The escalator flowed from the bleak abyss of the open street into the gaping abyss of the heavens, carrying along a black mass of wretched, slumbering bodies.
III
He was awoken by an impatient scraping sound. The metro was open.
The gray, drowsy flock, cursing and stretching, reluctantly cleared off the stairs. The depths radiated the thick, narcotizing warmth of the heated entrails of the city, digesting its first helping of light morning trains on an empty stomach. The people wheezed and yawned as they scrambled one after another onto the sidewalk, disappearing one by one into the prickly morning fog.
The first bistros opened their doors. The lucky owners of thirty centimes got to drink a cup of hot black dishwater while standing at a counter.
Pierre did not have thirty centimes, so he began wandering aimlessly up Boulevard de Belleville.
Paris slowly shook off its sleep. In the ruddy, moldering window embrasures of the stooping hotels, the profiles of old, disheveled, half-naked women showed themselves, majestic in their rotting frames, the phantom portraits of the great-grandmothers of this derelict neighborhood where prostitution is an ancestral dignity, like an inherited title or the profession of notary is elsewhere.
A window is a picture nailed to the dead, stone rectangle of the gray wall of the day. There are still-life windows, strange, meticulous compositions by unsung accidental artists, freely composed of a chance curtain, a forgotten vase, or the bright vermilion of tomatoes ripening on a ledge. There are window-portraits, window-interiors, and window-naïfs – suburban idylls à la the Douanier Rousseau – neither discovered nor appraised, ownerless.
When a train approaching the city at night passes the houses on either side of the tracks with their irregular, illuminated square windows set here an.d there and at various heights, then the window is a showcase for a strange, incomprehensible, even foreign life, and my eye – that of a lonely traveler – flaps as helplessly as a moth before the impenetrable panes of glass, incapable of entering.
When after a long and fruitless day in search of work Pierre returned down an empty and unfamiliar street, it was already evening, and the concave squares of the windows had started to grow phosphorescent with their internal, latent light. The street smelled of frying oil, the heat of unaired apartments, the holy, sacramental dinner hour. His greedy, tamed hunger lay at the threshold of his consciousness like a trained dog, without crossing over uninvited, content that every thought that hoped to enter his mind had to tread on it first.
Through the cloud of fatigue, Jeannette’s name battered about inside Pierre like a scream trapped in an airtight container and unable to free itself.
He understood that he had to go to her and talk things over. But what he would actually say to her he did not know.
Before he had disentangled himself from the muddle of streets, night had fallen. He blundered in the dusk for quite some time, with no point of orientation, only barely making out the street signs. Suddenly he had the impression he had come off an unfamiliar field path and onto a safe, well-traveled road.
How often it happens that wandering unfamiliar side streets we suddenly hit upon a familiar road the mind cannot recall, and we pay no heed to our legs as they instinctively guide us forward, a sleepy team of horses pulling their slumbering driver down a path once traveled. Who’s to say we haven’t accidentally hit upon tracks we ourselves once laid, into which the feet step comfortably and firmly, like a dog tracking its own scent. The town we walk every day, the individual beads of images our gaze gels into the negatives of our memory, compose a uniform concept of the city only when strung together on that invisible thread of our scattered steps, that intangible map of our own Paris, so unlike the Parises of others – though their streets may be the same as ours.
When Pierre’s meandering steps had finally brought him to Jeannette’s home, it was already past midnight. Nonetheless, Pierre went upstairs and knocked. Her sleepy-eyed mother opened the door. Jeannette wasn’t in. She hadn’t been home since the day before.
Pierre spent a long time walking down the stairs before going back onto the street. Finding himself on the sidewalk, he didn’t wait by the gate as before, but wandered heavily into the gloom.
On the corner of a bustling avenue, an open taxi drove past, splattering him with mud. A fat playboy was spread out on the seat kissing the lithe girl clinging to him, his free hand brushing back her skirt to explore her slender thighs.
Pierre was unable to make out the girl’s face, he saw only her dark blue cap and slender, almost girlish thighs, and with a sudden inner convulsion he recognized them as Jeannette’s. He started to run, shoving disgruntled passersby left and right.
A moment later the car vanished around a corner, right before his eyes.
He ran a few dozen more steps before stopping, winded. His murky, feverish thoughts suddenly flew off like spooked pigeons, leaving a gaping void and the flapping of wings in his temples.
He was on a narrow street that smelled of sauerkraut and carrots. He struggled to make it to the next corner.
On the abandoned fields of the spacious avenues towered gigantic green cylinders, red cones, white cubes, rough-hewn pyramids, a real kingdom of geometrical forms that had sprouted from the earth overnight. He was at the market stalls.
Gray, exhausted people in rags erected multistory buildings and towers from perfectly round heads of cabbage and bouquets of cauliflower. A sentimental cube of cut flowers shot up skyward. Everything that Paris would need for love and sustenance at daybreak had been gathered here during the night.
The pungent smell of freshly uprooted vegetables stopped Pierre in his tracks. The acrid, patient hunger that had been waiting in vain at the door to his consciousness started doggishly scratching with a paw.
Pierre moved closer. A man stooping under the weight of a gigantic armful of cauliflowers elbowed him and cursed. Pierre shifted meekly onto the sidewalk. Somebody grabbed him by the arm. He looked. A broad-shouldered, mustached, muscular man was pointing to a wheelbarrow filled with carrots…
Pierre took the hint and began to pile a formless tower on the street. A few other haggard people helped him out. He seemed to recognize one of them as his neighbor from the previous night on the metro steps.
The irregular red pyramid grew, drew even with the first floor, and rose higher.
When the empty wagons departed, all the vagrants were led into the depths of the hall. Taking a look around, Pierre noticed a mob, threadbare like himself, trailing behind. They all had filthy woolen rags wrapped around their necks, and their faces were bloodless, unshaven, and sallow.
They were all placed in a long line, and each was treated to a bowl of hot onion soup. Pierre also got a bowl and three francs cash. When he had slurped back the hot liquid, searing his mouth in the process, the bowl was snatched from his hands, and he was pushed aside to let others have their turn. Returning down the streets of this strange new city condemned to annihilation in only a few hours time, Pierre nicked a few big carrots still smelling of soil and greedily devoured them in an alleyway.