Baumgartner by Paul Auster

Author:Paul Auster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

LIFE SENTENCE

I had barely turned seventeen when the presiding judge of the Northern District handed down his verdict and sentenced me to what he called a life of making sentences. That was more than half a century ago, and since then I have lived alone in a cell on the third floor of Correctional Facility No. 7. I admit that the punishment was harsh, but to give the authorities their due, the door of my cell has never been locked, and there is little doubt in my mind that I could have walked out of here anytime I wanted. It’s not that I haven’t been tempted, but for reasons I have never fully understood, I have chosen to remain.

My jailer, who is an old man now, at least as old as I am if not older, has never spoken a word to me. For fifty-plus years, he has delivered my meals three times a day, and three times a day for the first twenty years he would laugh whenever he walked in and saw me hunched over the table working on my sentences. For the next twenty years, he would hold his hand against his mouth and snicker. Now he merely shakes his head and sighs.

There used to be another prisoner in the cell two doors down from mine, a man named Bronson or Brownson, and sometimes we would talk to each other about the bad food and the thin blankets on our beds, but Bronson or Brownson has said nothing to me for the past five or six years, which probably means he is dead. No doubt they carried him away one night while I was asleep.

From the silence in the corridor these days, I suspect that I am the last person in the solitary-confinement wing of the prison. It sounds lonely, I suppose, but it’s not as bad as all that. Great effort is required to make a sentence, and great effort requires great concentration, and as one sentence must inevitably follow another in order to build a work composed of sentences, great concentration is required throughout the day, which means that the days pass by quickly for me, as if each hour that registers on the clock were no longer than a minute. After fifty-plus years of quickly passing days, it feels as if my life has rushed by in a blur. I have become old, but because the days have passed so quickly, most of me still feels young, and as long as I can still hold a pencil in my hand and still see the sentence in front of me, I suppose I will carry on with the same routine I have been following since the morning I arrived here. And if a moment should finally come when I can no longer carry on, all I have to do is get up and leave. If I am too old to walk by then, I will ask my jailer to help me. I am sure he will be glad to see me go.

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