The White Paper Read online

  Nothing has a greater power to intimidate than children and whores. Too many things go into composing the gap dividing us from them. One doesn't know how to break the silence and attune one's outlook to theirs. In the rue de Provence, the only terrain of mutual understanding was the bed upon which I would lie down with the whore and the jointly accomplished act which gave neither of us the slightest pleasure.

  Those visits emboldened us, we accosted streetwalkers and thus made the acquaintance of a little individual who was known as Alice de Pilbrac. She lived on the rue La Bruyere in a modest apartment which smelled of coffee. If I remember rightly, Alice de Pilbrac while she did receive us, allowed us to do no more than admire her in a sordid dressing-gown and with her thin drab hair hanging down on her back. This regimen made my comrades pine or fidget, but it suited me handsomely. In the end, they grew tired of waiting and took off on a new tack. This time it was to pool our money, rent the front row for the Sunday matinee at the Eldorado, throw bouquets of violets at the vocalists and then go to the stagedoor and wait for them in the savage cold.

  If I recount these trifling episodes it is to indicate the appalling fatigue and stricken feeling of utter hollowness with which our Sunday outings would reward us, and my amazement to witness my comrades feast the whole week long on the details of the miserable nothings we accomplished.

  One boy knew the actress Berthe through whom I met Jeanne. They were in the theatre. I took a liking to Jeanne; I asked Berthe to do me the favor of finding out if she would be willing to become my mistress. Berthe brought back word that I had been turned down and suggested that I deceive my comrade by sleeping with her. Shortly afterward, learning from him that Jeanne was disappointed at not having heard anything from me, I went to see her. We discovered that my message had never been transmitted and decided to take our revenge by reserving for Berthe the surprise of our happiness.

  That adventure left such an imprint upon my sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth years that, today, whenever I see Jeanne's name in a newspaper or her picture on a billboard, I still experience a shock. And for all that, it is still possible to say nothing at all in relating this banal affair which measured itself out in long waits in dress-shops and in playing a pretty disagreeable role, for the Armenian who kept Jeanne, thought highly of me and made me his confidant.

  It was in the second year that the scenes began. After the most lively one, which transpired at five in the afternoon on the place de la Concorde, I abandoned Jeanne on a traffic island and fled home. I was not halfway through dinner, and was already planning a telephone call, when I was told that a lady was waiting downstairs in a taxi. It was Jeanne. "I'm not hurt," she said, "on account of having been left stranded in the middle of the place de la Concorde, but you haven't got the guts to play the game all the way through to the end. Two months ago you'd have come back to that island after having crossed the whole square. Don't let yourself think you proved yourself able to act like a man. All you proved is that your love is as weak as soda pop." This poignant analysis enlightened me: it advised me that I was no longer enslaved.

  In order that my love revive, I had to discover that Jeanne was unfaithful to me. She was, with Berthe. Today, this element in the story lays bare the basis of my love for her. Jeanne was a boy; she was fond of women, and I loved her with what my nature contained of the feminine. I came upon them in bed tangled up like an octopus. Administer a beating, that was what the situation called for; and instead I pleaded. They laughed at me, consoled me, and that was the bedraggled conclusion to an affair which, although it died of its own self, nevertheless wreaked sufficient havoc upon me to alarm my father and force him to emerge from the reserve he always maintained in regard to me.

  As I was returning to my father's house one evening at a later than usual hour, a woman approached me in the place de la Madeleine. She had a gentle voice. I peered at her, found her lovely, young, fresh as a rose.

  She said her name was Rose, liked to talk and we strolled hither and yon until that time of night when the market-gardeners, asleep over the vegetables in their cart, drop the reins and leave their horses to wend their way through a deserted Paris.

  I was to leave the next day for Switzerland. I gave Rose my name and address. She sent me letters written on lined paper and enclosed stamps for the reply postage. Back again in Paris, happier than Thomas de Quincey, I found Rose at the very same spot where we'd met the first time. She invited me to come to her hotel in Pigalle.

