The Interrogation Page 5

  So that’s it, said Adam to himself; so that’s it. The atomic war hasn’t happened yet. And of course I didn’t fight in the 1940 one, I must have been twelve or thirteen years old at the time. And even if I did fight in it, I’d have been far too young to remember about it now. There had been no wars since then, otherwise they would have been mentioned in the modern history textbooks. And Adam knew from having read these comparatively recently, that they did not report any war, anywhere, since the one against Hitler.

  Perplexed, he fell silent; and suddenly, by pure chance, he realized that the whole universe was redolent of peace. Here, as no doubt elsewhere, there was a wonderful silence. As though they were both coming up from a dive into the sea and breaking surface, both carrying deep inside their ears, against the eardrum, a ball of warm liquid setting up an imperceptibly rhythmic palpitation, pressing against the brain as a no-man’s-land of sibilant sounds, warblings, kindly whistles, single notes and the splash of waterfalls, where the worst rages, the most horrible ecstasies, sound like flowing brooks and seaweed.

  They spent the rest of the day listening to this peace, to the few sounds that came from outside or the imperceptible displacement of objects inside the house. In any case the silence was not absolute; he had referred to sibilant sounds and whistles; to these must be added other sounds, grating noises, friction between layers of air, specks of dust brushing past one another and falling on flat surfaces; all amplified 1,500 times.

  In case of need they huddled together in a corner of the first-floor room and made love mentally, thinking all the time ‘We’re spiders or slugs.’ And much other childishness of the same kind.

  Towards evening they arrived at a kind of imperfect state of themselves, as though everything they were doing was offbeat, even their slightest gesture, their faintest breath, and they had become mere halves of people. In this upstairs room, immediately above the one Adam lived in, there was a large billiard table with a threadbare cloth. They had lain down on this, side by side, gazing up at the ceiling. Adam’s face had kept its bored, yet somehow pleased expression; his left hand was lying horizontally across the billiard table with the open palm upturned. Michèle lit a cigarette for the satisfaction of dropping the ash into the pockets of the table; without moving her head, she looked sidelong at Adam’s profile; she felt a few seconds’ irritation because it had something fastidious about it, an air of satiety; she said she found all this horrible, that she had the impression of waiting for God knows what – the Strasbourg train, or her turn at the hairdresser’s.

  Adam held his pose perfectly, but one felt that for a fleeting instant he had considered moving his legs or raising his eyebrows. He said something through motionless lips, and Michèle had to get him to repeat it.

  ‘I said,’ he repeated, ‘that that’s what I can’t stand about women.’ He was still scrutinizing the ceiling; for he had discovered that if one looked straight at the middle of it, owing to the fact that there were no rough patches in the pale green paint that was spread evenly over the plaster, the eye was not arrested by any protuberance. One saw no walls or corners, and there was thus nothing left to indicate that this was a plane surface, theoretically parallel to the horizon, characterized by its pale green colour, smooth to the touch, vaguely sandy, and at all events a man-made affair. Aiming right at the centre, with half-puckered eyelids, one was suddenly faced by a new type of communication which ignored relief, the force of gravity, colour, the sense of touch, distance and time, and drained all genetic desire from you; the effect of which was to atrophy, to mechanize; which was the first stage of anti-existence.

  ‘That’s what I dislike – their need to express all their sensations. With no decent restraint. And they’re nearly always inaccurate. As though it mattered in the least to other people, anyhow…’

  He sniggered:

  ‘We’re stuffed with sensations, all of us! In my opinion it’s more serious to reflect that we all have the same ones. But no – people want to describe them and then go on to analyse them, and then construct arguments on them – which have no more than a documentary value, if that.’

  Adam drove his argument home:

  ‘So one gets metaphysics at a café table, or in bed with a woman, or at the sight of a dog that’s been run over in the street, because its eyes are popping out and its belly has split open, letting out a tumble of guts and a froth of blood and bile.’

