‘Wait, wait a minute, I – ’ the girl broke in. Adam continued:
‘I’d like to stop this silly game. If you knew how I’d like to. I’m crushed, soon nearly crushed…’ he said, his voice not weaker but more impersonal.
‘You know what’s happening?’ he asked. ‘I’ll tell you, just you. What’s happening is that people are living there, there and everywhere; what’s happening is that some of them are dying of heart-failure, quietly, at home, in the evening. What’s happening is that there are still people who are unhappy, because their wife’s left them, because their dog is dead, because their little boy chokes when he swallows. You know – And we, we, why do we have to put our oar in?’
‘Is that why you did all THAT?’ the girl demanded.
‘All WHAT?’ shouted Adam.
‘Well, those things – all those things that they – ’
‘Wait!’ said Adam. He was hurrying, as though ashamed of explaining himself:
‘I’ve had enough of it! That’s enough psychopathology for today – I mean – there’s nothing left to understand. It’s all over. You’re you and I’m me. Stop trying to put yourself in my place all the time. The rest is balls. I’ve had enough of it, I – do please stop trying to understand. You know, I – I’m ashamed – I don’t know how to put it. Don’t talk about it all any more…’
He suddenly lowered his voice and bent towards Julienne R., so that only she could hear him.
‘This is what we’ll do: I’ll talk to you very softly, just to you. And you must answer in the same way. I’ll say to you hello, how are you? and you’ll say to me, I’m very well, thank you. You see how I want it to be: and then, what’s your name, you’re pretty, I like the colour of your dress, or of your eyes. What’s your sign? Scorpio, Libra? You’ll answer yes, or no. You’ll talk to me about your mother, what you had for your meal, or the film you’ve seen at the cinema. The countries you’ve been to – Ireland, the Scilly Isles. You’ll tell me something that happened during your holidays, or your childhood. The first time you ever used lipstick. The time you got lost on a mountain. You’ll tell me whether you like going for walks in the evening, when it’s getting dark and one can hear hidden things moving. Or about when you went to look at the exam results, standing out in the rain, and what you were thinking as your eye ran down the list of names. You’ll talk to me very softly, telling me such tiny things that I shan’t even need to listen. Stories of storms of equinoctial gales, autumn in Brittany with heather growing above your head. When you were scared, when you couldn’t get to sleep and you used to go and look out into the darkness through the slats of the shutters. And for the others, for the others, I’ll go on with my own story. You know, that complicated story that explains everything. The mystical business. Shall we?’
The others were leaning forward, watching; some of them – the fair-haired boy, for instance – were grinning sarcastically. They didn’t take the thing seriously; they were all eager for this other-world rigmarole to come to an end, so that they could get home, have dinner and go out for the evening. There was something on at the cinema and at the Opera it might be Gluck.
Adam could read consent all over the girl – on her neck, all round her neck, in the corners of her mouth, on her shoulders and breasts, down her spine and right down to her feet, which were rigid in their gold-buckled court shoes set at an infinitesimal angle. He pushed back his shoulders until they touched the wall; he stretched out his legs till they brushed against her bare knees. He could feel the red and black pyjama-stripes on his skin; they extended from him to a kind of solid, impenetrable surface that was now forming between himself and the group of students. He groped in the jacket pocket and found the packet of cigarettes. The student with the sun-glasses held out a box of matches to him at arm’s length. There were five matches in the little cardboard drawer, three of them used and two fresh. Adam lit the cigarette flawlessly; as the only temporal detail in his successful bearing, a drop of sweat ran down from his armpit and fell like a cold pin-prick, level with his second rib. But it happened so rapidly, and was after all so well tolerated, that nobody could have guessed. Julienne R., hunched up on her chair, showed the greater fatigue; she was obviously waiting for something. Not anything novel or strange, something socially inevitable; something calm and icy, like crossing out a word in a sentence, for example.
‘A year or two ago,’ Adam began, ‘to go on with the story I was telling just now – ’
Julienne R. picked up her exercise-book and prepared to jot down essentials.
