The Interrogation Page 2
He knew he was on the right track.
And sure enough, he gradually managed to reconstruct a world of childish terrors; seen through the rectangle of the window, the sky seemed ready to break away and crash down on our heads. The sun, ditto. He looked at the ground and saw it suddenly melting, boiling, or flowing beneath his feet. The trees grew excited and gave off poisonous vapours. The sea began to swell, devoured the narrow grey strip of beach and then rose, rose to attack the hill, to drown him, moving towards him, to numb him, to swallow him up in its dirty waves. He could feel the fossilized monsters coming to birth somewhere, prowling round the villa, the joints of their huge feet cracking. His fear grew, invincible, imagination and frenzy could not be checked; even human beings become hostile, barbarous, their limbs sprouted wool, their heads shrank, and they advanced in serried ranks over the countryside, cannibalistic, cowardly or ferocious. The moths flung themselves on him, biting him with their mandibles, wrapping him in the silky veil of their hairy wings. From the pools there rose an armoured nation of parasites or shrimps, of abrupt, mysterious crustaceans, hungering to tear off shreds of his flesh. The beaches were covered with strange creatures who had come there, accompanied by their young, to await no one knew what; animals prowled along the roads, growling and squealing, curious parti-coloured animals whose shells glistened in the sunshine. Everything was suddenly in motion, with an intense, intestinal, concentrated life, heavy and incongruous as a kind of submarine vegetation. While this was going on he drew back into his corner, ready to spring out and defend himself pending the final assault that would leave him the prey of these creatures. He picked up the yellow exercise-book of a little while back, looked again for a moment at the drawing on the wall, the drawing which had once represented the sun; and he wrote to Michèle:
My dear Michèle,
I must admit I’m a little frightened, here in the house. I think if you were here, in the light, lying naked on the ground, I could recognize my own flesh in yours, smooth and warm, I shouldn’t need all that. While I’m writing you this, just imagine, there happens to be a narrow space, between the deck-chair and the skirting-board, that would fit you like a glove; it’s exactly your length, 5ft 4, and I don’t think its hip measurement is more than yours, 35½. So far as I’m concerned the earth has turned into a sort of chaos, I’m scared of the deinotheria, the pithecanthropes, the Neanderthal man (a cannibal), not to mention the dinosaurs, the labyrinthosaurs, the pterodactyls, etc. I’m afraid the hill may turn into a volcano.
Or that the polar ice may melt, which would raise the level of the sea and drown me. I’m afraid of the people on the beach, BELOW. The sand is changing into quicksands, the sun into a spider and the children into shrimps.
Adam closed the exercise-book with a snap, raised himself on his forearms, and looked out of the window. There was nobody coming. He reckoned how much time he would need to go down to the sea, bathe and get back. It was too late in the day; he had rather forgotten how long it was since he’d last been out of the house – two days, or more.
It looked as though he had been living entirely on biscuits – cut-price wafers bought at the Prisunic. Now and then he felt a pain in his stomach, and there was a sour taste round his glottis. He leant out of the window and contemplated the small section of the town that could be seen on the right, between two hills.
He lit a cigarette, one of the few remaining from the collection of eight assorted packets bought when he last went out, and said aloud:
‘What’s the use of going into town? It’s not worth while working like I do at these crazy things – getting scared stiff, in fact – believing that if I don’t go there, it’s they who’ll come here and kill me, yes, yes. I understand, my psychological reflexes have gone… but before that? Before that I could do one thing or another, and nowadays heaps of things convince me that it’s finished. Adam, for God’s sake, it’s an effort for me to go down among all those buildings, to hear people shouting, grumbling, arguing, etc., listening to them all by myself in a corner of the wall. Sooner or later one has to bring out a word or two, say yes, thank you, excuse me, it’s a beautiful evening but of course it’s true that yesterday was. I’m fresh from college, and it’s only fair, it would be only fair for all that muck to come to an end, and all that useless, idiotic, bloody chatter which is the reason why I’m here this evening, needing fresh air and cigarettes and with malnutrition lying in wait, asking myself why there shouldn’t be just a very few more unimaginable things.’
