The Interrogation Page 9
‘Dirty rat,’ said Adam.
‘Dirty rat!’
And he threw the first ball, with all his strength behind it. It crashed against the top of the skirting-board, an inch or two to the left of the animal, with a noise like thunder. A split second later the white rat squealed and leapt aside.
‘You see!’ exclaimed Adam triumphantly. ‘I’m going to kill you! You’re too old, you don’t react any more, you beastly white rat! I’m going to kill you!’
And then he let himself go. He threw five or six balls one after the other; some of them broke against the wall, others bounced on the floor and rolled back to his feet. One of the balls, as it broke, fired a splinter at the rat’s head, just behind the left ear, and drew blood. The rodent began to run along by the wall, with a kind of whistling draught emerging from its mouth. It rushed towards the cupboard, to hide there, and in its haste it bumped its nose against the corner of the piece of furniture. With a yelp it vanished into the hiding-place.
Adam was beside himself at this.
‘Come out of there, you filthy brute! Filthy rat! rat! filthy rat! Come out of there!’
He sent a few billiard balls under the cupboard, but the white rat didn’t budge. So he shuffled across on his knees and poked his bamboo stick about in the darkness. It hit something soft, close to the wall. Finally the rat emerged and ran to the far end of the room. Adam crawled towards it, holding his kitchen knife. With his eyes he thrust the animal against the wall; he noticed that the stiff fur was slightly bloodstained towards the top of the head. The thin body was quivering, the ribs rising and falling spasmodically, the pale blue eyes bulging with terror. In the two black rings set in their limpid centres Adam could read an inkling of doom, the anticipation of an outcome heavy with death and anguish, a moist, melancholy gleam; this fear was mingled with a secret nostalgia relating to many happy years, to pounds and pounds of grains of corn and slices of cheese devoured with quiet relish in the cool dusk of men’s cellars.
And Adam knew he embodied this fear. He was a colossal danger, rippling with muscles – a kind of gigantic white rat, if you like, ravenously craving to devour its own species. Whereas the rat, the real one, was being transformed by its hatred and terror into a man. The little animal kept twitching nervously, as though about to burst into tears or fall on its knees and begin to pray. Adam, moving stiffly on all fours, advanced towards it, shrieking, growling, muttering insults. There were no such things as words any longer; they were neither uttered nor received; from the intermediate stage they reissued eternal, veritable, negative; they were perfectly geometrical, sketched against a background of the unimaginable, with a touch of the mythical, something like constellations. Everything was written round the central theme of Betelgeuse or Upsilon Aurigae. Adam was lost amid the abstract; he was living, neither more nor less; occasionally he even squeaked.
He grabbed some of the balls and hurled them at the beast, hitting the target this time, breaking bones, making the flesh clap together under the hide, while he yelled disconnected words such as ‘Rat!’ ‘Crime! Crime!’ ‘Foul white rat!’ ‘Yes, yeh, arrah!’ ‘Crush….’ ‘I kill’, ‘Rat, rat, rat!’
He threw the knife, blade foremost, and drowned the white rat’s words by shouting one of the greatest insults that can possibly be flung at that species of animal:
‘Filthy, filthy cat!’
It was by no means over yet; the myopic little beast, maimed though it was, bounded out of Adam’s reach. It had already ceased to exist.
At the conclusion of a life full of concentrated memories it was a kind of pale phantom in ghostly outline, like a dingy patch of snow; it was leaking away over the brown floor, evasive and persistent. It was a lobular cloud, or a fleck of soft foam, dissociated from blood and terror, sailing on the surface of dirty water. It was what remains from an instant of linen-washing, what floats, what turns blue, what traverses the thick of the air and bursts before ever it can be polluted, before ever it can be killed.
Adam saw it gliding first left, then right, in front of him; a kind of fatigue added to his determination, sobering him.
