The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 2) Page 14

  Come on! What was I thinking? Tornada, stooping to such childishness! Tornada, my old friend of the Latin quarter! Tornada, Ninette’s godfather! He loved that child too much for him ever to cast aspersions on Lucienne, who was equally fond of her step-daughter and never ceased to demonstrate her affection for the child before him. Did that common adoration not constitute a bond between them? Did not Tornada know that Lucienne loved me, I spite of the difference in our ages? Tornada? Never. Anyone at all, but not Tornada.

  In fact, my old comrade remained impassive under my scrutinizing gaze. But by virtue of an astonishing receptivity, he had certainly understood with what it was that I was struggling internally.

  “Suspect your wife! Not on your life! She’s charming, your Lucienne. She might do you honor...”

  “But she does do me honor.”

  “Certainly—in her fashion. She’s worldly…she wears clothes well. She knows how to squander money. She’s a mistress of the house who has the good sense not to lose herself in petty domestic details and leave the direction of the household to Mademoiselle Robin, the governess. To others the work, to her the ornamentation of the hearth...dancing, singing, flirting…for she flirts too. In sum, she’s a perfect wife. Why should I suspect her—and of what?”

  He was not trying to throw me of the scent. I put his rancor down to the pious memory that he retained of Emeline, my first wife Ninette’s mother.

  “In sum,” he concluded, “all your maladies are based in your meninges. It’s there that it’s necessary to apply the iron…and it’s not incurable.”

  “Cure me, then!”

  “I have the possibility, certainly…are you sure you want me to?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “It’s just that…it’s a means that you might think a trifle radical.”

  “There could never be a means too energetic to free me from pains that are more exasperating than a veritable malady.”

  “You’re demanding it?”

  “I’m demanding it.”

  “Without me having to explain it to you?”

  “I’ll submit to anything.”

  “All right!”

  I had almost finished getting dressed. I only had to slip on one sleeve of my jacket. He stopped me, laid my arm bare, and indicated that I should keep still. Without a word, he went to his desk, opened a drawer and took out a little nickel case containing a Pravaz syringe and a slender glass tube filled with a clear liquid. Everyone is familiar with the procedure of hypodermic injections; I needn’t go into detail.

  He raised the instrument in the air.

  “The syringe, which Molière turned to ridicule, has become in our day an instrument of the greatest value. No one poisons anyone any longer more correctly than via the skin. Dramaturges who cause their heroines to die as a consequence of the ingestion of a drug are no longer up to date. It’s the injection that kills neatly. A j rather than a g—a matter of a downstroke. To us, the physicians of the twentieth century, belongs the right of the downstroke that once belonged to the seigneurs of old!”

  His joke did not relieve me of a certain apprehension. I could not understand why an injection, unless it contained a toxin, could influence the mentality of a human to the point of dissipating torments that were more mental than physical. I took a step backwards.

  “You’re running away?”

  “No, I’m not running away,” I said, taking another step backwards.

  He was a man of rapid interventions. He bounded toward me, grabbed my arm and plunged his needle into it.

  “Ping!” he exclaimed, at the same time.

  “Thank you.”

  Oh, if only I had known, how those thanks would have stuck in my throat!

  It always takes a few minutes before a medicament distributed in that fashion takes effect. I put my jacket on and watched Tornada putting his apparatus away, and then carefully emptying the rest of the liquid in his ampoule—which he then broke—into an ash-tray. It was as if he wanted to annihilate every trace of what he had done. I had still had time to read the number 222 inscribed on the ampoule.

  Soon, however, my vision blurred and I felt a contracture, difficult to describe, invading all my muscles, including those of my neck. It was not painful, merely troubling by virtue of its unexpectedness. Convinced that I was about to lose my balance and that it was necessary to hang on to an item of furniture, I exerted all my strength in the attempt to grab an armchair. A futile struggle: I fell like a log on to the carpet, but without losing consciousness.

  Tornada leaned over my inert body then. He took hold of one of my inert arms, to check its resistance. It was as if I were paralyzed by tetanus or curare. He lifted my eyelids, examined my pupils, and then closed them again. He pinched me forcefully on the left leg and observed that I did not react, although I felt a sharp pain. Finally, he felt the region of my heart.

  At the same time, he muttered: “Delightful…amusing…knocked out…torpedoed…gorgonized! No more pulse…respiration zero…reflexes nullified…dead, in sum. As a doornail! But let’s wait…let’s wait for the sequel.”

  He got up, went to open the door and shouted into the antechamber: “Jean! Jean!”

  Incapable of raising my eyelids, I couldn’t see anything, although I could hear perfectly clearly. I could therefore hear the manservant running in response to his master’s appeal. They both came back to me.

  “Is he dead?” he domestic asked.

  “An embolism, right there in front of me.”

  “One might think that Monsieur was having a run of bad luck. That’s the third in a week in Monsieur’s study! What will that do to Monsieur’s reputation, I wonder?”

  “I don’t care, Jean, and spare me your opinion. All I ask is that you get rid of him for me, like the others.”

  “Does Monsieur know his name and address?”

  “Don’t you recognize him?”

