Hardly anyone listened after that when Masson testified that I was an honest man “and I’d even say a
decent one.” Hardly anyone listened to Salamano either,
when he recalled how I had been good to his dog and
when he answered a question about my mother and me
by saying that I had run out of things to say to Maman
and that was why I’d put her in the home. “You must understand,” Salamano kept saying, “you must understand.” But no one seemed to understand. He was
ushered out.
Next came Raymond, who was the last witness. He
waved to me and all of a sudden, he blurted out that I was
innocent. But the judge advised him that he was being
asked not for judgments but for facts. He was instructed
to wait for the questions before responding. He was
directed to state precisely what his relations with the
victim were. Raymond took this opportunity to say that
he was the one the victim hated ever since he had hit
the guy’s sister. Nevertheless, the judge asked him
whether the victim hadn’t also had reason to hate me.
Raymond said that my being at the beach was just
chance. The prosecutor then asked him how it was that
the letter that set the whole drama in motion had been
written by me. Raymond responded that it was just
chance. The prosecutor retorted that chance already had
a lot of misdeeds on its conscience in this case. He
wanted to know if it was just by chance that I hadn’t
intervened when Raymond had beaten up his girlfriend,
just by chance that I had acted as a witness at the police
station, and again just by chance that my statements on
that occasion had proved to be so convenient. Finishing
up, he asked Raymond how he made his living, and
when Raymond replied “warehouse guard,” the prosecutor informed the jury that it was common knowledge that
the witness practiced the profession of procurer. I was
his friend and accomplice. They had before them the basest of crimes, a crime made worse than sordid by the
fact that they were dealing with a monster, a man without morals. Raymond wanted to defend himself and my
lawyer objected, but they were instructed that they must
let the prosecutor finish. “I have little to add,” the prosecutor said. “Was he your friend?” he asked Raymond.
“Yes,” R d aymon sa1″d. e “W were paIs.” The prosecutor
then put the same question to me, and I looked at Raymond, who returned my gaze. I answered, “Yes.” The
prosecutor then turned to the jury and declared, “The
same man who the day after his mother died was indulging in the most shameful debauchery killed a man
for the most trivial of reasons and did so in order to
settle an affair of unspeakable vice.”
He then sat down. But my lawyer had lost his
patience, and, raising his hands so high that his sleeves
fell, revealing the creases of a starched shirt, he shouted,
“Come now, is my client on trial for burying his mother
or for killing a man?” The spectators laughed. But the
prosecutor rose to his feet again, adjusted his robe, and
declared that only someone with the naivete of his
esteemed colleague could fail to appreciate that between
these two sets of facts there existed a profound, fundamental, and tragic relationship. “Indeed,” he loudly
exclaimed, “I accuse this man of burying his mother
With crime in his heart!” This pronouncement seemed
to have a strong effect on the people in the courtroom.
My lawyer shrugged his shoulders and wiped the sweat
from his brow. But he looked shaken himself, and I
realized that things weren’t going well for me. The trial was adjourned. As I was leaving the courthouse on my way back to the van, I recognized for a
brief moment the smell and color of the summer evening. In the darkness of my mobile prison I could make
out one by one, as if from the depths of my exhaustion,
all the familiar sounds of a town I loved and of a certain time of day when I used to feel happy. The cries
of the newspaper vendors in the already languid air, the
last few birds in the square, the shouts of the sandwich
sellers, the screech of the streetcars turning sharply
through the upper town, and that hum in the sky before
night engulfs the port : all this mapped out for me a
route I knew so well before going to prison and which
now I traveled blind. Yes, it was the hour when, a long
time ago, I was perfectly content. What awaited me
back then was always a night of easy, dreamless sleep.
And yet something had changed, since it was back to
my cell that I went to wait for the next day . . . as if
familiar paths traced in summer skies could lead as
easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.