“Pierre?”
Pierre strained his mind to recall something. Now he seemed to remember: Etienne, from the ground-floor packing room.
They cut through the crowd to a side street. Etienne said something sharp and incomprehensible. Yes, he’d been sacked as well. There was no work to be found. Crisis. You had to find some way to eke out a living. He’d tried everything. He’d dealt coke. No good. Too much competition. He’d tried pimping his own Germaine. She always brought in a dozen francs a night. But times were very tough. Not many foreigners. Supply was outstripping all possible demand. You had to make a little extra on the side.
Now he was a “scout.” A lot of leg work, but still, relatively lucrative. You had to know a few addresses and above all, not take any lip, that was key. You also had to know a bit of psychology. What attracts whom. Lots of competition as well, but if you were a good talker, you’d make out all right.
He specialized in older men. He knew a few houses where they kept fresh-faced little girls. That was a sure thing. Not far away, on Rue de Rochechouart. Thirteen-year-olds. Surefire goods. You just had to know how to serve them up. The presentation: short dress, a little apron, pigtails. A schoolroom upstairs: a picture of a saint, a child’s bed, a lectern, and a blackboard, where they’d written in chalk: 2 x 2 = 5. The full illusion. No older man could resist. You got ten francs from the guy for telling him the address and five from the house. It was a living.
This was his turf. If Pierre wanted, he could work him in, whisper a few addresses in his ear. The key? Eloquence. And a keen eye. Knowing whom to approach. Best to wait in front of a restaurant. Maybe check out his old turf, in front of Hôtel de l’Abbaye. Surefire. As long as you didn’t mess up the addresses…
A new whirlpool of pedestrians violently swept Pierre and carried him blindly. Etienne got lost somewhere. Pierre tried not to fight it and was swept along. After a few hours’ ebb and flow he was spit out at Place Pigalle.
A bright turnstile of advertisements. The flaming syllables of words written in the air by some unseen hand. Instead of “Mene, Tekel, Peres” – “Pigalle,” “Royal,” and “Abbaye.”
“Abbaye…”
Etienne had mentioned that.
A slender, fancy-dressed porter stood there in his short jacket, freezing in front of the glowing entrance, until an obsequious bow doubled him over.
Two older gentlemen. Alone. Loitering on the corner. Smoking.
Pierre mechanically moved closer. The gentlemen, absorbed in their talk, paid him no mind. Pierre tugged on the older, potbellied gentleman’s sleeve and mumbled into his ear:
“A good time… thirteen-year-olds… little aprons… a child’s bed… a blackboard… 2 x 2 = 5… the full illusion…”
The older gentleman violently yanked away his sleeve. Both men involuntarily checked for their wallets. Hastily, almost at a run, they jumped into a passing taxi, fearfully slamming the doors.
Pierre was left alone on the corner. He was baffled. Leaning on a wall, he blundered through the night down a dark, deserted boulevard. A pane of glass. A mirror. A gray, sallow face covered with a tangle of beard emerged from the mirror to greet him – the red, searing lanterns of his eyes.
Pierre stopped in his tracks. He seemed to understand. They’d simply gotten scared off. No earning a living with a face like that.
In the middle of the boulevard strolled a couple locked in embrace, kissing with every other step. A small, slanting cap. Long, slender legs. Jeannette!! The couple went into a corner hotel, kissing all the while. Again a car – a damned car! – cut in front of him.
With a single hop Pierre landed on the other side. The hotel door gave off a matte gleam. Six tall floors. Where to look? In which room? No chance! Better to wait till they came out.
Exhausted, Pierre leaned against a wall. Minutes passed, hours perhaps. Surely they were undressing by now.
In a frenzy of self-torment, Pierre’s mind went through all the successive stages of those caresses he so lucidly recalled, replacing himself with that other, faceless man with upturned collar.
He could now be quite certain they were lying in bed. The scoundrel was roaming his hands over her firm, white body. Now they were intertwined…
Suddenly everything burst. A couple was leaving the hotel across the way. A fat, bloated fellow and a slender girl. Jeannette!! The girl, climbing on her toes (oh, how well he knew that pose!) kissed the bloated fellow on the mouth. She hailed a taxi.
Screaming and leaping headlong, Pierre landed on the other side of the road. The taxi had made off with Jeannette. The bloated fellow remained in front of the hotel, examining the contents of his bulging wallet by the lamplight. The flush of delight from a few minutes before had yet to fade from his jowls. Jeannette’s parting kiss lingered on his revolting lips. The crumpled folds of his clothing still held the warmth of her touch, the singular, unforgettable smell of her body. At last!
The fist tore free from Pierre’s frame of its own accord and landed square between bulging, encysted eyes. The hollow crash of a toppled body. The bull-like, flabby neck squished like dough between his taut fingers. The wallet fell from his hands and flapped to the gutter, helpless as a shot bird.
The night responded to the powerless, hoarse calls of the fat man with a sustained, plaintive whistle. In a flutter of cheviot wings, navy-blue bats descended from the night’s recesses on all sides onto the scattered mane of Pierre’s red hair, like to the flame of a candle.
The rhythmic swing of a vehicle carried him somewhere into the infinity of the horizon. The narcotizing flap of capes. On his face – like a cold soldier’s shroud – the American flag of the sky, with stars upon stars.
V
Everything that happened next jutted across the boundary of three-dimensional reality, like Chaplin’s shack over the precipice.
The black walls streaming with twilight. A perfect cube of musty air you could cut with a knife, like a gigantic, magical Maggi bouillon cube. In the deep, barred well of the window – a gallon of condensed sky.
Pierre encountered a new, miniature underworld governed by its own peculiar laws on the margins of the giant, complicated mechanism of the world. An alien world of undeserved things: the narrow, comfortable couch under the drooping canopy of the ceiling, morning and evening – the mess tin of warm soup, flavored with a hunk of bread, free of labor. On the other side of the wall, in the neighboring cramped cells – a strange society of castaways, discarded like waste by the scrupulous, unforgiving machine of the world to this place behind the high wall on Boulevard Arago and, by someone’s inconceivable will, tied and hitched to a new and bizarre mechanism, governed by the new and bizarre laws of the World of Readymade Things.
The pointless walks around the symmetrical circles of the courtyard, regular as a carousel, under the low, sooty bell jar of the prison skies. The long string of the rosary manipulated by some unseen hand, of which each bead is the live, pulsating guts of human existence. The machinery built of cogs that had no place beyond the wall, but which unexpectedly meshed when thrown together in this monstrous lumberyard, clinging to one another and creating a new collective organism, functioning according to a new guiding principle, one scarcely conceived on the other side.
The days constantly changed into other days, somehow different, longer, outlined by the inscrutable measurements of some strange manual.
Somewhere, in the stuffy vases of apartments, in the flowerpots of offices, slowly, leaf by leaf, the metaphysical flower of the calendar was blossoming. The long thousands of miles measured in the cell extended in one mental straight line, getting lost somewhere in the muddy, reed-covered banks of the Orinoco River.