மரச் சிற்பம்

Translated from the original Tamil short story marac ciṟpam (மரச் சிற்பம்) by Shobasakthi. The original story is available at his website. If you have any questions or feedback, please contact ez.iniyavan@gmail.com.

Right off the bat, my eyes were drawn to a news story, overshadowing the headline about the Olympics Games scheduled to take place in Paris this year. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I was almost knocked senseless as my eyes digested that story. In disbelief, I read it thrice. The leader of a fast-rising nationalist party in France had said the following:
 
 “Our fatherland has become a dangerous place to live in. This sacred land is being trodden on by the dark feet of criminal gangs and agitators. There is only one way for us to emancipate ourselves from this lawlessness. In public lands, we should re-institute that symbol of France’s unique, great revolution, the wooden sculpture.”

It is common in the daily use of the French language to refer to various animate and inanimate concepts by their nicknames. A policeman is referred to as the ‘chicken,’ a woman the ‘flea,’ and a penis the ‘cock.’ ‘The wooden sculpture’ is a nickname for a guillotine.

In his novel ‘Les Miserables,’ Victor Hugo declared that “As long as one has not encountered the guillotine, one can be indifferent about capital punishment. But the moment one sees a guillotine, the shock would leave them senseless.” I worship Victor Hugo whole-heartedly. I have seen a guillotine with my own eyes.

It happened by accident. There was an exhibition in Paris’ Musée d’Orsay which had borrowed the title ‘Crime and Punishment’ from Dostoevsky. Attracted by the title, I went to see the exhibition. That is where France’s last guillotine was on display.

That wooden sculpture is fourteen feet high. Its base measures seven feet by two feet. They would make the person condemned to death lie on their stomach, their hands and feet bound to their body using thick rope. They will be positioned so that their neck fits within the hole that looks like the anus of the wooden sculpture. Their head would be on one side of the hole and the rest of the body on the other. Where would their soul be? When the heavy knife hanging at the top of the wooden sculpture like a crown dropped forcefully the severed hell would leap up. A dirty wicker basket would be placed underneath to catch the severed head.

One cannot say that every guillotine constructed during the French revolution looked thus. The Revolutionary Tribunal kept passing death sentences on tens of thousands of people around the country. Therefore, hundreds of little portable guillotines were constructed so that they can be carried by hand to get the job done effectively.

I came out of Musée d’Orsay thoroughly shaken. The disgusting wooden sculpture refused to vacate my brain. The victims who were decapitated by the wooden sculpture roamed within my head as formless images speaking silently. What would they have said when they were marched to the row of wooden sculptures standing in Paris’ Revolutionary Square? What would they have been thinking?

Was it true that King Louis XVI said, “I forgive my enemies,” when his head was placed on the anus of the wooden sculpture? What would Queen Marie Antoinette have thought when she was laid down on the wooden sculpture and her hair was cut off at the nape so that the knife could make a clean cut? When the Revolutionary Tribunal accused the queen of forcibly having sex with her eight-year-old son Louis Charles, she had declared, “I respond not to you but to all mothers here… Nature itself prevents me from responding to such a charge laid against a mother.” Did she think of that nature during her final moments? When the key leaders of the revolution, Danton and Robespierre were brought to the Revolutionary Square one after the other in the very next year and laid down on this wooden sculpture, what would they have been thinking? Would they have uttered their mantra of Liberty-Equality-Fraternity as their final words? The words chanted by the crowd in the Revolutionary Square, “Kill the traitors,” the last words they heard? When the twenty-four-year-old young woman Charlotte Corday who had driven a kitchen knife through the heart to murder the great revolutionary hero, the Friend of the People, Marat, the leader most instrumental in inciting the guillotine murders, was marched towards the wooden sculpture, what would she have thought? Did the words she uttered standing in front of Marat’s dead body, “I have done my duty! I murdered him to stop him from ordering the guillotine deaths of hundreds of thousands of people,” stay with her till the end and leap into the dirty wicker basket?

I threw the newspaper down on the table, and slowly opened the rickety window to invite the fresh sea breeze inside. For a week, I had been staying in this old inn by the sea in the city of Marseilles. When Paris is subject to a bitter cold and snowstorms, I gravitate towards a coastal town looking for the sea and some warmth. The management of this inn was very particular about preserving the old traditions. It was one of the very few inns in France that persisted in the cultural tradition of providing guests with a free daily newspaper. The goddamned curse that they slid under the rotting door of my room this morning has engulfed my whole being and was suffocating me.

