The Interrogation Read online

  ‘Hail Mary

  Full of Grace

  The Lord is with Thee

  etc.’

  An Italian, sitting on a bench, takes a packet of Italian cigarettes out of his pocket. The packet is three-quarters empty, so that the word ‘Esportazione’ loses its luxurious implications and meanders over the paper like a drooping pennon. He takes out a cigarette, and the expected happens: he begins to smoke. He looks at the breasts of a girl who walks by. One of those tight-fitting sailor-type jerseys they sell at the Prisunic. Two breasts.

  What with all these buildings, these huge grey rectangles, concrete upon concrete, and all these angular places, one soon gets from one point to another. One’s home is everywhere, one lives everywhere. The sun is exerting itself on the roughcast walls. What with this series of old and new towns, one is landed full in the hurly-burly of life; it’s like living in thousands of books piled one on top of another. Every word is an event, every sentence a series of events of the same kind, every short story an hour, or more, or less, a minute, ten or twelve seconds.

  With flies buzzing round his head and that child yelling down in the yard like a scalded cat, Mathias is trying to write his detective story. He is writing it by hand, on exercise-book paper.

  ‘Joséphime stopped the car:

  “You want to get out here?”

  “Okay, sonny,” said Doug.

  The moment he was out of the car he regretted it.

  “You shouldn’t have played the bloody fool.”

  The beautiful Joséphime had pulled out a little revolver inlaid with silver, a jewel of Belgian craftsmanship, and was now pointing it straight at Doug’s stomach.

  “It’s really too bad,” Doug reflected, “Now the women are beginning to want to put slugs into me too. Where’s my well-known sex appeal?”

  “So whats going to happen now?” sneered Doug. “You know, my life’s insured.”

  ‘For your widow’s sake I hope its for a fat sum,” said Joséphime.

  And she pressed the trigger.’

  and Douglas Dog died, or didn’t die.

  But there are still quite a lot of green, blue-sulphated vines to be seen from many windows. The children pick up snails along the narrow paths, in the sunshine: the snails have curled up in their shells, blindly trusting their lives to the thin layers of rubbery secretion that hold them to the branches of the oleanders. The café terraces are packed. At the Café Lyonnais, people are sitting under the red awnings, talking:

  On the beach perhaps?

  Waiter, a beer. A beer.

  A beer.

  Tickets for the National Lottery! Who’ll have the prize?

  Not me, thank you.

  Waiter, a glass of vin rosé.

  A vin rosé, yes Sir.

  There you are, Sir.

  How much?

  One franc twenty, Sir.

  Including service?

  Yes, Sir.

  Thank you.

  Jean, where shall we sit?

  I saw Monsieur Maurin yesterday, and d’you know what he said to me?

  Oh yes, he’s a funny fellow.

  Never. It’s impossible, absolutely impossible.

  After that I shall go, at any rate; I’ve got my shopping to do you know, quite a lot of things to get butter meat ribbon for the dressing-gown…

  Shall we go? Waiter?

  But what the hell does it matter, I ask you, what the hell does it matter, so then he said to me all the same.… But what the hell does it matter to him, eh, what the?

  It’s a stylish café, where dark red predominates, on the tables as well as on the walls; the tables, all round ones, are arranged geometrically on the pavement, so precisely that on a sunny day when the awning is up, anyone looking out of a second-storey window might think they were seeing the pieces of a one-coloured set of draughts arranged for a game. The glasses on the tables are plain ones, and sometimes show on their edges a semicircle of whipped cream and lipstick, mixed together.

  The waiters have white uniforms; with each order they put on the table, at the same time as the glasses, saucers whose colour varies according to the price of what was ordered; the men and women sit eating, drinking and talking quietly; and the waiters move silently, gliding past with empty or laden trays in their hands and napkins under their left arms, undulating along like skin-divers. Most of the noise comes from the street; it is manifold, though in its diversity it combines into a rich sound, more or less monophonic, such as is made by the sea, for instance, or the steady swish of rain; one audible note with millions of variants, tones, modes of expression accompanying it – women’s heels, horns tooting, the engines of cars, scooters and buses. A tuning ‘A’ played simultaneously by all the instruments in an orchestra.

