As if to illustrate all those unaccustomed thoughts, grating on a brain accustomed to less effort, the Investigator sprang to his feet, seized the back of the demolished chair, and used it to complete the destruction of the premises, reducing the neon tube to glass powder, shattering the telephone’s plastic shell, smashing the armoire, disemboweling mattress and eiderdown. He finished the job by taking hold of what remained of the night table, throwing it against the window—glass shards showered down on the devastated bed—and methodically laying waste whatever was intact in the room. Then he stopped, a little out of breath, but perfectly happy.
A violent energy, risen from unsuspected depths, electrified him. For the first time in his life, he’d performed a gratuitous act, and he wasn’t at all sorry. On the contrary, when he imagined what the Policeman’s face would look like when someone showed him the battlefield, the Investigator laughed a good deal. He’d decided that he was going to take back control of the situation, whatever it might be. He had an Investigation to conduct, and he would conduct it. He wasn’t going to let a few fairly deranged individuals, an impossible hotel, a shameless old man, a hostile city, and an enterprise, even the Enterprise itself, get the best of him. Wrecking his room was an affirmation of his freedom. History, he thought, crushes only those who are willing to be crushed.
He cleaned himself as best he could, using his sheet to remove from his skin the hardened, cracked, whitish crust left there by the Mauve Lilac. He opened his suitcase to take out some clean clothes. The fact that it contained a drill, a set of bits for wood, another set for metal, and a third for concrete, along with five pairs of women’s underpants, two brassieres, a Bible in Dutch, some apple-green sweatpants, a pair of rubber boots, a canary-yellow woolen dress, and three handkerchiefs that he recognized as his own, failed to diminish his newly regained vitality in the least. The Bellhop who’d cleared out his former room—as he had doubtless done with many others—had simply mixed up the personal belongings of several different Guests and then redistributed them at random to the various suitcases.
Without the slightest embarrassment, the Investigator slipped on a pair of the panties—pink synthetic fabric, with a delicate black lace trim—the jogging pants, the boots, and the yellow dress, which when sliced in half was miraculously transformed into a pleasantly warm sweater. After some little hesitation, he ultimately decided to leave the drill in the suitcase, telling himself that the tool would be more an encumbrance than anything else. On a hook fastened to the inside of the door, he found his raincoat, which someone had hung there. It had been cleaned and pressed, and it was protected by a thin plastic cover. An expert, faithful hand had mended the torn pocket and the big rip on the side. A piece of paper was pinned to the raincoat: With the compliments of the Management.
His heart was beating a hundred miles an hour. Throughout his body, he felt electric discharges contracting his muscles, including those of his face and eyelids, surprisingly and deliciously. It promised to be a fine day, he was certain of it. He was no longer simply a vapid, weak, drab character, profoundly distressed by a sequence of events he couldn’t understand. He was no longer just the Investigator. He was becoming a hero. He’d emancipated himself, he’d rebelled, he’d seized the power he’d been denied. The mouse would kill the cat. Chemistry was working miracles in him.
He left the room, violently slamming the door; the doorknob remained in his hand. He bounced it on his palm for a few seconds, negligently, rather like a fruit he was about to bite, and threw it over his shoulder, whistling. Then he went down the uneven stairs, two by two, on his way to the breakfast room.
XXIX
YOU’RE IN ROOM 93?” asked a Server wearing white tails and black pants.
“Absolutely!” the Investigator heard himself reply, in a revivified voice. With a gesture, the Server invited him to follow.
The breakfast room was once again packed with people, but the Investigator recognized that they weren’t the same as those who’d filled the room the previous day. This morning there were a lot of families, with children of all ages, including infants, and also many very old persons. They were all poorly dressed, in clothes that were often far from ordinary: Many of the men wore enormous, shabby robes that trailed on the ground, big, threadbare sheepskin jackets, or faded, sleeveless anoraks; the majority of the women had on black, cone-shaped coats, buttoned down the front from throat to feet. Headgear included knotted scarves, handmade ski caps, fur hats, felt toques, seedy-looking berets, decrepit bowlers.
The people were all tightly clutching bundles, or distended, pathetic imitation-leather gym bags, or cardboard boxes tied up with string, or enormous plastic sacks, many of them held together with brown adhesive tape, or ancient pasteboard suitcases that looked to be at the bursting point. Most of the individuals shared physical traits: angular faces, small stature, pronounced noses, olive or frankly gingerbread complexions, dark curly hair, mauve-circled eyes that their evident state of exhaustion made seem even larger.
It was a welter of bodies.
The Investigator couldn’t get over it. There were even more people than there had been the previous day. It seemed that the floor must crack under their weight. And what struck him with even greater force was the heavy silence that reigned in the spacious room. Those women, those men, those children, those old people—it was as if fatigue had sealed their lips and suppressed their desire to communicate.
