IN America I had a number of Hindu friends, some good, some bad, some indifferent.  Circumstances had placed me in a position where fortunately I could be of aid to them; I secured jobs for them, I harboured them, and I fed them when necessary.  They were very grateful, I must say; so much so, in fact, that they made my life miserable with their attentions.  Two of them were saints, if I know what a saint is; particularly Gupte, who was found one morning with his throat cut from ear to ear.  In a little boarding house in Greenwich Village he was found one morning stretched out stark naked on the bed, his flute beside him, and his throat gashed, as I say, from ear to ear.  It was never discovered whether he had been murdered or whether he had committed suicide.  But that's neither here nor there....

      I'm thinking back to the chain of circumstances which has brought me finally to Nanantatee's place.  Thinking how strange it is that I should have forgotten all about Nanantatee until the other day when lying in a shabby hotel room on the Rue Cels.  I'm lying there on the iron bed thinking what a zero I have become, what a cipher, what a nullity, when bango! out pops the word: NONENTITY!  That's what we called him in New York - Nonentity.  Mister Nonentity.

      I'm lying on the floor now in that gorgeous suite of rooms he boasted of when he was in New York.  Nanantatee is playing the good Samaritan; he has given me a pair of itchy blankets, horse blankets they are, in which I curl up on the dusty floor.  There are little jobs to do every hour of the day - that is, if I am foolish enough to remain indoors.  In the morning he wakes me rudely in order to have me prepare the vegetables for his lunch: onions, garlic, beans, etc.  His friend, Kepi, warns me not to eat the food - he says it's bad.  Bad or good, what difference?  Food!  That's all that matters.  For a little food I am quite willing to sweep his carpets with a broken broom, to wash his clothes and to scrape the crumbs off the floor as soon as he has finished eating.  He's become absolutely immaculate since my arrival: everything has to be dusted now, the chairs must be arranged a certain way, the clock must ring, the toilet must flush properly.... A crazy Hindu if ever there was one!  And parsimonious as a string bean.  I'll have a great laugh over it when I get out of his clutches, but just now I'm a prisoner, a man without caste, an untouchable....

      If I fail to come back at night and roll up in the horse blankets he says to me on arriving: "Oh, so you didn't die then?  I thought you had died."  And though he knows I'm absolutely penniless he tells me every day about some cheap room he has just discovered in the neighbourhood.  "But I can't take a room yet, you know that," I say.  And then, blinking his eyes like a Chink, he answers smoothly: "Oh, yes, I forgot that you had no money.  I am always forgetting, Endree.... But when the cable comes ... when Miss Mona sends you the money, then you will come with me to look for a room, eh?"  And in the next breath he urges me to stay as long as I wish - "six months ... seven months, Endree ... you are very good for me here."

      Nanantatee is one of the Hindus I never did anything for in America.  He represented himself to me as a wealthy merchant, a pearl merchant, with a luxurious suite of rooms on the Rue Lafayette, Paris, a villa in Bombay, a bungalow in Darjeeling.  I could see from first glance that he was a half- wit, but then half-wits sometimes have the genius to amass a fortune.  I didn't know that he paid his hotel bill in New York by leaving a couple of fat pearls in the proprietor's hands.  It seems amusing to me how that little duck once swaggered about the lobby of that hotel in New York with an ebony cane, bossing the bellhops around, ordering luncheons for his guests, calling up the porter for theatre tickets, renting a taxi by the day, etc., etc., all without a sou in his pocket.  Just a string of fat pearls around his neck which he cashed one by one as time wore on.  And the fatuous way he used to pat me on the back, thank me for being so good to the Hindu boys - "they are all very intelligent boys, Endree ... very intelligent!"  Telling me that the good lord so-and-so would repay me for my kindness.  That explains now why they used to giggle so, these intelligent Hindu boys, when I suggested that they touch Nanantatee for a five-spot.

