The Interrogation Page 16

  My matchbox was empty; I made it into a boat, sticking a burnt match upright in the lid. I threaded a scrap of paper onto the match, to make a sail, and put the whole thing into the fountain. It began to drift across the black surface. Puffs of wind hit the sail and sent it zigzagging towards the middle of the basin. I watched it for over a minute, and then suddenly lost sight of it. The fountain swallowed it up in a shower of drops and hid it behind a curtain of mist. The water began to bubble round it, and a few seconds later it vanished downwards like a shadow and evaporated in the tumult of greyness and black whirlpools.

  That was the moment when I’d have liked to hear somebody say, somebody say to me, Bastard!

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  In the end I went away after all, because a police car had seen me and slowed down. I went round through the Old Town and up again to the gardens behind the Bus Station. I thought I could lie down on a bench and get some sleep.

  In the gardens I found you and the American fellow. When I recognized you I thought I’d have a ball, because it was dark and you looked as though you were enjoying yourselves. I sat down beside you and began telling you stories. I forget what they were, riddles, ghost stories or disjointed phrases. I have an idea I told you about my great-grandfather, who was Governor of Ceylon. But I forget. The American lit a cigarette and waited for me to go. But I didn’t feel like going. I asked you for another 1,000 francs. Michèle said she’d given me enough for the time being; I replied that she had never returned the raincoat I’d lent her, and that it was certainly worth more than 5,000.

  Michèle, you lost your temper and told me to clear out. I laughed, and said give me 1,000 francs. The American threw away his cigarette and said:

  ‘Now, come on, get going.’

  I replied by swearing in American. Michèle got scared and gave me the 1,000 francs. The American stood up and said again: ‘Hey, get going’. I repeated the same oath. Michèle threatened to call the police. But the American said not to worry, he’d manage by himself. I couldn’t see straight. He made me get up off the seat and pushed me backwards. I came back at him, still talking, saying whatever came into my head, I can’t remember what. I think I was telling him about the raincoat, that it had cost 10,000 francs, that it had a cloth lining; and also about everything we’d done that day up in the hills. Michèle began to walk away, saying she was going for the police. The police station was just across the gardens.

  The American hadn’t understood a word I was saying, because I’d spoken very fast, in a muffled voice.

  He came back at me to push me backwards again, but I grabbed him by the collar. Then he hit me, first to the left of the chin and then again, under the eye. I tried to land a kick in his groin, but I missed. Then he began thumping me in the face and the stomach, with his fists and knees. Until I fell on the gravel path. He didn’t stop at that. He put his two fat knees on my chest and bashed my face as hard as he could. He nearly knocked me out, and he broke one of my front teeth; in doing that he must have hurt his fist, because he left off at once. He got up, panting, and went out of the gardens, calling Michèle.

  After a minute I managed to turn over, and I crawled on all fours to the bench. I sat down and wiped my face with my handkerchief; I didn’t feel any pain except from my broken tooth, but I was bleeding a lot. He must have driven his fist into my nose. In any case both my eyes were swollen up like oranges. As I wiped away the blood I was muttering under my breath; I was still a bit tight, and I could find nothing to say except:

  ‘Because of that stinker I shall have to go to the dentist, because of that bastard I shall have to spend 2,000 francs on going to the dentist.’

  Not more than five minutes later I saw the American and Michèle coming back with a copper. I just had time to get away through the bushes and over the hedge. I went back to the Old Town and washed my face and hands under a fountain. I had a cigarette to relax myself. My tooth was beginning to jag; it was half broken and felt as though the nerve had grown out through the enamel like a blade of grass. I thought to myself, I must be getting home, to the deserted house at the top of the hill.

  I went back there as quickly as I could. Passing the church by the harbour I saw it was five-and-twenty to five. There were cars going by with their lamps alight, and animals all over the place, in pairs, uttering weird cries. I was thinking all the time, ‘I’ve been sick twice and tomorrow I shall have to go and see the dentist, the dentist – dentist.’ I was thinking all the time about the leather chair and the steel levers whirling and the sickly smell of fillings, in the square of stale, cool air, very hygienic.