  “Why, it’s Étienne Montabert, Monsieur’s friend!”

  “It is, indeed, him.”

  “What a misfortune!”

  “Pooh! We’ll see. Go on—hurry up, Jean!”

  I had not recovered, for the moment, from the incredible confusion of my thoughts. They were dominated at first by the surprise of hearing the declaration that I was dead, when my senses remained active. To be sure, I could not check the functioning of my sense of smell, since I was no longer breathing, nor my sense of taste, since I was neither eating nor drinking, but I retained my hearing; my vision had not been suppressed when Tornada had opened my eyelids, and I could perceive, all along my extended body, the touch of the parquet. Thus, probably, all my senses remained to me.

  I was also astonished that that state of mummification, consecutive to the injection of the 222, was the remedy that Tornada opposed to the pathological troubles of purely mental origin. To be sure, I had a blind faith in anything that my savant friend undertook for the benefit of my health, but curing mental torments by muscular paralysis was beyond my comprehension. And witness the predominance of self-esteem, even when one knows that one has become, by virtue of death, an object of respect and pity: I cursed Tornada for putting me in a ridiculous posture. What were the members of my entourage going to say when, after having been lugged around like a corpse and brought back to my apartment, I was suddenly reanimated as a perfectly healthy man?

  Even more than the ridicule, however, I deplored the anguish that I was about to provoke in my nearest and dearest: my daughter; her governess, Mademoiselle Hélène Robin; and, above all, my dear wife Lucienne. Would their ulterior joy, on seeing me reborn, compensate for their initial dolor, given that in this base world one suffers much more from a catastrophe than one rejoices on discovering that it was only illusory?

  And what, if news of the occurrence spread to the general public, would the innumerable admirers of the fashionable poet Étienne Montabert, soon to be an Academician, think? My death, announced and then denied by the press, would surely increase the sale of my wo
rks—it was highly probable; it happens every day—but would not the adventure in the final count, harm the reputation of an honest artist and an enemy of advertising? And what about the redoubtable Anastasie?36 And the end-of-year reviewers, their criticisms?

  I had no other anxieties. I would be reanimated at the end of a determined time, since my senses subsisted. Tornada had been joking in telling his manservant that I was dead. That was obvious. And yet, to have learned that two cadavers had preceded me, within a week, in the surgeon’s study, nagged at me slightly even so. I could not believe that Tornada played the practical joke on his clients of passing them off as corpses when they were not. One only takes that sort of liberty with a firm friend like me, and Tornada had no friends apart from me. Those cadavers, therefore, were real cadavers. With the result that that coincidence of murderous fatality on the one hand, and deceptive science on the other, shaking the sentiment of my security somewhat, caused me to hope that Tornada would not maintain me for long in the scarcely-agreeable situation of living death.

  Tornada had disappeared. People brought by the manservant came in, whom I recognized by their speech as his chauffeur and his concierge. The former declared that recently his auto “was turning into a hearse” and the second that his building “was becoming a branch of Père-Lachaise.” They wrapped me in a blanket, lifted me up, with a great deal of difficulty because of the stiffness of my limbs, which rendered me somewhat unmaneuverable, and then loaded me into the elevator, maintaining me in an upright position. They did not seem to be astonished that a corpse could remain in that position.

  From the elevator they took me to the auto, which they had taken the precaution of bringing to the porch. As it was a vast limousine I was able to lie down there—quite comfortably, all things considered. Then, with the curtains lowered, the vehicle set off, without anyone having seen us. The facility with which one can make a corpse disappear in Paris, in broad daylight, is astonishing.

  I sailed thus—I employ that expression intentionally; being unable to feel my muscles, it seemed to me that I was in a boat—for the two kilometers that separated my house from Tornada’s. I had made that journey so often on foot and by car that it was possible for me to recognize the streets along which the auto traveled; when it stopped, I knew that I was at my door. There, the same maneuver: discreet entry under the porch, to the surprise of my concierge, upright ascent in the elevator, and along the landing.

  When Jean rang the bell, my chambermaid, Anna, opened the door.

  She was alarmed. “What’s that?”

  “It’s your boss.”

  “Is he ill?”

  “Better than that: he’s dead.”

  “Oh la la! And Madame’s out! No! She’s going to be surprised.”

  I had expected a different welcome, notably with regard to the reaction of my wife, who had never moderated her testimonies of affection toward me in front of the chambermaid—but one could not expect the girl to employ wholly appropriate literary expressions, and when she said “surprised” she undoubtedly meant “heartbroken” and “tortured.”

  I was laid down in the antechamber during the time it took to recount the story, take a glass of wine, recover from the fatigue of a transport in such a temperature—I’ve forgotten to say that the month of July was finishing in torrid heat—and then change the sheets on my bed. There were hurried footsteps in the corridors; the sound of cupboards opening. Worthy people! How frantic they were on my behalf! I regretted being unable to give them a tip. I would make up for it later.

  No matter: I was back, at home, in my cerebral factory, in the vicinity of my manuscripts, my books and my precious collections. I had so often sung about the souls of things that I could imagine my trinkets finding a satisfaction in that equal to my own. That suspected contentment, also satisfying my consciousness of ownership, helped me to be patient.

