Philippe Claudel - The Investigation

The Investigator smiled weakly and then lay down on the bed, once again without taking the trouble to undress. He rolled onto his side, drew his knees up to his stomach, tucked his chin into one shoulder, and closed his eyes.

Immediately he plunged into a deep sleep, holding the medicine bottle and the dry sausage, one in each hand: an old sausage, desiccated and inedible, and a medicine bottle containing tablets he couldn’t even take because he had no water and couldn’t get into the bathroom. The two items, in short, were unequivocally of no use, but they nonetheless bore witness to a touching human possibility in a world that appeared to him more and more unfounded.

SOMETHING WAS RINGING. A timorous, quavering, tired sound. The telephone. Like the previous morning. A little light was coming in through the closed shutters. The telephone. The Investigator opened his eyes. How small the room was, and how narrow! He felt as though he’d slept in a box. The ringing continued, but he couldn’t see any telephone. Where could it be, damn it? Nothing on the walls. Nothing on the armoire, or on the door of the armoire, or on the bathroom door. The ringing, though exceedingly weak, didn’t give up. Under the bed? Could someone have been so irrational as to put a telephone under a bed? No, nothing down there. The ringing went on. He pressed one ear against the armoire door, which he wouldn’t have been able to open in any case, but the ringing wasn’t coming from inside the armoire. The ceiling? The ceiling was all that was left! Could the telephone be attached to the ceiling? The ringing, timid but regular, persisted. The Investigator was on all fours on the bed. He didn’t want to look up; it was simply inadmissible that someone could have installed a telephone on the ceiling. The ringing didn’t stop. He resigned himself to tilting his head slowly upward, and there was the telephone, mounted a little to the left of the circular neon light.

He bounded to his feet on the bed, stretched out his arms toward the telephone, tried to reach the receiver clipped to its cradle, missed it, dislodged it on his third try, and caught it as it yo-yoed at the end of its rubber cord.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” replied a muffled voice, terribly far away.

“Can you hear me?” the Investigator asked.

“Can you hear me?” the voice repeated.

“Who is this?”

“Who is this?” the distant voice answered.

“I’m the Investigator.”

“I can’t take it anymore!” the distant voice said. “I can’t open it.”

“Open what?”

“It’s horrible, it’s absolutely impossible to open!”

“Open what?” the Investigator hollered.

“Impossible … I’ve tried everything. And it’s so hot! Help me …” the voice stammered, dying down.

“Are you still there?”

“I’ll never be able to leave.… It’s impossible.”

“But leave what? Where? Who are you?”

“Like a rat …” said the voice, and then it fell silent.

The Investigator looked at the receiver. No more words were audible, but the telephone hadn’t been hung up; he could still hear breathing. However, there was no longer anything human about that breathing. It sounded like wind blowing over a flat, desolate landscape. Who was the caller? Was he the same man who’d called him the previous morning? How could he find out? And what could he do? Not a thing, no doubt about that. Someone must be watching his movements. This was all a joke, only a joke.

After a few seconds, he stood on tiptoe, reached up to the base of the telephone, which was screwed to the ceiling, and put the receiver back on the hook; and at that moment, only at that moment, did he realize that he was completely naked.

An idiotic reflex made him cover his groin with both hands. But who could see him? The room had only one window, and the closed shutters protected him from any prying eyes. Besides, even though he didn’t wish to verify his conviction, he was positive that he’d find the same concrete-block wall behind the shutters in this room as he had in room 14.

Why was he naked? He wasn’t in the habit of sleeping in the nude. The Investigator felt so ashamed that he hid himself, head and body, under the bedcovers. All the same, he couldn’t stay there indefinitely. He rolled on the bed, wrapping the sheet around him, got to his feet on the mattress, and started looking for his clothes. He found the old sausage and the medicine bottle without difficulty, but there was no trace of his undershirt, his undershorts, his shoes, his shirt, his trousers, his suit jacket, or his raincoat. Vanished, evaporated, gone without trace. And yet they had to be there somewhere.

The Investigator tried to remember where he might have put his clothes, but since he was utterly unable to recall getting undressed, it was all the more difficult for him to figure out what he’d done with them. His interior dialogue came to an end with a violent sneeze, then another, then a third. His stopped-up, running nose obliged him to breathe through his mouth, at an elevated rate, so that he looked like a goldfish imprisoned in a bowl. A boiling-hot shower, or even an ice-cold one, wouldn’t do him any harm, he thought. It would give him a boost, stimulate his mind, invigorate his body. All he had to do was get into the bathroom!

Wrapped in his sheet, which gave him the air of a short, round-bellied Roman senator, the Investigator thought awhile before coming up with a plan he put into action without delay. The plan called for him to lift up the bed as high as possible — as high as his puny muscles would permit — to wedge the night table under it, and then, if he still had the strength, to raise the bed even higher, jamming the chair between the night table and the bed frame. In the end, the bed was standing nearly vertically on one side, and the bathroom door was free.

He could open it.

TO HIS GREAT ASTONISHMENT, he found the bathroom a model of refined luxury. He’d never have suspected that such a grandiose space, its walls decorated with pale-green mosaics topped by a fretwork frieze of studs gilded with fine gold, could exist within the precincts of the Hope Hotel; the bathroom was probably the sole remaining vestige of a time when the establishment really did provide first-class lodging. And to think, this sumptuous bathroom came with the room he’d been put in, which was, as he could certify, incontestably the narrowest, nastiest, wretchedest room in the Hotel — it was a mystery that passed his understanding!

A pearly light caressed the heavy gold fixtures of the two sinks, the bidet, the large bathtub — which had been hollowed out of a block of porphyry — and the shower, a spacious enclosure completely covered with bluish glass-paste tiles. From multiple loudspeakers — none of which he was able to locate, but which seemed to have been built into the walls — came music that mingled the cries of exotic birds, a gently stroked tambourine, soft brasses mimicking the sound of small coins falling on a stone floor, and flutes simultaneously shrill and mellow. In the center of the room, a small fountain threw up a stream of water, whose blithe gurgling and steamy vapor sent the Investigator into a reverie of distant seaports, of black and naked female slaves, of palm fronds wielded to cool his brow, of big ships anchored in the harbor, of their ebony macassar-wood decks laden with sacks of spices, pearls, amber, and bitumen. He’d been compelled to read a little poetry for school assignments in his youth, but he’d never understood any of it. And what he’d found especially hard to understand was that men could waste their time writing poems, which served no useful purpose, none at all; cold, precise investigative reports written to give an account of proven facts, to narrow a search for truth, and to draw valid conclusions struck him as a more intelligent — indeed, as the only valid — way of using language and serving humanity. How ill and unnerved must he be, that the mere sight of an opulent bathroom could set him daydreaming about languorous Negresses and palm wine, Oriental pastries and belly dances?