Fever Page 8

  ‘No, it doesn’t matter, I wasn’t really asleep, but … but listen, try to get to sleep all the same, try to relax, to calm down. Tomorrow you can go to the dentist.’

  ‘But I need to go to the dentist now, at once. Paule, I assure you I’m not exaggerating, it’s unbearable.’

  ‘I know, I understand, but wait till tomorrow, what else can I suggest? One can’t go waking up dentists at … what time is it, by the way?’

  ‘But I assure you, honestly, I can’t wait, I can’t wait any longer, something’s got to be done.’

  ‘Ten past four … yes, I know. But what can you do?’

  ‘Paule …’

  ‘What exactly is the matter? Have you got an abscess?’

  ‘I don’t know, you …’

  ‘Have you looked at your gum? Is it very red?’

  ‘No, there’s nothing there. Of course I’ve looked, what do you suppose? I assure you I don’t know what it is … It’s … It’s not red at all. It’s inside the jaw that I feel the pain, all over the jaw. My whole head’s hurting now, I …’

  ‘Have you taken any pain-killers? That’s the thing to do.’

  ‘I have, I’ve taken a whole lot of muck, aspirin, doridene, pyramidon. It’s made no difference.’

  ‘Have you tried suppositories?’

  ‘No, I’ve not got any. But it would take something very strong, morphine or something like that. But I’ve got nothing here. And it’s urgent, Paule, I don’t know what I shall do.’

  ‘Well, I really don’t know. Take some more of the stuff you’ve got, and then try to go to sleep all the same.’

  ‘I might go to an all-night chemist’s, but in any case I’ve no prescription, and I need opium or something of the kind.’

  ‘Yes, you need a prescription for that. Wait till tomorrow. You can go to a dentist first thing in the morning and you’ll see, it will be better at once.’

  ‘But I can’t wait any longer, Paule, really I can’t. My nerves are giving way.’

  ‘I know, but you’ll have to. What can I say? If I knew …’

  ‘Besides, Paule, I can’t even walk, I assure you. My whole head hurts, it feels as if it would burst. It’s frightful. And then there’s something else, Paule, there’s … Can you hear me? Paule, are you listening? Paule?’

  ‘Yes, I’m listening. What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know why, really I don’t, it’s completely idiotic. But I … I’m frightened. It’s completely idiotic, I know, but I can’t help it, I’m frightened. I can’t bear to be alone any more, I don’t know why not, but I can’t; I don’t understand why, whether it’s because I’m tired, or what. It’s as though I were suddenly going to die. As though something terrible, some catastrophe, were going to happen. And I’m defenceless. I’m frightened, Paule, I’m frightened.’

  ‘Now listen. Go back to bed and wait till morning. Don’t get worked up. All this will soon be over. But listen, you have to go to bed and rest. Tomorrow it will all be over.’

  ‘No, no, it won’t be over … I’m frightened, Paule, d’you understand, I’m frightened. I don’t know what it means, this is the first time it’s happened to me, but I’m frightened. I don’t know what of, or rather yes, I have an idea, but I can’t understand it. It’s here, everywhere, all round me, I feel as though there were people. They’re going to kill me. They’ve got in, and they’re prowling all round the place. They’re hiding behind the curtains, under the beds, in the passage, in the kitchen, and if I look round too suddenly, trying to catch sight of them, they’ll kill me. Or perhaps they’re waiting till I’m in bed again. If I get into bed they’ll come with knives and stab me in the back. Paule, I swear to you they’ll come. That’s all they’re waiting for.’

  ‘Now look here, stop being so childish. Calm down. You know quite well it isn’t true. You must be feverish. It’s probably an abscess. You must go back to bed and try to rest. Take some sleeping pills. And above all, relax, make your mind a blank. Well?’

  ‘But I can’t, I assure you I can’t. I’m frightened, I can’t help it. I’m in pain and I’m frightened.’

  ‘Listen, I’ll come and see you first thing in the morning. But you must go and rest. Do you hear?’

  ‘Oh, Paule, not tomorrow. Please, please come now.’

  ‘But you know very well I can’t. My parents wouldn’t let me. You woke them up with telephoning, and they’re furious. I have to go now. I’m sorry, but I assure you it’s quite impossible for me to come now. I promise you I’ll come first thing in the morning, about eight or nine o’clock.’

