‘What do you mean, spoke to me?’
‘Have there not been people who understood how remarkable it is, to forget nothing? Didn’t your teachers in school mark you out?’
Marcel sits for a moment, remembering.
‘I don’t think so. I didn’t do very well in school, in fact.’
He laughs, a strange kind of laugh. As if copying someone else’s laughter, Morel feels.
‘Not with your memory as it is?’
‘I don’t know,’ Marcel says. ‘My teachers didn’t seem to like me. They were often angry with me.’
‘Why?’
‘They said I wouldn’t work.’
‘Is that true?’
‘I thought I was doing as they wanted me to. I think I often didn’t understand them.’
Or maybe they didn’t understand you, thinks Morel.
‘I see. But no one knew about your memory? Your parents? Friends?’
Marcel thinks about friends. It’s a word he doesn’t associate with childhood very much. There was Ginette, of course, but Marcel wonders if she counts as a friend. He thinks about that, and then he chastises himself. Yes, of course she was a friend, even if he hadn’t understood everything about her, or what she wanted, and after all—
‘Marcel?’
Morel taps Marcel on the knee, bringing his attention back.
‘Your parents?’
Marcel thinks about that too.
‘My parents worked hard. And they were good to me. But I don’t know if they knew about my memory. Perhaps I can explain it to you like this, Doctor. I don’t think I knew myself about my memory for a very long time. I spoke to no one about it, and I assumed that everyone could do what I can do. I know that isn’t the case now.’
Morel battles between curiosity and frustration.
‘But someone must have noticed something, eventually? No?’
‘Well, for example, there was Monsieur LeChat. At the newspaper. He found out about my memory, but he grew cross with me too.’
‘And the patron of this club where you have been working? He must have given you the job because of it . . .’
‘Yes, but he thinks it’s—’
‘He thinks it’s a trick, am I right?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
Morel nods and closes his eyes for a moment. Such is the way with most people when faced with the impossible. Rather than admit that the impossible is possible, that a miracle has occurred, it is easier to pass it off as a mistake, as a fake, as a trick. That way, we do not have to change our understanding of the world.
‘Could you tell me more about your childhood, Marcel?’
Marcel appears to be staring at a spot hanging halfway in the air above their heads.
‘Marcel? Marcel . . . ?’
Morel taps his patient on the knee once more, and starts to understand why his teachers did not recognise the power of his mind. All too often, it seems that Marcel becomes lost inside it.
Something occurs to him then, and he tries a different approach. Perhaps he has been looking at this the wrong way. He has been trying to prove that Marcel’s memory is without limit, is of infinite breadth, but perhaps it would be as instructive to find out how far back it goes.
‘Marcel, could you tell me your earliest memory? Can you perhaps remember your early childhood, can you tell me something about that?’
‘Yes, of course,’ says Marcel. ‘But what do you want to know?’
‘Can you remember a time with your mother, perhaps, when you were very small?’
Marcel seems puzzled.
‘Yes. Of course. But what shall I tell you? Am I to tell you about every day of my life? How my mother would tuck me into bed every night? She would sing, most nights, I suppose if she wasn’t too tired, and lift up the bars of the bed, before—’
‘Wait,’ says Morel. ‘The bars on the bed?’
‘Well, I suppose bed is not the word. A cot would be the word, wouldn’t it, at that age?’
‘At what age?’
‘I mean, when I was a baby.’
‘A baby? You cannot surely expect me to believe that you can remember being a baby?’
‘Doctor, I already said that I don’t lie.’
‘Yes, but . . . Very well. Tell me more. How old are you? Can you speak?’
‘I knew how to say a few things. Mama, Papa. Horse.’
‘Horse?’
‘I had a wooden horse. A toy. It had a red mane for some reason, made of leather and a red tail, also of narrow strips of leather, and it was about so big, and was on wheels so you could roll him along the table, if you wanted, though I didn’t like to do that because I had damaged one wheel by dropping it on the—’
‘Yes, I see. Very good. Very good. And this is your earliest memory. Your mother, the cot, the horse?’
