AT one-thirty I called on Van Norden, as per agreement.  He had warned me that if he didn't answer it would mean that he was sleeping with someone, probably his Georgia cunt.

       Anyway, there he was, tucked away comfortably, but with an air of weariness as usual.  He wakes up cursing himself, or cursing the job, or cursing life.  He wakes up utterly bored and discomfited, chagrined to think that he did not die overnight.

       I sit down by the window and give him what encouragement I can.  It is tedious work.  One has to actually coax him out of bed.  Mornings - he means by mornings anywhere between one and five p.m. - mornings, as I say, he gives himself up to reveries.  Mostly it is about the past he dreams.  About his "cunts".  He endeavours to recall how they felt, what they said to him at certain critical moments, where he laid them, and so on.  As he lies there, grinning and cursing, he manipulates his fingers in that curious, bored way of his, as though to convey the impression that his disgust is too great for words.  Over the bedstead hangs a douche bag which he keeps for emergencies - for the virgins whom he tracks down like a sleuth.  Even after he has slept with one of these mythical creatures he will still refer to her as a virgin, and almost never by name.  "My virgin" he will say, just as he says "my Georgia cunt."  When he goes to the toilet he says: "If my Georgia cunt calls tell her to wait.  Say I said so.  And listen, you can have her if you like.  I'm tired of her."

       He takes a squint at the weather and heaves a deep sigh.  If it's rainy he says: "God damn this fucking climate, it makes one morbid."  And if the sun is shining brightly he says: "God damn this fucking sun, it makes you blind!"  As he starts to shave he suddenly remembers that there is no clean towel.  "God damn this fucking hotel, they're too stingy to give you a clean towel every day!"  No matter what he does or where he goes things are out of joint.  Either it's the fucking country or the fucking job, or else it's some fucking cunt who's put him on the blink.

       "My teeth are all rotten," he says, gargling his throat.  "It's the fucking bread they give you to eat here."  He opens his mouth wide and pulls his lower lip down. "See that?  Pulled out six teeth yesterday.  Soon I'll have to get another plate.  That's what you get working for a living.  When I was on the bum I had all my teeth, my eyes were bright and clear.  Look at me now!  It's a wonder I can make a cunt anymore.  Jesus. what I'd like is to find some rich cunt - like that cute little prick, Carl.  Did he ever show you the letters she sends him?  Who is she, do you know?  He wouldn't tell me her name, the bastard ... he's afraid I might take her away from him."  He gargles his throat again and then takes a long look at the cavities.  "You're lucky," he says ruefully.  "You've got friends, at least.  I haven't anybody, except that cute little prick who drives me bats about his rich cunt."

       "Listen," he says, "do you happen to know a cunt by the name of Norma?  She hangs around the Dôme all day.  I think she's queer.  I had her up here yesterday, tickling her ass.  She wouldn't let me do a thing.  I had her on the bed.... I even had her drawers off ... and then I got disgusted.  Jesus, I can't bother struggling that way anymore.  It isn't worth it.  Either they do or they don't - it's foolish to waste time wrestling with them.  While you're struggling with a little bitch like that there may be a dozen cunts on the terrasse just dying to be laid.  It's a fact.  They all come over here to get laid.  They think it's sinful here ... the poor boobs!  Some of these schoolteachers from out West, they're honestly virgins ... I mean it!  They sit around on their can all day thinking about it.  You don't have to work over them very much.  They're dying for it.  I had a married woman the other day who told me she hadn't had a lay for six months.  Can you imagine that?  Jesus, she was hot!  I thought she'd tear the cock off me.  And groaning all the time.  "Do you?  Do you?"  She kept saying that all the time, like she was nuts.  And do you know what that bitch wanted to do?  She wanted to move in here.  Imagine that!  Asking me if I loved her.  I didn't even know her name.  I never know their names ... I don't want to.  The married ones!  Christ, if you saw all the married cunts I bring up here you'd never have any more illusions.  They're worse than the virgins, the married ones.  They don't wait for you to start things - they fish it out for you themselves.  And then they talk about love afterwards.  It's disgusting.  I tell you, I'm actually beginning to hate cunt!"

       He looks out the window again.  It's drizzling.  It's been drizzling this way for the last five days.

       "Are we going to the Dôme, Joe?"  I call him Joe because he calls me Joe.  When Carl is with us he is Joe too.  Everybody is Joe because it's easier that way.  It's also a pleasant reminder not to take yourself too seriously.  Anyway, Joe doesn't want to go to the Dôme - he owes too much money there.  He wants to go to the Coupole.  Wants to take a little walk first around the block.

       "But it's raining, Joe."

       "I know, but what the hell!  I've got to have my constitutional.  I've got to wash the dirt out of my belly."  When he says this I have the impression that the whole world is wrapped up there inside his belly, and that it's rotting there.

       As he putting on his things he falls back again into a semicomatose state.  He stands there with one arm in his coat sleeve and his hat on assways and he begins to dream aloud - about the Riviera, about the sun, about lazing one's life away.  "All I ask of life," he says, "is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt."  As he mumbles this meditatively he looks at me with the softest, the most insidious smile.  "Do you like that smile?" he says.  And then disgustedly - "Jesus, if I could only find some rich cunt to smile at that way!"

       "Only a rich cunt can save me now," he says with an air of utmost weariness.  "One gets tired of chasing after new cunts all the time.  It gets mechanical.  The trouble is, you see, I can't fall in love.  I'm too much of an egoist.  Women only help me to dream, that's all.  It's a vice, like drink or opium.  I've got to have a new one every day; if I don't I get morbid.  I think too much.  Sometimes I'm amazed at myself, how quick I pull it off - and how little it really means.  I do it automatically like.  Sometimes I'm not thinking about a woman at all, but suddenly I notice a woman looking at me and then, bango! it starts all over again.  Before I know what I'm doing I've got her up to the room.  I don't even remember what I say to them.  I bring them up to the room, give them a pat on the ass, and before I know what it's all about it's over.  It's like a dream.... Do you know what I mean?"

       He hasn't much use for the French girls.  Can't stand them.  "Either they want money or they want you to marry them.  At bottom they're all whores.  I'd rather wrestle with a virgin," he says.  "They give you a little illusion.  They put up a fight at least."  Just the same, as we glance over the terrasse there is hardly a whore in sight whom he hasn't fucked at some time or other.  Standing at the bar he points them out to me, one by one, goes over them anatomically, describes their good points and their bad.  "They're all frigid," he says.  And then begins to mould his hands, thinking of the nice, juicy virgins who are just dying for it.

       In the midst of his reveries he suddenly arrests himself, and grabbing my arm excitedly, he points to a whale of a woman who is just lowering herself into a seat.  "There's my Danish cunt," he grunts.  "See that ass?  Danish.  How that woman loves it!  She just begs me for it.  Come over here ... look at her now, from the side.  Look at that ass, will you?  It's enormous.  I tell you, when she climbs over me I can hardly get my arms around it.  It blots out the whole world.  She makes me feel like a little bug crawling inside her.  I don't know why I fall for her - I suppose it's that ass.  It's so incongruous like.  And the creases in it!  You can't forget an ass like that.  It's a fact ... a solid fact.  The others, they may bore you, or they may give you a moment's illusion, but this one - with her ass! - zowie, you can't obliterate her ... it's like going to bed with a monument on top of you."

       The Danish cunt seems to have electrified him.  He's lost all his sluggishness now.  His eyes are popping out of his head.  And of course one thing reminds him of another.  He wants to get out of the fucking hotel because the noise bothers him.  He wants to write a book too so as to have something to occupy his mind.  But then the goddamned job stands in the way.  "It takes it out of you, that fucking job!  I don't want to write about Montparnasse.... I want to write my life, my thoughts.  I want to get the dirt out of my belly.... Listen, get that one over there!  I had her a long time ago.  She used to be down near Les Halles.  A funny bitch.  She lay on the edge of the bed and pulled her dress up.  Ever try it that way?  Not bad.  She didn't hurry me either.  She just lay back and played with her hat while I slugged away at her.  And when I come she says sort of bored like - 'Are you through?'  Like it didn't make any difference at all.  Of course, it doesn't make any difference, I know that goddamned well ... but the cold- blooded way she had ... I sort of liked it ... it was fascinating, you know?  When she goes to wipe herself she begins to sing.  Going out of the hotel she was still singing.  Didn't even say Au revoir!  Walks off swinging her hat and humming to herself like.  That's a whore for you!  A good lay though.  I think I liked her better than my virgin.  There's something depraved about screwing a woman who doesn't give a fuck about it.  It heats your blood...."  And then, after a moment's meditation - "Can you imagine what she's be like if she had any feelings?"

       "Listen," he says, "I want you to come to the Club with me tomorrow afternoon ... there's a dance on."

       "I can't tomorrow, Joe.  I promised the help Carl out...."

       "Listen, forget that prick!  I want you to do me a favour.  It's like this" - he commences to mould his hands again.  "I’ve got a cunt lined up ... she promised to stay with me on my night off.  But I'm not positive about her yet.  She's got a mother, you see ... some shit of a painter, she chews my ear off every time I see her.  I think the truth is, the mother's jealous.  I don't think she'd mind so much if I gave her a lay first.  You know how it is.... Anyway, I thought maybe you wouldn't mind taking the mother ... she's not so bad ... if I hadn't seen the daughter I might have considered her myself.  The daughter's nice and young, fresh like, you know what I mean?  There's a clean smell to her...."

       "Listen, Joe, you'd better find somebody else...."

       "Aw, don't take it like that!  I know how you feel about it.  It's only a little favour I'm asking you to do for me.  I don't know how to get rid of the old hen.  I thought first I'd get drunk and ditch her - but I don't think the young one'd like that.  They're sentimental like.  They come from Minnesota or somewhere.  Anyway, come around tomorrow and wake me up, will you?  Otherwise I'll oversleep.  And besides, I want you to help me find a room.  You know I'm helpless.  Find me a room in a quiet street, somewhere near here.  I've got to stay around here ... I've got credit here.  Listen, promise me you'll do that for me.  I'll buy you a meal now and then.  Come around anyway, because I go nuts talking to these foolish cunts.  I want to talk to you about Havelock Ellis.  Jesus, I've had the book out for three weeks now and I haven't looked at it.  You sort of rot here.  Would you believe it, I've never been to the Louvre - nor the Comèdie-Francaise.  Is it worth going to those joints?  Still, it sort of takes your mind off things, I suppose.  What do you do with yourself all day?  Don't you get bored?  What do you do for a lay?  Listen ... come here!  Don't run away yet ... I'm lonely.  Do you know something - if this keeps up another year I'll go nuts.  I've got to get out of this fucking country.  There's nothing for me here.  I know it's lousy now, in America, but just the same.... You go queer over here ... all those cheap shits sitting on their ass all day bragging about their work and none of them is worth a stinking damn.  They're all failures - that's why they come over here.  Listen, Joe, don't you ever get homesick?  You're a funny guy ... you seem to like it over here.  What do you see in it? ... I wish you'd tell me.  I wish to Christ I could stop thinking about myself.  I'm all twisted up inside ... it's like a knot in there.... Listen, I know I'm boring the shit out of you, but I've got to talk to someone.  I can't talk to those guys upstairs ... you know what those bastards are like ... they all take a byline.  And Carl, the little prick, he's so goddamned selfish.  I'm an egotist, but I'm not selfish.  There's a difference.  I'm a neurotic, I guess.  I can't stop thinking about myself.  It isn't that I think myself so important.... I simply can't think about anything else, that's all.  If I could fall in love with a woman, that might help some.  But I can't find a woman who interests me.  I'm in a mess, you can see that can't you?  What do you advise me to do?  What would you do in my place?  Listen, I don't want to hold you back any longer, but wake me up tomorrow - at one-thirty - will you?  I'll give you something extra if you'll shine my shoes.  And listen, if you've got an extra shirt, a clean one, bring it along, will you?  Shit, I'm grinding my balls off on that job, and it doesn't even give me a clean shirt.  They've got us over here like a bunch of niggers.  Ah, well, shit!  I'm going to take a walk ... wash the dirt out of my belly.  Don't forget, tomorrow!"

