‘You understand?’
‘Yes, yes, I understand,’ said the man.
‘And – haven’t you anything to tell us yourself?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you, why not? Do you live in the country?’
The man made as if to draw back, and the crowd seemed to do likewise.
‘No, I – ’
‘Are you selling something?’ asked a woman.
‘Yes, the word,’ said Adam.
The first bystander seemed to understand this:
‘So you’re a Jehovah’s witness? Eh?’
‘No,’ said Adam.
‘Yes, you – you’re a prophet?’
But Adam did not hear him; he turned back to the mysterious enigmas of his embryonic language, to his desperate isolation, the blockade protecting him from being overrun by the populace, and he went on with what he had begun:
‘Suddenly, on the earth, everything was different. Yes, at one stroke I understood everything. I understood that the earth belonged to me, and not to any other living species. Not to the dogs, not to the rats, not to the vermin, not to anything. Not to the snails or the cockroaches or the grasses or the fish. It belonged to the human beings. And so to me, since I was a human being. And do you know how I came to understand that! Something extraordinary had happened. An old woman had appeared. Yes, an old woman. An old woman. You’ll see what I mean. The road I was sitting beside was one of those steep, mountain roads. From where I sat, on these steps, I could see it sloping down and vanishing round a bend. Ahead of me there was just a bit of road, not more than a hundred yards; it was tarred, and shining under the clouded sun. Suddenly I heard muffled sounds, coming in my direction, I looked down the road, and there, coming into sight slowly, terribly slowly, was an old woman, a fat, ugly old woman, in a flower-printed coat that billowed round her like a flag. First I saw her head, then her shoulders, then her hips, her legs, and finally the whole of her. She was toiling up the tarred road, on her fat, blotchy legs, puffing like a cow, her mind a blank. I watched her emerging from the hill, like getting out of a bath, and coming up towards me. She cut a paltry figure, a black silhouette against the cloudy sky. She was, that’s it – she was the only moving thing in the whole region. Nature all round her was unvaried, motionless – except that – how should I put it? – it was making a halo round her head, as though she had the earth and sky for her hair. The town was still stretching away towards the sea, so was the river, the hills were still rounded and the trails of smoke still vertical. But they extended from her head. It was as though it had all tipped up. It had altered. It was she, you understand, she who’d made it all. The smoke, yes, that was a human thing all right. So were the town and the river. So was the bay. The hills – the hills had been cleared of trees and covered with telegraph poles, they were crisscrossed with lanes and gulleys. The road and the steps, the walls, the houses, the bridges, the dams, the airplanes – it wasn’t the ants, all that! It was she. A quite commonplace old woman. Fat and ugly. Not even fit to live. Organically incapable. Bulging with fat. Unable to walk straight. With bandaged legs, varicose veins, and cancer somewhere about her, in her rectum or somewhere. It was she. The earth was round and tiny. And human beings had worked it all over. There isn’t a single place on this earth, d’you hear me, not a single place on this earth that hasn’t got a road, a house, an aeroplane, a telegraph pole. Isn’t it enough to drive you mad, to think we belong to that race? It was she. It was she, this bundle of rags, full of entrails and stuff, of dirty, bleeding things, this dotty, muddy-eyed animal with a skin like a dried-up crocodile, its dewlap, its shrivelled uterus, its collection of drained-out glands, its lungs, its goitre, its yellow tongue all ready to stutter,… its gasps, like a stunned cow, its… its heavy cry.… Huh-huh… huh-huh .. swollen belly… broken veins… and its skull… bald, its hairy armpits scabbed with seventy-five years of sweat. It was she. She.… You – you see?’
Adam was speaking faster and faster; he was getting to the point where one no longer forms sentences, tries to make oneself understood. He was pressing right back against the painted iron railing; all that could be seen of him now was his head, which rose above the crowd and faced them, with something prophetic, something friendly about it; he was the man people point at, the one that sends them hurrying for the police, the one for whom they go to fetch their cameras, the one who’s either jeered at or insulted, according to choice.
