The Interrogation Read online

He shook his head.

  ‘No I don’t – why?’

  ‘Because time’s up. It’s too late now to feed the animals. It’s forbidden after five o’clock, otherwise they’d have no appetite left and they’d get ill.’

  Adam shook his head again.

  ‘It’s not for the monkey, it’s for me.’

  ‘Oh well, if it’s for yourself its not the same thing.’

  ‘Yes, it’s for me,’ said Adam, and began to peel the banana.

  ‘You understand,’ the old woman went on. ‘After the time-limit it would upset the creatures.’

  Adam nodded; he ate the banana, standing in front of the woman but with his eyes fixed, as though abstractedly, on the marmoset. When he had finished he opened the bag of sweets.

  ‘Will you have one?’ he asked; he noticed she was staring inquisitively at him.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, taking one.

  They shared the rest of the sweets, leaning on the counter and watching the monkey all the time. Then Adam crumpled the empty bag into a ball and put it in an ashtray. The sun was level with the tree-tops by this time. After that Adam put a great many questions to the old woman, asking how long she had been working in the snack-bar, whether she was married, how old she was, how many children she had, whether she enjoyed life, whether she liked going to the cinema. Leaning closer and closer, he gazed at her with growing affection, just as, a few hours earlier, he had gazed at the lioness, the crocodiles and the duck-billed platypus.

  In the long run, however, she grew suspicious. While Adam continued to ply her with questions and badgered her for her Christian name, she seized a damp cloth and began rubbing the zinc top of the counter, with vigorous movements that made the fat of her arms quiver. When Adam tried to take her hand as it went by, she blushed and threatened to call the police. A bell rang somewhere on the far side of the park, to announce closing-time. At this, Adam decided to leave; he said goodbye politely to the old woman; but she, standing with her back to the light, made no reply. He added that he would certainly come to see her again one of these days, before winter.

  Then he left the café and made for the gate at the other end of the zoo. Men in blue uniforms were swilling buckets of water over the floors of the cages. A kind of purple shadow filled the hollows of the landscape and savage cries rose to the surface in waves, witnessing to the presence on all sides of stifling heat that smelt of viscera. The sentry-boxes on either side of the entrance were closed. But as far as the road, almost as far as the sea, despite the general withdrawal of men and beasts, there hovered here and there a vague odour of she-monkey, gently insinuating itself into you till you began to doubt your own species.

  G. After that I know he went to wait for the dog, every day at the same time, on that kind of breakwater to the right of the beach. He didn’t go and sit on the pebbles, among the bathers, although he could have waited more comfortably there; partly because it was hot and partly because he liked to feel he could move more freely in a more open space, where the wind would all the same bring a gust of fresh air from time to time, he used to sit on the edge of the breakwater, with his feet dangling over the side. The entire beach lay before his eyes, the stones, the little heaps of greasy paper, and of course the bathers, always the same people, always in the same places. He used to spend quite a time watching like this: his shoulders propped against a block of concrete brought there by the Germans in 1942, his body sprawling full length in the sun, one hand in his trousers pocket, ready to fish out of the packet one of the two cigarettes he allowed himself per hour. With the other hand he would be scratching his chin, fumbling in his hair, or raking through the stones on the breakwater to find dust and different kinds of sand. He kept an eye on the whole beach, the people coming and going, the imperceptible rolling of the pebbles. But above all he watched for the black dog to emerge from the unknown mass of bathers and trot towards the road, sniff the clumps of grass, and leap and run and throw itself headlong into the little adventure on the pavements.

  Then, as though lassoed out of his torpor, he would set off once more to follow the animal, with no suspicion of where he was being led, without hope; yes, with the strange sort of pleasure that makes one continue a movement automatically or imitate everything that moves because, being a sign of life, it justifies all possible suppositions. One always likes to carry on a movement, even when it is trotting briskly on its four paws with their damp, brushing sound, propelling along the tarmac a light fleece of black hairs, two pricked-up ears and a pair of glassy eyes and is called, called once and for all, a dog.

