The Interrogation Read online

  And all of a sudden it happened. There was a kind of flurry in the crowd, with the sound of a guitar and the click of stiletto heels. The little blue light in the photomaton machine went on and off, a livid hand drew the curtains and he saw himself reflected, snow-white, in the metal structure. At his feet now, right against his feet, the black dog’s woolly body was covering the bitch’s yellow coat; minutes went by, while men and women still walked past and round them, pounding the linoleum with metal-tipped shoes. The bitch was now the colour of old gold, and beneath her sprawling, outstretched paws the floor undulated gently, flecked with highlights, with hundreds of overlaid, spectral shadows; in this vault of the shop, sunk below ground-level, people were talking louder, laughing more boisterously, buying and selling hand over fist. There was a constant clicking of photographs, and every time the magnesium flashed it shattered something in the middle of a white circle where the dogs seemed to be wrestling, open-mouthed, their eyes wide in a kind of avid terror. Adam’s forehead was damp with sweat; full of hatred and jubilation he stood motionless, whirling his brain round at high speed; a siren was shrieking in the middle of his skull; no one else could hear it, but it cried: ‘Warning, warning!’ as though war would break out at any moment.

  Then the pace slackened, the bitch began to moan, almost in pain. A child came into the trampled space, pointed at the animals and laughed. Everything had rushed past. As though a film had been speeded up for a few minutes there were still a few spasms of frenzy; but Adam had already turned his eyes away from the pile of dogs and was breathing again, as he pressed his fingerprints on the record-sleeves. The sound of the guitars died away and the cool lips that had spoken not long ago came again to the rim of the microphone and announced:

  ‘The last models from our summer collection are being offered at reduced prices on the lingerie counter.… Fancy petticoats, cardigans, English blouses, swim-suits and light jerseys, ladies…’

  Then Adam turned round and, with an almost straight back, began to climb the stairs to the ground-floor, preceded by the black, wool-clad hero; behind them, in the midst of the shaded labyrinth, close beside the electrical goods counter, in the bitch’s orange-coloured belly, they left a nothing, an emptiness – it was funny – which in a few months’ time would be filled with half-a-dozen little mongrel puppies.

  They went on together up the high-street. It was getting late; the sun was already going down. That meant that yet another day was over, one more to be added to thousands of others. They walked at a leisurely pace on the sunny side of the road.

  There were more cars than pedestrians, and at a pinch one could feel almost alone on the pavement.

  They passed two or three cafés, because it was one of those southern towns with at least one café to every building. Not one single man suspected that the dog wasn’t with Adam, that it was Adam who was with the dog. Adam sauntered along, glancing now and again at the people who went by. Most of the men and all the women wore dark glasses. They didn’t know him, or the dog either. And it was quite a time since they’d last seen this tall, ungainly fellow slouching along the street, hands in the pockets of his dirty old linen trousers. He must have been living for quite a while all alone in the deserted house at the top of the hill. Adam looked at their dark glasses and reflected that instead of going to live all by himself in a corner he might have done something else; such as buying a parrot that he could have carried on his shoulder wherever he went; so that if anyone stopped him he could have left the parrot to speak for him:

  ‘Morning, how are you?’

  ‘Morning, how are you?’

  and people would have realized he had nothing to say to them. Or he might have got himself up like a blind man, with a white walking-stick and thick, opaque spectacles; then other people would have been shy of coming near him, except occasionally, to help him across the street; and he would have let them do it, without saying thank you or anything, so that in the long run they’d have left him in peace. Another thing would have been to apply for a little kiosk where he could have sat all day selling tickets for the National Lottery. People would have bought as many tickets as they wanted, and he would have prevented anyone from talking to him by calling out at regular intervals, in a falsetto voice:

  ‘Tonight’s last winning tickets,

  Try your luck!’

