The Interrogation Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE INTERROGATION

  J. M. G. Le Clézio was born on 13 April 1940 in Nice. He was educated at the University College in Nice and at Bristol and London universities. With his knowledge of English he was able to work closely with his translator on The Interrogation, his first novel, which won the Prix Renaudot in 1963. Since then he has written over forty highly acclaimed books and has been translated into thirty-six languages. The Flood, Fever and Terra Amata are available as Penguin Modern Classics. Le Clézio was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2008. He divides his time between New Mexico, Nice and Mauritius.

  J. M. G. Le Clézio

  The Interrogation

  Translated from the French by Daphne Woodward

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  Le Procès-Verbal first published in France 1963

  This translation first published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 1964

  First published in Penguin Books 1970

  This facsimile edition published 2008

  Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, 1963

  Translation copyright © Hamish Hamilton, 1964

  All rights reserved

  The short extract from A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes is reproduced by permission of Chatto & Windus Ltd

  The moral right of the author and of the translator has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192752-7

  ‘Poll, as if he had been my favourite, was the only person permitted to talk to me.’

  – Robinson Crusoe

  I have two secret ambitions. One of them is to write, one day, a novel of such a kind that if the hero dies in the last chapter – or, at a pinch, develops Parkinson’s disease – I shall be swamped beneath a flood of scurrilous anonymous letters.

  From this point of view, I know, The Interrogation is not entirely successful. It is perhaps too serious, too mannered and wordy; its style ranges from para-realistic dialogue to pedantically aphoristical bombast.

  But I don’t despair of writing a really effective novel later on: something in the spirit of Conan Doyle, appealing not to the readers’ taste for realism – along the broad lines of psychological analysis and illustration – but to their sentimentality.

  It seems to me that in this direction there are great untrodden wastes to be explored, vast frozen regions dividing author from reader. Their exploration should employ every kind of sympathetic approach, from the humorous to the naive; it should not be systematic. There comes a moment when between the teller and the listener belief manifests itself, takes shape. This is perhaps the moment attained in the novel of ‘action’, the essential factor of which may be a species of compulsion. Where the words convey an elusive touch of reminiscence, a domestic quality. Where – just as in a magazine serial or a strip-cartoon in a cheap paper – every girl is expected to have a sigh of excitement, filling in the gap that yawns between the lines until then.

  It seems to me that writing, communicating, implies the ability to make anybody believe anything. And only an uninterrupted sequence of indiscretions can dent the reader’s armour of indifference.

  The Interrogation is the story of a man who is not sure whether he has just left the army or a mental home. In other words, I deliberately chose, at the outset, a tenuous, abstract theme. I have made very little attempt at realistic treatment (I have a stronger and stronger impression that there is no such thing as reality); I would like my story to be taken as a complete fiction, interesting only in so far as it produces a kind of repercussion (however briefly) on the reader’s mind. This sort of thing is familiar to all readers of detective stories and so forth. A kind of game or jigsaw puzzle in the form of a novel. It couldn’t be taken seriously, of course, but for the fact that the method has other advantages – it lightens the style, livens up the dialogue, and avoids dry-as-dust description and stale psychology.

  I apologize for putting forward a few theories in this way; that form of vanity is rather too fashionable nowadays. I also apologize for any slips or typing mistakes there may still be in my manuscript, in spite of several readings. (I had to type it myself, and I can only type with one finger of each hand.)

  Lastly, I would like to mention that I have begun another and much longer story, telling as simply as possible what happens the day after a girl’s death.

  Very respectfully yours

  J. M. G. LE CLÉZIO

  A. Once upon a little time, in the dog-days, there was a fellow sitting at an open window; he was an inordinately tall boy with a slight stoop, and his name was Adam; Adam Polio. He had the air of a beggar in his way of looking everywhere for patches of sunshine and sitting for hours practically motionless in the angle of a wall. He never knew what to do with his arms, he usually left them to dangle at his sides, touching his body as little as possible. He was like one of those sick animals that make a canny retreat into some refuge and watch stealthily for danger, the kind that comes creeping along the ground and hides in its skin, blending right into it. Now he was lying on a deck-chair by the open window, naked to the waist, bareheaded, bare-footed, with the sky slanting overhead. All he had on was a pair of beige linen trousers, shabby and sweat-stained; he had rolled the legs up to his knees.

  The yellow sunshine was hitting him full in the face, but without glancing off again: it was immediately absorbed by his damp skin, striking no sparks, not even the faintest little gleam. He guessed as much and made no movement, except that from time to time he lifted a cigarette to his lips and drew in a gulp of smoke.

