The Interrogation Page 6
The liquid mass on the left had ceased its headlong rush and become a sea of ice; all slumber and all steel, it had turned into a metallic carapace.
Adam was now running through a vista of iron, by no means dead, but living in depth, an enigmatic life of enclosed animation which no doubt found expression in currents or bubbles a hundred yards underground; the polished crust of the world was like a knight asleep in his armour, motionless but possessed of potential life so that the icy gleam indicates blood, resolution, arteries or brain. A smokeless fire, an electric fire, was smouldering under the black soil. And the earth’s surface was drawing off the whole strength of that fire, to such an extent that the rocks, waters, trees and air seemed to burn still more fiercely, to be the flames of petrified nature. The path, widening already, brought Adam to the bottom of a shaft beside the pill-box, steeped him in foul odours and sent him hurtling up the flight of steps. This was the culminating point of the road. The only place along the coast where the view was multiplied thousands of times over the three expanses of sea, land and sky. At the apex of this ascent Adam suddenly realized that running had become unnecessary and he stopped, petrified.
Coming from the vista that lay before him, the chilly wind covered him from head to foot, transformed his paralysis into pain. He stood there, prominent as a lighthouse, contemplating his own intelligence in the universe, certain now that he would be occupying its centre to all eternity, without intermission; nothing could break this embrace, drag him out of the circle, not even death which, on a certain day in a certain year, would photograph his human form between two thin planks, at the centre of his geological Age.
He took a few steps forward, against the breeze.
He was almost hobbling as he walked, as though facing up to a tremendous blaze; coming to a rock below the level of the path, he sat down, with an indifferent glance towards the horizon. His body was completely insignificant, as puny as a nerve against the blood-red background of a kind of dream.
A sailing boat, half-hidden from the other side of the sea, was crawling imperceptibly forward. After a quarter of an hour Adam began to feel cold; he shivered and looked in the direction of the pill-box, wishing more and more that Michèle would come along at last, out of breath from running after him and discomfited by having lost the race.
F. The sun went on blazing in the naked sky, and the countryside shrank back into itself, little by little, under the heat; the soil cracked in places, the grass turned a dirty yellow, sand heaped up in holes in the walls, and the trees were weighed down by dust. It seemed as though the summer would never end. Now the fields and terraced hillsides were occupied by cruel hordes of grasshoppers and wasps. The rutted lanes ran through the tumult of their wings, cut like razor-blades through these excrescences of the air, these hot bubbles full of spicy scents, which jostled one another at stubble height. The atmosphere made unremitting efforts.
Men cycled across the fields, emerged on to the main road and mingled with the flood of cars.
In the distance, all round the great amphitheatre of mountains, the houses flashed back the sunlight from their windows, and it was not difficult to assimilate them mentally to the stretches of cultivated land along the roadside. One could defy perspective and make a deliberate mistake about them, likening them to the splinters of mica that lay among the clods of earth. The boiling countryside looked pretty much like a black blanket thrown over red-hot coals; the holes sparkled violently, the material was blown into folds by subterranean gusts, and here and there columns of smoke rose as though from hidden cigarettes.
A sort of cast-iron grating encircled the park. On the south side it bordered the main road, parallel to the sea, and there was a big gate half-way along; on either side of the gate stood a kind of wooden sentry-box, keeping the sun off a pair of women in their fifties who sat knitting or reading thrillers. In front of each of the women, on a board that stuck out from the window of the sentry-box, lay a roll of pink tickets traversed at regular intervals by rows of perforations so that they could be easily torn off. A man in a blue uniform and cap lounged beside a stand of geraniums, taking the tickets bought at the sentry-box and tearing them with the tips of his fingers; little pink crumbs were clinging to the rough cloth of his jacket, at about stomach-level. The man did not so much as cast a bored glance behind him at the area under his charge, where he would have seen a crowd of people walking away, their faces inquisitive yet apathetic, and vanishing behind the barred cages. He didn’t speak to the women in the sentry-boxes either, and he barely replied to questions from the visitors; when he did, he spoke absent-mindedly, not looking at the questioners’ faces but staring at the roof of a restaurant on the beach – Le Bodo – all decked with flags and streamers. Occasionally, of course, he couldn’t avoid saying ‘thank you’, ‘yes’, ‘go ahead’, or something of the kind. And there were a few people who knew nothing, hadn’t a clue; as he took their tickets, tore them gently with a double twist of the wrists and dropped the useless scraps into a basket on his left, he would bring out a whole sentence:
‘Yes, Madame, I know. But we close at half-past five, Madame.’