       For six months or more it's been going on, this correspondence with the rich cunt, Irene.  Recently I've been reporting to Carl every day in order to bring the affair to a head, because as far as Irene is concerned this thing could go on indefinitely.  In the last few days there's been a perfect avalanche of letters exchanged; the last letter we dispatched was almost forty pages long, and written in three languages.  It was a potpourri, the last letter - tag ends of old novels, slices from the Sunday supplement, reconstructed versions of old letters to Llona and Tania, garbled transliterations of Rabelais and Petronius - in short, we exhausted ourselves.  Finally Irene decides to come out of her shell.  Finally a letter arrives giving a rendezvous at her hotel.  Carl is pissing in his pants.  It's one thing to write letters to a woman you don't know; it's another thing entirely to call on her and make love to her.  At the last moment he's quaking so that I almost fear I'll have to substitute for him.  When we get out of the taxi in front of her hotel he's trembling so much that I have to walk him around the block first.  He's already had two Pernods, but they haven't made the slightest impression on him.  The sight of the hotel itself is enough to crush him: it's a pretentious place with one of those huge empty lobbies in which Englishwomen sit for hours with a blank look.  In order to make sure that he wouldn't run away I stood by while the porter telephoned to announce him.  Irene was there, and she was waiting for him.  As he got into the lift he threw me a last despairing glance, one of those mute appeals which a dog makes when you put a noose around its neck.  Going through the revolving door I thought of Van Norden....

       I go back to the hotel and wait for a telephone call.  He's only got an hour's time and he's promised to let me know the results before going to work.  I look over the carbons of the letters we sent her.  I try to imagine the situation as it actually is, but it's beyond me.  Her letters are much better than ours - they're sincere, that's plain.  By now they've sized each other up.  I wonder if he's still pissing in his pants.

       The telephone rings.  His voice sounds queer, squeaky, as though he were frightened and jubilant at the same time.  He asks me to substitute for him at the office.  "Tell the bastard anything!  Tell him I'm dying...."

       "Listen, Carl ... can you tell me ...?"

       "Hello!  Are you Henry Miller?"  It's a woman's voice.  It's Irene.  She's saying hello to me.  Her voice sounds beautiful over the phone ... beautiful.  For a moment I'm in a perfect panic.  I don't know what to say to her.  I'd like to say: "Listen, Irene, I think you are beautiful ... I think you're wonderful!"  I'd like to say one true thing to her, no matter how silly it would sound, because now that I hear her voice everything is changed.  But before I can gather my wits Carl is on the phone again and he's saying in that queer squeaky voice: "She likes you, Joe.  I told her all about you...."

       At the office I have to hold copy for Van Norden.  When it comes time for the break he pulls me aside.  He looks glum and ravaged.

       "So he's dying, is he, the little prick?  Listen, what's the lowdown on this?"

       "I think he went to see his rich cunt," I answer calmly.

       "What!  You mean he called on her?"  He seems beside himself.  "Listen, where does she live?  What's her name?"  I pretend ignorance.  "Listen," he says, "you're a decent guy.  Why the hell don't you let me in on this racket?"

       In order to appease him I promise finally that I'll tell him everything as soon as I get the details from Carl.  I can hardly wait myself until I see Carl.

       Around noon next day I knock at his door.  He's up already and lathering his beard.  Can't tell a thing from the expression on his face.  Can't even tell whether he's going to tell me the truth.  The sun is streaming in through the open window, the birds are chirping, and yet somehow, why it is I don't know, the room seems more barren and poverty-stricken than ever.  The floor is slathered with lather, and on the rack there are the two dirty towels which are never changed.  And somehow Carl isn't changed either, and that puzzles me more than anything.  This morning the whole world ought to be changed, for bad or good, but changed, radically changed.  And yet Carl is standing there lathering his face and not a single detail is altered.

       "Sit down ... sit down there on the bed," he says.  "You're going to hear everything ... but wait first ... wait a little."  He commences to lather his face again, and then to hone his razor.  He even remarks about the water ... no hot water again.

       "Listen, Carl, I'm on tenterhooks.  You can torture me afterwards, if you like, but tell me now, tell me one thing ... was it good or bad?"

       He turns away from the mirror with brush in hand and gives me a strange smile.  "Wait!  I'm going to tell you everything...."

       "That means it was a failure."

       "No," he says, drawing out his words. "It wasn't a failure, and it wasn't a success either.... By the way, did you fix it up for me at the office?  What did you tell them?"

       I see it's no use trying to pull it out of him.  When he gets good and ready he'll tell me.  Not before.  I lie back on the bed, silent as a clam.  He goes on shaving.

       Suddenly, apropos of nothing at all, he begins to talk - disconnectedly at first, and then more and more clearly, emphatically, resolutely.  It's a struggle to get it out, but he seems determined to relate everything; he acts as if he were getting something off his conscience.  He even reminds me of the look he gave me as he was going up the elevator shaft.  He dwells on that lingeringly, as though to imply that everything were contained in the last moment, as though, if he had the power to alter things, he would never have put foot outside the elevator.

       She was in her dressing sack when he called.  There was a bucket of champagne on the dresser.  The room was rather dark and her voice was lovely.  He gives me all the details about the room, the champagne, how the garçon opened it, the noise it made, the way her dressing sack rustled when she came forward to greet him - he tells me everything but what I want to hear.

       It was about eight when he called on her.  At eight-thirty he was nervous, thinking about the job.  "It was about nine when I called you, wasn't it?" he says.

       "Yes, about that."

       "I was nervous, see."

       "I know that.  Go on...."

       I don't know whether to believe him or not, especially after those letters we concocted.  I don't even know whether I've heard him accurately, because what he's telling me sounds utterly fantastic.  And yet it sounds true too, knowing the sort of guy he is.  And then I remember his voice over the telephone, that strange mixture of fright and jubilation.  But why isn't he more jubilant now?  He keeps smiling all the time, smiling like a rosy little bedbug that has had it fill.  "It was nine o'clock," he says once again, "when I called you up, wasn't it?"  I nod my head wearily.  Yes, it was nine o'clock.  He is certain now that it was nine o'clock because he remembers having taken out his watch.  Anyway, when he looked at his watch again it was ten o'clock.  At ten o'clock she was lying on the divan with her boobies in her hands.  That's the way he gives it to me - in driblets.  At eleven o'clock it was all settled; they were going to run away, to Borneo.  Fuck the husband!  She never loved him anyway.  She would never have written the first letter if the husband wasn't old and passionless.  "And then she says to me: 'But listen, dear, how do you know you won't get tired of me?'"

       At this I burst out laughing.  This sounds preposterous to me, I can't help it.

       "And you said?"

       "What did you expect me to say?  I said: 'How could anyone ever grow tired of you?'"

       And then he describes to me what happened after that, how he bent down and kissed her breasts, and how, after he had kissed them fervidly, he stuffed them back into her corsage, or whatever it is they call these things.  And after that another coupe of champagne.

       Around midnight the garçon arrives with beer and sandwiches - caviar sandwiches.  And all the while, so he says, he has been dying to take a leak.  He had one hard on, but it faded out.  All the while his bladder is fit to burst, but he imagines, the cute little prick that he is, that the situation calls for delicacy.

       At one-thirty she's for hiring a carriage and driving through the Bois.  He has only one thought in his head - how to take a leak?  "I love you ... I adore you," he says.  "I'll go anywhere you say - Istanbul, Singapore, Honolulu.  Only I must go now.... It's getting late."

       He tells me all this in his dirty little room, with the sun pouring in and the birds chirping away like mad.  I don't yet know whether she was beautiful or not.  He doesn't know himself, the imbecile.  He rather thinks she wasn't.  The room was dark and then there was the champagne and his nerves all frazzled.

       "But you ought to know something about her - if this isn't all a goddamned lie!"

       "Wait a minute," he says.  "Wait ... let me think!  No, she wasn't beautiful.  I'm sure of that now.  She had a streak of gray hair over her forehead ... I remember that.  But that wouldn't be so bad - I had almost forgotten it, you see.  No, it was her arms - they were thin ... they were thin and brittle."  He begins to pace back and forth. - Suddenly he stops dead.  "If she were only ten years younger!" he exclaims.  "If she were ten years younger I might overlook the streak of gray hair ... and even the brittle arms.  But she's too old.  You see, with a cunt like that every year counts now.  She won't be just one year older next year - she'll be ten years older.  Another year hence and she'll be twenty years older.  And I'll be getting younger looking all the time - at least for another five years...."

       "But how did it end?" I interrupt.

       "That's just it ... it didn't end.  I promised to see her Tuesday around five o'clock.  That's bad, you know!  There were lines in her face which will look much worse in daylight.  I suppose she wants me to fuck her Tuesday.  Fucking in the daytime - you don't do it with a cunt like that.  Especially in a hotel like that.  I'd rather do it on my night off ... but Tuesday's not my night off.  And that's not all.  I promised her a letter in the meantime.  How am I going to write her a letter now?  I haven't anything to say.... Shit!  If only she were ten years younger.  Do you think I should go with her ... to Borneo or wherever it is she wants to take me?  What would I do with a rich cunt like that on my hands?  I don't know how to shoot.  I am afraid of guns and all that sort of thing.  Besides, she'll be wanting me to fuck her night and day ... nothing but hunting and fucking all the time ... I can't do it!"

       "Maybe it won't be so bad as you think.  She’ll buy you ties and all sorts of things...."

       "Maybe you'll come along with us, eh?  I told her all about you...."

       "Did you tell her I was poor?  Did you tell her I needed things?"

       "I told her everything.  Shit, everything would be fine, if she were just a few years younger.  She said she was turning forty.  That means fifty or sixty.  It's like fucking your own mother ... you can't do it ... it's impossible."

       "But she must have had some attractiveness ... you were kissing her breasts, you said."

       "Kissing her breasts - what's that?  Besides it was dark, I'm telling you."

       Putting on his pants a button falls off.  "Look at that will you.  It's falling apart, the goddamned suit.  I've worn it for seven years now.... I never paid for it either.  It was a good suit once, but it stinks now.  And that cunt would buy me suits too, all I wanted most likely.  But that's what I don't like, having a woman shell out for me.  I never did that in my life.  That's your idea.  I'd rather live alone.  Shit, this is a good room, isn't it?  What's wrong with it?  It's a damned sight better than her room, isn't it?  I don't like her fine hotel.  I'm against hotels like that.  I told her so.  She said she didn't care where she lived ... said she'd come and live with me if I wanted her to.  Can you imagine her moving in here with her big trunks and her hatboxes and all that crap she drags around with her?  She has too many things - too many dresses and bottles and all that.  It's like a clinic, her room.  If she gets a little scratch on her finger it's serious.  And then she has to be massaged and her hair has to be waved and she mustn't eat this and she mustn't eat that.  Listen, Joe, she'd be all right if she were just a little younger.  You can forgive a young cunt anything.  A young cunt doesn't have to have any brains.  They're better without brains.  But an old cunt, even if she's brilliant, even if she's the most charming woman in the world, nothing makes any difference.  A young cunt is an investment; an old cunt is a dead loss.  All they can do for you is buy you things.  But that doesn't put meat on their arms or juice between their legs.  She isn't bad, Irene.  In fact, I think you'd like her.  With you it's different.  You don't have to fuck her.  You can afford to like her.  Maybe you wouldn't like all those dresses and the bottles and what not, but you could be tolerant.  She wouldn't bore you, that I can tell you.  She's even interesting, I might say.  But she's withered.  Her breasts are all right yet - but her arms!  I told her I'd bring you around some day.  I talked a lot about you.... I didn't know what to say to her.  Maybe you'd like her, especially when she's dressed.  I don't know...."

       "Listen, she's rich, you say?  I'll like her!  I don't care how old she is, so long as she's not a hag...."

       "She's not a hag!  What are you talking about?  She's charming, I tell you.  She talks well.  She looks well too ... only her arms...."

       "All right, if that's how it is, I'll fuck her - if you don't want to.  Tell her that.  Be subtle about it, though.  With a woman like that you've got to do things slowly.  You bring me around and let things work out for themselves.  Praise the shit out of me.  Act jealous like.... Shit, maybe we'll fuck her together ... and we'll drive and hunt and wear nice things.  If she wants to go to Borneo let her take us along.  I don't know how to shoot either, but that doesn't matter.  She doesn't care about that either.  She just wants to be fucked, that's all.  You're talking about her arms all the time.  You don't have to look at her arms all the time, do you?  Look at this bedspread!  Look at the mirror!  Do you call this living?  Do you want to go on being delicate and live like a louse all your life?  You can't even pay your hotel bill ... and you've got a job too.  This is no way to live.  I don't care if she's seventy years old - it's better than this...."

       "Listen, Joe, you fuck her for me ... then everything'll be fine.  Maybe I'll fuck her once in a while too ... on my night off.  It's four days now since I've had a good shit.  There's something sticking to me, like grapes...."

       "You've got the piles, that's what."

