The Interrogation Read online

  It is not purely and simply a question of desire; just as, a while back, it was not purely and simply a question of the cigarettes people may be smoking all over the world. No, what drives Adam is reflection, lucid meditation. Starting from his own human flesh, from the sum of his present sensations, he annihilates himself by a dual system of multiplication and identification. Thanks to these two methods he can reason in the future as well as in the present and the past. Provided one takes these words at their proper value, that is to say as words. Whether close at hand or far off. He gradually obliterates himself by self creation. He practises a kind of sympoetry and ends not in Beauty, Ugliness, Ideal, Happiness, but in oblivion and absence. Soon he no longer exists. He is himself no longer. He is lost, a weak particle that still moves, still describes itself. He is no more than a vague ghost, solitary, eternal, measureless, the terror of lonely old women, who creates himself, dies, lives and lives again and sinks into darkness, hundreds, millions and milliards of an infinite time, neither one nor the other.

  O. This is how, later on, Adam described what happened next; he told the story carefully, writing with a ball-point pen in a yellow exercise-book which he had headed ‘My dear Michèle’, as though beginning a letter. The whole thing was found later, half-burnt. Some pages were missing altogether, either because they’d been torn out to wrap something up in – basketball shoes, household refuse – or even as a substitute for toilet paper, or because they had been too badly burnt. So they will not be given here, and their absence will be indicated by blanks of about the same length.

  A few days before the owners would normally be coming back and throwing me out of the house, I got into trouble in the town. I’d gone down there as usual, about two or three o’clock in the afternoon, to try to see Michèle, or the dog, or somebody else, but more especially to buy cigarettes, beer and something to eat. I particularly wanted to see Michèle, because I needed to borrow another 1,000 or 5,000 francs from her; I had made a short list on the back of an empty cigarette packet,

  fags

  beer

  chocolate

  stuff to eat

  paper

  newspapers if

  possible take

  a look round

  and made up my mind to follow it in that order.

  The cigarettes I found at a tobacconist’s on the way into the town. A little bar, quiet and fairly cool, called ‘Chez Gontrand’. There were picture postcards on the walls. The counter at the tobacconist’s end was a wooden one, painted brown. The woman behind it was between sixty and sixty-five years old. She wore a striped dress. An Alsation dog lay asleep at the far end of the bar; the rolls of fur round his neck hid the aluminium plate riveted to his collar and the name – Dick – that was engraved on it.

  I bought the beer at a self-service grocery which was spacious, clean and airy. As I went in they gave me a red plastic basket with perforated sides, to hold whatever I bought. Into it I dropped just one bottle of light ale, making a noise of glass hitting plastic. I paid and went out.

  The chocolate, in the same shop. But I stole that. I pushed the tablet inside my shirt, one end wedged behind the belt of my trousers. It made a bulge, so as I went past the pay-desk I had to pull my stomach in hard, to hide the lump. I could scarcely breathe. The girl at the desk didn’t notice, nor did the big lout who’s supposed to watch what goes on along the shelves. It seems to me they don’t give a damn, in that joint.

  This left the stuff to eat, the newspapers and the paper.

  The stuff to eat:

  I bought a tin of stew at the Prisunic.

  The newspapers:

  I found these in my usual way, you know, by hunting in the refuse-bins that are hung on the lamp-posts. I found a magazine in good condition, the local dental magazine. Good-quality paper with lots of blank spaces; I said to myself this makes a change, I shall have fun mixing it all up, sockets and dentures, molars and killing the nerve by method B.

  The paper:

  At the Prilux, a school exercise-book. (This one is almost finished already; when I’ve filled three more like it I can begin to think about finding a publisher. I’ve already got a striking title – The Complete Bastards.)

  The most important thing was: if possible take a look round.

  That is to say, while I was walking round the town, keep a look out for things that might be useful later on, perhaps try to find an empty house, even a tumble down one, where I could live when the one up on the hill becomes impossible, and try to see the dog, lots of animals, play games of my own, have a bath at the Public Baths, and borrow 5,000 francs from Michèle. In the first place don’t forget that I If I could find some kind of work, something that didn’t need much attention, some physical job, washer-up in a restaurant, layer-out at the Mortuary or crowd work at the film studios, I’d be satisfied with that. I should earn just enough to buy a packet of cigarettes when I want, once a day, for ex., & paper to write on, and a bottle of beer too, once a day. Anything more is luxury. I wish I could go to the U.S.A., they say one can live like that over there, and have sun in the South, and nothing to do except write, drink and sleep. Another idea would be to take holy orders, why not?