  Finally he propped himself up on his elbows, determined to convince Michèle:

  ‘You feel as though you were waiting for something don’t you? Something unpleasant – unpleasant rather than dangerous? – Isn’t that right? You feel as though you were waiting for something unpleasant. Well, listen to me. I’ll tell you. It’s the same with me. I have the same impression of waiting. But you must realize one thing: I personally shouldn’t worry about this impression of waiting, except that I’m positive that it’s bound to happen – that this unpleasant something-or-other will inevitably happen to me sooner or later. So that now, in point of fact, it’s no longer something unpleasant that I’m expecting, it’s something dangerous. You understand? It’s simply a way of keeping one’s feet on the ground. If you’d told me what you haven’t told me, for instance that you have the impression of waiting for something and that you know, you understand, you know that it must be death, then okay. I understand you. Because there always comes a day when one proves to be right in waiting for death. But you understand, don’t you, that what matters is not your unpleasant impression, but the fact that not a moment goes by without our consciously or unconsciously waiting for death. That’s the point. You know what that means? It means that in a certain system of life which one puts into application by the mere fact of existing, you’re leaving a negative element – which as it were, perfectly rounds off the human unit. It reminds me of Parmenides. You know, what he says, I think: “How, then, can what is be going to be in the future? Or how could it come into being? If it came into being, it is not; nor is it if it is going to be in the future. Thus is becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of.” That’s the way to talk. One must have an inkling of it. Otherwise, Michèle, it’s not worth being able to think. Talking’s no use you know, Michèle, no use at all.’

  It suddenly occurred to him, for no reason, that he had hurt Michèle’s feelings, and he was sorry about that, in a way.

  ‘You know, Michèle,’ he said, to make up for it, ‘you may be right. You may tell me – why not – that the whole involves the whole – in the long run that might perhaps be truest of all to Parmenides…’

  In his turn he looked sideways, watching the girl’s profile with eyes that were nevertheless not so perceptive; it brought him the satisfaction of a connexion that suddenly became possible, a real link between the two halves of his speech.

  ‘I mean, in the dialectical system of reasoning – rhetorical seems to me to be a more accurate term from this point of view – yes, in this system of reasoning that isn’t concerned with experience, you only have to say to me: “What time is it?” and I interpret your question like this: What, interrogative pronoun, belongs to a fallacious conception of the universe, in which everything is listed and classified and where one can pick out of a drawer, as it were, a suitable adjective for every subject. Time – an abstract idea, is divisible into minutes and seconds which, added together in infinite number, produce another abstract idea which we call eternity. In other words, time includes both the finite and the infinite, the measurable and the incommensurable; which is a contradiction and therefore a logical absurdity.

  ‘Is? Existence – just another word, an abstract anthropomorphism, existence being the sum of the individual’s associations of ideas. It? Same thing. It has no existence. It is the general extension of the male concept to an abstract idea, that of time, in addition to which it contributes to an aberrant grammatical form, the impersonal, bringing us back to the business of Is. Wait. And the whole sentence relates to a matter of time. There you are. W
hat time is it? If you knew how that little sentence tortures me! Or rather, no. It’s I who suffer through it. I’m crushed by the weight of my consciousness. I’m dying of it, that’s a fact, Michèle. It’s killing me. But fortunately one doesn’t live logically. Life isn’t logical, perhaps it’s a kind of disorder of the consciousness. A disease of the cells. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter, that’s no reason. One has to talk, I agree, one has to live. But Michèle, isn’t it just as well to say only what’s really useful? It’s better to keep the other things to oneself until one forgets them, until one comes to live solely for one’s own body, seldom moving one’s legs, huddled in a corner, more or less hunch-backed, more or less subject to the crazy impulses of the species.’

  Michèle still said nothing; she was not vexed, but her whole being was concerned on the discomfort built up, over what would soon be a period of hours, by movements one is hardly certain of having made, disconnected words, and all the rare or microacoustical sounds in the house and outside; she was perhaps discovering – who knows? – that we have in our ears a kind of amplifier which needs to be constantly regulated and which we must not turn up beyond a certain point, or we shall never understand anything again.