He took a step backwards, blew smoke through his nostrils, and went on, still talking to himself (but luckily he didn’t overdo that, no – partly because he had never been talkative).
‘Splendid, splendid – that’s all very fine, but I must go into town to buy fags, beer, chocolate and stuff to eat.’
To make it clearer he wrote on a scrap of paper:
fags
beer
chocolate
stuff to eat
paper
newspapers if
possible take
a look round
Then he sat down on the floor, by the window, in the sun, where he usually waits for dark, and to rest himself he began drawing signs in the dust, aimless patterns of fine lines, scratched with a fingernail. Because of course it’s tiring to live all alone like that, in a deserted house at the top of a hill. It means knowing how to look after yourself, enjoying fear, idleness and the unusual, wanting to dig lairs all the time and to hide in them, abasing yourself, keeping well concealed as you used to do when you were a kid, between two ragged pieces of old tarpaulin.
B. He had fetched up on the beach. He was lying on the pebbles at the extreme left, close to the piled-up rocks and the fringe of seaweed, an ideal place for flies to lay their eggs. He had just been swimming and now he was leaning back, propped on his elbows, leaving a small space, conducive to evaporation, between his wet back and the ground. His skin was dark red, not brown, and it clashed with his swimming-trunks, which were painted bright blue. From a distance he looked like an American tourist, but coming nearer one noticed that his face was dirty, his hair too long, and his straggling beard had been hacked off with scissors. His head hung listlessly on his chest.
His elbows were resting side by side on a bath-towel, but from the shoulder-blades downwards his body was in direct contact with the beach, and muddy patches of gravel had stuck to the hairs on his legs. With his head turned this way he could presumably see very little of the water, it would be chiefly the boulders to the left that met his eye; and assuming that these had not been washed for centuries, that for centuries men and animals had been covering them with filth, one could understand his air of vague disgust. Naturally the beach was crowded from end to end (Adam was at the extreme southeast) with people, mostly women and children, walking, sleeping or shouting, all in their different ways.
Adam had dozed for a time, like that, or even dropped right off; in the end he’d thought it would be better to stroll on and find a spot of shade somewhere. He had given himself until two o’clock, and his watch now said half-past one.
In point of fact all this was not unpleasant: it was really very hot, all sounds were dying away, one after another, as though the air were thickening, turning into a cloud. It was almost like being fitted into a hole in the atmosphere, one’s very own, under the piled-up land, water and sky.
Adam enjoyed watching the lively crowd on his right; it was many-coloured, humming with voices, and on the whole much less alarming when seen from here. It was rather as though he knew these people’s names, as though their mere proximity made them distant relations of the Pollo family; in any case they showed definite signs of common ancestry, the imperceptibly negroid stamp of some vanished Ameranthropus. Some of the women looked attractive in their sleep, with a kind of weighty subsidence of the flesh, a semi-burial amidst the grey pebbles, which gave a corresponding effect of relief, of soft curves, of a kind of vegetable love.
And sometimes
they turned over, rolling across their bathrobes with vague movements of the bust, twisting and stretching their necks. Their, children did not have this softness. On the contrary they were small, dwarfish, solemn; they gathered at the water’s edge and, left to themselves, began systematically to build castles and rake the shingle. Two or three of them, too young to use their hands, uttered regular, piercing cries for no reason, and the rest of the children accepted these as a form of incantation needed for the complete success of their work.
Adam watched them absent-mindedly as though they, their noise and movement, had no logical connexion with himself; and every sensation of his overwrought body, which magnified details, fashioned his being into a monstrous object, compact of pain, in which consciousness of life was merely consciousness of matter through the nerves. All this, of course, had a legendary past which could be invented a thousand times over without a single mistake.