      Curious now how the good lord so-and-so is requiting me for my benevolence.  I'm nothing but a slave to this fat little duck.  I'm at his beck and call continually.  He needs me here - he tells me so to my face.  When he goes to the crap-can he shouts: "Endree, bring me a pitcher of water, please.  I must wipe myself."  He wouldn't think of using toilet paper, Nanantatee.  Must be against his religion.  No, he calls for a pitcher of water and a rag.  He's delicate, the fat little duck.  Sometimes when I'm drinking a cup of pale tea in which he has dropped a rose leaf he comes alongside of me and lets a loud fart, right in my face.  He never says "Excuse me!"  The word must be missing from his Gujarati dictionary.

      The day I arrived at Nanantatee's apartment he was in the act of performing his ablutions, that is to say, he was standing over a dirty bowl trying to work his crooked arm around toward the back of his neck.  Beside the bowl was a brass goblet which he used to change the water.  He requested me to be silent during the ceremony.  I sat there silently, as I was bidden, and watched him as he sang and prayed and spat now and then into the washbowl.  So this is the wonderful suite of rooms he talked about in New York.  The Rue Lafayette!  It sounded like an important street to me back there in New York.  I thought only millionaires and pearl merchants inhabited the street.  It sounds wonderful, the Rue Lafayette, when you're on the other side of the water.  So does Fifth Avenue, when you're over here.  One can't imagine what dumps there are on these swell streets.  Anyway, here I am at last, sitting in the gorgeous suite of rooms on the Rue Lafayette.  And this crazy duck with his crooked arm is going through the ritual of washing himself.  The chair on which I'm sitting is broken, the bedstead is falling apart, the wallpaper is in tatters, there is an open valise under the bed crammed with dirty wash. From where I sit I can glance at the miserable courtyard down below where the aristocracy of the Rue Lafayette sit and smoke their clay pipes.  I wonder now, as he chants the doxology, what the bungalow in Darjeeling looks like.  It's interminable, his chanting and praying.

      He explains to me that he is obliged to wash in a certain prescribed way - his religion demands it.  But on Sundays he takes a bath in the tin tub - the Great I AM will wink at that, he says.  When he's dressed he goes to the cupboard, kneels before a little idol on the third shelf, and repeats the mumbo jumbo.  If you pray like that every day, he says, nothing will happen to you.  The good lord what's his name never forgets an obedient servant.  And then he shows me the crooked arm which he got in a taxi accident on a day doubtless when he had neglected to rehearse the complete song and dance.  His arm looks like a broken compass; it's not an arm any more, but a knucklebone with a shank attached.  Since the arm has been repaired he has developed a pair of swollen glands in the armpit - fat little glands, exactly like a dog's testicles.  While bemoaning his plight he remembers suddenly that the doctor had recommended a more liberal diet.  He begs me at once to sit down and make up a menu with plenty of fish and meat.  "And what about oysters, Endree - for le petit frère?"  But all this is only to make an impression on me.  He hasn't the slightest intention of buying himself oysters, or meat, or fish.  Not as long as I am there, at least.  For the time being we are going to nourish ourselves on lentils and rice and all the dry foods he has stored away in the attic.  And the butter he bought last week, that won't go to waste either.  When he commences to cure the butter the smell is unbearable.  I used to run out at first, when he started frying the butter, but now I stick it out.  He'd only be too delighted if he could make me vomit up my meal - that would be something else to put away in the cupboard along with the dry bread and the mouldy cheese and the little grease cakes that he makes himself out of the stale milk and the rancid butter.

      For the last five years, so it seems, he hasn't done a stroke of work, hasn't turned over a penny.  Business has gone to smash.  He talks to me about pearls in the Indian Ocean - big fat ones on which you can live for a lifetime.  The Arabs are ruining the business, he says.  But meanwhile he prays to the lord so-and-so every day, and that sustains him.  He's on a marvellous footing with the deity: knows just how to cajole him, how to wheedle a few sous out of him.  It's a pure commercial relationship.  In exchange for the flummery before the cabinet every day he gets his ration of beans and garlic, to say nothing of the swollen testicles under his arm.  He is confident that everything will turn out well in the end.  The pearls will sell again some day, maybe five years hence, maybe twenty - when the Lord Boomaroom wishes it.  "And when the business goes, Endree, you will get ten percent - for writing the letters.  But first Endree, you must write the letter to find out if we can get credit from India.  It will take about six months for an answer, maybe seven months ... the boats are not fast in India."  He has no conception of time at all, the little duck.  When I ask him if he has slept well he will say: "Ah, yes, Endree, I sleep very well ... I sleep sometimes ninety-two hours in three days."

