The High-Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

act in which my father had taken part didn't really gall me. I condemned it, of course, but it didn't turn my stomach. My indifference struck me as a sign of an underlying moral defect. The Jewish blood that flowed through my veiu, and of which I should have been justifiably proud, was not something I accepted; but the ignominy of my father: that I took on completely, to the point of defending his memory every time someone attacked it in front of me, and of watching over his burial place for years like a loyal dog. On the other hand, when someone mentioned my mother's martyrdom in my presence, I only pretended to sympathize. But deep down, I felt nothing. And I thought to myself that what happened to her was normal for a whore.
    At seven o'clock, seeing that I was not preparing to leave my office, and probably afraid of being obliged to pay me overtime, my boss grabbed me by the back of my jacket and unceremoniously threw me out. I came back to the shop to say goodbye to him, but he closed the metal shutter on me. I withdrew my hand just in time. I didn't hold it against him. He was a bit of a brute, but really very nice, deep down. There I was, exiled, once again. I was condemned to pass by number 47.1 crossed rue Froidevaux, I pressed up against the cemetery wall, I would have liked to have melted into it, the ivy lashed my face, my gray overcoat blended in with the saltpeter, I scraped my fingernails, but it wasn't night yet, alas, the dead were so peaceful on the other side, it wasn't night yet, August again, the music of time, hot and humid, on the other side lay my father, Rene Marlaud, 1902-1953, and no trace of my mother, gone up in smoke somewhere in Germany, August, again, but when would night fall, and Madame C., on the other side, watching me with her hippopotamus eye. I couldn't help looking away from the gray wall. The concierge's head emerged from the marsh. It must have been terribly hot, and yet I was cold. I lifted up the collar of my camelhair overcoat. I caught cold so easily. All my life I've been cold. Except when my father took me in his arms and let me stroke his prickly bearded face. August, all those leaves, the insects clinging to my hair, buzzing, and boulevard Ossements itself, in its greenish melancholy. There was a strange, miserable silence. You wanted to spin round, spin, spin, until you fall, an airplane in flames, like when you were small. And those grassy smells coming from who knows where, gardens, over there, probably, beyond the lime trees, in the splendor of the hollyhock. A young woman in a summer dress was weeping in the middle of the street, silently. She was pulling up, in vain, a dirty underskirt, which kept falling back down. The ivy, on the cemetery walls, had dark tints to it. The wire fencing that protected it from the living was painted purple. Yet if you wanted to, you could walk against the grayish stones, as I was, it was a question of habit. I was gazing at a chicken gizzard, from which some coarse-ground grains were spilling out, some tiny pebbles. Life had never seemed to me so slow and atrocious. Terrifying. The sky was taking on an ugly color of spoiled calf's liver. It would rain, that night. With a storm, perhaps, and a very strong wind.
    Madame C. crossed the street and took me by the hand.
     
    The strangeness of our sexual relations had put me off a bit in the beginning, of course, but then I ended up taking some pleasure in them. You get used to anything. I would wash myself for a long time after lovemaking. After all, it wasn't so unpleasant as all that to be a phallus-man, the w y there used to be cannon-men in the circuses. Madame C. was often very melancholic. She was only inexhaustible when it came to her childhood. Outside of that, and the question of the toilet, she was silent most of the time. She never spoke to me of her husband. I only knew that I looked like him. One evening, she confided to me that she was bored absolutely shitless on this earth, bored