The Interrogation Read online

  There was nobody at the Staréo; the regulars avoided it on Saturday evenings, preferring to come on Mondays, when it was crowded. Adam made his way through the darkened room, looking for Michèle or for Sonia Amadouny; they were not there. He went up to the bar and asked loudly:

  ‘Do you know Sonia Amadouny?’

  The barman turned a bored face towards Adam. He had grey temples and a silk tie. He shook his head. Soft music was coming from a pick-up. Leaning on the bar beside Adam there were two smiling, fair-haired pansies.

  Adam stared at them and at everything else; it was all really very quiet, very gentle, very nauseating. It was the first time for ages that one had breathed such pure air; one felt like staying here, in this species of oblivion, and waiting for anything or nothing; drinking a little whisky out of a big, cold glass, and standing next to these two handsome, effeminate boys; next to their soft-hued, short-lived suede jackets, next to their over-red lips, their over-white skin, their long, over-blond hair; with their bursts of laughter, their hands, their black, faintly dark-ringed eyes.

  But before that, one must walk as far as the Whisky, about a hundred yards away; it was on the first floor, and was probably the most popular night-club in the town. Two adjoining rooms, one with a bar, the other surrounded by leather benches. Adam put his head in at the door. Here the air was tense, packed with noises; the lamps were blood-red, everyone was dancing and shouting. To a jazz record by Coleman, Chet Baker, Blakey. A woman standing behind the cash-desk bent forward and said something to him. Adam couldn’t hear. She beckoned to him to come closer. Finally he caught a few words: he took a step towards her and shouted:

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said – come in!’

  Adam stood motionless for ten seconds, without thought or speech; he felt he had burst in all directions, was spread out over at least ten square yards of noise and movement. The woman at the cash-desk yelled again:

  ‘Come in – come in!’

  Adam made a trumpet of his hands and shouted back:

  ‘No. Do you know Sonia Amadouny?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sonia Amadouny?’

  ‘No.’

  The woman added something, but Adam had already stepped back and didn’t hear her; what with the darkness, the red lights, the convulsively jerking legs and hips, the two rooms were roaring like engines. It was like being suddenly flung into a steel shell, the cylinder of a motor-cycle, for instance, and imprisoned in four metal walls, with thickness, violence, explosions, petrol, and flames, smuts, coal, explosions, and the smell of gas, thick oil, as viscous as melting butter, bits of black and red, flashes of light, explosions, a great heavy, powerful gust of air that tears you limb from limb, kneads you and crushes you against four cast-iron walls, splashings, metal filings, clicks, forward-reverse, forward-reverse, forward-reverse: heat.

  Adam shouted again: ‘No, I want…’

  And then, louder: ‘Sonia Amadouny!’

  ‘…Sonia Amadouny!’

  The woman said something in reply and then, as Adam still couldn’t hear, shrugged her shoulders and grimaced ‘No!’

  The rain had almost stopped; just a few drops from time to time. The town was drenched. Adam walked the streets all night. From 9.30 in the evening till 5 in the morning. It was as though there had been a huge sun burning everything along its path, reducing it all to heaps of ashes.

  While he walked, Adam was thinking:

  (I took the wrong line. I was too off-hand about things. I went wrong. Idiot. What I wanted to do was to trail that girl Michèle. Like I did the dog. I wanted to play a game, like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve – are you ready? – thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen – are you ready? – nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four – I’ll count up to thirty – twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-nine-and-a-half, twenty-nine-and-three-quarters – and, and – thirty! and then hunt everywhere in the town. In the angles of walls, in doorways, in night-clubs, on beaches, in bars, in cinemas, in churches, in the parks. I wanted to look for you until at last I’d find you, dancing the tango with a medical student, or sitting in a deck-chair by the sea. You’d have left clues, of course, to help me find you; that would have been in the rules of the game. A name or two, Amadouny Sonia-Nadine, Germaine, a handkerchief on the ground with a streak of pinky orange lipstick on it, a hairpin in a deserted avenue. A conversation between two boys in a self-service restaurant. Some sly hint left under the blue plastic tablecloth at an all-night cake-shop. Or two initials – M.D. – stamped with the tip of a fingernail on a horsehair bench in a No. 9 trolleybus. And gradually I’d have begun to tell myself ‘I’m getting warm!’

  And then, at twenty-five past six in the morning, when I was absolutely whacked, I’d have found you at last, belted into your man’s raincoat, your lips firm, your hair wet with dew, your wool dress a bit creased; your eyes tired from staying open all night. Alone, nobody with you, cuddled up in a deck-chair on the promenade, looking towards the grey sunrise.

  But nobody waits for anybody; there are more important things in the world, of course. The world is over-populated and starving, with tensions on all sides. One ought to search that real world, investigate its minutest details; the lives of individual men and women don’t matter.

  Much more serious was the universe as a whole. Two thousand million men and women getting together to build things, cities, to prepare bombs, to conquer space.

  The newspapers announce: ‘The space-ship Liberty II has made seven circuits of the earth.’

  ‘The 100 megaton H Bomb has burst in Nevada.’