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  At this point three pages of the exercise-book have been torn out. The fourth has a drawing on it, an aerial view of some sort of town. The streets are drawn in with a ball-point pen. A red spot, like a Square, has been made by pressing on the paper a thumb covered with blood from a scratched pimple. A cigaretette-end has been crushed out at the bottom left of the page. All this with considerable application, it would seem, and great self-satisfaction – as evidenced by an eyelash that must have fallen off during the exaggerated time for which Adam’s head was bent over the paper. One may reckon that about three or four days elapsed between the page before the missing ones and the page that follows the gap. This is the last page in the famous yellow exercise-book. There are only a few lines on it, also written with a ball-point pen. The bottom of the page has been torn off, and there is a lot of scratching-out; in some places the words underneath are still legible, in other places they are completely obliterated. There are gaps in a few of the words, where the pen skidded on the greasy paper.

  Sunday morning, my dear Michèle,

  Michèle and the American must have gone to the police and given away my hiding-place. Very early this morning I was woken by a noise; alarmed, I got up and looked out of the window. I saw two or three men climbing the hill, not talking. They were walking fast, and looking up at the house every now and then. I thought at once they must be coppers, anyhow I had just time to grab two or three things and jump out of the window. They didn’t see me because there’s a line of rose-bushes-beans rose-bushes in front of the window. I went uphill a bit, above the house, then I sloped off to the left and doubled back along the dry bed of a stream. I passed not very far from them, and at one moment I caught sight of them clambering up through the patches of briars. I took care not to make a noise by kicking any loose stones. The of them.

  I came out on the road; at first I walked along the bank at the side, then I got down on the road. It wasn’t long after sunrise; there was a glimpse of the sea to the left, between the pines. The scent of pines and grass was overpowering. After that I strolled along as though I were out for a walk. Five hundred yards further on I came to a narrow lane running down to the seashore, so I took that. I thought it was better not to keep on the main road, because the coppers would be bound to recognize me if they came past by car. I’d left my watch behind in the house, but by the sun it was eight o’clock, not more. I was hungry and thirsty.

  Down below, near the beach, there was a café just opening. I had a cup of chocolate and an apple fritter. My broken tooth was hurting again. And I had about 1,200 fr. left. I began to wonder whether I oughtn’t to go into exile. To Sweden, Germany or Poland. The Italian frontier wasn’t far off. But it wouldn be y with no passport or money. Or I thought I might perhaps go and see my mother. I no longer needed to write it on the back of an empty cigarette packet: what I was going to do was to take a look round. In a town there are two kinds of houses one can live in – ordinary houses, and homes. There are two kinds of homes – mental homes and homes for the night. Among homes for the night, some are for rich people and some for poor people. Among those for poor people there are some with separate rooms and some with dormitories. Among those with dormitories there are some that are cheap and some that are free. Among those that are free there’s the Salvation Army. And the Salvation Army won’t always take you in. />
  That’s why, by and large, it was nice to live all alone in a deserted house at the top of a hill.

  Of course it was short on what people call comfort. You have to sleep on the floor unless the owners have left a bed, which they hadn’t in this case. The water is nearly always cut off (except the stand-pipe in the garden, you remember, Michèle?). You have no protection against burglars or animals: it means taking care of yourself; and when one’s alone one rea doesn’t de oneself efficiently against bugs, mosquitoes, spiders, or even scorpions and snakes. And then the owners are always liable to turn up suddenly. S mes they get angry when they find there’s somebody in their house. One hasn’t much of an excuse, especially in hot weather and when one’s a young chap, as tough as the next, in other words quite able to work – and particularly when one had a room of one’s own in the town, with everything one needed. They may go so far as to call the police, and one’s soon picked up, a tramp declared to be ‘of no wn ress’, a thief, a deserter – breaking and entering, confidence trick, blackmail or mendicancy.