  The Hotel M*** was lugubrious. The stairway stank of ether. That's the odor of whores who come home without having bagged a client. The room was the prototype of rooms that are never tidied. Rose smoked in bed. I complimented her on how well she looked. "That's because I'm made up. You should see me when I'm not," she said. "I haven't got any eyelashes. I look like a jackrabbit." I became her lover. She would take nothing from me, not even the smallest gift. Ah yes, she did accept a dress since, as she claimed, it was of absolutely no commercial value to her, was too elegant for the business, and would go into the closet to be preserved as a souvenir.

  One Sunday there came a knock on the door. I jumped up. Rose told me to take it easy and get back into bed. "It's just my brother. He'll be delighted to see you."

  This brother resembled the farm-boy and the Gustave of my childhood. He was nineteen and blessed with the worst sort of style. His name was Alfred or Alfredo and he talked a queer kind of French, but I was indifferent to the question of his nationality; he struck me as belonging to the country of prostitution which has its own patriotism and this language of his may have been its idiom.

  If I had to wage a somewhat uphill struggle to keep my interest in the sister alive, one may imagine how precipitous was the slope down which I was carried by a tremendous interest in the brother. He, as his countrymen put it, dug me perfectly, and we were soon employing all the craft and stealth of a pair of Redskins to contrive get-togethers and to prevent Rose from finding out about them.

  Alfred's body was more the body my dreams had possessed than the powerfully outfitted body of some adolescent or other. A faultless body, rigged with muscles like a schooner is with ropes and whose limbs seemed to radiate out like the rays of a star from a nuclear fleece whence would rear the one thing in a man that is incapable of lying and which is absent in women who are constructed for feigning.

  I realized I'd started off on the wrong road. I swore to myself never to go astray again, and now that I was on the right one, to follow it instead of getting sidetracked into the ways of others, and to pay much more attention to what my senses demanded than to what morality advised.

  Alfred reciprocated my caresses. He confessed that he wasn't Rose's brother. He was her business manager.

  Rose continued to play her role and we ours. Alfred would wink at me, give me the high sign and sometimes go off into gales of wild laughter. Puzzled, Rose would frown uncomprehendingly, never suspecting that we were in a conspiracy and that between us existed ties which guile consolidated.

  The fellow down at the hotel desk came in one day and found us wallowing to right and left of Rose. "There you are, Jules," she exclaimed, "my brother on one side of me and my sweetie-pie on the other. They're all I love in the world."

  The lies began to tire the lazy Alfred. He declared to me that he couldn't go on living this way, working one side of the street while Rose worked the other, tramping up and down this open-air market where the vendors are the merchandise. In other words, he was asking me to get him out of there.

  I assured him that nothing would give me greater pleasure. We decided that I'd reserve a room in a place des Ternes hotel where Alfred would install himself permanently, that after dinner I'd join him there for the night, that with Rose I'd pretend to think he'd disappeared and say that I was starting out to search for him, which would leave me free and net us plenty of good times.

  I arranged for the room, settled Alfred in it, and dined at my father's. The meal over, I rushed to the hotel. No Alfre
d. I waited from nine until one in the morning. Still no Alfred; and so I went home, my heart as heavy as lead.

  The next morning towards eleven I went back to the place des Ternes to see what was what; Alfred was in his room, asleep. He woke up, whimpered, whined and told me it wasn't any use trying, he didn't have the necessary self-control to break his old habits, he couldn't ever possibly do without Rose. He'd hunted for her all night long, first at her hotel at which she'd checked out, then on sidewalk after sidewalk, in every brasserie in Montmartre and in all the rue de Lappe dancing joints.

  "Sure," I told him, "Rose is crazy. So what? She's got a fever. She's staying with a friend of hers who lives on the rue de Budapest."

  He begged me to take him there without a moment's delay.

  Rose's former room at the Hotel M*** was a little palace next to this one belonging to her friend. We had to fight to keep afloat in a practically paste-like atmosphere of odors, clothing and doubtful sentiments. The women were in their slips. Alfred was on the floor, moaning and hugging Rose's knees. I was pale. Rose turned a face smeared with cosmetics and tears in my direction, she stretched her arms towards me: "Oh," she cried, "let's all go back to Pigalle and live together for ever and ever. I'm sure that's what Alfred wants. It is, isn't it, Alfred?" she added yanking his hair. He remained silent.