The air was full of flat flies and microscopic specks of dust, which settled on the heaps of pebbles or moved on a long, horizontal course. As a matter of fact there could be no mistake here either – you could choose to stare at one pebble, selected at random, and give it mental expression by some wish such as:
‘I’m going to throw it at the orange peel that’s floating out there on the sea.’
Or else you could cast your eyes over the whole stretch of scenery, where everything was enormous and casual, made up of hollows and bulges, headlands and bays, trees and wells, yes and no, water and air. And in that case you must feel yourself to be impressed on the ground, spread out in the sun, the true centre of indefinably more neutral matter.
He was afraid to move too much, though at times he longed almost frantically to do so. He lay still, his spine following the irregular contours of the stones, his neck bent, his stomach muscles strained to breaking-point. A light sweat, caused by fatigue or by the heat, kept gathering in beads on his cheekbones and trickling down like tiny raindrops along his cheeks, neck, ribs and legs. He had the impression of being the only damp spot on the entire beach, as though the clammy patch that was greasing the pebbles beneath his body were intensifying the hardness and the saltish, dusty whiteness of his surroundings.
He knew why. He had a shrewd idea of it. Nobody could have accused him of not knowing what he was about; for as he lay thus motionless he could see more clearly how the world revealed itself, by snatches, in its tranquil, ludicrous, headstrong course, in the thick of action, in aggressive chemical formulae; the sudden to-and-fro movement of pistons, the starting up of mechanical processes, in the trees, carbon cycles, regular lengthening of shadows, and noises, and the cavernous rustling of a fibrous soil which was systematically cracking up, parting its lips with baby-like cries which had seemed hitherto to belong exclusively to fish.
A man went past, calling out in a thin voice. He was a puny creature and his whole sunburnt body appeared to be straining upwards to cope with the weight of a basket of toffee-coated peanuts. He stopped, looked at Adam, made some remark, and then turned back along the beach the way he had come. Adam noticed that he put his feet down quite flat on the stones, and that before throwing the weight of his body on to either foot he moved his big toe in a narrow circle from left to right, no doubt to make sure there was nothing in the way. He walked off quietly like this, moving among the scattered bodies with unexpected dignity and uttering his meaningless cry at frequent intervals.
A dog came quickly by in the shallow water, and Adam followed it. He walked as fast as he could, either hand grasping one end of the towel, which he had rolled round his neck; he made a point of walking with the water half-way up his legs, to imitate the dog. He was savouring two different kinds of fear: first, the fear he would have felt if he had been walking dryshod on the beach, at the risk of cutting his heels on the edges of the stones which, as everyone knows, are sharper when out of the water; and the fear he felt now, because his legs were entering a peculiar element, cooler and thicker than air, and the soles of his feet were sliding, pushing back the layers of sea-water, and finally, after several ice-cold slithers, encountering an unstable, slimy surface covered with rootlets, with microscopic pods of weed that burst under his weight and coloured the liquid, near the bottom, with dark green particles, like a mist of leaves minced up in the process of decomposition.
Fortunately the dog hesitated when it came to concealed hollows, and each time Adam was able to make up the ground he had lost. Feeling that it was being followed, the animal looked round once with a stare that caught Adam on the chin. Then it set off again, towing the man behind it as though on a leash, in a few minutes it had managed to acquire an incredible dignity and now went forward, indefinably steadfast, chest-deep in the sea, exclusively concerned with getting to the right-hand end of the beach and the group of bathing huts that stood there.
They walked like this all the way, one behind the other. As could be surmised from a distance, the bathing huts formed a half-circle, backed up against the concrete jetty with the harbour beyond it. Further down the beach the bathers were lying in a confused mass of brightly-coloured towels and bikinis; they were facing the light and because of the way their bodies were foreshortened when seen from the water’s edge, they all seemed to have sloughed their old skins for new, faintly orange-tinted ones on which the sun had dribbled, leaving shiny traces.