  The movement of matter is all of one kind – the grey mass of cars, nose-to-tail in the background. There are no clouds in the sky, and the trees stand perfectly motionless, like dummies.

  Whereas animal movement is at its height: strollers and pedestrians are walking along the pavement; arms are swinging and waving; legs are tensed to take the weight of a body, about twelve or thirteen stone; they bend slightly for a second and then become levers on which the rest of the body describes a tiny parabola. Mouths breathe, eyes turn rapidly in their moist orbits. Colours take on movement and their purely pictorial quality is attenuated; the white man becomes more animal in movement. The black man, more Negro.

  It is all this that gives him his gentleness, his slightly sinuous, slightly sour disdain, as though he had invented the moon or written the Bible.

  He walks along the streets and sees nothing. He goes through whole squares, down entire boulevards – deserted, bordered with plane-trees or chestnuts – he goes past real police-stations, town-halls, cinemas, cafés, hotels, beaches and bus-stops. He waits for friends, for girls, or for nobody; often they don’t come and he gets tired of waiting. He doesn’t try to find reasons, that kind of thing doesn’t interest him, and perhaps after all it’s none of his business. So then he walks on again all alone, the sun scatters itself through the leaves, it’s cool in the shade, hot in the sunshine. He wastes time, gets excited, walks, breathes, waits for darkness. We can bet he has seen Libby on the beach and talked to her, sprawling on the dusty shingle. She talked to him about clothes, boys’ and girls’ interests, classical music, etc. The bad film she saw. – It’s in attending to such matters that one forgets the others; it does you good in the end, and you feel you’re gradually recovering your invulnerability, a hero again, projecting all your concentrated brains on a heap of dirty shingle and the noise of retreating waves. Afterwards, an hour later, you go back to the street, quite proud of yourself and reeling like a punch-drunk boxer. Tragedy is a thing of the past? Who cares – we’ve still got petty details, general ideas, ice-cream cornets, pizza at five o’clock, Film Clubs and Organic Chemistry:

  SUBSTITUTIONAL REACTIONS

  H atoms may be successively replaced by certain atoms of identical value, such as Cl. Must be exposed to light. (and bromide) (Br)

  CH4+Cl1 = CH3Cl+ClH

  CH3Cl+Cl2 = CHaCL2+ClH

  CH2Cl2+Cl2 = CHCl3+Cl4

  CHCl3+Cl2 = CCl4+Cl4

  (Carbon tetrachloride)

  To begin with we’ve got no psychological reflexes any longer, we’ve lost them. A girl is a girl, a chap going down the street is a chap going down the street; he’s sometimes a copper, a pal or a father, but he’s first and foremost a chap going down the street. Ask, and what answer will you get? ‘It’s a chap going down the street.’ Not that we’re scatterbrained – not at all; in fact we’re more like bureaucrats: under some kind of pressure: off-peak bureaucrats.

  Like that woman, Andrea de Commynes. The only one with a face that was rather sallow, rather pale, among all the brown, shining ones; the only one who conceals green eyes behind dark glasses and who is reading, one hand hooked into the curve of her bronze necklace, the other holding her leather-bound book. The pages are worm-eaten and the titl
e runs across the spine of the book, stamped in crooked letters from which the colour has faded:

  INGOLDSBY LEGENDS

  Not forgetting that plane that’s silently crossing the naked sky; not forgetting that statue on which the sun shines in torrents from six a.m. onwards, and which also represents a naked man, in the centre of a basin. And the pigeons, and the smell of earth underneath the paving-stones, and three old women sitting on the bench, nodding over their everlasting knitting.

  Or the beggar – known as the Whistler. The kind of fellow you don’t often come across. They call him that because when he isn’t begging he walks along all the streets whistling an old tango tune: ‘Arabella’. Then he stops, settles down in some corner of an old wall, preferably all yellow from dogs and children peeing there; he pushes up his trouser-leg on the side that has the stump, and he calls to the tourists as they go by. When one of them stops, he explains:

  ‘I live as best I can. I manage.

