He remembered his grandfather, who had been sent off to the war in his youth, and who came back with one arm missing and his lungs destroyed. He spent his days sitting on a chair, in the kitchen, by the window. His sole occupation was to gaze at the Brau and to feed the birds with crumbs of bread which he placed on the window ledge. The hungriest or the stupidest birds ended on a skewer and he roasted them in the embers of the fire after he had plucked them and rubbed them with oil and garlic.
The Mayor remembered that the old man used to eat them whole, without cleaning them, cracking their tiny bones in his magnificent and very white teeth.
He had come back from the war wounded, but he had returned. One of the very few in his company. The others were all dead. Rebels. Loudmouths. Anarchists and idealists mostly, whom chance had thrown together and who had risen up in a frenzy against their commanding officers, against the war, against the foolishness of a conflict that had gone on for more than three years and had already caused millions of casualties. The NCOs took a dim view of this. The rebellious soldiers were too numerous to stand trial and be shot. That would have risked sowing the spirit of revolution in other minds. They chose rather to send them to take up an impossible or pointless position. A hill with no strategic significance, on which the enemy’s artillery could spew out its volleys of gunfire and bombs without causing the least concern. They would be forced to commit suicide. They chose to make them die so that the war could continue its work of mass death without disruption, the ultimate aim being to reshape the map of the world, the powers and the nations, at the dawn of a new century. Of what importance, comparatively, were the lives of a few hundred men, even if what they said was true, even if what they thought was right?
All this was politics. Politics is dirty. It is not moral. Certain men choose to remain clean, whereas others accept that they must get their hands dirty. Both are needed, even if the former are always respected and the latter come to be loathed. Of course, the island was not the world, and the present situation was not war. But the Mayor was a leader who was concerned about his community, who took care of it, and who knew that in order to do this his job could lead him along muddy paths and to sacrifice an innocent man.
The notion that began to dawn in the mind of the Mayor would be considered immoral and contemptible by the great majority of people. Were he to do this and should God exist, the Mayor would without any doubt spend eternity in the next world shoveling burning coals, being so thirsty he could die, but never able to die. And if God did not exist, there were still the men. When they learned about what he had done, for everything comes to be known eventually, he would have to endure their horror and their opprobrium, perhaps even their justice. Who therefore would dare to be grateful to him?
And even in the highly unlikely event that it remained secret, he would know. He would have to live with what he had done until the end of his life, looking into the little round mirror in the bathroom every morning as he shaved, the face of a shit who believed he had acted for the best. A shit who would constantly be searching for excuses: it was the officers who gave him his orders, the situation was hopeless, communications had broken down and there was chaos; while he would be aware of his wife behind him, her presence, her smell, a woman who knew nothing about it and who, after she had yawned, would come up to him to give him a kiss on his neck which would cause him to shudder like the blade of an ax.
It is strange to think that people who are linked by the same activity can, at the same time, have feelings that are very different: while the Mayor, who was experiencing a deep disgust for himself and was resigning himself reluctantly to having to assume the role of a henchman, the Teacher, who was dressed in his sporting clothes, was making his way at a rapid and steady pace along the path that wound around the flank of the Brau. He did not appear to be suffering from the extreme heat, nor from his exertion, so stimulated was he by his decision and by what he had done. The feeling of being on the right and fair path gave him wings. Never had he run so easily, not knowing that in reality he was on the road to ruin.
As for the Superintendent, he was thinking once more of the scene in the Mayor’s office that morning. He liked the impression he had made. He liked to frighten people, to see other people having doubts, losing their self-confidence, using the wrong words, too, or muddling them, no longer able to choose the right ones. That had not been very difficult with the Mayor. He had known tougher customers. And he had left him without telling him everything. He had left him with questions to answer. He had simply presented the Mayor with the documents. Without informing him of the conclusions they allowed one to reach. He had destroyed his peace and tranquility. Like a weasel whose dirty fangs gnawed at its prey every second of its life, dismembered it, and left it half-eaten and contaminated in order to attack the next victim.
The Superintendent knocked back his glass of wine in a single gulp. He was sitting at a table on the terrace of the café. After his visit to the Mayor, he had intended to walk around the town, but very quickly the feeling that he was making his way through an anthill came over him; the size of the streets, that of the houses, the stifling impression of a labyrinth, everything contributed to the sense that he was making his way underground, but doing so in daylight, amid an oppressive heap of construction materials, each darker than the last: paving stones, pavements, walls, roofs, doors, shutters.
The men and women that he had passed hid their faces when they saw him, lowering their eyes, so that they lost all humanity and began to look like large, alarming insects. He had returned to his room and stretched out on the bed, after having taken from his suitcase a bottle of whisky which he had drunk straight from the bottle.
The anthill had vanished, and with it its occupants. He had thought again about his conversation with the Mayor, and the way in which he had departed from him, without saying a word, without revealing any of his intentions, leaving the councilor to roll his bright eyes over the bundle of photocopies, quitting the room without closing the door.
