‘ – so fine that you followed him, didn’t you?’
The head doctor agreed with this. ‘Yes, that was it,’ he said. ‘And I would even go further and ask whether you are sure the whole story isn’t about you. This Sim what-d’you-call-him – did he really exist?’
‘Sim Tweedsmuir,’ said Adam.
He shrugged his shoulders; the cigarette was burning the nail of his first finger and once again he had to crush it out on the floor with the toe of his slipper.
‘After all, I… I couldn’t tell you. I mean it doesn’t really matter whether it was I or he, you understand? In fact it doesn’t really matter whether it was you or me or him.’
He thought for a moment, then swung round to face the fair girl and asked abruptly:
‘What have you put me down as? A schizophrenic?’
‘No, a paranoiac,’ replied Julienne.
‘Really?’ said Adam, ‘I thought – I thought you’d have put me down as a schizophrenic.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I thought so. I don’t know.’
Adam asked if he couldn’t have a cup of coffee. He pretended he was thirsty, or cold, but what he really wanted was to make a slight change in the appearance of the room. He was tired of being in an infirmary, with infirmary chairs, an infirmary discussion, an infirmary smell and a great infirmary emptiness. Anyhow the doctor rang for the nurse and asked her to bring a cup of coffee.
His cup of coffee came very quickly; he put it down on his left knee and began stirring it slowly, to melt the sugar. He drank in sips, seldom raising his head. There was something in his mind, a kind of swelling; he couldn’t make out what it was. It might be like the memory of a dead person, the absurd idea of someone being dead and gone. Or, at a pinch, like being on a boat at night and remembering thousands of things, the waves for instance, and the gleams that are hidden by the darkness.
‘So you don’t know – do you know what you’re going to do now?’ Julienne began again; then she broke off and asked ‘Can you let me have a cigarette?’
Adam held out the packet. She lit her cigarette with a little mother-of-pearl lighter she took out of her handbag. She had clearly forgotten the others, and that might mean, at a pinch, that she would soon forget Adam too.
‘You don’t know what will happen to you…’
Adam made a gesture that brought his hand down on his trouser-leg, a fraction of an inch away from the kneecap.
‘No – but I have a pretty good idea, and that’s enough for me.’
She made a last effort to talk to him.
‘So there’s nothing you want?’
‘Yes there is – why?’
‘Well, what do you want? To die?’
‘Oh, not at all!’ smiled Adam. ‘I don’t in the least want to die.’
‘You want – ’
‘You know what I want. I want to be left in peace. No, not exactly that, perhaps… But I want lots of things. To do what isn’t me. To do what I’m told. The nurse told me when I first came that I must be good. There! That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to be good. No, I don’t really want to die. Because – because it can’t be so very restful to be dead. It’s like before birth. One must be bursting with eagerness to be born again. I think I should find that tiring.’
‘You’ve had enough of being by yourself…’
‘Yes, that’s it. I want to be with people now.’
He breathed in the smoke as it came out of Julienne’s nostrils.
‘I’m like that bloke in the Bible, you know, Gehazi, the servant of Elisha. Naaman had been told to bathe seven times in the Jordan, or something like that. To cure his leprosy. When he was cured he sent Elisha a present, but Gehazi kept it all for himself. So then, to punish him, God gave him Naaman’s leprosy. You understand? I’m Gehazi. I’ve caught Naaman’s leprosy.’
‘You know what?’ said Julienne – ‘Do you know what are the most beautiful lines of poetry ever written? It seems pretentious, of course, but I’d like to say them to you. May I?’
Adam nodded. She began:
‘It goes: “Voire, ou que je –” ’
But her voice faltered. She cleared her throat and began again:
‘Voire, ou que je vive sans vie
Comme les images, par cœur.
Mort!’
She looked to the left of Adam, a couple of inches to the left.
‘That’s by Villon. Did you know it?’