Then he stopped talking. He stood upright again and decided to finish the fight. He took a billiard ball in each hand – nearly all the others were broken now. And he began to walk towards the rat. As he moved along beside the skirting-board he saw the famous spot – he would mark it later on with a charcoal cross – where the white rat had begun to lose its life. Nothing remained on the parquet floor to testify to the beginning of the massacre except a few tufts of light-coloured hair, some scraps of ivory-like splinters of bone, and a pool. A pool of thick, purple blood, dulled already, which the dirty boards were swallowing drop by drop. In an hour or two, the time required to penetrate bodily into eternity, it would all be over. The blood would look like a stain caused by no matter what liquid – wine, for instance. As it coagulated it would harden or become powdery and one could scratch it with a finger-nail, put flies there and they wouldn’t be drowned or be able to feed on it.
With a veil of moisture in front of his eyes, Adam walked up to the rat. He saw it as though he were trying to look through a shower-curtain, a nylon hanging with little drops of water trickling down it and a naked flesh-coloured woman concealed behind, amid the dripping of rain and the smell of soap-bubbles.
The white rat was lying on its stomach, as though asleep at the bottom of an aquarium. Everything had drifted out of its ken, leaving a naked, motionless space: now very close to bliss, the rat was awaiting the ultimate moment when a half-sigh would die away on its stiff whiskers, propelling it for ever and ever into a sort of double life, at the exact meeting-point of philosophy’s accumulated chiaroscuri. Adam listened to its calm breathing; fear had left the animal’s body. It was far away now, scarcely even in the death-agony; with its two pale eyes it was waiting for the last ivory balls to come thundering down on its bones and dispatch it to the white rats’ paradise.
It would go down there, partly swimming, partly flying through the air, full of mystical rapture. It would leave its naked body lying on the ground so that all its blood could drain out, drop by drop, marking for a long time the sacred spot on the floor that had been the scene of its martyrdom.
So that Adam, patient, should stoop down and pick up its dislocated body.
So that he should swing it to and fro for a moment and then, weeping, fling it in a wide curve from the first-floor window to the ground on the hill-top. A thorny bush would receive the body and leave it to ripen in the open air, in the blazing sunshine.
I. Question:
My dear Michèle,
I do wish you’d come up to the house again one of these days, I haven’t seen you since we had that race, you remember, down below, along the headland. It’s ridiculous how much time I waste doing nothing in particular; perhaps because it’s so hot that I wonder if summer will ever come to an end. I found a dead white rat in an arbutus bush just under the wall of the house. It must have been dead for a good time, it was quite yellow except for some spots of blood, which looked like dust. And it had little concentric wrinkles round its eyes; the closed lids made an X shape; and it had fallen into a lot of thorny bushes; the arbutus berries or bilberries were ripe, and made hundreds of scarlet dots round its head. The thorns had torn it to pieces, unless it was the sun that had reduced it to that condition; I suppose a dead body decays more rapidly in the sun.
As well as this, someone had cut with a penknife on a cactus leaf, You say Cécile J.’s a Shit.
Cécile J. says Shit on you.
I wonder who on earth can have written that. Some little girl who happened to go past, or perhaps one of the idiots I sometimes see in the grass on Sunday afternoons, with fellows who have moustaches. She must have been angry because her moustached fellow had gone out with some other girl; so she took her penknife, and instead of doing the usual thing, carving a heart with compartments and putting
Cécile Eric
on either side, she put
Cécile J. says Shit on you
And I say it back to her.
What’s fun sometimes is to sit at home, in the house, with my feet in the sun; I remember this kind of thing too. It happened a long time ago, but I remember it to this day; there was some sort of big Girls’ School not far from my home. Four times a day they went past where I lived – at 8 in the morning, at noon, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon and at half-past 5. I was always there when they went by. They usually came along in groups of ten or twelve; they were all stupid, and most of them were ugly. But I’d picked out four or five who were vaguely pretty, and it amused me to see them go by like that, four times a day. I felt as if it gave me some kind of steady dates; I could do whatever I wanted, go fishing, go away for a week, be ill in bed – I’d know they were coming past regularly, just the same; it was nice, because it gave me the impression of having something to fill in my time. Like going home and seeing the four walls still there, and the table and the chairs and the ashtrays just as you’d left them.