 

      Mornings he is usually too weak to do any work.  His arm!  That poor broken crutch of an arm!  I wonder sometimes when I see him twisting it around the back of his neck how he will ever get it into place again.  If it weren't for that little paunch he carries he'd remind me of one of those contortionists at the Cirque Medrano.  All he needs is to break a leg.  When he sees me sweeping the carpet, when he sees what a cloud of dust I raise, he begins to cluck like a pygmy.  "Good!  Very good, Endree.  And now I will pick up the knots."  That means that there are a few crumbs of dust which I have overlooked; it is a polite way he has of being sarcastic.

 

      Afternoons there are always a few cronies from the pearl market dropping in to pay him a visit.  They're all very suave, butter-tongued bastards with soft, doelike eyes; the sit around the table drinking the perfumed tea with a loud hissing noise while Nanantatee jumps up and down and a jack-in-the-box or points to a crumb on the floor and says in his smooth slippery voice - "Will you please pick that up, Endree."  When the guests arrive he going unctuously to the cupboard and gets out the dry crusts of bread which he toasted maybe a week ago and which taste strongly now of the mouldy wood.  Not a crumb is thrown away.  If the bread gets too sour he takes it downstairs to the concierge who, so he says, has been very kind to him.  According to him, there concierge is delighted to get the stale break - she makes breadpudding with it.

      One day my friend Anatoly came to see me.  Nanantatee was delighted.  Insisted that Anatoly stay for tea.  Insisted that he try little grease cakes and the stale bread.  "You must come every day," he says, "and teach me Russian.  Fine language, Russian ... I want to speak it.  How do you say that again, Endree - borsht?  You will write that down for me, please, so that he can observe my technique.  He bought the typewriter, after he had collected on the bad arm, because the doctor recommended it as a good exercise.  But he got tired of the typewriter shortly - it was an English typewriter.

      When he learned that Anatoly played the mandolin he said: "Very good!  You must come every day and teach me the music.  I will buy a mandolin as soon as business is better.  It is good for my arm."  The next day he borrows a phonograph from the concierge.  "You will please teach me to dance, Endree.  My stomach is too big."  I am hoping that he will buy a porterhouse steak some day so that I can say to him: "You will please bite it for me, Mister Nonentity.  My teeth are not strong!"

      As I said a moment ago, ever since my arrival he has become extraordinarily meticulous.  "Yesterday," he says, "you made three mistakes, Endree.  First, you forgot to close the toilet door and so all night it makes boom-boom; second, you left the kitchen window open and so the window is cracked this morning.  And you forgot to put out the milk bottle!  Always you will put out the milk bottle please, before you go to bed, and in the morning you will please bring in the bread."

      Every day his friend Kepi drops in to see if any visitors have arrived from India.  He waits for Nanantatee to go out and then he scurries to the cupboard and devours the sticks of bread that are hidden away in a glass jar.  The food is no good, he insists, but he puts it away like a rat.  Kepi is a scrounger, a sort of human tick who fastens himself to the hide of even the poorest compatriot.  From Kepi's standpoint they are all nabobs.  For a Manila cheroot and the price of a drink he will suck any Hindu's ass.  A Hindu's, mind you, but not an Englishman's.  He has the address of every whorehouse in Paris, and the rates.  Even from the ten franc joints he gets his little commission.  And he knows the shortest to any place you want to go.  He will ask you first if you want to go by taxi; if you say no, he will suggest the bus, and if that is too high then the streetcar or the metro.  Or he will offer to walk you there and save a franc or two, knowing very well that it will be necessary to pass a tabac on the way and that you will please be so good as to buy me a little cheroot.

