One.

Marcel at the Station House

     If you find yourself being questioned about a crime you
did not commit, resist at all costs the impulse to be helpful.

         -- social psychologist Richard Ofshe


   Where were you the night of July 10?

I am unable to say from what place, from which dream, anything comes.

   If you were to commit a crime . . .

I would prepare the hundred masks that must fit a single face.

   You would plan it?

How many persons, cities, or roads does jealousy make us eager to know? I'd think about details.

   Like hair and fibers?

Like boeuf à la mode, like water lilies, like Vermeer's View of Delft.

   You went out to dinner that night?

I observe, I speak with servants, I remember.

   But sometimes you do the things you think about?

Nothing is so satisfying as the imagination's rendering of it.

   Because you have a bad memory?

Hours go by and I remember the tremors in my thighs.

   So how do you . . .

I like to watch famished rats clawing and biting each other.

   Are you kidding?

The day my mother died she took her little Marcel with her.

   And how did it feel when you first put your hands around her neck?

A slight ripple, like sipping linden tea or feeling a fingernail trail against a taut stomach.

   What was she wearing?

A Fortuny gown, pleated red silk, and diamonds. Red shoes, of course. Everything of those days has perished, but everything was born again.

   Did you love her?

I prefer to remain closeted with the little person inside me, hymning the rising sun. He would make me happier than she.

   There's a lot of evidence. We have a lot of evidence. We have your hair.

I'd curl it to face the photographer. I'd wear my velvet jacket, and the apple trees would expose their broad petals of white.

   You were nervous? You stuffed the body in the trunk?

No, I would have laid it on an old satin coverlet, after which I would have consoled myself, if I felt well enough, by walking along the avenues. I would have taken my walking stick, I would have sung at the top of my voice. I would have taken a few grams of Veronal.

   Are you sorry?

Ars longa, vita brevis.

   Which means?

I am acquainted with sin, in one form or another. Dostoyevsky writes about murder, but did he commit it? Laclos was the best of husbands.

   But you?

I don't invent things. I've become braver, thinking of my journey into the self like climbing down a well without a rope.

   You used a rope?

O! The trinity of braided strands, the coarse erotic fibers.

   I'd like to try a polygraph, If that's all right with you.


--Natasha Sajé
The Paris Review
Number 166, Summer 2003