  Anyhow, the dog served the purpose well enough, for the few people who went by in the opposite direction scarcely glanced at him through their smoked glasses and showed not the faintest wish to exchange greetings. That proved that he was no longer quite a full member of their detestable race and that like his friend Dog he could go about the streets and nose round the shops without being seen. Soon, perhaps, he too would be able to urinate placidly against the hubs of American cars or the ‘No Parking’ signs and make love in the open air, on the dusty footpath, between two plane-trees.

  At the far end of the high-street there was a sort of fountain, a greenish bronze affair such as one used to see all over the place in the old days. Set firmly in the pavement, with a handle to pump up the water and an iron-barred drain through which it ran away. The dog was thirsty, and stopped in front of this post-cum-fountain; he waited for a moment, doubtfully, sniffed at the grooved flagstone and then began to lick the grating, where faint traces of moss were clinging and empty cigarette-packets lay about, crumpled into balls. Adam came up silently behind him, hesitated, and then turned the handle. After a few gurgles the water came gushing out, falling on the dog’s head and splashing the toes of Adam’s shoes. The water flowed on as though the movement of the handle were manufacturing it, and the dog lapped up several mouthfuls with his jaws wide open; when he had finished he moved away from the fountain; shook his head, and trotted off. Adam scarcely had time to swallow two or three gulps of the water that goes on falling even after one stops turning the handle. He wiped his mouth as he walked away, and took a cigarette from his pocket.

  Some rough-and-ready signal must have gone off somewhere in the town – a flight of pigeons perhaps, or else the fact that the sun was vanishing behind the five-storey houses; for the dog was now walking straighter and faster. He had adopted a gait that, without being hurried, indicated frank indifference to all that was happening around him; his ears were pricking forward and his paws only touched the ground very briefly, as though he knew he was drawing a straight line that could not possibly be deflected. He trotted along, right in the middle of the pavement, doing five miles an hour in the opposite direction from the hooting cars and the red and green streaks of the buses. All this, no doubt, in order to reach a house somewhere in the town, where a plump woman, whom he could see only as far up as below the breasts, would set before him, down on the kitchen floor, a plastic plate of finely chopped meat and vegetables. Perhaps a red-and-white bone, bleeding like a scratched elbow.

  Behind the dog came Adam, almost at the double, as they crossed a succession of identical streets, past gardens, park gates that were just closing, quiet squares; a succession of big doorways, brown benches where tramps were already asleep with their heads leaning on the back of the seat; men and women were getting into cars; two or three old men were hobbling nonchalantly along, all in black; red workmen were putting oil lamps round the crater-like holes where they had been working all day under the open sky. A man of indeterminate age was going down the road too, on the opposite pavement, carrying on his back a wooden box full of panes of glass; every now and then he turned his head towards the house-fronts with a strange, melancholy cry that sounded like ‘Olivier!… Olivier!…’ but which must have been ‘On the way! On the way!’

  That was what the dog was trotting among; along the streets, past the houses, below the roofs that bristled with television aerials and brick chimneys; through the maze of drain pipes and glinting windows, right out in the grey street down below, at a jog-trot, his body hard as a sword.

  That was how he scampered by without looking at the stretches of house-wall or the shrubs in the littl
e gardens, notwithstanding the thousands of caverns that could have been disclosed by tearing away what was concealing them, the thousands of caverns in the depths of which people were nestling, ready to live among oak tables heavy-laden with flowers and baskets of fruit, velvet curtains, double beds and reproductions of impressionist paintings.

  What the dog was doing was walking quickly, going home; it was, crossing a final street in the village which would soon be asleep, trotting the length of a final wall covered with posters, pushing with his muzzle to open one side of a wrought-iron gate, and vanishing from sight close by, somewhere between the house-front and the orange-grove – all his, all theirs, not Adam’s.

  What the dog had done now was to desert Adam at the entrance to the house, leave him standing with his back against the concretee gate-post with its engraved name and number – Villa Belle, 9 – where he could stare through the gate’s twenty-six bars, gaze at a shaggy garden as pink and green as in a child’s picture-book, and wonder if it had been hot there that day or if it would rain there during the night.