  And really it was as though a big sun had been shining everywhere, all the time. A pear-shaped sun that could be measured by the Beaufort scale, a sun with down-geared dawns. They were weaving an impenetrable net all round the planet. They were ruling it systematically into squares by extending lines xx’, yy’, zz’. And inspecting every square.

  Society was arranging itself in groups of specialists:

  That’s to say the army, the Civil Service, the doctors, the butchers, the grocers, the metal-workers, the electronic engineers, the Merchant Navy captains, the Post Office clerks.

  People were putting up buildings twenty-two storeys high and then planting television aerials on the roofs. Underground they were putting drainpipes, electrical cables, metropolitan railways. They were making the earlier chaos bristle with posts and dykes. They were digging, sinking, burning or blasting. Dynamos were starting up with a soft purring sound and throwing their magnetic fields to every corner of the sky. Aircraft were taking off, with a noise like tearing paper. So were rockets, in saffron-yellow clouds, making straight for the unknown spot in the middle of outer space. And then dissolving into black plumes.

  Everything was returning to a new dawn, to a daybreak consisting of millions of united determinations. Above all there was this host of men and women, thirsting for violence and conquest. They were assembled at the world’s strategic points; they were drawing maps, naming countries, writing novels or compiling atlases: the names of the places they populated were lined up in columns:

  Ecclefechan

  Scotland

  55.3. N.

  3.14.W.

  Eccles

  England

  53.28.N.

  2.21.W.

  Eccleshall

  England

  53.28.N.

  2.21.W.

  Echmiadzin

  Armenia

  40.20.N.

  44.35.E.

  Echternach

  Luxembourg

  49.48.N.

  6.25.E.

  Echuca

  Victoria

  36.7. S.

  144.48.E.

  Ecija

  Spain

  37.32.N.

  5.9. W.

  Ecuador, Rep.

  South America

  2.0. S.

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sp; 78.0. W.

  Edam

  Netherlands

  52.31.N.

  5.3. E.

  Eddrachillis

  Scotland

  59.12.N.

  2.47.W.

  and their own names filled the books that lay on the shelves in cafés:

  Revd William Pountney

  Francis Parker

  Robert Patrick

  Robert Patton

  John Payne

  Revd Percival

  Robert de Charleville

  Nathaniel Rayner

  Abel Ram, Esq.

  It was among them that he should have hunted. Then he’d have found everything, including Michèle seated at dawn in a deck-chair, cold and wet with dew, shivering amid these interwoven forces. They were all living the same life; their eternity was slowly fusing with the raw materials of which they were the masters. Fusion, the fusion brought about in blast furnaces, the fusion that boils amid smelting metal as though in a crater, was the weapon that raised them above themselves. In this town, as elsewhere, men and women were cooking in their infernal stew-pans. Protuberant against the hazy background of the earth, they were awaiting something, some supreme event, which would wrap them in eternity. They lived among their machines; naked, stubborn, invincible, they were making their earth resplendent. Their almost completed world would soon wrest them for ever away from all things temporal. It was as though an iron mask were already being laid over their faces; in another century or two they would be statues, sarcophagi: within their bronze and concrete moulds there would live on, concealed, frail but immortal, a kind of particle of electric fire. Then will come the reign of timeless matter; all will be within all. And it seems likely there will be only one man, only one woman, left in the world.

  Adam was everywhere at once in the town streets. Outside a park drowned in the darkness, outside a dogs’ cemetery, under a hewn-stone porch; sometimes along the tree-lined avenue, or seated on the cathedral steps.

  Alone on this plain of stone and metal he kept an eye on everything; he was seen to smoke a cigarette beside the Fontaine Fusse and another under the railway bridge. He was quite incidentally under the arches of the Grand-Place, in the middle of the garden in the Square, or leaning on the railings of the promenade. Or on the beach, confronting a motionless sea. Being ubiquitous, he sometimes passed himself in the street, coming round the corner of a house. At this time, a quarter to four in the morning, there may have been 4,000 or 5,000 adams, the genuine article, going about the town. Some were on foot, others on bicycles or in cars; they were quartering the whole town, filling up even the smallest recesses in the concrete. An adam-woman, in a tight-fitting mauve dress, ran after the adam-man, her stiletto heels tapping loudly, and said:

  ‘Coming with me, baby?’

  and the adam-man followed her, as though reluctantly.

  Further east in the town, other adam-men were going off to work, whistling. An aged adam-man lay asleep, curled up on a vegetable-barrow. Quite possibly another one of him was dying, with faint cries, in his old yellow, sweat-soaked bed. Or yet another was hanging himself with his belt, because he had no money left, or no woman.

  In the Square, in the middle of the lawn, Adam halted at last; he leant back against the pedestal of a statue of himself; then, at about five o’clock, he stopped again, outside a laundry window. Drunk with fatigue and joy, he felt a kind of tears running down his cheeks; he suddenly began to weep, without looking at the hundreds and thousands of windows that were opening behind him. The adams ran past along the echoing pavement; with an effort, as though praying, he repeated two lines of a poem to himself. Exactly fifteen hours ahead of time, a strip of neon lighting reddened at the back of the window, performing a passage from a sunset.

