The damages to the room were catastrophic. The wooden chair had eventually broken under the pressure of the bed, which had pivoted on its side and toppled over, striking the telephone on its way down and ripping it from the ceiling, along with the neon tube, before smashing the night table and staving in the door of the armoire. Destabilized by the blow, the armoire had fallen onto its side, blocking the door that led to the old man’s bathroom.
Exhausted, the Investigator slid down to the floor and curled himself up with his head resting on his knees. Shaken by nervous spasms, in despair at what he considered the hopelessness of his situation, he felt like crying, but his body wouldn’t let him, as if it, too, had joined his tormentors. He would have liked to be no more. Yes, to disappear. How strange human desires are sometimes. Even though men fear death, they often consider it a solution to their problems, without even realizing that it solves nothing. Absolutely nothing. It doesn’t have to solve anything at all. That’s not its role.
He felt something a little cool against his right thigh and opened his eyes: It was the medicine bottle left by the Policeman. He picked it up, gazed at it for a few seconds without managing to conceive the smallest thought in its regard, opened it, dumped all the tablets into his mouth, and started to chew them. Taken without water, they had a taste like aromatic herbs, pleasant and fresh. He reduced them to a slightly bitter pulp, which he then swallowed.
The room looked like a tiny battlefield. As such, it became an image, but of what combat? And if there had been a combat, who was the victor, and who was the vanquished? The Investigator imagined the bill the Giantess wouldn’t fail to present to him. It would, he was sure, amount to a good part of his savings. Maybe even the whole of them. Strangely enough, the prospect didn’t bother him. He invested money without much knowing why, without even the desire to make use of it. At the end of every year, he had a meeting with the Financial Counselor, a man who would explain to him, with the aid of curves and diagrams, the most comfortable places for his money to nestle, places where it could nap in all tranquillity, like a pet, surrounded by all affection and necessary care, and where it would, beyond the shadow of a doubt and under the best possible conditions, reproduce itself. He didn’t understand much of what he was being told, but in the end he would agree to the Counselor’s proposals. Like most of his contemporaries, therefore, he was getting ready to die with money put aside. All at once, he realized the absurdity of that situation. If he had a little money, why keep it? For whom? Let it serve some useful purpose, like paying for damages! Why not?
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.