Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (94 page)

And so he has been in Paris three weeks. He has not yet joined a class; neither has he visited the Louvre since he does not know where the Louvre is, though he and Angelo have crossed the Place de la Concorde several times in cabs. Angelo, with his instinct for glitter and noise, promptly discovered the Exposition; he took his patron there. But Elmer does not consider these to be painting. Yet he lingered, went through it all, though telling himself with quick loyalty, It wont be Myrtle who would come here; it will be Mrs Monson who will bring her, make her come. He has no doubt but that they are in Paris. He has been in Europe long enough to know that the place to look for an American in Europe is Paris; that when they are anywhere else, it is merely for the weekend.

When he reached Paris, he knew two words of French: he had learned them from the book which he bought at the shop where he bought his paints. (It was in New York. “I want the best paints you have,” he told the young woman, who wore an artist’s smock. “This set has twenty tubes and four brushes, and this one has thirty tubes and six brushes. We have one with sixty tubes, if you would like that,” she said. “I want the best,” Elmer said. “You mean you want the one with the most tubes and brushes?” she said. “I want the best,” Elmer said. So they stood looking at one another at this impasse and then the proprietor himself came, also in an artist’s smock. He reached down the set with the sixty tubes—which, incidentally, the French at Ventimiglia made Elmer pay a merchant’s import duty on. “Of course he vants the best,” the proprietor said. “Cant you look at him and tell that? Listen, I vill tell you. This is the vun you vant; I vill tell you. How many pictures can you paint vith ten tubes? Eh?” “I dont know,” Elmer said. “I just want the best.” “Sure you do,” the proprietor said; “the vun that
vill paint the most pictures. Come; you tell me how many pictures you can paint vith ten tubes; I tell you how many you can paint vith sixty.” “I’ll take it,” Elmer said.)

The two words were
rive gauche
. He told them to the taxi driver at the Gare de Lyons, who said, “That is true, monsieur,” watching Elmer with brisk attentiveness, until Angelo spoke to him in a bastard language of which Elmer heard
millionair americain
without then recognising it. “Ah,” the driver said. He hurled Elmer’s baggage and then Angelo into the cab, where Elmer already was, and drove them to the Hotel Leutetia. So this is Paris, Elmer thought, to the mad and indistinguishable careening of houses and streets, to canopied cafes and placarded comfort stalls and other vehicles pedalled or driven by other madmen, while Elmer sat a little forward, gripping the seat, with on his face an expression of static concern. The concern was still there when the cab halted before the hotel. It had increased appreciably when he entered the hotel and looked about; now he was downright qualmed. This is not right, he thought. But already it was too late; Angelo had made once his pursed sound of pleasure and approbation, speaking to a man in the dress uniform of a field marshal in his bastard tongue, who in turn bellowed sternly, “
Encore un millionair americain
.” It was too late; already five men in uniform and not were forcing him firmly but gently to sign his name to an affidavit as to his existence, and he thinking
What I wanted was a garret
thinking with a kind of humorous despair
It seems that what I really want is poverty

He escaped soon though, to Angelo’s surprise, astonishment, and then shrugged fatalistic resignation. He took to prowling about the neighborhood, with in his hand the book from which he had learned
rive gauche
, looking up at garret windows beneath leads and then at the book again with helpless dismay which he knew would soon become despair and then resignation to the gold braid, the funereal frock coats, the piled carpets and the discreet lights among which fate and Angelo had cast him, as though his irrevocable horoscope and been set and closed behind him with the clash of that barred door in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. He had not even opened the box of paints. Already he had paid a merchant’s duty on them; he could well have continued to be the merchant which the French had made him and sold them. Then one day he
strayed into the Rue Servandoni. He was merely passing through it, hopeful still with fading hope, when he looked through open doors, into a court. Even in the fatal moment he was telling himself
It’s just another hotel. The only difference will be that living here will be a little more tediously exigent and pettily annoying
But again it was too late; already he had seen her. She stood, hands on hips in a clean harsh dress, scolding at an obese man engaged statically with a mop—a thin woman of forty or better, wiry, with a harried indefatigable face; for an instant he was his own father eight thousand miles away in Texas, not even knowing that he was thinking
I might have known she would not stay dead
not even thinking with omniscient perspicuity
I wont even need the book

