It was a prison like any other; a small shed with loam walls painted pumpkin yellow, an immodest chimney and a roof made from the leaves of asparagus fern. It was some time in the distant past, and everywhere there were stones and the shells of ammonites, trilobites, stalagpites and salpingites left over from the Ice Age. Inside the prison, you could hear someone snoring in broken Javanese. I went in.
A man was lying on a wooden bed, asleep. He was wearing a small pair of blue underpants and woollen knee protectors. On his left shoulder were tattooed the initials “K. I.”
“Heeeey!” I yelled in his ear.
You might well say that I could have called out something else, but he was asleep and couldn’t hear anything. Nonetheless, it woke him up.
“Brrr!” he said as he cleared his throat. “Who’s the idiot who opened the door?”
“Me,” I said.
Obviously, that made him none the wiser, but you shouldn’t expect to be either.
“If you confess, it means you’re guilty,” the fellow surmised. “But you are too,” I said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.”
It is rather difficult to argue with my absolutely diabolical dialectic logic. At that moment, to my astonishment, a red and white crow entered the room through the small skylight and flapped around in a circle seven times before flying straight back out again. To this day, ten years on, I am still wondering
182 If I Say If
whether its sudden appearance had any special significance. The man, subdued, looked at me and shook his head. “My name is Cain,” he said.
“I can read,” I answered. “Is that story about the eye true?”
“You have to be kidding!” he replied. “Yvan Audouard made it up.” “Eye-van Audouard?” I asked.
He burst out laughing. “Hey, that’s funny!” he said. I blushed self-consciously.
“I suppose you’ve come to ask me about Abel and why I took him out?” Cain continued.
“Dear me!” I said. “Just between you and me, there was something fishy about the newspapers’ version of events.”
“They’re all the same,” Cain said. “All a bunch of liars. You tell them something, they don’t get it, and what’s more they don’t check their work properly because they don’t give a damn how they write. Add to that the interference from the chief editor and the type-setters and you can see how far it can go.”
“Now then,” I said, “to the truth of the matter.” “Abel?” Cain asked. “He was a dirty bitch.” “Bitch?” I asked, surprised.
“Exactly,” Cain said. “Does that surprise you? Now I suppose you’re going to act like Paul Claudel and tell me that, even after having been in regular correspondence with Monsieur Gide for over forty years, you were still not aware of his tendencies?”
“Is that why Gide received the Nabel Prize?” I asked. “Exactly!” Cain said. “But let me tell you what happened.” “There’s no chance of us being disturbed by the guard?” I asked.
“Not likely,” Cain said. “He knows quite well that I have no desire to leave. What would I do on the outside? Nothing but queers and faggots everywhere.”
If I Say If
“You’re quite right there,” I said.
“So,” Cain resumed, as he settled down on his hard wooden plank, “you know when it happened. Abel and I were more like friends. You can see what I’m like. I’m more the big hairy type…”
Indeed, Cain was covered in a thick black mat of fur, was well built, and was as strong as an ox, like an eighty kilo wrestler.
“The big hairy type…” Cain said. “I had quite a lot of success with the girls and I was never bored on Sundays. My brother wasn’t the same…”
“Abel?” I said.
“Abel. In my opinion, he was a half-brother,” Cain said. “I’ve seen photos of the snake… another big queen, that one… Well, that was him all over. It wouldn’t surprise me if the old dear hadn’t jumped the fence with that cheeky little maggot… Variety is the spice of life, isn’t that what they say? So maybe it’s not Abel’s fault if he was what he was. Anyway, there wasn’t much of a family resemblance. Everyone drooled over his blonde locks. He was pale, sweet, likeable, and he stank of perfume, the dirty little bitch, enough to kill a skunk. When we were young, things were okay. We played cops and robbers, that’s all. Nothing intellectual, you understand. That comes later. We shared the same room, we slept in the same bed, we ate from the same plate. We didn’t leave each other’s side. You see, to me, he was more like a little sister. I mollycoddled him. I combed his blonde hair. All in all, we got on very well together.”
“I have to tell you…” continued Cain, who had just stopped mid- sentence to let out a loud snort of disgust, “I have to tell you it bothered him, that little swine, when I started chasing the chicks. But he didn’t dare say anything. I thought he’d have time to learn, and after suggesting to him a couple of times to go and find himself a girlfriend I stopped when I saw he wasn’t interested… He wasn’t as developed as me…”
“Exactly,” I agreed. “Besides, that’s the very thing everyone has been talking about, and that’s what they blame you for. You were twice his size.”
“Blamed me for!” Cain exploded. “But he was a dirty pig, that little pile of trash!”