  I sell waste paper. I suppose you wouldn’t have anything for me?

  A small coin for an old cripple?’

  The other man says:

  ‘Afraid not, I’m completely broke today,’ and adds:

  ‘Do you like – er – that kind of life?’

  He replies:

  ‘Well, I’ve no complaints,’ and adds: ‘So you really mean it? Not even one little cigarette for me? Sir? For a poor cripple?’

  His stump develops scabs in the open air. It often looks like that sort of vegetable that’s sold in the market in summer. Thousands of cars are making their way in Indian file to the ‘Grand Prix Automobile’. One or two drivers may be killed, perhaps. They’ll scatter sawdust on the ground and wait for Monday’s paper. There it’ll be: ‘Tragedy Mars Big Car Race’, handled no worse than anywhere else.

  Hornatozi is having his wife followed. Hornatozi, the Son in Hornatozi & Son, Corn Merchants. He goes to work in his light-panelled office, and now and then he takes his wife’s photograph out of his pocket. Hélène is tall, young and auburn-haired. Like Joséphime and Mme Richers, she often wears a black dress. Hornatozi knows that the day before yesterday, between 3 and 3.30 in the afternoon, she went to No 99 Avenue des Fleurs. On the negative, which is smeared with finger-prints, Hélène Hornatozi is smiling into space, her head tilted a little to the left. She bears this drifting smile, and from her curved lips there flutters out the mysterious holy spirit that establishes relationships among men; it is as though she lay there dead, laid out on the marble surface of the film, offering beneath her glazed effigy the last vestiges of her woman’s body, a parcel of white bones on a black background, a mask from which the flesh has been scooped out and where the colours are reversed; hovering between the air and this translucent screen, Hélène’s memory contracts in her negative rigor mortis and her eyes, white pupils on black sclerotic, bore two holes through the rampart that surrounds the living, causing them to believe once and for all in ghosts. It is from this memory fixed by the developing fluid that the woman derives all her power; an insubstantial trace of maleficence draws all eyes to her voluptuous body, formed for love; in Hornatozi’s fingers the white figure outlined in black burns with a thousand jealous fires. His thumbs, pressing on the edge, are sweating slightly and will yet again leave the greasy ridges of their prints behind them. He bends forward now, his hypnotized gaze plunging straight into the big hollow orbits where night seems to be falling; for he longs to make the journey, if only as a slave, and come at the end of his sufferings to the delicious intimacy of earlier days, the warmth of being hidden in being, the innocence, the assuaged yearnings, an almost alcoholic inhumation. But she, the woman of whom he is no longer sure whether she is dead or whether she has been unfaithful, shuts him out from her strange domain merely by indicating its celluloid walls; and it is vain for him to bend over the shiny card, vain for his breath to quicken, his mouth throwing rings of steam onto her picture, vain for his temples to swell and his shoulders to sag. Already, he perceives, the wickedness has faded to an abstraction, the powers of evil have destroyed themselves; nothing sharp remains in the photograph except a glint of light reflected from the window onto the rippled surface of the paper, running from side to side, captive, irrational and therefore human, like a bubble on a plate of broth.

  Down below lies the long, flat, dusty expanse of the quays, still in the full glare of the sun; boats and derricks; the Customs House; the docks, with eleven dockers working there. Every three minutes the pulley lowers a bale of cotton or a cord of wood. In the globe of stale smells, the rattle of chains, the whiteness, the quivering air, the loads collapse onto the dock.

  In a dark hotel room a Negro student is reading a Série Noire detective story. Old women are searching the depths of attic rooms through field-glasses.

  Louise Mallempart, a pale dimness amid the silky folds of the sheets, is thinking of a table covered with a damask cloth and bearing enthroned in its centre one large glass of cold water.

  All this comes of the heat that is branching out, crawling low down, just above the ground. A tiny, trembling breath of air makes wrinkles round the objects it meets. Earth, water and air consist of masses of black and white particles, mingling in a blur like a million ants. There is nothing really incoherent any more, nothing wild. One would think the world had been drawn by a child of twelve.