       "My hair's falling out too ... and I ought to see the dentist.  I feel as though I were falling apart.  I told her what a good guy you are.... You'll do things for me, eh?  You're not too delicate, eh?  If we go to Borneo I won't have hemorrhoids anymore.  Maybe I'll develop something else ... something worse ... fever perhaps ... or cholera.  Shit, it's better to die of a good disease like that than to piss your life away on a newspaper with grapes up your ass and buttons falling off your pants.  I'd like to be rich, even if it were only for a week, and then go to a hospital with a good disease, a fatal one, and have flowers in the room and nurses dancing around and telegrams coming.  They take good care of you if you're rich.  They wash you with cotton batting and they comb your hair for you.  Shit, I know all that.  Maybe I'd be lucky and not die at all.  Maybe I'd be crippled all my life ... maybe I'd be paralysed and have to sit in a wheelchair.  But then I'd be taken care of just the same ... even if I had no more money.  If you're an invalid - a real one - they don't let you starve.  And you get a clean bed to lie in ... and they change the towels every day.  This way nobody gives a fuck about you, especially if you have a job.  They think a man should be happy if he's got a job.  What would you rather do - be crippled all your life, or have a job ... or marry a rich cunt?  You'd rather marry a rich cunt, I can see that.  You only think about food.  But supposing you married her and then you couldn't get a hard on anymore - that happens sometimes - what would you do then?  You'd be at her mercy.  You'd have to eat out of her hand, like a little poodle dog.  You'd like that, would you?  Or maybe you don't think of those things?  I think of everything.  I think of the suits I'd pick out and the places I'd like to go to, but I also think of the other thing.  That's the important thing.  What good are the fancy ties and the fine suits if you can't get a hard on anymore?  You couldn't even betray her - because she'd be on your heels all the time.  No, the best thing would be to marry her and then get a disease right away.  Only not syphilis.  Cholera, let's say, or yellow fever.  So that if a miracle did happen and your life was spared you'd be a cripple for the rest of your days.  Then you wouldn't have to worry about fucking her anymore, and you wouldn't have to worry about the rent either.  She'd probably buy you a fine wheelchair with rubber tires and all sorts of levers and what not.  You might even be able to use your hands - I mean enough to be able to write.  Or you could have a secretary, for that matter.  That's it - that's the best solution for a writer.  What does a guy want with his arms and legs?  He doesn't need arms and legs to write with.  He needs security ... peace ... protection.  All those heroes who parade in wheelchairs - it's too bad they're not writers.  If you could only be sure, when you go to war, that you'd have only your legs blown off ... if you could be sure of that I'd say let's have a war tomorrow.  I wouldn't give a fuck about the medals - they could keep the medals.  All I'd want is a good wheelchair and three meals a day.  Then I'd give them something to read, those pricks."

       The following day, at one-thirty, I call on Van Norden.  It's his day off, or rather his night off.  He has left word with Carl that I am to help him move today.

       I find him in a state of unusual depression.  He hasn't slept a wink all night, he tells me.  There's something on his mind, something that's eating him up.  It isn't long before I discover what it is; he's been waiting impatiently for me to arrive in order to spill it.

       "That guy," he begins, meaning Carl, "that guy's an artist.  He described every detail minutely.  He told it to me with such accuracy that I know it's all a goddamned lie ... but I can't dismiss it from my mind.  You know how my mind works!"

       He interrupts himself to inquire if Carl has told me the whole story.  There isn't the least suspicion in his mind that Carl may have told me one thing and him another.  He seems to think that the story was invented expressly to torture him.  He doesn't seem to mind so much that it's a fabrication.  It's the "images", as he says, which Carl left in his mind, that get him.  The images are real, even if the whole story is false.  And besides, the fact that there actually is a rich cunt on the scene and that Carl actually paid her a visit, that's undeniable.  What actually happened is secondary; he takes it for granted that Carl put the boots to her.  But what drives him desperate is the thought that while Carl has described to him might have been possible.

       "It's just like that guy," he says, "to tell me he put it to her six or seven times.  I know that's a lot of shit and I don't mind that so much, but when he tells me that she hired a carriage and drove him out to the Bois and that they used the husband's fur coat for a blanket, that's too much.  I suppose he told you about the chauffeur waiting respectfully ... and listen, did he tell you how the engine purred all the time?  Jesus, he built that up wonderfully.  It's just like him to think of a detail like that ... it's one of those little details which makes a thing psychologically real ... you can't get it out of your head afterwards.  And he tells it to me so smoothly, so naturally.... I wonder, did he think it up in advance or did it just pop out of his head like that, spontaneously?  He's such a cute little liar you can't walk away from him ... it's like he's writing you a letter, one of those flowerpots that he makes overnight.  I don't understand how a guy can write such letters ... I don't get the mentality behind it ... it's a form of masturbation ... what do you think?"

       But before I have an opportunity to venture an opinion, or even to laugh in his face, Van Norden goes on with his monologue.

       "Listen, I suppose he told you everything ... did he tell you how he stood on the balcony in the moonlight and kissed her?  That sounds banal when you repeat it, but the way that guy describes it ... I can just see the little prick standing there with the woman in his arms and already he's writing another letter to her, another flowerpot about the roof tops and all that crap he steals from his French authors.  That guy never says a thing that's original, I found that out.  You have to get a clue like ... find out whom he's been reading lately ... and it's hard to do that because he's so damned secretive.  Listen, if I didn't know that you went there with him, I wouldn't believe that the woman existed.  A guy like that could write letters to himself.  And yet he's lucky ... he's so damned tiny, so frail, so romantic looking, that women fall for him now and then ... they sort of adopt him ... they feel sorry for him, I guess.  And some cunts like to receive flowerpots ... it makes them feel important....But this woman's an intelligent woman, so he says.  You ought to know ... you've seen her letters.  What do you suppose a woman like that saw in him?  I can understand her falling for the letters ... but how do you suppose she felt when she saw him?

       "But listen, all that's beside the point.  What I'm getting at is the way he tells it to me.  You know how he embroiders things ... well, after that scene on the balcony - he gives me that like an hors d'oeuvre you know - after that, so he says, they went inside and he unbottoned her pyjamas.  What are you smiling for?  Was he shitting me about that?"

       "No, no!  You're giving it to me exactly as he told me.  Go ahead ..."

       "After that" - here Van Norden has to smile himself - "after that, mind you, he tells me how she sat in the chair with her legs up ... not a stitch on ... and he's sitting on the floor looking up at her, telling her how beautiful she looks ... did he tell you that she looked like a Matisse? ... Wait a minute ... I'd like to remember exactly what he said.  He had some cute little phrase there about an odalisque ... what the hell's an odalisque anyway?  He said it in French, that's why it's hard to remember the fucking thing ... but it sounded good.  It sounded just like the sort of thing he might say.  And she probably thought it was original with him ... I suppose she thinks he's a poet or something.  But listen, all this is nothing ... I make allowances for his imagination.  It's what happened after that that drives me crazy.  All night long I've been tossing about, playing with these images he left in my mind.  I can't get it out of my head.  It sounds so real to me that if it didn't happen I could strangle the bastard.  A guy has no right to invent things like that.  Or else he's diseased....

       "What I'm getting at is that moment when, he says, he got down on his knees and with those two skinny fingers of his he spread her cunt open.  You remember that?  He says she was sitting there with her legs dangling over the arms of the chair and suddenly, he says, he got an inspiration.  This was after he had given her a couple of lays already ... after he had made that little spiel about Matisse.  He gets down on his knees - get this! - and with his two fingers ... just the tips of them, mind you ... he opens the little petals ... squish-squish ... just like that.  A sticky little sound ... almost inaudible.  Squish-squish!  Jesus, I've been hearing it all night long!  And then he says - as if that weren't enough for me - then he tells me how he buried his head in her muff.  And when he did that, so help me Christ, if she didn't swing her legs around his neck and lock him there.  That finished me!  Imagine it!  Imagine a fine, sensitive woman like that swinging her legs around his neck!  There's something poisonous about it.  It's so fantastic that it sounds convincing.  If he had only told me about the champagne and the ride in the Bois and even the scene on the balcony I could have dismissed it.  But this thing is so incredible that it doesn't sound like a lie anymore.  I can't believe that he ever read anything like that anywhere, and I can't see what could have put the idea into his head unless there was some truth in it.  With a little prick like that, you know, anything can happen.  He may not have fucked her at all, but she may have let him diddle her ... you never know with these rich cunts what they might expect you to do...."

       When he finally pulls himself out of bed and starts to shave the afternoon is already well advanced.  I've finally succeeded in switching his mind to other things, to the moving principally.  The maid comes in to see if he's ready - he's supposed to have vacated the room by noon.  He's just in the act of slipping into his trousers.  I'm a little surprised that he doesn't excuse himself, or turn away.  Seeing him standing there nonchalantly buttoning his fly as he gives her orders I begin to titter.  "Don't mind her," he says, throwing her a look of supreme contempt, "she's just a big sow.  Give her a pinch in the ass, if you like.  She won't say anything."  And then addressing her, in English, he says, "Come here, you bitch, put your hand on this!"  At this I can't restrain myself any longer.  I burst out laughing, a fit of hysterical laughter which infects the maid also, though she doesn't know what it's all about.  The maid commences to take down the pictures and the photographs, mostly of himself, which line the walls. "You," he says, jerking his thumb, "come here!  Here's something to remember me by" - ripping a photograph off the wall - "when I go you can wipe your ass with it.  See," he says, turning to me, "she's a dumb bitch.  She wouldn't look any more intelligent if I said it in French."  The maid stands there with her mouth open; she is evidently convinced that he is cracked.  "Hey!" he yells at her as if she were hard of hearing.  "Hey, you.  Yes, you!  Like this....!" and he takes the photograph, his own photograph, and wipes his ass with it.  "Comme ça!  Savvy?  You've got to draw pictures for her," he says, thrusting his lower lip forward in absolute disgust.

       He watches her helplessly as she throws his things into the big valises.  "Here, put these in too," he says, handing her a toothbrush and a douche bag.  Half of his belongings are lying on the floor.  The valises are crammed full and there is nowhere to put the paintings and the books and the bottles that are half empty.  "Sit down a minute," he says.  "We've got plenty of time.  We've got to think this thing out.  If you hadn't come around I'd never have gotten out of here.  You see how helpless I am.  Don't let me forget to take the bulbs out ... they belong to me.  That wastebasket belongs to me too.  They expect you to live like pigs, these bastards."  The maid has gone downstairs to get some twine.... "Wait till you see ... she'll charge me for the twine even if it's only three sous.  They wouldn't sow a button on your pants here without charging for it.  The lousy, dirty scroungers!"  He takes a bottle of Calvados from the mantelpiece and nods to me to grab the other.  "No use carrying these to the new place.  Let's finish them off now.  But don't give her a drink!  That bastard, I wouldn't leave her a piece of toilet paper.  I'd like to ruin the joint before I go.  Listen ... piss on the floor, if you like.  I wish I could take a crap in the bureau draw."  He feels so utterly disgusted with himself and everything else that he doesn't know what to do by way of venting his feelings.  He walks over to the bed with the bottle in hand and, pulling back the covers, he sprinkles Calvados over the mattress.  Not content with that, he digs his heel into the mattress.  Unfortunately there's no mud on his heels.  Finally he takes the sheet and cleans his shoes with it.  "That'll give them something to do," he mutters vengefully.  Then, taking a good swig, he throws his head back and gargles his throat, and after he's gargled it good and proper he spits it out on the mirror.  "There, you cheap bastards!  Wipe that off when I go!"  He walks back and forth mumbling to himself.  Seeing his torn socks lying on the floor he picks them up and tears them to bits.  The paintings enrage him too.  He picks one up - a portrait of himself done by some Lesbian he knew and he puts his foot through it.  "That bitch!  You know what she had the nerve to ask me?  She asked me to turn over my cunts to her after I was through with them.  She never gave me a sou for writing her up.  She thought I honestly admired her work.  I wouldn't have gotten that painting out of her if I hadn't promised to fix her up with that cunt from Minnesota.  She was nuts about her ... used to follow us around like a dog in heat ... we couldn't get rid of the bitch!  She bothered the life out of me.  I got so that I was almost afraid to being a cunt up here for fear that she'd burst in on me.  I used to creep up here like a burglar and then lock the door behind me as soon as I got inside.... She and that Georgia cunt - they drive me nuts.  The one is always in heat and the other is always hungry.  I hate fucking a woman who's hungry.  It's like you push a feed inside her and then you push it out again....Jesus, that reminds me of something ... where did I put that blue ointment?  That's important.  Did you ever have those things?  It's worse than having a dose.  And I don't know where I got them from either.  I've had so many women up here in the last week or so I've lost track of them.  Funny too, because they all smelled so fresh.  But you know how it is...."