It’s fun to remember that, here in a house that isn’t my own – where the deck-chairs are deck-chairs stolen from the beach, and the candles are candles stolen from the chapel on the port. The newspapers taken out of dustbins in the town. The scraps of meat and potatoes, the tins of pineapple, the odds and ends of string, the charred wood, the sticks of chalk and all these three-quarter objects that prove I’m alive and that I steal things. I’m glad I found this house; I can have peace at last, even if I don’t know how to fill in the twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours of peace and silence, I’m caught up in the strip-cartoon I chose for myself…
Reply:
I can’t answer you, Adam, I can’t answer your question about the girl who wrote those words on the cactus leaf; but I’ve thought of a whole lot of stories; it’s rather as if I were afraid to tell them to myself and had to start writing so as to bring all these queer things out of the confusion they’re in as a rule. In any case it’s not disagreeable, because when they’re all strung together – all the little happenins one sees everywhere, the bits of paper with three words written on them, the leaves on which somebody has carved a phrase with a penknife, the insults one sometimes hears while crossing the street, etc. – they amuse me and I believe I’m fond of them.
Yesterday I went to the cinema; it was a curious film, but it’s made me feel talkative; I think you’re wasting your time on things of no importance; you’re wasting yourself; it won’t get you anywhere; you’re afraid of everything that’s sentimental; I’d like to tell you a story. No matter what. No matter what.
Reply:
All right. Let’s tell stories. They’ve not much connexion with bloody reality; but one enjoys them; let’s tell the most delicate stories imaginable, like the story of a garden we’ll suppose to be covered in snow and at the same time bathed in sunshine. There’d be cherry-trees all over the place. Except at the far end of the garden, where there’d be a high wall, very white. The snow would have settled on the branches of the cherry-trees and along the top of the wall. But because of the sun it would be slowly melting and it would fall on the grass, making a sound like drops of water, plop-plop.
And one of the trees would grumble: ‘Quiet! quiet! I can’t get to sleep!’ it would groan, creaking its boughs.
But the drops would go on falling, making even more noise. The sun would say:
‘Sleep! Who’s talking about sleep? Nobody is to sleep when I’m here on the watch!’
And the pear-trees would have plump, ripe pears on them, with scars for mouths. The scars would have been made by birds, but they might look very like lips all the same. And the pears would roar with laughter.
Then one of the cherry-trees, the oldest, would begin to grumble again:
‘Be quiet! I must get some sleep! I must get some sleep! Or I shall never be able to flower!’
The drops would take no notice. Just before falling, while still hanging by their tails from the branches, they would call out in shrill voices:
Silence, silence! La queue du chat balance!
Just to tease.
It would be like that all over the garden. The little flakes of snow would be falling on the grass, softly, placidly, and the effect would be funny, because it would sound like rain although the sun would be blazing away. And everybody would be grumbling. The grass, because it’s green and would like to change colour. The dead twigs, because they’re dead. The roots because they would so much like to see the sky; the lumps of soil because they’ve had an overdose of phosphates; the blades of grass because they can’t breathe. And the strawberry leaves because they’re covered with soft, whitish hairs and it’s somehow ridiculous, for a leaf, to be covered with soft, whitish hairs. Then the garden would change, little by little; there would be hardly any snow left on the cherry-trees and none at all along the top of the wall. And there would be hardly any sun left, either, to melt it. The noises would begin to be different. For instance the cherry-tree would creak its boughs, to get its own back. The pears would suddenly become too ripe and fall; some of them would go squash, making a mushy patch of over-ripeness on the grass. The others would manage to escape, and would crawl away, dribbling juice through their scars. But the wall would still stand straight and calm and silent. All white. It wouldn’t move. And the result would be that seeing the wall so handsome, so noble, all the rest of the garden would feel ashamed of its noisy excitability.