They looked like peasants or workers or day laborers or farmhands from another century, beasts of burden whose bodies, unceasingly subjected to undernourishment and the law of work, were compelled to make do with their meager bones and the bit of flesh that covered them. Everything about the breakfast throng betrayed poverty, indigence, as well as the dread which that condition—no doubt undergone for decades or even centuries—had succeeded in depositing at the deepest level of their every movement, of every look in their eyes, like a genetic trait it’s no use struggling against. The same mark, the mark of the downtrodden, was imprinted on each of those creatures. But nothing allowed the observer to identify their origins unequivocally or to name the exact country they came from.
Most of them were gathered in dense clusters around tables intended to seat four. For lack of room, skinny children sat on the laps of adults scarcely bigger than they were. They were nibbling on rusks the Investigator recognized, rusks identical to the appalling things he’d been obliged to consume the previous morning, and next to them stood little cups of black coffee, scantily filled with a muddy brew the mere memory of which nauseated him. So all those people, every one of them inhumanly thin whatever their age or sex, nevertheless had to subsist on the same starvation diet.
“Tourists?” the Investigator inquired.
“You must be joking!” the Server replied. “Them, Tourists? Have you taken a good look at them? Have you got a whiff of them?”
“Please, not so loud, they could hear you!” the Investigator murmured.
“They can’t understand us, they’re not from here. I don’t know what language they speak, but it’s not ours, that’s for sure. They’re Displacees.”
“Displacees?”
“Yes, Displacees!” And when the Investigator seemed surprised, the Server took it upon himself to add, “What planet do you live on? For several months now, they’ve been getting turned away in droves, but they keep coming back, and there are always more of them. Have you noticed how many children those women put out? If we could avoid having anything to do with them, we would, but the Hotel is requisitioned by the Repatriation Service, practically every other day. Look at them. Do you think they’re unhappy? They’re just different, that’s all. I hate difference. And I love disinfectants. Take yourself, for example: You smell particularly good, so I’m favorably inclined toward you. Anyway, I was able to save you a table—it’s right over there. Management has asked me to express their deep regrets for exposing you to this unseemly spectacle and this disagreeable odor. I’ll be back in a moment with y
our breakfast.”
The Investigator walked over to the table the Server had indicated. Its four chairs were all empty. The other tables in the room, several of them only a few steps away, were occupied by large families, by men, women, and children pressed against one another in the greatest discomfort; the Investigator’s table, however, was like a protected reserve, a forbidden island. At the other tables, an average of twenty persons huddled wretchedly in an amount of space equivalent to what he had all to himself. Without looking around too much, the Investigator sat down, lowered his head, and waited.
He tried in vain to remember ever having heard of this phenomenon. “Displacees”? Of course, he knew that certain movements of populations were part of reality, and he was aware of the attraction his continent held for a great many individuals. But Displacees?
“Room 93?”
The Investigator didn’t have leisure for further reflection. The two Servers standing before him had spoken his room number in unison. He nodded, and with a single motion, the Servers placed two large trays on the table, wished that he would enjoy his meal, and disappeared into the Crowd, which opened a passage for them with some difficulty and very quickly closed up again, like two hands trying to keep their warmth in the hollow of their palms.
XXX
FOUR THICK SLICES OF BACON, three white sausages, two andouillettes with herbs, a ham omelet, four boiled eggs, six herring fillets marinated in vinegar and onions, some small gherkins in sweet-and-sour sauce, smoked salmon sprinkled with dill, reindeer meatballs, a jar of rillettes, an assortment of cheeses, a basket of Viennese-style baked goods, half a pound of butter, grilled toast, aniseed bread, poppy-seed bread, sesame-seed bread, honey, quince marmalade, rose jam, a slice of cheesecake, a pitcher of apple juice, a bowl of fresh fruit salad, some bananas, some peaches, some strawberries, a pineapple, five kiwis, a large pot of smoked black tea, and another of bergamot tea. Not a rusk in sight! Not a drop of vile black coffee! The Investigator couldn’t believe his eyes. So many delights, and all of them on the table in front of him, the empty-bellied starveling. His head spun at the sight of all that food, and his dizziness felt like intoxication. He didn’t know where to start, but he knew he had to, especially since he was afraid the Servers would change their minds or realize they’d made a mistake and come back for the trays.
He flung himself on the croissants, the omelet, the herbed sausages, the poppy-seed bread, cramming the food into his mouth with his fingers, barely chewing, swallowing things whole, gasping for air; he poured himself cups of steaming tea and drank them down in one gulp, thrust his fingers into the honey, tore apart a herring fillet spread with quince jelly, dunked a chocolate puff pastry into the rillettes jar, mopped up the herring marinade with bacon, wiped his lips with a slice of toast, which he then shoved into his mouth, chewed up and swallowed two bananas at once, nibbled on a reindeer meatball. He felt his belly filling up like a granary after the harvest. He smiled as he devoured, stuffing himself without stint, his head lowered to the bowls, the plates, the cups, abandoning all dignity, not caring in the slightest about the various sauces running down his chin or the stains on his sweater or the state of his fingers, which had been reduced to greasy tongs. And to think how hungry he’d been, so hungry he could have wept. A distant memory. He smiled as he gorged.
