Article 353

by Tanguy Viel

  The judge didn’t stir. Between him and me, it was as if there were now a pile of little model boats on his desk.

  It’s true, I said, we’d never seen the like. But now you understand how the hundred thousand volts I’ve been pouring into him all these years, you understand how they were discharged.

  I tried to explain that to the trial judge, too. The circumstances. Yes, the circumstances, I said. I’m not trying to win your sympathy, I said, but there are circumstances, after all.

  Now holding on to the metal bar in my turn, I remember, the first thing I said to the trial judge facing me, in front of the full courtroom, was: Do you know La Fontaine’s fables, Your Honor?

  Unsure whether to smile or not, she simply said, “Go on.” So I told her. Everything I knew. Everything you know, now. The past six years. The château. The money. The emptiness. Erwan’s childhood.

  All I’m asking, I told her, is for you to believe me when I say that I took good care of Erwan. During all those years together I never let him hang out in the empty town alone, never left him at the bus stop with the other bored boys his age, spending long Saturday afternoons under the concrete shelter, not Erwan. To keep him from that, I took the car and we went for drives, we walked on the rocks, or sometimes just had a drink in the port looking at boats, yes, we often did that, looking at the boats on the docks. Now I wonder if that was the best thing I did.

  I told the trial judge that I was wrong, that I’d done things backward, and that’s probably the fate of parents, I said, it’s the fate of parents to someday look back and be afraid that they’d failed. I’m not sure she quite understood what I wanted to say, since all I could come up with after that was a somewhat heavy silence—somewhat judgmental, actually—as if I should’ve weighed what I’d just said, while I tried to catch the eye of someone to support me, maybe Erwan’s, and especially France’s. She was sitting all the way to the right on the other side of Erwan, with me at the bar in the middle. The three of us could’ve made a perfect triangle of which I was the top point, while the trial judge on her dais was across from me, you might say symmetrically, like a more powerful magnet, just by her presence drawing the point of the triangle to herself. And I felt that I should talk, that I should go on talking so the triangle of Erwan, France, and me, that triangle, wouldn’t disappear completely.

  Standing there at the courtroom bar, do you know what I felt like talking about in front of the crowd? Maybe because of the cold of the metal bar I was leaning against, as I looked at Erwan and France, what I felt like talking about was the day I wound up hanging from the car of the Ferris wheel, dangling in space, and watching Erwan’s hands gripping my wrists, trying to get around my wrists, yes, I wanted to talk about that. But I didn’t. All I said was: Your Honor, none of this is Erwan’s fault. Erwan just wanted to keep me from falling.

  And I’m not sure that it was actually her I was speaking to at that moment, since my gaze kept moving from the center to the right, toward France and her eyes, and of course she was looking away, probably doing everything she could to keep from cursing me, and even then in the courtroom, it’s strange sometimes when two people’s eyes are trying so hard not to meet, sometimes each person knows that they’re seeking and magnetizing the other, as if they’d drawn a fluorescent line where they refused to meet, like a reversed magnetic field, like two magnets repulsing each other but which you kept trying to bring together, that was France and me, both of us, as if we were both to blame and it went back to the very fact of our being parents.

  When the verdict was handed down the next day, and Erwan was sentenced to two years in prison for aggravated vandalism, property damage, and disturbing the peace, the two years in prison seeming to darken the very beams supporting the ceiling, France left right away. The moment she heard the total of days woven like a net around Erwan, I saw her get up and leave, like a reporter who might’ve just come to cover the event, at least that’s what she would’ve liked it to look like, and not a mother torn up inside, unable to sit in her chair another minute, unable to imagine her son behind the glass of a visiting room, but instead an indifferent reporter doing her job, anything so as not to collapse in the courtroom crying “Erwan” or “Martial,” as she might have needed to do.

  A hubbub rose in the courtroom, a general end-of-session movement, Erwan motionless in his box, people’s whispered comments. So I went out too, and the two of us, France and me, found ourselves in the courthouse hallway under the big windows facing the sea. We sat down on a bench without saying anything, without even judging if the sentence was heavy or light, or simply fair. France didn’t say anything, looking at the worn floor tiles, but then she did, at last she said, This is your fault. Maybe it was just once, but once is enough to cut down a man like me and raise an inner army of guilt. Maybe she didn’t really mean it, maybe it was because she was angry or upset, but it’s always too late, she said it once and it’s written there, inside my skull, I swear this time when I heard that, it felt like my whole scalp had been pulled back, ripping everything raw, and rubbing alcohol poured directly onto my brain.

  And if I were able to answer her, if I’d had the strength to make conversation, if I were only able to say anything, it would be with my gasping breath that she would hear not what I really had to say but the very fact that I couldn’t say anything. I think she understood some things in my silence.

