In the entrance hall of our house I took my wife’s wrists in my hands. Cold entered my fingers, the knuckles. This is what she told me while I was caressing her pulse:
“Down below by the crossing of boulevard Saint-Moche where the red lights are, Pip and I placed ourselves. There wasn’t much traffic.”
“Ah!” I say.
“The lights regularly changed from red to green to a yellow colour rather like amber, then red again, again green, and so on. I thought, if he comes by, if our motor car passes, I shall see him, I shall recognize it.”
And I: “Ah!”
“Perhaps he got lost. . Perhaps he’s looking for us. . The traffic flow became even less as it got later. . When it is late the streets are more present, more street. . And then I noticed it — our car — dark and wet and shiny with rain, just like a new black coin. I don’t know if the traffic lights were red or green. It came by along the sidewalk where we stood and the tyres made a swishing noise on the wet tar, you know how, and how the droplets then splash in arcs.”
And I: “Ah!”
She: “I lifted my hand, this one” — she twists the one wrist between my fingers so that the right hand lies palm up, a baby bootee washed up in a gutter, a wrinkled fish — “so that Rab may see me, may see my hand, and a rivulet of water ran down my sleeve all along the arm. . But he didn’t see me. . I don’t know if he saw me. And then I suddenly realized that he was not alone in the car. By the glow of the street lamps and the late night café on the corner I noticed Rab is not alone in our motor car. In fact, he’s not the one driving it. Behind the wheel there’s someone else, a black man wearing a coat looking like a clown’s costume, such a big blocked pattern. A smartly dressed fellow. And he wears a hat with a feather stuck in the band. Duck. His face shone and his lips were slightly parted and puffed so that one could see the whiteness of his teeth — just as if he were humming a tune through the nose. Both his hands were posed on the steering wheel higher than the dashboard. Black hands — broken-winged ravens. Rab sat next to him. He looked directly in front of him. His head was dark. The dewlap. . I saw it all in such a hurry and yet I keep on seeing it still. Oh. . I know. . I don’t know anymore. The car disappeared. It doesn’t stop. Neither does it return, no, never again. Oh. . ”
And “Ah,” I then said.
Light failed. (It was a sad affair.) The sieur Vlilv never budged; only the fires in his eyes smouldered. (Tomorrow, one thought, the flaked ash will fleck his withered cheekbones.)
After the explanation and the silence it was clear that the moment for taking back the sieur Vlilv had been broken open. I propose to do so and my father acquiesces with dark eyes; the sieur Vlilv says it ’s most decent of us, considerate et cetera, but that it will be quite sufficient if we could take him as far as the station; he has a return ticket to his destination. We walk down to the enclosure where the captive donkey used to graze, long ago. We find a carriage there, a tame one. We get in and I drive. We must remain standing with our eyes closed to slits for it would seem that at earlier times the carriage transported hay, and bits of chaff were now blowing all over. There is the sharp tang of long-gone life. We drive over the bumpy ground under the grass, out on to the gravel road and further to where it catches the asphalt. The sieur Vlilv’s hair is swept upwards by the wind; among the curls one sees the glistening of the chaff’s faded gold; the backs of his hands, the knuckles, are pale with the effort of clinging to the carriage’s edge. Evening sky is of tin; the colour and the heat of day burnt away.
The carriage is awkward to handle, not so easy to swivel — with the result that I’m forced to choose the way where I can best control the vehicle.
Nearer to the station the town begins, the first tall buildings with man-high marks of rubbing and scraping against the whitewashed walls. The streets are gorges of twilight, up high among the inclining balconies (canopies) with their empty washing lines the first three stars; bats speed in low parabolas through the weak sky, with the sound of mirrors crackling and splintering, the squeaky noises of radar in orgasm. Despite my best intentions we get caught up in a labyrinth of blue clots — the narrow and sombre and twisting lanes; I no longer know in which direction the station is situated. The high and soundless buildings exclude the heavens. Had there been more space, perhaps a horizon, one might still have oriented oneself by the smoke-flags of some train engine, but already it is too late and too dark and day lies smouldering, finished: the smoke is everywhere. We end up among a procession of refuse lorries descending, just like us, in concentric circles through the network of narrow thoroughfares — and on all sides, scraping behind the buildings, are other lanes, again buildings and streets once more, like the grainy pattern of a fingertip, falling lower, so that we hear the rising of hubbub and clanking, how it washes against the façades, flows under the arches and in the tunnels. The dust lorries are closed in, with long spouts on the bodies, like threshing-machines. These spouts eject a yellow liquid, golden in the dusk, up into heaven. It splashes all over us, the thick jets, the big dark drops; I see the stickiness in the sieur Vlilv’s hair; my father closes his eyes so that his spectacles are emptied; soaked-through bats plunge down, fall into the carriage where they lie fluttering — blue cots in the greener obscurity.
