And again, as though in response to the soldier’s look, a bus stopped on the open road and let us get in. Was it the same bus as before, which had by then completed its circuits in the backcountry? If so, it had let the child off somewhere and picked up no other passengers. But were we “passengers”? We were alone in the bus, in seats high above the road; behind us there were small cars, none of which passed us. Little by little we became a convoy. Apparently we were being escorted to the city with a police car in the lead. And sitting erect with our hands on our knees, looking straight ahead, we found this perfectly natural.
The city had no suburbs. A moment before in the paling light we had been passing country walls that gave the effect not only of being dilapidated but of having suddenly caved in. Already the road was ending and we were outside the railroad station. Was the whole city just an extension of the station? What other buildings were there apart from the offices of the railroad administration? In any case, only their façades were floodlit, and otherwise there was no street lighting. The revolving sign that flickered above the roofs in the twilight turned out to be moving trains. Proceeding on foot, we found other hallmarks of a city, such as a park and a movie house. There was no fountain in the park — a ring of palm trees around a cedar — and the movie house, like the country walls, had been reduced to a ruin, this obviously with great suddenness — clean cracks such as the passage of time alone does not produce; the ticket office had collapsed, and the clock on top of it, dial, glass, and mechanism, was a total wreck. The earthquake must have taken place a long time ago, the faces on the once-colored posters were all beyond recognition. The houses that followed were new, built of thick, undressed concrete. Suddenly the dark city seemed full of life, because the passersby were a mixture of all races, and there was no way of knowing whether these constantly moving people, foreigners like ourselves, none with eyes for anyone else, were fugitives or whether, each for himself, they were on their way to some feast.
Standing in the middle of the sidewalkless street, a doorman motioned us into his hotel with a sweeping gesture. As with the bus driver before him, we took him for an agent of our old man. The lobby was resplendent, as though brand-new; we were the only guests. The one and only attendant let us pick our own rooms, which were in every way alike, all decorated with pictures of the city before the catastrophe and the day after it.
Bathed and changed, we repaired to the dining room, which, like the whole hotel, was empty and brightly lit. A man’s voice, chanting in a cracked singsong to the accompaniment of a harpsichord, was issuing from the loudspeaker. Listening in the doorway, we assumed it to be the voice of our old man, and when seated we looked for him under the disguise of the waiter, previously the receptionist. Wasn’t his hair dyed? Hadn’t the liver spots on the backs of his hands been burned off? Weren’t the lenses of his glasses mere window glass? In the end we asked him for some information just to see his pencil and his handwriting. Dissemble if you will, your monogram imprinted in the sand of the cigarette urn in the entrance is trace enough for us.
Though we were alone in the room, the festive illumination, the trailing plants along the walls, and the bay trees that flanked the tables gave us the feeling that we were surrounded by invisible people. Every time the waiter came through the swinging door with his brass, dome-shaped cart — revealing a kitchen so glaringly white as to efface any figures that may have been there-he was followed by cries and a hubbub of busy voices, as though this were a moment of feverish activity. We were sure that when the meal was over the old man would appear in the doorway in a chef’s hat and receive our applause, smiling bashfully, with the modesty characteristic of master chefs.
Suddenly the hall was full of diners; additional waiters hurried in from all directions; evidently people kept late dinner hours in this town; and though we had seen only foreigners in the streets, all these late diners seemed as casual as only natives can be.
Each time we looked up in vain, our hope waned a little; each time we mistook someone for the Awaited One, our memory of the man himself grew dimmer. Did he really exist? Weren’t he, his pencil, and his notebook mere delusions? And who were we — the woman with the pursed lips, the young fellow with the dirty fingernails, the unknown man with the pimp’s bracelet and the corresponding bundle of banknotes?
When did the thought come to us, all of us at once, that the missing man had vanished forever? It happened suddenly in the dining room that was once again empty — the waiters had left long ago; the festive illumination and harpsichord music were unchanged, but the singing voice was gone. A thought without an image, accompanied by a nausea that made us speechless, incapable of so much as an outcry. Each for himself, without a parting word, by separate itineraries — elevator, stairs, service entrance — we went to our separate rooms, followed by the music, which resounded through the corridors, that music of which the poet said that heard in the distance it filled all those with horror who knew that they would never return home.
All night long the city seemed to be one vast railroad station: in all the rooms shunting sounds were heard, interspersed with loudspeaker voices calling out strings of place-names such as “Venice-Milan-Ventimiglia-Lyon-Paris,” or “Istanbul-Salonika-Belgrade-Zagreb-Munich-Ostend,” and it seemed to us that these resonant litanies intensified the effect of the music. The only other sounds were strangely tinny bells and an occasional whimpering and howling nearby, so wild that one of us thought of a madhouse, one of a prison, and one of a zoo. But never a barking, not even in the distance, as though, perhaps since the earthquake, there was not a single dog in the whole city.
But to make up for it, the cocks started crowing in the early darkness, so many in so many different places that we thought we were out of doors and that hotel and city were an illusion. Our only certainty was that something had happened to the old man, and that certainty, instead of calming us, made us see ghosts. Didn’t people who had just died — especially those who had been dear to one in life — become terrifying revenants if one hadn’t taken leave of them properly?
So then the old man went into the phase of evil absence. And it persisted. He lurked in the darkest corners of the room and attacked us in our instant-long insomniac dreams; and in the morning sun he was still there, ready to pounce. At the very same moment, one of us screamed because he had seen the old man’s cape on a clothes hanger, one recoiled from the glove on the balcony railing, while one pulled his knife and spun around because he had mistaken his own hair, hanging down over his face, for a marauder. The “dead man” had become a multitude of dead men, and all had banded together against us forlorn survivors.
Breakfast was served us on the terrace overlooking the hotel park. Though seated at the same table, we were not in any sense “together.” We were strangers to one another, more so than the night before. Shoulder to shoulder, we seemed to have partitions between us. Had we ever had anything in common? Stupid mishap, falling in with these particular people! Stupid illusion of kinship that has sent me and these people to this weird place.
Worse than estrangement, there was hostility between us. None of us found the strength to go his separate way or to content himself with staying there, looking around him and playing with his thoughts. Glued to the spot, unable to take an interest in anything, we were enemies and would soon come to blows. The woman kept crumpling slips of paper and setting fire to them, as though burning us in effigy. The gambler shivered in the balmy air and at intervals exploded in suicidal laughter, as though about to run amok. Even the mild-mannered soldier, staring at always the same line in his book, incapable of reading, red in the face, bared his teeth from time to time. Losing each other’s contours, we were no longer face to face; we did what we had never done before — we judged, deprecated, and in the end hated one another.