Tropic of Cancer Read online

  A hustler! Perhaps it wasn’t so pleasant to smell that boozy breath of hers, that breath compounded of weak coffee, cognac, apéritifs, Pernods and all the other stuff she guzzled between times, what to warm herself and what to summon up strength and courage, but the fire of it penetrated her, it glowed down there between her legs where women ought to glow, and there was established that circuit which makes one feel the earth under his legs again. When she lay there with her legs apart and moaning, even if she did moan that way for any and everybody, it was good, it was a proper show of feeling. She didn’t stare up at the ceiling with a vacant look or count the bedbugs on the wallpaper; she kept her mind on her business, she talked about the things a man wants to hear when he’s climbing over a woman. Whereas Claude—well, with Claude there was always a certain delicacy, even when she got under the sheets with you. And her delicacy offended. Who wants a delicate whore! Claude would even ask you to turn your face away when she squatted over the bidet. All wrong! A man, when he’s burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants to see everything, even how they make water. And while it’s all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed. Germaine had the right idea: she was ignorant and lusty, she put her heart and soul into her work. She was a whore all the way through—and that was her virtue!

  Easter came in like a frozen hare—but it was fairly warm in bed. Today it is lovely again and along the Champs-Elysées at twilight it is like an outdoor seraglio choked with dark-eyed houris. The trees are in full foliage and of a verdure so pure, so rich, that it seems as though they were still wet and glistening with dew. From the Palais du Louvre to the Etoile it is like a piece of music for the pianoforte. For five days I have not touched the typewriter nor looked at a book; nor have I had a single idea in my head except to go to the American Express. At nine this morning I was there, just as the doors were being opened, and again at one o’clock. No news. At four-thirty I dash out of the hotel, resolved to make a last-minute stab at it. Just as I turn the corner I brush against Walter Pach. Since he doesn’t recognize me, and since I have nothing to say to him, I make no attempt to arrest him. Later, when I am stretching my legs in the Tuileries his figure reverts to mind. He was a little stooped, pensive, with a sort of serene yet reserved smile on his face. I wonder, as I look up at this softly enameled sky, so faintly tinted, which does not bulge today with heavy rain clouds but smiles like a piece of old china, I wonder what goes on in the mind of this man who translated the four thick volumes of the History of Art when he takes in this blissful cosmos with his drooping eye.

  Along the Champs-Elysées, ideas pouring from me like sweat. I ought to be rich enough to have a secretary to whom I could dictate as I walk, because my best thoughts always come when I am away from the machine.

  Walking along the Champs-Elysées I keep thinking of my really superb health. When I say “health” I mean optimism, to be truthful. Incurably optimistic! Still have one foot in the nineteenth century. I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans. Carl finds it disgusting, this optimism. “I have only to talk about a meal,” he say, “and you’re radiant!” It’s a fact. The mere thought of a meal—another meal—rejuvenates me. A meal! That means something to go on—a few solid hours of work, an erection possibly. I don’t deny it. I have health, good solid, animal health. The only thing that stands between me and a future is a meal, another meal.

  As for Carl, he’s not himself these days. He’s upset, his nerves are jangled. He says he’s ill, and I believe him, but I don’t feel badly about it.

  I can’t. In fact, it makes me laugh. And that offends him, of course. Everything wounds him—my laughter, my hunger, my persistence, my insouciance, everything. One day he wants to blow his brains out because he can’t stand this lousy hole of a Europe any more; the next day he talks of going to Arizona “where they look you square in the eye.”

  “Do it!” I say. “Do one thing or the other, you bastard, but don’t try to cloud my healthy eye with your melancholy breath!”

  But that’s just it! In Europe one gets used to doing nothing. You sit on your ass and whine all day. You get contaminated. You rot.

  Fundamentally Carl is a snob, an aristocratic little prick who lives in a dementia praecox kingdom all his own. “I hate Paris!” he whines. “All these stupid people playing cards all day… look at them! And the writing! What’s the use of putting words together? I can be a writer without writing, can’t I? What does it prove if I write a book? What do we want with books anyway? There are too many books already. …”

  My eye, but I’ve been all over that ground—years and years ago. I’ve lived out my melancholy youth. I don’t give a fuck any more what’s behind me, or what’s ahead of me. I’m healthy. Incurably healthy. No sorrows, no regrets. No past, no future. The present is enough for me. Day by day. Today! Le bel aujourd’hui!

