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‘I’ve just found twenty francs,’ he said, ‘down on the ground there.’

‘A coin, you mean?’

‘Strange, don’t you think?’ he said.

‘Someone must have lost it.’

‘I wonder.’

Daisy gave it back to him. Then she wiped her earth-stained fingers against the stone wall.

‘It must have been there quite a time. It’s thick with earth.’

‘No — not earth—

What?’ she said.

‘No, I mean, not earth, not exactly. More a kind of dust, something like ash. Here, I’ll clean it up a bit. Tear me off some of your paper—’

He began to clean the twenty-franc piece, very carefully, sitting there close to the sea, facing the fountain, half in the sun, half in shadow. He scraped every tiny corner and recess, using the sharp fingernail of his right-hand index finger, wrapped up in a scrap of paper. But the metal remained worn and lustreless, permanently blackened by its contact with the soil.

Far beyond the world of peace and quietness, far from that secret paradise where springs gush forth in undisturbed tranquillity, a place of murmuring trees, where each light breeze and wasp moves as the fancy takes it; far from the rain drumming down steep roofs and into the gaping maw of the gutters; far beyond all these scarcely-formulated worlds, this flesh-coloured beauty, these innumerable swarming crevasses, these mouths for ever muttering their interminable stories, mingled with breath smelling of food and soda-water — far away and beyond all this there seems to be a weight binding your feet and hands, a weight that tears you away, all trembling and bloody, from any pleasure in life. It’s like a block of marble, high as a house, weighing countless tons, dragging you through the birth-pangs of mortal being. Before you know it you’re off, without knowing where, the freezing cold penetrating every pore in a trice, while you vainly try to cry out, even to get your breath back; but those grim metallic shafts pierce through you like the long swift movement of a sword thrusting into your vitals. There are no set limits to this race: it is virtually interminable, so that nothing — neither the act of writing, nor a name (such as T E A P E), nor birth itself could check its advance. Imperceptibly, during this descending progress, the world expands: not in depth or surface area, but in quantity—the universe multiplies, colours, elements (both static and alive), living creatures, all become increasingly divergent. Strange endless scribblings encircle every part of space and make it incomprehensible. It is as though speed of movement, or the sharpness of the senses, or some such factor, were blowing up reality to the point where it passed beyond one’s grasp. Patches of light, dark shadows, straight lines, emphatic or lightly sketched shapes, all simultaneously merge, yet remain distinct. Every object becomes, at one and the same time, akin to, and different from, every other object. Then comes a murmurous sound, swelling into wild, harmonious music, rising from the heart of matter and mingling its mournful vibrations with those of the light. It is, you might say, as though the earth were on the boil, a slow succession of bursting bubbles. The human observer, deceived by his own sensibilities, plunges further into the depths; rhythm and theme catch him in mid-flight, while colour-patterns (ever-changing, ever-destructive) cast a camouflage over him. Voices have a heavy, cavernous boom, are linked every twenty-four seconds to the rhythm of a man hammering away with all his strength on a spark-bright bundle of crazy steel tubing. Somewhere between earth and sky there oscillates a large, flattish object, its surface daubed with blood, apparently made of riveted and interlapping steel plates, sliding to and fro with each compression or expansion of their overall mass, and yet very much all of a piece, easily liftable on some gigantic bar, like a curtain. Then, deeper still, the effect is akin to that other sea one discovers after plunging beneath the surface. The rhythm is slow still, that gong-stroke every twenty-two or twenty-three seconds: but the quality of the sound has changed. It is no longer music, but rather a kind of soft, continuous frictional note, somewhat like falling rain, or the hiss of wet tyres. Sometimes, especially round a gas-flare, or a cigarette-lighter, or even a flash of light off the bodywork of a car, there forms a note so high and shrill as to be quite unbearable; but it never lasts for long. Very soon it splits into two notes, then three, then four, then five, then six. A kind of musical shrubbery has been brought into existence. It grows, spreads, extends its branches, mingles with the other vegetal tissue of sounds about it. After some 2,503 further subdivisions, the shrill note has become no more than a fine, disembodied whisper, the sound of a finger brushing across skin, magnificent to the nth degree, the scarcely audible sound of a hand caressing the dry, powdery texture of some young girl’s thigh. Such is the unremitting frictional sound that accompanies these speeded-up movements in the blue of the sky; later, the blue might have been replaced by orange, but now colours, too, are separating off and multiplying — not in a static context, as it might be the white wall of the apartment block, but as part of the universal va-et-vient: a subtle and alarming movement, that modifies every least detail of existence, something for the insect world to imitate. Now time, too, splits up, propagates, drains and devours itself. The stereoscopic patterns divide: the higher ones pursue their vertical flight into the void, those beneath them plunge greedily downwards, are swallowed by oblivion.