“Is everything all right?”
The first Server had just reappeared. At the sound of his voice, the Investigator raised his eyes. “Everything’s fine,” he said, gesturing at the carnage he’d already perpetrated on the contents of the two trays.
“If there’s anything you want, don’t hesitate to let us know,” the Server said. “That’s why we’re here.”
He bowed, turned, elbowed, and disappeared behind the screen of bodies massed around the Investigator’s table. Now only a few inches away from him, they formed a human wall, a compact masonry of eyes, hands, mouths, faces pressed against one another, a living mural of Displacees, observing him, imploring him. He was surrounded by old people and young people, women and men, children and adolescents, crowded next to one another, on top of one another, in thickly serried ranks, in three or four superimposed layers, like a mass grave for the living, and they looked at him, and their wide-open, staring eyes expressed their atrocious hunger, their longing to eat—perhaps even their willingness to kill for—a piece of bread, a slice of sausage, a disk of hard-boiled egg.
The person closest to him was a child. It might have been four or five, or maybe even ten, but it was so thin that it seemed beyond age. The Child—a little human being, scarcely alive, in fact almost dead, its grotesquely distended stomach touching the edge of the table where the food was piled—looked at the Investigator. It didn’t ask for anything. It merely looked at the Investigator with its empty eyes. It looked at him from the depths of its exile. It was no longer simply a Displacee. It was also a Witness.
The Investigator dropped the piece of sausage he was still holding between his fingers. No more room. Only with difficulty could he swallow what was in his mouth. His stomach hurt. He was suffocating. Those people were all so close to him. Too close to him. He couldn’t get any air. And the Child was staring at him. So were all the others, but the Child most of all, and there was something in its pupils that scored the Investigator’s soul like an engraver’s tool on a copper plate, and what that tool etched there were questions. Interrogations.
All sounds had ceased. The Investigator undid the big napkin he’d knotted around his neck and dropped it on the table, which was still laden with food. Then, slowly, he got up.
And to think, everything had started off so well.
Little by little, the massed Displacees gave way before the Investigator, as people do before gods or lepers. Just as he was stepping through the door, he met one of the Servers, who asked, “Are you leaving us already?” The Investigator made no reply; he held his belly with both hands and clenched his teeth. He felt like vomiting, but he sensed that he’d never be able to disgorge everything, to eject everything. Because you can never eject everything, he thought. Never. Just as he doubted that one could live happily somewhere without stealing the happiness of someone who lived somewhere else. He shivered. He felt as heavy as a manhole cover, the rubber boot was chafing his boiled foot, and, to top it all, there he was, turning into a philosopher. A pedestrian, banal philosopher, without breadth or depth, wearing a pair of women’s panties under apple-green sweatpants, and trotting out pedestrian thoughts, as worn out as old pots tired of always cooking the same soups.
XXXI
SOMEONE WAS DRUMMING on the door of the restroom he’d shut himself up in.
He’d had barely enough time to flee the breakfast room, cross the lobby, spot a door he’d never noticed before—the sign on it read “Men”—plunge through it, and vomit everything he’d just eaten. Now, though the heaving had finally subsided, he was still on all fours with his head half inside the toilet bowl, and the drumming on the door was getting louder.
“I’m coming …” he managed to gasp. His voice echoed as though in a cave. He rose regretfully to his feet, wiped his mouth with toilet paper, and unlatched the door.
“Well, I never!” The Policeman was standing in front of him. Attired in a mauve smock with white polka dots, he was holding a long-handled scrub brush in one hand and in the other the blue bucket, which was filled with sponges and cleaning products.
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t feeling very well …” the Investigator said with a moan.
The Policeman scrutinized his outfit but made no remark.
“I haven’t damaged anything, don’t worry. Or soiled anything, either. Take a look for yourself.”
The Policeman’s face suddenly hardened. “I’ve made no accusations. I was worried about you. I saw you charge into the restroom while I was busy finishing a report—I had my office door ajar, it’s too stuffy in there—and you treat me as if I were acting in the line of duty. What do you take me for? Do you think you’re the only one who
cares about others’ misfortunes? Can you believe that the Displacees’ pitiful psychological and hygienic conditions don’t concern me as much as they do you? I may be the Policeman, but that doesn’t make me any less a human being. And even if I don’t vomit up my breakfast as you do, their fate nonetheless touches me, and I do everything in my power to make their Displacement as transitory as possible. I try to ensure that, within a very short time, they return to their own proper place, which they should never have left. Now please stand aside, I have work to do.”
The Investigator was still going over in his mind what the Policeman had just said, but the latter, his hands protected by a pair of pink rubber gloves, vigorously sprinkled a yellow liquid redolent of bleach and pine resin on the toilet and then, using a sponge, scrubbed the porcelain bowl with all his might.
“You’re not a policeman. This isn’t a luxury hotel. This is not reality. I’m in a novel, or a dream, and, what’s more, probably not in one of my own dreams but in another’s dream, the dream of a complex, perverse being having fun at my expense.”
The Investigation Page 11