      Kepi is interesting, in a way, because he has absolutely no ambition except to get a fuck every night.  Every penny he makes, and they are damned few, he squanders in the dance halls.  He has a wife and eight children in Bombay, but that does not prevent him from proposing marriage to any little femme de chambre who is stupid and credulous enough to be taken in by him.  He has a little room on the Rue Condorcet for which he pays sixty francs a month.  He papered it all himself.  Very proud of it, too.  He used violet-coloured ink in his fountain pen because it lasts longer.  He shines his own shoes, presses his own pants, does his own laundry.  For a little cigar, a cheroot, if you please, he will escort you all over Paris.  If you stop to look at a shirt or a collar button his eyes flash.  "Don't buy it here," he will say.  "They ask too much.  I will show you a cheaper place."  And before you have time to think about it he will whisk you away and deposit you before another show window where there are the same ties and shirts and collar buttons - maybe it's the very same store! but you don't know the difference.  When Kepi hears that you want to buy something his soul becomes animated.  He will ask you so many questions and drag you to so many places that you are bound to get thirsty and ask him to have a drink, whereupon you will discover to your amazement that you are again standing in a tabac - maybe the same tabac! - and Kepi is saying again in that small unctuous voice: "Will you please be so good as to buy me a little cheroot?"  No matter what you propose doing, even if it's only to walk around the corner, Kepi will economize for you.  Kepi will show you the shortest way, the cheapest place, the biggest dish, because whatever you have to do you must pass a tabac, and whether there is a revolution or a lockout or a quarantine Kepi must be at the Moulin Rouge or the Olympia or the Ange Rouge when the music strikes up.

      The other day he brought a book for me to read.  It was about a famous suit between a holy man and the editor of an Indian paper.  The editor, it seems, had openly accused the holy man of being diseased.  Kepi says it must have been the great French pox, but Nanantatee avers that it was the Japanese clap.  For Nanantatee everything has to be a little exaggerated.  At any rate, says Nanantatee cheerily: "You will please tell me what it says, Endree.  I can't read the book - it hurts my arm."  Then, by way of encouraging me - "it is a fine book about the fucking, Endree.  Kepi has brought it for you.  He thinks about nothing but the girls.  So many girls he fucks - just like Krishna.  We don't believe in that business, Endree...."

      A little later he takes me upstairs to the attic which is loaded down with tin cans and crap from India wrapped in burlap and firecracker paper.  "Here is where I bring the girls," he says.  And then rather wistfully: "I am not a very good fucker, Endree.  I don't screw the girls any more.  I hold them in my arms and I say the words.  I like only to say the words now."  It isn't necessary to listen any further: I know that he is going to tell me about his arm.  I can see him lying there with that broken hinge dangling from the side of the bed.  But to my surprise he adds: "I am no good for the fucking, Endree.  I never was a very good fucker.  My brother, he is good!  Three times a day, every day!  And Kepi, he is good - just like Krishna."

      His mind is fixed now on the "fucking business".  Downstairs, in the little room where he kneels before the open cabinet, he explains to me how it was when he was rich and his wife and the children were here.  On holidays he would take his wife to the House of All Nations and hire a room for the night.  Every room was appointed in a different style.  His wife liked it there very much.  "A wonderful place for the fucking, Endree.  I know all the rooms...."

      The walls of the little room in which we are sitting are crammed with photographs.  Every branch of the family is represented, it is like a cross-section of the Indian empire.  For the most part the members of this genealogical tree look like withered leaves: the women are frail and they have a startled, frightened look in their eyes: the men have a keen, intelligent look, like educated chimpanzees.  They are all there, about ninety of them, with their white bullocks, their dung cakes, their skinny legs, their old-fashioned spectacles; in the background, now and then, one catches a glimpse of the parched soil, of a crumbling pediment, of an idol with crooked arms, a sort of human centipede.  There is something so fantastic, so incongruous about this gallery that one is reminded inevitably of the great spawn of temples which stretch from the Himalayas to the tip of Ceylon [Sri Lanka], a vast jumble of architecture, staggering in beauty and at the same time monstrous, hideously monstrous because the fecundity which seethes and ferments in the myriad ramifications of design seems to have exhausted the very soil of India itself.  Looking at the seething hive of figures which swarm the facades of the temples one is overwhelmed by the potency of those dark, handsome peoples who mingled their mysterious streams in a sexual embrace that has lasted thirty centuries or more.  These frail men and women with piercing eyes who stare out of the photographs seem like the emaciated shadows of those virile, massive figures who incarnated themselves in stone and fresco from one end of India to the other in order that the heroic myths of the races who here intermingled should remain forever entwined in the hearts of their countrymen.  When I look at only a fragment of these spacious dreams of stone, these toppling, sluggish edifices studded with gems, coagulated with human sperm, I am overwhelmed by the dazzling splendour of those imaginative flights which enabled half a billion people of diverse origins to thus incarnate the most fugitive expressions of their longing.