       The maid has piled his things up on the sidewalk.  The patron looks on with a surly air.  When everything has been loaded into the taxi there is only room for one of us inside.  As soon as we commence to roll, Van Norden gets out a newspaper and starts bundling up his pots and pans; in the new place all cooking is strictly forbidden.  By the time we reach our destination all his luggage has come undone; it wouldn't be quite so embarrassing if the madam had not stuck her head out of the doorway just as we rolled up.  "My God!" she exclaims, "what the devil is all this?  What does it mean?"  Van Norden is so intimidated that he can think of nothing more to say than "C'est moi ... c'est moi, madame!"  And turning to me he mumbles savagely: "That cluck!  Did you notice her face?  She's going to make it hard for me."

       The hotel lies back of a dingy passage and forms a rectangle very much on the order of a modern penitentiary.  The bureau is large and gloomy, despite the brilliant reflections from the tile walls.  There are bird cages hanging in the windows and little enamel signs everywhere begging the guests, in an obsolete language, not to do this and not to forget that.  It is almost immaculately clean but absolutely poverty- stricken, threadbare, woebegone.  The upholstered chairs are held together with wired things; they remind one unpleasantly of the electric chair.  The room he is going to occupy is on the fifth floor.  As we climb the stairs Van Norden informs me that Maupassant once lived here.  And in the same breath remarks that there is a peculiar odour in the hall.  On the fifth floor a few windowpanes are missing; we stand a moment gazing at the tenants across the court.  It is getting toward dinner time and people are straggling back to their rooms with that weary, dejected air which comes from earning a living honestly.  Most of the windows are wide open: the dingy rooms have the appearance of so many yawning mouths.  The occupants of the rooms are yawning too, or else scratching themselves.  They move about listlessly and apparently without much purpose; they might just as well be lunatics.

       As we turn down the corridor toward room 57, a door suddenly opens in front of us and an old hag with matted hair and the eyes of a maniac peers out.  She startles us so that we stand transfixed.  For a full minute the three of us stand there powerless to move or even to make an intelligent gesture.  Back of the old hag I can see a kitchen table and on it lies a baby all undressed, a puny little brat no bigger than a plucked chicken.  Finally the old one picks up a slop pail by her side and makes a move forward.  We stand aside to let her pass and as the door closes behind her the baby lets out a piercing scream.  It is room 56, and between 56 and 57 is the toilet where the old hag is emptying her slops.

       Even since we have mounted the stairs Van Norden has kept silence.  But his looks are eloquent.  When he opens the door of 57 I have for a fleeting moment the sensation of going mad.  A huge mirror covered with green gauze and tipped at an angle of 45 degrees hangs directly opposite the entrance over a baby carriage which is filled with books.  Van Norden doesn't even crack a smile; instead he walks nonchalantly over to the baby carriage and picking up a book begins to skim it through, much as a man would enter the public library and go unthinkingly to the rack nearest to hand.  And perhaps this would not seem so ludicrous to me if I had not espied at the same time a pair of handlebars resting in the corner.  They look so absolutely peaceful and contented, as if they had been dozing there for year, that suddenly it seems to me as if we had been standing in this room, in exactly this position, for an incalculably long time, that it was a pose we had struck in a dream from which we never emerged, a dream which the least gesture, the wink of an eye even, will shatter.  But more remarkable still is the remembrance that suddenly floats up of an actual dream which occurred only the other night, a dream in which I saw Van Norden in just such a corner as is occupied now by the handlebars, only instead of the handlebars there was a woman crouching with her legs drawn up.  I see him standing over the woman with that alert, eager look in his eye which comes when he wants something badly.  The street in which this is going on is blurred - only the angle made by the two walls is clear, and the cowering figure of the woman.  I can see him going at her in that quick, animal way of his, reckless of what's going on about him, determined only to have his way.  And a look in his eyes as though to say - "you can kill me afterwards, but just let me get it in ... I've got to get it in!"  And there he is, bent over her, their heads knocking against the wall, he has such a tremendous erection that it's simply impossible to get it in her.  Suddenly, with that disgusted air which he knows so well how to summon, he picks himself up and adjusts his clothes.  He is about to walk away when suddenly he notices that his penis is lying on the sidewalk.  It is about the size of a sawed-off broomstick.  He picks it up nonchalantly and slings it under his arm.  As he walks off I notice two huge bulbs, like tulip bulbs, dangling from the end of the broomstick, and I can hear him muttering to himself "flowerpots ... flowerpots."

       The garçon arrives panting and sweating.  Van Norden looks at him uncomprehendingly.  The madam now marches in and, walking straight up to Van Norden, she takes the book out of his hands, thrusts it into the baby carriage, and, without saying a word, wheels the baby carriage into the hallway.

       "This is a bughouse," says Van Norden, smiling distressedly.  It is such a faint, indescribable smile that for a moment the dream feeling comes back and it seems to me that we are standing at the end of a long corridor at the end of which is a corrugated mirror.  And down this corridor, swinging his distress like a dingy lantern, Van Norden staggers, staggers in and out as here and there a door opens and a hand yanks him, or a hoof pushes him out.  And the further off he wanders the more lugubrious is his distress; he wears it like a lantern which the cyclists hold between their teeth on a night when the pavement is wet and slippery.  In and out of the dingy rooms he wanders, and when he sits down the chair collapses, when he opens his valise there is only a toothbrush inside.  In every room there is a mirror before which he stands attentively and chews his rage, and from the constant chewing, from the grumbling and mumbling and the muttering and cursing his jaws have gotten unhinged and they sag badly and, when he rubs his beard, pieces of his jaw crumble away and he's so disgusted with himself that he stamps on his own jaw, grinds it to bits with his big heels.

       Meanwhile the luggage is being hauled in.  And things begin to look crazier even than before - particularly when he attaches his exerciser to the bedstead and begins his Sandow exercises.  "I like this place," he says, smiling at the garçon.  He takes his coat and vest off.  The garçon is watching him with a puzzled air; he has a valise in one hand and the douche bag in the other.  I'm standing apart in the antechamber holding the mirror with the green gauze.  Not a single object seems to possess a practical use.  The antechamber itself seems useless, a sort of vestibule to a barn.  It is exactly the same sort of sensation which I get when I enter the Comèdie-Francaise or the Palais-Royal Theatre; it is a world of bric-a-brac, of trap doors, of arms and busts and waxed floors, of candelabras and men in armour, of statues without eyes and love letters lying in glass cases.  Something is going on, but it makes no sense; it's like finishing the half-empty bottle of Calvados because there's no room in the valise.

       Climbing up the stairs, as I said a moment ago, he had mentioned the fact that Maupassant used to live here.  The coincidence seems to have made an impression upon him.  He would like to believe that it was in this very room that Maupassant gave birth to some of those gruesome tales on which his reputation rests.  "They lived like pigs, those poor bastards," he says.  We are sitting at the round table in a pair of comfortable old armchairs that have been trussed up with thongs and braces; the bed is right beside us, so close indeed that we can put our feet on it.  The armoire stands in a corner behind us, also conveniently within reach.  Van Norden has emptied his dirty wash on the table; we sit there with our feet buried in his dirty socks and shirts and smoke contentedly.  The sordidness of the place seems to have worked a spell on him: he is content here.  When I get up to switch on the light he suggests that we play a game of cards before going out to eat.  And so we sit there by the window, with the dirty wash strewn over the floor and the Sandow exerciser hanging from the chandelier, and we play a few rounds of two-handed pinochle.  Van Norden has put away his pipe and packed a wad of snuff on the underside of his lower lip.  Now and then he spits out of the window, big healthy gobs of brown juice which resound with a smack on the pavement below.  He seems content now.

       "In America," he says, "you wouldn't dream of living in a joint like this.  Even when I was on the bum I slept in better rooms than this.  But here it seems natural - it's like the books you read.  If I ever go back there I'll forget all about this life, just like you forget a bad dream.  I'll probably take up the old life again just where I left off ... if I ever get back.  Sometimes I lie in bed dreaming about the past and it's so vivid to me that I have to shake myself in order to realize where I am.  Especially when I have a woman beside me; a woman can set me off better than anything.  That's all I want of them - to forget myself.  Sometimes I get so lost in my reveries that I can't remember the name of the cunt or where I picked her up.  That's funny, eh?  It's good to have a fresh, warm body beside you when you wake up in the morning.  It gives you a clean feeling.  You get spiritual like ... until they start pulling that mushy crap about love et cetera.  Why do all those cunts talk about love so much, can you tell me that?  A good lay isn't enough for them apparently ... they want your soul too...."

       Now this word soul, which pops up frequently in Van Norden's soliloquies, used to have a droll effect upon me at first.  Whenever I heard the word soul from his lips I would get hysterical; somehow it seemed like a false coin, more particularly because it was usually accompanied by a gob of brown juice which left a trickle down the corner of his mouth.  And as I never hesitated to laugh in his face it happened invariably that when this little word bobbed up, Van Norden would pause just long enough for me to burst into a cackle and then, as if nothing had happened, he would resume his monologue, repeating the word more and more frequently and each time with a more caressing emphasis.  It was the soul of him that women were trying to possess - that he made clear to me.  He has explained it over and over again, but he comes back to it afresh each time like a paranoiac to his obsession.  In a sense Van Norden is mad, of that I'm convinced.  His one fear is to be left alone, and this fear is so deep and so persistent that even when he is on top of a woman, even when he has welded himself to her, he cannot escape the prison which he has created for himself.  "I try all sorts of things," he explains to me.  "I even count sometimes, or I begin to think of a problem in philosophy, but it doesn't work.  It's like I'm two people, and one of them is watching me all the time.  I get so goddamned mad at myself that I could kill myself ... and, in a way, that's what I do every time I have an orgasm.  For one second like I obliterate myself.  There's not even one me then ... there's nothing ... not even the cunt.  It's like receiving communion.  Honest, I mean that.  For a few seconds afterwards I have a fine spiritual glow ... and maybe it would continue that way indefinitely - how can you tell? - if it weren't for the fact that there's a woman beside you and then the douche bag and the water running ... all those little details that make you desperately selfconscious, desperately lonely.  And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap ... it drives me nuts sometimes ... I want to kick them out immediately ... I do now and then.  But that doesn't keep them away.  They like it, in fact.  The less you notice them the more they chase after you.  There's something perverse about women ... they're all masochists at heart."

       "But what it is you want of a woman, then?" I demand.

       He begins to mould his hands; his lower lip droops.  He looks completely frustrated.  When eventually he succeeds in stammering out a few broken phrases it's with the conviction that behind his words lies an overwhelming futility.  "I want to be able to surrender myself to a woman," he blurts out.  "I want her to take me out of myself.  But to do that she's got to be better than I am; she's got to have a mind, not just a cunt.  She's got to make me believe that I need her, that I can't live without her.  Find me a cunt like that, will you?  If you could do that I'd give you my job.  I wouldn't care then what happened to me: I wouldn't need a job or friends or books or anything.  If she could only make me believe that there was something more important on earth than myself.  Jesus, I hate myself!  But I hate these bastardly cunts even more - because they're none of them any good.

       "You think I like myself," he continues.  "That shows how little you know about me.  I know I'm a great guy.... I wouldn't have these problems if there weren't something to me.  But what eats me up is that I can't express myself.  People think I'm a cunt-chaser.  That's how shallow they are, these highbrows who sit on the terrasse all day chewing the psychologic cud....That's not so bad, eh - psychologic cud?  Write it down for me.  I'll use it in my column next week....By the way, did you ever read Stekel?  Is he any good?  It looks like nothing but case histories to me.  I wish to Christ I could get up enough nerve to visit an analyst ... a good one, I mean.  I don't want to see these little shysters with goatees and frock coats, like your friend Boris.  How do you manage to tolerate those guys?  Don't they bore you stiff?  You talk to anybody, I notice.  You don't give a goddamn.  Maybe you're right.  I wish I weren't so damned critical.  But these dirty little Jews who hang around the Dôme, Jesus, they give me the creeps.  They sound just like textbooks.  If I could talk to you every day maybe I could get things off my chest.  You're a good listener.  I know you don't give a damn about me, but you're patient.  And you don't have any theories to exploit.  I suppose you put it all down afterwards in that notebook of yours.  Listen, I don't mind what you say about me, but don't make me out to be a cunt-chaser - it's too simple.  Some day I'll write a book about myself, about my thoughts.  I don't mean just a piece of introspective analysis ... I mean that I'll lay myself down on the operating table and I'll expose my whole guts ... every goddamned thing.  Has anybody ever done that before? - What the hell are you smiling at?  Does it sound naïf?