He didn’t need the book. She wrote on a piece of paper the rate for the rooms; she could have made it anything she wished. He told himself that, housed again, static, dismayed, and relieved, while she nagged at him about his soiled clothes, examining and mending them, prowling furiously among his things and cleaning his room furiously (Angelo lived on the floor above him) while she jabbed French words and phrases into his mouth and made him repeat them. Maybe I can get away some night, he told himself. Maybe I can escape after she is asleep and find an attic on the other side of town; knowing that he would not, knowing that already he had given up, surrendered to her; that, like being tried for a crime, no man ever escapes the same fate twice.

And so soon (the next day he went to the American Express Co. and left his new address) his mind was saying only Paris. Paris. The Louvre, Cluny, the Salon, besides the city itself: the same skyline and cobbles, the same kindlooking marbles thighed as though for breeding—all that merry sophisticated coldblooded dying city to which Cezanne was dragged now and then like a reluctant cow, where Manet and Monet fought points of color and line; where Matisse and Picasso still painted: tomorrow he would join a class. That night he opened the box of paints for the first time. Yet, looking at them, he paused again. The tubes lay in serried immaculate rows, blunt, solid, torpedolike, latent. There is so much in them, he thought. There is everything in them. They can do anything; thinking of Hals and Rembrandt; all the tall deathless giants of old time, so that he turned his head suddenly, as though they were in the room, filling it, making it seem smaller than a hencoop,
watching him, so that he closed the box again with quiet and aghast dismay. Not yet, he told himself. I am not worthy yet. But I can serve. I will serve. I want to serve, suffer too, if necessary.

The next day he bought watercolors and paper (for the first time since reaching Europe he showed no timorousness nor helplessness in dealing with foreign shopkeepers) and he and Angelo went to Meudon. He did not know where he was going; he merely saw a blue hill and pointed it out to the taxi driver. They spent seven days there while he painted his landscape. He destroyed three of them before he was satisfied, telling himself while his muscles cramped and his eyes blurred with weariness, I want it to be hard. I want it to be cruel, taking something out of me each time. I want never to be completely satisfied with any of them, so that I shall always paint again. So when he returned to the Rue Servandoni, with the finished picture in the new portfolio, on that first night when he looked at the tall waiting spectres, he was humble still but no longer aghast.

So now I have something to show him, he thinks, nursing his now lukewarm beer, while beside him Angelo’s pursed sound has become continuous. Now, when I have found who is the best master in Paris, when I go to him and say Teach me to paint, I shall not go emptyhanded; thinking
And then fame. And then Myrtle
while twilight mounts Montparnasse gravely beneath the year turning reluctant as a young bride to the old lean body of death. It is then that he feels the first lazy, implacable waking of his entrails.

Angelo’s pursed sound has become continuous: an open and bland urbanity, until he sees that his patron has risen, the portfolio under his arm. “We eat-a, eh?” he says, who in three weeks has learned both of French and English, while Elmer has not yet learned how to ask where the Louvre and the Salon are. Then he indicates Elmer’s beer. “No feeneesh?”

“I’ve got to go,” Elmer says; there is upon his face that rapt, inturned expression of a dyspeptic, as though he is listening to his insides, which is exactly what Elmer is doing; already he moves away. At once a waiter appears; Elmer still with that rapt, not
exactly concerned expression but without any lost motion, gives the waiter a banknote and goes on; it is Angelo who stays the waiter and gets change and leaves a European tip which the waiter snatches up with contempt and says something to Angelo in French; for reply and since his patron is going on, walking a little faster than ordinary, Angelo merely takes time to reverse his sound of approbation by breathing outward through his pursed lips instead of inward.

And now musical with motion Michel also, though it is in the Place de l’Observatoire that Angelo overtakes his patron, where even then he still has to trot to keep up. Angelo looks about, his single eyebrow lifted. “No eat-a now?” he says.

“No,” Elmer says. “The hotel.”

“Otel?” Angelo says. “Eat-a first, eh?”

“No!” Elmer says. His tone is fretted, though not yet harried and not yet desperate. “Hotel. I’ve got to retire.”

“Rittire?” Angelo says.

