The Man in a Hurry Read online

  PAUL MORAND

  THE MAN IN A HURRY

  Translated from the French

  by Euan Cameron

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One · A Cracking Pace

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  Part Two · The Price of Time

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  Notes

  An Art of Living: a Letter to Paul Morand from a Close Friend

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  THE MAN IN A HURRY

  To Hélène Morand

  … but does one dedicate a book

  to the person to whom one dedicated one’s life?

  P.M.

  PART ONE

  A Cracking Pace

  CHAPTER I

  AT THE POINT at which the road reached the top of the slope and was about to dip down on the other side again, the man jumped out of the taxi without waiting for the driver to brake. He went into one of those suburban taverns where in the summer you can have lunch with a view and where you can dine in the cool of the evening. With an anxious step, he charged down the path lined with box hedges and rushed over to the terrace. There was such a contrast between the sweltering, glare-filled outskirts of the city and the still, stony silence of this panorama that he stopped in his tracks. Paris fanned out beneath him; an incline plunged towards the Seine, hemmed in by the hills of Clamart and the heights of the Sénart forest. The eye could look down from Villeneuve-Saint-Georges as far as Kremlin-Bicêtre. He took a seat at a metal table and clapped his hands. Twice, he glanced at his watch, as if it were a friend. Nobody chose to bring him a drink. Finally, a waiter in his seventies whose rheumatism was aggravated by working at night came to wipe the table with a duster. Why, since he had achieved his aim, did the visitor appear disconcerted?

  The sun was still lighting up the sky, while below, darkness had already fallen; driven from the heavens by sudden flurries of light, rather like an actor unable to make up his mind whether to leave the stage, at nine o’clock the sun was lingering in the summer dusk, drowned in a rosy mist.

  The customer without a drink cast his eye over the surrounding tables; all around him people were dining; at that time of the year refugees (everyone was exclaiming rapturously in Central European languages) had come to graft themselves onto the old Parisian clientele of lovers, boozy wedding parties and entertainers for whom Sceaux and Robinson were a rustic extension of Montparnasse.

  The man kept turning around, as though he were being followed; twice he looked to see whether his watch had anything new to tell him. He had scarcely been sitting down for more than a minute or two than he clapped his hands again, prodded the hobbling, elderly waiter, and insisted on having something to drink.

  Behind the lady at the bar, who was totting up numbers, a whole array of aperitifs was displayed. The visitor gazed at the cordials and coloured alcoholic drinks with melancholy, with longing, with love. His legs began to quiver; his knees knocked together; he clenched his fists, did his best to resist, sighed, and all of a sudden yielded to his desire, abruptly giving way to his impulse, and dashed over to the shelf; his arm brushed against the tiered cake that was the barmaid’s hairdo, he snatched a bottle of quinquina at random, slipped a finger into the handle of a beer mug as he passed the trolley, having also grabbed a soda siphon with the other hand, hopped down the two steps and collapsed into his chair. After having poured the soda water and the Dubonnet into his beer mug—simultaneously, to save time—he gulped it all down.

  Only then did he realize that he had never been thirsty.

  “May I, monsieur, at your table be seated?”

  The customer looked the newcomer up and down.

  “Is it to sketch a portrait of me? No one has ever been able to draw me, I warn you; I don’t keep still.”

  “Allow me to introduce myself: Doctor Zachary Regencrantz, from Jena. Here is my card. Yours, please? Your behaviour has greatly interested me, Monsieur… Monsieur Pierre Niox. I have been observing you ever since you entered the restaurant. Fascinating! My attention was drawn by your extremely sudden appearance on the terrace. I saw the way you bounded in! Your impetuous movements struck me, a specialist in the study of impulsive movement and the anatomy of reflexes, as most unusual and not at all in keeping with their aim. They had originality and even beauty. Rather like a panther leaping on a mosquito. Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  The doctor held forth in measured tones, without beating about the bush, proceeding as though on tiptoes in a language which he was clearly more accustomed to reading than speaking; he lost his balance over the slippery syntax and recovered as best he could.

  “So far nothing abnormal, my dear monsieur. I classified you straight away among the paroxysmal-needing-to-satisfy-himself-quickly-subjects, having initially imagined that you dashed in so that you could shorten the distance that separated you from the moment at which you could drink, since thirst seemed to be the Mittelpunkt, the core of your activity. But this new incident—one that would readily require clinical observation and even perhaps a substantial monograph—is that having satisfied an apparently burning desire, but which in reality was not burning, you have not so much as touched your glass, as it were.”

  Pierre scrutinized this Regencrantz with the friendliness one feels for someone who talks to you about yourself, even though in theory he did not care for people touching him or murmuring in his ear, but he was used to Jews who, when they speak to you, always look as though they are buying something or telling you a secret. Pierre felt himself being stared at intently by a pair of blue eyes rimmed with gold; the eyes of a 100-year-old man in the sallow face of a skier. Very white teeth shone from skin bronzed by altitude; the doctor’s tan was not as well preserved as it had been and was starting to turn green in patches. A nose like a bishop’s crosier protruded between two cheeks that at the most serious moments always looked as though they were about to burst out laughing. Regencrantz scratched his skull, which was covered with a pale moss that was all the more unusual because the hair on his head had taken refuge in his ears and his nostrils.