And above this scene of chaos, these ear-dulling noises, it seems to me that I myself am poised, dreaming, or drifting in chill and monumental splendour, like some great iceberg, blue depths glinting, nine-tenths under water, a solid mass of stiff glacial fury. My ears are filled with words in unknown, inhuman-sounding languages. The syllables jostle and trip against one another, build patterns in the void. They are not addressed to any person; they form a termite-language, their volubility is made up of endless tiny points. Nothing has any further significance. Everywhere — on the peeling walls and the monumental fountains, across the doors of dark, stinking retreats, in the station booking-hall, over millions of virgin pages — there runs that delicate secret writing which no one can read. Here are set forth facts of immediate concern and all-too-ghastly reality, which must yet pass unrevealed: rather like those frightful accidents, known yet somehow kept from the mind, which lie so heavy on our consciences. All measure and restraint have been lost; it seems to me that the world is in torment, that it bears an incurable wound.

Besson stands rooted to the spot, staring straight in front of him, unable to see anything but this horror, and looking like some exotic statue. All unbeknown to himself he has become a fragment of black wood, a sculptured piece of ebony. His thick lips are motionless, his neck has stiffened into a knot of old cords. His limbs are thin and tough, his belly excessively swollen, hard and distended like that of a pregnant woman. Beneath his belly the penis is erect, pointed. There are no muscles or veins visible on the surface of his body: the whole thing is as smooth as a pebble. At the centre of his belly lies a hole dug with the point of a knife, enclosing a canaclass="underline" this is his navel, like the puncture left by a pistol-shot. Besson’s legs are short and bowed; his toes are splayed out in an unpleasant fashion, rather as though, somewhere higher up, he were making the ghost of an obscene gesture. Above all, under the dome of his skull, breaking the frontal curve, are two enormous eyes, two balls of black wood set in black wood, two blind, senseless domes, soft to the finger’s touch: such is the persona, the frog-mask, that François Besson has chosen to wear. It is this monstrous weight of sorrow and pity that he allows to drag him down, so that he falls, falls, passing the striated layers of the earth’s surface, the sudden reddish explosions of the elements, basic clusters of matter; he falls deeper and faster than a man confronted by a smoking cigarette; yet he knows he will never arrive at any destination. Foreign languages all have their word for hope; but this word sticks in the throat. I am not isolated; I can communicate with you all; but it is bound to be too late. It may be that — caught in this trap, caught in the very midst of life — such languages work their way through me, turn me into a phantom, irresistibly strip me of all the individual characteristics I once possessed. After days of this journey, with nothing left of myself save this vast and vulnerable body, open to every emotional assault, I was expecting some sort of triumphal conclusion to the matter — and in the very midst of a clear and levelled world, I am still taken unawares. I have had scant opportunity to extract myself from my dilemma, since the town I am entering is very like the other one, I am hemmed in by near-identical walls, overwhelmed by the same colours and sounds and desires: time and space have made a complete revolution. On the other side of this liquid mass, on the earth’s further face, the darkness — despite the chaos close at hand — has not diminished one jot. It still holds everything in its vice-like grasp, covers each object with its friable skin. On the high level ground to the left of the town, a level area of a few acres contains emblems signifying silence and death. Here everything is rectilinear, comprehensible, and as a result almost joyful; under the vaguely aligned crosses, caught by this species of three-faced mirror, lie no end of curious beings. And it is true enough that, once upon a time, they were alive: vigorously, insolently alive. Now nothing remains of them but an ill-defined oblong of blackish earth, and two white sticks nailed together in an upright position. The burial-grounds of men, dogs, beetles and briars have merged and become one. Perhaps, indeed, the cemetery is a cemetery no longer, but rather a kind of vague terrain extending over the whole earth, a vision, it may be, to superimpose on that of our daily existence, to spread out — everywhere and to all eternity — the soul racked by indecisive respect and terror? The earth is a night-soil dump, very tranquil, very neatly ordered, where the device of these small meticulous crosses allows every being, despite their annihilation, to persist in the shape of black letters inscribed on pine-wood lathes.