the show to begin. The lobby was glassed in like a lighthouse, and around it a furious wave of automobiles crashed onto the sidewalk, only to recede moments later, leaving the white foam of ermine capes and tuxedo mantles, shirtfronts and sleeves on the rocky shore of the pavement.
A vast black crowd, a roaring deluge, pressed into the side doors, jostling and crushing toes. Pierre had the impression he’d seen such a mob somewhere before, that he was a missing piece of it. It reminded him of the same idiotic stream of people that had squeezed into the market for a bowl of onion soup.
A new, towering tidal wave tossed him aside, smashing his face into a wall – which upon closer inspection turned out to be a soft human face, one suddenly familiar. The face, using hands to free itself from the unexpected pressure, was also inspecting him.