And then we should see the garden gradually becoming gentle and icy again. There would only be a spiritless turbulence here and there, microscopic in every respect. Another few hours and it would be all white, green and pink, like a beautiful iced cake, all tranquil; and sleep would descend, with nightfall, just at the right moment – yes, really just at the right moment. – on all those leaves, eh.
Reply:
My dear Michèle,
Again today I’ve been thinking that summer’s bound to finish one of these days, and wondering what I should do when summer’s over, when it’ll be less hot, without the sun, and we shall see the water seeping in everywhere, rainwater, all the time, drop by drop.
There’ll be autumn, and then winter. They say it will be cold when summer’s over. I’ve been thinking that I shan’t know where to go then. I’ve been thinking that the people who live in this house will come back one evening, by car. They’ll bang the car doors and climb up the path that cuts across the hill, and invade the house again. Then it occurred to me that they’ll throw me out – kick me out, perhaps. Unless they send for the police. And I shall be dragged off somewhere; it’s sure to be some place where I shan’t want to stay. That’s as far as I can look ahead. After that it’s all vague again, I don’t know what will happen to me.
They’ll certainly be angry with me for a whole lot of things. For sleeping here, on the floor, for days and days; for messing up the house, drawing squids on the walls and playing billiards. They’ll accuse me of opening beer-bottles by smashing the necks against the window-sill: there’s practically no yellow paint left on the wooden edge. I imagine I shall have to appear before long in a law-court full of men; I’m leaving them this filth as my testament; I’m not proud, but I hope they’ll sentence me to some kind of punishment, so that I can pay with my whole body for the crime of being alive; if they humiliate me, whip me, spit in my face, I shall at last have a destiny, I shall at last believe in God. Perhaps they’ll tell me I live in some other century, the 26th, for example, and you’ll see how far I shall last into the future.
But I prefer to think of what I shall be able to do if they leave me free to go away.
It’s hard to say, because I have masses of plans in my mind already. And that’s funny, because I’ve not really given it much thought; I’ve had ideas, naturally, like everyone has, when I was strolling round the town by myself, or with you, Michèle, or wool-gathering in my own room, lying in my deck-chair.
For instance, I might go into mourning, a grey suit with a black band. I’d walk about the
streets and people would think I’d lost a near relation, one of my parents, my mother. I’d attend every burial service and when the ceremony was over some people would shake hands with me and others would kiss me, whispering expressions of regret. In that case my chief occupation would be reading the ‘Deaths’ column in the newspapers. I’d go to all funerals, handsome or shabby. And little by little I should get used to the life. I should discover what one’s supposed to say, and the proper way to walk very softly, with downcast eyes.
I should like going to cemeteries, and I should enjoy touching dead people on the brow, seeing their pale, bulging eyes and empty jaws, and the marble slabs on the tombs; and I’d read what was written in the middle of the wreaths, on the ribbon that’s hooked to the plaster violets:
Regrets
If necessary I could drone out:
Nigher still and still more nigh
Draws the day of prophecy
Doomed to melt the Earth and Sky.
O, what trembling there shall be
When the world its Judge shall see.
Or I might travel; I’d go to a lot of towns I don’t know, and make a friend in each of them. Then, later, I’d go back to the same towns: but I’d deliberately choose a day when I was sure not to meet my friend. For instance I’d go to Rio during the Carnival. I’d ring the bell at my friend’s house – let’s call him Pablo – and of course he’d be out. So then I could take a piece of paper and write him a note:
‘My dear Pablo,
I came to Rio today to see you. But you weren’t at home. I suppose you were at the Carnival, like everyone else. I’m sorry not to have been able to see you. We could have had a drink and a chat. Perhaps I shall be back this way next year. ’Bye for now.