  I’m not blind or crippled. I shall go off to the cold countries; I shall travel in a goods-train and bed in the street in Rotterdam. I shall sit on a bollard beside a fishing-net and go down to the beach to bathe. The dog will perhaps come past here today, Sunday, 29th August, nearly nine o’clock in the morning. It’s hot and sultry; it seems there’ll be fires on the hill-sides round about. Here I’m hidden away.

  Unf[

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  On the back of the exercise-book Adam has signed his name, in full: ‘Adam Polio, martyr.’ Although one can’t say for certain, it is extremely probable that the above passage was concluded in the place where it accidentally turned up later on, in the ‘Gents’ at the Torpedo Snack-Bar.

  P. Towards the end of the morning, about noon or nearing one o’clock, he had become just a man in the middle of the beach. His long, skinny body was stretched out on the scorching pebbles. To let the air through a little and reduce the roasting effect of the sun, he had propped himself backwards on his elbows, leaving a narrow gap between his spine and the ground. He had settled close to the water’s edge, so that whenever a motorboat rushed past out at sea, towing somebody on water-skis, it wetted the soles of his feet with the ripples in its wake.

  At a distance, and from behind, he looked much the same as ever. He was still wearing the dark blue shorts with oil-stains on them, and the sun-glasses with gilt wire frames. His clothes were folded in a heap beside him, topped by a two-month-old magazine; this had originally been open in the middle, at a page dealing with a railway accident; but the wind, blowing from one side, had closed it again; now it was the back cover that lay upwards, showing a little boy eating spaghetti and cheese. Further along the beach another little boy was playing all by himself, paddling barefooted in the water. Adam was not looking at him; Adam was about thirty years old now.

  Adam Polio had a longish head, with a slightly pointed top. His hair and beard, roughly hacked with scissors, were full of tangles and matted locks. His whole face had some lingering trace of good looks, rather large eyes, or perhaps a soft, immature nose, cheeks that were boyish, beardless under their covering of yellow beard. He had a narrow torso filled with dozens of ribs; it was stretched by his drawn-back arms and did not look very sturdy. His shoulders were bulgy in front, with muscles no doubt; his arms were bony. His hands were shortish, broad and plump, with an undeniable air of hands that couldn’t undo the fastening on even the easiest bra. The rest was in proportion. But seen at close quarters, with the sun making patches on it, and the splashes of sea-water, Adam’s body looked as though it were being gradually spotted with all kinds of colours, from bright yellow to blue.

  Thus camouflaged, he was caught in a multitude of other spots – brown, green, black, black-and-grey, white, ochre, dirty red; from far off he looked like a small child, from nearer, like a young man, and from close to, like a kind of funny old man, centenarian and innocent. He was breathing rapidly. Each time he breathed in, the hairs round his navel straightened up to denote the fleeting presence of about 2 litres of air, which penetrated his bronchial tubes, dilated them down to the smallest, stretched his ribs and pushed away the top of the stomach and the smaller intestine with a thrust of the diaphragm. The air went right down inside, echoing with his heart-beats, the furthest recesses of his flesh turned blood-red and his veins were shaken at regular intervals by a great blue tide that swept up through his body. The air filtered in everywhere, warm, laden with smells and microscopic scraps. It invaded the mass of meat and skin and sent tiny electric shocks through and through it. Everything functioned along its course: the valves closed, the capillaries of the windpipe drove out the dust, and in the lowest depths of the great damp cavity, stained purple and white, the carbon dioxide accumulated, waiting to be driven upwards, ready to be exhaled and to mingle with the atmosphere; it would go to hover here and there on the beach, in the holes between the stones, on the sweating foreheads, adding to the density of the steel-grey skies. Deep down inside Adam was an agglomeration of cells, nuclei, plasma, atoms combined in any number of ways; nothing was airtight any longer. Adam’s atoms could have mingled with the atoms in the stones, and he might have been drawn down quietly through the ground, the sand, water and slime; everything would have crumbled together, as though into an abyss, and have vanished into the blackness. In Adam’s left femoral artery an amoeba had formed its cyst. And the atoms were revolving like infinitesimal planets in his immense, cosmic body.

