Antonio had written “I shall return,” then he laid down the pen.
“And then?” Laurent asked.
“That is for you to know.”
Laurent leaned over the paper. The letters presented their orderly backs to him; he regarded them with the anxious deference of a man entrusting his goods to strangers. He could trace his own name, at the cost of an effort that left him little inclined to go further. For the rest, he had recourse to those who possessed that singular advantage: making a voice travel while the body was held fast.
A departure was being prepared at Bicêtre. The convoy was to carry condemned men away to the hulks. Laurent had asked Brochetti to write to his mother, not because they were companions, but because Antonio knew how to write and he had found no one else. In exchange, he had offered him a portion of his bread. Antonio had refused the bread, accepted the paper, and then awaited the first words with an impatience that Laurent mistook for generosity.
“Tell her I shall come back to see her,” he resumed. “When this is over.”
Antonio struck out the beginning of the sentence. Laurent protested at once: he had paid for the paper, and they would not give him another to indulge the humor of his scribe. Brochetti considered the erasure. The ink was still wet; it had rendered illegible in an instant what the other had taken so long to resolve upon promising.
“You will write that to her when you know it to be so.”
Laurent asked him by what right he chose what news his mother was to receive. Anger lent him an eloquence with which he would fain have filled the page. He spoke of the old woman, of her eyes that could no longer discern small objects, of the neighbor who would read the letter aloud and assume a knowing air before ill tidings. He did not wish that neighbor to find too much matter for comment.
Antonio listened to him without raising his head. He had been born in Rome; he had assaulted a Greek priest and found himself condemned to a term to which no end was promised. Laurent knew these few particulars, or believed he knew them, because they had circulated among the men. He had never questioned Brochetti about the priest. In a prison, certain inquiries give the impression of repeating the magistrates’ work for nothing.
“Write only that I am doing well,” he said at last.
Antonio took up the pen.
“Are you doing well?”
“She can do nothing for the rest.”
This reply seemed to arrest something in Brochetti. He set down the requested words in a more deliberate hand. Laurent bent so close that his breath stirred the edge of the paper. He wished to watch this useful falsehood come into being. His mother would learn of the departure, then she would reach this sentence; for a few seconds at least, she might catch her breath.
In the yard, an order passed from man to man. The sound of things being set down was heard, approaching footsteps, a name called out. Laurent broke off his dictation to listen. He would have liked to recognize in that stir the promise of being elsewhere. A road remains a road, even when one has not chosen it: there would be different air, other faces, a horizon farther off than the wall before which one ate.
“You are in haste, then?” Antonio asked.
Laurent hesitated. The question made him feel almost guilty for having pictured the sky.
“I am in haste for it to begin to end.”
Brochetti gave a slight nod. He looked at the sheet, then at his hands. Laurent understood that he had just spoken to a man for whom arrival opened no countdown. He sought a phrase that would not sound like consolation. He found none. Both men had been stripped of their freedom; the sentence of the one still left him numbers of which the other could make no use.
“That does not prevent you from writing,” he said softly.
“To whom?”
Laurent lowered his eyes. He had thought he was recommending an occupation; Antonio was laying bare an absence. He returned to his mother, to the precise matters he could still dictate: not to sell the small cupboard, to keep the tools at his brother’s, to demand a receipt if anyone claimed money in his name. These instructions lent him, for a moment, the consequence of a man ordering his affairs before a journey. Antonio wrote them down without comment.
When the paper was filled, Laurent asked to hear it read. He wished to hear every word, including those he had just uttered. Brochetti read quickly. Coming near the erasure, he stopped. Laurent asked what was missing. The other replied that there remained enough room to sign.
They disputed a second time. Laurent wanted his promise; Antonio would not restore it. The refusal had lost every semblance of counsel. There was in this obstinacy something that went beyond the letter, a way of being no longer able to endure that another should still possess a future to offer anyone.
“She is my mother,” Laurent said. “It is not yours who awaits this paper.”
Antonio handed him the pen. Laurent’s fingers gripped it too high. He formed his name slowly, with pauses between the letters, as though he were carrying a burden across a narrow passage. When he had finished, he folded the sheet before Brochetti could alter anything upon it.
A warder came to announce a muster. Laurent rose with the others. Antonio remained motionless for a moment; the order was repeated to him. Nothing in the voice heard that morning by our protagonist warranted hatred. It was precisely what Laurent would retain in his memory: he could have gone a whole day beneath that tone without distinguishing it from any other.
A short while later, there were cries. Laurent did not see the first blow; he was thrust back along with several prisoners. The departure fell into disarray, men ran in opposite directions, someone shouted for help. Brochetti had just struck down a warder. The paper Laurent clutched against himself crumpled in his hand; he was no longer mindful of protecting it.
The warder died. In the memoirs published under the name of Sanson, Brochetti is said to have committed this murder to obtain death, which he preferred to prison and the galleys. He was condemned, then executed on the Place de Grève on May 22, 1824. This outcome left the warder no part in the choice attributed to the condemned man: his life had been taken merely to alter another’s fate.
Laurent belongs to our fiction, as do his letter and their conversation. Before his own departure, he asked that the paper be read to him once more. A man followed the lines, paused at the crossed-out words, and asked what had been written beneath. Laurent replied that he no longer remembered. He then had the letter sent just as it was. His mother would find news in it, a few directions, and his clumsy signature. As for the promise, she would have to wait until he knew how to trace it himself.