       I'm smiling because whenever we touch on the subject of this book which he is going to write some day, things assume an incongruous aspect.  He has only to say "my book" and immediately the world shrinks to the private dimensions of Van Norden and Co.  The book must be absolutely original, absolutely perfect.  That is why, among other things, it is impossible for him to get started on it.  As soon as he gets an idea he begins to question it.  He remembers that Dostoevski used it, or Hamsun, or somebody else.  "I'm not saying that I want to be better than them, but I want to be different," he explains.  And so, instead of tackling his book, he reads one author after another in order to make absolutely certain that he is not going to tread on their private property.  And the more he reads he more disdainful he becomes.  None of them are satisfying; none of them arrive at that degree of perfection which he has imposed on himself.  And forgetting completely that he has not written so much as a chapter he talks about them condescendingly, quite as though there existed a shelf of books bearing his name, books which everyone is familiar with and the titles of which it is therefore superfluous to mention.  Though he has never overtly lied about this fact, nevertheless it is obvious that the people whom he bottonholes in order to air his private philosophy, his criticism, and his grievances, take it for granted that behind his loose remarks there stands a solid body of work.  Especially the young and foolish virgins whom he lures to his room on the pretext of reading to them his poems, or on the still better pretext of asking their advice.  Without the least feeling of guilt or selfconsciousness he will hand them a piece of soiled paper on which he has scribbled a few lines - the basis of a new poems, as he puts it - and with absolute seriousness demand of them an honest expression of opinion.  As they usually have nothing to give by way of comment, wholly bewildered as they are by the utter senselessness of the lines, Van Norden seizes the occasion to expound to them his view of art, a view, needless to say, which is spontaneously created to suit the event.  So expert has he become in this role that the transition from Ezra Pound's cantos to the bed is made as simply and naturally as a modulation from one key to another; in fact, if it were not made there would be a discord, which is what happens now and then when he makes a mistake as regards those nitwits whom he refers to as "pushovers".  Naturally, constituted as he is, it is with reluctance that he refers to these fatal errors of judgement.  But when he does bring himself to confess to an error of this kind it is with absolute frankness; in fact, he seems to derive a perverse pleasure in dwelling upon his inaptitude.  There is one woman, for example, whom he has been trying to make for almost ten years now - first in America, and finally here in Paris.  It is the only person of the opposite sex with whom he has a cordial, friendly relationship.  They seem not only to like each other, but to understand each other.  At first it seemed to me that if he could really make this creature his problem might be solved.  All the elements for a successful union were there - except the fundamental one.  Bessie was almost as unusual in her way as himself.  She had as little concern about giving herself to a man as she has about the dessert which follows a meal.  Usually she singled out the object of her choice and made the proposition herself.  She was not bad-looking, nor could one say that she was good-looking either.  She had a fine body, that was the chief thing - and she liked it, as they say.

       They were so chummy, these two, that sometimes, in order to gratify her curiosity (and also in the vain hope of inspiring her by his prowess), Van Norden would arrange to hide her in his closet during one of his seances.  After it was over Bessie would emerge from her hiding place and they would discuss the matter casually, that is to say, with an almost total indifference to everything except "technique".  Technique was one of her favourite terms, at least in those discussions which I was privileged to enjoy.  "What's wrong with my technique?" he would say.  And Bessie would answer: "You're too crude.  If you ever expect to make me you've got to become more subtle."

       There was such a perfect understanding between them, as I say, that often when I called for Van Norden at one-thirty, I would find Bessie sitting on the bed, the covers thrown back and Van Norden inviting her to stroke his penis ..."just a few silken strokes," he would say, "so as I'll have the courage to get up."  Or else he would urge her to blow on it or, failing that, he would grab hold of himself and shake it like a dinner bell, the two of them laughing fit to die.  "I'll never make this bitch," he would say.  "She has no respect for me.  That's what I get for taking her into my confidence."  And then abruptly he might add: "What do you make of that blonde I showed you yesterday?"  Talking to Bessie, of course.  And Bessie would jeer at him, telling him he had no taste.  "Aw, don't give me that line," he would say.  And then playfully, perhaps for the thousandth time, because by now it had become a standing joke between them - "Listen, Bessie, what about a quick lay?  Just one little lay ... no."  And when this had passed off in the usual manner he would add, in the same tone: "Well, what about him?  Why don't you give him a lay?"

       The whole point about Bessie was that she couldn't, or just wouldn't, regard herself as a lay.  She talked about passion, as if it were a brand new word.  She was passionate about things, even a little thing like a lay.  She had to put her soul into it.

       "I get passionate too sometimes," Van Norden would say.

       "Oh, you" says Bessie.  "You're just a worn-out satyr.  You don't know the meaning of passion.  When you get an erection you think you're passionate."

       "All right, maybe it's not passion ... but you can't get passionate without having an erection, that's true isn't it?"

       All this about Bessie, and the other women whom he drags to his room day in and out, occupies my thoughts as we walk to the restaurant.  I have adjusted myself so well to his monologues that without interrupting my own reveries I make whatever comment is required automatically, the moment I hear his voice die out.  It is a duet, and like most duets moreover in that one listens attentively only for the signal which announces the advent of one's own voice.  As it is his night off, and as I have promised to keep him company, I have already dulled myself to his queries.  I know that before the evening is over I shall be thoroughly exhausted; if I am lucky, that is, if I can worm a few francs out of him on some pretext or other, I will duck him the moment he goes to the toilet.  But he knows my propensity for slipping away, and, instead of being insulted, he simply provides against the possibility by guarding his sous.  If I ask him for money to buy cigarettes he insists on going with me to purchase them.  He will not be left alone, not for a second.  Even when he has succeeded in grabbing off a woman, even then he is terrified to be left alone with her.  If it were possible he would have me sit in the room while he puts on the performance.  It would be like asking me to wait while he took a shave.

       On his night off Van Norden generally manages to have at least fifty francs in his pocket, a circumstance which does not prevent him from making a touch whenever he encounters a prospect.  "Hello," he says, "give me twenty francs ... I need it."  He has a way of looking panic-stricken at the same time.  And if he meets with a rebuff he becomes insulting.  "Well, you can buy a drink at least."  And when he gets his drink he says more graciously - "Listen, give me five francs then ... give me two francs...." We go from bar to bar looking for a little excitement and always accumulating a few more francs.

       At the Coupole we stumble into a drunk from the newspaper.  One of the upstairs guy.  There's just been an accident at the office, he informs us.  One of the proofreaders fell down the elevator shaft.  Not expected to live.

       At first Van Norden is shocked, deeply shocked.  But when he learns that it was Peckover, the Englishman, he looks relieved.  "The poor bastard," he says, "he's better off dead than alive.  He just got his false teeth the other day too...."

       The allusion to the false teeth moves the man upstairs to tears.  He relates in a slobbery way a little incident connected with the accident.  He is upset about it, more upset about this incident than about the catastrophe itself.  It seems that Peckover, when he hit the bottom of the shaft, regained consciousness before anyone could reach him.  Despite the fact that his legs were broken and his ribs busted, he had managed to rise to all fours and grope about for his false teeth.  In the ambulance he was crying out in his delirium for the teeth he had lost.  The incident was pathetic and ludicrous at the same time.  The guy from upstairs hardly knew whether to laugh or to weep as he related it.  It was a delicate moment because with a drunk like that, one false move and he'd crash a bottle over your skull.  He had never been particularly friendly with Peckover - as a matter of fact, he had scarcely ever set foot in the proofreading department: there was an invisible wall like between the guys upstairs and the guys down below.  But now, since he had felt the touch of death, he wanted to display his comradeship.  He wanted to weep, if possible, to show that he was a regular guy.  And Joe and I, who knew Peckover well and who knew also that he wasn't worth a good goddamn, even a few tears, we felt annoyed with this drunken sentimentality.  We wanted to tell him so too, but with a guy like that you can't afford to be honest; you have to buy a wreath and go to the funeral and pretend that you're miserable.  And you have to congratulate him too for the delicate obituary he's written.  He'll be carrying his delicate little obituary around with him for months, praising the shit out of himself for the way he handled the situation.  We felt all that, Joe and I, without saying a word to each other.  We just stood there are listened with a murderous, silent contempt.  And as soon as we could break away we did so; we left him there at the bar blubbering to himself over his Pernod.

       Once out of his sight we began to laugh hysterically.  The false teeth!  No matter what we said about the poor devil, and we said some good things about him too, we always came back to the false teeth.  There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous.  And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem.  It's no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity - you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going.  And since we didn't have to put on a false front we could laugh about the incident to our heart's content.  We laughed all night about it, and in between times we vented our scorn and disgust for the guys upstairs, the fatheads who were trying to persuade themselves, no doubt, that Peckover was a fine fellow and that his death was a catastrophe.  All sorts of funny recollections came to our minds - the semicolons that he overlooked and for which they bawled the piss out of him.  They made his life miserable with their fucking little semicolons and the fractions which he always got wrong.  They were even going to fire him once because he came to work with a boozy breath.  They despised him because he always looked so miserable and because he had eczema and dandruff.  He was just a nobody, as far as they were concerned, but, now that he was dead, they would all chip in lustily and buy him a huge wreath and they'd put his name in big type in the obituary column.  Anything to throw a little reflection on themselves; they'd make him out to be a big shit if they could.  But unfortunately, with Peckover, there was little they could invent about him.  He was a zero, and even the fact that he was dead wouldn't add a cipher to his name.

       "There's only one good aspect to it," says Joe.  "You may get his job.  And if you have any luck, maybe you'll fall down the elevator shaft and break your neck too.  We'll buy you a nice wreath, I promise you that."

       Toward dawn we're sitting on the terrasse of the Dôme.  We've forgotten about poor Peckover long ago.  We've had a little excitement at the Bal Negre and Joe's mind has slipped back to the eternal preoccupation: cunt.  It's at this hour, when his night off is almost concluded, that his restlessness amounts to a fever pitch.  He thinks of the women he passed up earlier in the evening and of the steady ones he might have had for the asking, if it weren't that he was fed up with them.  He is reminded inevitably of his Georgia cunt - she's been hounding him lately, begging him to take her in, at least until she can find herself a job.  "I don't mind giving her a feed once in a while," he says, "but I couldn't take her on as a steady thing ... she'd ruin it for my other cunts."  What gripes him most about her is that she doesn't put on any flesh.  "It's like taking a skeleton to bed with you," he says.  "The other night I took her on - out of pity - and what do you think the crazy bitch had done to herself?  She had shaved it clean ... not a speck of hair on it.  Did you ever have a woman who shaved her twat?  It's repulsive, ain't it?  And it's funny, too.  Sort of mad like.  It doesn't look like a twat anymore: it's like a dead clam or something."  He describes to me how, his curiosity aroused, he got out of bed and searched for his flashlight.  "I made her hold it open and I trained the flashlight on it.  You should have seen me ... it was comical.  I got so worked up about it that I forgot all about her.  I never in my life looked at a cunt so seriously.  You'd imagine I'd never seen one before.  And the more I looked at it the less interesting it became.  It only goes to show you there's nothing to it after all, especially when it's shaved.  It's the hair that makes it mysterious.  That's why a statue leaves you cold.  Only once I saw a real cunt on a statue - that was by Rodin.  You ought to see it some time ... she has her legs spread wide apart.... I don't think there was any head on it.  Just a cunt you might say.  Jesus, it looked ghastly.  The thing is this - they all look alike.  When you look at them with their clothes on you imagine all sorts of things: you give them an individuality like, which they haven't got, of course.  There's just a crack there between the legs and you get all steamed up about it - you don't even look at it half the time.  You know it's there and all you think about is getting your ramrod inside; it's as though your penis did the thinking for you.  It's an illusion!  You get all burned up about nothing ... about a crack with hair on it, or without hair.  It's so absolutely meaningless that it fascinated me to look at it.  I must have studied it for ten minutes or more.  When you look at it that way, sort of detached like, you get funny notions in your head.  All that mystery about sex and then you discover that it's nothing - just a blank.  Wouldn't it be funny if you found there ... nothing at all.  It's disgusting.  It almost drove me mad.... Listen, do you know what I did afterwards?  I gave her a quick lay and then I turned my back on her.  Yeah, I picked up a book and I read.  You can get something out of a book, even a bad book ... but a cunt, it's just sheer loss of time...."

       It just so happened that as he was concluding his speech a whore gave us the eye.  Without the slightest transition he says to me abruptly: "Would you like to give her a tumble?  It won't cost much ... she'll take the two of us on."  And without waiting for a reply he staggers to his feet and goes over to her.  In a few minutes he comes back.  "It's all fixed," he says.  "Finish your beer.  She's hungry.  There's nothing doing anymore at this hour ... she'll take the both of us for fifteen francs.  We'll go to my room ... it's be cheaper."

       On the way to the hotel the girl is shivering so that we have to stop and buy her a coffee.  She's a rather gentle sort of creature and not at all bad to look at.  She evidently knows Van Norden, knows there's nothing to expect from him but the fifteen francs.  "You haven't got any dough," he says, mumbling to me under his breath.  As I haven't a centime in my pocket I don't quite see the point of this, until he bursts out: "For Christ's sake, remember that we're broke.  Don't get tenderhearted when we get upstairs.  She's going to ask you for a little extra - I know this cunt!  I could get her for ten francs, if I wanted to.  There's no use spoiling them...."