Adam drank some coffee and made a negative gesture with his hand. He looked at the others, who had been listening, a little embarrassed, a little ironical. And he wondered why he was left in pyjamas the whole blessed day. So he shouldn’t escape, perhaps? And perhaps, in spite of the vertical stripes, the things were not pyjamas. This might be the uniform worn in an asylum, or by sick people. Adam picked up the coffee cup from his knee and drank the rest. A little damp sugar was left at the bottom. He scraped it out with the spoon and licked it. He would have liked another cup of coffee, dozens of cups of coffee. He would have liked to talk about it, too. To the fair-haired girl, perhaps. He’d have liked to say to her, stay with me, in this house, stay with me and we’ll make coffee at any time of the day or night, and then drink it together; there would be a big garden all round, and we could walk about in it until morning, in the dark, with the planes flying overhead. The young man with dark glasses took off his glasses and looked at Adam.
‘If I’ve got it right,’ he said, ‘the idea of your friend’s religion was a kind of pantheism – or mysticism. A sort of link with God by means of knowledge? The path of certitude, what?’
Julienne R. added:
‘But what does it all matter to you? This stuff about mysticism? What does it all mean? Does it really interest you so much?’
Adam flung himself back in his chair, almost violently.
‘You haven’t understood. Not in the very least. It’s not God that interests me, you see. It wasn’t God for Sim either. Not God as such, as the creator, or what have you. Responding to a sort of craving for the final or the absolute, there, like a key unlocking a door. Good heavens, you’ll never understand in that way. That doesn’t interest me. I don’t need to have been created. It’s like this discussion. It doesn’t interest me for what it is, for what it appears to be. Only because it fills a vacuum. A terrible, unbearable vacuum. Between two levels of life… Between two stages, two periods, you see what I mean?’
‘But then what good does it do, all this mystical stuff?’ asked the spectacled student.
‘None at all. Absolutely none. It’s as though you were talking to me in a language I don’t understand. What good do you expect it to do? I can’t tell you. It would be like trying to explain why I’m not you – Take Ruysbroek, for instance; what good did it do him to draw distinctions between the material elements, earth, air, fire and water? It might have been poetry, of course. But it wasn’t. Mysticism served to raise him to the level – not the psychological level, eh? not that – the level of the ineffable. It doesn’t matter where that level lay. No matter what level. The important thing is that at a certain moment in his life he believed he had understood everything. Since he had made the connexion with what he had always called God, and that God being by definition eternal, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, Ruysbroek too was all those things. At least during his attacks of mysticism. And towards the end he may even have been permanently at his level, his state of full effusion. That’s it. It isn’t knowing that matters, it’s knowing one knows. It’s a state in which culture, knowledge, speech and writing become worthless. By and large, if you like, it might be a sort of comfort. But never an end in itself, you see, never an end in itself. And at that level, of course, there haven’t been so very many real mystics. You understand – speaking in the dialectical manner – but the relationship is different, of course – or perhaps one is oneself. It’s simply a state. But when you get down to it, it’s the only possible outcome of knowledge. In any o
ther way, knowledge leads to a dead end. And then it ceases to be knowledge. It takes a form in the past tense. Whereas there it’s suddenly exaggerated, it becomes so enormous, so overwhelming, that nothing else matters. One is that one is – Yes, that’s it. To be is being…’
Mlle R. gave a faint shake of the head; her lower lip quivered, as though she were torn between contradictory ideas.
‘Very clever, all that,’ said the spectacled fellow, ‘but that’s all one can say for it…’
‘It’s meaningless, a lot of metaphysical bombast,’ another student interrupted. The spectacled fellow went on:
‘I don’t know – I don’t know if it has occurred to you that it’s a kind of argument that has no end to it. Like the reflections in a triple mirror. Because, for instance, I can reply that one is that one is that one is that one is. And so forth. It seems to me to be more like rhetoric. The type of rhetoric that amuses a boy of twelve. Syllogisms. This kind of thing: a boat takes six days to cross the Atlantic, therefore six boats will take one day.’
‘I don’t – ’
‘Because, because the concept of existence implies a unity. A unity which is the consciousness of being. And because this consciousness of being is not the same as its definition in words, which can be multiplied ad infinitum. Like anything imaginary. There’s no reason why it should ever stop. Eh?’