  He has one day a week off, Carl, and on that day he’s more miserable, if you can imagine it, than on any other day of the week. Though he professes to despise food, the only way he seems to enjoy himself on his day off is to order a big spread. Perhaps he does it for my benefit—I don’t know, and I don’t ask. If he chooses to add martyrdom to his list of vices, let him—it’s O.K. with me. Anyway, last Tuesday, after squandering what he had on a big spread, he steers me to the Dôme, the last place in the world I would seek on my day off. But one not only gets acquiescent here—one gets supine.

  Standing at the Dôme bar is Marlowe, soused to the ears. He’s been on a bender, as he calls it, for the last five days. That means a continuous drunk, a peregrination from one bar to another, day and night without interruption, and finally a layoff at the American Hospital. Marlowe’s bony emaciated face is nothing but a skull perforated by two deep sockets in which there are buried a pair of dead clams. His back is covered with sawdust—he has just had a little snooze in the water closet. In his coat pocket are the proofs for the next issue of his review, he was on his way to the printer with the proofs, it seems, when some one inveigled him to have a drink. He talks about it as though it happened months ago. He takes out the proofs and spreads them over the bar; they are full of coffee stains and dried spittle. He tries to read a poem which he had written in Greek, but the proofs are undecipherable. Then he decides to deliver a speech, in French, but the gérant puts a stop to it. Marlowe is piqued: his one ambition is to talk a French which even the garçon will understand. Of Old French he is a master; of the surrealists he has made excellent translations; but to say a simple thing like “get the hell out of here, you old prick!”—that is beyond him. Nobody understands Marlowe’s French, not even the whores. For that matter, it’s difficult enough to understand his English when he’s under the weather. He blabbers and spits like a confirmed stutterer… no sequence to his phrases. “You pay!” that’s one thing he manages to get out clearly.

  Even if he is fried to the hat some fine preservative instinct always warns Marlowe when it is time to act. If there is any doubt in his mind as to how the drinks are going to be paid he will be sure to put on a stunt. The usual one is to pretend that he is going blind. Carl knows all his tricks by now, and so when Marlowe suddenly claps his hands to his temples and begins to act it out Carl gives him a boot in the ass and says: “Come out of it, you sap! You don’t have to do that with me!”

  Whether it is a cunning piece of revenge or not, I don’t know, but at any rate Marlowe is paying Carl back in good coin. Leaning over us confidentially he relates in a hoarse, croaking voice a piece of gossip which he picked up in the course of his peregrinations from bar to bar. Carl looks up in amazement. He’s pale under the gills. Marlowe repeats the story with variations. Each time Carl wilts a little more. “But that’s impossible!” he finally blurts out. “No it ain’t!” croaks Marlowe. “You’re gonna lose your job… I got it straight.” Carl looks at me in despair. “Is he shitting me, that bastard?” he murmurs in my ear. And then aloud—“What am I
going to do now? I’ll never find another job. It took me a year to land this one.”

  This, apparently, is all that Marlowe has been waiting to hear. At last he has found someone worse off than himself. “They be hard times!” he croaks, and his bony skull glows with a cold, electric fire.

  Leaving the Dôme Marlowe explains between hiccups that he’s got to return to San Francisco. He seems genuinely touched now by Carl’s helplessness. He proposes that Carl and I take over the review during his absence. “I can trust you, Carl,” he says. And then suddenly he gets an attack, a real one this time. He almost collapses in the gutter. We haul him to a bistro at the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet and sit him down. This time he’s really got It—a blinding headache that makes him squeal and grunt and rock himself to and fro like a dumb brute that’s been struck by a sledge hammer. We spill a couple of Fernet-Brancas down his throat, lay him out on the bench and cover his eyes with his muffler. He lies there groaning. In a little while we hear him snoring.