  ‘What time is it?’ Michèle asked, yawning.

  ‘After all I’ve been saying to you, you still keep it up?’ said Adam.

  ‘Yes, what time is it?’

  ‘The time when, bright in the darkness, wandering around the earth, a light from elsewhere…’

  ‘No, listen, seriously, Adam – I bet it’s past five o’clock.’ Adam looked at his watch:

  ‘You’ve lost your bet,’ he said. ‘It’s ten to five.’

  Michèle sat up, got off the billiard table and walked across the darkened room. She looked through the chinks in the shutters.

  ‘It’s still sunny outside,’ she announced – and added, as though suddenly suspecting the fact that the back of her shirt was drenched with sweat:

  ‘It’s really hot today.’

  ‘We’re right in the summer,’ said Adam.

  She buttoned up her blouse (in actual fact it was a man’s shirt altered to fit), never for a moment taking her eyes off the slit in the shutter and the little bit of landscape to be seen through it; she was black all over, except for a white streak that cut across her face at eyebrow level. It was as though someone had taken control of their bodies, depositing them in a furrow and only letting them see parts of things. She, whose view was restricted to the size of the slit in the shutter, measuring about ¾ inch by 12 inches; he, still lying on the table, only half-aware that she was looking out.

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ said Michèle, ‘you haven’t got a bottle of beer left?’

  ‘No, but there’s a tap in the garden, on the other side of the house.… The only one the Water Board hasn’t cut off…’

  ‘Why do you never have anything to drink in the place? It seems to me you could easily buy a bottle of grenadine or something, now and again.’

  ‘I can’t afford it, little girl,’ replied Adam. He had still not moved. ‘I expect you’d like us to go into town for a drink?’ Michèle swung round on her heel. She peered into the depths of the room and the shadows were mirrored in her eyes, as black dots against a background of dazzle.

  ‘No, let’s go down to the beach,’ she said decidedly.

  They agreed to go for a walk on the rocks, along the headland. There was a kind of smugglers’ path starting from the beach, and they followed this, side by side, in almost total silence. They passed groups of anglers going home as though from work, with their rods over their shoulders. They went soberly along the path, which followed the line of the shore at a convenient height, not too near the water or too far up the hill. Clumps of aloes had been planted at regular intervals, to rest the eyes and the mind. In the same way, the surface of the sea was decorated with an almost geometrical design of sharp crests, imitating waves. The whole thing looked as carefully done as a piece of cloth in hounds-tooth check or a huge allotment laid out to suit the tastes of beetles or snails.

  There were at least a dozen houses on this stretch of the hill; one could see faint traces of their drain-pipes, winding along just below the ground, like roots. A few yards further on the path ran below a concrete pill-box; a steep flight of steps went down a shaft and came up again bringing with it a hot smell of excrement. Adam and Michèle skirted round the building without realizing it was a pill-box. He simply thought it was one of those modern-styled villas, and wondered how the owners could bear to live in the vicinity of such a stench.

  When they reached the tip of the headland the sun had quite disappeared. All signs of the track petered out here; they had to leap from rock to rock, almost at sea-level, with only half of the sky overhead, the other half being cut off by the overhang of the hillside. Jumping from a bit too high up, Michèle twisted her ankle, and they both sat down on a flat rock, to rest. They smoked – he had two cigarettes, she one.

  About a hundred yards from the shore a big fish was swimming along, its black, cylindrical body half out of the water. Adam said it was a shark, but they couldn’t be certain because, in the gathering dusk, they could not make out if it had fins or not.

  For half an hour the big fish swam round and round in the bay, widening its circle each time. The spiral it traced was by no means perfect; it was more in the nature of a lunatic figure, the practical illustration of a species of delirium in which the dark creature was losing its way, endlessly and blindly running its nose against superimposed layers of hot and cold currents. Hunger, death or old age was perhaps gnawing its belly, and it was prowling aimlessly, almost a ship in its desires, almost a sandbank in its imperfection, its almost invisible negative eternity.

