A Night of Serious Drinking Read online

  In any case, just at that moment various kinds of hot sausage had arrived, seasoned with assorted mouth-incinerating spices. It was another excuse for drinking, quite apart from the fear of having to think, and Dudule the Conspirator, who had seen it done at the pictures, went round from one person to the next with a flat flask which he got out of his back pocket, offering swigs of the same horrible lemon-flavored wood alcohol that the Americans, during Prohibition, called vodka, cognac, gin, or simply “drink,” according to how interesting they wished to appear to others.

  Unfortunately, I had allowed a poet called Solo the curio man to get near and begin a long speech in which he tried, without success, to convince me that the earth was round and that there were men, “the Antipodeans, who walk around upside down by using a type of wooden propeller, which is called a boomerang in Dutch,” and he had been going on and on for I don’t know how much slowly ticking time when, looking up, I saw that everybody was listening attentively to what Totochabo was saying—Totochabo is a Chippawayo, that is meaningless, name which had been given to the man behind the firewood. Here, more or less, is what I was able to catch of his words.

  6

  Totochabo was saying:

  “… After a few years of practice, the most moronic virtuoso gets to the point where he can shatter a crystal wineglass from a distance, simply by emitting a note which corresponds exactly to the unstable equilibrium of the vitreous material. A number of violinists no more stupid than any others have been quoted as managing it almost naturally. Your hostess is always extremely proud of having sacrificed to Art—or it may be to Science—the best piece of her glassware, a family heirloom perhaps and, what is more, she is so delighted that it makes her forget to shout at her son who has just got home from school dead drunk; the son will persist in his bad ways, will fail his exams, be reduced to going into business, will become rich and respected, and this entire chain of consequences hangs on a given musical note which may be expressed by a number. I have forgotten to mention that the word ‘Art’ is the only word which carp are able to say. But to continue.

  “The physicists Chladni and Savart, by causing metal plates covered with fine sand to vibrate, have produced geometric figures from the nodal lines which separate the areas of movement. Now, instead of sand, using tacky sunflower dust, these scientists—as they are called, and not without cause …”

  “We’re thick and tired of all that nonthenthe,” blurted the lisping Johannes Kakur, a learned Gascon, as he advanced on Totochabo the red wine oozing from his eyes; and into his face he thrust an angry fist clutching some books stuffed full of reference cards and with marginal annotations in a variety of colored inks.

  “You’ve got it wrong, my poor wee fellow,” said the mealy-mouthed old man.

  The learned Gascon, deflated, let go of his books. I stepped forward and gathered them up unobtrusively. The names of their authors meant very little to me: Higgins, De la Rive, Faraday, Wheatstone, Rijke, Sondhaus, Kundt, and Schaffgotsch. There was also an odd volume by Helmholtz which I put to one side. Finally, I discovered a Rhyming Dictionary and an Encyclopedia of the Occult Sciences in which I immersed myself, not forgetting to have a drink after reading each entry, with the delight you always get from finding other people who are stupider than you are.

  7

  “Thus sound retains its power over fire,” the old man was proceeding when I started to listen again. “And over air through the voice, as you can tell from mine at this moment, or in a number of other ways. Over water, as you know from the work of the physicists Plateau, Savart, and Maurat and through the inquiries of Dr. Faustroll, the Pataphysician, into liquid veins with special reference to their vertical flow from a hole opened up in a thin lining or wall. And over earth, by which I mean the solid element which Timaeus of Locri Epizephyrii said was composed of cubes, as I have already explained by the example of the vibrating plates; I would further instance the walls of Jericho if recourse to an authority of this sort were not in this day and age of dim luminaries more or less pooh-poohed.”

  “Oh! that’ll do,” I said. I really wanted to add: “We didn’t come here to listen to a lot of lectures, we didn’t come here to quench our thirst with rhetoric …” but he broke off abruptly.

  “Now who was it was asking for explanations?”

  “Not me.”

  “It’s all the same.”