  Yet in confrontation with others, as he lay in the foreground of the beach with both feet trailing in the sea, he was an individual; the sun’s yellow-white rays fell vertically on his sugar-loaf skull, and with his projecting jaw, his scrubby beard and his general air of being a specimen, he looked more and more like a character in the first part of a Greek play. Just now he was smoking a cigarette; sun-blinks flew past his eyes like artificial flies and then burst like bubbles. Salt whitened on the hairs of his body. And the same little boy paddled about in the sea, singing in a drone:

  … Criaient la gloire

  de Dieu,

  Chantaient l’amour

  de Dieu…

  He stopped for a glance at his mother, who was lying further up the shingle, abandoned to sleep; and then began again, on the wrong note,

  … Criaient la gloire

  de Dieu, etc.

  Planes flew overhead without a sound, between two layers of atmosphere. People were going off to lunch. A wasp with one wing half torn off was running over the stones; twice it nearly wheeled inland, but losing its sense of direction in this chaotic desert it made a mistake and crawled to meet its death – towards the sea, where a single drop of salt water drowned it in the sunshine. Now the little boy was singing:

  Oh Sarimarès

  belle amie d’autrefois,

  en moi tu demeures vi-ive

  in steadier voice. Then he climbed up the beach, knocking Adam’s magazine to the ground as he went past. After which he went on more cautiously, staring at Adam’s back with his two small, heavy-lidded eyes; until he reached the bath-towel where his mother lay asleep, pulled it towards him, sat down and forgot.

  Not long after this, Adam got up and went away. He walked quickly to the Post Office nearest to the harbour and went to the Poste Restante window. The clerk gave him a bulging envelope, a fat letter. On the envelope was written:

  Adam Pollo,

  Poste Restante No. 15

  and the address.

  Because it was cool there, and perhaps because he didn’t quite know where else to go, Adam opened the letter in the Post Office. He sat down on a bench not far from the table with the telephone directories. Beside him was a girl making out a money-order. She had to have several shots at it, with pauses for mental arithmetic; she was sweating, and tightly clutching a ball-point pen with an advertisement printed on it and a rubber band twisted round it.

  Adam unfolded the letter; there were three pages of large writing, mu
ch more like drawings or hieroglyphs than the Roman alphabet; it must have been traced by a heavy hand, a not very feminine hand, accustomed to bearing down weightily on flat surfaces, and more especially on sheets of paper. A touch of fantasy in the arrangement of the letters and the slope of the final ‘s’s suggested affection, liveliness, or perhaps simply the faint irritation of having to write on the off-chance, with no guarantee that the letter would be read. The pages lay there, undeniably, offering a message which one must be able to read between the lines, kind of ingenuously cunning riddle. Changeless, at all events, as though engraved on some stone in a wall, a message from a mortal hand which could never be effaced by time, which offered itself, clear as a date, abstruse as the chart of a maze.

  The letter had been waiting in its pigeon-hole at the Poste Restante for over a week.

  19th August

  My dear Adam,

  When your father and I found your note in the letter-box we were very much surprised, as you can imagine. We were not expecting anything of the kind – neither what you have done, nor your way of telling us about it. We hope you aren’t keeping anything from us – that there’s nothing serious behind all this. Though neither your father nor I liked your showing so little confidence in us. We still feel hurt, I assure you.

  Your father was terribly against the idea of writing to you Poste Restante, as you asked us to do in your note. We had a long argument about it and, as you see, I’ve gone against his wishes and taken it upon myself to indulge your whim.