‘Oh no,’ says Marcel.
‘No?’ asks Morel, and he leans in a little closer. His voice drops a note or two. ‘Can you tell me what is?’
‘That’s harder,’ says Marcel.
‘Why?’ whispers Morel.
‘Because it is before I had words. I can recall the feelings and the sensations, however. Would you like me to tell you?’
Morel can only bring himself to nod.
‘So,’ says Marcel, and he looks up and to the left into the shadowy space that hangs by the ceiling in the corner of the cell. ‘It’s dark. Almost completely dark, though sometimes, very rarely, there is faint light. No, light would not be the word. You see, Doctor, it is hard because there aren’t words to go with the things I saw and felt. But perhaps I can say that the darkness decreases slightly. Yes, I feel happy putting it that way: the darkness decreases from time to time, just a little. But it doesn’t matter whether it is completely dark or not, it’s a good thing. I mean, I am safe; I feel safe where I am, and it’s warm, always just right. It’s dark, and I’m warm. And from time to time I hear my mother talking. I don’t know what she’s saying, of course, but I know her voice by now and she sounds happy, well, almost all the time, although there was one occasion when I know that she was upset, and her breathing came out in hard sobs and I think now that she must have been crying. But anyway, aside from her voice, I could sometimes hear other voices, and aside from the voices, there was always the drum. You know, the drum, drum, drum, the beat, you would say, I suppose the beat of her heart, so close by. And I used to like that, to hear that, I mean, because . . .’
Marcel talks on. He talks on, and on, and on, but Morel is no longer listening. It has dawned on him what Marcel is talking about, and he is so taken with wonder, this doctor who has seen everything in his time, who has seen the strangest things of human nature, of wild monstrances, of extreme apparitions, of energetic emanations from the mind and body of woman and man, he is so taken with wonder that his skin grows cold, and the hairs on the back of his neck arise, and his own heart starts to beat a little more profoundly. Just as Marcel’s mother’s must have done from time to time, as the unborn boy listened to it, and felt her warm blood coursing around him, as he listened to her heart, from the warm, dark safety of her womb.
THE LIBRARY OF HELL
A few days after Marcel has returned to his beginning, Inspector Petit finds himself with a little spare time and within walking distance of the National Library, in the Rue de Richelieu. Petit is struck by another imposing façade, and this is one face that does not lie. The exterior, the entrance, with its nobly carved bibliotheque nationale above the portal, all these things lead you to believe that beyond lay the most important repository of books in the world, not just France, and such is the truth of the matter.
Petit has seen enough of libraries recently, and he hurries across the courtyard to a small office to begin his enquiries. Things begin simply enough as he shows his Sûreté identification card, but when he mentions the collection he wishes to consult, the man behind the desk freezes momentarily and, though he gives the inspector the information he needs, makes no further eye contact
with him.
Irritated, Petit stomps his way up a flight of stairs, and then another, heading higher and towards the back of the building. Somehow he expected Hell to be downwards, yet it seems the guardians of the national shame have chosen to locate their underworld on the very top floor, out of reach of all but the fittest of perverts. Still nettled, Petit takes the chance to remind himself that he is not the pervert; the perverts are the men (and women, he supposes, my God!) who created this material in the first place, so why the clerk downstairs treated him with contempt is hard to fathom. He is a police inspector, after all, pursuing, what . . . ? This is not his case; it is not anyone’s case. There is no case at all. There is a curious link between two photographers, and a break-in at a studio. That is all. Yet he finds that he is driven to follow matters a little further before he can entirely let the matter of the murderous memory man go. It’s worst at night, the voice inside him, her voice. Her voice, telling him not to fail anyone else as he failed her. In the middle of the night it seems so real, though he pushes it away as best he can. In the morning, he knows it’s just his fancy, yet the result is the same: he cannot let it drop. He cannot.