  I had to accompany my father to Toulon for the wedding of my cousin, the daughter of Vice-Admiral G***-F***. The future looked enormously unsure, bleak. I announced this family trip to Rose, left them— Rose and the still mute Alfred—at the Pigalle hotel, and promised I'd visit them just as soon as I got back.

  At Toulon I noticed that Alfred hadn't returned a little gold chain of mine. It was my fetish. I'd looped it around his wrist, forgotten about it, and he'd not remembered to remind me.

  Home again in Paris, I went to the hotel and when I entered the room, Rose welcomed me with a big kiss. There wasn't much light in there to see by. I didn't recognize Alfred at first. What was there unrecognizable about him?

  The police were scouring Montmartre. Alfred and Rose were worried sick because of their questionable nationality. They'd fixed themselves up with a set of false passports, were ready to take off at the drop of a hat, and Alfred, full of the lore he'd picked up at the movies, had dyed his hair. It was with an anthropometric precision that his little blond face contradicted the jet-black mop surmounting it. I asked him for my chain. He denied having it. Rose declared he did indeed have it. He said it wasn't true, swore it wasn't. She fished it out from under the pillow, he swore he hadn't put it there, threatened her, threatened me and pulled a pistol out of his pocket.

  I made it into the hallway in one leap and went down the stairs four at a time, Alfred hot on my trail.

  Outside, I shouted to a taxi. I shouted my address, jumped in, and as the taxi started off, I turned and peered through the rear-view window.

  Alfred was standing in front of the door of the hotel. Great tears were flowing down his cheeks. He extended his arms imploringly; he called to me. Under his badly dyed hair he was heartbreakingly pale.

  I wanted to rap on the glass partition, to tell the driver to stop. I could not simply turn my back upon that solitary distress and run off like a coward to take sanctuary in family comfort; but, on the other hand, there was the chain to consider, the pistol, I thought of the false passports and of this flight in which Rose would certainly ask me to join them. And now, whenever I ride in one of those old red Paris taxis, I have only to close my eyes to see the little silhouette of Alfred take shape, and to see the tears streaming down his face under that Chicago racketeer's hairdo.

  The Admiral being ill and my cousin off on her honeymoon, I had to return to Toulon. It would be tedious to describe that charming Sodom smitten by wrathful heavenly fires in the form of a caressing sun. In the evening a still sweeter indulgence inundates the city and, as in Naples, as in Venice, a holiday-making crowd saunters in slow circles through the squares where fountains play, where there are trinket and tinsel stalls, waffle-sellers, and gyp-artists. From the four corners of the earth men whose hearts are gone out to masculine beauty come to admire the sailors who hang about singly or drift in groups, smile in reply to

  longing's stare, and never refuse the offer of love. Some salt or nocturnal potion transforms the most uncouth ex-convict, the toughest Breton, the wildest Corsican into these tall whores with their low-necked jumpers, their swaying hips, their pompoms, these lithely graceful, colorful whores who like to dance and who, without the least sign of awkwardness, lead their partners into the obscure little hotels down by the port.

  One of the cafes where you can dance is owned by a former cafe-concert singer who has the voice of a girl and who used to do a strip-tease, starting it off as a woman. These days he wears a turtle-neck sweater and rings on his fingers. Flanked by the seafaring giants who idolize him and whose devotion he repays with mistreatment. In a large, childish hand and with his tongue stuck out he jots down the prices of the drinks his wife announces to him in a tone of naive asperity.

  One evening, pushing open the door to the place run by that astonishing creature who ever basks in the midst of the respect and deferential gestures of a wife and several husbands, I stopped abruptly, rooted to the spot. I'd just caught sight, caught a profile view, of Dargelos' shade. Leaning one elbow upon the mechanical piano, it was Dargelos in a sailor-suit.