‘That’s not true,’ said Adam. ‘That’s not true. Because you’re making a confusion. You’re confusing existence as real experience with existence as cogito, as the point from which thought starts and to which it returns. You think I’m talking about psychological concepts. That’s what I dislike about you. You’re always trying to drag in your blasted analytical systems, your psychological stunts. You’ve adopted a particular system of psychological values, once and for all. Useful for analysis. But you don’t see, you don’t see that I’m trying to make you think – of a much wider system. Something that goes further than psychology. I’m trying to get you to think of a huge system. Of a kind of universal thought. Of a purely spiritual state. Something representing the culmination of reasoning, the culmination of metaphysics, of psychology, philosophy, mathematics, the lot. Yes, it’s exactly that: what’s the culmination of everything? It’s to be to be.’
He switched to Julienne R.
‘It’s because just now I said something about a state of ecstasy. So you assumed it was a psychological condition. Something that will yield to treatment. Something like paranoid pathological delirium and so forth. I don’t give a damn for that. I’ll try to tell you what it is, and have done with it. After that, don’t ask me what I think about Parmenides, because I shan’t be able to tell you any longer…’
Adam pushed his chair back and wedged his shoulders against the wall. It was a cold, solid, white-tiled wall that one could easily take into partnership, either for a struggle or for a doze. Besides, it would certainly re-echo the vibrations of Adam’s vocal cords, transmitted through his back, and carry them all over the room, thus sparing him the fatigue of speaking loudly. Adam explained, his words hardly articulated:
‘I could tell you about something that happened a year or two ago, and which has nothing to do with stuff about God or self-analysis or anything of that kind – Of course you’re at liberty to analyse it by the usual psychological criteria if you want. But I don’t think that would be any use. In fact that’s the very reason why I’m choosing something that seems to have no connexion with God, metaphysics and all that stuff.’
He stopped and looked at Julienne. He saw her face move almost imperceptibly, at the base of the nostrils and round the eyes, as though stirred by some complicated rage. And suddenly, without anyone else having noticed the change, he felt terribly ridiculous. He bent forward, away from the supporting wall, exposing himself to the biting gaze of his enemies. And he said calmly, aware throughout his being that only this fair-haired girl could understand him:
‘Yes…’
At intervals of 7 seconds he said again:
‘Yes – Yes.’
She said: ‘Go on.’
Adam reddened. He drew his legs in under his chair, as though about to get up. It was as though thanks to those few seconds, to a dark-ringed glance from an unknown girl and to the words ‘Go on’, brought out in a muffled tone after an infinitesimal mental hesitation, a pact of friendship had been signed between them. In her turn she crushed out her cigarette end with the toe of her black court shoe. In form and substance, the situation curiously resembled that of a man and a woman, strangers to each other, suddenly aware of having been photographed side by side by some street photographer.
‘It’s not worth it,’ Adam grunted, ‘you don’t like the anecdotal style.’
She said nothing, simply bent her head; not quite as low as the first time, however, so that only the front half of the S came into view. On the other hand the movement was sufficient to loosen the front of her dress, and Adam saw two silver threads, the two sides of a chain, that met in the cleft of her breasts. The chain certainly ended lower down, between the cups of her brassière, with a little mother-of-pearl cross, or a medal of the Virgin set in aquamarines. The idea of concealing something rather sacred, the picture of a divinity, against the most eminently biological part of a woman’s body was slightly fantastic. It was childish, touching, or else pretentious. Adam looked round at the others. Except for the spectacled student, who was writing in his notebook, and the Martin girl, who was talking to the head doctor, they all showed signs of weariness. Embarrassment had given way to boredom and was taking strange, nightmarish forms, prompting, it seemed, a perpetual repetition of the same gestures, sounds and smells.
Adam sensed that this might last for another fifteen minutes, certainly not more, and decided to make the most of what time remained to him.
