From atop a hill, motionless on their horses, which are pacing nervously, the officers watch the great expanse of brush into which the blue men have already disappeared, as if they had been swallowed up by the earth. The Senegalese foot soldiers come back, carrying their dead companions, without a glance at the hundreds of men and women in rags who are lying on the ground. Somewhere on the slopes of the valley, amidst the thorn bushes, a boy is sitting next to the body of a dead warrior, staring very hard at the bloody face whose eyes have grown dark.
IN THE STREET lit with the rising sun, the boy walks unhurriedly alongside the parked cars. His lean body glides past the shiny hulls, his reflection slips over the windows, the polished fenders, the headlights, but that’s not what he’s looking at. He leans slightly toward each automobile, and his eyes search the interior of the cab, the seats, the floor under the seats, the rear window, the glove compartment.
He moves silently forward, all alone in the wide empty street where the sun is lighting the first glimmer of morning, clear and pure. The sky is already very blue, limpid, without a cloud. The summer wind is blowing in from the sea, rushing through the streets, along the straight avenues, whirling about the small parks, shaking the palm trees and the tall araucarias.
Radicz quite likes the summer wind; it’s not a malevolent wind like the one that tears up the dust, or the one that goes into your body and chills you to the bone. It’s a mild wind, laden with sweet smells, a wind that smells of the sea and of grass, that makes you sleepy; Radicz is happy, because he slept out under the stars, in an abandoned garden, with his head between the roots of a tall parasol pine not far from the sea.
Before sunrise, he woke up and knew instantly that the summer wind had begun. So he rolled around in the grass a little, the way dogs do, and then he ran without stopping all the way to the edge of the sea. He looked at it for a long time from up on the road, so lovely and so calm, still gray with night, but already splashed in places with the blue and pink of dawn. For a second even, he almost felt like climbing down on the rocks — still cold with night — taking off all his clothes, and diving into the water. It was the summer wind that had called him out to the sea, had shown him the water. But he remembered he didn’t have much time left, that he had to hurry because people would be getting up soon. So he went back up into the streets, looking for cars.
Now, he’s nearing a large complex of buildings and gardens. He walks along the alleys of the park, where the cars are stopped. There isn’t a soul in the gardens for as far as you can see. The shades on the buildings are still down; the balconies are empty. The summer wind is blowing on the façades of the buildings, making the shades snap. There’s also the soft sound in the branches of the mimosas and the oleanders, and the tall palm trees rustling as they sway.
The light appears slowly, first up in the sky, then on the tops of the buildings, and the streetlamps grow pale. Radicz really likes this time of day because the streets are still silent, the houses closed up, without a soul, and it’s as if he were alone in the world. He walks slowly along the alleys around the building, and he thinks the whole city is his, there’s no one else left. Maybe, as in the aftermath of a catastrophe, while he was sleeping in the abandoned garden, the men and women had fled, had already left, running for the mountains, abandoning their houses and their cars. Radicz moves along beside the still hulls, looking inside, the empty seats, the motionless steering wheels, and he has the strange feeling that someone is observing him, threatening him. He stops, looks up in the direction of the high walls of the buildings. The dawn light has already lit the tops of the façades with its pink hue. But the shades and the windows remain closed, and the large balconies are empty. The sound of the wind passing is a very soft sound, very lazy, a sound which isn’t meant for humans, and again Radicz feels the void which has hollowed out over the city, which has replaced human sounds and movements.
Maybe while he was sleeping, his head between the roots of the old parasol pine, the summer wind, as if coming from some other world, mysteriously put all the men and all the women in town to sleep, and they’re lying in their beds, in their apartments with closed shutters, deep in a magical sleep that will never end. So now the city can rest at last, breathe, the wide empty streets with stopped cars, the closed shops, the darkened streetlamps and traffic lights; so now the grass will be able to grow peacefully in the cracks of the pavement, the gardens will start looking like forests again, and the rats and birds will be able to go wherever they want fearlessly, as they did in the days before humans.
Radicz stops for a minute to listen. The birds just happen to be awakening in the trees, starlings, sparrows, blackbirds. It’s the blackbirds especially that are calling out very loudly, and flying heavily from one palm tree to another, or else hopping along on the wet tar in the big parking lots. The boy really likes blackbirds. They have a lovely black coat and a bright yellow beak, and they have that peculiar way of hopping, with their head turned slightly to one side, keeping an eye out for danger. They look like thieves, and that’s why Radicz likes them. They’re like him, a bit careless, a bit crooked, and they know how to whistle shrilly to warn that danger is near; they know how to laugh, with a kind of resonant chuckling in their throats that really makes him laugh too. Radicz moves slowly through the parking lots, and from time to time, he whistles to answer the blackbirds. Maybe while the boy was sleeping in the abandoned garden, his head between the roots of the tall parasol pine, the men and women left the big city, just like that, without making a sound, and the blackbirds have taken their place. That idea really pleases Radicz, and he whistles even louder, using his fingers, to tell the blackbirds he’s with them, that it’s all theirs, everything, the houses, the streets, and even the shops and everything inside them.
The light in the park, around the buildings, is rapidly increasing. Dewdrops are glistening on the roofs of the cars, on the leaves of the shrubs. Radicz has to force himself not to stop and look at all those drops of light. In the emptiness of the big parking lot, with those high white walls, those shades rolled down, those empty balconies, they shine with heightened intensity, as if they were the only real and living things. They quiver a little in the wind from the sea, they look like thousands of unblinking eyes watching the world.
Then once again, Radicz vaguely feels the threat hanging over it all, here, in the parking lot of the buildings, the danger that is prowling. It’s a gaze, or perhaps a light, that the boy can’t see, can’t understand. The threat is hidden under the tires of the stopped automobiles, in the reflections on their windows, in the wan glow of the streetlamps that are still lit in spite of the daylight. It makes a shudder run over his skin, and the boy feels his heart slowing down, then speeding up, and the palms of his hands grow moist with cold sweat.
The birds have disappeared now, except some flights of swifts that go rushing by at top speed, twittering. The blackbirds have fled over to the other side of the huge blocks of concrete, and the air has grown silent. Even the wind is gradually letting up. Dawn doesn’t last very long over the big city; it shows its miracle for an instant, then fades away. Now day is coming. The sky is no longer gray and pink, the dull color is invading it. There’s a sort of haze in the west, over where the tall chimneys of the storage tanks have undoubtedly begun spitting out their poisonous fumes.