  At ten minutes to two, the dog left the beach; he had splashed about in the water for a bit before he set off, and the hair on his chest was still matted into little fluffy locks. He scrambled up the embanked pebbles, panting with the effort, went past Adam at a distance of a few yards and stopped at the roadside. The sun made him blink and threw a white patch on his cold muzzle.

  He paused, as though waiting for someone; this gave Adam time to jump off the breakwater and get ready to leave. For a moment Adam was tempted to whistle or snap his fingers or just to call to him as most people do with most dogs – something like ‘Come on, dog!’ or ‘Hi, Fido!’ But the words were cut short in his head before he had even begun to utter them.

  Adam merely stopped and looked at the animal from behind; seen from this angle he was curiously foreshortened, standing foursquare on his paws with arched back and the hair thinning out along his spine; and his neck looked bulgy, thickset and muscular, the kind of neck dogs never have.

  He looked at the top of the dog’s head, with the furrow down the middle of the skull and the ears cocked. A train made a noise as it entered a tunnel – a long way off, of course, far up in the mountains. The dog’s right ear moved forward a fraction of an inch to catch the rattle of the engine; then twitched smartly back, as a child down on the shore began to yell and went on and on at the full pitch of its lungs – smitten by some grief, a burst ball or a sharp stone.

  Adam waited, motionless, for the starting signal; but the dog took him by surprise – darted forward, ran round a car, and went on up the road. He trotted rapidly, keeping close to the bank, rarely glancing to right or left. He stopped twice before reaching the crossing where the main road runs through the village; once beside the back wheel of a parked Oldsmobile; although there was nothing special about that car, he didn’t look at it, or sniff it, or lift his leg quietly against the metal hub-cap. The second time was when that elderly woman was coming down to the beach with a boxer bitch on a lead; she glanced in his direction, gave a slight tug at her dog’s leash, and then looked at Adam. She felt entitled to remark, as she went by:

  ‘You should keep your dog on the lead, young man.’

  Adam and the dog both followed the bitch with their eyes – their bodies turned the way they were walking, but their heads twisted back over their shoulders. They went on like this for a few seconds’ silence, with little yellow flecks at the back of their eyes. Then the dog barked and Adam growled wordlessly, deep down in his throat: rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrroa, rrrrrrrrrrrrroaa, oaarrrrrrr, rrrrrrrro.

  At the fork in the road Adam hoped the dog would turn right, because a bit further along was the hill where he lived, the path you’ve heard about and the big house – still empty – that he occupied. But as usual the dog unhesitatingly turned left, making for the town. And as usual Adam followed him, merely regretting, in a particular corner of his memory, that such an imperative reason should draw the quadruped towards the crowds and the houses.

  After the road along the sea-front there came a sort of avenue, with plane-trees set at regular intervals along the pavements, casting dense black shadows. The dog made a point of walking through these shady patches, and at such moments, because of his curly coat, he disappeared among the black ringlets and discs of the leaf-shadows.

  Once this business of shade and sunshine began, hesitation became more frequent; the dog would veer abruptly from left to right and then back fr
om right to left; he was weaving his way among the pedestrians, whose numbers were increasing all the time because by now they were well into the town: open shops, hot or cool smells coming in waves, colours everywhere, faded canvas umbrellas – all this clamped between walls, together with posters, shreds of posters bearing snatches of print that announced events over and done with three months ago:

  Squa Id ATCH

  Bar de Band and James W. Brown

  Fem in

  MARTI

  ritive

  The dog had slowed down considerably, partly because the crowd was growing thicker and thicker and partly, no doubt, because he must be approaching his goal. So Adam was able to relax and smoke a cigarette. He even took advantage of a moment the dog spent in sniffing at an old patch of urine, to buy a chocolate-filled roll from the stall outside a confectioner’s shop; he had eaten nothing since morning, and felt weak. He nibbled at the warm roll while he followed the dog along the main street. Coming to a red light, the animal stopped, and Adam came and stood beside him; he was still holding a small piece of roll in the grease-spotted paper from the shop, and he thought of giving part of it to the dog. But he reflected that if he did that the animal might take a liking to him, which would be risky; afterwards it would be the dog that would follow him, and he didn’t know where to go, he didn’t want the responsibility of leadership. And besides he was hungry and would rather not give away what little food he had left. So he finished the chocolate roll and looked down at the dark, hairy body panting beside his feet, sniffing, with his back legs tense, and waiting obediently for the traffic policeman to wave people across the road.