‘Want to tell you. Wait. Can tell you a story. You know. Like over the wireless. Dear listeners. I can argue. I can argue with you. Who wants to? Who’d like to talk to me? Eh? Can we argue about something? We can talk about the war. There’s going to be a war – No.… Or about the cost of living. What’s the price of potatoes? Eh? It seems potatoes are enormous this year. And turnips quite tiny. Or about abstract painting. If no one has anything to say. Haven’t you anything to say? I can tell a story. That’s it. I can make up fables for you. On the spot. Here – I’ll give you some titles. Listen. The legend of the dwarf palm that wanted to travel in Eastern Europe. Or the ibis turned into a girl by a commercial traveller. Or Asdrubal the two-mouthed. And the Love-story of a carnival king and a fly. Or How Zoe, the Queen of Peloponnesus, found the treasure of the rock-tomb without really trying. Or The courage of trypanosomes. Or How to kill rattlesnakes. That’s easy. You need to know three things. Rattlesnakes. Are very vain. Don’t like jazz. And as soon as they see an edelweiss they fall into a cataleptic trance. So. This is what you have to do. You take a clarinet. When you see the snake you pull an ugly face at him. Being vain, they get in a rage and rush at you. At that moment you play them Blue Moon or Just a Gigolo. On the clarinet. They don’t like jazz. So they stop short. They hesitate. At that precise instant you take out. You take out of your pocket a real edelweiss, picked in the snow. And they fall into a cataleptic trance. So then. All you have to do is grab them and slip a p onto them somewhere. When they recover from the trance. They see they’ve become merely. That they’ve become merely prattle-snakes. And as they’re so terribly vain, this kills them. They prefer to commit suicide. They hold their breath. For hours. In the end it kills them. They turn quite black. Do you hear? etc.’
Adam talked from 2.10 p.m. to 2.48 p.m. The crowd of listeners had grown appreciably. They were beginning to look really wary, and their interruptions drowned Adam’s voice at times. He was talking faster and faster and more and more incoherently. He was hoarse with fatigue, and a kind of irritation had stolen over his face.
There were two deep furrows across his forehead now, and his ears were red. His shirt was clinging to his back and shoulders. He had talked so much, shouted so much, that he scarcely overtopped the crowd any more; he was fused with it, and his pointed head, with the thick hair and beard, seemed to hover among the listeners like somebody else’s head; instead of degrading it, despair had carved it into an effigy. It was as though a dull hatred had severed it from the trunk, on the threshold of some peculiar revolution, and as in days of yore, the populace, aroused by the hero, was carrying in its sticky centre, like a sea, a noble countenance that was still alive. At once innocent and shameful, the eyes shone madly in their deep sockets, caught in the mass hysteria like marbles in a string bag. Among them all they had built up an agglomeration of human flesh and sweat, indivisible in aspect, where nothing that was comprehended in it could continue to exist. Sudden cries, laughter, jests, the roar of engines, motor-horns, the sea and the boats, were all stripped of logic. Everything was coming and going confusedly, in jerks with the sound and colours of a riot.
The truth is hard to register; all of a sudden the pace quickened alarmingly. In a second, it was over. There was an eddy in the crowd, with cries, of anger perhaps. After that everything followed its natural course. Except for this strange, unexpected detail, nothing was left to chance. What I mean is that it was so simple and so automatic that when the crowd took action it was at least two hours ahead of its own schedule.
R. At last he was
in the shade, sitting in a cool, clean little room which faced north and was thus hermetically sealed against the sun. Not a sound to be heard except the faint plash of water flowing into a tank somewhere in the distance, and the cries of children playing a long way away, at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, in some park with sandpits and benches. The walls seemed to match these faint sounds, for they did not look strong; they were of hollow bricks, plastered over and then painted; the paint was cream-coloured and grainy-surfaced. These walls must be pleasantly damp with condensation, summer and winter alike. There was an open window in the exact centre of the outer wall. It was barred, and the sun, thus intercepted, threw vertical and horizontal shadows across the blankets on the bed and Adam’s striped pyjamas. The bars – three vertical and two horizontal – divided up a sky that was just like the walls. It was an arbitrary yet harmonious division into squares, and their number, twelve, brought a quaint reminder of the Celestial Houses as described by Manilius.