  Of the original Dargelos this facsimile had above all the barefaced arrogance, the insolent and casual manner. Hell of a fellow was spelled out in letters of gold on the flat hat tilted down in front over his left eyebrow, his tie was knotted up over his Adam's apple and he was wearing those amply bell-bottomed pants which sailors used once upon a time to roll to the thigh and which nowadays the regulations find some moral excuse or other for outlawing.

  In another place I'd never have dared put myself within range of that lofty stare. But Toulon is Toulon; dancing eliminates uncomfortable preambles, it throws strangers into each other's arms and sets the stage for love.

  They were playing dipsy-doodly music full of sauciness and winning smiles; we danced a waltz. The arched bodies are riveted together at the sex; grave profiles cast thoughtful downward glances, turn less quickly than the tripping and now and then plodding feet. Free hands assume the gracious attitudes affected by common folk when they take a cup of tea or piss it out again. A springtime exhilaration transports the bodies. Those bodies bud, push forth shoots, branches, hard members bump, squeeze, sweats commingle, and there's another couple heading for one of the rooms with the globe lights overhead and the eiderdowns on the bed.

  Despoiled of the accessories which cow civilians and of the manner sailors adopt to screw up their courage, Hell of a fellow became a meek animal. He had got his nose broken by a syphon-bottle in the course of a brawl. Without that crooked nose his face might well have been uninteresting. A syphon-bottle had put the finishing touch to a masterpiece.

  Upon his naked torso, this lad, who represented pure luck to me, had Lousy Luck tattooed in blue capital letters. He told me his story. It was brief. That afflicting tattoo condensed it in a nutshell. He'd emerged from the brig. After the Ernest-Renan mutiny there'd been the inquest; they'd confused him with a colleague; that was why his hair was only half an inch long; he deplored a tonsure which wonderfully became him. "I've never had anything but lousy luck," he repeated, shaking that bald little head reminiscent of a classical bust, "and it ain't never going to change."

  I slipped my fetish-chain around his neck. "I'm not giving it to you," I explained, "it's a charm, but not much of a one, I guess, for it hasn't done much for me and won't for you either. Just wear it tonight." Then I uncapped my fountain pen and crossed out the ominous tattoo. I drew a star and a heart above it. He smiled. He understood, more with his skin than with the rest, that he was in safe hands, that our encounter wasn't like the ones he'd grown accustomed to: hasty encounters in which selfishness satisfies itself.

  Lousy luck! Incredible�
�with that mouth, those teeth, those eyes, that belly, those shoulders and cast-iron muscles, those legs, how was it possible? Lousy luck, with that fabulous little undersea plant, forlorn, inert, shipwrecked on the frothy fleece, which then stirs, unwrinkles, develops, rouses itself and hurls its sap afar when once it is restored to its element of love. Lousy luck? I couldn't believe it; and to resolve the problem I drowned myself in a vigilant sleep.

  Lousy Luck remained very still beside me. Little by little, I felt him undertaking the delicate maneuver of extricating his arm from under my elbow. I didn't for a single instant think he was meditating a dirty trick. It would have been to demonstrate my ignorance of the code of the fleet. "Gentlemanliness," "semper fidelis" and the strict up and up embellish the mariners' vocabulary.

  I watched him out of the corner of one eye. First, several times, he fingered the chain, seemed to be weighing it, kissed it, rubbed it against his tattoo. Then, with the dreadful deliberation of a player in the act of cheating, he tested to see if I was asleep, coughed, touched me, listened to my breathing, approached his face to my open right hand lying by my face and gently pressed his cheek to my palm.

  Indiscreet witness of this attempt being made by an unlucky child who, in the midst of the sea's wilderness, felt a life-saver coming within reach, I had to make a major effort in order not to lose my wits, feign a sudden awakening and demolish my life.

  Day had scarcely dawned when I left him. My eyes avoided his which were laden with all the great expectations surging up in him and the hopes to which he couldn't give expression. He returned my chain. I kissed him, I edged past him and switched off the lamp by the bed.