Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

He sat down near the window. The three girls on duty-one half-breed, two white women-were sitting with clients, one of whom was getting ready to leave. Clappique waited, looked outside: nothing, not even a sailor. In the distance, rifle-shots. He started, on purpose: a squarely-built blond girl, disengaged, had just sat down beside him. “A Rubens,” he thought, “but not perfect: she must be by Jordaens. Not a word. ” He twirled his hat on his forefinger, rapidly, threw it up in the air,

caught it dexterously by the brim and placed it on the knees of the woman:

“Take good care of this 1-little hat, my dear girl. It’s the only one in Shanghai. What’s more, it’s tame. ” The woman’s face broadened into a smile: he was a funny guy. And gayety gave a sudden animation to her face, stolid up to this moment.

“Shall we have a drink, or go upstairs?” she asked. “Both.”

She brought some Schiedam. “It’s a specialty of the house.”

“No fooling?” said Clappique.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Do you suppose I give a God damn?”

“Are you in trouble?”

She looked at him. With the funny guys you had to be on your guard. However, he was alone, he wasn’t trying to show off; and he really didn’t seem to be making fun of her.

“What else can you expect, in this sort of life?”

“Do you smoke?”

“Opium is too high. You can use the needle, of course, but I’m afraid: with their dirty needles you get abscesses, and if you’ve got boils they throw you out of the house. There are ten women for every job. And besides. ” Flemish, he thought. He cut her short:

“You can get opium pretty cheap. I pay two dollars and seventy for this.”

“Are you from the North too?”

He gave her a box without answering. She was grateful to him-for being a compatriot, and for the gift.

“Even so it’s too much for me. But this one won’t have cost me much. I’ll chew some tonight.”

“You don’t like to smoke?”

“You think I’ve got a pipe? How do you get that way?”

She smiled bitterly, still pleased however. But the habitual suspicion returned:

“Why do you give me this?”

“Never mind. … I enjoy it. I’ve been ‘in the game.’ ” …

As a matter of fact, he didn’t look like a man who pays for his pleasures. But he surely hadn’t been “in the game” for a long time. (He occasionally felt the need of inventing whole biographies for himself, but rarely when a sexual adventure was involved.) She sidled over to him on the bench.

“Just try to be nice. It’ll be the last time I have a woman.”

“Why is that?”

She was slow, but not stupid. After having answered she understood: “You’re going to kill yourself?”

He wasn’t the first one. She took Clappique’s hand between her own, and kissed ^m, clumsily and almost maternally.

“That’s too bad. ”

“Do you want to go upstairs?”

She had heard that men sometimes had such an urge before death. But she didn’t dare to get up first: it would be like hastening his suicide. She had kept his hand in both of hers. Slumped on the bench, legs crossed and arms held tightly to his sides like a delicate insect, nose pushed forward, he looked at her from afar, in spite of the contact of their bodies. Although he had scarcely been drinking, he was drunk with his lie, with this heat, with the fictive world he was creating. When he said he would kill himself he did not believe what he was saying; but, since she believed it, he was entering a world where truth no longer existed. It was neither true nor false, but real. And since neither his past which he had just invented, nor the elementary gesture, presumably so close, upon which his relation to this woman was based-since neither of these existed, nothing existed. The world had ceased to weigh upon him. Liberated, he lived now only in the romantic universe which he had just created, strengthened by the bond which all human pity establishes before death. His intoxication was so strong that his hand trembled. The woman felt it and thought it was due to anguish:

“Isn’t there a way of-fixing it?”

“No.”

The hat, poised on the corner of the table, seemed to be looking at him ironically. He pushed it over on the bench so as not to see it.

“A love affair?” she went on asking.

A volley of shots burst in the distance. “As if there weren’t enough who are going to die tonight,” she thought.

He got up without answering. She thought her question brought up memories in him. In spite of her curiosity, she felt like begging his pardon, but did not dare. She got up, too. Slipping her hand under the bar, she pulled out a parcel (a syringe, towels) from between two glass jars. They went upstairs.

When he went out-he did not turn round, but knew she was following him with her eyes through the win- dow-neither his mind nor his sensuality had been quenched. The mist had returned. After walking fifteen minutes (the cool night air did not calm ^m) he stopped before a Portuguese bar. Its windows had not lost their polish. Standing apart from the clients, a slim brunette with very large eyes, her hands on her breasts as if to protect them, was looking out into the night. Oappique looked at her without moving. “I am like a woman who doesn’t know what a new lover is going to get out of her. Let’s go and commit suicide with this one.”

In the din of the Black Cat, Kyo and May had waited.

The five last minutes. Already they should have left. It astonished Kyo that Clappique had not come (he had collected almost two hundred dollars for him), although he had half expected it: each time Clappique behaved in this way he was so much himself that he only half surprised those who knew him. Kyo had at first considered him a rather picturesque eccentric, but he was grateful to him for having warned him, and was beginning little by little to feel a real friendship for him. However, he was beginning to doubt the value of the information the Baron had given him, and his failure to keep his appointment made him doubt it all the more.

Although the fox-trot was not over, there was a great stir in the direction of one of Chiang Kai-shek’s officers who had just come in: couples left the dance, drew near, and, although Kyo could hear nothing, he guessed that some important event had occurred. Already May was moving in the direction of the group: at the Black Cat a woman was suspected of everything, and therefore of nothing. She returned very quickly.

“A bomb has been thrown at Chiang Kai-shek’s car,” she told him in a low voice. “He was not in the car."'

“And the murderer?” asked Kyo.

She returned towards the group, came back followed by a fellow who insisted on her dancing with him, but who left her as soon as he saw she was not alone.

“Escaped,” she said.

“Let's hope so. ”

Kyo knew how inaccurate such information usually was. But it was scarcely probable that Chiang Kai-shek had been killed. The importance of such a death would be so great that the officer would not have ignored it. “We will find out at the Military Committee,” said Kyo. “Let’s go there right away.”

He was too hopeful of Ch’en’s escape to doubt it entirely. Whether Chiang Kai-shek was still in Shanghai or had already left for Nanking, the unsuccessful attempt at his life gave a capital importance to the meeting of the Military Committee. And yet, what was to be expected of it? He had transmitted Clappique’s statement, in the afternoon, to a Central Committee that was skeptical and made a point of being so: the repression confirmed Kyo’s thesis too directly not to make his confirmation of it lose some of its validity. Besides, the Committee was agitating for union with the Kuomintang, not for struggle: a few days earlier the political chief of the Reds and one of the Blue chiefs had made some touching speeches in Shanghai. And the failure of the attempt to seize the Japanese concession, at Hankow, was beginning to show that the Reds were paralyzed in Central China itself; the Manchurian troops were marching on Hankow, which would have to fight them before fighting those of Chiang Kai-shek. Kyo was advancing through the fog, May at his side, without speaking. If the Communists had to fight tonight, they would scarcely be able to defend themselves. Whether they had given up their last firearms or not, how would they fight, one against ten, in disagreement with the instructions of the Chinese Communist Party, against an army that would oppose them with its corps of bourgeois volunteers armed with European weapons and having the advantage of attack?