  At least that’s the way I interpreted it when she stood up a little later and then, as she was leaving—because it’s always when you’re leaving that these things happen, as if you’re already gone, you understand, and the fact of your no longer being there, as if you had the right to do things that you would never dare when you were still all there, the right to say things in confidence when you’re already on your feet—we were standing in the open big glass door, and I could already feel the air on her neck pulling her outside, as we parted, we joined hands, yes, just our hands, and maybe it was a second longer, I mean, we held hands a second longer and then I don’t know what happens at moments like that, but I know that she and I squeezed each other’s hands a little harder and then we stepped very close to each other and, yes, we kissed, we kissed each other long enough for me to remember what that felt like to kiss her, before she kind of jerked and slowly backed away, and then, see, she left.

  As I left the courthouse, standing outside on the few outdoor steps above the harbor, I tried to take stock of where I was, the way you sometimes can in life, where you want to note all the coordinates, where you use a compass on a chart to measure distances and landmarks, and draw a little x in pencil on the paper: “Here’s where I am.” Except that now the landmarks weren’t just steeples or water towers standing like beacons over the ocean anymore but instead were dry, solitary sentences, averted faces, and “it’s your fault” or “your son.” I remember the seagull that was standing there, with the calm ocean stretching away in front of us. Then Erwan came out of the courthouse, head down, pushed by the policemen into the car that would take him to the jail where he was being held.

  I watched the car drive off, the nape of Erwan’s neck just visible through the rear window, and I kept telling myself: Something’s wrong, something’s backward in this life. In a normal world I would be the one there, in the back of a white sedan with “Police” written on it, not Erwan, not my seventeen-year-old son.

  That happened right here, Your Honor, in this very courthouse a few floors down. It’s as if everything was converging here from the beginning, like, I don’t know, a painting you might look at from anywhere but that keeps pulling you back to the center, as if I were drawn by a light that would always bring me here. Maybe you’re the light, I told the judge, maybe you magnetize my memories and set them spinning in me like the rings around Saturn.

  Maybe so, said the judge, maybe so.

  You know, I think this courthouse remembers everything. I think it holds all the trials and the verdicts in the world,
silently and methodically storing them deep inside, for centuries. I think that one day, when it collapses, on that day it’ll suddenly spit out all of the injustices on earth and they’ll spread like a black cloud over the cities of the future. But the problem, I told the judge, is that I won’t be around to see it. Not me or anybody else in this story. And Lazenec no more than the others.

  So you understand that one can’t always wait for centuries for some sort of natural justice that might never be done.

  Lazenec came out then, surrounded by reporters asking for his reactions, microphones held to his silent mouth, and maybe the reporters were thinking the same thing I was, that the world was upside down, that the only person who should’ve left under a flashing blue police light was him. He passed by me but didn’t see me. I watched him get into his car in the parking lot, and I had the feeling I would never see him again.

  Obviously I was wrong, I said to the judge.

  With a guy like that, if you don’t get rid of him, he’ll never disappear, that’s what I’ve come to understand, Your Honor. He’ll come back. Always. Basically that’s all he knows how to do, come back; he slips away of course, but then comes back, hidden in the shadow of a clock that measures weeks instead of hours, maybe waiting for us to be less angry, waiting for me to get over the bad nights I spent ruminating and telling myself that it wasn’t his boat that Erwan should’ve gone after. I can’t tell you how many days or weeks passed, or even how many times I visited Erwan at the jail on Wednesday afternoons. But I know that in those thirty weekly minutes we spent facing each other there, it was as if I were gradually taking back the hundred thousand volts that were still humming inside him, I was positively filling myself with all of Erwan’s dark energy and soon, yes soon, I would be charged up enough to put everything right.

  But the days slip by and accumulate like silt that slows the current. Time, time that was once bitter and nervous and sleepless, becomes smooth and polished, like a layer of stones on the beach. And that was the moment Lazenec chose to come back as if nothing had happened—because nothing was finished, and nothing could ever finish because nothing had ever begun, you understand?

  Lazenec rang my doorbell.

  Three months, maybe. He lasted three months without being seen in any street in town and without coming to inspect his five acres of mud, just three months, and then he rang my bell.

  What kind of a brain, I asked the judge, what brain do we normal people need to have to recognize that there’s a category of people like that on earth, who lack that thing I’m sure you and I share, I told the judge, something that normally stops us or threatens us, something—a conscience maybe—that arises pretty early, provided we have the shaky mirror in our heads that made even Adam cover himself with a fig leaf, something that hobbles us, yes, but also honors us. And the fact is that some people lack that thing, the way others are born without an arm, and others are born lacking, I don’t know, lacking…

  Humanity? said the judge.

  Yes, basically that’s it, humanity.

  So here’s the guy who destroyed Le Goff, the guy who destroyed Erwan, the guy who destroyed me, this same guy shows up at my door and acts like he’s an ordinary neighbor who might’ve come by just to say hello or, I don’t know, out of amnesia, trying to smooth over the past the way you varnish a floor to avoid splinters, and he says, mechanically: I’m sorry about Erwan.

  I don’t think I knew what to say.

  If I can ever be helpful, he continued, let me know.

  No, I said, I don’t think so.

  And Lazenec did that sort of quarter-turn when someone is on the point of leaving but already knows that he’s not going to go before he follows his thought to the end, and he stopped and looked at me and said: If you like, we could go fishing together one of these days.

  Beg pardon? I said.

  I could take you out, he said. And he added: I don’t bear grudges.

  You hear that? I asked the judge. He said that: I don’t bear grudges. Five hundred twelve thousand francs and he’s the one who doesn’t bear grudges, what in the world can a guy like me say to that? With the darkness, or evil, or malevolence that guys like him use to stab at the people around them, somehow, in some way I can’t explain to you, they manage to take away whatever dignity people have left, or maybe just their common sense.

  Because here’s the thing: I said yes.

  The rest, you know.

  The rest was written by the currents that wash bodies up on our coast. You can call it voluntary homicide or some expression or other that says things in a normal language, but what I did, Your Honor, doesn’t make me feel like a killer, what I did was to ostracize him, you understand, I ostracized him the way you burn off a wart to grow new skin. It was as if the skin were our town and the time had come to pull the evil out by the root. I did it for the good of all of us.

  The sun now seemed to be breaking through, maybe because of the turning of the tide at five o’clock. When the tide turns, the weather here often changes and the sky clears up around five, in any case you see the sun more often in the afternoon than in the morning, there’s no explaining it but that’s the way it is.

  Anyway, I didn’t really kill him. In terms of finishing him off physically, the sea did a lot better job than I did, but as for justice…Justice, I told the judge, only people can do that.

  But the fact is, he’s dead, said the judge. The fact is, you’re the one sitting here facing me.

  What do you mean?

  The sea and the fog won’t be on trial, you will.

  Yes, but so what? What do you expect me to do about it?

  No one can ignore the law, said the judge.

  No, of course not, no one can ignore the law, I said. If we forgot about it, if we erased it from the law books, everything would crumble, right? And those books of yours standing on the shelves, you could toss them all out the window. With a little luck, you’d see them floating in the harbor. With a little luck, the fish would read them. But I think you’ll agree that the fish and the seaweed don’t need to read books like that, because they’re not about to ignore the laws that concern them.

  There was another silence, and then I said: Is this going to cost me big-time?

  I don’t know, he said.

  You don’t know?

  No, it depends.

  On what?

  On me.

  Suddenly he stood up, as if he couldn’t sit still anymore, or wanted to get out of his judge’s armchair, and walked over to the window with his hands in his pockets. Then he turned back to me, maybe hesitating one last time, and using a tone as if he were asking me a question, said: After all, this outing of yours on the water, it could also have been an accident.

  I frowned, trying to understand what he meant, that is, understanding perfectly what he meant to say but maybe not unfolding it into a logical, organized sentence, more like a ball of fire ricocheting through my brain from one side to the other, unsure what wall it would stop at. It was odd to see the judge deliberately look down and start playing with the end of his necktie, without knowing if this was the pride of someone who’s holding all the strings or the awkwardness of someone thinking he was going beyond the law, so I just said: For me, this isn’t a laughing matter, Your Honor.

  As he stood there looking at me, stroking his chin and letting the silence last, I understood that he wasn’t joking.

  But I should’ve gone to get help, I said, or maybe run to the harbormaster’s office, so an accident…You know that there are a lot of things against me, Your Honor.

  But the judge was no longer listening to me. He now took one of the red books lying on his desk and opened it in front of him, as if now only law books could decide the matter, as if everything I’d said during those long hours sitting there, everything I was saying now to lighten this end of the day, I hadn’t said to a judge or the courth
ouse air, but that each sentence had just been waiting to take its place there, on the pages of a law book.

  Amid the rustling of that same paper, which he gently leafed through, the judge found the page he was looking for, ran his finger down it, stopped, and said, Listen carefully, Kermeur, listen carefully and maybe this will make it clearer for you.

  And then he started reading aloud, calmly and distinctly, like he was addressing a big crowd, or because he wanted me to learn each sentence by heart, and I heard him read:

  Article 353 of the Penal Code: The law does not ask judges to account for the ways they reach decisions, and it does not prescribe rules by which they must particularly weigh the sufficiency or adequacy of evidence; it requires that they determine in silence and contemplation and in the sincerity of their conscience what impression the evidence against the accused and the means of that person’s defense have made on their thinking. The law asks of them only this one question, which contains the full measure of their duty: Are you fully convinced?

  Now, when I look at the sea from my kitchen window, when I breathe the free air of the sea below, I often recite the lines of Article 353 aloud, like a psalm from the Bible written by God himself, in the judge’s voice, which still echoes in my ears as he looked at me more intently than ever, and said: An accident, Kermeur, an unfortunate accident.

  TANGUY VIEL was born in Brest, France, in 1973. He is the author of seven novels, including Le Black Note, Cinéma, The Absolute Perfection of Crime (winner of the Prix Fénéon and the Prix littéraire de la Vocation), Beyond Suspicion, Paris-Brest, and La Disparition de Jim Sullivan. Article 353 won the Grand prix RTL-Lire 2017 and the Prix François-Mauriac de la région Aquitaine. He lives near Orléans, France.