  “What about his proposition?” says Carl. “Should we take it up? He says he’ll give me a thousand francs when he comes back. I know he won’t, but what about it?” He looks at Marlowe sprawled out on the bench, lifts the muffler from his eyes, and puts it back again. Suddenly a mischievous grin lights up his face. “Listen, Joe,” he says, beckoning me to move closer, “we’ll take him up on it. We’ll take his lousy review over and we’ll fuck him good and proper.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Why we’ll throw out all the other contributors and we’ll fill it with our own shit—that’s what!”

  “Yeah, but what kind of shit?”

  “Any kind… he won’t be able to do anything about it. We’ll fuck him good and proper. One good number and after that the magazine’ll be finished. Are you game, Joe?”

  Grinning and chuckling we lift Marlowe to his feet and haul him to Carl’s room. When we turn on the lights there’s a woman in the bed waiting for Carl. “I forgot all about her,” says Carl. We turn the cunt loose and shove Marlowe into bed. In a minute or so there’s a knock at the door. It’s Van Norden. He’s all aflutter. Lost a plate of false teeth—at the Bal Nègre, he thinks. Anyway, we get to bed, the four of us. Marlowe stinks like a smoked fish.

  In the morning Marlowe and Van Norden leave to search for the false teeth. Marlowe is blubbering. He imagines they are his teeth.

  It is my last dinner at the dramatist’s home. They have just rented a new piano, a concert grand. I meet Sylvester coming out of the florist’s with a rubber plant in his arms. He asks me if I would carry it for him while he goes for the cigars. One by one I’ve fucked myself out of all these free meals which I had planned so carefully. One by one the husbands turn against me, or the wives. As I walk along with the rubber plant in my arms I think of that night a few months back when the idea first occurred to me. I was sitting on a bench near the Coupole, fingering the wedding ring which I had tried to pawn off on a garçon at the Dôme. He had offered me six francs for it and I was in a rage about it. But the belly was getting the upper hand. Ever since I left Mona I had worn the ring on my pinkie. It was so much a part of me that it had never occurred to me to sell it. It was one of those orange-blossom affairs in white gold. Worth a dollar and a half once, maybe more. For three years we went along without a wedding ring and then one day when I was going to the pier to meet Mona I happened to pass a jewelry window on Maiden Lane and the whole window was stuffed with wedding rings. When I got to the pier Mona was not to be seen. I waited for the last passenger to descend the gangplank, but no Mona. Finally I asked to be shown the passenger list. Her name was not on it. I slipped the wedding ring on my pinkie and there it stayed. Once I left it in a public bath, but then I got it back again. One of the orange blossoms had fallen off. Anyway, I was sitting there on the bench with my head down, twiddling the ring, when suddenly someone clapped me on the back. To make it brief, I got a meal and a few francs besides. And then it occurred to me, like a flash, that no one would refuse a man a meal if only he had the courage to demand it. I went immediately to a café and wrote a dozen letters. “Would you let me have dinner with you once a week? Tell me what day is most convenient for you.” It worked like a charm. I was not only fed… I was feasted. Every night I went home drunk. They couldn’t do enough for me, these generous once-a-week souls. What happened to me between times was none of their affair. Now and then the thoughtful ones presented me with cigarettes, or a little pin money. They were all obviously relieved when they realized that they would see me only once a week. And they were still more relieved when I said—“it won’t be necessary any more.” They never asked why. They congratulated me, and that was all. Often the reason was I had found a better host; I could afford to scratch off the ones who were a pain in the ass. But that thought never occurred to them. Finally I had a steady, solid program—a fixed schedule. On Tuesdays I knew it would be this kind of a meal and on Fridays that kind. Cronstadt, I knew, would have champagne for me and homemade apple pie. And Carl would invite me out, take me to a different restaurant each time, order rare wines, invite me to the theater afterward or take me to the Cirque Médrano. They were curious about one another, my hosts. Would ask me which place I liked best, who was the best cook, etc. I think I liked Cronstadt’s joint best of all, perhaps because he chalked the meal up on the wall each time. Not that it eased my conscience to see what I owed him, because I had no intention of paying him back nor had he any illusions about being requited. No, it was the odd numbers which intrigued me. He used to figure it out to the last centime. If I was to pay in full I would have had to break a sou. His wife was a marvelous cook and she didn’t give a fuck about those centimes Cronstadt added up. She took it out of me in carbon copies. A fact! If I hadn’t any fresh carbons for her when I showed up, she was crestfallen. And for that I would have to take the little girl to the Luxembourg next day, play with her for two or three hours, a task which drove me wild because she spoke nothing but Hungarian and French. They were a queer lot on the whole, my hosts. …

