“To my mind it was just an accident, or a stroke of bad luck, if you prefer. And a thing like that takes you off your guard.”
He wanted to continue, but the Judge cut him short. “Quite so. That’s all, thank you.”
For a bit Céleste seemed flabbergasted; then he explained that he hadn’t finished what he wanted to say. They told him to continue, but to make it brief.
He only repeated that it was “just an accident.”
“That’s as it may be,” the Judge observed. “But what we are here for is to try such accidents, according to law. You can stand down.”
Céleste turned and gazed at me. His eyes were moist and his lips trembling. It was exactly as if he’d said: “Well, I’ve done my best for you, old man. I’m afraid it hasn’t helped much. I’m sorry.”
I didn’t say anything, or make any movement, but for the first time in my life I wanted to kiss a man.
The Judge repeated his order to stand down, and Céleste returned to his place amongst the crowd. During the rest of the hearing he remained there, leaning forward, elbows on knees and his Panama between his hands, not missing a word of the proceedings.
It was Marie’s turn next. She had a hat on and still looked quite pretty, though I much preferred her with her hair free. From where I was I had glimpses of the soft curve of her breasts, and her underlip had the little pout that always fascinated me. She appeared very nervous.
The first question was: How long had she known me? Since the time when she was in our office, she replied. Then the Judge asked her what were the relations between us, and she said she was my girl friend. Answering another question, she admitted promising to marry me. The Prosecutor, who had been studying a document in front of him, asked her rather sharply when our “liaison” had begun. She gave the date. He then observed with a would-be casual air that apparently she meant the day following my mother’s funeral. After letting this sink in he remarked in a slightly ironic tone that obviously this was a “delicate topic” and he could enter into the young lady’s feelings, but—and here his voice grew sterner—his duty obliged him to waive considerations of delicacy.
After making this announcement he asked Marie to give a full account of our doings on the day when I had “intercourse” with her for the first time. Marie wouldn’t answer at first, but the Prosecutor insisted, and then she told him that we had met at the baths, gone together to the pictures, and then to my place. He then informed the court that, as a result of certain statements made by Marie at the proceedings before the magistrate, he had studied the movie programs of that date, and turning to Marie asked her to name the film that we had gone to see. In a very low voice she said it was a picture with Fernandel in it. By the time she had finished, the courtroom was so still you could have heard a pin drop.
Looking very grave, the Prosecutor drew himself up to his full height and, pointing at me, said in such a tone that I could have sworn he was genuinely moved:
“Gentlemen of the jury, I would have you note that on the next day after his mother’s funeral that man was visiting the swimming pool, starting a liaison with a girl, and going to see a comic film. That is all I wish to say.”
When he sat down there was the same dead silence. Then all of a sudden Marie burst into tears. He’d got it all wrong, she said; it wasn’t a bit like that really, he’d bullied her into saying the opposite of what she meant. She knew me very well, and she was sure I hadn’t done anything really wrong—and so on. At a sign from the presiding judge, one of the court officers led her away, and the hearing continued.
Hardly anyone seemed to listen to Masson, the next witness. He stated that I was a respectable young fellow; “and, what’s more, a very decent chap.” Nor did they pay any more attention to Salamano, when he told them how kind I’d always been to his dog, or when, in answer to a question about my mother and myself, he said that Mother and I had very little in common and that explained why I’d fixed up for her to enter the Home. “You’ve got to understand,” he added. “You’ve got to understand.” But no one seemed to understand. He was told to stand down.
Raymond was the next, and last, witness. He gave me a little wave of his hand and led off by saying I was innocent. The Judge rebuked him.
“You are here to give evidence, not your views on the case, and you must confine yourself to answering the questions put you.”
He was then asked to make clear his relations with the deceased, and Raymond took this opportunity of explaining that it was he, not I, against whom the dead man had a grudge, because he, Raymond, had beaten up his sister. The judge asked him if the deceased had no reason to dislike me, too. Raymond told him that my presence on the beach that morning was a pure coincidence.
“How comes it then,” the Prosecutor inquired, “that the letter which led up to this tragedy was the prisoner’s work?”
Raymond replied that this, too, was due to mere chance.
To which the Prosecutor retorted that in this case “chance” or “mere coincidence” seemed to play a remarkably large part. Was it by chance that I hadn’t intervened when Raymond assaulted his mistress? Did this convenient term “chance” account for my having vouched for Raymond at the police station and having made, on that occasion, statements extravagantly favorable to him? In conclusion he asked Raymond to state what were his means of livelihood.
On his describing himself as a warehouseman, the Prosecutor informed the jury it was common knowledge that the witness lived on the immoral earnings of women. I, he said, was this man’s intimate friend and associate; in fact, the whole background of the crime was of the most squalid description. And what made it even more odious was the personality of the prisoner, an inhuman monster wholly without a moral sense.
Raymond began to expostulate, and my lawyer, too, protested. They were told that the Prosecutor must be allowed to finish his remarks.
“I have nearly done,” he said; then turned to Raymond. “Was the prisoner your friend?”
“Certainly. We were the best of pals, as they say.”
The Prosecutor then put me the same question. I looked hard at Raymond, and he did not turn away.
Then, “Yes,” I answered.
The Prosecutor turned toward the jury.
“Not only did the man before you in the dock indulge in the most shameful orgies on the day following his mother’s death. He killed a man cold-bloodedly, in pursuance of some sordid vendetta in the underworld of prostitutes and pimps. That, gentlemen of the jury, is the type of man the prisoner is.”
No sooner had he sat down than my lawyer, out of all patience, raised his arms so high that his sleeves fell back, showing the full length of his starched shirt cuffs.
“Is my client on trial for having buried his mother, or for killing a man?” he asked.
There were some titters in court. But then the Prosecutor sprang to his feet and, draping his gown round him, said he was amazed at his friend’s ingenuousness in failing to see that between these two elements of the case there was a vital link. They hung together psychologically, if he might put it so. “In short,” he concluded, speaking with great vehemence, “I accuse the prisoner of behaving at his mother’s funeral in a way that showed he was already a criminal at heart.”
These words seemed to take much effect on the jury and public. My lawyer merely shrugged his shoulders and wiped the sweat from his forehead. But obviously he was rattled, and I had a feeling things weren’t going well for me.
Soon after this incident the court rose. As I was being taken from the courthouse to the prison van, I was conscious for a few brief moments of the once familiar feel of a summer evening out-of-doors. And, sitting in the darkness of my moving cell, I recognized, echoing in my tired brain, all the characteristic sounds of a town I’d loved, and of a certain hour of the day which I had always particularly enjoyed. The shouts of newspaper boys in the already languid air, the last calls of birds in the public garden, the cries of sandwich vendors, the screech of streetcars at the steep corners of the upper town, and that faint rustling overhead as darkness sifted down upon the harbor—all these sounds made my return to prison like a blind man’s journey along a route whose every inch he knows by heart.