Everything I’m telling you’s exact. There’s a lot more besides!.. But my memory’s out of breath! Too many people have walked over it.. like the bridge. over the memories.. as over the days!.. Too many people yelling battle!.. And then the smoke again. And I dive under the car. I’m telling it the way I’m thinking. Going down toward the floodgates, they were carousing something fantastic as far as the Orleans ramp!.. They were dancing worse than on the other, a hundred thousand times worse than the one in Avignon!.. In the forge of God’s Thunder!. And boom! and zimm! and Saint Mary! and dead and dead! in the Hurricane Ball!.. Look!. Look!. Unimportant!.. Even the world there turned inside out, an old soft broken-down umbrella!.. It drifted in the cyclones!. Too bad!. Rrpp!.. and Bing!.. Boom!. I saw it passing over the Grand Hotel! It was going fine! I saw it drifting.. swaying up there.. frolicking in the clouds!.. The bumbershoot and the main span! they were spinning around in the flurry. together!. among the massacring pussy planes, squirting gunfire. Rraap!.. Whah!.. Rraango!.. Whah!.. Rroong!. That’s about the noise made by a real molten torpedo. the most enormous! In the heart of a black and green volcano!.. What a burst of fire!.. Another bomb grazing us! goes exploding right into the current. The blast rocks us. Your guts all ripped out… Your heart popping into your mouth!.. palpitating like a rabbit.. What shame, shitting with fright.. crawling.. under the ammunition trucks with three.. four.. five legs all wound up.. Arms everywhere all mixed up.. smashed, melted into jitters! into a pulp of panic-mad slugs everyone for himself!.. Sunk, wallowing, hiccuping, you come to, tossing in the air, ripped apart, shrunk, shot the hell away! head over heels! It’s a motor about to catch fire!.. We scale a mountain of wounded.. Thick groans beneath our feet!.. They puke…We’re lucky! It’s a favor!..We emerge! groggy, smiling. Another one attacking us! He’s swooping down, a death drum! He smashes the clouds with bullets… His little tongues of fire shoot forth everywhere!.. I see all his flames pointed at us.. It’s gray and black!.. and cursed from head to tail!. He’s looking for us. He catapults from the sky with a volley of rage!.. He’s bewitching us!.. He’s damning us!.. We throw ourselves on our knees.. We beg the Virgin Mary!.. with big fervent signs of the cross!.. God the Father. the North winds! the ass-hole!. Mercy upon us! which fails us in our gurgling drawers… It’s the fall of the Spirits!.. He keeps shooting away at us, volley after volley each one worse! hanging from the angels!.. He flits about. bolts forward. wavers. He’s closing in inside his cyclone. Ffrroo!. He’s gliding again. A silky noise!
We stop seeing him. He’s enchanting us!..A sign of the cross!.. three. four. five!.. That doesn’t stop the horrors!.. the murderous atrocities!.. No conjuring him away!.. He sugars us again from leeward! We’re going to get the whole works!. He’s at the height of his passion. He's hailing us.. blasting us. on the wing!.. It’s the ricochets of the massacre!. The sheet metal’s drumming away!. The suppliants swoon and collapse!. The mob’s capsizing!. The convoy gives way!.. the parapet splits!.. the string of trucks starts kicking up. rioting. and pitches into the water!.. Ah! I’m still being spared!.. Got away from an awful upset!.. It’s been that way for twenty-two years!. It can’t last forever!.. I take a stance with Lisette, a girl-friend who’s not scared.. between the wheels of the ambulance.. you see the cavalcade from there!.. all of it! all!.. Capsizing in all directions.. We also see Largot the barber, he hasn’t left us since Bezons, he’s been following us with his bike.. He’s been drunk since Juvisy, he wanted to kill a German, but he hasn’t talked about it since fitampes.. There he is against the parapet… He’s squeezing a grandmother in his arms… He kisses her at every explosion… In the throbbing of the motors… An old woman with white hair… in wisps, braids and curlpapers. Her whole head’s bleeding red. Largot’s gentle with her. He’s drinking her blood. He’s lost his sense of respect.. but he’s stubborn, greedy..