  I once knew a fellow who was a potter. He married a woman called Blanche and he lives in a house up in the hills. I went to see him one day, at three in the afternoon; it was very hot, and there were beans climbing over a pergola. The sun was hardening everything into scabs. He was working under the pergola, half naked. He was scratching Aztec patterns on some kind of earthenware pots; and the sun was drying the clay, making little specks of powder all round the vase; afterwards he laid on the colours and they were fired in the oven, heat on heat. It was all in harmony. There was a salamander with a forked tail asleep on the sun-baked ground. I don’t think I had ever in my life seen so much heat upon heat. The outside temperature was 39° Centigrade and the oven temperature was 500°. That evening his wife Blanche cooked the beans. He was a good chap; he was always nearly dead by the end of the day. Quite white, a patch of dancing air, an equilateral cube gradually baking.

  I said to myself that I too might have a house in the country. On the side of a kind of flinty mountain; under the scorching stones there’d be snakes, scorpions and red ants.

  This is how I should spend my day: I’d have a patch of ground, all covered with stones, exposed to the sun from morning till night. In the middle of it I would make bonfires. I’d burn planks, glass, cast-iron, rubber, anything I could find. I’d produce kinds of statues, like that, straight out of the fire. Black objects, scorched in the wind and dust. I should throw on tree-trunks and burn them; I should twist everything, blacken everything, coat everything with a crackling powder, send the flames soaring, thicken the smoke into heavy coils. The orange-coloured tongues would make the earth bristle, shake the sky right up to the clouds. The livid sun would fight against them for hours on end. Insects would come by thousands to fling themselves on my bonfire and burrow head-first into the colourless layer at the foot of the blaze. Then, blown upwards by the heat, they would climb the flames like an invisible column and fall back in a soft shower of ashes, delicate and fragile, transformed into charred specks on my head and my bare shoulders; and the blast of the flames would blow on them and make them shudder against my skin; it would give them new legs and new wing-sheaths, a new life that would carry them into the air and deposit them in swarms, soft as crumbs of smoke, in the holes between the stones, right down to the foot of the mountain.

  About five o’clock in the afternoon – let’s say – the sun would win. The sun would burn up the flames, leaving only a round black patch in the middle of the bonfire area, with all the rest as white as snow. The black patch would look like the sun’s shadow, or a bottomless hole in the ground. And nothing would remain except charred tree-trunks, lumps of metal looking as though struck by lightning and melted, twisted glass, drops of steel like water among the ashes. Everything would have grown like dark plants, with grotesque stems, d
riblets of cellulose, crevices full of glowing coals. Then I’d collect all these convulsed shapes together and pile them up in a room in the house. I should enjoy living between a mountain of white stones and a burnt-up jungle. It’s all connected with heat. It would decompose everything so as to reconstitute a world blighted by drought; heat, pure and simple. Thanks to that everything would be white and hard and set. Like a block of ice at the North Pole it would represent material harmony, so that time would cease to flow on. Yes, it would be really beautiful. By day it would be heat plus heat, and by night, blackness plus coal.

  [

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  And one day I’d take an old car, run it into the middle of the bonfire site, and pour petrol over it. Then I’d pour petrol over myself, get into the car and set fire to it.

  And I should keep on my dark glasses, so that when they found my charred body, my round skull, there would be a funny, black caricature of an insect there, its plastic body would have sunk boiling into the sockets of my eyes. Two wire rods, .like spindly legs, would be sticking up on either side, making antennae for me.

  I hope no one would recognize any trace of me in that blistered mummy. Because I would very much like to live all naked and all black, once and for all burning, once and for all created.

  Michèle.

  I made a very thorough search for you.

  First of all there was that fellow Gérard, or François, I forget his name. I knew him in the days when I used to play pinball. Or when I was a student of some kind. He didn’t recognize me, because since then I’ve grown a beard and I wear dark glasses. He told me he’d seen you going down towards the Vieux Port.

  I went down there and sat on a bench in the shade. I waited a bit, with the idea of having a rest. I was just opposite the jetty and there were two Englishmen there, dressed up like yachtsmen, talking. They were pretending to be deathly bored with the Mediterranean, and one of them said:

  ‘I am looking forward to the Shetlands.’

  Quite a lot of people were going past, pointing out the white boats to their children.

  An hour later I went up again to the Grand-Place, the one with the fountain. In the Café I ran into a girl you must know, called Martine Préaux. I told her that Gérard, or François – anyhow, that dark chap in the pink shirt – had seen you going down towards the Vieux Port. She said something like this:

  He’s crazy, I’ve just seen Michéle in the other Café, further down. She was with an American.’

  ‘An American? An American sailor?’

  ‘No, not a sailor, just an American. A tourist.’

  I asked her if she thought you’d still be there. She said:

  ‘I really don’t know. Perhaps; it’s not so very long ago,’ and added: ‘You’d better go and look.’

  You weren’t in the other café any longer, always supposing you ever had been. The waiter didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. It would have meant tipping him, and I couldn’t afford it; so I sat down all the same and had a glass of grenadine-and-water.

