First published in Great Britain in 2004 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Originally published in Brazil in 2000
by Companhia das Letras
This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Bernardo Carvalho, 2000
English translation copyright © John Gledson, 2004
The right of Bernardo Carvalho and John Gledson to be identified as respectively the author and translator of the work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 1 84195 496 9
eISBN 978 1 78211 083 5
Typeset in Van Dijck 12/18 pt by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Polmont, Stirlingshire
Design by James Hutcheson
www.canongate.tv
For Henrique
CONTENTS
ACT ONE
ACT TWO
There’s not a chink of light anywhere. It’s not surprising that the Baron of LaChafoi, with all his forty-some years lived to the full, doesn’t see anyone when he opens his eyes. He doesn’t understand why he’s here. They’ve thrown him into a stone cell – he could tell from touching – and slammed the door. It all began a week before, when he was awakened after a night of debauchery and excess, surrounded by guards shouting insults and accusations. He could hardly remember where he was – and nothing of what had happened in the last few hours. Somebody had been murdered but they didn’t say who it was: ‘Everyone who is still alive is a suspect!’ they shouted. As a provincial nobleman who had survived the Revolution, it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that. But since the upstart Buonaparte had crowned himself Emperor, he had never been humiliated in such a fashion. They were probably talking about the other three who had taken part in the orgy, the baron concluded, without realising that, if there had been a murder, the most probable thing was that one of them was dead, and so there were only two left excluding him. That was what he underlined later to the tribunal – and it seems that it was that line of reasoning that determined what he later realised was his detention – insisting at the end that the last thing he remembered doing was swallowing the aphrodisiac in some aniseed pastilles. At no point on the agonising road which had led him in chains from the Château Lagrange, where he was found unconscious by the guards, to a local jail and to Bicêtre Prison in Paris, then on to the tribunal, and from there to the dark cell where he now found himself, did they bother to utter the victim’s name; since they didn’t reply to his questions, this explained why he had been taken for a madman for asking so many times who had died – ‘as if he didn’t know already’ – that was what they retorted, in a sarcastic, reproving tone which did nothing to alleviate his ignorance. Since he’d been woken by the guards, he hadn’t seen any of the other three, his fellow revellers, though he had already suspected, judging from his own fate, that since they were also suspects (at least the other two who must still be alive), they had probably ended up in the same place.
The situation was incomprehensible. Since they had woken him in the château – a ruin in point of fact, the only property left to him from all those taken by the Revolution and not returned under the Empire – until they had taken him to that dark cell, the baron not only didn’t know the victim’s identity and the details of the crime he was suspected of, but was ignorant of what people were saying around him. He didn’t understand anything. They persisted in calling him by a name that wasn’t his, although he never failed to point out that he had a noble title: ‘Pierre de LaChafoi, baron’. This, in spite of the years passed under the Terror, when, under questioning from all kinds of authorities, he learned to renege all his aristocratic attributes, and collaborated willingly, thanks to the advice of his cousin, the Count of Suz, with everything the Revolution had demanded of him. Now, since he was really under suspicion, when he was woken by the guards he acted as if, after the years of the Terror, he had recovered his pride in his aristocratic origins – which would have been seen as suicidal fifteen years ago – and corrected them every time they addressed him in that strange language; just as later he had to correct the man in white who had taken him to the cell that to the touch seemed made of stone. After uselessly groping round it to find a way out, he must have fallen into a deep, despondent sleep, because when he opened his eyes again in the darkness in which he could see nothing, and said to himself, in yet another of his tautological reasonings, and trying to remember how he had got there, that this must be quite usual, since there was no light anywhere, a high-pitched voice welcomed him with a gloomy: ‘At last!’
He wanted to believe that his eyes were still closed, and tried to open them again. As if they weren’t properly open, he opened them wider, as wide as he could. He still couldn’t see further than his nose. ‘Who’s there?’ he exclaimed, backing against the wall from fear. But the voice only replied: ‘If I were to tell you my name, you might not be able to bear the darkness, or my presence.’
BARON: Who are you?
VOICE: I prefer to spare you that.
BARON: What is this place?
VOICE: You must be joking.
BARON: No. Of course this isn’t a prison, though it seems just like one to me. I should be free by now. They didn’t prove anything. Where am I?
VOICE: There are other ways of punishing apart from prisons. Have you never heard of . . .
BARON: No! Not that! They’ve sent me to Charenton! How could they? Just because they had no proof. Is that the reason? Is that what they call a reason? The asylum was one of the possibilities put forward by the tribunal, but I told them I wasn’t mad! I’m not mad!
VOICE: That’s what they all say.
BARON: Charenton! It’s not possible! But isn’t it here that the Marquis de Sade is interned?
VOICE: Who?
BARON: De Sade! The marquis . . . That’s it! Charenton! At least that’s something. It’s my last chance. Luck must be on my side in some way.
VOICE: That’s the first time I’ve heard anything so stupid from someone who’s just arrived.
BARON: The marquis will be my salvation.
VOICE: There is no salvation.
BARON: Do you know why I’ve ended up here? I’m accused of murder.
VOICE: It happens to lots of people.
BARON: Only I’ve killed no one.
VOICE: That’s what they all say.
BARON: They don’t believe me, but the truth is that I don’t know who the murderer was – much less who died.
VOICE: It’s no accident they sent you here. Prisons are for murderers. The asylum is for madmen. Each to his own.