"Bah!.. It’s red wine!” he declares. "Bah! It’s good, too!”.. He’s joking besides!. But not her!.. The grandmother closes her eyes.. She’s wagging her head… She’s lulled by the thundering!.. by the storms rocking us.. Largot yells out to me again…
"It’s red wine! Hey, ambulance! It’s red wine! Say! Macadam! ”
That’s what he calls me. In spite of our being in a catastrophe I’m irritated by him. I don’t like familiarity. All those drunken carcasses around sicken me. I feel some funny ideas myself. I’m not drunk!. I never drink anything.. It’s my reason tottering.. under the shocks of the circumstances! just that! events that are just too much!..And Zoom! it starts again worse!..
It’s coming back bad, a horrible din!.. A fantastic combustion!.. three torpedoes together, a bouquet! enough to shatter sky and earth! you don’t recognize the elements! enough to blow the top of your head off!.. and then your mind and eyeballs! and it shoots horribly through your lungs!.. stabbed from front to back!.. nailed to the shutter like an owl!.. and that backfire!.. the thousand motors at it again.. attacking the ramp!. The mad racket’s closing in!.. the jerking!
.. smashing mob!.. and the howling of the trampled! of those skinned by the wild column!. those crushed beneath the transports!.. and the caterpillar with the hundred-twenty thousand grinding teeth!. to bite the echo. a rent calvary!
.. under its three hundred thousand chains stuffed with dangling steel… with guts of twirling hoops… cockeyed under its crown. with its whole big cannon head to flatten you from way off!.. Sees you from way off, watches you! crazy you, tearing up the road!.. fleeing in a daze the Godawful sight of that monstrous hodgepodge!.. Ah! that tank, the "Bite-Me-Awful”!.. Tell me about it! Nostradamus Model!
.. that there’s really no surviving the hopeless racket!.. under the mechanical poxing, the oil-bearing tribulations!.. But the world-shakeup’s musical… no stopping the dance!.. It’s the "Damn-it-all Ball”!. And the string of the hundred thousand dead, of the thousand squeaking birds flying around cheeping, weaving their calls..
And then there's another garland with two accents and heavy blunderbusses. It’s coming from way back. from the hills… Artillery’s rolling in the echoes. You can’t cut capers you’re so crushed by your body loaded with damned frozen lead!.. But the rhythm gets you again. the bottom of the bridge full of grenades is fidgeting for you.. Got to prance the same way over the wreckage of people and animals. quartered by the dragging.. then shriveled tight big as an egg depending on the bursts of panic. Ah! the case of rebellion crops up in those dazed whirls. There’s Brigitte, the wife of Sacagne the District Attorney, she suddenly ups and gets out of her car, tears away from the anguished pleas, lifts her skirt up once and for all and jumps on the parapet, from there overlooking the mob, yelling insults through the torment!..
"Brigitte!.. Brigitte!.. I beg you! please come back to me!. your kind husband! Keep your head!. I beseech you! I summon you!”
"Shit! Shit! You don’t exist!”
"Gentlemen, Ladies, my wife’s crazy!.. She’s pregnant! It’s the excitement! I’m District Attorney Sacagne of Montargis from the Cote-d’Or!”
"Shit! Hey, Chink, you’re a pain in the ass! The hell with your bitch! The slob!”
That’s what the crowd calls her.. That’s what made things bitter! He collapses on the world! Just then everything becomes fire, thunder and lightning again! a ripping from the sky inside and about. A blast crushes, pulverizes the wall. Ah! it was time!.. scatters the whole panic, the people, arches, cars, the boiling river’s steaming. Hell’s right here!. The flames envelop us, we’re whirled about in space!.. I’m carried off with a cartload of plums, the little terrier that’s stopped barking, a sewing machine and, I think, a cast-iron tank trap hooked with barbed wire! as far as I could see!.. We split off in mid-air! The molten iron squirted toward the right, toward the locks, the whole works and the slugs! Me, the little terrier and the cart bore toward the left. in another volley of grenades. toward the poplars. the Warehouse. at a good height and full of drive… I saw higher than the clouds.. and bleeding drop by drop… a pale white hand and all about clouds of birds. all red. flitting about sprung from the wounds.. the fingers all studded with stars. strewn on the margins of space… in long gentle veils.. light and graceful.. lulling the Worlds. and grazing you. and your pretty eyes.. caressingly.. everything carries you off.. every thing drifts dream ward.. everything yields… to the fetes of the Palace of Nights..