At the far end of a low-ceilinged corridor he finds the door he has been looking for – a small brass nameplate states the single word: ‘Hell’. He has been told to wait for the keeper of the collection to join him, and yet, like Orpheus and countless others before him, he cannot help testing the waters of this underworld, and so he tries the doorknob.
It turns, but the door is locked.
His timing is, as usual, awful. He still has his hand on the knob when a shrill voice reaches down the corridor to him.
‘No admittance to Hell without a librarian!’
The line is delivered absolutely without humour or even irony.
Caught red-handed, Petit waits for the librarian in question to permit him entrance. Down the corridor walks a prim middle-aged man, with pince-nez riding well down his nose, and on his shoulders a few flakes originating from the little remaining hair on his pasty white head. He does not see much sunlight, Petit surmises.
‘Aubenas,’ says the librarian, without smiling. ‘You are the policeman?’
‘Inspector Petit,’ says the naughty schoolboy, suddenly remembering an especially hot morning in Africa when he impaled a Mandingo warrior with his bayonet. He briefly hates himself for being cowed by this keeper of books.
‘This is a police matter?’
Petit nods with as much dignity as he can muster.
Aubenas ferrets in an inside pocket for the key to Hell, and slides it into the lock in a most precise manner, which makes Petit’s lip curl for some reason he can’t identify. Aubenas then stands aside with obvious displeasure at the etiquette of allowing his visitor to enter the room before him.
Petit decides he would like to punch the pompous prick on the nose. Why does everyone he meets seem to have to lord it over him? What is it about him that invites such gentle but persistent humiliation?
He steps through the doorway, banging his head on the lintel as he does so. He doesn’t need to turn to know Aubenas is silently smiling at this, and anyway, he’s more than interested in the room before him. He expected a small attic space with a few file cabinets of dirty stuff. In actual fact, the Library of Hell is a long room that stretches away beyond window after window, and then turns a corner out of sight. There are shelves to the ceiling, which again are higher than he imagined from the low corridor outside, with ladders on rails to reach the top levels of filth. There are cabinets, many, many cabinets, and plan chests too, for larger scale perversions, he presumes.
He had also expected there to be some obvious sign of the nature of the material held by the library; he now realises of course that that would be absurd. On the face of it, therefore, the library looks just as mundane, as everyday, as dull, as any library has a right to. But what lies inside those cabinets, and in those chests? What lies between the covers (he almost thinks the word sheets) of the thousands, the tens of thousands of books on the shelves?
‘How may we assist you?’ Aubenas snaps.
‘Quite a place you have here,’ Petit says, and before the librarian can get on a high horse of any kind, adds, ‘Yes, I am looking for a pornographer, a particular pornographer. I gather you’re the expert.’
He lets that one hang a moment, before adding, ‘I would like you to look at this photograph.’
He pulls out the envelope that contains the photograph of Ondine, and hands the whole thing to Aubenas, who, Petit notices, is clearly expecting something salacious and is also equally clearly disappointed to find Ondine fully clothed.
He hands the photograph back to Petit with a bored air.
‘What of it?’
Petit pushes the hand bearing the photograph back towards its owner.
‘Look closer. Do you see the small imperfection?’
‘The light is not good,’ Aubenas says, but he seems more intrigued now and moves under one of the high oval attic windows.
Petit follows him and points out the mark.
‘I’ve been told that this mark can be found on the work of one particular pornographer, that it most likely appears on all his work.’
‘Who told you that?’
Petit ignores the question. It’s time to take control. Anyway, a thought has occurred to him.
‘How do you catalogue photographs of a pornographic nature?’
In answer to his own question, certain different approaches spring into his mind, each of them intriguing in its own way. How to do such a thing? By some scale of obscenity? By deviance? By position?