‘You have plenty of time. At half-past five, yes, Madame.’
Adam set out at random past the cages, listening with half an ear to the talk going on around him, and sniffing a bit at the variety of smells emanating from dung and wild beasts; the yellowish smell, laden with urine, had the special faculty of bringing things – particularly animals – into sensuous relief. He stopped in front of a lioness’s cage; for a long time he stared through the bars at the supple body, full of vague muscles, reflecting that the lioness might have been a woman, an elastic woman moulded of rubber, and this acrid smell might have come from a mouth accustomed to Virginia tobacco, mixed with a suspicion of lipstick, a smell of peppermint tablets from the teeth, and all the faint, indefinable shadows, downy growths and chapped skin that leave a halo round the lips.
He leant on the railing that kept people away from the cage, and surrendered to an invading torpor dominated by a longing to touch the beast’s fur, to thrust his hand into the thick, silky pelt, to fasten his claws like iron nails at the back of the creature’s neck and overlay the long, sun-hot body with his own body, now sheathed in a leonine hide and covered with a mane, extraordinarily powerful, extraordinarily typical of the species.
An old woman went past the cage, leading a child, a little girl, by the hand; she went past, and as she walked on, against the light, her shadow blinking across each bar in turn, the lioness raised her head. Two flashes passed in opposite directions; at some point above the sand the black shaft, heavy with human experience, encountered the strange, greenish steely flare from the lioness and it seemed for an instant that the old woman’s white, almost naked body was mated with the beast’s tawny coat; both of them reeled, then sketched an advancing and receding movement of the loins, as though in this barbarous understanding they were performing an erotic dance-step. But a split second later they drew apart and their gestures were separate again, leaving beside the cage only an immaculate white patch like a pool in the sunshine, a kind of peculiar corpse, a phantom where the wind stirred twigs and leaves. Adam, in his turn, looked at the woman and the child and felt himself gripped by an unfamiliar nostalgia, a quaint need to eat; unlike most of the people who went by he had no wish to speak to the lioness, to tell her she was beautiful, that she was big or that she was like a great cat.
He spent the rest of his afternoon walking all over the zoo, mingling with the tiniest races that lived in its cages, at one with the lizards, mice, beetles or pelicans. He had discovered that the best way to mix with a species is to make oneself desire a female member of it. So he concentrated, round-eyed, stooping, elbows propped on all the railings. His searching gaze penetrated the smallest concavities, the folds of skin or plumage, the scales, the fluffy hairs that sheltered the visibly ignoble slumbers of balls of black hair, masses of flabby cartilage, dusty membranes, red annulations, skin tha
t was cracked and split like a square of earth. He stripped the gardens of their grass, dived head-first into mud, devoured humus voraciously, crawled along burrows at a depth of twelve yards, pawed a new, kindred body born from the putrefied corpse of a fieldmouse. With his mouth drawn down between his shoulders he pushed forward his eyes, his two big, round eyes, gently, with a thousand precautions, waiting for a kind of electric shock that would contract his skin, activate the ganglions that propelled him, and throw the rings of his body against one another like copper bracelets, with a faint tinkle, when once he had become subterranean, coiled, gelatinous – yes, the one and only real, tenebrous earthworm.
At the panthers’ cage, this is what he did: he leant forward slightly, over the railing, and suddenly waved his hand at the bars. The animal – a dark-furred female – flung herself towards him with a roar; and while the terrified bystanders fell back a step and the beast, mad with fury, tore the ground with her claws, Adam, paralysed with fear, trembling in every limb, heard the voice of the keeper, which set up a delicious vibration somewhere in the back of his head.
