The Stranger (11 page)

Meanwhile, the sun was getting low outside and it wasn’t as hot anymore. From what street noises I could hear, I sensed the sweetness of evening coming on. There we all were, waiting. And what we were all waiting for really concerned only me. I looked around the room again. Everything was the same as it had been the first day. My eyes met those of the little robot woman and the reporter in the gray jacket. That reminded me that I hadn’t tried to catch Marie’s eye once during the whole trial. I hadn’t forgotten about her; I’d just had too much to do. I saw her sitting between Céleste and Raymond. She made a little gesture as if to say “At last.” There was a worried little smile on her face. But my heart felt nothing, and I couldn’t even return her smile.

The judges came back in. Very quickly a series of
questions was read to the jury. I heard “guilty of murder” … “premeditated” … “extenuating circumstances.” The jurors filed out, and I was taken to the little room where I had waited before. My lawyer joined me. He was very talkative and spoke to me more confidently and cordially than he ever had before. He thought that everything would go well and that I would get off with a few years in prison or at hard labor. I asked him whether he thought there was any chance of overturning the verdict if it was unfavorable. He said no. His tactic had been not to file any motions so as not to antagonize the jury. He explained to me that verdicts weren’t set aside just like that, for nothing. That seemed obvious and I accepted his logic. Looking at it objectively, it made perfect sense. Otherwise there would be too much pointless paperwork. “Anyway,” he said, “we can always appeal. But I’m convinced that the outcome will be favorable.”

We waited a long time—almost three-quarters of an hour, I think. Then a bell rang. My lawyer left me, saying, “The foreman of the jury is going to announce the verdict. You’ll only be brought in for the passing of sentence.” Doors slammed. People were running on stairs somewhere, but I couldn’t tell if they were nearby or far away. Then I heard a muffled voice reading something in the courtroom. When the bell rang again, when the door to the dock opened, what rose to meet me was the silence in the courtroom, silence and the strange feeling I had when I noticed that the young reporter had turned
his eyes away. I didn’t look in Marie’s direction. I didn’t have time to, because the presiding judge told me in bizarre language that I was to have my head cut off in a public square in the name of the French people. Then it seemed to me that I suddenly knew what was on everybody’s face. It was a look of consideration, I’m sure. The policemen were very gentle with me. The lawyer put his hand on my wrist. I wasn’t thinking about anything anymore. But the presiding judge asked me if I had anything to say. I thought about it. I said, “No.” That’s when they took me away.

For the third time I’ve refused to see the chaplain. I don’t have anything to say to him; I don’t feel like talking, and I’ll be seeing him soon enough as it is. All I care about right now is escaping the machinery of justice, seeing if there’s any way out of the inevitable. They’ve put me in a different cell. From this one, when I’m stretched out on my bunk, I see the sky and that’s all I see. I spend my days watching how the dwindling of color turns day into night. Lying here, I put my hands behind my head and wait. I can’t count the times I’ve wondered if there have ever been any instances of condemned men escaping the relentless machinery, disappearing before the execution or breaking through the cordon of police. Then I blame myself every time for not having paid enough attention to accounts of executions. A man should always take an interest in those things. You never know what might happen. I’d read stories in the papers like everybody else. But there must have been books devoted to the subject that I’d never been curious enough to look into. Maybe I would have found some accounts of escapes in them. I might have
discovered that in at least one instance the wheel had stopped, that in spite of all the unrelenting calculation, chance and luck had, at least once, changed something. Just once! In a way, I think that would have been enough. My heart would have taken over from there. The papers were always talking about the debt owed to society. According to them, it had to be paid. But that doesn’t speak to the imagination. What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap to freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.

Despite my willingness to understand, I just couldn’t accept such arrogant certainty. Because, after all, there really was something ridiculously out of proportion between the verdict such certainty was based on and the imperturbable march of events from the moment the verdict was announced. The fact that the sentence had been read at eight o’clock at night and not at five o’clock, the fact that it could have been an entirely different one, the fact that it had been decided by men who change their underwear, the fact that it had been handed down in the name of some vague notion called the French (or German, or Chinese) people—all of it seemed to detract from the seriousness of the decision. I was forced
to admit, however, that from the moment it had been passed its consequences became as real and as serious as the wall against which I pressed the length of my body.

At times like this I remembered a story Maman used to tell me about my father. I never knew him. Maybe the only thing I did know about the man was the story Maman would tell me back then: he’d gone to watch a murderer be executed. Just the thought of going had made him sick to his stomach. But he went anyway, and when he came back he spent half the morning throwing up. I remember feeling a little disgusted by him at the time. But now I understood, it was perfectly normal. How had I not seen that there was nothing more important than an execution, and that when you come right down to it, it was the only thing a man could truly be interested in? If I ever got out of this prison I would go and watch every execution there was. But I think it was a mistake even to consider the possibility. Because at the thought that one fine morning I would find myself a free man standing behind a cordon of police—on the outside, as it were—at the thought of being the spectator who comes to watch and then can go and throw up afterwards, a wave of poisoned joy rose in my throat. But I wasn’t being reasonable. It was a mistake to let myself get carried away by such imaginings, because the next minute I would get so cold that I would curl up into a ball under my blanket and my teeth would be chattering and I couldn’t make them stop.