The Secretary had looked at him in alarm. He had noticed that her throat was speckled with red blotches as a result of the shock. He had given her a big smile. The red had shifted to her cheekbones. He had dozed off with this vision in his mind.
The Café Owner brought him the plat du jour. The Superintendent did not ask for any explanations. He would not touch it. He was not hungry. He was never hungry. He was constantly thirsty. He ordered a second bottle of wine.
Opposite him, in the center of the harbor square, a long table about twenty meters long had been erected. The guests had not yet arrived. A warm wind was rustling the paper tablecloths. Some of the napkins were on the ground. A glass had been knocked over. He thought of the Last Supper. Before it had begun. A subject that no artist had ever thought of depicting. Someone had laid the plates, the glasses, the cutlery, and had then gone away. A servant? One of the apostles? They were waiting only for Christ and his companions, and Judas, for the final act of the rather mundane tragedy that had occupied the minds of a large part of mankind for two thousand years.
The Superintendent had a weakness for Judas. Judas had been loathed now for such a long time. The Superintendent would have liked to be loathed for just as long. Like Judas. Love fades sooner or later. But not loathing. It lingers, even grows sometimes, and constantly reactivates itself. It is the driving force of the human species. In the long run, the triumph of Judas will endure longer than that of Christ, which can be seen crumbling everywhere. The proofs of love are lacking among men, whereas the signs of treason and evil proliferate. The Superintendent poured himself some more wine. In his mind he drank to Judas.
The fishermen gradually arrived and gathered around the table. They spoke in loud voices, hailing one another and laughing in a dialect the Superintendent did not understand. Some of them made their way toward a warehouse. They came out again carrying small casks, baskets filled with bread, jars, plates of cheese, and ham. A mass of food and bottles soon cluttered the ta
blecloth. It was no longer the Last Supper. You were suddenly walking straight into a painting by a Flemish primitive. An abundance of food, drinks, toothless laughter that split the dazed and sunburned faces, unsteady bodies, mounting drunkenness, stupid features. The crude and the idiotic. Eating and drinking. The omission of death, which, however, when you look carefully, can always be found somewhere in the painting: a skull at the foot of a tree, a branch in the shape of bones, two crows, a scythe placed next to a barn, a bare tree in the midst of ripe wheat fields, worms devouring fruit. And what about here, where was death hiding? Was it he himself who embodied it that day?
For his amusement, the Superintendent looked everywhere for real-life reproductions of paintings he had seen in galleries where he often used to go to relax and think before spending his spare time wandering from bar to bar. One might have taken him for a conventional drunkard, a new type of Sisyphus who would swap his rock for a glass that required emptying but never stopped being refilled for him. But alcohol, which was his most faithful companion, was also the most deceptive, because for a long time now it had forbidden him the slightest drunkenness, and the Superintendent was condemned, in addition to eternal lucidity, nevermore to know what he was looking for.
XVI
ON THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY, VARIOUS SIGNS SUGGESTED that something was about to happen.
There was already, and had been since dawn, an oppressive heat, without any breeze. The air seemed to have solidified around the island, in a dense and gelatinous transparency that here and there distorted the horizon when it did not obliterate it: the island hovered in the midst of nowhere. The Brau gleamed with meringue-like reflections. The bare, black lava that lay on top of the vines and the orchards shimmered as if it had suddenly become liquid again. The houses were very quickly filled with an enervating exhalation that wore out the body and the mind. There was no freshness to be enjoyed there.
Then there was a smell, almost imperceptible to begin with, which you could persuade yourself was something you might have dreamed about, or else that it came from human beings, from their skin, their mouths, their clothing, or from within them. But from one hour to the next the smell asserted itself. It crept in discreetly, almost secretively.
Some people believed that the odor came from the grapes that had been laid out to dry on the walls. Bunches that include grapes affected by the rain can in their gradual rotting process sometimes secrete this invisible, vaguely sugary mustiness, insipid yet seductive, that carries within it sensuous hints of overripe fruit, but also scents of venison, of badly scorched fur on the surface of which a few scraps of meat have been left behind that are starting to rot, and through which tiny white maggots are making their way.
And then, when it is not the grape, the vapors that come from the depths of the earth remain. The island should be imagined as one of many lids set down hurriedly over geological periods on top of the gigantic cauldron that is the planet, filled with burning molasses that never stop bubbling.
The island’s memory bears witness to three major eruptions of the Brau over the centuries, and to streams of lava which have almost entirely destroyed the houses every time and killed many people, and yet the survivors have never dreamed of deserting the place. When it is not the volcano’s safety valve that opens up, its side slopes periodically release steam and gasses, like a pipe-smoker’s dreams. That in itself is not the sign of an eruption. This faint stench is reminiscent of a hard-boiled egg that has been cut in half, left on a counter for days, and forgotten.
But what people smelled that Sunday had nothing to do with this. One had to face the facts. It was something very different from insubstantial and purely geological, chemical miasmas. There was something alive about this faint stench. And as the day went on, oppressive and torrid, the air seemed to grow heavy from all this invisible cooking.