  “Sit yourself down, doctor. I’m going to give you a consultation. I am neither worried, nor paroxysmal, nor impulsive, nor overwrought. I am perfectly healthy.”

  “We shall see.”

  “Were I on my own, I would feel marvellous; but there are other people.”

  “Halt! All my patients say the same thing: ‘Doctor, I’m a victim…’”

  “I’m not a victim, I’m a martyr.”

  “Ah, there we are. You can tell me what it is that is bothering you.”

  “My misfortune is to be precise. My life is spent waiting. You see, this evening I was meant to meet a friend here. Where is he? He is where everyone is: elsewhere.”

  “One question I shall ask you: are you enthusiastic?”

  “No. Normally quite indifferent, and even apathetic.”

  “Do you believe in the afterlife? Do you talk with God?”

  “I reckon that, having tricked me by bringing me into the world, it’s for Him to get in touch
first.”

  “And do you believe in progress?”

  “What do you take me for?”

  “Is your restless activity of the metaphysical kind? I mean: polypragmosyne?”

  “Don’t look for a moral cause, most honourable doctor, you won’t find anything. It is not because of any acquired wisdom that I move quickly, I do so instinctively. The only explanation is that I possess a fatal gift, as the romantics used to say: that of mobility. I am cursed with moving at a galloping pace in a universe that moves at a trot.”

  “You are like the alchemists who used to see all the principles of the properties of the body in quicksilver. Have you always been so… impatient?”

  “Me, impatient? But I’m so patient that I sometimes have convulsions as a result.”

  “The expression gave me away. Can you say in French: ‘How long have people appeared slow to you?’”

  “Always have done. Well, actually, no. I’m not really sure.”

  “You imply that your subconscious”—the doctor laid stress on the word with a very Germanic relish for terminology—“prefers not to remember. You don’t know, but it knows and it has to speak out. If you would care to see me again, we shall collaborate on a methodical observation of your good self, which will lead us to throw some light on your nature.”

  “But I’m not ill!”

  “Who mentioned illness? I certainly don’t want to treat you. If you want to charge around like that, you’re perfectly entitled to.” (And with his hand the doctor imitated the throw of the javelin.) “I am simply trying to find out for myself, and I say once more that your case is interesting, that there is an original personality within you. The way you took flight, a moment ago, was admirable, and your agility and your lightness were exemplary. This is not a fatal gift in the least, I can assure you, it is a gift pure and simple.”

  “You make me very happy, doctor.”

  “My first diagnosis is that you are not living under a curse, as you say you are. No more than other men. You are actually rather better built, more athletic, and your reflexes, which are made of saltpetre, deserve my careful study. Call me from time to time, especially at moments of over-excitement, and we shall chat. Here is my address.”

  “Wait, doctor, don’t go. This time you’re the one who’s in a hurry.”

  “Very well. I’ll stay and listen to you. For myself, I have my entire life, when I am able, for organized leisure time.”

  “Very well, then listen: my profession is that of an antique dealer; except on rare occasions, I never buy later than AD 1000. I am known for the Carolingian period. I have never sold anything later than thirteenth-century, unless it was a fake, and in that case one returns the money.”

  “All that is a long time ago when people did not run as fast as you!”

  “Yes. I said the same thing to myself last week, at Mount Athos, while inspecting a Byzantine ivory piece smoothed over by the centuries. All the same, one has to move quickly, with bric-a-brac as with everything else, and particularly in my area. Why? Because there’s a regular demand and a steady market for eighteenth-century objects, whereas with the Middle Ages it’s less reliable than the most active gold mine: I watch my customers rushing from Scythian art to Gandharan; six months later it’s Pre-Columbian that’s in vogue and Mycenaean that’s out of favour.”

  “Might that not be the fault of young hotheads like you, Monsieur Dynamite?”

  “No, it’s my customers’ fault. My clientele are as scarce as they are select. They’re difficult and anxious. They are made up of those spurious sages, those devotees who run museums, and the demanding newly rich. Who is more excitable than a collector of objects from the Middle Ages? He strides across the centuries as he would streams. Could anyone be more volatile in his moods? I’ve been dealing with that sort for fifteen years now…”

  “Without adopting the required philosophy?”

  “Philosophy has no more to do with resignation, doctor, than eloquence has with the art of saying nothing. On the contrary, it’s in so far as I’m a philosopher that I feel revolutionary.”

  “You told me that you are fit and well?”

  “What I told you was that I was strong and from good stock. We are all made up of the same atoms that move around at the same speed and yet no one manages to keep up with me. Some mistaken adjustment must have been made at my birth. Explain it if you can. I’m aware of a discrepancy between my own rhythm and that of my environment. One of the two has to give way, either I succumb or else I teach my contemporaries, who really do mope about like snails, to follow my pace. Ah! The slowcoaches!”

  “A good thing you’re not a dictator. You’d be conducting a Blitzkrieg every day!”

  “What can I do?”

  “Improve yourself.”