      It is a strange, inexplicable medley of feelings which assails me now as Nanantatee prattles on about the sister who died in childbirth.  There she is on the wall, a frail, timid thing of twelve or thirteen clinging to the arm of a dotard.  At ten years of age she was given in wedlock to this old roue who had already buried five wives.  She had seven children, only one of whom survived her.  She was given to the aged gorilla in order to keep the pearls in the family.  As she was passing away, so Nanantatee puts it, she whispered to the doctor: "I am tired of this fucking....I don't want to fuck any morel, doctor."  As he relates this to me he scratched his head solemnly with his withered arm.  "The fucking business is bad, Endree," he says.  "But I will give you a word that will always make you lucky; you must say it every day, over and over, a million times you must say it.  It is the best word there is, Endree ... say it now ... OOMAHARUMOOMA!"

      "OOMARABOO...."

      "No, Endree ... like this ... OOMAHARUMOOMA!"

      "OOMAMABOOMBA...."

      "No, Endree ... like this...."

      ... But what with the murky light, the botchy print, the tattered cover, the jigjagged page, the fumbling fingers, the foxtrotting fleas, the lie-a-bed lice, the scum on his tongue, the drop in his eye, the lump in his throat, the drink in his pottle, the itch in his palm, the wail of his wind, the grief from his breath, the fog of his brainfag, the tic of his conscience, the height of his rage, the gush of his fundament, the fire of his gorge, the tickle of his tail, the rats in his garret, the  hullabaloo and the dust in his ears, since it took him a month to steal a march, he was hard-set to memorize more than a word a week.

 

      I suppose I would never have gotten out of Nanantatee's clutches if fate hadn't intervened.  One night, as luck would have it, Kepi asked me if I wouldn't take one of his clients to a whorehouse nearby.  The young man had just come from India and he had not very much money to spend.  He was one of Gandhi's men, one of that little band who made the historic march to the sea during the salt trouble.  A very gay disciple of Gandhi's I must say, despite the vows of abstinence he had taken.  Evidently he hadn't looked at a woman for ages.  It was all I could do to get him as far as the Rue Laferriere; he was like a god with his tongue hanging out.  And a pompous, vain little devil to boot!  He had decked himself out in a corduroy suit, a beret, a cane, a Windsor tie; he had bought himself two fountain pens, a kodak, and some fancy underwear.  The money he was spending was a gift from the merchants of Bombay; they were sending him to England to spread the gospel of Gandhi.

      Once inside Miss Hamilton's joint he began to lose his sang-froid.  When suddenly he found himself surrounded by a bevy of naked women he looked at me in consternation.  "Pick one out," I said.  "You can have your choice."  He had become so rattled that he could scarcely look at them.  "You do it for me," he murmured, blushing violently.  I looked them over coolly and picked out a plump young wench who seemed full of feathers.  We sat down in the reception room and waited for the drinks.  The madam wanted to know why I didn't take a girl also.  "Yes, you take one too," said the young Hindu.  "I don't want to be alone with her."  So the girls were brought in again and I chose one for myself, a rather tall, thin one with melancholy eyes.  We were left alone, the four of us, in the reception room.  After a few moments my young Gandhi leans over and whispers something in me ear.  "Sure, if you like her better, take her," I said, and so, rather awkwardly and considerably embarrassed, I explained to the girls that we would like to switch.  I saw at once that we had made a faux pas, but by now my young friend had become gay and lecherous and nothing would do but to get upstairs quickly and have it over with.