The Mayor had not been wrong to say to Swordy that later on, when he thought back to the morning of the discovery of the three corpses, he would tell himself that it had never happened, that it was a nightmare, and gradually, by dint of telling himself that it was a nightmare, the notion would lose its consistency and its distinctness. Eventually, its outlines would lose their clarity. Its faded colors, like those on old Polaroid photos, would make the scene transparent. The bodies of the dead and those of the eyewitnesses would turn into specters, and then dissolve. There would then be only two or three small steps to take before finally reaching oblivion.
But things did not happen in this way, alas.
The Teacher did not have to come and knock on the Superintendent’s door on Monday morning, because on Sunday evening the Superintendent himself, accompanied by the Mayor, came to knock on his door. It was just after eight o’clock and the heat had not yet cooled, any more than the stench of decay had faded, which now wallowed shamelessly in the streets and did its best to get inside the houses.
When the Teacher opened his door and saw the two men, he smiled at the Superintendent and favored the Mayor with a grateful glance, but when the Superintendent spoke and asked him to confirm his civil status, he stopped smiling immediately and asked what was meant by this.
“You are under arrest.”
The Teacher’s lips began to quiver and he was unable to control the movement of his eyelashes, which blinked wildly as if their inner mechanism had suddenly malfunctioned. For him it was an enormous farce. The Superintendent and the Mayor, without saying a word, maintained their silence and stared at the Teacher, whose large body seemed to sag and grow weak. There they stood: a man who was astounded facing two others, all three motionless, with the night drooping over their heads.
The previous night, the Superintendent had gone to bed late. Sitting on the terrace of the café and helping himself to more wine the moment the bottle was empty, he had enjoyed the spectacle of the fishermen’s dinner. A succinct summing-up of mankind and its decline, or of the very tenets of society. A group like this that clinked glasses and laughed would, a few hours later, start shouting at one another and making acrimonious remarks and threatening gestures. The jokes turned into barbs, the laughter into arrows, the personalities grew menacing. It was not just the glasses brimming with alcohol that were responsible for this. It happened only when the film that had formed over a jar in which tarantulas, woodlice, and cockroaches were swarming was removed. It was not he who had created the poison. He was simply releasing it, nothing more.
Blows had been avoided that evening, but it had been a near thing. They had all left without saying goodbye to one another, staggering about, leaving their upturned chairs behind them and the banquet table strewn with broken glasses and litter. Only the Mayor had stayed behind, with a fisherman sitting beside him who had a trapeze-shaped head and hair like a bear’s fur. The Mayor was whispering in his ear while the other man was sipping glasses of brandy, his elbows on the table, and nodding from time to time. When the two men eventually got to their feet, they shook hands at length.
The following day, Sunday, while he was still stretched out on his bed in his pajamas but awake, there was a knocking at his window. The Superintendent drew back the curtains and recognized the Mayor. Without bothering to get dressed, he opened the door to him and invited him in. The Mayor preferred to remain in the doorway. The Superintendent grabbed hold of a bottle of whisky from the bedside table and knocked back a mouthful with which he gargled as if it were a mouthwash, then swallowed it.
“It’s early, Mr. Mayor. Too early for me. I’m a creature of the night. I should have warned you.”
“I would not have allowed myself to disturb you were the matter not serious.”
“A serious matter? You’ll get me excited! A serious matter on your island that doesn’t exist, that barely exists—I’m curious. Could you enlighten me?”
“The best thing would be for you to come with me to my office. They’re waiting for us there.”
“Who is?”
“The witnesses.”
The Superintendent snatched hold o
f his clothes which had been thrown in disorderly fashion onto the chair. He started to slip on his boxer shorts.
“Do you know why I do this job? No, you don’t know, and you would never guess. I chose it because I wanted to kill. Yes, kill. The funniest thing about this story is that I’ve killed very few people in my career.”
The Superintendent was struggling with a vest that had once been white, but which with wear and tear and countless washes, no doubt badly supervised, had become yellow in places.
“I took the wrong path. Had I chosen violent crime, as was the tradition in my family, I would probably have been more likely to realize my dream. What pleasure I took in gazing into the face of my father, who was a real scoundrel, when I informed him that I wanted to study the history of art and not carry on the business of racketeering and extortion of every kind that had become his specialty. He died shortly afterward. I hope I was partly responsible for his death.”
The Superintendent had slipped on his trousers. He sniffed his socks before putting them on. He put on his shoes and tied the laces. The Mayor gazed down upon his skull and its shiny bald spot. He would have liked to have a brace with which to drill a hole inside it, to see the shape of the Superintendent’s brain. Standing in the doorway, he could hear the sea and the cries of the birds. He also detected a strange smell which he attributed to the lack of ventilation in the shop that the Café Owner had converted into a bedroom, and also to the body that had slept there, but perhaps the smell came from outside, without his being able to detect the source.
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