But Chantal is not listening. She is preoccupied with an agony even greater than yours. She cannot care that recently her Papa has begun to think about our several lives. But of course from you I expect total attention. We are grown men, after all, and have eaten from the same bowl often enough. As for me, in this instance I respect your wishes. My beautiful high-fidelity radio stays dead.
Let us hope that I have not miscalculated and that there is not some overblown machine now lumbering down upon us, filling the road ahead, its great belly brimming with thick liquid fire and, in its noisy cab, a gargantuan young peasant singing to keep himself
awake. Disaster. Witless, idiotic disaster. Because what I have in mind is an "accident" so perfectly contrived that it will be unique, spectacular, instantaneous, a physical counterpart to that vision in which it was in fact conceived. A clear "accident," so to speak, in which invention quite defies interpretation.
In the first place I fully intend us to pass the dark chateau where our own Honorine lies sleeping. We will be traveling at our highest speed, of course, and already will have reached the top of our arc. But perhaps for an instant our lights will somehow intrude upon Honor- ine's interior life, or perhaps even the sound of our passing-that faint horrifying expulsion of breath which is the combination of tires and engine racing together at a great distance-may somehow attract the briefest response from Honorine's dormant consciousness. She will move an arm, make a sound, roll over, who knows? Then eight kilometers beyond the chateau and we approach the old Roman viaduct. You remember it, that narrow dead viaduct that spans the dry gorge and always reminds me of flaking bone. Of course you remember it. And in the smallest imaginable amount of time our demon steel shall fuse its speed with the stasis of old stone. The sides of our handsome car shall nearly touch the low balustrades of that high and rarely traversed construction, we shall all three of us be aware of the roar of stone, the sound of space, our headlights boring across the gorge as in a cheap film. And now, now you are thinking that here is the spot where it shall
all end. Yes, here would be the natural site of what will be called our "tragic accident." Roman time, modern car, insufficient space between the balustrades, the appalling distance to the rocks in the bottom of the gorge, the uneven surface of the roadway across that viaduct. . What could be better? But you are wrong.
Because that is the problem. Precisely. All those "logical" details and all those lofty "symbols" of melodrama speak much too clearly to the professional investigator (and reporter) of such events. No, we shall not be able to crash off the viaduct or even miss it altogether and so sail directly into the wilderness of that deep gorge like some stricken winged demon from the books of childhood. Instead we shall merely continue beyond the viaduct about three kilometers (hardly the twitch of a lid, the snap of a head) where we shall make an impossible turn onto the premises of an abandoned farm and there, with no slackening of pace, run squarely into the windowless wall of an old and now roofless barn built lovingly, long ago, of great stones from the field. That wall is a meter thick. A full meter, or even slightly more.
The car that passes the very chateau that must have been its destination; the unmistakable tire tracks across the viaduct; the turn that is nothing less than incomprehensible; the tremendous speed upon impact; the failure of the autopsy to reveal the slightest trace of alcohol in the corpse of the driver. . What can they think? What can they possibly produce as explanation? What will they say about an event as severe and improbable as this one will appear to be, as well as one loud enough to wake the curate in the little nearby village of La Roche?
But that is exactly the point, since what is happening now must be senseless to everyone except possibly the occupants of the demolished car. During the-let me see-next hour and forty minutes by the dashboard clock, it will be up to the three of us to make what we can of this experience. And we will not be able to count on Chantal for any very meaningful contribution.
At any rate the lumbering disruptive oil truck is out of the question. Out of the question. Nothing will destroy the symmetry I have in mind. Don't you agree?
I have never seen the old curate of La Roche, but I know that he coughs a great deal and has a tobacco breath and that his fingers are forever stained with wine. But he is a deep and noisy sleeper, of that I am certain. What an irony that the co-ordinates of space and time have fixed on him to be our Chanticleer, so to speak, and that it will be he who will offer the first cockcrow to the explosion that will inaugurate our silence. Which reminds me, only yesterday I sat in this very automobile and watched an old couple helping each other down a village street (not La Roche, I have never been in La Roche) toward a life-sized and freshly painted wooden Christ-on-the-Cross mounted on a stone block not far from where I sat in my car. The old man, who was holding the woman's elbow, was a thin and obviously bad- tempered captive of marriage. The old woman was bowlegged. Or at least her short legs angled out from where her knees must have been beneath the heavy skirts, and then jutted together sharply at the ankles. This creature depended for locomotion on the lifetime partner inching along at her side. The old man was wearing a white sporting cap and carrying the woman's new leather sack. The old woman, heavily bandaged about the throat in an atrocious violet muffler, was carrying a little freshly picked bouquet of flowers. Well, it's a simple story. This scowling pair progressed beyond my silent automobile (you must imagine the incongruity of the old married couple, the orange roof tiles, the waiting Christ, the beige-colored lacquer of this automobile gleaming impressively in the bright sunlight) until at last the woman deposited the trim little bouquet of flowers at the feet of the Christ.
There you have it. Ours is a country of coughers and worshipers. Between the two I choose the coughers. At least there is something especially attractive about one of our schoolyards of coughing children, don't you agree? The incipient infection is livelier than the health it destroys. Yes, I do appreciate that hacking music and all their little faces so bright and blighted.
But have I never told you I am missing a lung? The war of course. That is another story. Perhaps we shall get to it. At any rate it is probably true that my missing lung determined long ago my choice of a doctor. You see, my poor doctor is missing one leg (the left,
I believe) which was amputated only weeks before the poor fellow's wife ran off, finally, with her lover of about twenty years' standing. It was a compounded shock, an unusual circumstance, and as soon as I learned of it I became an additional patient on the diminishing roster of my crippled physician. The affinity is obvious, obvious. But by now you will have perceived the design that underlies all my rambling and which, like a giant snow crystal, permeates all the tissues of existence. But the crystal melts, the tissues dissolve, a doctor's leg is neatly amputated by a team of doctors. Design and debris, as I have said already. Design and debris. I thrive on it. For me the artificial limb is more real, if you will allow the word, than the other and natural limb still inhabited by sensation. But I know you, cher ami. You are interested not in the doctor's amputated leg but in his missing wife. Well, each man to his taste. At least I can report that my physician is highly skilled, despite all his cigarettes and his trembling hands. Incidentally, his cough is one of the worst I have ever heard.
But you are groaning. And yet even now we have so far to go that I cannot help but advise you to conserve the sounds in your throat. That's better, much better. But must you wring your hands? Remember, you are setting a firm example for Chantal.