Adam was thinking of it at this very moment, as he sat in his striped pyjamas on the edge of the iron bed. They had given him permission to smoke, and he was making use of it and of a plastic ashtray. His cigarette, smouldering tip downwards at the bottom of the ashtray, was helping him to pursue an unlimited train of thought which could not be interrupted as long as the tobacco lasted. They had cut his hair and shaved him, and his face looked very young again. It was turned towards the monochrome rectangle of the window; Adam had already got as far as choosing one of the compartments formed by the intersection of the bars; owing to his bad taste, or perhaps accidentally, he had chosen the eighth, starting from the left. In any case, whether his choice had been deliberate or no, Adam was well aware that, according to Manilius, the Eighth Celestial House is that of Death. Knowing this made it virtually impossible for him to be sincere; there was no importance in anything he might imagine or believe on the basis of this single fact (irrespective of the data relating to angles, quadrille, sextile, etc., whether or no they could be confirmed by the ecliptic, the North–South line, the meridian or the First Vertical, or assimilated to the famous points on the equator, 30° and 60° – Whether or no one agreed with Manilius that the Eighth Celestial House was potentially the Third); he had chosen to play that game as he might have played Battleships, Consequences, hopscotch or Animal, Vegetable or Mineral – prepared from the start to keep to the basic rules.
That having been said, it was not too exactly himself, any longer. And what is more, it was not too exactly the window-bars either; it was six crosses intermingled, in the style of:
which made frames for other symbols, such as Aglaon and Tetragrammaton with 2 Maltese crosses, one inverted swastika, and one Star of David, or else Ego Alpha et Omega, or perhaps an alternation of Stars of David and suns.
If one had suddenly been transformed into that window, or if one had been facing Adam, one would have seen that he was sitting bolt upright on the raised edge of the mattress, with his head bent slightly forward and his hands resting on his knees, like someone just looking at the time. Seen thus, he looked as though he were thinking or as though he felt cold. He kept on staring at the same point, to the left.
The floor beneath his parallel feet was covered with dark red tiles, which had once been glazed; they were hexagonal in shape, and so strictly geometrical as to resemble a scale model of the room itself. The light coming through the window must undergo prolonged reverberation, as though the walls were covered with bevelled mirrors. It was the shiny paint and the innumerable facets of its grainy surface that reflected the light and threw it back continuously from point to point. He, Adam, knew the room well, having inspected it carefully at the very beginning: he granted it, despite its small size, a familiar, even family appearance, in fact soothing. It was deep and hard and austere. Everything, particularly the walls, stood out in cold, unmistakable relief. Yet it was this very coldness that he appreciated without seeing it; he did not dislike the matter of the place, because of the implication that a game was in progress, a game that required him, Adam, to adjust himself, to give way, and not the things around him. He knew he was succeeding, by stages; he remained hard, insensitized, motionless, and his temperature was going down. From 36.7° C to 36.4°. Sitting to the right of his cigarette, he was bathed in the cream-coloured half-light, grainy, moist, with no thought of passing time. There were lots of such moments in the day. He had been collecting them since early childhood: for instance when you’re lying in the bath and you feel the water changing gradually from hot to warm, warm to cool and cool to cold; and you lie stretched out, up to your chin in an alien element, looking up at the ceiling between two layers of steam and wondering how long the water will take to get icy cold again; you pretend you’re in a boiling pot and that by sheer force of will (or of Zen) you’re enduring the heat, getting the better of something like 100°C. You are destined to emerge shamefaced, deserted, naked or shivering.
And the bed: he often thought that later on, when he had money, he would get his bed put on wheels, and have himself pushed out of doors. He’d be warm, knowing it was cold outside, and he would keep himself to himself under the blankets, while remaining completely in touch with the outer world. The room was so cramped, so stifling, that he felt sure of this. That was perhaps what he wanted more than anything else. In any case it seldom happened to him, in fact hardly ever. He felt certain that if he fell asleep there he would have no need to turn over noiselessly in bed in the middle of the night and look all round, trying to understand what he was seeing, translating mentally, here an empty coat-stand, there a chair and a towel, further on the shadow of a bar enlarged by the moonlight, etc. No more need, before getting into bed, to learn by heart where things stood; no more need to lie with his head towards the door, so as to keep watch. Here there was a bolt on the door and bars across the window. He was enclosed, alone, the sole one of his kind, right at the centre.