      We took adjoining rooms with a connecting door between.  I think my companion had in mind to make another switch once he had satisfied his sharp, gnawing hunger.  At any rate, no sooner had the girls left the room to prepare themselves than I hear him knocking on the door.  "Where is the toilet, please?" he asks.  Not thinking that it was anything serious I urge him to do it in the bidet.  The girls return with towels in their hands.  I hear him giggling in the next room.

      As I'm putting on my pants suddenly I hear a commotion in the next room.  The girl is bawling him out, calling him a pig, a dirty little pig.  I can't imagine what he has done to warrant such an outburst.  I'm standing there with one foot in my trousers listening attentively.  He's trying to explain to her in English, raising his voice louder and louder until it becomes a shriek.

      I hear a door slam and in another moment the madam bursts into my room, her face as red as a beet, her arms gesticulating wildly.  "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," she screams, "bringing a man like that to my place!  He's a barbarian ... he's a pig ... he's a ...!"  My companion is standing behind her, in the doorway, a look of utmost discomfiture on his face.  "What did you do?" I ask.

      "What did he do?" yells the madam.  "I'll show you....Come here!"  And grabbing me by the arm she drags me into the next room.  "There!  There!" she screams, pointing to the bidet.

      "Come on, let's get out," says the Hindu boy.

      "Wait a minute, you can't get out as easily as all that."

      The madam is standing by the bidet, fuming and spitting.  The girls are standing there too, with towels in their hands.  The five of us are standing there looking at the bidet.  There are two enormous turds floating in the water.  The madam bends down and puts a towel over it.  "Frightful!  Frightful!" she wails.  "Never have I seen anything like this!  A pig!  A dirty little pig!"

      The Hindu boy looks at me reproachfully.  "You should have told me!" he says.  "I didn't know it wouldn't go down.  I asked you where to go and you told me to use that."  He is almost in tears.

      Finally the madam takes me to one side.  She has become a little more reasonable now.  After all, it was a mistake.  Perhaps the gentlemen would like to come downstairs and order another drink - for the girls.  It was a great shock to the girls.  They are not used to such things.  And if the good gentlemen will be so kind as to remember the femme de chambre.... It is not so pretty for the femme de chambre - that mess, that ugly mess.  She shrugs her shoulders and winks her eye.  A lamentable incident.  But an accident.  If the gentlemen will wait here a few moments the maid will bring the drinks.  Would the gentlemen like to have some champagne?  Yes?

      "I'd like to get out of here," says the Hindu boy weakly.

      "Don't feel so badly about it," says the madam.  "It is all over now.  Mistakes will happen sometimes.  Next time you will ask for the toilet."  She goes on about the toilet - one on every floor, it seems.  And a bathroom too.

      "I have a lot of English clients," she says.  "They are all gentlemen.  The gentleman is a Hindu?  Charming people, the Hindus.  So intelligent.  So handsome."

      When we get into the street the charming young gentleman is almost weeping.  He is sorry now that he bought a corduroy suit and the cane and the fountain pens.  He talks about the eight vows that he took, the control of the palate, etc.  On the march to Dandi even a plate of ice cream it was forbidden to take.  He tells me about the spinning wheel - how the little band of Satyagrahists imitated the devotion of their master.  He relates with pride how he walked beside the master and conversed with him.  I have the illusion of being in the presence of one of the twelve disciples.

      During the next few days we see a good deal of each other; there are interviews to be arranged with the newspaper men and lectures to be given to the Hindus of Paris.  It is amazing to see how these spineless devils order one another about; amazing also to see how ineffectual they are in all that concerns practical affairs.  And the jealousy and the intrigues, the petty, sordid rivalries.  Wherever there are ten Hindus together there is India with her sects and schisms, her racial, lingual, religious, political antagonisms.  In the person of Gandhi they are experiencing for a brief moment the miracle of unity, but when he goes there will be a crash, an utter relapse into the strife and chaos so characteristic of the Indian people.