  The town was curiously empty of dogs; except for the boxer bitch they had passed just now on the way up from the beach, led on a leash by the old woman, they had only met people. Yet the streets bore the stigmata of a secret animal life; such as smells, patches of dried urine, excrement, tufts of hair left on the kerb where a sudden, compelling coitus had taken place in the full flood of the sunshine, among the hurrying feet and growling buses.

  The signs of canine life thus to be found – by looking carefully, as one went along, at the pattern of the pavement – made a cryptic record of comings and goings through the labyrinth of the town. They all helped to build up a concept of space and time with nothing human about it, and to bring hundreds of dogs home to their usual lairs every evening, safe and sound and sure of being themselves.

  He, Adam, was well and truly lost; not being a dog (or not yet, perhaps) he could not steer himself by all these notes inscribed on the ground, these smells, these microscopic details that rose up from the resonant tarmac and automatically enveloped the rachidian bulb via the muzzle, the eyes, the ears or even the mere contact of padding paws or scratching toe nails. And being in any case no longer human – never again – he passed, unseeing, right through the town, and nothing meant anything to him any more.

  He did not see ‘Studio 13’, ‘Gordon’s Furniture’, ‘Frigidaire’, ‘High Class Grocers’, ‘Standard Oil’, ‘Café La Tour’, ‘Williams Hotel’, ‘Postcards and Souvenirs’, ‘Ambre Solaire’, ‘Galeries Muterse’, ‘Bar and Tobacconist’, ‘Place Your Bets’, ‘National Lottery’.

  Who had drawn lines on the pavement? Who had carefully laid sheets of glass over the showcases? Who – yes, who – had written ‘Pyjamas and Matching Striped Sheets’? or ‘Today’s Menu’? Who had said one day ‘Wireless Sets and Spare Parts’, ‘Come In and Look Round’, ‘Great Sale of Bikinis’, ‘Autumn Fashions’, ‘Wholesale and Retail Wine-merchants’, etc., etc.?

  Yet there it all was, put there so that in the summer people like Adam could find their way about, be reminded that they were greedy or that they longed to sleep naked in striped pyjamas with matching striped sheets and striped pillows, perhaps with striped wallpaper on the bedroom walls, and striped moths bumping into striped lampshades during the striped nights streaked with neon lighting and days striped with railway-lines and cars. So when people saw Adam, round-shouldered, his hands thrust into the pockets of his grubby-kneed trousers, following just ONE dog, not even on a leash, a dog covered with blackish wool, the least they murmured under their breath was ‘there are some weird types along this coast’, even if they didn’t go as far as ‘some people would be just as well in a loony-bin’.

  A dog is certainly much easier to follow than most people suppose. In the first place it depends on the angle of vision, the level of one’s eyes; one has to search among the swarms of legs to find the black patch living, palpitating, running below knee-height. Adam managed this without much difficulty, for two reasons: the first was that his slight stoop gave him a natural tendency to look down at the ground, and thus at the quadrupeds that live there; the other reason was that for. a long time he had been training himself to follow something. They say that from the age of twelve or fifteen, when he came out of school, he would spend half an hour at a time following people – often teenage girls – through the crowded streets. He didn’t do it with any purpose, but because he enjoyed being led to a lot of different places without bothering about street-names or any serious considerations. It was at this period that it had been revealed to him that the majority of people, with their stiff bearing and self-willed expressions, spend their time doing nothing. At the age of fifteen he was already aware that people are vague and unscrupulous and that, apart from the three or four genetic functions they carry out every day, they go about the town with no inkling of the millions of cabins they could have had built for themselves out in the country, to be ill, or pensive, or nonchalant in.

