The Tenant (19 page)

“We’ll have to raise the leg a little bit more. She’ll be more comfortable.”

He sensed that someone or something was pulling at one of his limbs, very far from him, miles away. And he did feel more comfortable. Then these phrases he had overheard—they were talking about him! But why would they speak of him as if he were a woman?

He thought about it for a long time. He had great difficulty gathering his thoughts into any sort of concrete form. Sometimes he went on thinking without being able to remember what he was thinking about. His brain turned endlessly around a void, and then it began to come back to him, he began to pick up the threads of his own reason.

He supposed that they were mocking him. They continued to talk about him as if he were a woman because of the way he had been dressed. They were ridiculing him, in defiance of all justice. He detested them so violently that his vision blurred again. A wave of nervous trembling swept through his body, reawakening the dormant pain. He let himself slip off in a tide of suffering.

Later on, he felt somewhat better. He was in another white room now, much larger than the one he had been in before. It was still impossible for him to move. In the little angle of vision he possessed, he could just catch glimpses of other beds containing other recumbent forms. Then, quite suddenly, the room was filled with men and women, scattering among all the beds.

Someone walked up, very close to him, and he heard the rustling of paper. Whoever it was had placed a package on the night table to the left of the bed. He saw the man when he sat down.

He was undoubtedly delirious. It was fortunate that he was conscious of this fact, or his mind might have gone completely. Feature for feature, the man was his double. It was another Trelkovsky who was seated at his bedside, silent and mournful. He wondered whether there really was a man sitting there, transformed by his fever into a living replica of himself, or whether the whole apparition was simply an invention of his tortured brain. He felt suddenly disposed to study this problem. The pain had practically disappeared. He was floating in a downy vacuum that was not at all disagreeable. It was almost as if he had accidentally discovered some secret form of balance. Far from terrifying him, the vision had reassured him. The image he had seen was like a reflection in a mirror, and in that way it was comforting. He yearned to see himself like that in a mirror.

He heard the sound of whispering voices, and then a head was abruptly framed in his field of vision. He recognized that face at once; it was Stella. Her mouth was pulled back in a smile that revealed two canine teeth of abnormal size, and she was speaking slowly, as though she had trouble understanding the language she used.

“Simone, Simone,” she was saying, “you recognize me, don’t you? It’s Stella; your friend, Stella. Don’t you recognize me?”

A moaning sound came from Trelkovsky’s mouth, stifled at first, then swelling to an unbearable scream.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

R
OLAND
T
OPOR
is a Frenchman whose success in France, before the publication of
The Tenant,
had been as a cartoonist. Not surprisingly, his drawings are macabre, ghoulish and funny. In his career as a novelist, he seems destined for international fame. Mr. Topor is a native of Paris and currently makes his home there.