  At Tania’s I look down on the spread from the balcony. Moldorf is there, sitting beside his idol. He is warming his feet at the hearth, a monstrous look of gratitude in his watery eyes. Tania is running over the adagio. The adagio says very distinctly: no more words of love! I am at the fountain again, watching the turtles pissing green milk. Sylvester has just come back from Broadway with a heart full of love. All night I was lying on a bench outside the mall while the globe was sprayed with warm turtle piss and the horses stiffened with priapic fury galloped like mad without ever touching the ground. All night long I smell the lilacs in the little dark room where she is taking down her hair, the lilacs that I bought for her as she went to meet Sylvester. He came back with a heart full of love, she said, and the lilacs are in her hair, her mouth, they are choking her armpits. The room is swimming with love and turtle piss and warm lilacs and the horses are galloping like mad. In the morning dirty teeth and scum on the windowpanes; the little gate that leads to the mall is locked. People are going to work and the shutters are rattling like coats of mail. In the bookstore opposite the fountain is the story of Lake Chad, the silent lizards, the gorgeous gamboge tints. All the letters I wrote her, drunken ones with a blunt stub, crazy ones with bits of charcoal, little pieces from bench to bench, firecrackers, doilies, tutti-frutti; they will be going over them now, together, and he will compliment me one day. He will say, as he flicks his cigar ash: “Really, you write quite well. Let’s see, you’re a surrealist, aren’t you?” Dry, brittle voice, teeth full of dandruff, solo for solar plexus, g for gaga.

  Upon the balcony with the rubber plant and the adagio going on down below. The keys are black and white, then black, then white, then white and black. And you want to know if you can play something for me. Yes, play something with those big thumbs of yours. Play the adagio since that’s the only goddamned thing you know. Play it, and then cut off your big thumbs.

  That adagio! I don’t know why sh
e insists on playing it all the time. The old piano wasn’t good enough for her; she had to rent a concert grand—for the adagio! When I see her big thumbs pressing the keyboard and that silly rubber plant beside me I feel like that madman of the North who threw his clothes away and, sitting naked in the wintry boughs, threw nuts down into the herring-frozen sea. There is something exasperating about this movement, something abortively melancholy about it, as if it had been written in lava, as if it had the color of lead and milk mixed. And Sylvester, with his head cocked to one side like an auctioneer, Sylvester says: “Play that other one you were practicing today.” It’s beautiful to have a smoking jacket, a good cigar and a wife who plays the piano. So relaxing. So lenitive. Between the acts you go out for a smoke and a breath of fresh air. Yes, her fingers are very supple, extraordinary supple. She does batik work too. Would you like to try a Bulgarian cigarette? I say, pigeon breast, what’s that other movement I like so well? The scherzo! Ah, yes, the scherzo! Excellent, the scherzo! Count Waldemar von Schwisseneinzug speaking. Cool, dandruff eyes. Halitosis. Gaudy socks. And croutons in the pea soup, if you please. We always have pea soup Friday nights. Won’t you try a little red wine? The red wine goes with the meat, you know. A dry, crisp voice. Have a cigar, won’t you? Yes, I like my work, but I don’t attach any importance to it. My next play will involve a pluralistic conception of the universe. Revolving drums with calcium lights. O’Neill is dead. I think, dear, you should lift your foot from the pedal more frequently. Yes, that part is very nice… very nice, don’t you think? Yes, the characters go around with microphones in their trousers. The locale is in Asia, because the atmospheric conditions are more conducive. Would you like to try a little Anjou? We bought it especially for you….