  Othello spoke up:

  “Right then, I’ve got you. You say: power over fire, air, water, and earth. You’ve forgotten the fifth. What about the fifth?”

  “You see,” Totochabo pointed out to me, “I’m as fed up with all this as you are. I shall now devise a way of shutting him up with a spot of sham erudition.”

  Raising his voice, he went on:

  “If it’s half-wits you want, you’d better go and look for them somewhere else, for we know jolly well that beneath the perceptible form of sound is hidden a silent essence. It is from this, this crucial point at which the kernel of the perceptible has yet to choose to be sound or light or something else, from this hinterland of nature where to see is to see sound and to hear is to hear suns, it is from this very essence that sound draws its power and its ordering force.”

  And with a wink in my direction, he whispered:

  “That should silence them, wouldn’t you say?”

  “For good,” I replied. “But when you say sham erudition, do you mean real knowledge?”

  “My poor fellow,” he said, “how very thirsty you are!”

  It was true and I set about treating my condition.

  8

  We were drinking like fish. All of a sudden, a large, very learned, vegetarian girl began to stir:

  “What you’re saying is all very well,” she said, and with her elbow knocked over her dealcoholized Pernod (in which the fur-furol and the higher ethers had been left), “all very well. I cast no aspersions on your experiments, and the names of the eminent physicists you’ve quoted inspire me with the greatest confidence. But all this fuss over a broken mandolin is a bit much. Besides, you’ve made out that you did the damage with words and not with specific musical sounds. The sounds of the human voice simply do not have the mathematical precision of the notes you get from a single string …”

  “Phew!” whistled Totochabo. When he whistled, it was like a feather tickling your nostrils. I sneezed. Fifteen pairs of eyes looked at me sternly. In the time it took me to say to myself: “So that’s what people call eyes like bingo-balls, though bingo henceforth will be an archaic game like bezique, snakes and ladders, migraine, step-this-way-young-sir, Cleopatra’s nose, …” in the time it took me to let my garlands of clichés tumble out, everybody else had downed three drinks to dispel the uneasy atmosphere. I on the other hand had to endure the explanations which followed with a parched gullet.

  9

  These explanations were rather intricate, and with my mind on drinking, I was only able to take in a few of the basic ideas. First, the talk ran on having a proper scale for vowels to be explained somehow or other with the help of the words: boo, bore, baa, burr, by, bay, be, which Totochabo had written up in chalk on the chimney hood and which he’d asked us to read aloud. There had been the most awful noise. There were those who tried conscientiously, some who made puns which others found stupid, oaths were exchanged, final verdicts were bandied about, and then all at once somebody called Francis Coq was seen to be on his feet starting to get cross. He shouted us all down through his sharp, watering nose, thumped the table, cut himself on a piece of glass, then with a sidelong glance, attempted to pass off his alcoholic drooling as one of the classic signs of fury, suddenly looked rather uncomfortable and screamed in a piping voice several notes higher than the voice he would have liked to calm our mood with:

  “So what the hell!” and he sat down again, but his words, prickly with inner uneasiness, imposed silence far better than the solemn speech he had thought of would ever have done.

  I was at last about to say something wh
en suddenly the large, very learned girl robbed me of my chance:

  “All this is extremely futile,” we heard her grumble. “We are not here to talk literature, acoustics, or sorcery. We are here for the reason you know. I demand that we change the subject.”

  “But who chose the subject?” replied the old man. “Just now you accused me of breaking a mandolin. I’m simply defending myself. And first of all I would point out it wasn’t a mandolin, it was a guitar.”

  “Don’t try to wriggle out of it, it won’t wash.”

  “I’m not trying to wriggle out of anything, dear lady. I am simply answering your questions. I would as soon talk about gardening or heraldry or Charles V, but I assure you it would still be a shambles. Nobody here is capable of staying awake for two seconds together. And when you’re asleep, you don’t drink properly.”

  It was peremptorily said.

  “And anyway,” said Marcellin, who hadn’t understood a word, “you didn’t even mention consonants or the rhythm of syllables or images or even the unconscious.”