  ‘You can’t come now?’

  ‘No, it’s impossible. If I could I would, but I assure you it’s not possible.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m to do now.’

  ‘Go and rest, that’s the thing.’

  ‘I don’t know. I oughtn’t, I oughtn’t to be alone. I thought …’

  For a few seconds neither of them said anything more. Beaumont had seated himself on a stool beside the telephone; half of his face had turned into a kind of stone, granite no doubt, hard but at the same time crumbly, traversed by little tight blue veins, where all the elements seemed to hold together because of a hoarse, strident cry, a cry of pain and rage. The girl’s voice reached his ear again. It sounded somehow different, now; further away, perhaps, or tired, maybe. She said:

  ‘You must understand—what you’re asking me is quite impossible, quite impossible.’

  Beaumont did not move. His eyes were motionless under their lids, as though tears had frozen on them. He was listening eagerly to the high-pitched, melancholy drone that emerged from his jaw and linked him to the walls of the corridor; his right hand was already removing the telephone receiver from his ear, and he could feel himself going away, massacred, rigid with stupor.

  The voice went on, sounding very thin now:

  ‘Listen. It’s absolutely impossible, really it is. But I’ll come and see you tomorrow morning first thing. All you have to do is wait for me and rest. I’ll ring up the dentist, if you like. You’ll see, everything will be all right. Don’t worry, just rest.’

  An electric humming noise cut through the girl’s words, weaving through them like some sort of bluebottle caught between a muslin curtain and a window-pane.

  ‘Listen, can you hear me? You hear me? Hello? Say something. Do please understand.’ Then: ‘Hello? Hello? Are you there? Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Hello?’

  Beaumont’s arm was dangling by his side now. Far away, very far away, he could hear the telephone crackling; but he had no more wish to listen and understand. The very idea of being obliged to lift the receiver to his ear again seemed to him disgusting, nauseating. His eyes burning with fatigue, he stared at the paper on the wall of the corridor. His jaw was humming at a lower pitch now; it vibrated in long, lazy waves that ran down his spine, his arms and legs, and marked their arrival at each of his extremities, particularly at the top of his head, where the apex of the brain was, by a weak, colourless explosion that spread out like a flaming petrol-jet. Beaumont was submerged by these waves; he was drowning; again from very far away, or perhaps, to be more precise, as though it came from behind a partition, he heard the click of the telephone as the girl at the other end rang off, preparatory to drawing her dressing-gown and black nylon nightdress more closely round her and going back to her room—whispering through the crack of her parents’ door, as her mother sat up among the pillows: ‘It was nothing, Mother, it was nothing. Good night.’

  Left alone in the corridor, sitting on his stool, Beaumont felt a sudden upsurge of strange fury, something cold and sharp, like an electric shock in his right hand, for instance, which flung him on his feet, solitary in the middle of the floor, unhitched from the telephone, covered with muscles and sinews, as though abruptly stripped not only of his pyjamas, his raincoat and the Hindu knife, but of his skin as well, his long, white, feverish, distended skin. With his jaw pushing forward, he progressed across the floor in the
direction of his bedroom. A very faint air current entered his open mouth, ran down to his lungs, and then came out again, warmed, charged with odours and gases, and thrust itself into the atmosphere, gently altering its percentages and temperatures. That was life, a mere nothing, a vague, unvarying phenomenon, so easy to reduce; and pain, this incoherent passion made up of vibrations and graphs, pain trickled into this thread of air, connecting the lungs to the neighbouring objects. It was a plant with double roots, one of them buried in human flesh, the other tattooed on matter, like a flower on the tapestry covering a wall. With this new, unforeseen organ growing inside and outside himself, Beaumont was receiving the indication of his own death; stone and plaster, paper, textiles and glass were being cunningly shown to him, he was making their acquaintance, he was being pushed towards them, towards the inhuman calm, the mysterious order where time has ceased to flow, where movement is imperceptible and sensation eternal. That skirting-board was himself, that dirty yellow colour was himself; so was this rubbish, this furniture, these pieces of worm-eaten wood, this peeling paintwork. This bed, this heap of wool and cotton stuffs on to which he now fell, and which rocked calmly beneath the weight of his body. Without even turning off the light, Beaumont crawled over the mattress till he reached the pillow. Then he laid his head on the downy mass and lowered his eyelids.