       "Il est mechant, celui-la," she says to me, gathering the drift of his remarks in her dull way.

       "Non, il n'est pas mechant, it est très gentil."

       She shakes her head laughingly.  "Je le connais bien, ce type."  And then she commences a hard-luck story, about the hospital and the back rent and the baby in the country.  But she doesn't overdo it.  She knows that our ears are stopped; but the misery is there inside her, like a stone, and there's no room for any other thoughts.  She isn't trying to make an appeal to our sympathies - she's just shifting this big weight inside her from one place to another.  I rather like her.  I hope to Christ she hasn't got a disease....

       In the room she goes about her preparations mechanically.  "There isn't a crust of bread about by any chance?" she inquires, as she squats over the bidet.  Van Norden laughs at this.  "Here, take a drink," he says, shoving a bottle at her.  She doesn't want anything to drink; her stomach's already on the bum, she complains.

       "That's just a line with her," says Van Norden.  "Don't let her work on your sympathies.  Just the same, I wish she'd talk about something else.  How the hell can you get up any passion when you've got a starving cunt on your hands?"

       Precisely!  We haven't any passion either of us.  And as for her, one might as well expect her to produce a diamond necklace as to show a spark of passion.  But there's the fifteen francs and something has to be done about it.  It's like a state of war: the moment the condition is precipitated nobody thinks about anything but peace, about getting it over with.  And yet nobody has the courage to lay down his arms, to say, "I'm fed up with it ... I'm through."  No, there's fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn about anymore and which nobody is going to get in the end anyhow, but the fifteen francs is like the primal cause of things and rather than listen to one's own voice, rather than walk out on the primal cause, one surrenders to the situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher- bearers pick up the maimed and bleeding heroes and pin medals on their chest.  Then one has the rest of his life to think about the fifteen francs.  One hasn't any eyes or arms or legs, but he has the consolation of dreaming for the rest of his days about the fifteen francs which everybody has forgotten.

       It's exactly like a state of war - I can't get it out of my head.  The way she works over me, to blow a spark of passion into me, makes me think what a damned poor soldier I'd be if I was ever silly enough to be trapped like this and dragged to the front.  I know for my part that I'd surrender everything, honour included, in order to get out of the mess.  I haven't any stomach for it, and that's all there is to it.  But she's got her mind set on the fifteen francs and if I don't want to fight about it she's going to make me fight.  But you can't put fight into a man's guts if he hasn't any fight in him.  There are some of us so cowardly that you can't even make heroes of us, not even if you frighten us to death.  We know too much, maybe.  There are some of us who don't live in the moment, who live a little ahead, or a little behind.  My mind is on the peace treaty all the time.  I can't forget that it was the fifteen francs which started all the trouble.  Fifteen francs!  What does fifteen francs mean to me, particularly since it's not my fifteen francs?

       Van Norden seems to have a more normal attitude about it.  He doesn't care a rap about the fifteen francs either now; it's the situation itself which intrigues him.  It seems to call for a show of mettle - his manhood is involved.  The fifteen francs are lost, whether we succeed or not.  There's something more involved - not just manhood perhaps, but will.  It's like a man in the trenches again: he doesn't know anymore why he should go on living, because if he escapes now he'll only be caught later, but he goes on just the same, and even though he has the soul of a cockroach and has admitted as much to himself, give him a gun or a knife or even just his bare nails, and he'll go on slaughtering and slaughtering, he'd slaughter a million men rather than stop and ask himself why.

       As I watch Van Norden tackle her, it seems to me that I'm looking at a machine whose cogs have slipped.  Left to themselves, they could go on this way forever, grinding and slipping, without ever anything happening.  Until a hand shuts the motor off.  The sight of them coupled like a pair of goats without the least spark of passion, grinding and grinding away for no reason except the fifteen francs, washes away every bit of feeling I have except the inhuman one of satisfying my curiosity.  The girl is lying on the edge of the bed and Van Norden is bent over her like a satyr with his two feet solidly planted on the floor.  I am sitting on a chair behind him, watching their movements with a cool, scientific detachment; it doesn't matter to me if it should last forever.  It's like watching one of those crazy machines which throw the newspaper out, millions and billions and trillion of them with their meaningless headlines.  The machine seems more sensible, crazy as it is, and more fascinating to watch, than the human beings and the events which produced it.  My interest in Van Norden and the girl is nil; if I could sit like this and watch every single performance going on at this moment all over the world my interest would be even less than nil.  I wouldn't be able to differentiate between this phenomenon and the rain falling or a volcano erupting.  As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance.  The machine is better to watch.  And these two are like a machine which has slipped its cogs.  It needs the touch of a human hand to set it right.  It needs a mechanic.

       I get down on my knees behind Van Norden and I examine the machine more attentively.  The girl throws her head on one side and gives me a despairing look.  "It's no use," she says.  "It's impossible."  Upon which Van Norden sets to work with renewed energy, just like an old billy goat.  He's such an obstinate cuss that he'll break his horns rather than give up.  And he's getting sore now because I'm tickling him in the rump.

       "For God's sake, Joe, give it up!  You'll kill the poor girl."

       "Leave me alone," he grunts.  "I almost got it in that time."

       The posture and the determined way in which he blurts this out suddenly bring to my mind, for the second time, the remembrance of my dream.  Only now it seems as though that broomstick, which he had so nonchalantly slung under his arm, as he walked away, is lost forever.  It is like the sequel to the dream - the same Van Norden, but minus the primal cause.  He's like a hero come back from the war, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.  Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door he enters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves a bad taste.  Everything is just the same as it was before; the elements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.  Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up, his body was stolen.  He's like a machine throwing out newspapers, millions and billions of them every day, and the front page is loaded with catastrophes, with riots, murders, explosions, collisions, but he doesn't feel anything.  If somebody doesn't turn the switch off he'll never know what it means to die; you can't die if your own proper body has been stolen.  You can get over a cunt and work away like a billy goat until eternity; you can go to the trenches and be blown to bits; nothing will create that spark of passion is there isn't the intervention of a human hand.  Somebody has to put his hand into the machine and let it be wrenched off if the cogs are to mesh again.  Somebody has to do this without hope of reward, without concern over the fifteen francs; somebody whose chest is so thin that a medal would make him hunchbacked.  And somebody has to throw a feed into a starving cunt without fear of pushing it out again.  Otherwise this show'll go on forever.  There's no way out of the mess....

       After sucking the boss's ass for a whole week - it's the thing to do here - I managed to land Peckover's job.  He died all right, the poor devil, a few hours after he hit the bottom of the shaft.  And just as I predicted, they gave him a fine funeral, with solemn mass, huge wreaths, and everything.  Tout compris.  And after the ceremonies they regaled themselves, the upstairs guys, at a bistro.  It was too bad Peckover couldn't have had just a little snack - he would have appreciated it so much to sit with the men upstairs and hear his own name mentioned so frequently.

       I must say, right at the start, that I haven't a thing to complain about.  It's like being in a lunatic asylum, with permission to masturbate for the rest of your life.  The world is brought right under my nose and all that is requested of me is to punctuate the calamities.  There is nothing in which these slick guys upstairs do not put their fingers: no joy, no misery passes unnoticed.  They live among the hard facts of life, reality, as it is called.  It is the reality of a swamp and they are they frogs who have nothing better to do than to croak.  They more they croak the more real life becomes.  Lawyer, priest, doctor, politician, newspaperman - these are the quacks who have their fingers on the pulse of the world.  A constant atmosphere of calamity.  It's marvellous.  It's as if the barometer never changed, as if the flag were always at half-mast.  One can see now how the idea of heaven takes hold of men's consciousness, how it gains ground even when all the props have been knocked from under it.  There must be another world besides this swamp in which everything is dumped pell-mell.  Its hard to imagine what it can be like, this heaven that men dream about.  A frog's heaven, no doubt.  Miasma, scum, pond lilies, stagnant water.  Sit on a lily pad unmolested and croak all day.  Something like that, I imagine.

       They have a wonderful therapeutic effect upon me, these catastrophes which I proofread.  Imagine a state of perfect immunity, a charmed existence, a life of absolute security in the midst of poison bacilli.  Nothing touches me, neither earthquakes nor explosions nor riots nor famine nor collisions nor wars nor revolutions.  I am inoculated against every disease, every calamity, every sorrow and misery.  It's the culmination of a life of fortitude.  Seated at my little niche all the poisons which the world gives off each day pass through my hands.  Not even a fingernail gets stained.  I am absolutely immune.  I am even better off than a laboratory attendant, because there are no bad odours here, just the smell of lead burning.  The world can blow up - I'll be here just the same to put in a comma or a semicolon.  I may even touch a little overtime, for with an event like that there's bound to be a final extra.  When the world blows up and the final edition has gone to press the proofreaders will quietly gather up all commas, semicolons, hyphens, asterisks, brackets, parentheses, periods, exclamation marks, etc., and put them in a little box over the editorial chair.  Comme ça, tout est règle....

       None of my companions seem to understand why I appear so contented.  They grumble all the time, they have ambitions, they want to show their pride and spleen.  A good proof-reader has no ambitions, no pride, no spleen.  A good proof-reader is a little like God Almighty, he's in the world but not of it.  He's for Sundays only.  Sunday is his night off.  On Sundays he steps down from his pedestal and shows his ass to the faithful.  Once a week he listens in on all the private grief and misery of the world; it's enough to last him for the rest of the week.  The rest of the week he remains in the frozen winter marshes, an absolute, an impeccable absolute, with only a vaccination mark to distinguish him from the immense void.

       The greatest calamity for a proof-reader is the threat of losing his job.  When we get together in the break the question that sends a shiver down our spines is: what'll you do if you lose your job?  For the man in the paddock, whose duty it is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses.  To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one's life shovelling up hot turds is a piece of imbecility.  A man can get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.

       This life which, if I were still a man with pride, honour, ambition and so forth, would seem like the bottom rung of degradation, I welcome now, as an invalid welcomes death.  It's a negative reality, just like death - a sort of heaven without the pain and terror of dying.  In this chthonian world the only thing of importance is orthography and punctuation.  It doesn't matter what he nature of the calamity is, only whether it is spelled right.  Everything is on one level, whether it be the latest fashion for evening gowns, a new battleship, a plague, a high explosive, an astronomic discovery, a bank run, a railroad wreck, a bull market, a hundred-to-one shot, an execution, a stick-up, an assassination, or whatever.  Nothing escapes the proof-reader’s eye, but nothing penetrates his bullet-proof vest.  To the Hindu Agha Mir, Madam Scheer (formerly Miss Esteve) writes saying she is quite satisfied with his work.  "I was married June 6th and I thank you.  We are very happy and I hope that thanks to your power it will be so forever.  I am sending you by telegraph money order the sum of ... to reward you...."  The Hindu Agha Mir foretells your future and reads all your thoughts in a precise and inexplicable way.  He will advise you, will help you rid yourself of all your worries and troubles of all kinds, etc.  Call or write 20 Avenue MacMahon, Paris.

       He reads all your thoughts in a marvellous way!  I take it that means without exception, from the most trivial thoughts to the most shameless.  He must have a lot of time on his hands, this Agha Mir.  Or does he only concentrate on the thoughts of those who send money by telegraph money order?  In the same edition I notice a headline announcing that "the universe is expanding so fast it may burst" and underneath it is the photograph of a splitting headache.  And then there is a spiel about the pearl, signed Tecla.  The oyster produces both, he informs all and sundry.  Both the "wild" or Oriental pearl, and the "cultured" pearl.  On the same day, at the Cathedral Trier, the Germans are exhibiting the Coat of Christ; it's the first time it's been taken out of the mothballs in forty-two years.  Nothing said about the pants and vest.  In Salzburg, also the same day, two mice were born in a man's stomach, believe it or not.  A famous movie actress is shown with her legs crossed: she is taking a rest in Hyde Park, and underneath a well-known painter remarks "I'll admit that Mrs. Coolidge has such charm and personality that she would have been one of the 12 famous Americans, even had her husband not been President."  From an interview with Mr. Humhal, of Vienna, I glean the following ... "Before I stop," said Mr Humhal, "I'd like to say that faultless cut and fit does not suffice; the proof of good tailoring is seen in the wearing.  A suit must bend to the body, yet keep its line when the wearer is walking or sitting."  And whenever there is an explosion in a coalmine - a British coalmine - notice please that the King and Queen always send their condolences promptly, by telegraph.  And they always attend the important races, though the other day, according to the copy, it was at the Derby, I believe, "heavy rains began to fall, much to the surprise of the King and Queen."  More heart- rending, however, is an item like this: "It is claimed in Italy that the persecutions are not against the Church, but nevertheless they are conducted against the most exquisite parts of the Church.  It is claimed that they are not against the Pope, but they are against the very heart and eyes of the Pope."