  H. There was something new in the empty house on the hill. This was a rat, of a handsome size, not black like most sewer-rats, but on the white side – between grey and white – with pink nose, tail and paws and two piercing blue, lidless eyes which gave him a courageous expression. He must have been there a long time already, but Adam hadn’t noticed him before. Adam had gone up to the living-room on the first floor, where he had once lain on the billiard table with Michèle. He had not been back there since, presumably because it hadn’t occurred to him; unless it was because he couldn’t be bothered to climb the little wooden staircase to the upper floor.

  Then he had remembered the billiard table and reflected that he might while away a few hours by playing billiards. That was why he had come back there.

  So he opened the window and pushed back one of the shutters, so as to see properly. He hunted everywhere for the billiard balls; he thought the owners had hidden them away in a drawer and he broke open all the furniture with a knife. But there was nothing in the chest of drawers or in the sideboard or in the cupboard or in the little lemonwood table, except old newspapers and dust.

  Adam stacked the newspapers on the floor, intending to read them later on, and went back to the billiard table; he now found, on the right-hand side of the table, a kind of drawer, which was locked, where it seemed the balls must drop after falling into the pockets round the table. With his knife, Adam dug a groove round the lock. It took him a good twenty minutes to force the drawer. Inside, sure enough, he found nine or ten ivory balls, some red and some white.

  Adam took the balls and laid them on the table. He still needed a cue to play with. But these the owners must have hidden carefully, perhaps in another room; perhaps they’d even taken them away with them, God knows where.

  Adam suddenly felt tired of searching. He looked round him, hoping to find a substitute for the cues. There was really nothing except the legs of a Louis XV armchair; it would have meant taking them off, and besides they were twisted and gilded and Adam didn’t want to dirty his hands with gold.

  He now remembered that in the little front garden of the house he had seen two or three rose-trees, tied to bamboo props. He went down to the flower-bed, pulled up one of the rose-trees, and wrenched the bamboo shaft out of the ground.

  Before going upstairs again he took his knife and cut one of the roses off the tree; it was not very large but it was a nice, round shape, with sweet-scented pale yellow petals. He put it into an empty beer-bottle, on the floor of his room, beside the heap of blankets. Then, without even looking at it, he went back upstairs.

  He played billiards by himself for a few minutes; he sent the balls one against another without paying much attention to their colour. Once he managed to send four into the pockets at one stroke. But except for that once, which seemed to be more or less of a fluke, he had to admit he was not much good. Either he missed the balls he was aiming at, or he failed to hit the right spot: the cue struck the ivory surface a little to one side instead of in the middle, and the ball went off in all directions, spinning madly on its own axis. In the end Adam gave up playing billiards; he took the balls, dropped them on the floor and tried to play bowls. He was no better at this, please note, but as the balls fell on the floor they made a certain noise and set up certain movements, so that one could take more interest in the thing, even get some satisfaction out of it.

  Anyhow it was while he was amusing himself like this, that he saw the rat. It was a fine, muscular rat, standing on its four pink paws at the far end of the room and staring at him insolently. When Adam caught sight of it he lost his temper at once; he tried to hit the rat with a billiard ball, meaning to kill it or at least to hurt it badly; but he missed it. He tried again several times. The rat didn’t seem to be frightened. It looked Adam straight in the eye, its pallid head stretched forward, its brow furrowed. When Adam threw his ivory ball the rat sprang to one side, with a kind of plaintive squeak. When he had thrown all the balls, Adam squatted down on his heels, so as to be more or less level with the beast’s eyes. He reflected that it must be living in the house, like himself, though perhaps it hadn’t been there so long. It must come out at night from a hole in some piece of furniture, and trot upstairs and downstairs, hunting for food.

  Adam did not know exactly what rats ate; he couldn’t remember whether they were carnivorous or not. If it was true what the dictionaries said: ‘Rat: s. Species of small mammiferous rodent with a long annulated tail.’