  “There, you see,” said Totochabo with a sigh.

  Then he went on:

  “As for the unconscious, I might not speak of it, granted, but I speak to it. Let the unconscious answer me, if it can do so without expiring in the process.”

  On not receiving an answer, he continued:

  “Right, in that case I’ll go on to the very end of my explanations. Besides, all roads lead to Man. Listen or don’t listen, as you choose, but do not—on any account—forget to drink.”

  10

  Indeed the large cask had just been broached. I prudently remained near the tap. I immersed myself in black thoughts. I said to myself:

  “No way even of being drunk. Why does drinking make you so thirsty? How can I get out of this vicious circle? What would it be like if I woke up? Wait a minute! My eyes are wide open, all I can see is filth, tobacco smoke, and the besotted faces of these people who look as if they could be my brothers. What am I thinking of? Is it a memory, a hope? Are the light and the self-evidence of things past or yet to come? I had it a moment ago, but I’ve let it slip away. What am I talking about? What am I dying of? …” and so on just like when you’ve already had a fair bit to drink.

  I made an effort to listen again. It was very difficult. Inside, I was furious without really knowing why. I felt that “it wasn’t the point,” that “there was something much more urgent that needed doing,” that “the old man was getting on our wick,” but it was like when you dream and suddenly you think “hey! this isn’t reality” but cannot for the moment find the gesture that is called for, which is to open your eyes. Afterwards, it all seems very clear and simple. Here, you couldn’t tell what you had to do. Meantime, we had to endure—and go on hearing—the old man who, with his irritating way of distorting words, was saying:

  “But the rhetorical, technical, philosophical, algebraic, logistic, journalic, romanic, artistic, and aesthetishoo usages of language have led mankind to forget the proper use of the spoken word.”

  This was getting interesting. Unfortunately, the large, learned girl turned the conversation by interjecting irrelevantly:

  “So far, you’ve only talked about inanimate objects. What about animate objects, then?”

  “Oh them! You know as well as I do how sensitive they are to articulated language. For instance, a man walks down the street; he is preoccupied with his inner ticklings (thoughts, he calls them). You yell out: ‘Hey!’ Immediately, the whole complex machine, with its mechanisms of muscle and bone, blood channels, thermo-regulation, gyroscopic gadgets …”

  “It’th wha’?” bellowed Johannes Kakur, his face purple with exasperation.

  “The bits behind the ears, you dolt!” (Everybody pretended to understand so as not to interrupt.) “As I was saying, all this complicated equipment does a half-twist, the jaw drops, the eyes bulge, the legs wobble and the whole thing stares at you like a calf or a viper or a visor or a bucket or a rat, it all depends. And the inner ticklings (well, what do you call them?) are suspended for a moment and perhaps the direction they take will be permanently changed as a result. You are also aware that the word: ‘Hey!’ if it is to produce this effect, must be pronounced with a particular intonation. Generally speaking, people talk as they might fire a gun, at random, every ear for itself. But there is another manner of speaking. It consists first of having a clearly defined target. Next of taking careful aim. And then, fire! Every ear for itself. But if I’ve aimed carefully, I’ll score a bull’s ear. It’s even better when your words begin to suggest images, that is to sculpt the psychophysical waste produced by walking stomachs, carving it by means of various stirrings of the animal spirits, but I can’t explain everything to you at once. Besides, you don’t need to do much; you’ve only to think a bit. For example, in that last sentence, think about the words ‘not’ and ‘have,’ which are completely devocalized by elision.”

  I said to myself: “Ouch! … my head is bursting, don’t fire any more at me,” and I turned back to the cask.

  11

  But I had left my flock of black thoughts next to the cask, and I discovered them still there. They threw their arms round my neck with cries of joy, calling me “dear uncle,” and shrieking all manner of affectionate words, like: “At last! You’re back! Oh! How happy we are to see you again!” They clung to my hair, ears, and fingers, removed my spectacles, upset my glass, dirtied my trousers, and put lumps of bread in my socks. They were all over me. To calm them down, I started singing them this song, which I had composed in bygone times in similar circumstances:

  Yer knows, there’s times yer jus’ don’t know;

  Nuffink’s wot yer know, nix, not a fing.