       I had to travel precisely all around the world to find just such a comfortable, agreeable niche as this.  It seems incredible almost.  How could I have foreseen, in America, with all those firecrackers they put up your ass to give you pep and courage, that the ideal position for a man of my temperament was to look for orthographic mistakes?  Over there you think of nothing but becoming President of the United States some day.  Potentially every man is Presidential timber.  Here it's different.  Here every man is potentially a zero.  If you become something or somebody it is an accident, a miracle.  The chances are a thousand to one that you will never leave your native village.  The chances are a thousand to one that you'll have your legs shot off or your eyes blown out.  Unless the miracle happens and you find yourself a general or a read admiral.

       But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.  Day by day.  No yesterdays and no tomorrows.  The barometer never changes, the flag is always at half-mast.  You wear a piece of black crape on your arm, you have a little ribbon in your buttonhole, and, if you are lucky enough to afford it, you buy yourself a pair of artificial lightweight limbs, aluminium preferably.  Which does not prevent you from enjoying an aperitif or looking at the animals in the zoo or flirting with the vultures who sail up and down the boulevards always on the alert for fresh carrion.  Time passes.  If you're a stranger and your papers are in order you can expose yourself to infection without fear of being contaminated.  It is better, if possible, to have a proof-reader’s job.  Comme ça, tout s'arrange.  That means, that if you happen to be strolling home at three in the morning and you are intercepted by the bicycle cops, you can snap your fingers at them.  In the morning, when the market is in swing, you can buy Belgian eggs, at fifty centimes apiece.  A proof-reader doesn't get up usually until noon, or a little after.  It's well to choose a hotel near a cinema, because if you have a tendency to oversleep the bells will wake you up in time for the matinee.  Or if you can't find a hotel near a cinema, choose one near a cemetery, it comes to the same thing.  Above all, never despair.  Il ne faut jamais desesperer.

       Which is what I try to din into Carl and Van Norden every night.  A world without hope, but no despair.  It's as though I had been converted to a new religion, as though I were making an annual novena every night to Our Lady of Solace.  I can't imagine what there would be to gain if I were made editor of the paper, or even President of the United States.  I'm up a blind alley, and it's cosy and comfortable.  With a piece of copy in my hand I listen to the music around me, the hum and drone of voices, the tinkle of the linotype machines, as if there were a thousand silver bracelets passing through a wringer; now and then a rat scurries past our feet or a cockroach descends the wall in front of us, moving nimbly and gingerly on his delicate legs.  The events of the day are slid under your nose, quietly, unostentatiously, with, now and then, a by-line to mark the presence of a human hand, an ego, a touch of vanity.  The procession passes serenely, like a cortege entering the cemetery gates.  The paper under the copy desk is so thick that it almost feels like a carpet with a soft nap.  Under Van Norden's desk it is stained with brown juice.  Around eleven o'clock the peanut vendor arrives, a half-wit of an Armenian who is also content with his lot in life.

       Now and then I get a cablegram from Mona saying that she's arriving on the next boat.  "Letter following," it always says.  It's been going on like this for nine months, but I never see her name in the list of boat arrivals, nor does the garçon ever bring me a letter on a silver platter.  I haven't any more expectations in that direction either.  If she ever does arrive she can look for me downstairs, just behind the lavatory.  She'll probably tell me right away that it's unsanitary.  That's the first thing that strikes an American woman about Europe - that it's unsanitary.  Impossible for them to conceive of a paradise without modern plumbing.  If they find a bedbug they want to write a letter immediately to the chamber of commerce.  How am I ever going to explain to her that I'm contented here?  She'll say I've become a degenerate.  I know her line from beginning to end.  She'll want to look for a studio with a garden attached - and a bathtub to be sure.  She wants to be poor in a romantic way.  I know her.  But I'm prepared for her this time.

       There are days, nevertheless, when the sun is out and I get off the beaten path and think about her hungrily.  Now and then, despite my grim satisfaction, I get to thinking about another way of life, get to wondering if it would make a difference having a young, restless creature by my side.  The trouble is I can hardly remember what she looks like nor even how it feels to have my arms around her.  Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost their vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like time-bitten mummies stuck in a quagmire.  If I try to recall my life in New York I get a few splintered fragments, nightmarish and covered with verdigris.  It seems as if my own proper existence had come to an end somewhere, just where exactly I can't make out.  I'm not an American anymore, nor a New Yorker, and even less a European, or a Parisian.  I haven't any allegiance, any responsibilities, any hatreds, any worries, any prejudices, any passion.  I'm neither for nor against.  I'm a neutral.

       When we walk home of a night, the three of us, it often happens after the first spasms of disgust that we get to talking about the condition of things with that enthusiasm which only those who bear no active part in life can muster.  What seems strange to me sometimes, when I crawl into bed, is that all this enthusiasm is engendered just to kill time, just to annihilate the three-quarters of an hour which it requires to walk from the office to Montparnasse.  We might have the most brilliant, the most feasible ideas for the amelioration of this or that, but there is no vehicle to hitch them to.  And what is more strange is that the absence of any relationship between ideas and living causes us no anguish, no discomfort.  We have become so adjusted that, if tomorrow we were ordered to walk on our hands, we would do so without the slightest protest.  Provided, of course, that the paper came out as usual.  And that we touched our pay regularly.  Otherwise nothing matters.  Nothing.  We have become Orientalized.  We have become coolies, white-collar coolies, silenced by a handful of rice each day.  A special feature in American skulls, I was reading the other day, is the presence of the epactal bone, or os Incae, in the occiput.  The presence of this bone, so the savant went on to say, is due to a persistence of the transverse occipital suture which is usually closed in fetal life.  Hence it is a sign of arrested development and indicative of an inferior race.  "The average cubical capacity of the American skull," so he went on to say, "falls below that of the white, and rises above that of the black race.  Taking both sexes, the Parisians of today have a cranial capacity of 1,448 cubic centimetres; the Negroes 1,344 centimetres; the American Indians 1,376."  From all of which I deduce nothing because I am an American and not an Indian.  But it's cute to explain things that way, by a bone, an os Incae, for example.  It doesn't disturb his theory at all to admit that single examples of Indian skulls have yielded the extraordinary capacity of 1,920 cubic centimetres, a cranial capacity not exceeded in any other race.  What I note with satisfaction in that the Parisians, of both sexes, seem to have a normal cranial capacity.  The transverse occipital suture is evidently not so persistent with them.  They know how to enjoy an aperitif and if they worry if the houses are unpainted.  There's nothing extraordinary about their skulls, so far as cranial indices go.  There must be some other explanation for the art of living which they have brought to such a high degree of perfection.

       At Monsieur Paul's, the bistro across the way, there is a back room reserved for the newspapermen where we can eat on credit.  It is a pleasant little room with sawdust on the floor and flies in season and out.  When I say that it is reserved for the newspapermen I don't mean to imply that we eat in privacy; on the contrary, it means that we have the privilege of associating with the whores and pimps who form the more substantial element of Monsieur Paul's clientele.  The arrangement suits the guys upstairs to a T, because they're always on the lookout for tail, and even those who have a steady little French girl are not averse to making a switch now and then.  The principal thing is not to get a dose; at times it would seem as if an epidemic had swept the office, or perhaps it might be explained by the fact that they all sleep with the same woman.  Anyhow, it's gratifying to observe how miserable they can look when they are obliged to sit beside a pimp who, despite the little hardships of his profession, lives a life of luxury by comparison.

       I'm thinking particularly now of one tall, blonde fellow who delivers the Havas messages by bicycle.  He is always a little late for his meal, always perspiring profusely and his face covered with grime.  He has a fine, awkward way of strolling in, saluting everybody with two fingers and making a beeline for the sink which is just between the toilet and the kitchen.  As he wipes his face he gives the edibles a quick inspection; if he sees a nice steak lying on the slab he picks it up and sniffs it, or he will dip the ladle into the big pot and try a mouthful of soup.  He's like a fine bloodhound, his nose to the ground all the time.  The preliminaries over, having made peepee and blown his nose vigorously, he walks nonchalantly over to his wench and gives her a big, smacking kiss together with an affectionate pat on the rump.  Her, the wench, I've never seen look anything but immaculate - even at three a.m., after an evening's work.  She looks exactly as if she had just stepped out of a Turkish bath.  It's a pleasure to look at such healthy brutes, to see such repose, such affection, such appetite as they display.  It's the evening meal I'm speaking of now, the little snack that she takes before entering upon her duties.  In a little while she will be obliged to take leave of her big blonde brute, to flop somewhere on the boulevard and sip her digestif.  If the job is irksome or wearing or exhaustive, she certainly doesn't show it.  When the big fellow arrives, hungry as a wolf, she puts her arms around him and kisses him hungrily - his eyes, nose, cheeks, hair, the back of his neck ... she'd kiss his ass if it could be done publicly.  She's grateful to him, that's evident.  She's no wage slave.  All through the meal she laughs convulsively.  You wouldn't think she had a care in the world.  And now and then, by way of affection, she gives him a resounding slap in the face, such a whack as would knock a proof-reader spinning.

       They don't seem to be aware of anything but themselves and the food that they pack away in shovelsful.  Such perfect contentment, such harmony, such mutual understanding, it drives Van Norden crazy to watch them.  Especially when she slips her hand in the big fellow's fly and caresses it, to which he generally responds by grabbing her teat and squeezing it playfully.

       There is another couple who arrive usually about the same time and they behave just like two married people.  They have their spats, they wash their linen in public and after they've made things disagreeable for themselves and everybody else, after threats and curses and reproaches and recriminations, they make up for it by billing and cooing, just like a pair of turtledoves.  Lucienne, as he calls her, is a heavy platinum blonde with a cruel, saturnine.  She has a full underlip which she chews venomously when her temper runs away with her.  And a cold, beady eye, a sort of faded china blue, which makes him sweat when she fixes him with it.  But she's a good sort, Lucienne, despite the condor-like profile which she presents to us when the squabbling begins.  Her bag is always full of dough, and if she deals it out cautiously, it is only because she doesn't want to encourage him in his bad habits.  He has a weak character; that is, if one takes Lucienne's tirades seriously.  He will spend fifty francs of an evening while waiting for her to get through.  When the waitress comes to take his order he has no appetite.  "Ah, you're not hungry again!" growls Lucienne.  "Humpf!"  You were waiting for me, I suppose, on the Faubourg Montmartre.  You had a good time, I hope, while I slaved for you.  Speak, imbecile, where were you?"

       When she flares up like that, when she gets enraged, he looks up at her timidly, and then, as if he had decided that silence is the best course, he lets his head drop and he fiddles with his napkin.  But this little gesture, which she knows so well and which of course is secretly pleasing to her because she is convinced now that he is guilty, only increases Lucienne's anger.  "Speak, imbecile!" she shrieks.  And with a squeaky, timid little voice he explains to her woefully that while waiting for her he got so hungry that he was obliged to stop off for a sandwich and a glass of beer.  It was just enough to ruin his appetite - he says it dolefully, though it's apparent that food just now is the least of his worries.  "But" - and he tries to make his voice sound more convincing - "I was waiting for you all the time," he blurts out.

       "Liar!" she screams. "Liar!  Ah, fortunately, I too am a liar ... a good liar.  You make me ill with your petty little lies.  Why don't you tell me a big lie?"

       He hangs his head again and absentmindedly he gathers a few crumbs and puts them to his mouth.  Whereupon she slaps his hand.  "Don't do that!  You make me tired.  You're such an imbecile.  Liar!   Just you wait!  I have more to say.  I am a liar too, but I am not an imbecile."

       In a little while, however, they are sitting close together, their hands locked, and she is murmuring softly: "Ah, my little rabbit, it is hard to leave you now.  Come here, kiss me!  What are you going to do this evening?  Tell me the truth, my little one.... I am sorry that I have such an ugly temper."  He kisses her timidly, just like a little bunny with long pink ears; gives her a little peck on the lips as if he were nibbling a cabbage leaf.  And at the same time his bring round eyes fall caressingly on her purse which is lying open beside her on the bench.  He is only waiting for the moment when he can graciously give her the slip; he is itching to get away, to sit down in some quiet café on the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre.

