Journey to the End of the Night (Trans. Ralph Manheim) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Author:Louis-Ferdinand Céline [Céline, Louis-Ferdinand]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-09-25T01:48:04+00:00

In that aedicula at hip height, I found Bébert. He too had gone there for shelter. He had seen me running out of the Henrouille house. "So that's where you've been . . ." he said. "Now you'll have to go up and see the people on the fifth floor of our house, it's their daughter . . ." The girl he was referring to, I knew her well . . . wide hips, beautiful thighs, long and silky . . . There was something tender yet willful about her, and in her movements the precise grace that you often find in women who are sexually fit. She had consulted me several times about her pains in the abdomen. At twenty-five, after her third abortion, she was having complications. Her family called it anemia.

You should have seen her, so solidly built and with a taste for coitus unusual in females. Discreet in her ways, modest in dress and speech. Not the least bit hysterical. But well endowed, well fed, well balanced, a champion in her line. An athlete of pleasure. No harm in that. She only went with married men. And only with connoisseurs, men capable of recognizing and appreciating nature's triumphs, who won't settle for some vicious little slut. No, her soft skin, her sweet smile, her way of walking, and the nobly mobile fullness of her hips earned her the heartfelt, well-merited enthusiasm of certain office managers who knew their stuff.

Unfortunately these office managers couldn't divorce their wives on her account. On the contrary, she helped them to stay happily married. So every time she found herself three months gone, it never failed, she went to the midwife. When you're a hot number and you haven't got a sucker handy, life is no bed of roses.

Her mother opened the door by a crack, as cautiously as if she'd been expecting a murderer. She spoke in whispers, but they were so loud, so intense, she might just as well have been cursing.

"Oh, doctor, what have I done to deserve such a daughter! Oh, doctor, you won't breathe a word to anyone in the neighborhood, will you? ... I trust you . . ." She went on and on, airing her fears and spluttering about what the neighbors might think . . . She was having an attack of knuckleheaded anxiety. Those attacks last a long time.

She gave me time to get used to the dim light in the hallway, the smell of leeks in the soup, the wallpaper with its idiotic leaves and flowers, and her strangled voice. Finally, amid bumblings and exclamations, we reached her daughter's bedside. She lay prostrate, her mind wandering. I'd have like to examine her, but she was losing so much blood, there was such a gooey mess I couldn't see anything in her vagina. Blood clots. A glug-glug between her legs like in the decapitated colonel's neck in the war. All I could do was put back the big wad of cotton and pull up the blanket.

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