Could he have restrained himself?
“No, I can’t. I can’t get my breath back, I can’t slow down, I can’t stop; the entire drama of my being is contained in those two words: I cannot.”
The crossing of the Atlantic by steamship, New York and its feverishness, the energy Pierre had to expend as soon as he arrived in Chicago and the rapid success of the business dealings he had been involved in, made him feel much better. The very day before the opening, the Western museums had acquired everything he had brought from Europe, including the Mas Vieux cloister, which the city of Chicago had bought and paid for cash on the nail, having long been jealous of the little French cloister of the same period that overlooked New York, from the top of Washington Heights.
Since people were surprised that he had not waited for the opening of an exhibition at which he would doubtless have found collectors whose private offers might have been higher than those of the museums, Pierre replied: “I have never made money except by selling too early.”
“I was wise to come,” he told himself. “America agrees with me. This dry, golden autumn stimulates me.
“I like the rhythm of these great urban ganglions, the excitement of the traffic and the bouncing of the elevators at the top of buildings as straight as avenues; the conductivity of all this American material puts me in a state of healthy intensity.
“Life is easy here; there is so much good humour at every level of this cosmopolitan overexcitement! After all! Here is a country where everything lives at the pace of the Stock Exchange. I can escape from the continuous crucifixion of the old continent which used to get me down. In this way I can prove what I have always maintained, that frenzy can espouse order, and that firmness cannot stand in the way of passion.”
Two weeks went by, then a month. Pierre was no longer having fun.
“It seems to me that my admiration for quick-start police motorcycles with their sirens that give them the right of way, and my enthusiasm for the easy attraction of avenues that are straight and uncluttered with cars, is exhausted.
“I’m beginning to become blasé about the pleasure of signing bills everywhere instead of wasting precious time handing over and receiving money. Is it rather sad to see the appeal of new things fade like this? I am scarcely aware any more of how satisfying it is to find telephones in every room instead of ‘having a phone’ as one does in Paris… and I no longer go into raptures about the convenience, very relative furthermore, of being pursued by long-distance calls as I move around each day.
“Nor do I take any pleasure in seeing a boy from the Western Union appearing as if out of a box the moment I ring, to take my telegram that I can no longer reconsider, which I regret immediately afterwards.
“Yes, all this is convenient… but not essential. A simplification of the daily task, that’s all. It’s the work of Slav and German immigrants; they have organized their new nation according to ultra-fast methods, the former out of laziness and the latter by being practical. But they have not succeeded in endowing Americans with the tragic meaning of life, by which I mean its brevity. They are actually idlers; in this, they have remained Anglo-Saxons.”
The man in a hurry soon realized that not only did he not care for all this comfortable transatlantic galloping around, but he even took pity on it.
In reality, there was no galloping at all.
And the day even came when American apathy infuriated him even more than French disorganization.
“Before the Americans, who ever thought about relaxing? Everything here is an excuse for parties and dawdling…
“The United States is the largest unemployment workshop in the world.
“It’s Sunday twenty hours a day.
“To say nothing of standardization, which has reached such perfection that everything stops all the time.
“A New Yorker is always free for meals.
“All American women are dying of boredom.”
Pierre visited Wall Street on a day following a wave of panic: the slump in business appalled him.
“How could I have thought at the beginning of my stay that America lived at a Stock Exchange pace!” he wondered.
He walked through the Chinese district: they were letting off firecrackers in honour of Lao Tzu. In Harlem, the centre of the darkest idleness, the Negros slept all day long. In Chicago, crowds lounged around for hours on end, beneath the first of the spring rainfalls, just to watch gangsters being buried or film stars getting married. Only the Italians from Cicero, once the importers of farniente, toiled.
“From the moment of my arrival at the wharf, from the moment the immigration officer with preposterous slowness checked the questionnaire containing the seventy-two queries asked of immigrants, up until my departure when crowds of friends will come and laze around on deck, not because they like me, but because they have nothing better to do — it was, it is and always will be like this. With every voyage, the steamship brings back from Europe Yankee idlers who are half asleep, drunk or who out of carelessness have remained on the wrong side of a gangway that has actually been drawn up and lowered again ten times over. America, a land discovered by people who had zest in them, consists of nothing more than hold-ups, vacations, strikes and gaping onlookers.
“If I had to stay here,” he sighed when he saw New York again on his return from Chicago, “I’d die of ankylosis and paralysis. I must leave without waiting for the end of the Exhibition.
“Leave for where…
“For the lethargic Orient?
“For languorous Rio?
“For indolent Oceania?
“For the stillness of Tibet?
“A little organization, for heaven’s sake! A little concentration. I must know where I want to go; let’s close our eyes, let’s imagine these journeys. Where do I feel drawn to out of a deep-seated need…? Obviously, to a railway station first of all; a train, no matter which one! The circle line? Going round and round New York endlessly? Come on now, I am in full possession of my mind, after all… What I need is something to do immediately, this very day. I can’t remain in this room, it would drive one to suicide!”
All of a sudden, he remembered having accepted an invitation from an important daily newspaper to fly over New York at sunset this same evening. He was saved.
“Let’s go,” he exclaimed joyfully, “let’s go to this very American occasion.”
Pierre arrived at the elevated railway. Four parallel lines ran south-east to north-west, the two outer ones for the stopping trains, and in the middle, four tracks reserved for the express trains. He took the stopping train.
The time? Shortly after the ebb tide that had already emptied the business district.
The place? Downtown, where the first streets start, in the direction of the Bronx, that is to say New York’s back of beyond; along one of those parrot ladders, vertical avenues, crossed by side roads, that lead to the north.
The setting? A suspended iron bridge with a plunging view over dirty windows, low roofs and, further on, over offices and clean windows, brilliantly lit hotels, apartments that were initially simple, then more and more luxurious, and then, once more, humble ones.
Pierre is almost the only person in his carriage: a few office cleaning ladies, some delivery drivers hanging by one arm from the straps — all these people immersed in their evening newspaper as though in a printer’s bath. A toothpaste advertisement provides travellers with a mirror in which Pierre inspects himself.