The breeze that entered the room made me even wearier, instead of calming me. I sat at the writing desk and tried to write something. I could not write even a single letter. It was already half past ten. Thinking that a cup of coffee might invigorate me again, I put on my shoes and left my room. I rolled up the cursed newspaper and took it with me. Madame Annabelle would be waiting for the newspaper.

I met Madame Annabelle on the very first day I arrived in this town. It was around nine in the morning when I alighted from the train. The manager of the inn said I could check in to the room only after noon. I went to the cafe across the street to kill time until then. I chose a small round table under the awning because it was a convenient place to smoke in. Having ordered an espresso, I whiled away the time watching the street and puffing cigarette smoke. It was then that Madame Annabelle walking very slowly towards the cafe.

I think she was about seventy years old. Her white legs, arms, and chin had a dusting of golden hair that glittered. The hair on her head had gone completely white, with patches of baldness here and there. Colorful ribbons of the kind that little girls wear crisscrossed her head, perhaps in an attempt to hide the bald spots. Her fleshy under-eye bags hung like rotten orange segments below her small gray eyes. Annabelle was below average height. But she was heavyset, with thick arms, legs, and neck. In reality, they were probably swollen. She wore a knee-length gown. Her stockings were rolled down. She was carrying a bulging cloth bag with difficulty. Her face was swollen like a pink balloon, clearly giving her away as an alcoholic.

Annabelle sat down at the table next to me. Her panting sounded to me like the cooing of a pigeon. The waiter greeted her with, “Good day Madame Annabelle! How are you today? You are well, I hope? I have brought you your usual drink,” and put a small shot glass full of liquor on her table. Annabelle lifted the glass towards me, drank its contents in one gulp, and put the empty glass down in a corner of the table. Then she took out sheaves of newspapers from her cloth bag, spread them on the table, and started reading them.

Bored, I squinted trying to see what she was reading. The papers she was reading were all old from the previous day or even the previous week. I was not sure how she sensed that I was observing her. She turned suddenly to me and said, “My friend! I don’t remember seeing you here before. Where do you come from?” I noticed two things about her voice. It was masculine, and it was flat, devoid of emotion. It sounded like those mechanical-sounding daily announcements in railway stations, “Votre attention, s’il vous plaît.” She always spoke this way. Whatever emotions she had, emerged from her in the same flat tone.

In the subsequent days, I learned one thing about her. Annabelle arrived at the cafe at ten every morning. She sat at a table until six in the evening reading her newspapers. She ordered a drink every hour. She collected the newspapers from the roadside and from garbage cans. I made it a habit to give her the free newspaper I got in my room at the inn every morning, after quickly browsing through it.

As I descended the stairs at my inn, my consternation made me sit down on the steps and read the story about the wooden sculpture again. The cursed news had so blunted my brain that I did not comprehend that no matter how many times I read the news, it would remain unchanged.

When I reached the cafe, Annabelle sat on the table at the far-left end under the awnings, reading her newspapers. “Bonjour Madame Annabelle,” I placed the newspaper on the table and sat on the chair opposite to her. Within a week, we have become acquainted well enough with each other for us to drink sitting at the same table.

The waiter said, “You look tired? Are you not well? The salty air doesn’t agree with everyone. Let me bring you a cup of coffee,” and went to fetch the coffee. Annabelle kept looking at me, pouting her cracked thin lips. I pointed to the story about the wooden sculpture. As she finished reading the story, her next drink arrived. She drank it up in one gulp and was dabbing her lips with her handkerchief.

Impatiently I said, “These barbarians want to dig out the bloody wooden sculptures buried centuries ago and stand them in public places. This shameless newspaper is even reporting this story.” I felt that even a word or two in Annabelle’s monotone voice would calm me down.

Annabelle folded her handkerchief and said:
 
 “Not centuries ago. The wooden sculptures were in operation until forty-seven years ago. The last head it chopped off is buried in this town.”

I first thought that Annabelle was blabbering because she was already drunk this early in the morning. But I had never seen her blabber, even when she was drunk. She was clear and precise in everything she said, just like an announcement in a train station.

“What do you mean? Forty-seven years ago?” I asked.

“Tenth of September 1977, at 4:40 am,” Annabelle said in the same emotionless voice.

I could not believe my years. Dear reader, can you?

