"LIFE", said Emerson, "consists in what a man is thinking all day."  If that be so, then my life is nothing but a big intestine.  I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night.

      But I don't ask to go back to America, to be put in double harness again, to work the treadmill.  No, I prefer to be a poor man of Europe.  God knows, I am poor enough; it only remains to be a man.  Last week I thought the problem of living was about to be solved, though I was on the way to becoming self-supporting.  It happened that I ran across another Russian - Serge is his name.  He lives in Suresnes, where there is a little colony of émigres and run-down artists.  Before the revolution Serge was a captain in the Imperial Guard; he stands six foot three in his stockinged feet and drinks vodka like a fish.  His father was an admiral, or something like that, on the battleship "Potemkin".

      I met Serge under rather peculiar circumstances.  Sniffing about for food I found myself toward noon the other day in the neighbourhood of the Folies-Bergère - the back entrance, that is to say, in the narrow lane with an iron gate at one end.  I was dawdling about the stage entrance, hoping vaguely for a casual brush with one of the butterflies, when an open truck pulls up to the sidewalk.  Seeing me standing there with my hands in my pockets the driver, who was Serge, asks me if I would give him a hand unloading the iron barrels.  When he learns that I am an American and that I'm broke he almost weeps with joy.  He has been looking high and low for an English teacher, it seems.  I help him roll the barrels of insecticide inside and I look my fill at the butterflies fluttering about the wings.  The incident takes on strange proportions to me - the empty house, the sawdust dolls bouncing in the wings, the barrels of germicide, the battleship "Potemkin" - above all, Serge's gentleness.  He is big and tender, a man every inch of him, but with a woman's heart.

      In the café nearby - Café des Artistes - he proposes immediately to put me up; says he will put a mattress on the floor in the hallway.  For the lessons he says he will give me a meal every day, a big Russian meal, or if for any reason the meal is lacking then five francs.  It sounds wonderful to me - wonderful.  The only question is, how will I get from Suresnes to the American Express every day?

      Serge insists that we begin at once - he gives me the carfare to get out to Suresnes in the evening.  I arrive a little before dinner, with my knapsack, in order to give Serge a lesson.  There are some guests on hand already - seems as though they always eat in a crowd, everybody chipping in.

      There are eight of us at the table - and three dogs.  The dogs eat first.  They eat oatmeal.  Then we commence.  We eat oatmeal too - as an hors d'oeuvre.  "Chez nous," says Serge, with a twinkle in his eye, "c'est pour les chiens, les Quaker Oats.  Ici pour le gentleman.  Ça va."  After the oatmeal, mushroom soup and vegetables; after that bacon omelette, fruit, red wine, vodka, coffee, cigarettes.  Not bad, the Russian meal.  Everyone talks with his mouth full.  Toward the end of the meal Serge's wife, who is a lazy slut of an Armenian, flops on the couch and begins to nibble bonbons.  She fishes around in the box with her fat fingers, nibbles a tiny piece to see if there is any juice inside, and then throws it on the floor for the dogs.

      The meal over, the guests rush away.  They rush away precipitously, as if they feared a plague.  Serge and I are left with the dogs - his wife has fallen asleep on the couch.  Serge moves about unconcernedly, scraping the garbage for the dogs.  "Dogs like very much," he says, "Very good for dogs.  Little dog he has worms ... he is too young yet."  He bends down to examine some white worms lying on the carpet between the dogs's paws.  Tries to explain about the worms in English, but his vocabulary is lacking.  Finally he consults the dictionary.  "Ah," he says, looking at me exultantly, "tapeworms!"  My response is evidently not very intelligent.  Serge is confused.  He gets down on his hands and knees to examine them better.  He picks one up and lays it on the table beside the fruit.  "Huh, him not very beeg," he grunts.  "Next lesson you learn me worms, no?  You are gude teacher.  I make progress with vou...."

      Lying on the mattress in the hallway the odour of the germicide stifles me.  A pungent, acrid odour that seems to invade every pore of my body.  The food begins to repeat on me - the Quaker Oats, the mushrooms, the bacon, the fried apples.  I see the little tapeworm lying beside the fruit and all the varieties of worms that Serge drew on the tablecloth to explain what was the matter with the dog.  I see the empty pit of the Folies-Bergère and in every crevice there are cockroaches and lice and bedbugs; I see people scratching themselves frantically, scratching and scratching until the blood comes.  I see the worms crawling over the scenery like an army of red ants, devouring everything in sight.  I see the chorus girls throwing away their gauze tunics and running through the aisles naked; I see the spectators in the pit throwing off their clothes also and scratching each other like monkeys.

