Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller Read Free Book Online

he got a box in the ears. That made him wag his tongue some more, whereupon he got such a wallop that his teeth flew down his throat and his jaw-bone was broken in three places. Still he didn’t know enough to hold his trap. Like the damned fool that he was he goes to the police station and registers a complaint. A week later, while he’s sitting on a bench snoozing, a gang of roughnecks break into the place and beat him to a pulp. His head was so battered that his brains looked like an omelette. For good measure they emptied the safe and turned it upside down. Dave died on the way to hospital. They found five hundred dollars hidden away in the toe of his sock … Then there was Clausen and his wife Lena. They came in together when he applied for the job. Lena had a baby in her arms and he had two little ones by the hand. They were sent to me by some relief agency. I put him on as a night messenger so that he’d have a fixed salary. In a few days I had a letter from him, a batty letter in which he asked me to excuse him for being absent as he had to report to his parole officer. Then another letter saying that his wife had refused to sleep with him because she didn’t want any more babies and would I please come to see them and try to persuade her to sleep with him – I went to his home – a cellar in the Italian quarter. It looked like a bughouse. Lena was pregnant again, about seven months under way, and on the verge of idiocy. She had taken to sleeping on the roofbecause it was too hot in the cellar, also because she didn’t want him to touch her any more. When I said it wouldn’t make any difference now she just looked at me and grinned. Clausen had been in the war and maybe the gas had made him a bit goofy – at any rate he was foaming at the mouth. He said he would brain her if she didn’t stay off that roof. He insinuated that she was sleeping up there in order to carry on with the coal man who lived in the attic. At this Lena smiled again with that mirthless batrachian grin. Clausen lost his temper and gave her a swift kick in the ass. She went out in a huff taking the brats with her. He told her to stay out for good. Then he opened a drawer and pulled out a big Colt. He was keeping it in case he needed it some time, he said. He showed me a few knives too, and a sort of blackjack which he had made himself. Then he began to weep. He said his wife was making a fool of him. He said he was sick of working for her because she was sleeping with everybody in the neighbourhood. The kids weren’t his because he couldn’t make a kid any more even if he wanted to. The very next day, while Lena was out marketing, he took the kids up to the roof and with the blackjack he had shown me he beat their brains out. Then he jumped off the roof head first. When Lena came home and saw what happened she went off her nut. They had to put her in a straight-jacket and call for the ambulance … There was Schuldig the rat who had spent twenty years in prison for a crime he had never committed. He had been beaten almost to death before he confessed; then solitary confinement, starvation, torture, perversion, dope. When they finally released him he was no longer a human being. He described to me one night his last thirty days in jail, the agony of waiting to be released. I have never heard anything like it; I didn’t think a human being could survive such anguish. Freed, he was haunted by the fear that he might be obliged to commit a crime and be sent back to prison again. He complained of being followed, spied on, perpetually tracked. He said “they” were tempting him to do things he had no desire to do. “They” were the dicks who were on his trail, who were paid to bring him back again. At night, when he was asleep, they whispered in his ear. He was powerless againstthem because they mesmerized him first. Sometimes they placed dope under his pillow, and with it a revolver or a knife. They wanted him to kill some innocent