‘No, I’ll tell you, it’s not worth while. For one thing you don’t like the anecdotal style, and for another thing, in a way, from the point of view of truth, from a realistic standpoint, that’s not it, either…’
‘Why not?’ said Julienne.
‘Because it’s literature. Just that. I know we’re all more or less literary, but it won’t do any longer. I’m really tired of – It’s bound to happen, because one reads too much. One feels obliged to put everything forward in a perfect form. One always feels called upon to illustrate the abstract idea by an example of the latest craze, rather fashionable, indecent if possible, and above all – and above all, quite unconnected with the question. Good Lord, how phoney it all is! It stinks of fake lyricism, memories, childhood, psychoanalysis, the springtime of life and the history of the Christian religion. One writes cheap novelettes full of masturbation, sodomy, Waldensians and sexual behaviour in Melanesia, when it isn’t the poems of Ossian, Saint-Amant or the canzonettas placed in the tabulary by Francesco da Milano. Or ‘Portrait of a Young Lady’ by Domenico Veneziano. Shakespeare. Wilfred Owen. Joâo de Deus. Léoville Lhomme. Integralism. Fazil Ali Clinassi, etc. etc. And the mysticism of Novalis. And the song of Yupanqui Pachacutec:
Like a lily of the fields I was born
Like a lily I grew tall
Then time went by
Old age came
I withered
And so died.
And Quipucamayoc. Viracocha. Capacocha-Guagua. Hatunrincriyoc. Intip-Aclla. The promises of Menephtah. Jethro. David’s kinah. Seneca the Tragedian. Anime, paran-dum est. Liberi quondam mei, vos pro paternis sceleribus poenas date. And all that: Markovitch cigarettes, the Coupe Vétiver, Wajda, Cinzano ashtrays, ball-point pens, my ball-point pen, BIC No 576 – reproduction “APPROVED 26/8/58, Pat. Off.” All that. Eh? Is it correct? Does it mean anything? Is it correct?’
Adam ran his hand through his close-cropped hair. He felt that the gesture gave him an American air.
‘You know what?’ he said. ‘You know what? We spend our time turning out rubbishy cinema. Yes, cinema. Theatre as well, and psychological novels. There’s hardly any simplicity left in us, we’re croaker
s, half-portions. Weary Willies. You’d think we’d been invented by some writer of the thirties, who’d wanted us to be affected, handsome, refined, full of culture, full of filthy culture. It sticks to my back like a wet coat. It sticks to me all over.’
‘Eh – what is simple, at that rate?’ The rather ill-timed interruption came from the spectacled student.
‘How d’you mean, what’s simple? Don’t you know? Haven’t you even the faintest idea, then?’ Adam’s hand went to his pocket in search of the packet of cigarettes, but stopped, tense, before getting there.
‘Do you really not see it, life, life the whore, all round you? You don’t see that people are alive, alive, that they’re eating, etc.? That they’re happy? You don’t see that the man who wrote “the earth is blue like an orange” is a lunatic or a fool? – Of course not, you say to yourself there’s a genius, he’s dislocated reality in a couple of words. You run them off, “blue, earth, orange”. It’s beautiful. Whatever you like. But I personally need a system, or I go mad. Either the earth is orange or the orange is blue. But in the system that consists of employing words, the earth is blue and oranges are orange. I’ve reached a point where I can’t stand freak talk any longer. You understand, it’s too difficult for me to find my way to reality. Maybe I’ve no sense of humour? Because according to you it takes a sense of humour to understand that stuff? You know what I say? I’m so far from lacking a sense of humour that I’ve gone much further than you. And there it is. I’ve come back ruined. My kind of humour lay beyond words. It was hidden and I couldn’t give it expression. And as I couldn’t put it into words, it was much vaster than yours. Eh? In fact it was boundless. You know. Myself, I do everything that way. The earth is as blue as an orange, but the sky is as bare as a clock, the water as red as a hailstone. Or better still – the coleopterous sky floods the bracts. To want to sleep. Cigarette cigar besmirches the souls. 11th. 887. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z & Co.’
The Interrogation Page 21