‘Don’t breathe a word to anyone. I don’t want the women to know what’s going on. They would change their attitude, they wouldn’t be able to help it, and what I am doing would lose all its power.’
‘Suppose we all started staring at them – wouldn’t they be even more embarrassed?’
‘They would no longer be embarrassed at all.’
These thoughts came to me with dazzling certainty and I felt absolutely sure of them. Where did they come from? I still have no idea, I only know that I derived enormous pleasure from what was going on in my mind.
‘Something that everybody does becomes meaningless. It’s just a habit, a custom, nobody knows when it started, they just repeat it mechanically. If I want to annoy him, I must be the only one to stare at him.’
Anthea pondered. I’m not sure she completely understood me; I was driven by an unquestionable authority and nothing was going to stop me.
‘I don’t know what all this may lead to,’ I told her, ‘but that’s what’s so exciting: in our absurd existence, I’ve invented something unexpected.’
She gently nodded her head.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘And I shall carry on thinking about it.’
And I resumed my position, sitting cross-legged, my eyes riveted on the young guard.
Was he really handsome or did I only find him handsome because he was the only man who wasn’t old? I, who knew so little, and who couldn’t remember the world, did recognise the signs of age. I’d seen hair turn grey, and then white, speckles appear, baldness threaten the heads of the oldest women, wrinkles, dry skin, folds, weakening tendons, stooped backs. The guard had clear skin, his step was supple as I knew mine was, despite the little space there was for me to test it; he was upright and young like me. I found that strange: weren’t there enough old men left? Maybe they were all dead? Or did they not know what to do with the young men? They couldn’t think of any more tasks to set them and so they sent them to pace up and down between the bars and the wall? There hadn’t been any young guards before, I said to myself, and my heart began to race. How long had he been there? I had the feeling that I hadn’t noticed him straight away, I hadn’t counted the days, I didn’t know when I’d started making up stories because I had no reference points. Unless I was mistaken, if his presence was recent, then, for the first time in years, something had changed. Beyond the walls, in that outside world which was totally concealed from us except for the food we ate and the fabric they gave us, things had happened and those events affected us. The guards had always been so old that we didn’t notice them age. I’d been a little girl when I arrived, now I was a woman, a virgin for ever, but an adult despite my underdeveloped breasts and my aborted puberty: I’d grown, my body had recorded the passage of time. The old women didn’t change any more than the old guards, their hair had turned white, but it happened so slowly that it was hardly noticeable. I’d been their clock: watching me, the women watched their own time tick by. Maybe that was why they didn’t like me, perhaps the mere fact of my existence made them cry. The young guard wasn’t a child when he arrived, he was tall, with thick hair, and there were no lines on his face. When he showed the first signs of withering, then I would feel my own skin to see whether I was getting older. He too would be a clock, we would grow old at the same speed. I could watch him and judge how much time I had left from the springiness of his step.
So, there had been a change. Somewhere, a decision had been taken which affected us, the impact of which we could assess: one of the old men had disappeared – perhaps he’d died – and had been replaced. Had this escaped the notice of those who governed our lives, were they not concerned about giving us a piece of information, or had they relaxed their vigilance?
I didn’t take my eyes off the guards. They always went in threes, pacing up and down the corridor. They were silent. When they passed one another, their eyes didn’t meet but I had the impression that they watched each other as closely as they watched us. The authorities must have been afraid that they’d disobey orders, or that they’d speak to us. Once again, I had a sudden insight, I understood why they had to be in threes: it prevented any complicity. They weren’t permitted to have private conversations, which might have conveyed something to us; they had to maintain the role of suspicious jailers all the time.
The two men on duty with the young guard had been there for ages. During the early years, the women had tried to talk to the guards, to make demands or move them to pity, but nothing could break down their cruel indifference. Then, they gave up and behaved as if they couldn’t see the guards, as if they’d banished their presence from their minds – or as if they themselves were bars that the women had become so used to that they no longer bumped into them. Nobody imagined that they felt in the least humiliated, but the prisoners’ pride was preserved intact. They no longer complained to the guards or took their imperturbability as an insult. And that made the gaze of this girl, sitting absolutely still, all the more powerful.
I’d stopped telling myself stories: watching the guard, I was creating one. I needed patience, I had nothing else to give. I don’t know how many waking periods I spent in this way. I thought a lot, and it occurred to me that we should stop speaking in terms of day and night, but of waking and sleeping periods. My certainty grew stronger: we were not living according to a twenty-four-hour cycle. When the lights were turned down, no one was tired: the women said it was because they had nothing to do. Perhaps they were right, but I didn’t know what it was like to work. My conviction came from continually watching the young guard. The relief guards didn’t come when we awoke, at mealtimes, when we went to bed or when we were moving around, but in between, at irregular intervals. The main door would open a fraction, the three men pacing up and down around the cage would converge, and sometimes they’d all leave the room as the next shift entered; at other times, only one or two were replaced. Was there any connection between their timetable and ours? How could I measure the passage of time? The only indicators I had were my body rhythms.
Anthea taught me that the heart always beats at the same rate, between seventy and seventy-four times a minute in a healthy person.
I began to count.
I had learned very little. Thirty, forty, fifty, seventy, eighty, I had to sort out the tens in my mind, but then I realised I didn’t know my tables and I barely knew how to do division. If, between the time when they turned the lights full on and the time when the guards changed shift, when the young guard came on duty, my heart had beaten seven thousand, two hundred times, that would have made a hundred minutes. It was just a question of multiplying Anthea’s seventy-two by a hundred, but what I had was three thousand, two hundred and twenty, or five thousand and twelve! I was incapable of performing the necessary operations. It was all very well concentrating and counting, but I couldn’t make use of the figures I obtained.
‘Can you teach me to do sums?’ I asked Anthea.
‘Without pencil and paper?’
She explained:
‘We are not as heartless as you think, and we have discussed your education a great deal. Teach you to read? With what, and to read what? Counting was possible up to a point, but only for mental calculations and we weren’t able to show you arithmetical operations. You wouldn’t know how to read a number. Helen and Isabel taught you your tables, but you must have forgotten because you never used them. Besides, when you realised that it wasn’t a game, you refused, it made you cross. We couldn’t force you and we couldn’t punish you, because of the guards. We couldn’t make you want to learn things you thought were pointless, and, in the end, we didn’t really see the need. Eight eights, and what then? What do you find sixty-four of here? Was there any point teaching you anything?’