  Little Adam will soon be twelve; one evening at the farm, one wet evening, while he can hear the cows being brought in along the lanes, while he listens to the Angelus and feels the earth withering, he picks up a big piece of blue cardboard and draws the world.

  At the top of the blue cardboard, on the left, he draws a red and yellow ball with his coloured pencils; it’s like the sun, except that there are no rays coming out of it. To balance it he draws another ball on the other side, high up on the right – a blue one, with rays. That must be the sun, since there are rays coming out of it. Then he draws a straight line right across the cardboard below the sun-moon and the moon-sun. With his green pencil he makes a lot of little vertical strokes going down into the horizon. These represent corn and grass. Some of them are barbed – those are fir-trees. Black in the white chalk sky, a horse with spider’s legs is about to trample on a man put together from cylindrical tins and hairs. And wherever there is space left on the cardboard he draws big stars, brown or mauve stars ringed with yellow. In the middle of each star is a kind of black dot that transforms it into a live animal, watching us with its bacteria-nucleus, its strange, solitary maggot’s eye.

  A weird universe he is drawing, all the same, the little boy Adam. An arid, almost mathematical universe, where everything is easily understood in terms of a cryptographic code whose key is immanent; in the brown line round the cardboard a large population can be established without fatigue – shopkeepers, mothers, little girls, devils and horses. They are set there, line for line, in an indissoluble, independent, subdivided matter. Almost as though there were a kind of god in a box, giving orders for everything, with eye and finger, and saying to each thing, ‘be’. It’s also as though everything were contained in everything, to all infinity. That is to say, in this clumsy drawing by the little boy Adam as well as in the calendar from the wholesale grocer’s or a square yard of checked cloth.

  To give another example of a type of madness with which Adam had grown familiar, one might mention the well-known Simultaneity. Simultaneity is one of the necessary elements of that Unity of which Adam had one day had an inkling, either during the business at the Zoo, or because of the Drowned Man, or in connexion with many other incidents we are deliberately omitting. Simultaneity is the total annihilation of time and not of movement; an annihilation to be conceived not necessarily as mystical experience, but by a constant exercise of the will to the absolute in abstract reasoning. The idea is, that when engaged in any particular action, smoking a cigarette for instance, one shall be indefinably aware, all along, of the millions of other cigarettes which are presumably being smoked by millions of other people all over th
e world. That one shall have the sensation of millions of flimsy paper cylinders, part one’s lips and let a few grammes of air mingled with tobacco smoke filter through them; and then the gesture of smoking becomes single and unique. It is transformed into a Stereotype; the habitual mechanism of cosmogony and myth-making can come into play. In a way this procedure is the reverse of the ordinary philosophical method, which begins with an action or sensation and leads up to a concept that contributes to knowledge.

  This process, which holds good for myths in general, such as birth, war, love, the season, death, can be applied to anything: any object whatsoever, a match-stick on a polished mahogany table, a strawberry, the striking of a clock, the shape of the letter Z, can be recaptured without limit in space and time. And by thus existing millions and milliards of times, as well as their own time, they become eternal. But their eternity is automatic: they need never have been deliberately created, and are to be met with in every century and every place. All the components of the telephone are present in the rhinoceros. Emery paper and magic lanterns have always existed; and moon is really sun and sun moon, the earth is Mars, Jupiter, a whisky and soda and that queer instrument that will soon be invented to create objects or destroy them, its structure being known by heart already.

  To understand this properly one would have to follow Adam and try the path of certitudes, which is that of materialistic ecstasy. Then time shrinks and shrinks; its echoes become briefer and briefer; like a pendulum allowed to run down, what used to be years soon become months, the months dwindle to hours, to seconds, to quarter-seconds, to thousandths of seconds; and then all at once, abruptly, to nothing. One has reached the only fixed point in the universe and become virtually eternal. In other words, a god, since one needs neither to exist nor to have been created. It is not a question of psychological immobilization nor, strictly speaking, of mysticism or asceticism. For it is not prompted by the search for a means of communication with God, or by the desire for eternity. It would be only one more weakness in Adam were he to attempt to overcome matter, his own matter, by employing the same impulsions as matter itself.