  As Michèle and Adam stood up it appeared for the last time, its menacing torpedo shape gliding between the waves; then it moved out to sea and was obliterated. Michèle said very softly, pressing close to Adam:

  ‘I’m cold… I’m cold, I’m very cold…’

  Adam did not shrink from the touch of the girl’s body; indeed, he even took her hand – a soft, slender, warm hand – and repeated, as they walked on:

  ‘You’re cold? You’re cold?’

  To which Michèle replied:

  ‘Yes.’

  After that came the holes in the rocks; there were all sizes of them, large and small; they chose an average-sized one, a one-person hole, and sprawled in it at full length. Especially Adam: not a day went by without his achieving the miracle that consisted of whipping up his mythological senses to a frenzy, surrounding himself with stones and rubble; he would have liked to have all the rubbish and refuse in the world and bury himself under it. He surrounded himself on all sides with matter, ashes, pebbles, and gradually turned into a statue. Not like one of those Carrara marbles or medieval Christs which always sparkle to some extent with an imitation of life and pain; but like those pieces of cast-iron, a thousand years old or twelve, which are not dug up but are occasionally identified by the dull sound the spade gives back when it encounters them between two crumbling lumps of earth. Like a seed – just like the seed of a tree – he lay concealed in the cracks in the ground and waited in beatitude for the water that would germinate him.

  He moved his hand a little towards the right, gently, already knowing what he would touch. In a second’s infinite pleasure he felt his knowledge vacillating, a tremendous doubt overwhelming his mind; while a certain logical, memorable experience tried to make him recognize the feel of Michèle’s skin (the bare arm lying beside him), his fingers groped blindly to left and right and met only the soil, granulous to the touch, hard and crumbling.

  Adam seemed to be alone in this ability to die whenever he wanted, a private, hidden death; the only living creature in the world who was passing insensibly away, his flesh not decaying and putrefying, but freezing into a mineral.

  Hard as a diamond, angular, brittle, at the heart of the crystal, held in position by a geometrical pattern, confined within his resol
ute purity, with none of the weaknesses characteristic of the shoals of codfish which, in their collective refrigeration, never lose the little drop of moisture that glitters at the junction of their fins, or the glazed eye, two evidences of a painful death.

  Michèle got up, dusted her clothes with her hands, and said plaintively:

  ‘Adam – Adam, shall we go?’

  She continued:

  ‘Adam, you frighten me when you’re like that – not moving, not breathing, you might be a corpse…’

  ‘Idiot!’ Adam retorted. ‘You’ve disturbed my meditations! That’s finished it, I should have to begin all over again.’

  ‘Begin what?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing… I can’t explain. I’d already got to the vegetable stage.… To mosses and lichens. I was just coming to the bacteria and the fossils. I can’t explain.’

  It was over. He knew now that the danger had been averted for the rest of the day. He got to his feet, seized Michèle by the shoulders and the waist, threw her to the ground and undressed her. Then he took her, with his mind far away, concentrated, for instance, on the leaden-hued body of the shark which must be describing wider and wider circles in the world as it sought for the Straits of Gibraltar.

  Later on, with a shout of HAOH, he ran off by himself over the rocks and along the path that led back to the beach, through bushes and thorns from one slab of rock to the next, peering into dark hollows, divining the host of obstacles that might have tripped him up, barked his shins or snapped him in two with a sharp crack down there on some flat stone, leaving him still quivering, to be devoured by those disgusting parasites. The night had achieved a sort of black perfection; each object was a fresh disturbance on the map of the district. The earth’s surface was striped black and white like a zebra’s hide; the concentric circles of the mountains were like fingerprints laid one beside another, with no pause for rest. The tips of the cacti had piled arms in anticipation of a mysterious battle.