‘That’s a clever thing to do, that is! That’s clever! That’s a clever thing to do! Clever! Clever, eh?’
Thus divided again from the panther, Adam retreated a little way and muttered, without looking at the keeper:
‘I didn’t know… I’m sorry…’
‘You didn’t know what?’ said the man in uniform, trying at the same time to quieten the animal with words such as ‘Ho there! Ho there! Ho! Ho! Rama! Rama! Quiet! Quiet! Rama!’ ‘You didn’t know what? You didn’t know that there’s no sense in teasing wild animals? It’s clever, yes, clever, to play tricks like that!’
Adam did not try to make excuses; he muttered again, in embarrassment:
‘No… I didn’t know… I wanted…’
‘Yes, I know,’ the man interrupted. ‘It’s amusing to play tricks on the animals when they’re shut up in cages! It’s fun; but it wouldn’t be such fun if the cage happened to come open, would it, eh? That wouldn’t be such fun. And it would be fun if you were the one who was inside, don’t you think?’
He turned away in disgust and appealed to a woman bystander:
‘Some people just don’t seem to have a clue. That there beast hasn’t eaten for three days and as if that wasn’t enough, there are people who think it’s a joke to come and jeer at the creatures in their cages. Yes, I sometimes wish the cage would open a crack and let one of those devilish brutes out. Then you’d see ’em running – oh yes, they’d understand fast enough then, they’d know fast enough.’
Adam moved away without waiting for the end of the sentence. He did not shrug his shoulders, but walked slowly, dragging his feet. He went past the mammals’ cages; the last of these, the smallest and lowest, held three gaunt wolves. A kind of wooden kennel had been set up in the middle of the cage, and the wolves were circling round and round this tirelessly, incessantly, their slanting eyes stubbornly fixed on the bars that rushed past at top speed, level with one’s knees.
They circled in opposite directions, two one way and one the other; after a certain number of turns, let’s say ten or eleven, for some sudden, queer, unaccountable reason, as though at the snap of someone’s fingers, they wheeled about and went on again in the other direction. They were mangy beasts, grey with dust, mauve round the jaws; but they never stopped circling their den and the steely glint of their eyes was reflected all over their bodies – they looked as though they were covered with metal plates, violent, full to vomiting with hatred and ferocity. The circular movement they were making inside the cage became, owing to its regularity, the one really mobile point in the surrounding space. All the rest of the park, with its human beings and its other cages, sank into a kind of motionless ecstasy. One was suddenly frozen, fixed in an unbearable rigidity that spread all round as far as that bell-shaped structure of iron and wood, the wolves’ cage; one was like a luminous circle seen through a microscope and containing, stained in bright colours, the basic elements of life, such as chromosomes, globules, trypanozomes, hexagonal molecules, microbes and fragments of bacteria. A structural geometry of the microcosmic universe, photographed through dozens of lenses; you know, that white disc, dazzling as a moon, coloured by chemical products, which is true life, without movement, without duration, so far away in the second infinity that nothing is animal any longer, nothing is apparent; nothing remains but silence, fixity, eternity; for all is slow, slow, slow.
They, the wolves, were in the middle of this desiccated landscape, its only sign of movement; movement that, seen from above, perhaps from an aircraft, would have resembled some strange palpitation or the ant-like stirring that sets up on the surface of the sea, diametrically below the plane. The sea is round, whitish, crested, and hardened like a block of stone, it lies 6,000 feet below; yet if you look carefully there is something independent of the climbing sun, a sort of little knot in the substance, a flaw that glints, advances, has a scrabbling centre. That’s it; for if I suddenly turn away from the electric light I see it, that tiny star that looks like a white spider; it struggles, swims, makes no progress, it lives on the black landscape of the world, and it falls, to all eternity, past millions of windows, millions of engravings, millions of chasings, milliards of flutings, lonely as a star, never to die of its perpetual suicides because it is long since dead in itself and buried at the back of a sombre bronze.