  As I wasn’t sure what to do, and as I mostly can’t think without doodling on a piece of paper, I tore out the first page from my exercise-book and drew a plan of the town, cross-hatching the places where you might be. It took me nearly an hour. In order of importance, the places were:

  at home

  the cafés in the Place

  the shops in the Avenue

  the seafront

  the church

  the bus-station

  the Rue Smolett

  the Rue Neuve

  the Descente Crotti

  After that I got up, paid for the grenadine, and went straight off to look for you. I had about 50 francs left. Luckily I’d still got the [

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  what you said to me. He had a rather flabby face, a crew-cut, and long, fat legs. As it was dark, I went to the far end of the bar and asked for a glass of red wine.

  At first I hadn’t meant to drink so much. If I’d wanted to get tight I’d have started with something else; beer, for instance; I can’t carry red wine. When I begin drinking that I always throw it up in the end, and I don’t care for throwing up. It’s the same with excrements, I don’t like to think I’m leaving part of myself somewhere. I want to remain complete.

  Why I drank too much this time was that I had the 5,000 francs in my pocket, I’d nothing else to do, and I didn’t like the look of the American. I began by ordering:

  ‘A glass of red wine’

  when I might just as easily have said: ‘A Misty Isley’ or “An espresso and two croissants.”

  The point is that after that I was too tired to call a different order to the waiter. I’d say:

  ‘The same again.’

  ‘Red?’ he’d ask.

  And I’d nod.

  A funny thing happened then. The Bar was crowded, the waiters were hurrying to and fro, and you were sitting near the door with that American fellow. I looked at all of you, one after another, and you were all doing the same thing, that’s to say drinking, talking, crossing your legs, smiling, smoking and puffing out the smoke through your nostrils, etc. You all had faces, arms and legs, backs to your heads, sexual organs, hips and mouths. You all had the same lump of reddened skin on your elbows, the same tear-glands, their edges showing, the same double cleft in the small of the back, the same type of ears, curled like a shell, no doubt cast in the same mould, hideously identical. Not one of you had two mouths, for example. Or a foot in place of the left eye. You were all talking at the same time and telling one another the same things. You were all, all, all alike. You were living in twos, in threes, fours, fives, sixes, tens, twenty-nines, one hundred and eighty-threes, etc.

  I amused myself by reconstructing your talk:

  Suzanne’s in a nursing-home.

  Of course not, never, why on earth? There’s no reason!

  It’s because of Georges, I saw him the other evening at the Mexico, he

  It’s true in a way. But Ionesco isn’t

  stinker if anyone asks you that say it’s

  Hi! Jean-Claude, want a cigarette? You know

  half a pint of draught you wouldn’t have twenty francs

  It’s Henri, a pal of Jackie’s. I’ve a job

  Then what’s the matter?

  D’you want to know the truth? You know the truth?

  necessarily modern, he’s in the tradition of the

  me, afterwards. I’ve had enough of this, shall we go?

  on Thursday, when it rained, well, the thing worked

  at the City Stores I unload packing-cases twice

  to put a record on it’s not worth mentioning

  so then I had a good shower. He said to me it’s

  He tells you stories, okay, they’re good ones, but you get tired of them, there isn’t

  realists, you know, of Monnier, Henri Monnier, for instance.

  It’s not ten o’clock yet, let’s wait another

  All the same I went to Monaco

  it’s all washed up now here?

  a week, it’s quite well paid and it gives me a bit of exercise

  no use counting on me for the next match

  Hi, Claude! No news

  a word of truth in it all any more

  five minutes anyhow. I’m sure he’ll come, he kept saying he would.

  But there was no sense in all these words, all these intermingled phrases. You were all men and women, and never until then had I felt so strongly that you constituted a race. I suddenly wished I could take refuge with the ants and learn as much about them as I knew about you.

  I drank four or five more glasses of wine; I’d had nothing to eat, and drink on an empty stomach always makes me ill. I drank more than a bottle of red wine, down there at the far end of the bar.

  I had a kind of sick taste on my tongue. It was very hot, and everything felt clammy. I remember tearing a page out of the exercise-book and writing in the middle of it:

  Interrogation concerning a disaster among the ants.<
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  Then I wrote some stuff on the back of the sheet; but I’ve lost it since then and I can’t remember what it said. I think it mentioned powder, mountains of white powder.

  When I left the bar I was pretty well plastered. Going past you I saw you were showing some photographs to the American. I felt ill, so I went for a long walk in the Old Town. I staggered along, leaning against the wall. Twice I vomited into the gutter. I had no idea what time it was, or what I was doing. I sat down on the rim of the Fontaine Saint-François; I put the parcels of food and the exercise-book down beside me. I smoked two cigarettes one after another. A cold breeze was flapping the awnings outside the shops.