      I try to quiet myself.  After all, this is a home I've found, and there's a meal waiting for me every day.  And Serge is a brick, there's no doubt about that.  But I can't sleep.  It's like going to sleep in a morgue.  The mattress is saturated with embalming fluid.  It's a morgue for lice, bedbugs, cockroaches, tapeworms.  I can't stand it.  I won't stand it!  After all, I'm a man, not a louse.

      In the morning I wait for Serge to load the truck.  I ask him to take me into Paris.  I haven't the heart to tell him I'm leaving.  I leave the knapsack behind, with the few things that were left me.  When we get to the Place Pereire I jump out.  No particular reason for getting off here.  No particular reason for anything.  I'm free - that's the main thing....

      Light as a bird I flit about from one quarter to another.  It's as though I had been released from prison.  I look at the world with new eyes.  Everything interests me profoundly.  Even trifles.  On the Rue due Faubourg Poissonnière I stop before the window of a physical culture establishment.  There are photographs showing specimens of manhood "before and after".  All frogs.  Some of them are nude, except for a pince-nez or a beard.  Can't understand how these birds fall for parallel bars and dumb-bells.  A frog should have just a wee bit of paunch, like the Baron de Charlus.  He should wear a beard and a pince-nez, but he should never be photographed in the nude.  He should wear twinkling patent-leather boots and in the breast pocket of his sack coat there should be a white handkerchief protruding about three-quarters of an inch above the vent.  If possible, he should have a red ribbon in his lapel, through the buttonhole.  He should wear pyjamas in going to bed.

      Approaching the Place Clichy toward evening I pass the little whore with the wooden stump who stands opposite the Gaumont Palace day in and day out.  She doesn't look a day over eighteen.  Has her regular customers, I suppose.  After midnight she stands there in her black rig rooted to the spot.  Back of her is the little alleyway that blazes like an inferno.  Passing her now with a light heart she reminds me somehow of a goose tied to a stake, a goose with a diseased liver, so that the world may have paté de foie gras.  Must be strange taking the wooden stump to bed with you.  One imagines all sorts of things - splinters, etc.  However, every man to his taste!

      Going down the Rue des Dames I bump into Peckover, another poor-devil who works on the paper.  He complains of getting only three or four hours' sleep a night - has to get up at eight in the morning to work at a dentist's office.  It isn't for the money he's doing it, so he explains - it's for to buy himself a set of false teeth.  "It's hard to read proof when your dropping with sleep," he says.  "The wife, she thinks I've got a cinch of it.  What would we do if you lost your job? she says."  But Peckover doesn't give a damn about the job; it doesn't even allow him spending money.  He has to save his cigarette butts and use them for pipe tobacco.  His coat is held together with pins.  He has halitosis and his hands sweat.  And only three hours' sleep a night.  "It's no way to treat a man," he says.  "And that boss of mine, he bawls the piss out of me if I miss a semicolon."  Speaking of his wife he adds: "That woman of mine, she's got no fucking gratitude, I tell you."

      In parting I manage to worm a franc fifty out of him.  I try to squeeze another fifty centimes out of him but it's impossible.  Anyway, I've got enough for a coffee and croissants.  Near the Gare St. Lazare there's a bar with reduced prices.

      As luck would have it I find a ticket in the lavabo for a concert.  Light as a feather now I go there to the Salle Gaveau.  The usher looks ravaged because I overlook giving him his little tip.  Every time he passes me he looks at me inquiringly, as if perhaps I will suddenly remember.

      It's so long since I've sat in the company of well-dressed people that I feel a bit panic-stricken.  I can still smell the formaldehyde.  Perhaps Serge makes deliveries here too.  But nobody is scratching himself, thank God.  A faint odour of perfume ... very faint.  Even before the music begins there is the bored look on people's faces.  A polite form of self- imposed torture, the concert.  For a moment, when the conductor raps with his little wand, there is a tense spasm of concentration followed almost immediately by a general slump, a quiet vegetable sort of repose induced by the steady, uninterrupted drizzle from the orchestra.  My mind is curiously alert; it's as though my skull has a thousand mirrors inside it.  My nerves are taut, vibrant! the notes are like glass balls dancing on a million jets of water.  I've never been to a concert before on such an empty belly.  Nothing escapes me, not even the tiniest pin falling.  It's as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards.  I can feel the light curving under the vault of my ribs and my ribs hang there over a hollow navel trembling with reverberations.  How long this lasts I have no idea; I have lost all sense of time and place.  After what seems like an eternity there follows an interval of semiconsciousness balanced by such a calm that I feel a great lake inside me, a lake of iridescent sheen, cool as jelly; and over this lake, rising in great swooping spirals, there emerge flocks of birds of passage with long slim legs and brilliant plumage.  Flock after flock surge up from the cool, still surface of the lake and, passing under my clavicles, lose themselves in the white sea of space.  And then slowly, very slowly, as if an old woman in a white cap were going the rounds of my body, slowly the windows are closed and my organs drop back into place.  Suddenly the lights flare up and the man in the white box whom I had taken for a Turkish officer turns out to be a woman with a flowerpot on her head.