And I think back on something which the sieur Vlilv pronounced in a very tranquil tone of voice earlier in the afternoon, a citation it was from the Bhagavad-Gita, namely a dialogue between Arjuna going forth in his war chariot to do battle (the two enemy armies are in position for the confrontation), keening now with the futility of all this, bewailing all the people, kings and soldiers, friends and relatives and antagonists (the king on the opposing side is blind already) who will have to bite the dust, die (and why?) and Krishna, disguised, of course, but still, as ever, a reincarnation of Vishnu, with him in the war chariot; and Krishna saying:
Your words are wise, Arjuna, but your sorrow is for nothing.
The truly wise mourn neither for the living nor the dead.
There never was a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor any of these kings.
Nor is there any future in which we shall cease to be. .
Realize that pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory
And defeat, are all the same: then go into battle. .
Wiederholen
La cendre c’est la maladie du cigare.
When we were young we often had the fancy to go camping or holidaying for a few days further than the dunes where the land flattens again. Now, looking back, I no longer remember the details exactly and it may well be that one of our group lived there permanently so that the rest of us just went to visit from time to time. The land was terrible, sublime, massive, majestic in its absolute barrenness. Stretched out it lay around you: to both sides and to the hinterland it was unending and apparently smooth — just here and there like a guileless pattern of reef, a crinkle or a seam — until that too curbs away into the perspective, in the haziness of the no-more-see; to the front — in my memory I now view the world from the veranda of the house where we usually sojourned — there was at first a firmament of nothingness, for the skyline is the distance which you always carry near you, inside you, but then further along where it starts descending to sea level it was more indented, there were, scanty at first and gradually with deeper contrasts, the waves of dunes as the land washed against the sea and crumbled there, there were fissures and gaps in the walls of the land, chasms with high walls trapping the shadows and causing them to be more or less intense, and through which pass serpentined, places where the ground suddenly disappeared under your feet, so suddenly that involuntarily your stomach was squeezed higher, rather as if there were landslides or a centuries-long erosion of catastrophic magnitude testifying to — relatively speaking — telescoped cataclysms. Purple it was then, brownish at times, depending on the cracking of the day or the twilight of the evening — but the dominant colour scheme of this naked world was grey, a hundred different shades of grey, starting with the wet ashen colour deep under the wings of a broody speckled hen, passing through the nearly transparent silver of falling rain to the hard glitter of a blue-grey rock ledge in the sun, and stone reefs and harshness were the most common characteristics of this area, but despite the nudity it wasn’t cruel or sore: all these hues of grey surged and heaved, a gigantic play of aloof light and shade washing over the expanses to give contour and nearness and a sombreness, a depth, a mystery, a surfaceless mirror. And yet there was no chiaroscuro alternation of frisk-light and sucking-shadow: the summits of heaven were cloudless and limpid and blue with maybe just the slightest haze of limitless distances or the trembling, nearly like smoke, when there is a play in temperature shortly prior to the piercing of the sun or immediately afterwards. The sun, fearsome horseman with a robe of glistening blood, ah! Except for the falling away of the land in the direction of the sea there was neither hill nor abrupt rock formation nor disintegration of terrain, nor sand windblown in heaps even, to project fervent stains. No vegetation worth mentioning — be it tree or shrub — which might have brought the colour of differentiation, even if that were just a needle-line or a knife-notch or a small hairy fist. No, all these tones of grey were indigenous to the environment — but there was change nevertheless, movement. That which created the illusion of a succession of cooler blots and inaccessibility was indeed part of a much larger context, the impersonal rocking of the sun-planet through a space which could never be plumbed and is perhaps therefore, with our limited definitions, not space at all, always expanding, bigger and more illimitable; it was, seen closer to us, maybe the languorous round of seasons: but in these quarters there were no noticeable seasons and no climate to speak of. Or does the soil have its own climate? Where the dunes start rolling and the ravines and gullies sink away to a lower area, there at least other colours may be found: the dove-grey with violet tints of the sand, gold maybe from a reverberation of light between cliff faces or beams skimming over crests, the flicker and sparkle sometimes of a glow — like movement — being splashed off anthracite or quartz, a curve of greenery and nearly the appearance of grass or very ancient dappled glass and verdigris where an aperture opens up in the earth. At certain times of the day there were blue sections not related to anything at all, immanent, unreal, except that the eye could perceive them. And by night there were horrible dark hollows, knots in the grain of darkness usually so grey and so smooth, sluice-chambers in the horizon, a mothiness, a leprosy, the opening up of vertical caverns — which, when you stared at it from miles away, from the yard of the house, when you tried to feel it with your brain, down and down, caused the skin of you forearms to pucker from a cool satisfaction. The land softens, the land caves in, the land unravels, the land screams with a gurgle becoming dust once more of a black liquid in the holes and the splits.