  There was, after all, another dog, just across the street, accompanying a man and woman who were both about forty; this was a very beautiful bitch, slender and silky-haired, poised confidently on long legs; and Adam and the other immediately wanted a closer look at her. She had gone with her owners into a department store, packed with people, which was engorging and disgorging every second through its glass doors a flood of visitors, mostly women, laden with parcels and paper bags. The dog kept its nose to the ground, following some kind of trail, and Adam followed the dog. They entered the shop almost together. As they went through the door a neon sign flashed above their heads, reflecting downwards between people’s feet, on the dog’s woolly back and on bits of the linoleum-covered floor, in reversed letters, ‘Prisunic’, ‘Prisunic’, ‘Prisunic’.

  At once they were surrounded by people, women or children, or by walls, ceilings and displays of goods. Overhead was a kind of yellow slab from which there hung at intervals, between two strips of lighting, cards bearing inscriptions such as ‘Bargain prices’, ‘Hardware’, ‘Wines’, or ‘Household Goods’. People’s heads were right up among these cardboard rectangles and sometimes knocked into one, making it twirl round on its string for a long time. The counters were set at right-angles, with gaps for the customers to pass through. The whole place shone with a multitude of bright colours, jostling you to left and right, calling ‘Buy! Buy!’, displaying goods for sale, smiles, the click of women’s heels on the plastic floor, and then putting records on the record-player at the back of the shop, between the bar and the photomaton booth. The whole thing was covered by the generalized strains of piano and violin music, except now and again when the low, placid voice of a woman, speaking with her mouth close against the microphone, was heard to say: ‘Beware of pickpockets, ladies and gentlemen.’

  ‘Section 3 Supervisor is wanted in the Manager’s Office… Section 3 Supervisor is wanted in the Manager’s Office… .’

  ‘Hello! Hello! We recommend our snag-proof seamless nylon stockings, all sizes, three different shades – pearl, flesh or bronze – now on sale in the lingerie department on the ground floor….’

  The dog found the bitch again in the basement, at the electrical goods counter. He had been obliged to search the entire ground floor, slipping past hundreds of human legs, before he saw her. When he caught sight of her she was beginning to go down the stairs that led to the basement; Adam hoped fo
r a moment that the dog would not venture to follow her to the bottom. Not that he himself was not eager to get closer to the female – on the contrary; but he would willingly have forgone that pleasure so as to escape from this horrible shop; he was dazed by the noise and the lights and felt somehow caught up in the human swarm; it was rather as though he were moving in reverse, and a hesitant nausea lingered in his throat; he sensed that the canine species was eluding him in this stuffy place, all formica and electricity; he couldn’t resist reading the price-tags all round him; a sort of commercial instinct was trying to put things to rights in his consciousness. He did some half-hearted mental arithmetic. An ancestral attachment to all this material that man had taken a million years to conquer was stealthily awakening, defeating his will-power, flooding right through him, translated into diminutive shufflings, tiny movements of the eyelids and the zygomatic muscles, shivers passing down the spine, dilations and contractions of the pupils as they adjusted themselves; the dog’s black spine was bobbing up and down, ahead of him, and he was almost beginning to see it again, to weigh it in the depths of his brain in a native tremolo of unborn judgements.

  The dog did indeed pause at the top of the stairs, intimidated by this dimly-lighted pit that kept swallowing up the crowd. But a little girl tried to pull his tail as she went by and babbled ‘D-doggy,… want doggy…’ and he had to go down. Adam followed him.

  Down below there were fewer people. This was where records, stationery, hammers and nails, espadrilles, etc., were on sale. It was very hot. The man, the woman and the bitch were standing at the electrical goods counter, inspecting lamps and lengths of flex. The bitch had sat down under a lampshade with her tongue hanging out. When she saw Adam and the dog she got up; her leash was trailing on the ground. Her owners were apparently too busy shopping to notice anything at all. Adam sensed that something funny was going to happen; so he stayed where he was at the record counter. He pretended to be looking at the shiny cardboard sleeves; but he turned his head slightly to the left and watched the animals.