But naturally, you can’t always be reasonable. At other times, for instance, I would make up new laws. I would reform the penal code. I’d realized that the most important thing was to give the condemned man a chance. Even one in a thousand was good enough to set things right. So it seemed to me that you could come up with a mixture of chemicals that if ingested by the patient (that’s the word I’d use: “patient”) would kill him nine times out of ten. But he would know this—that would be the one condition. For by giving it some hard thought, by considering the whole thing calmly, I could see that the trouble with the guillotine was that you had no chance at all, absolutely none. The fact was that it had been decided once and for all that the patient was to die. It was an open-and-shut case, a fixed arrangement, a tacit agreement that there was no question of going back on. If by some extraordinary chance the blade failed, they would just start over. So the thing that bothered me most was that the condemned man had to hope the machine would work the first time. And I say that’s wrong. And in a way I was right. But in another way I was forced to admit that that was the whole secret of good organization. In other words, the condemned man was forced into a kind of moral collaboration. It was in his interest that everything go off without a hitch.

I was also made to see that until that moment I’d had mistaken ideas about these things. For a long time I believed—and I don’t know why—that to get to the
guillotine you had to climb stairs onto a scaffold. I think it was because of the French Revolution—I mean, because of everything I’d been taught or shown about it. But one morning I remembered seeing a photograph that appeared in the papers at the time of a much-talked-about execution. In reality, the machine was set up right on the ground, as simple as you please. It was much narrower than I’d thought. It was funny I’d never noticed that before. I’d been struck by this picture because the guillotine looked like such a precision instrument, perfect and gleaming. You always get exaggerated notions of things you don’t know anything about. I was made to see that contrary to what I thought, everything was very simple: the guillotine is on the same level as the man approaching it. He walks up to it the way you walk up to another person. That bothered me too. Mounting the scaffold, going right up into the sky, was something the imagination could hold on to. Whereas, once again, the machine destroyed everything: you were killed discreetly, with a little shame and with great precision.

There were two other things I was always thinking about: the dawn and my appeal. I would reason with myself, though, and try not to think about them anymore. I would stretch out, look at the sky, and force myself to find something interesting about it. It would turn green: that was evening. I would make another effort to divert my thoughts. I would listen to my heartbeat. I couldn’t imagine that this sound which had been with me for so long could ever stop. I’ve never really
had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head. But it was no use. The dawn or my appeal would still be there. I would end up telling myself that the most rational thing was not to hold myself back.

They always came at dawn, I knew that. And so I spent my nights waiting for that dawn. I’ve never liked being surprised. If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there. That’s why I ended up sleeping only a little bit during the day and then, all night long, waited patiently for the first light to show on the pane of sky. The hardest time was that uncertain hour when I knew they usually set to work. After midnight, I would wait and watch. My ears had never heard so many noises or picked up such small sounds. One thing I can say, though, is that in a certain way I was lucky that whole time, since I never heard footsteps. Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right. Because I might just as easily have heard footsteps and my heart could have burst. Even though I would rush to the door at the slightest shuffle, even though, with my ear pressed to the wood, I would wait frantically until I heard the sound of my own breathing, terrified to find it so hoarse, like a dog’s panting, my heart would not burst after all, and I would have gained another twenty-four hours.

All day long there was the thought of my appeal. I
think I got everything out of it that I could. I would assess my holdings and get the maximum return on my thoughts. I would always begin by assuming the worst: my appeal was denied. “Well, so I’m going to die.” Sooner than other people will, obviously. But everybody knows life isn’t worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn’t much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living—and for thousands of years. In fact, nothing could be clearer. Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying. At that point, what would disturb my train of thought was the terrifying leap I would feel my heart take at the idea of having twenty more years of life ahead of me. But I simply had to stifle it by imagining what I’d be thinking in twenty years when it would all come down to the same thing anyway. Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter. Therefore (and the difficult thing was not to lose sight of all the reasoning that went into this “therefore”), I had to accept the rejection of my appeal.

Then and only then would I have the right, so to speak—would I give myself permission, as it were—to consider the alternative hypothesis: I was pardoned. The trouble was that I would somehow have to cool the hot blood that would suddenly surge through my body and sting my eyes with a delirious joy. It would take all my strength to quiet my heart, to be rational. In order to
make my resignation to the first hypothesis more plausible, I had to be level-headed about this one as well. If I succeeded, I gained an hour of calm. That was something anyway.

It was at one such moment that I once again refused to see the chaplain. I was lying down, and I could tell from the golden glow in the sky that evening was coming on. I had just denied my appeal and I could feel the steady pulse of my blood circulating inside me. I didn’t need to see the chaplain. For the first time in a long time I thought about Marie. The days had been long since she’d stopped writing. That evening I thought about it and told myself that maybe she had gotten tired of being the girlfriend of a condemned man. It also occurred to me that maybe she was sick, or dead. These things happen. How was I to know, since apart from our two bodies, now separated, there wasn’t anything to keep us together or even to remind us of each other? Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me. I wasn’t interested in her dead. That seemed perfectly normal to me, since I understood very well that people would forget me when I was dead. They wouldn’t have anything more to do with me. I wasn’t even able to tell myself that it was hard to think those things.

It was at that exact moment that the chaplain came in. When I saw him I felt a little shudder go through me. He noticed it and told me not to be afraid. I told him that it wasn’t his usual time. He replied that it was just
a friendly visit and had nothing to do with my appeal, which he knew nothing about. He sat down on my bunk and invited me to sit next to him. I refused. All the same, there was something very gentle about him.