It was a time when great thinkers and artists like Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, François Truffaut, and Goddard were living here. Giscard d’Estaing, who was the president of France in 1977 had fiercely fought the Nazis in his youth. How could the bloody wooden sculpture have operated at a time when such great people lived?

Therefore, I concluded that Madame Annabelle was somehow deluded. Still, propelled by something unseen, I cross-examined her, “Whose head was cut off?” Now her delusion would be cleared.

“A young twenty-seven-year-old man called Hamida was killed. His family name was Djandoubi,” she droned on in her voice devoid of emotion.

How could I now not believe what Annabelle was saying! She had mentioned the family name of the murdered man and even the date and time of the death. Still my doubts had not completely dissipated because I still had faith in the inordinate amount of reading I had done on French history and life. Therefore I asked Annabelle, “How do you know all this?”

Annabelle was silent for a while. Then she beckoned the waiter and asked for another drink. When it arrived, she downed it in a single gulp and started talking. As she talked, I came to believe her story completely. Without interrupting her in any way, I listened to her quietly. She spoke in her characteristic emotionless voice and a flat expression on her face.

“Hamida lived in our upstairs room for a while. I was then fourteen or fifteen. He was Tunisian. He came to this city by sea when he was nineteen, in search of a job. He found a job in the sawmill. Sébastien worked in the same sawmill — Sébastien was my father. I called him by name since I was very small. Sébastien liked Hamida. “Hamida is a smart boy, a hard worker,” he would say often. It was through this acquaintance that he ended up as a boarder in our upstairs room.

In those days, everyone would agree that Hamida was the handsomest among all the young men in this town. Black curly hair. A broad forehead. Smiling brown eyes. A physique like a stone sculpture. He could win anyone over by speaking softly and pleasantly. He met with that horrible accident while he was living in our house. His right leg was trapped under a vehicle in the sawmill. When Sébastien told me that Hamida’s right leg had to be amputated at the knee, I could not stop sobbing the entire day. Hamida was in the hospital for a very long time. He fell in love with a woman he met at the hospital and went to live with her. They arrested him for murdering that woman. I met him accidentally on the street just two days before he was arrested. Wearing his artificial leg, he was a little unsteady on his feet. “You still live at the same address, Annabelle?” he asked. I responded ‘Yes.’ That was the last time I saw him. Sébastien was at the court on the day they sentenced Hamida to death. When he came home, he started drinking without talking to anyone. He kept drinking the whole day.

I interrupted impatiently. “But did they kill him on the guillotine, Annabelle?”

Annabelle nodded in agreement. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the scene when they laid him down on the wooden sculpture and cut him into two. What did they do with his artificial leg? What was his final minute like?

Annabelle looked at me as if she wanted to ask, “What are you thinking about?” I told her what was on my mind. We were silent for a while. When her next drink arrived, she downed it in one go and said, “I will tell you that story,” in that same dry emotionless tone.

2

On the ninth of September 1977, the French president Giscard d’Estaing rejected the plea for mercy from the convicted man. At three in the afternoon that day, Mrs. Monique Mabelly, the investigating judge, received word from the Head of the prison. Early the following morning, the convict’s head was to be inserted into the anus of the wooden sculpture in her presence. A vehicle would arrive at Mabelly’s house at four in the morning to take her to the prison.

Mrs. Mabelly was shaken by this news. The convict’s face appeared in her mind and unsettled her. The realization that this man was just a year younger than her son Rémy spread throughout her brain like scabies.

At the end of the trial, just before the verdict was to be announced, the counsel for the accused, Jean Cudarro pleaded, “Ever since Hamida Djandoubi met with the horrible accident, he has been suffering from trauma that impaired his judgment. Therefore, your honor, I appeal to consider the case of this handicapped man with compassion and mercy and sentence him to a minimal punishment. Those words still kept ringing in Mabelly’s ears. But she could not escape from the bloody ritual that was to take place. The law stipulated that she must be present at the events that were going to unfold the following morning.

At seven in the evening, Mrs. Mabelly went to the movie theater with her friend Bastiana to see a movie. After the movie, they went to Bastiana’s house. Mabelly dreaded the thought of going back to her house. The vehicle that would take her to the prison would arrive at four in the morning.