Adam was listening slowly, without moving his eyes half an inch; there was nothing he needed. All sounds (the gurgle of water in the pipes, the dull thuds, the bursting of seed-pods, the cries from far away that came into the room, cut off one by one, the whispering of a fall of dust nearby, somewhere beneath a piece of furniture, the slight vibrations of the phagocytes, the tremulous awakening of a pair of moths because of a heavier knock on the other side of the wall) seemed to come from inside them. Beyond the walls there were more rooms, all of them rectangular, architecturally designed.
The same design was repeated in every section of the building, room, corridor, room, room, room, room, room, room, room, room, room, W.C., room, corridor, etc. Adam was glad to detach himself like that, with 4 walls, 1 bolt and 1 bed. In the cold and in a clear light. It was comfortable, if not durable. One ended sooner or later by suspecting as much and calling for it.
Outside, outside the sun was perhaps still shining; there were clouds, perhaps, in little wisps or perhaps only half the sky was covered. That was all the rest of the town; one felt that people were living all around, in concentric circles, thanks to the walls; one had, wasn’t that so, a great many streets, going in all directions; they divided the blocks of houses into triangles or quadrilaterals; these streets were full of cars and bicycles. By and large, everything was repetition. One was practically sure to find the same planes a hundred yards further on, with exactly the same basis angle of 35° and the stores, the garages, the tobacconists, the leather goods shops. Adam was working out the plan in his head and adding a lot of things to it. If you took an angle of 48.3°, for instance, well, you could be sure of finding it somewhere in the Plan. It would be a funny thing if there were no place for that angle at Chicago; and then, after finding it again, one needed only look at the drawing to realize at once what had to be done. At that rate Adam could never get lost. It was the curves that were the hardest; he didn’t understand how to react there. The best thing was to draw a graph; the circle was less complicated: one only had to square it (so far as possible, of course) and decompose it into a polygon: the
n there were angles, and one was saved. For instance he would extend the side GH of the polygon and get a straight line. Or he could even extend two sides, GH and KL, which would give him the equilateral triangle GLz, and then he would know what to do.
The world, like Adam’s pyjamas, was striped with straight lines, tangents, vectors, polygons, rectangles, trapezoids of all kinds, and the network was perfect; no parcel of land or sea but was divided with great precision and could be reduced to a projection or a diagram.
In fact one need only start out with a polygon of about 100 sides, drawn on a piece of paper, and one would be sure of finding one’s way about, anywhere in the world. By walking on along the streets, following one’s own vectorial inspiration, one might perhaps even – who can say? – get as far as America or Australia. At Chu-Cheng, on the Chang, a little hollow house with walls of papyrus is waiting patiently in sunshine and shade, amid the soft rustle of leaves, for the messiah-surveyor who, compass in hand, will one day come to reveal the obtuse angle that is splitting it asunder. And many others as well, in Nyasaland, in Uruguay or in the heart of Vercors, all over the world, on stretches of arid, eroding land, among the bushes of broom, covered with millions of angles swarming like vermin, with millions of squares as fatal as signs of death, of straight lines splitting the sky on the far horizon with lightning gestures. One ought to have gone everywhere. One ought to have had a good plan, plus faith; a complete confidence in Plane Geometry and a Hatred of all that is curved, all that undulates, sins on the side of pride, the circle or the terminal.
In the room at that moment, with the daylight coming in through the window, leaping forward and back in all directions and enfolding him as though in a sheet of sparks; with the cool, monotonous sound of waters; Adam was growing more tense; he was watching and listening intently, he felt himself growing, becoming a giant; he saw the walls extending to infinity, squares being added to squares, larger and larger, always a little larger; and little by little the whole earth was covered with this scribble, lines and planes intersecting with sharp cracks like rifle-shots, marked at their intersections by big sparks that fell away like round balls and he, Adam Polio, Adam P…, Adam, not severed from the Pollo clan, was in the centre, right at the heart, with the drawing all made out, all ready for him to take to the road, and walk, go from angle to angle, from segment to vector, and name the lines by scratching their letters in the ground with his fore-finger: xx’, yy’, zz’, aa’, etc., etc.
The Interrogation Page 18