‘I was on the beach with a girl. I’d been bathing, but she’d not gone in; she was lying on the shingle, reading a science-fiction magazine. There was a story in it called “Bételgeuse”, I think. When I came out of the water she was still there. I could see she was hot, and I don’t know why – probably to annoy her – I put my wet foot on her back. She was wearing a bikini. At that she jumped up and said something to me. I don’t remember what it was. But that’s the important thing. Two minutes later she came back to me and said, “Because you made me all wet just now, I’m going to take one of your cigarettes.” And she felt in the pocket of my trousers, which were lying beside me on the beach, to find the cigarette. I said nothing, but I began to think. Two hours later, I remember, I was still thinking about it. I went home and looked in the dictionary. I swear this is true. I looked up every word, so as to understand. And even then I couldn’t understand. I spent the whole night thinking about it. By about 4 in the morning I was crazy. I’d got what the girl had said on my brain. The words were flying in all directions. I could see them written up everywhere. On the walls of my room, on the ceiling, in the squares of the windows, along the edge of the sheet. It was bothering me to death. Then I began to get things straight again. But it wasn’t the same now. It was as though everything had become either false or correct, from one day to the next. I said to myself, no matter how I twist The Sentence, or the facts that are parallel to it, it MUST be pure logic. I mean I began to understand everything, clearly. And I thought I must go, push my motorbike into the sea, and all that. I said to myself that the – ’
But Adam had already become invisible to them all, as he had been obliged to do with his mother, with Michèle and with many other people; sitting alone at the lightest end of the infirmary, he seemed to be hovering slightly, with his thin limbs, his egg-shaped head and his left hand, from which the cigarette stuck out horizontally. His body, stiffly upright on the metal chair, seemed to be smoking amidst involuntary chaos; some mere trifle, his prognathous jaw, his sweat-beaded forehead and perhaps his triangular eyes, was turning him into a prehistoric creature. It was as though he were perpetually climbing out of some muddy yellow water in the form of a lacustrine bird, its feathers flat against its skin and every tiny muscle in movement to prise it skywards. His voice rolled down over the terrestrial population, no longer particularly comprehensible, and carried him along on its waves like a kite. Above him, close to the ceiling, two blue globes were bumping together, the shock of their clashing curves reverberating in magnetic storms. It was like the idea of a God of destiny, a knot of mysteries and canonizations, born one day from the spark between two cog-wheels in a locomotive. Adam was turning into a sea. Unless he had fallen asleep, without the pose, owing to the magnetic influence of Julienne R.’s gaze or the hypnotic persuasion of a mere striped pyjama suit. In any case he was drifting backwards, soft, transparent, undulating, and the words were rattling together in his mouth like pebbles, with strange rumbling noises. A bubbling network had lined the cramped room, and the others were in danger of following it. When Adam stopped talking and began to emit feeble grunts, the doctor decided to intervene; but it was too late. He called out two or three times ‘Hello! M. Polio! M. Polio! Hey!’ shaking Adam by the shoulder. Then he noticed a kind of grin across Adam’s bony face, sharpening his parchment-coloured features. It began high up, just below the cheekbones, and split the face in two without parting the lips or revealing ev
en the tip of an incisor. At this he gave up all hope and sent for the nurse. Slowly, one by one, they left the cold room, while Adam was led away, tottering, down the corridor.
From the depths of his slumber, Adam felt them going; his lips moved and he almost whispered ‘good-bye’. But not even a grunt came out of his throat. Somewhere or other a blue ball-point pen was squeaking slightly as it crossed the page of an exercise-book and wrote the one word: ‘Aphasia’.
While Adam went round one corner of the passage and then another, leaning on the nurse’s warm arm, he was entering a region of fable. He was thinking, perhaps, very softly, very tenuously, far ahead of his frozen vocal cords, that he was really in his proper place. That at last he had found the beautiful house of his dreams, cool and white, built amid the silence of a wonderful garden. He was telling himself that he was happy, all alone in his beige-painted room, with its single window through which the sounds of peace flowed in unbroken. He had no objection; it was to be his at last, that perennial repose, that boreal night with its midnight sun, with people to look after him; out-door walks and subterranean slumbers; even, now and then, a pretty nurse whom one could lead into a thicket at dusk. Letters. A visitor from time to time, and big parcels of chocolate and cigarettes. There would be the annual celebration on Founder’s Day, 25th April or 11th October. Christmas and Easter. Perhaps tomorrow the blonde girl would come to see him. Alone this time. He would take her by the hand and talk to her for a long time. He would write her a poem. After a couple of weeks, all being well, he would be allowed to write letters. Then, towards the late autumn, they’d be able to stroll in the garden together. He would say to her, I can stay here for another year, perhaps not so long; after that, when I leave, we’ll go and live in the South, at Padua or Gibraltar. I’ll work a bit, and in the evening we’ll go to night-clubs or to a café. Now and then, when we feel like it, we’ll come back here for a month or two. They’ll be glad to see us and they’ll give us the best room, the one that looks over the garden. Outside the dead leaves are crackling in the sun and the living leaves are rustling in the rain. One can hear a train. The corridors smell of vegetable broth, everything seems to be hollow, warm and yet cool. That’s the moment to dig oneself a hole in the ground, pushing aside the twigs and crumbs of earth, and get into it, feet first, well hidden, to spend an invalid’s winter. After that there’ll be the cup of tilleul and then darkness, closing over the clouds of the Last Cigarette as though over Sinbad’s magic smoke. At a pinch, a bell may ring. A mosquito is prowling round the lamp, making a noise like a marble-polishing machine. That’s the moment to surrender the earth to the termites. The moment to escape backwards and pass through the stages of past time. One is caught in the torpor of the evenings of childhood, as though in bird-lime; one is smothering in the fog, after some meal or other, in front of a curiously empty holly-patterned plate with smears of soup left on it. Then comes the cradle period and one dies, suffocated in swaddling-clothes, choking with rage at being so small. But that’s harmless. Because one has to go back even further, through blood and pus, to one’s mother’s womb and there, arms and legs curled into an egg-shape, with one’s head against the rubber membrane, fall into a dark sleep, peopled by strange terrestrial nightmares.
Adam is all alone; he lies on his bed beneath strata of draughts, expecting nothing any more. He is enormously alive, staring up at the ceiling, at the spot where No. 17’s haemor-rhage came through three years ago. He knows that everyone has gone away now, right away. He is going vaguely to sleep in the world allotted to him; opposite the high window, as though to counterbalance the six swastikas formed by the bars, a single cross hangs on the wall, mother-of-pearl and pink. He is inside the oyster, and the oyster is at the bottom of the sea. He still has a few bothers, of course; he will have to keep his room tidy, give samples of urine for analysis, answer test questions. And one is always at the mercy of being unexpectedly released. But with any luck he’ll be here for a long time, attached to this bed, these walls, that garden, this harmony of bright metal and fresh paint.
While awaiting the worst, the story is over. But wait. You’ll see. I (please note I haven’t used that word too often) think we can count on them. It would be really strange if one of these days there were not something more to say about Adam or some other among him.
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Interrogation
The Interrogation Page 22