“Would you be really annoyed if the world went at your speed and caught up with you?”
“No danger of that. Whenever that happens, I’ll have been long dead.”
“And have returned to nothingness?”
“Who knows? There may be a reward up there for those who have spent long enough in Gehenna waiting for others, a paradise where buses and women arrive on time, and speeches take up ten words, where causes and effects go hand in hand, where the alpha collides with the omega and where God—”
“God is above Time,” said Placide, out of his depth.
“Not at all! God is Time. If he’s invisible to us, it’s because he moves too quickly. To be able to see him, one would have to move as quickly as he does: that’s what Eternity is. The other day, a train was pulling out; ‘Ah,’ cried the child sitting nearby, ‘look, the trees are walking!’ So with the other life: it will be the turn of stationary things to start walking.”
“Watch the bend!” yelled Placide. “Your door’s about to open, for heaven’s sake! Your speedometer’s marking one hundred and sixty! And you don’t drive as well as you think you do.”
“Quickly and badly, that’s my motto!”
“An epitaph more likely.”
“Epitaphs are the mottos of the dead.”
At that moment, after a surge of speed, Pierre was negotiating a bend. The beam of the car’s headlights lit up a square shape that was not moving and badly parked. It was a large truck without rear lights that had pulled up on the road. Pierre slammed on his brakes from a distance of thirty metres.
Suddenly they had all the time in the world, more than a fifth of a second, to contemplate the twin tyres that loomed up, to take a careful look at the jack perched under the axle of the broken-down truck and the thick plank beneath it, as well as the faulty tail light and the number of the police car covered in dust that they were about to crash into, all presided over by a tarpaulin the colour of a bat. They took the time to read each letter of the name of the transport company, to consider almost nonchalantly each blade of grass and the enormous spare wheel by the side of the road, and the merest insect on this warm night made Amazonian by the proximity of the Rhône; they saw their lives flash by, were able to think about their future, about the gendarmes who would soon arrive with a box of bandages that lacked the required medicaments, about the curious bystanders, about the very haughty neighbours.
With a bold swing of the steering wheel, however, Pierre managed to avoid the worst, the local ambulance, the hospital bed and the temporary burial chamber at Saint-Vallier cemetery. Due to his quick reflexes, they were let off with a brand-new wing that still smelt of the workshop and cellulose paint. But, this battered wing being one of those improvements of current automobile construction that wrapped itself round the headlight, the light immediately went out, followed by the other one.
The night was resplendent, very dark and close-textured; the stars shone, you could hear the wide Rhône flowing over its cool bed and you could sense it between the tall poplars and the mooring stakes.
“And here we are,” muttered Placide, quivering and trying to be composed.
“What a fine river!” said Pierre. “At last some water that moves quickly!”
“We had a lucky escape. The scoundrel who was driving that large truck must have been off drinking or asleep!” said Placide indignantly. “That’s a bad deed that deserves a proper whipping.”
“Come now, control yourself, Monsieur de Grignan!”2
“And where is there a garage open at this time?”
“You’re sure to find one tomorrow morning.”
“But until then?”
“Settle yourself into what’s left of the car. Take my overcoat.”
“And you? Where are you going?”
“To Paris,” Pierre said simply. “You wouldn’t want me to wait, would you?”
And he set off into the night, walking in the middle of the road, at a rapid pace, dragging deeply on his chewed-up cigar.
CHAPTER V
IT IS MIDDAY. Madame de Boisrosé, naturally, is in bed, for she scarcely ever rises from this bed; she is unable to sleep in it and even though she is drowsy and constantly tired, she spends night and day trying to sleep. Nothing is more exhausting than being unable to sleep; there is a horizontal weariness that active people will never experience.
The sun skims the imitation Louis XVI bedroom furniture and flows into the tepid atmosphere; the damp logs sparkle in the stove, mingling humidity with the heat, causing a season of Caribbean rain to pervade this Saint-Germain apartment.
The Boisrosé family, who have lived there since the separation decree that had caused Monsieur de Boisrosé to retreat to his refuge at the Mas Vieux, leaving the three daughters to their mother, are holding a daylight wake in honour of the deceased. On hearing of his death, the four women, who had not set eyes on the old hermit for nine years, discovered an immense love for him. Separation, jealousy, quarrels and resentment do not preclude love, a reptilian fondness that bites its own tail and feeds happily from its opposite end. What the Boisrosé ladies enjoyed most about this bereavement was the nervous shock and the tearful stimulation aroused by the unexpected event, the notion of sorrow fomenting grief itself, or rather a magical elation similar to the outbursts at Negro funerals, all culminating in a French apotheosis of family-mindedness. During his bitch of a life, Monsieur de Boisrosé had let out numerous sighs; only the last of these was heard.
“Poor Papa died all on his own,” sobbed Fromentine.
“Without having seen the old colony again, or the Trou Dauphin,” said Hedwige.
“Without a bit of warm earth for his final resting place.”
“He would have preferred the sailors’ cemetery or even the Negro one to a grave in France!”
“He died of grief; I, too, will die of grief; one never dies of anything else,” said Madame de Boisrosé.
Lying across her mother’s bed, Fromentine was allowing her mascara to run like watery pitch down her lacklustre cheeks. Her red hair blazed. Sitting on the floor, dark-haired Hedwige, her back to the base of the bed, looked like a funerary allegory, while Angélique, her blonde head buried against Madame de Boisrosé’s cheek, made up the final panel of this three-coloured, domestic carrying of the Cross. Nothing could stem the tears of these four women, who rake up old memories and end up crying over themselves — that bottomless urn — nothing, that is, unless it be the smooth expanse of their Creole nonchalance in which everything they feel or undertake gets buried in the sand.
Once they had all wept and sobbed a great deal, once the emotion of the morning had subsided — something that was regularly provoked by the arrival of Angélique, who lived in Paris, who had not been able to cry at home during the night, and who rushed off to her own family as soon as her husband had left for the office — once this daily memorial service had lasted long enough — and it had been going on for three weeks — they realized that midday had struck and that it was high time to prepare lunch, which today happened to be peppers with sweetcorn.
While Angélique was laying the table and Fromentine was greasing the frying pan, Madame de Boisrosé whetted her appetite by polishing off a box of chocolates. She was a woman of forty-eight who, on days when she washed and daubed herself with white, managed to look only sixty, for among Creoles nature works twice as hard. Madame de Boisrosé ruled over her three daughters in the manner of the Sun King. The three Boisrosé girls would be famous for their beauty had they ever encountered other people, but they knew no one. They lived in Saint-Germain, a town that is nonetheless connected to Paris by ninety trains each day, as though they were living in a field of sugar cane. No news penetrated there, they received no communications from either the outside world or the present day; they bloomed amid an inaccessible and inflated collective happiness. The eldest daughter (twenty-four years old), the only married one, is called Angélique; the middle one (twenty), Hedwige; the youngest (eighteen), Fromentine.