5
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 comer, 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 thisthat 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-! 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.
vVhereas, 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 shuffie, 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.