  He could not remember the two or three legends related to the subjects of rats, in connexion with sinking ships, sacks of corn and plague. To tell the truth he had not even realized until today that there were such things as white rats.

  Adam stared at this one, listened hard; and discovered in the rat something akin to himself. He reflected that he too might have gone to ground in the daytime between two worm-eaten boards and roamed about at night, searching for crumbs between the floor-boards and being lucky enough now and again, in some recess in a cellar, to come across a litter of white cockroaches that would have made a fine treat for him.

  The rat still stood motionless, its blue eyes fixed on him; there were rolls of fat, or of muscle, round its neck. In view of its size, which was slightly above average, and of the abovementioned rolls of flabby muscle, it must be a rat of advanced age. Adam didn’t know how long a rat lives, either, but he would easily have put this one at eighty years old. Perhaps it was already half dead, half blind, and past realizing that Adam wished it ill.

  Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly, Adam forgot that he was Adam, that he had heaps of things of his own downstairs, in the sunny room; heaps of deck-chairs, newspaper, all sorts of scribbles, and blankets that smelt of him, and scraps of paper on which he had written ‘My dear Michèle’ as though beginning a letter. Beer bottles with their necks broken, and a sort of tea-rose that was spreading the ramifications of its hot-flower perfume, minute by minute, between four walls. The yellow scent of a yellow rose in a yellow room.

  Adam was turning into a white rat, but by a strange kind of metamorphosis; he still kept his own body, his hands and feet did not turn pink nor his front teeth lengthen into fangs; no, his fingers still smelt of tobacco and his armpits of sweat, and his back was still bent forward in a crouching position, close to the floor, regulated by the S-shaped bend in his spine.

  But he was turning into a white rat because he was thinking of himself as one; because all of a sudden he had formed an idea of the danger that the human race represented for this breed of small, myopic, delicate animals. He knew that he could squeak, run, gnaw, stare with his two little round, blue, brave, lidless eyes; but it would all be in vain. A man like himself would always be sufficient; he need only resolve to take a few steps forward and lift his foot a few inches, and the rat would be killed, crushed, its ribs broken, its oblong head lolling on the floor-boards in a tiny pool of mucus and lymph.

  And suddenly he stood up
; he had turned into fear itself, been transformed into danger-for-white-rats; his head was full, now, of something that was no longer anger or disgust or any form of cruelty, but a kind of obligation to kill.

  He decided to set about it rationally. First of all he shut the doors and windows so that the creature should not run away. Then he went and picked up the billiard balls; as he came closer the rat drew back a little, pricking its short ears. Adam laid the balls on the billiard table and began to talk to the rat in a low voice, making strange, hoarse, throaty sounds.

  ‘You’re afraid of me, eh, white rat?’ he muttered. ‘You’re afraid. You’re trying to behave as though you weren’t afraid… With those round eyes of yours.… Are you looking at me? I admit you’re a brave chap, white rat. But you know what’s ahead of you. They all know, all the members of your species. The other white rats. And the grey ones and the black ones. You’ve been waiting a long time for what I’m going to do to you. White rat, the world is no place for you. You’re doubly disqualified for living: in the first place you’re a rat in a man’s world, among men’s houses and traps and guns and rat-poison. And in the second place you’re a white rat in a country where rats are generally black. So you’re absurd, and that’s an extra reason…’

  He counted the balls; there was one missing. It must have rolled under the cupboard. Adam scraped about with the bamboo stick and brought out the sphere of ivory. It was a red one, and cold, and held in the palm of the hand it felt bigger than the others. And consequently more lethal.

  When everything was ready, Adam took up his stance beside the billiard table, resolute; all at once he felt himself becoming a giant, a very tall fellow, ten feet or thereabouts, bursting with life and strength. At a little distance, against the back wall, close beside the square of pale light falling from the window, the animal stood, planted on its four pink paws, displaying great patience.