‘By studio,’ Aubenas supplies the underwhelming but obvious solution to the problem. ‘The recovered works of each studio, more often than not meaning of an individual photographer, are filed together. This is a newer area of the library, of course. Perversion, in all its forms, was around long before photographic records of it could be made.’
He begins walking down the length of Hell towards a section in the corner where locked file cabinets stand in rows.
‘Do you know the man with the imperfect lens? Have you seen it before?’
Aubenas gives a quick shake of his head, which sees the end of the life of a few more of his straggling hairs.
‘I have not. But I do not study these things closely.’
Petit studies his face and wonders if that’s true or not. This whole place seems like an embarrassment to the library, not to say to France, and yet Petit finds himself wondering if Aubenas has the only key, and how often he makes his way up to Hell.
‘Nevertheless,’ Aubenas adds, ‘there are no more than fifty or sixty photographers whose work has been added to our collection. Seventy at most. It shouldn’t take you long to find which of them bears the mark of imperfection that you seek.’
He pulls out a smaller bunch of keys and unlocks the cabinets. Petit notes from the small handwritten label on the first cabinet that it ranges from A to C.
Aubenas slides open the top drawer, and invites the inspector to inspect.
‘You can work on the top of this plan chest, if you wish.’
Petit pulls out a packet wrapped in card, and slips the first photograph out. A cursory glance shows a man taking another man’s erect penis into his mouth, in front of a scene of a tent in a desert.
Petit slides the photograph back in the packet. Aubenas is watching him.
‘The light is terrible in here,’ Petit mumbles. ‘Perhaps you could provide me with a lamp?’
Aubenas’s nose twitches. The pince-nez stays in place.
‘We have electric light in the library proper.’
Petit holds his gaze, until the librarian backs down, mutters something incoherent, and disappears to find some source of light.
Alone with the greatest deviance that France has managed to create, record and ban, Petit begins to work his way methodically through the packets.
Whoever this first photographer is, or was, he seems to have
had a penchant for men engaged in activities with other men. Petit knows that such things occur; indeed, the Paris police has an entire vice squad much of whose time is spent pursuing such individuals. But he has never had such bold, crude physical evidence put before his eyes. He tries to concentrate on looking for the mark; upper left, that’s where it will be, upper left, never mind that there’s a naked man putting his hand up another—
He stops.
He’s looked at fifteen photographs from this pornographer, and found no mark. What he has found has upset him, if he’s honest. The culmination, or should that be nadir, is an image of two boys. Young boys. If he is to get through the perhaps seventy files, he won’t be able to look at each and every photograph. Thank God.
Thank God and yet, now that he’s looking at the work of one Benoit Antoine, he finds he is taking a little longer over each image. Antoine seems to have favoured women, young women, captured in positions of sexual union. The first shows a naked girl kneeling before another, with large lolling breasts, seated in an armchair. Behind them, a mountain scene is laughable. Would they want to be quite so unclothed if they really were on an alp? That thought barely enters Petit’s head however; he’s much more taken with what the kneeling girl is doing with her tongue, and how far apart the seated girl can get her legs.
He shakes himself, because he’s heard the quick click of Aubenas’s returning footsteps.
‘Anything?’ asks Aubenas.
Petit shakes his head.
‘On to the Bs,’ he says, shoving the Sapphic work of Antoine back into its plain brown card packet.
‘Your light,’ says Aubenas, putting an oil lamp on top of the chest. Petit now wishes he hadn’t asked for it, but perhaps it will make things faster.
‘Very good,’ says Petit, and bends to his work again. Aubenas stands and watches him, something that grows extremely vexing in no time at all.
‘Perhaps you’d like to help?’ he suggests, and Aubenas shrugs to show that it’s all the same to him.
‘I’ll start from D,’ he says, ‘and leave the Bs and Cs to you.’
Why? thinks Petit. Something you want to see in the Ds? Something you don’t want me to see? Perhaps . . .