The dog halted, began to turn its nose towards Adam, stopped half-way, and jumped ashore. It climbed the ridges of pebbles, skirted past two or three groups of sleepers, and settled itself beside a young woman.
Adam imitated it; but while the dog took up a position on the right, he went to the left. Before sitting down he hastily unfolded the towel he had been carrying round his neck and spread it on the ground; then he squatted there, hugging his knees. For ten or fifteen seconds, a few inches from the woman’s stomach, he watched the dog, which was licking its paws; its eyelids were lowered and its nose pointed downwards. Adam looked at his feet and decided to follow the dog’s example; oil must have accumulated along the tide line since the last storm, and the soles of his feet were black. He began scraping between his toes with a sliver of driftwood.
Adam quite realized that time was going by in this unexpected way; it was one of the kinds of time you can take to yourself completely, one of the elastic kinds that you need only adjust to the scale of whatever it is you have to do, in order to enjoy it in peace. So Adam told himself in a whisper that he was in control of things; there was no fundamental difference between the two points of the beach that he had occupied in turn. Sitting on the bath-towel, he could let his gaze roam slowly round, carrying it to infinity in concentric circles. Either one was prepared to admit that a pebble, plus a thousand pebbles, plus brambles, plus refuse, plus traces of salt, far from being motionless, lived a life of secretion and moved within a different time-system; or else one must declare that life can only be measured by the evidence of the senses. In that case Adam was undoubtedly the one and only living creature in the world.
‘Hadn’t you better try this?’ the young woman suggested.
Adam smiled his thanks, took the paper handkerchief she held out to him – noticing as he did so that it had left a kind of fluff or snow on the tips of her fingers – and went on wiping away the oil. He thought he ought to say something. He muttered:
‘Yes – it is easier like this.’
He tried to meet the young woman’s eyes, but it was no use: she was wearing the kind of very dark sun-glasses, with thick lenses and frames, that are a speciality of tourists from New York at Portuguese seaside resorts. He was too shy to ask her to take them off, though he felt what a relief it would be to see her eyes. Sentimentally, he could only see his own reflection in each plastic-rimmed lens; he looked just like a big, fat monkey, bending over and working at his feet. As though, by swaying the body forward, that position set up the concentration needed to produce the intuition that one was living, yes, living all alone in one’s corner, isolated from the death of the world.
The young woman suddenly drew up her legs, a little slanting, with her head and shoulders raised just above the ground, sighed voluptuously and sent her fingers groping along her spine, brushing over the white mark on her tanned skin, as she refastened the strap of her bikini. She paused for a moment in this position, a captive figure, arms crossed behind her back, making hollows below the shoulder-blades, as though indicating to some matador the chink in her armour, the point where the sword can be thrust through to the heart. She was sweating very slightly under her arms and between her breasts. She said:
‘I must go now.’
Adam followed up with ‘Do you come here often?’
‘It depends,’ she said. ‘And you – ?’
‘I come every day. Haven’t you seen me?’
‘No.’
He went on:
‘I’ve seen you before, sitting down here – or around here. I mean at this end of the beach. Why do you sit in the same place every day? I mean, is there anything special about it? For instance, is it really cleaner than anywhere else, or cooler, or hotter, or does it smell nice, or what?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s just a habit. Is that what you mean?’
Adam registered this as though it really deserved attention.
‘No – no, I don’t believe you. Or at least what you say about having habits. It seems to me your dog is the one that has habits. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he brings you to this part of the beach every time. If you’d watched him you would certainly have noticed how he arrives on the beach, goes in for a bathe, up to the neck in water, with his nose pointing straight ahead, and afterwards sleeps in the sun for a bit, and licks his paws. And then how he trots away, composedly, always stepping on the flat stones so as not to hurt his paws, until he’s far enough from the children, so that they won’t poke his eye out with their spades and rakes. Isn’t that so? And without ever changing his clothes.’