  In the darkness the pain grew worse, if possible. It ceased to be multiform, an architectural structure. It became an upright, clear-cut symbol, light and dark, a kind of triumphal I on which the whole of his body was impaled. His position was now fixed, and until the end, until the dental surgeon, the

  stomatologist, etc., he would have to maintain it, revolving desperately round it; vertical violence. Whatever he might do, whatever he actually did—namely, to get up again, sit on the edge of the bed, look at his reflection, in the glass panel of the wireless set that stood on the bedside table, take a cigarette and then drop it on the floor without having had the heart to light it, he would never cease to be standing up, standing on his two feet, stiff, paralysed, haggard.

  Then he took the bottle of spirits and began drinking. Not that his jaw left him then, but getting drunk pushed it further away. By about half-past four he was approximately six feet away from his jaw; rather as though a big nail had been driven into the bone and the gums, and he had been obliged to tug with all his strength so as to drag the wound away and give himself space. The sounds outside the window were coming more frequently now. The waterfall had stopped some time ago, but it had been replaced by the hiss of motor-car tyres, by human footfalls, by the rattle of safety-curtains being run up. In another two or two and a half hours it would be daylight. Beaumont, sprawled on his bed, swallowed the last mouthful of spirits. He was talking to himself at intervals, not in sentences, but in little words grunted out while he was drinking, things like ‘aïe’, ‘aïe-aïe-aïe’ ‘oh’, ‘ah bad bad’, ‘hallo-aïe’, ‘aïe-ooh’. The liquid ran down his oesophagus, and he remained dry; around the bed, every square centimetre had been drained of its liquid content; the floor, wallpaper, plaster, shutters, ashes, were all dried up, a desert. It was like great slabs of slate, rough and dusty, against which the air was rubbing with a noise like emery-paper; the atmospheric cube of the room was like the bag of a vacuum-cleaner, stuffed with particles of dust, dandruff, hairs, tufts, cinders, splinters, filings, rust, with a kind of harsh, corrosive sand that got in everywhere, choking the ball-bearings, filling up spaces, sticking the different parts together.

  Beaumont was now sitting on a little heap of gravel, and his body seemed to be ageing, the way a mummy does. His damaged jaw was a strange bone, rather yellow and dirty, from which the nerves stuck out like blades of grass. Even his skin, once so much alive, his skin, which had been the habitation of sweat and depths of warmth, was now only a woollen blanket, an old, moth-eaten, threadbare horse-cloth, full of knots and coarse-woven lines. The world had slowly turned into a queer symphony of flannels, some of them grey, others red or brown or bluish, which were all irritating and scratching one another. There was the cloth of the walls against the unbleached linen of the air; the round dot of orange-coloured embroidery, all by itself, that was the electric bulb; the sackcloth darkness rubbing against the knitted shutters or the flannelette of the tiled roofs; the nylon of the window-panes on the cloth of the walls; the unbleached linen of the air against the satinette of the dark parquet. And coverlets, more and more coverlets, here and there, cloths, woollens, lisle thread stuffs, suedines, thick, firm velvets, cottons, tergal, muslins, furs, linens, always linens, everywhere, filing one another down with imperceptible movements that spread clouds of fibres and powder all round them, together with a monotonous chant of wear and tear, a single, discordant sound swarming with scratchings, scrapings and choppings, ceaselessly, aimlessly, until it drowned all the other noises of the town. Caught in these mandibles, in these chewings, Beaumont had become the hem of a hanging, a little ball of mixed wool, something dead and consumable, huddled in the cotton of his striped pyjamas, encompassed in the oilskin flaps of his raincoat as though in a shroud; and he was living there, lying flat, stitched on to this refuse from a mechanical loom, feeling things move round him.

  This was how he saw daylight arrive and settle into his room. The electric light was still burning in the same place, in the glass bulb dangling at the end of its flex, where the flies were sleeping. The metallic sounds, the pounding of heels, the confused noise of passing cars had increased in volume; sometimes, though still exceptionally, a shout was heard, rocketing up from a wide-open mouth that called, in the direction of the windows, ‘Jérôme!’ Or a sort of death-knell trailed along the house-fronts, probably the bell for matins.

