The Interrogation Read online

  Adam Pollo.’

  Or I’d go to Paris on the Fourteenth of July, or to Moscow for the procession in the Red Square, to Rome for the Council or to Newport the day of the Jazz Festival.

  The real difficulty would be to choose my friends properly; I should need to be certain they’d be away when I came back to see them.

  Otherwise my little game would go wrong, and I might not have the heart to carry on with it. I should muddle up my dates, and when I rang the bell their doors would be flung open and they’d exclaim, with beaming smiles of welcome:

  ‘Adam Polio? You here? What a delightful surprise! If you’d come tomorrow you’d have missed me, it’s the Bull Fight…’

  Yes, it would be just as well to plan that sort of amusement methodically. I must think about it often; perhaps I’ll buy a diary where I can jot down the dates of festivals and important events in towns all over the world. Of course there’ll always be the risk that one of my friends has been taken ill or turned eccentric and not gone to the fiesta. But risks like that give a spice of adventure to the thing.

  These ideas I’ve been telling you about are only two among any number of others; I’ve thought up a whole heap of different schemes for fitting into the world. I might suffer from elephantiasis; I’ve noticed that always disgusts most people and keeps them at a distance. Or I might have a prognathous jaw; that makes people sorry for you and they never want to see how your bottom teeth jut out when you open your mouth. To limp because of eczema in one leg, to be a scoundrel, or to pick one’s teeth with a little red celluloid spoon, the kind that’s given away in packets of soap-powder – those aren’t bad methods either. Or one can spend whole days trying to pick out decayed places in one’s teeth with the point of a knife. Generally speaking, anything in the nature of disease, madness or physical infirmity will do the trick.

  But there are convenient situations in social life where people tend to leave you in peace; jobs like water-divining, pimping or gardening are particularly advantageous.

  I’ve often thought I’d like to be a cinema operator, up in the projection-room. For one thing, you’re shut up in a small room, all alone with the projector. There are no openings except the door and the slits that let the beam of light through. All you have to do is to put the reel on the spindle, and while it’s running off, with a pleasant humming sound, you can smoke cigarettes and drink beer straight out of the bottle, keeping an eye on the blueish electric light bulb and saying to yourself that this is like being on board a liner during a cruise, one of the few people who aren’t fooled by what’s going on.

  Reply:

  My dear Michèle,

  Now that it seems it’s going to rain soon.

  Now that it seems the sun will be getting weaker, from day to day, from ray to ray, until it dies through being changed into a snowball, and that I shall be obliged to follow the cooling process, huddled up in my deck-chair,

  Now that I have the impression that the triumph of the infirm and the crippled is about to begin,

  Now that I am abandoning the earth to the termites, I think you ought to come.

  Don’t you really want, as I do, to come and sleep in the last remains of the light?

  Do you really not want to come and tell me a quiet story while we drink beer or tea and hear sounds go past the window? And then we’d be naked, and we’d look at our bodies, we’d count something on our fingers, and we’d relive the same day a thousand times.

  We’d read the newspaper.

  When are the people of the house coming back? I’d so much like you to tell me sometime who carved those things on the cactus leaf and who killed that animal, the white rat that died by being impaled perhaps with two blue eyes glazed with its courage in the tangle of arbutus-bushes and didn’t rot but became embalmed and by now must be pierced through and through with the heat.

  J. It was raining. So the dog would not be on the beach today. Where would he be? Nobody knew. At home, no doubt; unless he decided to roam the streets all the same, hunching his broad woolly back under the raindrops.

  Adam went to the beach to have a look, though with no great hopes. The beach was ugly in the rain. The wet stones were not like stones any longer, the concrete like concrete or the sea like sea. They had all run on top of one another and mixed into mud. Nothing to be seen of the sun, naturally. In its place in the sky there was a funny little knot of seagulls, and at the spot it usually shone down on there was another little knot, of black seaweed.

  In the town, Adam found it was almost cold. He was uncertain where to go; he didn’t know whether he liked the rain or not. If he hadn’t liked it at all he would not have hesitated to go into a café and drink beer, quietly bored. But he wasn’t sufficiently sure of not liking it, to take on that expense. Letting himself drift, he arrived in a kind of department store. Because of the rain there were three times as many people as usual inside. Adam edged his way between the counters, telling himself he wouldn’t stay there very long.