  With an effort, as though praying, no longer conscious of darkness or daylight, Adam repeated two lines from a poem:

  ‘’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,

  That miss the many-splendoured thing.’

  N. Sunshine, a man and woman lying on a double bed in a room with half-closed shutters, a terracotta ashtray between them on the sheet, which is grey in some places and scorched in others. The room is square, beige, squat, really set in the middle of the block of flats. All the rest of the town consists of concrete, hard corners, windows, doors and hinges.

  On the night-table beside them a wireless set is turned on, pouring out a flood of words only interrupted every eight minutes by an islet of music.

  ‘So we can safely say that the coming year will be, will prove more favourable to the tourist industry and we cannot fail to be gratified by this in view of the considerable importance the emphasis that has always been placed on the tourist industry and particularly on the influx of foreign tourists from which our beautiful country draws its chief source of income (…) for this purpose we have already made considerable improvements in our hotel system all along the coast, developing those hotels which were inadequate, improving those which offered no more than a modicum of comfort and thus establishing with more modern hotels the whole tourist organization which is becoming more and more necessary owing to competition from abroad and particularly from the Southern countries such as Italy, Spain and Yugoslavia (…) well Monsieur Duter we are most grateful for the information you have so kindly given us and we shall soon be on the air again for another interview dealing with local tourist resources (…) it is exactly nine minutes thirty seconds past two o’clock, Radio-Montecarlo has chosen Lip to give you the correct time (…) Two o’clock in the afternoon is the time to relax, but not to relax just anyhow the only relaxation that does you good relax with a cup of coffee (…) appreciate the flavour of good coffee, hot or iced as you prefer and relax relax rela…’

  There is no alarm-clock or clock of any kind on the night-table. The man is still wearing his wrist-watch, which makes a little leather coat right round his skin: apart from this he is naked. The woman is naked too; she has a wedding-ring on the fourth finger of her right hand. Between the first and middle fingers of that hand she is squeezing a cigarette; its crushed, sweat-damped paper shows the outlines of the strands of tobacco. And she is smoking.

  Their clothes are rolled up carelessly on a chair, pushed right into the angle between the back and the seat. On the front of the wireless set there is a photo, slipped into the frame round the list of wavelengths; it shows the same man and woman, clothed this time, in a street in Rome; he is smiling, she is not. On the back of the photo they have written their names:

  Mme and M. Louise and Jean Mallempart

  They wrote their names like that two years ago, for a joke, because they were getting married next month; so they supposed. But that must be old stuff by now. Two hot summers, during which the heat from the valves of the wireless may have twisted the photograph right out of shape. There is nothing terribly tragic, or absurd, in the bedroom where, at this hour, at the third pip exactly ten minutes past two, with sun, closed shutters, sweat, cinema-organ music, nothing definite is moving, except the woman’s hand as she smokes, and the round eye of the man, Jean Mallempart, shining below his forehead.

  In the grocer’s shop on the ground floor of this newish modern block of flats, in the grocer’s shop called ‘Alimentation Rogalle’, the calendar says it is late August, getting near the end of August, something like the 26th or the 24th. This is marked on the square of white paper of the calendar which is sold as ‘comic’ because it has a joke every day, today’s joke is ‘What goes “ninety-nine bump?” A centipede with a wooden leg.’ Above this is a square of cardboard with a picture of a blonde in a spotted dress. She is holding up a glass, and we are told, in red capital letters, that what she is drinking is ‘BYRRH’ ‘Apéritif’. The place is hot, almost boiling, with that sickly smell of geraniums and that sound of tyres gliding along the streets. We’re in summer, and nearing the end of August. On the beaches the deck-chairs creak under the weight of broad, sunburnt, oily backs; dark glasses groan when folded up. In one or two dining-rooms, s
imultaneously, a red ant is eating straight off the greenish leaf of plastic that imitates a yellow rose or a pink carnation.

  Men and women are entering the water; they bathe placidly, waiting a moment with their arms in the air for the slight ripple set up by a motorboat some way from the shore to reach them and wet another few inches of their stomachs; then they throw themselves forward, heads up, out of their depth, and advance through the water which gradually strips them of their names, making them absurd, breathless, jerky.

  The water is quite round, and painted a gaudy blue; a mere eighteen inches from the shore a little boy in a bathing-suit is sitting in the sea, counting on his fingers the refuse washed up by the tide. He finds:

  one banana-skin

  one half-orange

  one leek

  one piece of wood

  one strip of seaweed

  one lizard, headless

  one empty Artane tube, all twisted

  two brown masses, of unknown origin

  one piece of what looks like horse-dung

  one scrap of cloth (Bedford cord)

  one cigarette end (Philip Morris)

  On the promenade, still in the sun, where it crosses the Boulevard de la Gare, an old lady is dying of sunstroke. She dies very easily, so easily she almost does it several times. Falling flat on her face on the pavement, without a word, she knocks her hand against the front mudguard of a parked car, and her old, dried-up hand begins to bleed imperceptibly, while she dies. While people go past, while they look for the police, the priest or the doctor, and a woman looking on stiffens and murmurs below her breath