      The young Hindu, of course, is optimistic.  He has been to America and he has been contaminated by the cheap idealism of the Americans, contaminated by the ubiquitous bathtub, the five-and-ten-cent store bric-a-brac, the bustle, the efficiency, the machinery, the high wages, the free libraries, etc., etc.  His ideal would be to Americanize India.  He is not at all pleased with Gandhi's retrogressive mania.  Forward, he says, just like a YMCA man.  As I listen to his tales of America I see how absurd it is to expect of Gandhi that miracle which will deroute the trend of destiny.  India's enemy is not England, but America.  India's enemy is the time spirit, the hand which cannot be turned back.  Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world.  America is the very incarnation of doom.  She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.

      He thinks the Americans are a very gullible people.  He tells me about the credulous souls who succoured him there - the Quakers, the Unitarians, the Theosophists, the New Thoughters, the Seventh-day Adventists, etc.  He knew where to sail his boat, this bright young man.  He knew how to make the tears come to his eyes at the right moment; he knew how to take up a collection, how to appeal to the minister's wife, how to make love to the mother and daughter at the same time.  To look at him you would think him a saint.  And he is a saint, in the modern fashion; a contaminated saint who talks in one breath of love, brotherhood, bathtubs, sanitation, efficiency, etc.

      The last night of his sojourn in Paris is given up to "the fucking business."  He has had a full program all day - conferences, cablegrams, interviews, photographs for the newspapers, affectionate farewells, advice to the faithful, etc., etc.  At dinner time he decides to lay aside his troubles.  He orders champagne with the meal, he snaps his fingers at the 'garcon' and behaves in general like the boorish little peasant that he is.  And since he has had a bellyful of all the good places he suggests now that I show him something more primitive.  He would like to go to a very cheap place, order two or three girls at once.  I steer him along the Boulevard de la Chapelle, warning him all the while to be careful of his pocketbook.  Around Aubervilliers we duck into a cheap dive and immediately we've got a flock of them on our hands.  In a few minutes he's dancing with a naked wench, a huge blonde with creases in her jowls.  I can see her ass reflected a dozen times in the mirrors that line the room - ad those dark, bony fingers of his clutching her tenaciously.  The table is full of beer glasses, the mechanical piano is wheezing and gasping.  The girls who are unoccupied are sitting placidly on the leather benches, scratching themselves peacefully just like a family of chimpanzees.  There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected.  In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane.  And like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws.  My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambience which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulation of the nerve ends.

      And the more substantial, the more solid the core of me became, the more delicate and extravagant appeared the close, palpable reality out of which I was being squeezed.  In the measure that I became more and more metallic, in the same measure the scene before my eyes became inflated.  The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the introduction of a single foreign particle, even a microscopic particle, as I say, would have shattered everything.  For the fraction of a second, perhaps, I experienced that utter clarity which the epileptic, it is said, is given to know.  In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis.  In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs.  On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama.  If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses.  For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood.  He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality.  Everything is endured - disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui - in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.  And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off.  All the while someone is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water.  And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige of relief.  Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.

      And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet.  What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit.  That, I believe, would be more miraculous than anything which man has looked forward to.  It would be miraculous because it would be undreamed of.  It would be more miraculous than even the wildest dream because 'anybody' could imagine the possibility but nobody ever has, and probably nobody ever again will.

      Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me.  For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some intrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.  At dawn I parted company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs, enough for a room.  Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself.  Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions.  I myself was intact.  The world was intact.  Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake; tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn for sympathy, for aid, for faith.  It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone than at this very moment.  I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer.  Even if war were declared, and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge it up to the hilt.  And if rape were the order of the day then rape I would, and with a vengeance.  At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress?  Had one single element of man's nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history?  By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all.  At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage.  When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a skeleton.  One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh.  The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts.  On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour.  If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal.  Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones.  I am done with that.  I have reached the limits of endurance.  My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further.  As far as history goes I am dead.  If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back.  I have found God, but He is insufficient.  I am only spiritually dead.  Physically I am alive.  Morally I am free.  The world which I have departed is a menagerie.  The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws.  If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.