  Then he found himself stuck behind a fat woman who was looking at socks. Adam looked too, and saw there were all sizes. Blue dominated except in the children’s socks, where it was white. The fat woman was principally interested in that category. She handled most of them, at random, stretching them between her big red hands. Lifting the hem of her pinafore-dress with the toe of his shoe, Adam saw she had varicose veins; they ran in a series of purplish lumps just under the skin and that made him want to look higher up, to see what happened on her thighs. But Adam was drawn away by a movement in the crowd, and left the woman before he could find out any more. He stopped at the record counter, waited a moment for his turn, and then asked the assistant:

  ‘Have you got MacKinsley Morganfield?’

  Adam looked at the girl before she answered, reflecting that she was pretty; she had the soft cheeks of a little girl in quite good health, nut-brown hair, and her best feature was a pair of full lips, not made up but very red, which were now parting silently so that a pearly drop sparkled in the middle of the warm cavity of her mouth; her voice would certainly flow deep down in her throat and with four vibrations of the upper vocal cords, put an end to that faint quivering at the corners of her mouth, complete the most recent of human apotheoses, half desire, half habit.

  ‘What did you say?’ she asked.

  ‘MacKinsley Morganfield,’ said Adam. ‘A fellow who sings.’

  ‘What does he sing?’ said the salesgirl; her eyes hovered blank and evasive, round the circum-ocular part of Adam’s face.

  ‘He’s an American singer,’ said Adam, ‘a Negro who sings blues.’ The girl went to the other end of the counter, opened a drawer and began searching through some lined-up records.

  Adam watched her from behind, looking particularly at the back of her neck; it was bent and the nape was rounded and white, with thousands of little curly hairs growing up from it. He still didn’t understand how an imaginary name, such as ‘MacKinsley Morganfield’ or ‘Gallaher’s Blues’ or ‘Ricardo Impres’ could have power to bend, at will, the round necks of the little girls who sold records in multiple stores.

  After a time she turned to him and said no, she hadn’t got that record.

  Adam wanted to see the nape of her neck again, so he threw out another name, at random.

  ‘And Jack Crivine?’

  But the girl seemed to have understood. With a faint smile, she replied:

  ‘No, I don’t know that name.’

  Disappointed, Adam thanked her and went away. And yet, as he fled he could feel her eye, a big green eye, staring at his back.

  There were books there, hooked on to a kind of wire turnstile; Adam reflected that he might come to the shop every day at the same time, for example, and read one page from a selected book. If the book had 251 pages it would take him 251 days to read it. Probably a bit longer, allowing for the covers, foreword and list of contents, and for days when he couldn’t come. Adam took a book from the turnstile at random, opened it towards the middle, and
read:

  114 A HIGH WIND IN JAMAICA

  back into the bows for a fresh run: but at each charge his run grew shorter and shorter. The pig was hemming him in. Suddenly the pig gave a frightful squeal, chiefly in surprise at his own temerity, and pounced. He had got the goat cornered against the windlass: and for a few flashing seconds bit and trampled. It was a very chastened goat which was presently led off to his own quarters: but the children were prepared to love him for ever, for the heroic bangs he had given the old tyrant.

  But he was not entirely inhuman, that pig. That same afternoon, he was lying on the hatch eating a banana. The ship’s monkey was swinging on a loose tail of rope; and spotting the prize, swung further and further till at last he was able to snatch it from between his very trotters. You would never have thought that the immobile mask of a pig could wear such a look of astonishment, such dismay, such piteous injury.

  Adam closed the book; strictly speaking there was nothing so very touching about that page; and yet as he hooked the volume back on to the wire turnstile, Adam smiled tenderly. He felt he would discover little by little, within his enclosed world, heaps of unknown things, battles between wild animals, decks of ships overloaded with coal and sunshine. With buckets of water and coils of tarred rope. He resolved to come back tomorrow, or later on, to read another page.

