Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Author:Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Contemporary Fiction, Reference, Contemporary, Literary, Literary Fiction, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 0811216543
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2014-02-14T05:00:00+00:00

You’d have a hard time talking me out of the idea that Robinson wasn’t mostly to blame for my trouble starting up again. At first I didn’t pay much attention to my spells. I somehow kept dragging myself from one patient to the next, but I’d become even uneasier than before, more and more so, like in New York, and I was beginning to sleep even worse than usual.

In short, meeting Robinson again had given me a shock, and I seemed to be falling sick again.

With the misery painted all over his face, I felt he was bringing back a bad dream that I’d been unable to get rid of all those years. It was driving me nuts.

All of a sudden he turned up. I’d never see the last of him. He must have been looking for me in the neighborhood, I certainly wasn’t looking for him … He was bound to come back again and make me think about his rotten life. Actually everything conspired to make me think of his repulsive substance. Even those people I saw out the window, who didn’t look like anything much, just walking in the street, chewing the fat in doorways, rubbing shoulders, made me think of him. I knew what they were after and what they were hiding behind their innocent look. To kill and get killed, that’s what they wanted, not all at once of course, but little by little like Robinson, with all the old sorrows they could summon up, all the new miseries and still nameless hatreds, except when they do it with out-and-out war, and then it’s quicker.

I didn’t even dare go out, for fear of meeting him.

My patients would have to send for me two or three times in a row before I’d make up my mind to visit them. Usually they had called in someone else by the time I got there. My head was a shambles like life itself. I was called to 12 Rue Saint-Vincent, fourth floor, where I’d been only once before. Actually, they came to get me in a car. I recognized the grandfather right away, he wiped his feet elaborately on my doormat. A furtive type, gray and stooped, his grandson was sick and he wanted me to hurry.

I remembered his daughter too, another strapping wench, a little faded, but strong and silent, she always came home to her parents for her abortions. They never scolded her, but all the same they wished she’d finally get married, all the more so since she already had a little boy of two staying with the grandparents.

For no reason at all this child was always getting sick, and when he was sick, the grandfather, the grandmother, and the mother wept together. What made them weep all the more was that he had no legitimate father. It’s at times like that that families are most afflicted by irregular situations. The grandparents were convinced, without quite admitting it to themselves, that illegitimate children are more delicate and prone to illness than others.

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