“Shall we watch another movie?” Mabelly asked Bastiana. They had snacks and watched the Ciné-Club film on television until one in the morning. She then went home dejectedly. By the time she went to bed, it was already two in the morning. She could not sleep at all. At half past three, she got up and dressed herself up in her official attire. She felt that the hands of the clock were running at breakneck speed that day. At four in the morning, the vehicle arrived. An official was sitting in the front seat next to the driver. No one said a word. The vehicle sped towards Baumettes prison.

When Mabelly reached the prison, everyone was there awaiting her arrival. A procession formed, consisting of some thirty people including Mabelly, the Attorney General, the counsel for the convict, prison officials and guards, the people who operate the wooden sculpture, and the imam who was there to carry out his religious duties. The procession moved towards the area where the wooden sculpture stood. Brown blankets had been laid along the floor to avoid the procession from having to walk on the floor. Along the way, a chair stood in a corner. Mabelly and some others stopped by the chair. The rest went to fetch the convict. The imam went with them. “He is lying down, but not sleeping,” an official informed Mabelly. A couple of minutes later, another official told her, “He is now putting on his artificial, wooden leg.”

The convict walked softly over the brown blankets. His hands were cuffed in front of him. When he saw Mabelly, he locked eyes with her with a gentle smile. Mabelly lowered her eyes, pretending to check the documents in her hand. The convict was made to sit on the chair next to Mabelly.

In a calm, steady voice, the convict asked, “I want a cigarette.” The guard placed a cigarette between the convict’s lips and lit it. He took a deep draw of the cigarette, raised his cuffed hand to remove it and said, “These cuffs are too tight.” The guard tried to loosen the cuffs. Charles Chevalier, the man who would operate the wooden sculpture, and his young assistant were standing to the left of the convict. Since the guard did not succeed in loosening the cuffs, it was decided to remove them altogether and tie the convict’s hands with a rope. As soon as the cuffs were removed, Charles Chevalier patted the convict on his shoulder and said, “See! you’re free!” Those ghastly words sent a shiver down Mabelly’s spine. She looked at the convict through the corner of her eye. But the convict sat silently, lost in thought. Perhaps he was reminiscing about Tunisia, the land where he was born and brought up. Or perhaps he was thinking about his childhood. Or perhaps he remembered the Mediterranean sea which he had crossed to get here. Or perhaps he was thinking about his former lover whom he had murdered.

The convict’s hands remained unbound for a few minutes. His cigarette had burned down to its stub. When he asked for another cigarette, he was given one. He was now drawing on the cigarette as slowly as he could. There was no escape anymore. When that cigarette ended, his life would end, too. His face gradually tightened, as if he was slowly realizing the gravity of his situation. Mabelly wondered how long that cigarette would last.

The convict beckoned his lawyer and spoke to him in hushed tones. By the time they finished talking, the second cigarette had finished. The convict had been sitting in that chair for a quarter of an hour.

A young guard showed up with a bottle and a small glass, and asked the convict, “Do you want to have some rum?” The convict nodded slowly. The guard filled half of the glass and handed it to the convict. The convict slurped the rum very slowly, sip by sip. Mabelly realized that he was pretending to enjoy the rum. In reality, he was just trying to prolong the time he had left to remain alive. Everyone present understood very clearly that if the convict was given just one additional second to live, he wanted to live it fully.

The convict tried everything he could to prolong his life. He spoke to his lawyer again. He took a piece of paper from the lawyer, shredded it into a hundred pieces, and handed them to a prison official saying, “Please throw this in the garbage.” The official stuffed them into his pocket. He asked the official, “What are you going to do with the books I have in my prison cell?” The official said, “We would handle them according to the law.” The convict called the imam over. When the imam said something in Arabic, the convict responded. The official standing next to Mabelly murmured with irritation, “Is he asking to be slaughtered in halal fashion?” When Mabelly turned sharply towards the official, he grinned sheepishly and lowered his eyes.

Only one sip of rum remained in the glass. The convict knew that once he drank that, his life would end. He made one last attempt. He asked calmly and politely for another cigarette. When a guard attempted to give him one, Charles Chevalier, the operator of the wooden sculpture, interrupted. He was starting to lose his patience. When he said, “We have already been dealing with this man with more compassion and charity than is called for. We must now put an end to this,” the Attorney General intervened and stopped the convict from getting a third cigarette. The convict asked again in a very polite voice:

“Please give me my last cigarette.”

That voice gnawed at Mabelly’s heart. Mabelly had no doubt that the convict was in a sound mental state. He understood that he could not do anything other than delay his demise in the wooden sculpture by another two minutes by asking for one last cigarette. Just like a child who tries everything possible to delay going to bed, the convict was trying everything he could to delay going to lie down in the guillotine bed.