  He was happy to be living in a scale model of the universe, all his own, a gentle place with a thousand different ploys to occupy it.

  K. Adam left the shop abruptly. He put a cigarette between his lips; by squinting he could see it getting spotted with raindrops. When the paper was thoroughly soaked he lit the cigarette and listened to the tobacco sizzling as it struggled against the damp.

  He went down several streets and emerged on the promenade.

  Until today there had been no rain for a long, long time. You could tell that just from the smell of the rain as it mingled with the dust on the pavements.

  Adam set out along the sea-front; the fresh water was trickling in streams over his temples, through his hair and down inside his shirt-collar. It was making its way in little rills through the layer of salt that months of sunshine and sea-bathing had deposited on his skin. The promenade was a funny place, a widish, tarred road running below the public gardens; at first it bordered the harbour with its quays; then it went round a succession of small inlets, used as beaches for the tourists. There was only one footpath, on the side nearest the sea. So going past on a fine day, you could gaze in wonder at a crowd of pensive sadists, backs bent, elbows resting on the handrail as they gazed at another crowd consisting this time of masochists, slumbering, naked, on the beach below.

  You made your choice; sometimes you’d stay up above with the sadists, your goggle-eyes riveted on somebody’s stomach which was usually dented by a navel.

  Sometimes you went down below, staggering over the scorching pebbles, and then stripped and lay on your back, arms outstretched, under the avalanche of heat and staring eyes. The proof is that on a day like this no one was leaning on the railings because there was no one crazy enough to be lying naked on the beach in the rain. Unless it was the other way about.

  Anyhow, there was nobody there. Adam strolled along with his hands in his pockets. The rain had put out his cigarette; he threw it over the parapet and watched it drop to the quay below. When he raised his eyes he noticed two cranes and a boat, a good distance away.

  Their black ironwork was absolutely motionless. The cranes stood with arms extended, frozen in a kind of sinister cramp; the ship was framed between them, hardly smoking at all. It was a dark red colour all over, and the rain was driving against its portholes. Half of a name could be seen curving round the stern in capital letters, thus:

  DERMY

  and

  SEILLE

  The part one couldn’t see must be ‘Commander’ or ‘Admiral’ or ‘Captain’ or perhaps ‘City of’. It could have been ‘Pachy’ or ‘Epi’ or any old thing. As for the other word, below, one could easily have betted ten million that it was ‘Marseille’ if one had had the ten million, or if it had been worth while.

  But that was not all; the rain was still falling, and the rustle of dead leaves could be heard on all sides; the dirty landscape was ringing with this monotonous sound, the only one. Adam felt a disastrous listlessness creeping over him; he bent down slightly and leant on the iron balustrade. He closed his fingers round it and allowed the water to flow down his arms like blood onto the wet railings. He was also thinking, no doubt, of his approaching death, his drained body lying full length on the concrete of a rain-washed, nocturnal quay, his acquiescent corpse, white as morning, which would still be shining with a thin trickle of blood, a hairbreadth of daily life, the last root thrusting down into the bowels of the earth. He listened to the noise that came zooming out of the sea like a waterfall; everything ahead of him, right to the far end of the docks, was quiet and calm, yet quivering with menace and hatred. He could feel his heart beating harder and harder, faster and faster; and he crumpled up, with his chest against the iron rail. The deserted wharves were cluttered with abandoned merchandise, some of it covered with tarpaulins, some not.

  Standing at the water’s edge or floating on its surface, two cranes and a boat had been left about. They were sharpened ruins, collections of broken razor-blades that made a grating sound as they clove the raindrops in two. Everything had been deserted, owing to a bit of a storm; some object or other, the pale shadow of something left over from a murder, the scattered materials. There was no more work, and that meant death.

  Perhaps, one never knows, there was still a faint breath of life here and there, hidden behind the rubbish. Not in the shell-holes, anyhow; nor down there, you can be sure. A tuft of grass, drunk with rain, bent double with the weight of coal-dust and still thrusting up through the veneer of asphalt. Perhaps a pair of ants, perhaps a cat, perhaps some kind of seaman, smoking his pipe in a vacated shanty-town. But those didn’t count; they were merely Phantoms and Co.