       I know him, the innocent little devil, with his round, frightened eyes of a rabbit.  And I know what a devil's street is the Faubourg Montmartre with its brass plates and rubber goods, the lights twinkling all night and sex running through the street like a sewer.  To walk from the Rue Lafayette to the boulevard is like running the gauntlet; they attach themselves to you like barnacles, they eat into you like ants, they coax, wheedle, cajole, implore, beseech; they try it out in German, English, Spanish; they show you their torn hearts and their busted shoes, and long after you've chopped the tentacles away, long after the fizz and sizzle has died out, the fragrance of the lavabo clings to your nostrils - it is the odour of the Pafum de Danse whose effectiveness is guaranteed only for a distance of twenty centimetres.  One could piss away a whole lifetime in that little stretch between the boulevard and the Rue Lafayette.  Every bar is alive, throbbing, the dice loaded; the cashiers are perched like vultures on their high stools and the money they handle has a human stink to it.  There is no equivalent in the Banque de France for the blood money that passes currency here, the money that glistens with human sweat, that passes like a forest fire from hand to hand and leaves behind it a smoke and stench.  A man who can walk through the Faubourg Montmartre at night without panting or sweating, without a prayer or a curse on his lips, a man like that has no balls, and if he has, then he ought to be castrated.

       Supposing the timid little rabbit does spend fifty francs of an evening while waiting for his Lucienne?  Supposing he does get hungry and buy a sandwich and a glass of beer, or stop and chat with somebody else's trollop?  You think it ought to weigh on him, oppress him, bore him to death?  You don't think that a pimp is inhuman, I hope?  A pimp has a private grief and misery too, don't you forget.  Perhaps he would like nothing better than to stand on the corner every night with a pair of white dogs and watch them piddle.  Perhaps he would like it if, when he opened the door, he would see her there reading the Paris-Soir, her eyes already a little heavy with sleep.  Perhaps it isn't so wonderful, when he bends over his Lucienne, to taste another man's breath.  Better maybe to have only three francs in your pocket and a pair of white dogs that piddle on the corner than to taste those bruised lips.  Bet you, when she squeezes him tight, when she begs for that little package of love which only he knows how to deliver, bet you he fights like a thousand devils to pump it up, to wipe out that regiment that has marched between her legs.  Maybe when he takes her body and practises a new tune, maybe it isn't all passion and curiosity with him, but a fight in the dark, a fight single-handed against the army that rushed the gates, the army that walked over her, trampled her, that left her with such a devouring hunger that not even a Rudolph Valentino could appease.  When I listen to the reproaches that are levelled against a girl like Lucienne, when I hear her being denigrated or despised because she is cold and mercenary, because she is too mechanical, or because she's in too great a hurry, or because this or because that, I say to myself, hold on there bozo, not so fast!  Remember that you're far back in the procession; remember that a whole army corps has laid siege to her, that she's been laid waste, plundered and pillaged.  I say to myself, listen, bozo, don't begrudge the fifty francs you hand her because you know her pimp is pissing it away in the Faubourg Montmartre.  It's her money and her pimp.  It's blood money.  It's money that'll never be taken out of circulation because there's nothing in the Banque de France to redeem it.

       That's how I think about it often when I'm seated in my little niche juggling the Havas reports or untangling the cables from Chicago, London and Montreal.  In between the rubber and silk markets and the Winnipeg grains there oozes a little of the fizz and sizzle of the Faubourg Montmartre.  When the bonds go weak and spongy and the pivotals balk and the volatiles effervesce, when the grain market slips and slides and the bulls commence to roar, when every fucking calamity, every ad, every sport item and fashion article, every boat arrival, every travelogue, every tag of gossip has been punctuated, checked, revised, pegged and wrung through the silver bracelets, when I hear the front page being hammered into whack and see the frogs dancing around like drunken squibs, I think of Lucienne sailing down the boulevard with her wings outstretched, a huge silver condor suspended over the sluggish tide of traffic, a strange bird from the tips of the Andes with a rose-white belly and a tenacious little knob.  Sometimes I walk home alone and I follow her through the dark streets, follow her through the court of the Louvre, over the Pont des Arts, through the arcade, through the fents and slits, the somnolence, the drugged whiteness, the grill of the Luxembourg, the tangled boughs, and the snores and groans, the green slats, the strum and tinkle, the points of the stars, the spangles, the jetties, the blue and white striped awnings that she brushed with the tips of her wings.

       In the blue of an electric dawn the peanut shells look wan and crumpled; along the beach at Montparnasse the water lilies bend and break.  When the tide is on the ebb and only a few syphilitic mermaids are left stranded in the muck, the Dôme looks like a shooting gallery that's been struck by a cyclone.  Everything is slowly dribbling back to the sewer.  For about an hour there is a deathlike calm during which the vomit is mopped up.  Suddenly the trees begin to screech.  From one end of the boulevard to the other a demented song rises up.  It is like the signal that announces the close of the exchange.  What hopes there were are swept up.  The moment has come to void the last bagful of urine.  The day is sneaking in like a leper....

       One of the things to guard against when you work nights is not to break your schedule; if you don't get to bed before the birds begin to screech it's useless to go to bed at all.  This morning, having nothing better to do, I visited the Jardin des Plantes.  Marvellous pelicans here from Chapultepec and peacocks with studded fans that look at you with silly eyes.  Suddenly it began to rain.

       Returning to Montparnasse in the bus I noticed a little French woman opposite me who sat stiff and erect as if she were getting ready to preen herself.  She sat on the edge of the seat as if she feared to crush her gorgeous tail.  Marvellous, I thought, if suddenly she shook herself and from her derrière there sprung open a huge studded fan with long silken plumes.

       At the Café de l'Avenue, where I stop for a bite, a woman with a swolen stomach tries to interest me in her condition.  She would like me to go to a room with her and while away an hour or two.  It is the first time I have ever been propositioned by a pregnant woman: I am almost tempted to try it.  As soon as the baby is born and handed over to the authorities she will go back to her trade, she says.  She makes hats.  Observing that my interest is waning she takes my hand and puts it on her abdomen.  I feel something stirring inside.  It takes my appetite away.

       I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender.  As soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the loose.  In America she'd starve to death if she had nothing to recommend her but a mutilation.  Here it is different.  A missing tooth or a nose eaten away or a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural homeliness of the female, seems to be regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male.

       I am speaking naturally of that world which is peculiar to the big cities, the world of men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by the machine - the martyrs of modern progress.  It is this mass of bones and collar buttons which the painter finds so difficult to put flesh on.

       It is only later, in the afternoon, when I find myself in an art gallery on the Rue de Seze, surrounded by the men and women of Matisse, that I am drawn back again to the proper precincts of the human world.  On the threshold of that big hall whose walls are no ablaze, I pause a moment to recover from the shock which one experiences when the habitual gray of the world is rent asunder and the colour of life splashes forth in song and poem.  I find myself in a world so natural, so complete, that I am lost.  I have the sensation of being immersed in the very plexus of life, focal from what place, position or attitude I take my stance.  Lost as when once I sank into the quick of a budding grove and, seated in the dining room of that enormous world of Balbec, I caught for the first time the profound meaning of those interior stills which manifest their presence through the exorcism of sight and touch.  Standing on the threshold of that world which Matisse has created I re-experienced the power of that revelation which had permitted Proust to so deform the picture of life that only those who, like himself, are sensible to the alchemy of sound and sense, are capable of transforming the negative reality of life into the substantial and significant outlines of art.  Only those who can admit the light into their gizzards can translate what is there in the heart.  Vividly now I recall how the glint and sparkle of light caroming from the massive chandeliers splintered and ran blood, flecking the tips of the waves that beat monotonously on the dull gold outside the windows.  On the beach, masts and chimneys interlaced, and like a fuliginous shadow the figure of Albertine gliding through the surf, fusing into the mysterious quick and prism of a protoplasmic realm, uniting her shadow to the dream and harbinger of death.  With the close of day, pain rising like a mist from the earth, sorrow closing in, shuttering the endless vista of sea and sky.  Two waxen hands lying listlessly on the bedspread and along the pale veins the fluted murmur of a shell repeating the legend of its birth.

       In every poem by Matisse there is the history of a particle of human flesh which refused the consummation of death.  The whole run of flesh, from hair to nails, expresses the miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in its thirst for a greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into hungry seeing mouths.  By whatever vision one passes there is the odour and the sound of voyage.  It is impossible to gaze at even a corner of his dreams without feeling the lift of the wave and the cool of flying spray.  He stands at the helm peering with steady blue eyes into the portfolio of time.  Into which distant corners has he not thrown his long, slanting gaze?  Looking down the vast promontory of his nose he has beheld everything - the Cordilleras falling away into the Pacific, the history of the Diaspora done in vellum, shutters fluting the froufrou of the beach, the piano curving like a conch, corollas giving out diapasons of light, chameleons squirming under the book press, seraglios expiring in oceans of dust, music issuing like fire from the hidden chromosphere of pain, spore and madrepore fructifying the earth, navels vomiting their bright spawn of anguish.... He is a bright sage, a dancing seer who, with a sweep of the brush, removes the ugly scaffold to which the body of man is chained by the incontrovertible facts of life.  He it is, if any man today possesses the gift, who knows where to dissolve the human figure, who has the courage to sacrifice an harmonious line in order to detect the rhythm and murmur of the blood, who takes the light that has been refracted inside him and lets it flood the keyboard of colour.  Behind the minutiae, the chaos, the mockery of life, he detects the invisible pattern; he announces his discoveries in the metaphysical pigment of space.  No searching for formulae, no crucifixion of ideas, no compulsion other than to create.  Even as the world goes to smash there is one man who remains at the core, who becomes more solidly fixed and anchored, more centrifugal as the process of dissolution quickens.

       More and more the world resembles an entomologist's dream.  The earth is moving out of its orbit, the axis has shifted; from the north the snow blows down in huge knife-blue drifts.  A new ice age is setting in, the transverse sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn belt the fetal world is dying, turning to dead mastoid.  Inch by inch the deltas are drying out and the river beds are smooth as glass.  A new day is dawning, a metallurgical day, when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow ore.  As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows blurred; osmosis there still is, and here and there articulation, but at the periphery the veins are all varicose, at the periphery the lightwaves bend and the sun bleeds like a broken rectum.

        At the very hub of this wheel which is falling apart, is Matisse.  And he will keep on rolling until everything that has gone to make up the wheel has disintegrated.  He has already rolled over a goodly portion of the globe, over Persia and India and China, and like a magnet he has attached to himself microscopic particles from Kurd, Baluchistan, Timbuktu, Somaliland, Angkor, Tierra del Fuego.  The odalisques he has studded with malachite and jasper, their flesh veiled with a thousand eyes, perfumed eyes dipped in the sperm of whales.  Wherever a breeze stirs there are breasts as cool as jelly, white pigeons come to flutter and rut in the ice-blue veins of the Himalayas.

       The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters.  The grand whorehouse which they have made of life requires no decoration; it is essential only that the drains function adequately.  Beauty, that feline beauty which has us by the balls in America, is finished.  To fathom the new reality it is first necessary to dismantle the drains, to lay open the gangrened ducts which compose the genito-urinary system that supplies the excreta of art.  The odour of the day is permanganate and formaldehyde.  The drains are clogged with strangled embryos.

       The world of Matisse is still beautiful in an old- fashioned bedroom way.  There is not a ball bearing in evidence, nor a boiler plate, nor a piston, nor a monkey wrench.  It is the same old world that went gaily to the Bois in the pastoral days of wine and fornication.  I find it soothing and refreshing to move amongst these creatures with live, breathing pores whose background is stable and solid as light itself.  I feel it poignantly when I walk along the Boulevard de la Madeleine and the whores rustle beside me, when just to glance at them causes me to tremble.  Is it because they are exotic and well-nourished?  No, it is rare to find a beautiful woman along the Boulevard de la Madeleine.  But in Matisse, in the exploration of his brush, there is the trembling glitter of a world which demands only the presence of the female to crystallize the most fugitive aspirations.  To come upon a woman offering herself outside a urinal, where there are advertised cigarette papers, rum, acrobats, horse races, where the heavy foliage of the trees breaks the heavy mass of walls and roofs, is an experience that begins where the boundaries of the known world leave off.  In the evening now and then, skirting the cemetery walls, I stumble upon the phantom odalisques of Matisse fastened to the trees, their tangled manes drenched with sap.  A few feet away, removed by incalculable eons of time, lies the prone and mummy-swathed ghost of Baudelaire, of a whole world that will belch no more.  In the dusky corners of cafés are men and women with hands locked, their loins slather-flecked; nearby stands the garçon with his apron full of sous, waiting patiently for the entr'acte in order to fall upon his wife and gouge her.  Even as the world falls apart the Paris that belongs to Matisse shudders with bright, gasping orgasms, the air itself is steady with a stagnant sperm, the trees tangled like hair.  On its wobbly axle the wheel rolls steadily downhill; there are no brakes, no ball bearings, no balloon tires.  The wheel is falling apart, but the revolution is intact....