  “Why me? I have to put up with people, because my fellow citizens have retained, in this tormented century, the pace of a former age. I admire people: they seem to have time for everything, they move forward on a horizontal plane; as for me, I have the feeling I’m constantly falling, as in dreams; when I was born, I fell from a roof and I could see all the floors going by and the ground getting dreadfully closer. I reckon speed is the modern form of sluggishness and I know that I’m obeying the true momentum of the universe and that I’m the only person who can feel that I’m obeying it. Why change? Why would I change, since it’s not my mistake?”

  “With mental dramas there are never any exterior causes.”

  “Tell me straight away that I’m mad. You’ve already treated me as if I were a case of paroxysm, doctor! I’m very upset.”

  “Please don’t paint such a bleak picture, dear Monsieur Niox. I spoke not of tragedy, but drama, for drama has its comical side.”

  “So I’m a clown?”

  “Our initial relationship this evening stems from a scene that can be characterized as basically comical. Your taking flight, so out of proportion to your supposed thirst, would have made anyone laugh. (You yourself were compelled to laugh.) But nevertheless, I think I may be permitted to look beyond this superficial comedy.”

  “The martyr?”

  “No. But a personality who has been affected as far as sexual attraction is concerned, who has been badly bruised, who is probably courageous and quite capable of playing the hero in some modern adventure or other. Along with the word ‘drama’, I used the adjective ‘mental’. I would have done better to use the word ‘spiritual’, yes, spiritual drama, ein seelisches Drama. You are entitled to believe that, had you simply gulped down your aperitif like a raw egg, I would not have spoken to you. Gluttony can be of no interest to me, it should be classified under hysteria; thirst, a primitive impulse, would have justified your haste and would thus have removed its grandeur and its importance. I would have expelled you from the pathology amid general indifference. It is only in proportion to the pointlessness of your actions and insofar as the spirit within you will do its best to shake up matter, that you deserve to be considered as a work of art or feature in the clinician’s notebook, which often amounts to the same thing when it is a question of achieving the truth. But whatever the motivation of your behaviour, you are a truly veritable sphinx as far as I am concerned. You state that there is a conflict between you and the others? Very well. Who is right? Whom should I blame and whom should I absolve? In this debate I wish to make a judgement. Paris, an ancien régime city, is an excellent climacteric resort for the observation of human beings, for, like all the old capitals, it is the refuge of oppressed sensibilities, of those who ignore rules and of the cripples of the present age. Why does Paris have such a great reputation among us? Because it is a city of nervous upheaval and moral tumult. Here, monsieur, we must assert the profundity of this city that is supposed to be superficial and that has invented so many vices and so many styles. I wish to take advantage of my stay in Paris, while awaiting my transit visa for New York. I am noting things down. Later, I transfer them to index cards. Who knows whether I am not already able to recognize
the symptoms of a new and, to us Germans, undiscovered passion?”

  “Are you still talking about me?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Then you will be disappointed, doctor. Just content yourself with this evening’s episode.”

  “I want to do better.”

  “My autopsy?” asked Pierre with a laugh.

  “Ha! Ha! Ha! Your autopsy! Ha! Ha! You are laughing, Monsieur Niox. Sie gehen zu schnell! You are going too fast!”

  Regencrantz got to his feet.

  “Man is a magnetic needle that is never still,” said Pierre.

  “Except at the pole…”

  “Yes, indeed! Amid the polar ice, in death… Death which is nothing but a word! I drink to our life, doctor!”

  “Prosit!”

  CHAPTER II

  CONFINED TO PARIS all afternoon, Pierre had been longing for fresh air, and being eager to sample the cool of the evening, he was consumed with the desire to go up to the woods at Robinson. But now that Regencrantz had left him, all he could think of was sliding downhill again towards his bed, like a river; he tumbled down the slope at full speed so that he could sleep.

  The concierge just has time to catch him as he speeds by and to hand him a message from Placide.

  “Monsieur Niox, from your colleague. It’s urgent.”

  Pierre tears open the letter in the lift and reads it between floors: “Latest development,” writes Placide, “the house that was not for sale is for sale; but there’s not a moment to lose. Phone me this evening when you get home.”

  “Not a moment to lose!” Pierre exclaims. “Marvellous! When do we leave?”

  He rings Placide, who agrees to come along with him. Tomorrow morning at six o’clock, it’s settled, they will both be on the road.

  In bed, Pierre manages to fold himself in three in such a way that even when he is lying still he seems to be making a perilous plunge. He concentrates, then relaxes into a soliloquy: “Pierre, think hard before you fall asleep and before waking up and finding out you’re a landlord. Pierre, you’re going to tie yourself down! You’re taking root. You’re settling down. You’re becoming stable! Your agile legs are going to bind together like those of a stone god! Your rushing stream will end up in a lake, in a bog. Is it possible? You, owning a house! You should know that there are snails that die crushed by their own shells! Are you going to swap the turmoil of a free man for the turmoil of a home owner? Think carefully while it’s still dark before collapsing into a deep sleep. Up till now, what do you own? Treasures that are in any case not yours and which would fit into a single suitcase. You are one of those men who don’t have any excess baggage.