  You must understand that what was happening to Adam on this particular rainy day might equally well have happened to him on any other day. On a very windy day, for instance. Or on a day during the equinox, or on one of those much-vaunted sunny days. With great patches of light spreading over the ground, there would have been an enormous crowd on the promenade, lots of women and children. The cars would have kept up a continuous roar behind him; he would have met groups of boys and girls in sweaters, T-shirts and blue jeans, passing him on their way to the beach; they’d have set their transistors yelling as they went by. This way:

  But darling darling

  Keep in touch

  Keep-in-touch

  Keep-in-touch-with-me.

  And down there, on the docks, the cranes would have been set turning and the boat’s funnel smoking, the men shouting, the barrels of oil rolling and the big rounds of cork would have been stowed; the ground would have been made to smell of coal and diesel oil and the air to ring with hammer-blows banging on the rusty hulls of the cargo-boats. That’s it, everything would have been done that is done on a sunny day. But Adam would have guessed, all the same; he would have sat down, quite dumbfounded, on a bench on the promenade and seen space being peopled with ghosts. He would have felt death invading all his movements, only instead of being grey and unoccupied death would have been red and white and industrious.

  But one particular noise would have come spurting out of everything, drowning all other sounds – a noise bordering on rain, very close to the tumult of waterfalls or the hissing of steam-engines. This was a kind of fate; Adam had gone beyond the evidence of his senses, and for him, henceforth, nothing seemed to move. He reconciled all measures of time and motion, from the butterfly to the rock. Time, having become universal, was destroying itself through its own complexity. In the world as he now understood it, everything was explicitly alive or dead.

  After that it didn’t matter so much that he should have stood up and walked on again beside the hand-ra
il, whistling a waltz tune through his teeth. That he should walk the length of a big puddle of yellow water that was boiling under the rain. That with the toe of his shoe he should crush an empty matchbox that had (I 25 A) written on its underside. Nor did it matter that as Le went along he should try to catch a glimpse of the little stucco temple an old bourgeois family had erected at the far end of their garden in more prosperous days. Or that he should happen to pass a group of seminarists, shivering in their long, black cassocks and whispering:

  ‘At Castelnaudry, didn’t you know?’

  ‘And yet he told me it was better not to’ and laughing.

  No, it didn’t matter much, because the breath of real life was no longer in them; they were no longer bright and victorious, they were nothing but lean spectres who brought forewarning of a great void that would open up some day. They predicted all possible causes of death – the burst of machine-gun fire from a passing car, the chopper of the guillotine, smotherings under pillows, stranglings, poisonings, murders by axe, embolisms, or just simple runnings-over in the street by four vulcanized rubber tyres.

  Adam expected some such violent end whenever he put a foot forward. It wasn’t difficult to imagine. He might be struck by lightning; they would bring him down from the top of the hill on a stretcher, black and charred, amid the rumbling of the storm. He might be bitten by a mad dog. Poisoned by water. Or else, drenched as he was by the rain, he might very easily get pneumonia. Trailing his hand along the balustrade, he might scratch himself on a jagged piece of metal and develop lockjaw.

  An aerolite might fall on his head. Or an aeroplane. The rain might cause a landslide so that the promenade would collapse, burying him under tons of earth. A volcano might erupt beneath his feet – there – at any moment. Or he might simply slip on the wet asphalt, or on a banana skin, why not, and fall backwards, fracturing his cervical vertebrae. A terrorist or a lunatic might choose him for a target and send a bullet into his liver. A leopard might escape from a menagerie and tear him to pieces at a street-corner. He might murder somebody and be sent to the guillotine. He might choke himself on a sugared almond. Or war, sudden war, might touch off some gigantic calamity, some kind of bomb, send up a mushroom of smoke surrounded by flashes of lightning, and annihilate him, vaporize him – Adam, poor, puny Adam – in a microscopic contraction of the atmosphere. His heart would stop beating and silence would spread through his body; in a chain reaction, the cold would creep slowly along his limbs until with tremendous stupefaction he would vaguely recognize that his furthest recesses of red flesh, which used to be warm, now had something corpse-like about them.