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 Policeman stood upright, gazed at the Investigator, seemed to reflect, and in the end dropped the sponge into the bucket. This act produced a strange sound, like a brief sob. Keeping his eyes on the Investigator, the Policeman slowly stripped off his gloves. Then he said, “Follow me.”
He said it without violence, almost gently. The Investigator, still surprised by the words that had come out of his own mouth and the tone in which he’d spoken them, was on the verge of apologizing, but he opted instead to remain silent and followed the other’s lead.
The Policeman stopped on the exterior steps of the Hotel and said, “I assume you’re getting ready to return to the Enterprise this morning for the purposes of your Investigation?”
It was a morning identical to that of the previous day: soft, caressed by a golden light, and filled with intense human activity. A concentrated, compact Crowd surged along the sidewalks on either side of the street, and the roadway was invisible under a flood of vehicles, packed closely together and rolling past at an extremely reduced speed. None of the drivers appeared to be complaining about the slowness of their progress.
“Mild in the morning, ferocious in the evening.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m speaking of the climate,” the Policeman explained. “At first, I was a little surprised, like you. It didn’t make any sense. During the first part of the day, the air is springlike, even summery, but inevitably, toward the end of the afternoon, there’s snow, followed in the evening hours by a frost that chews up your face, and then, to cap things off, down comes the night, too soon, falling like a guillotine blade. That could be a metaphor for life, but I’m not the Poet, I’m the Policeman.
“You pay too much attention to appearances. I really wonder how you can conduct an Investigation of any sort with so little discernment. You see me wearing a housekeeper’s smock and carrying a brush, and you jump to premature conclusions. Because my temporary office looks like a broom closet, you tell yourself I’m a simple cleaning person who’s lost his mind. No, don’t protest! According to what I’ve been told, that’s just what you thought. What a lack of imagination on your part! I could have taken offense. I could have arrested you on the spot — you’ve given me any number of reasons for doing that, ever since yesterday morning. I could have exercised my arbitrary, limitless power and subjected you to torture of one kind or another, but I believe in the virtues of pedagogy. Come with me.”
The Policeman crossed the sidewalk with the most breathtaking ease. The Crowd instantaneously divided into two separate floods. Men and women moved out of his way as he approached, colliding with one another to let him through. No one even grazed him. He reached the curb effortlessly and turned around to assess the Investigator’s reaction.
His mouth agape, the Investigator was staring as though he’d just witnessed a miracle. Observing this, the Policeman shrugged his shoulders and smiled, as if to say that the Investigator hadn’t seen anything yet. Then he turned toward the street, simply raising one arm and, at the same time, placing his left foot on the asphalt roadway. All the vehicles stopped at once. The sight was astonishing. It was as if a sea had abruptly parted, revealing its rocky bottom — in this case, ordinary blacktop, with ruts or potholes here and there — and forcing its waters to one side or the other. The Policeman crossed the street in a few seconds and stepped onto the opposite sidewalk. There, too, the Crowd took the greatest care to avoid him.