  When the cigarette was finished, when it burnt his thumb and fore-finger and he had to drop it on the floor, he took a handkerchief from his trousers pocket and with great deliberation wiped his chest and forearms, the base of his throat and his armpits. Once rid of the thin film of sweat which had protected it until that moment, his skin began to glow like fire, red with light. Adam got up and walked quickly to the back of the room, into the shade; from the pile of blankets on the floor he pulled out an old shirt made of cotton, flannelette or calico, shook it and slipped it on. When he bent down, the tear in the middle of the back, between his shoulder-blades, opened in a way it had, to the size of a coin, and revealed, at random, three pointed vertebrae which stuck out beneath the taut skin like fingernails under
thin rubber.

  Without even buttoning his shirt, Adam took from among the blankets a kind of yellow exercise-book, the sort used in schools, in which the first page was headed, like the beginning of a letter:

  My dear Michèle,

  then he went back to sit in front of the window, protected now from the rays of the sun by the material that clung to his ribs. He opened the exercise-book on his knees, ruffled briefly through the pages covered with closely-written sentences, produced a ball-point pen from his pocket, and read:

  My dear Michèle,

  I would so much like this house to stay empty. I hope the owners won’t come back for a long time.

  This is how I’d dreamt of living for ages: I put up two deck-chairs facing each other, just under the window; like that, about midday, I lie down and sleep in the sun, turned towards the view, which is beautiful, so they say. Or else I turn away a little towards the light, throwing my head into full relief. At four o’clock I stretch out further, provided the sun is lower or shining in more directly; by that time it’s about ¾ down the window. I look at the sun, perfectly round; at the sea, that’s to say the horizon, right up against the window-rail; perfectly straight. I spend every minute at the window, and I pretend all this is mine, silently, and no one else’s. It’s funny. I’m like that the whole time, in the sun, almost naked, and sometimes quite naked, looking carefully at the sky and the sea. I’m glad people think everywhere that I’m dead; at first I didn’t know this was a deserted house; that kind of luck doesn’t come often.

  When I decided to live here I took all I needed, as though I were going fishing, I came back in the night, and then I toppled my motorbike into the sea. Like that I gave the impression I was dead, and I didn’t need to go on making everyone believe I was alive and had heaps of things to do, to keep myself alive.

  The funny thing is that no one took any notice, even at the beginning; luckily I hadn’t too many friends, and I didn’t know any girls, because they’re always the first to come and tell you to stop playing the fool, to get back to the town and begin all over again as though nothing had happened: that’s to say cafés, cinemas, railways, etc.

  From time to time I go into town to buy stuff to eat, because I eat a lot, and often. Nobody asks me questions, and I don’t have to talk too much; that doesn’t worry me, because years ago they got me into the habit of keeping my mouth shut, and I could easily pass for deaf, dumb and blind.

  He paused for a few seconds and wiggled his fingers as though to relax them; then he bent over the exercise-book again, so that the little veins in his temples swelled and the egg-shaped, hirsute lump of his skull was exposed to the savage thrusts of the sun. This time he wrote:

  My dear Michèle,

  Thanks to you, Michèle – for you exist, I believe you – I have my only possible contact with the world down the hill. You go to work, you’re often in the town, at the different street crossings, among the blinking lights and God knows what. You tell heaps of people you know a chap who lives alone in a deserted house, a complete nut; and they ask you why he isn’t shut up in a loony-bin. I assure you I’ve nothing against it, I’ve no cervical complex and I think that’s as good a way as any other to end one’s days – in peace, in a comfortable house, with a formal French garden and people to see that you get your meals. The rest doesn’t matter, and there’s nothing to prevent one from being full of imagination and writing poems – this kind of thing:

  today, day of the rats,

  last day before the sea.

  Fortunately I can make you out amidst a mass of memories, like when we used to play hide-and-seek and I would catch sight of your eye, your hand or your hair between clusters of round leaves, and thinking about it all of a sudden I would discard my faith in appearances and cry shrilly: ‘Seen you!’

  He thought about Michèle, about all the children she’d be having sooner or later, in any case; irrationally, that didn’t matter, he could wait. He would tell those children a whole heap of things, when the time came. He’d tell them, for instance, that the earth was not round, that it was the centre of the universe, and that they were the centre of everything, without exception. Then they would no longer be in danger of losing themselves, and (unless they got polio, of course) they would have 99 chances in a hundred of going about like those children he had seen last time he went to the beach – shouting, yelling, chasing rubber balls.

  He would tell them, too, that there was only one thing to be afraid of – that the earth might turn over, so that they would be head downwards with their feet in the air, and that the sun might fall down on the beach, about six o’clock, making the sea boil so that all the little fishes would burst.