The convict had been sitting in the chair for twenty minutes. Everyone except the convict looked at one another as if to say, “We cannot delay any longer.” A prison official nudged the convict to take the last sip of rum. The convict peered into the eyes of the official and poured the last bit of rum onto the floor. For a minute, true silence prevailed. No one said anything. It was Mabelly, who was standing to the left of the convict, broke the silence. She said, “It is getting late,” to the prison official.

Two guards grabbed the convict’s shoulders with their strong hands and turned his body slightly towards the left in the direction where Mabelly was standing. Immediately, Charles Chevalier and his assistant, who were standing to the right, grabbed each arm of the convict, and started to tie them behind his back using a rope. At that time, the convict’s brown eyes were on Mabelly’s. Mabelly could not tell if the emotion in those eyes was suffering or pleading or hatred or anger or guilt or a mixture of all of these. Mabelly thought childishly that if they tied his eyes instead of his hands, she could escape this uneasy feeling.

Once the convict’s hands were bound, Charles Chevalier’s assistant took a pair of scissors and started cutting the neck region of the convict’s prison uniform. But while he was cutting the cloth haphazardly, the pointed tip of the scissors accidentally grazed the convict’s skin. A droplet of blood bubbled up on the convict’s skin like a red ruby. Everyone except the convict was shaken by the sight of the blood drop. Mabelly involuntarily shouted, “oh my!” Charles Chevalier leapt over to the side of his assistant and yanked the scissors out of his hand, shouting, “You pig! Can’t you do anything properly? Are you trying to make my job go up and flames, you idiot?” The convict remained motionless. Charles Chevalier deftly cut out the neck portion of the blue uniform.

The convict was ordered to stand up. He stood up slowly and bent his head to regard the ground. What was he leaving behind on this earth? A sip of rum?

The single door next to the chair was opened. The procession led the convict towards the wooden sculpture. It stood erect in the inner yard of the prison. The convict looked upwards towards the sky in order to avoid looking at the wooden sculpture. Perhaps he wanted the sky to be the last thing he saw. But a black screen blocked the sky out from the prison yard. The sky was blocked off for fear that someone in a helicopter might try to film a death sentence being carried out. Even a little bird cannot watch what went on in the prison yard.

Charles Chevalier brought a small red carpet and spread it out on the ground in front of Mrs. Mabelly. His assistant removed the artificial leg from the convict. Since his hands were tied behind his back, the convict hopped over on one foot towards the wooden sculpture and lay down on his stomach inside it. Mabelly secretly pleaded to God that the convict would not ask for water to drink or for another cigarette. She just wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible and leave.

When the wooden sculpture moved, blood spurted out of its anal hole. There was no other option: Mabelly now had to examine the dirty wicker basket to confirm that there was a severed head inside. Charles Chevalier lifted up the basket and brought it to show it to Mabelly and the Attorney General for confirmation. Then he lifted the head out of the basket and placed it on the red carpet. His assistant brought the artificial leg and placed it next to the severed head. It looked as if a human head grew out of that leg.

3

If you, the reader, find it difficult to escape from Annabelle’s last words, you can imagine my state of mind, having listened to the story in person. At the same time, I wondered how Madame Annabelle knew all the little details. It would be more comforting if this was fiction, I thought, in my anguish. I asked this question aloud from Annabelle.

“How do you know all this?”

She responded in the same flat voice.

“Justice Mabelly returned home at 5:10 in the morning. She sat at her writing desk and wrote all of this on two white sheets of paper. She then sealed the sheets in an envelope which she handed to her son Rémy, instructing him to submit it to the government after her death. When Mabelly died, the envelope was submitted to the government. Somehow the two pages ended up being published by a newspaper. I grabbed a copy of that newspaper from the garbage can by the lighthouse.

Suddenly a question popped up in my mind. I asked Annabelle right away:

“Just as Justice Mabelly wrote what she wanted released after her death, isn’t it possible that the convict also wrote something to be released after his death, and left it with someone?”

The waiter brought another drink and placed it in front of Annabelle. Annabelle took the glass without a word and started sipping it patiently. Looking at the way she was drinking, it seemed to me that she would be consuming this drink sip by sip for the rest of her life.

March 2024 (appeared in the Tamil short-story collection imiz).