|
XVI
The commissioner brought us together in the dining hall.
 "Gentlemen," he exclaimed with stentorian gravity, "I hope you are prepared to make your statements. I will set myself up in the manager's office, and you will come to me in turn, like sheep before the watering hole."
"Don't you have a sense of humor?" Montes asked me. "Why aren't you laughing?"
I was disposed to reply in due fashion, but the alcohol on his breath led me to draw back.
The interrogation began. I was among the first called. Although he applied no pressure, I told him what I knew, withholding not a single ray of light that might allow the investigation to find its direction. Like a benevolent crime novelist, I limited myself to placing appropriate emphasis on my words. I was confident that, under my yoke, even Aubry's modest abilities would succeed in uncovering the mystery.
Leaving the office I realized that I had marred my exposition by forgetting an essential point. I wanted to return, but was not allowed. I had to wait until the other witnesses had given their garrulous babblings. Purgatory is never brief.
It will not be idle, perhaps, to make record in this chronicle of one detail--which Aubry communicated to me in later conversations--of Andreas statement. The night before my cousin, according to her custom, had placed a cup of chocolate on Mary's night table. The cup was missing. Andrea declared that she had not immediately noticed its absence and cited, by way of explanation, the state of her nerves.
The bread I had requested finally arrived. My spirit was revived.
When they called for me, I did not rise like someone obeying a summons, but rather like a man receiving his just compensation. Entering the office, I murmured the traditional strophe:
A bird at last flies past,
Leaving amidst the mist.
I salute him with a gesture
As though he were a Christian.
I looked silently at the commissioner. Then dramatically I announced, "In the boy's room, in the basement of this inn, hidden among the cages, there is a dead bird. An albatross. I found it this afternoon, its breast opened, its organs removed." I paused before continuing, "Perhaps some hours later, when Dr. Montes was examining the girl's body, solitary hands, in the basement, were embalming the albatross. What to think of two such symmetrical situations? The poison that killed the girl preserves in the bird a simulation of life."
|