“Cabinet,” Elmer says.

“Ah,” Angelo says; “cabinet.” He glances up at his patron’s concerned, at once very alert and yet inwardlooking face; he grasps Elmer by the elbow and begins to run. They run for several steps before Elmer can jerk free; his face is now downright alarmed.

“Goddamn it, let go!” He cries.

“True,” Angelo says in Italian. “In your situation, running is not what a man wants. I forgot. Slow and easy does it, though not too slow. Coraggio,” he says, “we come to her soon.” And presently the pay station is in sight. “Voila!” Angelo says. Again he takes his patron’s arm, though not running; again Elmer frees his arm, drawing away; again Angelo indicates the station, his single eyebrow high on his skull, his eyes melting, concerned, inquiring; again he reverses his sound of approbation, indicating the station with his thumb.

“No!” Elmer says. His voice is desperate now, his expression desperate yet determined. “Hotel!” In the Garden, where Elmer walks with long harried strides and Angelo trots beside him, twilight is gray and unsibilant among the trees; in the long dissolving arras people are already moving toward the gates. They pass swiftly the carven figures in the autumntinged dusk, pass the bronze ones in solemn nowformless gleams secretive and brooding;
both trotting now, they pass Verlaine in stone, and Chopin, that sick feminine man like snow rotting under a dead moon; already the moon of death stands overhead, pleasant and affable and bloodless as a procuress. Elmer enters the Rue Vaugirard, trotting with that harried care, as though he carries dynamite; it is Angelo who restrains him until there is a gap in the traffic.

Then he is in the Rue Servandoni. He is running now, down the cobbled slope. He is no longer thinking
What will people think of me
It is as though he now carries life, volition, all, cradled dark and sightless in his pelvic girdle, with just enough of his intelligence remaining to tell him when he reaches the door. And there, just emerging, hatless, is his landlady.

“Ah, Monsieur Odge,” she says. “I just this moment search for you. You have visitors; the female millionaires American Monson wait you in your chamber.”

“Yes,” Elmer says, swerving to run past her, not even aware that he is speaking to her in English. “In a minute I will—” Then he pauses; he glares at her with his harried desperate face. “Mohsong?” he says. “Mohsong?” then: “Monson!
Monson!
” Clutching the portfolio he jerks his wild glare upward toward his window, then back to the landlady, who looks at him in astonishment. “Keep them there!” he shouts at her with savage ferocity. “Do you hear? Keep them there! Dont let them get away. In a minute I will—” But already he has turned, running toward the opposite side of the court. Still galloping, the portfolio under his arm, he rushes up the dark stairs while somewhere in his desperate mind thinking goes quietly
There will be somebody already in it. I know there will
thinking with desperate despair that he is to lose Myrtle twice because of his body: once because of his back which would not let him dance, and now because of his bowels which will give her to think that he is running away. But the cabinet is empty; his very sigh of relief is the echo of his downwardsighing trousers about his legs, thinking Thank God. Thank God. Myrtle.
Myrtle
. Then this too flees; he seems to see his life supine before the secret implacable eyeless life of his own entrails like an immolation, saying like Samuel of old: Here I am. Here I am. Then they release him. He wakes again and reaches his hand toward the niche where scraps of newspaper are kept and he becomes utterly immobile while time seems to rush past him with a sound almost like that of a shell.

He whirls; he looks at the empty niche, surrounded by the derisive whistling of that dark wind as though it were the wind which had blown the niche empty. He does not laugh; his bowels too have emptied themselves for haste. He claps his hand to his breast pocket; he becomes immobile again with his arm crossing his breast as though in salute; then with a dreadful urgency he searches through all his pockets, producing two broken bits of crayon, a dollar watch, a few coins, his room key, the tobacco tin (worn silver smooth now) containing the needles and thread and such which the cook had given him ten years ago in Canada. That is all. And so his hands cease. Imbued for the moment with a furious life and need of their own, they die; and he sits for a moment looking quietly at the portfolio on the floor beside him; again, as when he watched them fondle the handgrenade on board the transport in 1916, he watches them take up the portfolio and open it and take out the picture. But only for the moment, because again haste descends upon him and he no longer watches his hands at all, thinking Myrtle. Myrtle.
Myrtle
.