  Dressed now, he sat in the deck-chair and looked out of the window; to do this he had to raise the cross-bar of the chair to the highest notch. The hill went down to the road in a slope that was half gradual and half steep, jumped four or five yards; and then came the water. Adam couldn’t get a complete view; there were lots of pines and other trees and telegraph poles in the way, so he had to imagine parts of it. Sometimes he wasn’t sure whether he’d guessed right, so he had to go all the way down. As he walked along he could see the skein of lines and curves unravelling, different things would splinter off and gleam; but the fog gathered again further ahead. One could never be definite about anything in this kind of landscape; one was always more or less a queer unknown quantity, but in an unpleasant way. Call it something like a squint or a slight exophthalmic goitre; the house itself, or the sky, or it might be the curve of the bay, would become obscured from view as Adam walked down. For shrubs and brushwood wove an uninterrupted screen in front of them; at ground-level the air quivered in the heat, and the far horizon seemed to be rising in puffs of light smoke from among the blades of grass.

  The sun distorted certain things, too. Beneath its rays the road would liquefy in whitish patches; sometimes when a line of cars was going by, the black metal would burst like a bomb for no apparent reason, a spiral of lightning would flash from the bonnet and make the entire hill blaze and bend, shifting the atmosphere by a few millimetres with a thrust of its halo.

  That was at the beginning, really at the beginning; for afterwards he began to understand what it meant, monstrous solitude. He opened a yellow exercise-book and wrote at the top of the first page, as though beginning a letter:

  My dear Michèle,

  He used to play music as well, like everyone else; once, in the town, he had stolen a plastic pipe from a toy-stall. He had always wanted a pipe and he’d been delighted to have this one. It was a toy pipe, of course, but good quality, it came from the U.S. So when he felt inclined he would sit in the deck-chair at the open window and play gentle little tunes. Rather afraid of attracting people’s attention, because there were days when fellows and girls used to come and lie down in the grass, round the house. He played softly, with infinite gentleness making almost inaudible sounds, blowing hardly at all, pressing the tip of his tongue against the mouthpiece and pulling in his diaphragm. Now and then he would break off and rattle his fingertips along a row of empty tins, arranged in order of size; that made a soft rustling, rather like bongo drums, which went zigzagging away in the air, rather like the howls of a dog.

  And that was the life of Adam Polio. At night he would light the candles at the back of the room and take up his position at the open window in the faint sea-breeze, standing absolutely erect, full of the energy that the dusty noonday takes from a man.

  He would wait a long time, without moving, proud of being almost dehumanized, until the first flights of moths arrived, tumbling, hesitating outside the empty hole of the window, pausing in concentration and then, maddened by the yellow blink of the candles, launching a sudden attack. Then he would lie down on the floor among the blankets, and stare fixedly at the hustling swarm of insects, more and more of them, thronging the ceiling with a multiplicity of shadows and collapsing into the flames, making a wreath of tiny legs round the corolla of boiling wax,
sizzling, scraping the air like files against a granite wall, and smothering, one by one, every glimmer of light.

  For someone in Adam’s circumstances, and who had been trained to meditation by years at a university and a life devoted to reading, there was nothing to do except think of things like this and avoid madness; hence it was probable that only fear (of the sun, to take one example) could help him to remain within the bounds of moderation and, should the occasion arise, to go back to the beach. With this in mind, Adam had now slightly changed his usual position: leaning forward, he had turned his face towards the back of the room and was looking at the wall. Seeing the light dimly across his left shoulder, he was forcing himself to imagine that the sun was an immense golden spider, its rays covering the sky like tentacles, some twisting, others forming a huge W, clinging to projections in the ground, to every escarpment, at fixed points.

  All the other tentacles were undulating slowly, lazily, dividing into branches, separating into countless ramifications, splitting open and immediately closing up again, waving to and fro like seaweed.

  To make sure, he had drawn it in charcoal on the wall opposite.

  So now he was sitting with his back to the window, and could feel terror creeping over him as the minutes went by and he contemplated the tangle of claws, the savage medley that he could no longer understand. Apart from its special aspect of something dry and charred which was shining and sprinkling, it was a kind of horrible, deadly octopus, with its hundred thousand slimy arms like horses’ guts. To give himself courage he talked to the drawing, looking at its exact centre, at the anthracite ball from which the tentacles flowed out like roots calcinated in some past age; he addressed it in rather childish words:

  ‘you’re a beauty – beautiful beast, beautiful beast, there, you’re a nice sun, you know, a beautiful black sun.’