When Adam left the wolves’ cage he went to another enclosure; an artificial glade in the middle of the park, with several ornamental basins to left and right where a few big pelicans, their wings clipped, could come to drink. The pink flamingos, the ducks and penguins, were the same kind of life too; the discovery that Adam had made little by little, since a certain day that summer on the beach, then in two or three cafés, then in an empty house, a train, a motor coach, a newspaper, he was now making again, a little more completely each time, as he watched the lions, the wolves and the puffins.
It was so simple that it stared you in the face and made you crazy, or at any rate most unusual. That was it, he’d got it, he grasped it and let it escape at the same moment; he felt sure, and yet he no longer even knew what he was doing, what he was going to do, whether he had escaped from a lunatic asylum or deserted from the army. That was what was happening, what was going to happen to him; by dint of seeing the world, the world had gone right out of his eyes; things had been so thoroughly seen, smelt, felt, millions of times, with millions of eyes, noses, ears, tongues, skins, that he had become like a faceted mirror. Now, the facets were innumerable, he had been transformed into memory, and the blind spots where the facets met were so few that his consciousness was virtually spherical. This was the point, verging upon total vision, where one sometimes becomes unable to live, ever to live again. Where sometimes, lying on a sickening bed on a hot summer afternoon, one sometimes empties a whole bottle of Parsidol into a glass of cold water and drinks and drinks and drinks, as though there were never to be another fountain on the face of the earth. People had been waiting centuries for that moment, and he, Adam Polio, had reached it, had suddenly got there and appropriated all things to himself; he was no doubt the last of his race, and this was true, because the race was approaching its end. After that one need only let oneself expire gently, imperceptibly, let oneself be stifled, invaded, ravished, no longer by milliards of worlds but by one single, solitary world; he had effected the junction of all times and all spaces, and now, covered with ocelli, huger than a fly’s head, he was waiting, solitary at the tip of his slender body, for the strange accident that would flatten him on the ground and encrust him, once more among the living, in the bloody pulp of his own flesh, his shattered bones, his open mouth and blind eyes.
Towards the end of the afternoon, just before the zoo’s closing-time, Adam went into the snack-bar, found himself a table in the shade, and ordered a bottle of Coca-Cola. To his left was an olive-tree in which someone had thought fit to set up a kind of wooden platform with a chain; and
at the end of the chain there was a lively black and white marmoset, evidently put there to amuse the children and cut down the animals’ food bill; children were never satisfied until they had bought a banana or a bag of sweets from a toothless old woman who was there for the purpose, and offered them to the monkey.
Adam leant back in his chair, lit a cigarette, took a sip out of the bottle, and waited. He waited without knowing exactly for what, settling down vaguely between two layers of warm air and watching the monkey. A man and woman went slowly past his table, loitering along with their eyes fixed on the small, furry animal.
‘Pretty things, marmosets,’ said the man.
‘Yes, but bad tempered,’ said the woman. ‘I remember my grandmother had one for a time; she was always giving it titbits. But do you suppose it was grateful? Not at all, it would bite her ear till it bled, the nasty brute.’
‘That may have been a sign of affection,’ said the man.
Adam was suddenly seized by a ridiculous impulse to get things straight. He turned to the couple and explained.
‘It’s neither pretty nor bad-tempered,’ he said, ‘it’s just a marmoset.’
The man burst out laughing, but the woman looked at him as though he were a complete imbecile and she had always known it. Then she shrugged and walked away.
The sun was quite low by this time; the visitors were beginning to leave, emptying the space round the cages and the café tables of a multitude of legs, shouts, laughter and colours. As dusk came on the animals emerged from their artificial lairs and stretched themselves; barking was heard on all sides, with the whistling of parrots and the growling of the carnivores impatient for their food. There were still a few minutes left before closing time; Adam got up, went across to the old woman and bought a banana and some sweets; while he was paying she said crossly:
‘Do you want to feed the monkey?’