[ 569 ]

	of the countdown irritated him and increased the rate at which
	he could hear himself dying. During his solitary and quite super-
	fluous peregrinations, he had developed a morbid sensitivity to
	night noises in luxury hotels (the gogophony of a truck rated
570.05	three distressibles; the Saturday-night gawky cries exchanged by
	young apprentices in the empty street, thirty; a radiator-relayed
	snore from downstairs, three hundred); but, though indispens-
	able at times of total despair, earplugs had the disadvantage (es-
	pecially after too much wine) of magnifying the throbbing in
570.10	his temples, the weird squeaks in his inexplored nasal cavity,
	and the atrocious creak of his neck vertebras. To an echo of
	that creak, transmitted vascularly to the brain before the system
	of sleep took over, he put down the eerie detonation that took
	place somewhere in his head at the instant that his senses played
570.15	false to his consciousness. Antacid mints and the like proved
	sometimes insufficient to relieve the kind of good old-fashioned
	heartburn, which invariably afflicted him after certain rich
	sauces; but on the other hand, he looked forward with juvenile
	zest to the delightful effect of a spoonful of sodium bicarbonate
570.20	dissolved in water that was sure to release three or four belches
	as big as the speech balloons in the “funnies” of his boyhood.
	Before he met (at eighty) tactful and tender, ribald and
	learned, Dr. Lagosse who thenceforth resided and traveled with
	him and Ada, he had detested physicians. Notwithstanding his
570.25	own medical training, he could not shake off a sneaky, credulous
	feeling, befitting a yokel, that the doctor who pumped up a
	sphygmomanometer or listened in to his wheeze already knew
	(but still kept secret) what fatal illness had been diagnosed with
	the certainty of death itself. He wryly remembered his late
570.30	brother-in-law, when he caught himself concealing from Ada
	that his bladder troubled him on and off or that he had had an-
	other spell of dizziness after paring his toenails (a task he per-
	formed himself, being unable to endure any human hand to
	touch his bare feet).

[ 570 ]

	As if doing his best to avail himself of his body, soon to be
	removed like a plate wherefrom one collects the last sweet
	crumbs, he now prized such small indulgences as squeezing out
	the vermicule of a blackhead, or obtaining with the long nail of
571.05	his little finger the gem of an itch from the depths of his left
	ear (the right one was less interesting), or permitting himself
	what Bouteillan used to brand as le plaisir anglais—holding one’s
	breath, and making one’s own water, smooth and secret, while
	lying chin-deep in one’s bath.
571.10	On the other hand, the pains of life affected him more acutely
	than in the past. He groaned, on the tympanic rack, when a
	saxophone blared, or when a subhuman young moron let loose
	the thunder of an infernal motorcycle. The obstructive behavior
	of stupid, inimical things—the wrong pocket, the ruptured
571.15	shoestring, the idle hanger toppling with a shrug and a hingle-
	tingle in the darkness of a wardrobe—made him utter the
	Oedipean oath of his Russian ancestry.
	He had stopped aging at about sixty-five but by sixty-five he
	had changed in muscle and bone more sharply than people who
571.20	had never gone in for such a variety of athletic pursuits as he
	had enjoyed in his prime. Squash and tennis gave way to ping-
	pong; then, one day, a favorite paddle, still warm from his grip,
	was forgotten in the playroom of a club, and the club was never
	revisited. During his sixth decade some punching-bag exercise
571.25	had done duty for the wrestling and pugilistics of his earlier
	years. Gravitational surprises now made skiing grotesque. He
	could still click foils at sixty, but a few minutes of practice
	blinded him with sweat; so fencing soon shared the fate of the
	table tennis. He could never overcome his snobbish prejudice
571.30	against golf; it was too late to begin, anyway. At seventy, he
	tried jogging before breakfast in a secluded lane, but the clack-
	ing and bouncing of his breasts reminded him too dreadfully
	that he was thirty kilograms heavier than in his youth. At
	ninety, he still danced on his hands—in a recurrent dream.

[ 571 ]

	Normally, one or two sleeping pills helped him to hold at
	bay the monster of insomnia for three or four hours in one
	blessed blur, but sometimes, particularly after he had com-
	pleted a mental task, a night of excruciating restlessness would
572.05	grade into morning migraine. No pill could cope with that
	torment. There he sprawled, curled up, uncurled, turned off
	and turned on the bedside light (a gurgling new surrogate—real
	lammer having been forbidden again by 1930), and physical
	despair pervaded his unresolvable being. Steady and strong
572.10	struck his pulse; supper had been adequately digested; his daily
	ration of one bottle of burgundy had not been exceeded—and
	yet that wretched restlessness continued to make of him an
	outcast in his own home: Ada was fast asleep, or comfortably
	reading, a couple of doors away; the various domestics in their
572.15	more remote quarters had long passed over to the inimical
	multitude of local sleepers that seemed to blanket the sur-
	rounding hills with the blackness of their repose; he alone was
	denied the unconsciousness he so fiercely scorned and so as-
	siduously courted.

[ 572 ]