Dawn. Pierre was overcome with fatigue and drowsiness, lulled by the warmth of the aromatic soup he had consumed. He started scouting for a place to sleep.
Here, in the concave spaces of alcoves, in the recesses of the clotted homes, people slept balled up, coiled like orange peels. Pierre found himself a free crevice sheltered from the wind and planted himself in it, wrapping strips of newspaper from a garbage can around his freezing extremities, as he had seen others do. He was already asleep before he had managed to cozy up to the damp, mangy wall.
He was awoken by a short navy-blue man in a cape who had been patiently explaining to him for some minutes that lying down was forbidden and that he would have to move on at once. Pierre was not precisely sure where “on” might be, but nonetheless he obediently began drifting again.
The fantastical, laboriously built city of the night gave way like a Fata Morgana. Where a moment ago rose magical cubes and bulging cones of turnip heads, now the motorhome trams glided down their slick rails, their bow collectors impersonating smoke. It was now daytime…
Work was nowhere to be found. Roaming down side streets, Pierre entered garage after garage, offering to wash automobiles. He was greeted everywhere with the hostile faces and bloodshot eyes of workmen scrubbing cars, their eyes fierce, like dogs smelling a rival for a bone that will feed one at most. Nobody was in need of help.
When night fell, Jeannette’s name trembled inside him – a new burning cramp more painful than the hunger. He instinctively started wandering in the direction of her apartment.
Jeannette still wasn’t home.
The long streets multiplied before him, stretching into infinity like a rubber strap tied to his leg, they scampered from under his feet like lizards in the reflections of the dashing lights, they knowingly winked in the dusk with the eyes of a thousand pay-by-the-hour hotels.
Approaching one hotel, Pierre suddenly spotted a couple emerging. A broad-shouldered man and a petite, slender woman. He couldn’t make out the woman’s face in the darkness, but he recognized her silhouette as Jeannette’s. He lurched toward them, shoving aside the passersby who got in his way. Before he managed to catch up with them, they had stepped into a taxi and driven off.
Before the doors of the empty hotel, he stood for a moment, helpless, in a powerless frenzy. The onrushing wave of pedestrians swept him further along.
He had not moved a hundred steps when he saw a couple leaving another hotel. The girl’s silhouette was deceptively like Jeannette’s. To get his hands on them, he had to cross the street. His path was blocked by a surging flood of automobiles. When he at last reached the opposite sidewalk, the couple was no longer there, they had dissolved into the crowd. In his helpless rage he choked on bitter tears.
All around hotel signs flickered on and off, suggestively flashing their alternating red and white lights, beckoning pedestrians inside. Jeannette could have been in any one of those hotels at that moment. Exhausted by the lusts of an insatiable muscleman, she was sleeping curled up like a child, her hands folded between her knees as though in prayer. The thug was stroking her white, frail, defenseless body. Pierre felt an inexpressible caring for her, almost tenderness.
His thoughts swirled, as tangled and twisted as the alleyways down which he drifted. On the thresholds of cheap hotels stood skinny women in shabby clothing, sheltering themselves from the rain under the rapidly blossoming palms of umbrellas. They stopped passersby with alluring staccato clicks of the tongue, just as dogs are called all over the world. In Paris, this is how they call people.
A slender, consumptive girl in soaked evening slippers promised him the most carefully concealed delights of her scrofulous body for only five francs. To emphasize an indecent gesture she meant to be seductive, she stuck out a white, furry tongue, as though she had indigestion.
Pierre shook from the cold and inner turmoil. From somewhere close by drifted the bouncing melody of a player piano. A small red lantern indicated it was a lively establishment.
Pierre recalled that he still had the three francs he’d earned during the night, and he decided to go in. With his three francs he could order himself a boca and sit in the warmth until morning.
He was enveloped by a wave of nauseating, staggering warmth, the powerful smell of powder, cheap perfumes, and cheap women. He groped his way to the first table by the wall and, utterly exhausted, slumped heavily onto the upholstered couch, whose springs gave a harsh lament.
When he opened his eyes into the dazzling light, it seemed to him that the couch spring beneath him was also the central spring of the whole mechanism he had unintentionally damaged.
The room in no way differed from the bar of an average public house, with tables and the piano now playing at such a slow tempo that Pierre could hear the vacuum between the individual tones of the gamboling keyboard, the pulse of a falling drop, a molecule of time.
By the wall, in the shade of the rachitic palms in green buckets, sprouted rows of speckled toadstool-tables. A dozen naked, voluptuous women circulated in lazy, atomized movements between them, as though filmed in slow motion. Their plump, swollen bodies were visibly straining to break the air’s resistance, rocking on the rubber pillows amid the flat, thickened clouds of tobacco smoke, the bodies of Renaissance angels, their faded sashes fluttering rhythmically and fanned out like the tattered wings of moths.
Pierre understood everything in a flash. The spring quivered, and a final bounce tossed him into a different reality.
Yes, this was paradise. Pierre saw this at once, though not being religious, he had never precisely imagined this institution before. He recognized it by the blissful torpor flowing through his veins, by the somehow familiar sounds, the paradisiacal music he seemed to know from a previous life, and by the rustling wings of the angels languidly circling him. But why did the clouds so remind him of tobacco smoke, why did the ambrosia distiller so resemble the bar of an ordinary bistro.
Suddenly his gaze fell on the corner, and Pierre died of humble ecstasy.
Over the wooden altar of the countertop, towered the Lord of Sabaoth, silent and still as a statue. This was no Christian God with a long white beard, it more resembled a bronze, serene Buddha, whose gigantic statue Pierre had once seen at a colonial exhibition. This was the same god exactly, of matronly shape, a puffy, wrinkled, feminine visage, yet from these ears hung the expensive votive offerings of massive earrings counterbalanced like the scales of an exact, mystical weight.
Men trickled one by one into the room with the chilly draft, fumbling and embarrassed, looking long and helplessly for the free table awaiting them.
At a few tables Pierre noticed other women, wrapped in the tight embrace of costly furs, like the sinners in the pictures of the old masters, who vainly struggled to cover their burning nakedness with the transparent fringe of their flowing hair.
From time to time a man would raise himself slowly, staring at one of the angels surrounding him, his eyes wide with astonishment – as though in her face he had suddenly seen that of another, someone familiar and long lost. Then the couple, taking each other by the hand and tracing slow semicircles with their feet, approached the altar of the counter, where in exchange for the mystical writ of a banknote the motionless Buddha of the puffy feminine visage made a ceremonial, liturgical gesture and handed the woman the symbolic ring of the number and the narrow stole of a towel. The betrothed then ascended in the majestic spirals of a twisting, celestial staircase, guided only by fluttering butterfly glances from the odd women wrapped in furs.