  But comes the dawn, yer start to crow

  As how yer knows ’bout everyfing.

  But yer don’ know nuffink,

  Nuffink’s wot yer know,

  The whole fing’s on the blink!

  Gradually they went to sleep and when they were well away I picked them up one by one, tied a stone round each one’s neck, and holding them by their back legs, I dropped them through the bung into the large cask. The sad, faint splash! splash! they made as they fell caused me to burst into tears. But it was a relief, for a moment.

  12

  Not long after, I pricked up my ears, for Totochabo’s voice had turned tragic:

  “And now,” he was saying, “I have a confession to make. As references, I quoted the names of some respected men of learning. That was just to give you confidence. Otherwise, you would never have dared to think about questions that the learned societies do not consider. Now that you’ve swallowed the bait, I shall say no more about these Gentlemen and their theories.

  “I’ve got a couple of other ideas. For instance, about the viscosity of sound. Sounds spread over surfaces, slide across polished floors, flow in gutters, pile up in corners, snap on ridges, fall like rain on mucous membranes, swarm on plexuses, flame up on body hair, and flutter on skin like warm air over summer fields. There are aerial battles where sound waves bounce back on themselves, start spinning and whirl between heaven and earth, like the indestructible regret of the suicide, who halfway down from the sixth floor all of a sudden no longer wants to die any more. There are words which do not reach their mark and roll up into roving balls, swollen with danger, like lightning does sometimes when it fails to find its target. There are words which freeze …”

  Johannes Kakur burst out once again:

  “We know all that thtuff! We’ve read Pantagruel ath well, you old thoak!”

  The other replied:

  “If only you knew how much I’d like to stop talking, you wouldn’t be so thirsty.”

  It was another of those sentences which left us puzzled for an hour, during which, plying ourselves with wines from Greece and elsewhere, we forgot all about it.

  13

  Dozing off subsequently, I saw, through the red cobwebs of a nightmare, a clean, empty room, brilliantly lit, which
was next to ours, though I had not noticed it earlier. Through a wide, open door, I saw Totochabo disguised as an ostrich like some African bush hunter; he had kept this room for himself—it was a bit like the armory, but without the arms, of a feudal castle—for receiving visitors of note.

  There were three men with him, walking and talking. I recognized François Rabelais straight off even though he was disguised under a nun’s habit, which featured a large, floating coif like a sea manta, the ominous sting ray, except that its dark coloring was the result of Hebrew inscriptions covering the white starch like so many fly spottings. Instead of the customary bunch of keys and rosary, there hung in the blue folds of the cloth an extremely common-looking pigsticker. The second person had a thin, oval belly like a long fish, the white clothes of a fencer, a waspish eye, a heroic honey-colored moustache with the ends painted green, and a foil with the button removed: it was Alfred Jarry. I heard him explaining that “the reason why his trouser-bottoms were not held in by lobster claws was that he was wearing shorts and white stockings,” and that was all I could catch of what the four men were saying. The third was Léon-Paul Fargue in the uniform of an admiral, which he had decked out with a lot of extra gold braid; he wore the two-pointed hat the wrong way and, instead of the sword, was carrying a boarding cutlass. One minute on his chin and the next in his hand was a false Armenian beard, and depending on the various phases, curves, and knots of the conversation, his face went from smooth to hairy and from hirsute to shaved just like the amazing evolutions of a human shooting star.

  It’s a pity I was able to hear so little of what they said to each other. Nobody else noticed the three visitors, nor even the room in which they chatted. When I told the others about it, they simply laughed at me.

  14

  Shortly afterwards, I lost sight of these goings-on. For some minutes, little Sidonius had been tweaking my ears to get me to listen to a very strange story: