As for him, he sat motionless and gazing into space on the landing in front of the room under its rusty tin roof, his back to the wall, his legs stretched out before him, his head lowered, for so long he was almost forgotten. He walked out quietly and went to buy himself some hooch and when he had his bottle he climbed quietly up the old tamarind tree, part of whose dense foliage covered the roof of this rickety building, and he sat down on the main fork of the tamarind tree to knock back in peace. The former music teacher, whose sickly body was dressed in black and grimy clothes, looked like some miserable and forlorn big flying squirrel or big bat or winged demon. His clothes, his body and his sitting posture blended astonishingly well in the shady branches of the old tamarind tree. When someone threw him a stone or shouted at him asking if he meant to hang himself, he didn’t react. When he had had enough of the taunting, he climbed higher still. Early rainy season rain fell hard. The wind gusted. But he kept sitting soaked in that tamarind tree without turning a hair. No one knew when it was he climbed down quietly. Around ten at night, which was rather late for the place, in the sizzle of the rain a shot was heard, tearing the quiet that reigned over the market area and waking up toddlers who started to wail. The shot had obviously come out of the rented room of the former music teacher. A single bullet and then silence for a while, followed by the sound of a scuffle, of a tussle, a scream, and then a second gunshot was heard. Gunshots were heard once in a long while and, each time, they meant tragedy. The local folk, in a panic, rushed to the site of the event and, once on the spot, undertook to break down the rickety worm-eaten door of the rented room. Six or seven men in the prime of life dashed into the room. They’d later be police witnesses and all would testify that the scene they saw then was that of the little girl slumped against the partition wall like a lifeless doll, blood squirting from her temple, and his wife thrashing about in the middle of the room, beseeching him to spare her life, blood flowing down her sarong at the level of her abdomen. Before they could yell at him to stop or impede him, the former music teacher standing legs apart in the dim flickering light, looking exactly like a rabid dog, totally indifferent to the intrusion of those that had just broken down the door, shot at her again, this time at chest level. She toppled back, winded, jerked once or twice and collapsed inert, her eyes rolled upwards and gleaming with vindictive resentment. That was when the men pounced on him and he thrashed about viciously, insulting those fuckers that came to prevent him from fulfilling the final wish of his life, which was to kill himself. But the men didn’t listen and finally snatched the gun away from him and immobilised him with a tight arm lock in his back, insulted him, kicked him and punched him to reward him for fighting to the death while his gun was being snatched away, and even once trussed up and hopeless he kept spitting on all those that were within reach. With much shoving, nudging and kicking that made him stagger and reel, he was marshalled out of his rented room on an icy night under a noiseless drizzle. He seemed to have come back to his senses, as his tears began to flow, he no longer thrashed about, no longer opposed any resistance. He walked along the redearth road that had turned into a mire, surrounded by a crush of people like a swarm of crows harassing an owl, while another contingent crowded the rented room like a swarm of flies buzzing over a putrid corpse. As he was taken to the police station he was still being beaten up, even though he no longer showed the least inclination to resist or run away but on the contrary appeared totally determined to surrender. The entire town had been awoken to find itself confronted to an appalling reality and swearwords surging from everywhere like a jungle flash flood cursed him for having gone as far as killing a young girl and even a woman begging for mercy. The event was reported boisterously and got embellished and somewhat distorted as is in the nasty nature of rumours and gossip. It was a terrifying event as happens seldom. And even though it was a story that made their hair stand on end, for the people around the market it was a kind of entertainment. You learned of it in the minutest detail from your classmates the next morning, maybe because you were eager to find out, even if you did your utmost to prevent that eagerness from showing. In your quiet ways, you were horribly pleased by what had happened, even though you were sorry that he was at the very least still alive. If you were pleased by his fate, it was because you felt increasingly secure, in the sense that under police control he probably would no longer have the opportunity to get drunk and talk a lot of nonsense in his delirium, which might lead to your secret being exposed. Sorrow or pity over the death of the grimy little girl and of his wife wasn’t the first feeling that was born in your heart. You are a human being, an individual thinking of herself before anything else. One of your friends, whose father is a lawyer, revealed that, when she was learning music with him and her father, leafing through her course notebook, saw the teacher’s annotations, he had remarked that his handwriting showed a blatant criminal temperament and his deeply etched signature betrayed a cruel mind. And other friends chimed in at once that indeed they remembered that he used to write wrathful comments on some pages of their training manuals and pressed his biro so forcefully that he rumpled and pierced the paper and he’d say, full of himself, Do you know that our handwriting tells more of our character than the lines of the hand? And thinking back to his handwriting and the murders that had just been committed, they could clearly see the connection. One of your friends reported another aspect of the event: after the autopsy a few female traders at the market had the body of his wife and the body of his daughter taken to a small monastery by the river and improvised a merit-making ceremony hardly anyone attended. Those murders became big news even the national press got interested in. The main dailies presented info and photos in great detail, very simply because at the time publishing political news was too risky. But that was nothing compared to the magazines specialising in crime and gore that were on sale the following week, which published his story in a most elaborate way and illustrated it with coloured and black-and-white photographs. Those magazines, one of your friends bought them only to read the news about him. Those revolting photos and accounts showed no respect for the dead, but it was through those pictures taken from various angles that you saw his utterly cramped and stuffy rented room, its tin partition walls papered over with posters of movie stars and old newspaper sheets. On some pictures you could see the rotting and disjointed floorboards, a pail and a plastic basin, and cobwebs on the walls and ceiling, bottles of cheap hooch that had rolled everywhere and some filled only with cigarette butts, an ice box, an old all-crumpled mosquito net strung up on one side only, the rest of it more or less rolled up and lying on the folded blanket and the pillow, with a small woven mat by the bed. But what held all your attention were the corpses of his wife and daughter, which you examined at length. There were many photographs taken from various angles without any necessity as if to take pot shots at the dead once again. Those photos gave you nightmares. At the time, you didn’t know that law holds that a corpse belongs to the one who is dead, but common sense had you asking yourself what right others had to publicly humiliate a dead body. Before publishing those pictures, they should have asked themselves what the dead person would feel, what those who saw them would feel or even what the members of the family of the dead would feel. You told yourself that many of those pictures should have been censured, especially those of the corpse of his wife, whose sarong had slipped, so that you could see her breasts quite plainly. But they hadn’t been censored, because those magazines had columns dedicated to interviews of top police officers and written by bootlickers, which greatly helped management and circulation. The pictures of the corpses of mother and daughter left you aghast. You contemplated those pictures of corpses for a long time, the corpses of a pretty young woman obscene in death and of a small girl. And you told yourself that in those two corpses there had once been what was called life, now snuffed out, and all that remained was pitiful bodies, utterly inferior and valueless bodies, and when you recalled the little girl’s words telling
you before she left that she’d come back to see you, you were seized by a fit of icy shivering. That made your nights painful – worried and frightened and disgusted and ashamed, as you tossed around, knocked about, twisted in knots of confusion like algae in a madly turbid stream. You couldn’t think of anything else for long. Sooner or later you realised that you were thinking again about him and his wife and that child. The next day, while at school and focusing with pleasure on a flower arrangement, suddenly a searing pain came back to torment you when someone said that, even though he had said he meant to kill himself after committing those two murders in cold blood but had been prevented, in fact it wasn’t true, as it was most probable he intended to run away after killing those two but, upon being prevented to do so, he had come up with that suicide story. According to his own statement, he had shot the child while she slept, it was a premeditated murder, and after that he had shot his wife, but his first shot had woken her and that’s why there had been a struggle. But nevertheless she had died as he wanted. He had said it had been very hard for him to resolve himself to kill the child and that was the reason why he had decided to kill her first. As for his wife, he had no reason to procrastinate. In any case, his fault was blatant enough and he would in all likelihood be given a harsh penalty, death sentence or else life imprisonment. You wanted him to die, your former music teacher. The death sentence was what was most proper. Such was the thought in a dark corner of your mind. With me, you didn’t want to hide anything. You didn’t want to conceal anything of all that concerned you once you had decided to reveal your secret. You wanted him to die soon. Learning that he had made a full confession, including how he had obtained his weapon by stealing it from the master hoodlum (the very one who had doused him as he quarrelled with his wife), you were alarmed that he might have admitted to other mistakes he had yet to reveal and provided loathsome details of what he had done with you. Your anguish and torment seemed never to come to an end. What would happen if he himself revealed what he had ordered you to keep secret? He didn’t have anything to lose any longer. You felt that all eyes in the world existed only to watch you with suspicion and it was those eyes that were going to tear you to pieces. But at no time were you dragged to be implicated in this scandalous trial – there was nothing more than your embarrassment at having to answer questions about him (He taught you the violin, didn’t he? Come now, tell us what he was like as you see it.) which you did everything to avoid: the whole affair had nothing to do with you, it went on without you having anything to do with it. But then you did get involved in the event one afternoon some days later when he was taken out of jail for reconstruction. Actually, that reconstruction should have taken place earlier but had been delayed because much of the local police was conscripted to welcome the minister of the Interior and his party who happened to be on an inspection tour of the province. Your curiosity was such that you couldn’t resist. It wasn’t clever of you. You were torn between resentment, pity and fear, but you went there nonetheless and, furthermore, you left school for that purpose. At first, you weren’t aware of anything, but when a few forward boys who had been musicians under his direction asked you if you wanted to go and watch the reconstruction, you accepted. And it was with those friends that you took advantage of your innocent face of a model pupil to ask the bursar for permission to absent yourself from school. There was a crowd around the Chinese wooden shophouses behind the market by the river. It was a day of great heat. Heavy black clouds swept across the sky. The stifling heat seemed to increase as time went on, even though the clouds hid the sun away at times. It was there that you saw him for the last time, a criminal brought back to the scene of the crime. He looked lethargic, dejected, glum and worn out, as if deprived of life. His dull eyes looked haggard like the eyes of an insane person. He walked slowly, head hung which he raised at times to look around him as if he didn’t understand what was going on. The eyes of those that crowded both sides of the narrow blind alley bore only hatred mixed with irrepressible curiosity. Each and every one of them felt as if they had never seen him or else that the former music teacher they saw was no longer him, but a creature with the odious aura of a criminal, a peculiar, vicious and foul beast from a foreign land whose lair was in some underground grotto. Some of them were starting to show their hatred with remarks like There he is, that shit who kills a little girl and his own wife begging for mercy. You shit! You bastard! You beast! Some of them who believed they knew best started to explain certain things about him that they thought the others didn’t know yet, to give them the benefit of their knowledge. When some of them started to insult him, so did the others, and it was then that curses began to be hurled about. A middle-aged man, busy munching boiled peanuts he took out of the paper bag he held in one hand, stepped forward brazenly and expertly spat out a peanut that caught him on the cheekbone. He didn’t blink, didn’t even look round. Another stepped forward brazenly and threw at him a thumb-sized ice cube he had taken out of his mouth to show he was no less skilful and that ice cube caught him on the eyebrow. Again he didn’t blink, didn’t even look round but went on walking head hung. And when yet another, with the look of an impish child, squared up in the correct manner and with the tip of his umbrella thrust at him and hurt him in the hip while shouting Gee up! Gee up! as if chasing a bovid with a goad, the people around burst out laughing for fun mixed with cool jubilation devoid of any pity. A whole crowd followed the policemen and the accused. It was an exceptional event not to be missed. It was hard to explain why there were so many people, just as can’t be explained why there are always so many people when an accident or some disaster occurs. Destruction is delicious food, choice entertainment. The four or five policemen present that day were irritated and on edge. On the site of the crimes, they asked the people to stay outside, not to interfere, not to touch anything, to let officials do their work. The door of his rented room was taken out by one officer as it hardly stuck to its frame since the night of the event. The criminal had been brought back to the site of his crimes and was compelled to perform again the gestures of his crimes. He was compelled to recollect all he had done from the moment he had decided to do his deed. He sat against a partition with the weapon in his hand. The child lay there sleeping. His wife lay close by, sleeping also. At this point, he started to moan and it sounded like the plaint of an animal, which horrified and stupefied you at once. His memories must be surging forth, so vivid he could no longer control himself. You slipped among those that thronged the door but you couldn’t see well inside the room, as sometimes the people in front of you blocked your view. You heard his voice that broke into sobs in answer to the impatient questions of the police officer in charge of the case, who put the answers down in writing. The reconstruction took less than half an hour, actually. The case had nothing complicated but you had the impression it lasted an eternity and when he was pushed out of the room your heart started to beat wildly. He seemed to have grown even shorter and even more stooped. Tears flooded his face and it was clear he was trying his best not to sob. He yet again mumbled something you didn’t catch, but the tone of his voice between the incessant insults and curses of the people around him showed clearly that he was absolutely unable to control himself. The next instant, you heard his delirious voice firm up. Where was his wife’s body, he asked. Where was his daughter’s body, he asked. He wanted to go to the cremation of his wife and daughter. That’s what he wanted. Nothing and no-one would prevent him from doing so, he said. He’d go to the cremation of his wife and daughter. The people elbowed one another, pushed those in front, who pushed back, massed like waves of confusion that was little by little turning into madness. Insults, curses rang out increasingly dense, increasingly violent. But look at those crocodile tears. But listen to those sobs of a heart of stone. You bastard! You shit! He has a bloody hell of a nerve clowning around like this. Cut out the play-acting. And then, to everybody’s surprise, the fat middle-aged man that had spit a peanut at the criminal’s mug suddenly sprang
forward and rushed to him shouting insults and gave him a mighty slap on the face. Why do they keep alive an animal like him? Let’s make mincemeat of him! Let’s rip his limbs off! Let’s stick this pig! Let’s kill him once and for all! That man snorted and spit at him right in the face in a paroxysm of hatred. This time, he looked up and stared at his aggressor in bewilderment, then shook his head a little. But his stooped body stiffened when he found himself faced with the vociferations of a man of powerful built whose unbuttoned shirt revealed a Buddha amulet suspended at his neck by a nylon cord that swayed on his curly-haired chest. You’re evil as a beast! You’re worse than a beast from hell! You mangy cur! If you want to kill someone, why don’t you kill me? While he insulted him, he kicked him. Others started to spit on him, to throw stones at him and even a bag of crushed ice. Some beat him with pieces of wood picked up from the roadside or even with sugar cane stalks. A vendor struck him full-force with her shoulder pole. When he collapsed there were some to fall upon him and beat him up. The red flowers of evil splayed out their petals, red like their own blood, here and there, as if born out of the magic formulas of a magus without peer, and each flower growing up became another demon among demons in the midst of a cattle of beasts of hatred, of blind stupidity and of craven curiosity whose revengeful minds were irrepressible. Some of the disgruntled officers merely shouted out Beware the accused doesn’t escape! but they didn’t give a damn about the accused getting beaten up and endeavoured to contain the crowd grudgingly, pulled on the accused for him to get up, while uttering perfunctory warnings. They seemed to have witnessed this kind of event many times in their lives as cops. This criminal was hated by the mass of the people and deserved to be punished. How could they resist people’s will? And soon this criminal would be punished more severely anyway. The burning sun, the stifling air, the sky groaning with thunder intermittently as if to incite the people to further madness… He painfully rose to his feet again when he was pulled up and resumed his progress, head bent, body and face bruised. But then he stumbled and fell flat on his face, only to get up again and collapse motionless. The handcuffs forced him to crawl like a prehistoric crocodile in the middle of a jungle of wild plants full of evil intents that gave out a stench of revulsion and sometimes bent their bows to make him get up in order to make him fall again. He was a criminal and that was his punishment and he fully deserved such violent castigation. All along and on both sides of his path, he was the target of looks and curses of all kinds. It looked as though the people had for all eternity sought out someone on whom to discharge themselves of their sins, someone weaker than them and unable to react, and now they had found him. Some, while kicking and punching him non-stop, took advantage of it to admonish him. Why didn’t he toe the line? Why did he stray from the straight and narrow? Why didn’t he behave like a good man? None of them found that their own behaviour was out of the ordinary. He was a murderer, a killer of wife and child, not to mention the floating useless life he had led before that, given that he did nothing to earn a living, a piece of human garbage turned servile and fawning dog just to have enough to eat, enough to drink. The punishment inflicted on him was far too mild, actually. But what right have those people, you asked yourself, shouting in the silence of your shock, while he is suffering and lowly, hungry, assailed by anguishes of all kinds? Have those people ever helped him? Have they ever shared anything with him? What right have those people to pass their aggression full of hatred on to him and compel him to accept sins he hasn’t committed? You alone, you alone had that right, you kept repeating to yourself as you walked among them. You alone, you alone had that right. The violence the people did to him caused your aversion and condemnation to evaporate at once. It had started and it went on like a fairy tale in the land of nightmare, as if under another sky, under another sun, but it was of utmost seriousness, against a background of obscenities and sermons, against a background of unrelenting blows, against a background of noisy and vulgar comments. You felt as if you were among wild beasts. Those people that vied with each other in blind violence, taken individually were no doubt ordinary well-behaved citizens, good parents to their children, no doubt religious-minded, respectful of the moral code and always ready to acquire merits through the monks, eager to respect social conventions, but when they found themselves together in this kind of situation they behaved like animals. Once it was over, some of them would perhaps be sad about it and would find it hard to believe they had behaved like that. But, for sure, others would remember it as a heroic deed in their lives, and for sure, a great number of them didn’t agree with what was going on and had felt more or less as you felt but had just watched passively. Quite a few actually had tried to contain the crowd but they were unable to stop anything and in the end they had changed their minds: why should they protect a murderer? What for? They didn’t want to stand out. They didn’t want to be noticed. They were afraid of what people might say. The murderer at times raised his chin, at times pinched his lips tight, lowered his head and went on staggering forth. He had become some sort of object that was beaten out of human shape, gleaming with blood, sweat, mud, phlegm and saliva. He was a target that had to be destroyed, a spittoon that collected the disgust and hatred the people expectorated, and at one moment he spit out and his spittle was blood. But then, unexpectedly, he suddenly stopped, looking dazed, and faced the crowd that surrounded him as if he had just woken from a dream. He let out an amazing breath-stopping roar and started to yell in distress. He wasn’t addressing anyone in particular but all of the people there. It was a harsh and rasping yell. I’ve already confessed to everything. I’ve actually already condemned myself. I’m surely going to be punished for what I’ve done. Of that you can be confident. But don’t you punish me for what I haven’t done. Don’t do with me as if I were a beast. Do you hear me? I am not a beast. I swear to you that I’m not a beast. Or if I am a beast then I’m a beast as much as you all are, I’m one like you all are. His words made you want to step forward, to shout in distress and in passion, to shout at the top of your voice his very words: Don’t treat me as if I were a beast. Do you hear me? I am not a beast. I swear to you that I am not a beast. You couldn’t forgive him, and yet you would’ve wanted to know, had he looked at you then, even from the corner of his eye, how he would have reacted. But he didn’t notice you and your shout remained in the dark grotto of your conscience and stayed there safely for quite a long time. He never revealed anything about your relationship as you had feared. That secret remained a secret and yours alone, as on the very next day he committed suicide in the cell of the police station with the help of a small leather belt; he tied one end to a bar of the cell and slipped the other round his neck. His whole behaviour proved his determination, which all had decried and refused to believe, to put an end to his life right after his double murder was carried out. He had actually behaved as if he awaited death and had done everything for it to come to him. After the autopsy, a few of his hoodlum mates took his body to the small riverside monastery where the bodies of his wife and daughter were waiting and improvised a merit-making ceremony hardly anyone attended. After seven days the monastery put the three bodies aside, given that no relative had come to claim them. Two months later, a
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