  About ten past seven, Beaumont got up; he had no jaw left, no gums, no wisdom tooth, no devitalized molar, nothing. His beard was longish by now, and thicker on the right cheek. He tottered out into the corridor; he seemed to be pushing away something in front of his mouth, no doubt his alcohol-saturated breath, which was escaping in the form of a triangle. He picked up the telephone receiver, still dangling at the end of its cord, and dialled a number with his right hand. 80.10.10. He stood waiting, without a word. The telephone rang five or six times, away in the one-roomed flat overlooking the sea, beside the white bed where clothes were lying untidily like sloughed skins. But no one answered, and Beaumont hung up. He did it very simply, almost without regret, a mist veiling his eyes. Then his forefinger went back to the dial with its ten figures. 89.22.81. The telephone began to ring. Pinned on the wall above Beaumont’s head was an old photograph cut out of a book, a bearded man in a white cassock, and underneath was written:

  Père de Foucauld

  at the hermitage at Beni-Abbès.

  At the fourth ring, a voice answered:

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello?’ said Beaumont, so faintly that the other man did not hear him.

  ‘Hello?’ said the voice again.

  ‘Hello?’ Beaumont repeated.

  ‘Hello, who’s speaking?’

  ‘Beaumont,’ said Beaumont.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Beaumont. I …’

  ‘Who do you mean, Beaumont? Who do you want to speak to?’ the voice shouted.

  ‘Well, I’ll explain,’ said Beaumont; ‘I’ve had no sleep all night. I have a horrible pain, just here, in my jaw. A terrible pain. I couldn’t sleep all night. I … I even had to get tight so as to be able to stand it. You understand? So then I tried telephoning to … to a girl friend. I wanted her to come and see me. You understand? I was scared. But although I begged her and explained to her, she wouldn’t. She said the first thing that came into her head, the first excuse she could find, that it was too late, that her parents wouldn’t let her go out at night, etcetera, and she …’

  ‘But why on earth should I care about all this, and anyhow, who are you?’

  ‘She wouldn’t. It was four o’clock in the morning and she wanted her sleep. You understand? She preferred
her sleep. She told me …’

  ‘Listen. Who are you? And why did you ring me up?’

  ‘I’m Beaumont, I told you that before. I …’

  ‘Well, I don’t know any Beaumont, and besides …’

  ‘No! Listen to me before you ring off. Don’t ring off right away.’

  Beaumont suddenly felt the presence of the Hindu dagger, against his hip. The futility of the weapon—or perhaps something else, something unknown—became apparent to him, and he took it out of his belt. The knife fell on the floor, beside his feet, at the spot where it was to remain till the end. Beaumont went on talking, slowly, painfully; the words had difficulty in making their way across the infected area of his mouth, the area of his face, now depopulated in the cold.

  ‘Hello? Yes. Listen: I’ll explain, I suddenly felt so frightened, last night. It had never happened to me before. The loneliness, it must have been that, the loneliness. I was all alone in this great big flat, it was unbearable. And I had this thing in my mouth, this tumour that was torturing me. Can you imagine what it was like, can you even imagine it? So I rang up this girl I told you about, but she wouldn’t come. So I took a bottle of spirits and I began to drink. I didn’t stop until now. I’m high, as high as a kite. But that doesn’t matter. I have the impression I’m finished, that everything’s finished. There’s nothing more I can do, really there isn’t, that’s the truth, it’s terrible, it’s … I’ve been ill before, you understand, no, I’ve been ill before in my life, but I didn’t know this, I didn’t know what it was like. I’ve been tight before, too, but not like this. Not like this. I’ve had toothache before, and everything, but it wasn’t the same. You understand. You understand. It wasn’t like today, this emptiness, this silence, all that, this neglect. So I picked up the telephone and dialled a number, at random. I don’t know exactly what I’ll do now, but …’

  ‘Yes,’ said the voice; the whole thing was ridiculous, in the style of Write me your Troubles, Letters from Our Readers, delivered in a self-conscious, hesitant tone; it was almost literature.