  After half an hour of stagnation there, my removers came back.

  “You take the head; you take the legs; I’ll take the rest,” the valet said to his collaborators.

  The concierge however, who was of Herculean build and who had been stimulated to show off by the glass of wine, claimed that he could carry me unaided.

  “You’re just weaklings. Let me do it.”

  He picked me up. His back was creaking, but he carried me. He took me through the big drawing room and the small one, and then the study, which connected directly with my bedroom. He went like a bat out of hell, but a hell not paved with good intentions, and misfortune dictated that I should come into contact a little too brutally with a column supporting an admirable antique Japanese porcelain vase, decorated with terrifying warriors from whom I sought the inspiration of fury when I had to improvise the speech of irritated people. And bang! There were my heroes lying on the ground in their turn.

  “What will Madame say?” Anna lamented.

  “Bah! Send it to my boss. Perhaps he can stick porcelain as well as he unsticks people in his practice…,” joked Tornada’s chauffeur coarsely.

  Hercules unloaded me on to my bed. I was rotated so that I was occupying it lengthwise. I was covered with a sheet, provisionally, and Anna, who knew the price of effort, took the laborers of death to the kitchen to swill another liter before returning to the ardors of the street.

  I remained alone. The dead, were they able to reflect, would say that they are singularly importuned as soon as they have concluded their last supper. They are dressed, they are adorned, they are illuminated; people mutter prayers around them; they really are not allowed a second of true repose. Personally, I was alone, and I felt keenly, for the moment, the privilege of abandonment.

  Chapter II

  Alas, I was soon recalled to contingencies, and in an amazing fashion. As soon as my removers had departed, Anna came back. She was only passing through. I recognized her movements by the rustle of her silk dress, one of my wife’s cast-offs. She headed for my study—continuous, as I have said, with my bedroom.

  Through the open door I heard her pick up the telephone on my work desk and demanded: “Ségur 102-90, if you please, Mademoiselle.”

  She had asked for that number without consulting the directory and without hesitation. She therefore knew it by heart and could not be having recourse to it for the first time.

  She waited briefly, hung up the receiver, picked it up again and agitated the call button.

  “Finally, Mademoiselle—I want Ségur 102-90.”

  Ségur 102-90: to whom could that number belong, and who was she calling there? It could not be her mistress. Ségur numbers served the vicinity of the École Militaire, and Lucienne, in giving me an account of her afternoon schedule, as she did every day after lunch, had never expressed any intention of going there. She was going to her dentist’s in the Rue d’Isly, near the Gare Saint-Lazare, and from there to go try on a dress at her petty couturier’s, nearby in the Rue Pasquier. Then she was to finish off her afternoon by taking a cup of tea at the home of her friend Madame Godsill, the charming divorcée of a rubber magnate famous in the U.S.A. It could not, therefore, be Lucienne that Anna was calling.

  Nor could Ségur 102-90 be Mademoiselle Hélène Robin, my daughter’s governess. She was at the Jardin des Tuileries with the child, as she was every afternoon. Before leaving, Ninette had even thanked me joyfully for a balloon that she was inaugurating that day. I’m going to go “Boom boom!” she had said to me, mimicking the bouncing of her toy. No, neither my daughter nor her governess were at Ségur 102-90.

  “Who, then?”

  “Mademoiselle! Ségur 102-90! I repeat that it’s very urgent. It’s to tell a lady that her husband has just died.”

  It was definite. Lucienne was in Ségur, in the vicinity of the École Militaire.

  What was she doing there?

  Oh, nothing reprehensible, assuredly. Her love for me was the guarantee of her conjugal honor. How many times, during our transports, had she not taken my graying head in her young arms in order to murmur to me: “Étie
nne, you’re so good and I love you so much, that if I were commanded by a hypnotizer to deceive you, well, I would be able to resist his fluid and would rather kill myself!” One does not misinterpret such spontaneous remarks.

  But when all was said and done, she was at Ségur 102-90. What was she doing there?

  The idea soon occurred to me—given that she was so coquettish, adoring clothes—that she had gone there in search of a hat to accompany the dress that she was having made up at her couturier’s. It must be that the case that at this Ségur there was little fairy as ingenious and artistic as the seamstress in the Rue Pasquier. Where will a Parisienne who has a clothing budget of twenty thousand francs a year, not go to procure a hat or a dress on the best terms? She will go on foot through the streets of the most somber and dangerous quarters, for kilometers that would discourage her before ravishing panoramas.

  All the more so because Lucienne had a genius for discovering these small-scale couturiers and milliners. To be sure, she ordered her most important outfits from the major fashion houses. From time to time, I filled in a hole in her modest budget. I settled late bills, only too happy to utilize my income thus to see her smile, to be rewarded by a kiss. But she was not wasteful, and I could not forget my enchantment when she arrived in my work-room brandishing a dress that seemed to me to be new and exclaiming: “Look, my darling! Look! Do you recognize it? It’s my old organdie dress!”

  “That?”