      There is a buzz now and all those who want to cough, cough to their heart's content.  There is the noise of feet shuffling and seats slamming, the steady, frittering noise of people moving about aimlessly, of people fluttering their programmes and pretending to read and then dropping their programmes and scuffling under their seats, thankful for even the slightest accident which will prevent them from asking themselves what they were thinking about because if they knew they were thinking about nothing they would go mad.  In the harsh glare of the lights they look at each other vacuously and there is a strange tenseness with which they stare at one another.  And the moment the conductor raps again they fall back into a cataleptic state - they scratch themselves unconsciously or they remember suddenly a show window in which there was displayed a scarf or a hat; they remember every detail of that window with amazing clarity, but where it was exactly, that they can't recall; and that bothers them, keeps them wide awake, restless, and they listen now with redoubled attention because they are wide awake and no matter how wonderful the music is they will not lose consciousness of that show window and that scarf that was hanging there, or the hat.

      And this fierce attentiveness communicates itself; even the orchestra seems galvanized into an extraordinary alertness.  The second number goes off like a top - so fast indeed that when suddenly the music ceases and the lights go up some are stuck in their seats like carrots, their jaws working convulsively, and if you suddenly shouted in their ear Brahms, Beethoven, Mendeleev, Herzegovina, they would answer without thinking - 4,967,289.

      By the time we get to the Debussy number the atmosphere is completely poisoned.  I find myself wondering what it feels like, during intercourse, to be a woman - whether the pleasure is keener, etc.  Try to imagine something penetrating my groin, but have only a vague sensation of pain.  I try to focus, but the music is too slippery.  I can think of nothing but a vase slowly turning and the figures dropping off into space.  Finally there is only light turning, and how does light turn, I ask myself.  The man next to me is sleeping soundly.  He looks like a broker, with his big paunch and his waxed moustache.  I like him thus.  I like especially that big paunch and all that went into the making of it.  Why shouldn't he sleep soundly?  If he wants to listen he can always rustle up the price of a ticket.  I notice that the better dressed they are the more soundly they sleep.  They have an easy conscience, the rich.  If a poor man dozes off, even for a few seconds, he feels mortified; he imagines that he has committed a crime against the composer.

      In the Spanish number the house was electrified.  Everybody sat on the edge of his seat - the drums woke them up.  I thought when the drums started it would keep up forever.  I expected to see people fall out of the boxes or throw their hats away.  There was something heroic about it and he could have driven us stark mad, Ravel, if he had wanted to.  But that's not Ravel.  Suddenly it all died down.  It was as if he remembered, in the midst of his antics, that he had on a cutaway suit.  He arrested himself.  A great mistake, in my humble opinion.  Art consists in going the full length.  If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT.  Ravel sacrificed something for form, for a vegetable that people must digest before going to bed.

 

      My thoughts are spreading.  The music is slipping away from me, now that the drums have ceased.  People everywhere are composed to order.  Under the exit light is a Werther sunk in despair; he is leaning on his two elbows, his eyes are glazed.  Near the door, huddled in a big cape, stands a Spaniard with a sombrero in his hand.  He looks as if he were posing for the "Balzac" of Rodin.  From the neck up he suggests Buffalo Bill.  In the gallery opposite me, in the front row, sits a woman with her legs spread wide apart; she looks as though she had lockjaw, with her neck thrown back and dislocated.  The woman with the red hat who is dozing over the rail - marvellous if she were to have a hemorrhage! if suddenly she spilled a bucketful on those stiff shirts below.  Imagine these bloody no-accounts going home from the concert with blood on their dickies!

      Sleep is the keynote.  No-one is listening any more.  Impossible to think and listen.  Impossible to dream even when the music itself is nothing but a dream.  A woman with white gloves holds a swan in her lap.  The legend is that when Leda was fecundated she gave birth to twins.  Everybody is giving birth to something - everybody but the Lesbian in the upper tier.  Her head is uptilted, her throat wide open; she is all alert and tingling with the shower of sparks that burst from the radium symphony.  Jupiter is piercing her ears.  Little phrases from California, whales with big fins, Zanzibar, the Alcazar.  When along the Guadalquivir there were a thousand mosques ashimmer.  Deep in the icebergs and the days all lilac.  The Money Street with two white hitching posts.  The gargoyles ... the man with the Jaworski nonsense ... the river lights ... the ...