‘Try to forget—Impossible. I can’t do it.’
‘Why not?’
‘When I shut my eyes, I see things—Strange things. Terrifying things. Skulls, I see skulls … And devils coming up to me and saying … It’s your turn … It’s your turn …’
‘But you—You believe in God?’
‘Why … Why do you ask that?’
‘You believe in eternal life, don’t you?’
The old woman lifted her head with difficulty. She murmured:
‘Yes, yes—I believe in God—But sometimes, when I’m frightened, I think … I think, suppose it’s not true? Suppose there’s nothing? Nothing at all? All this life, all that … For nothing … I’m frightened …’
‘You haven’t got confidence?’
She looked at Joseph with a sort of anger:
‘No! No! I haven’t got confidence! I haven’t got confidence!’
She began trembling again.
‘If I had confidence—If I really had confidence, I shouldn’t be frightened. But I feel—It seems to me, I—I feel there’s nothing there, where I’m going. There’s nothing waiting for me. I feel that. I’m so cold. That’s because there’s nothing …’
She tried to smile, but only succeeded in pulling an ugly face.
‘I’m not very brave, am I?’
Joseph looked at her, deeply touched.
‘But you are—You’re very brave,’ he said.
She struggled to speak.
‘In the old days—I thought dying was easy. But it’s difficult. I don’t want … I don’t want to feel myself slipping away. I don’t want to find I can’t breathe any more. To fight against death … Against it … I want to stay here, to stay here. I’m afraid it will hurt. That I shan’t be able to …’
She looked at Joseph with clouded eyes.
‘Like the cat … He tried to bite me … To bite me, me … Why—Why are you staying here—Watching me … Help me. No, go away! Go away!’
She began to breathe more heavily. Her head fell back and her eyes stared up at the ceiling; a kind of sweat was moistening her forehead, near the grey locks, and her dress, round the shoulders.
‘I can hear my heart …’ she said; ‘it’s beating. It’s beating hard. I don’t want it to stop. It’s beating so hard. I want to remain myself … Not to disappear, no, not to disappear … It mustn’t …’
Joseph got up and went to fetch a glass of water; then he came back to the woman, who was breathing with difficulty, and poured a little water between her lips. She drank thirstily.
‘That’s good … Thank you …’ she whispered.
‘Just keep quiet,’ said Joseph.
She looked at him weakly.
‘Why are you staying?’ she faltered.
‘You—You’d rather I went away?’ asked Joseph.
‘No, no—Stay here,’ she said; ‘I think it’s over. It’ll be better now.’
‘Just rest. Don’t think about anything,’ said Joseph.
‘Yes … I’m very tired now … I’m done up.’
‘Just rest.’
‘Yes, I’ll rest.’
‘Go to sleep, try to go to sleep.’
‘Yes, perhaps … I’ll try.’
She closed her eyes; her breathing was almost regular again, and her withered face, so distorted a little time ago, seemed to be reconstructing itself. Joseph walked about the kitchen for a moment, making no noise. He looked out of the window, between the plastic curtains, and saw the great expanse of clear blue sky, with big white and grey clouds scurrying across it. In the garden a bird was calling intermittently. The trees stood straight, and their leaves were twirling round in the wind like little metal weathercocks.
The boy went out on to the terrace and walked a little way along its mosaic-pebbled floor. In a corner a full dustbin had been taken by storm by the ants. A broom was propped against the wall, head in air; the bristles were full of some sort of downy fluff mixed with hair. Joseph picked up some dates that had fallen from the date-palm, and threw them one by one into the garden.
When he returned to the kitchen he saw that the old woman’s eyes were still closed. He went up to her and said:
‘Are you asleep?’
‘No,’ she replied, without raising her eyelids.
The plaster was peeling off the cream-washed walls of the room and there were stains everywhere; on the floor, near the furniture, on the door, on the ceiling. Funny whitish patches, with big, colourless rings round them. The smell of death pervaded the whole place. To begin with, it was quiet, with an absolute stillness that brought a lump into your throat; repressed scents, too, subtle shapes which had ceased to pry about in the air, had all turned towards the woman’s body and were overwhelming it.
Thus, everything was going on there, inside; there was nothing outside, nothing arriving unexpectedly to surprise you. It was a continual flight, the retreat of the organs and bones, a gradual, furtive obliteration. Joseph stood in front of the old woman lying back in the armchair; and from her closed eyes, her dry, compressed lips which stirred with a weak sucking movement, from her whole forlorn, overall-clad body, he received, as it were, deep, cruel blows in his own face. Her broad face, full of cartilage and flesh, with its livid skin, closed down in the centre like a sea-anemone. Her hands, her legs, her sunken bust, all seemed to be drawn in by a savage mouth, by a star-shaped wound whose wrinkled edges were clinging together, making ghastly efforts to skin over. In fact there was nothing left but this mouth, or this anus, which was retracting, folding back, an old snake-skin, smothering itself, swallowing itself, swallowing itself without disgust. One should do the same, no doubt—live inside oneself, push one’s head down into one’s body, feed on one’s own flesh, consume oneself completely, criminally, to the point of oblivion. Then, if time were emptied of its drugs, one would perceive the dark expanse, a veritable hall with shining holes in it, where words and suffering have no more hold, where everything is bare, swallowed up, suffocated. In the depths of this glasshouse one would sometimes hear the crystal footfalls of eternity, a trembling music which licks at sleep. Like that. Lasciviously. Indolently. For its own satisfaction.
Joseph touched the old woman’s hand.
‘Are you asleep now?’ he said softly.
As before, she answered, without opening her eyes:
‘No …’
‘Don’t you want to sleep a little?’
‘No … I’m quite all right now.’
‘You’re not frightened any longer?’
‘No … I’m all right.’
‘Would you— like me to go for the doctor, now?’
‘No, no—There’s no more need, now. I’m all right … Quite all right …’
‘You’re not afraid of dying, any more?’
‘I’m going to die, yes …’
‘And you’re not afraid, any longer?’
‘No … I’m all right …’
‘It doesn’t hurt any more?’
‘ … No … I’m cold, but it doesn’t matter …’
‘Would you like a blanket?’
‘No, no, it’s—The cold is inside me.’
‘Are you thirsty? Shall I bring you a glass of water?’
‘No, no …’
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘I’ m all right—Really.’
‘What makes you feel so comfortable?’
‘I don’t know—It seems to me—I see such lovely things …’
‘You see things? What do you see?’
‘It’s beautiful …’
‘But what does it look like? Tell me.’
‘I don’t know … Clouds, perhaps … Horses …’
‘What else? What else?’
‘… Yes, horses … Men in armour … Gilded … In a golden rain … And tall, so tall that their heads are in the clouds … It’s strange … White mountains, too. Snow everywhere … They have helmets on their heads …’
‘What else is there?’
‘Fire. I see fire. It doesn’t move … Burning all the time … In all directions … The flames are coming towards me … They’re shooting up … It’s beautiful …’
‘What’s it burning? Houses?’
‘Yes … It seems—It seems as though it were burning down in the water … With big bubbles. Big black bubbles. And smoke.’
‘What else do you see, Mademoiselle Maria?’
‘There’s a very tall man, too … He’s coming nearer … All white, he’s hovering in the air … He’s smiling … He’s stretching out his arms like a cross … And he’s speaking … Jesus … It’s Jesus …’
‘What’s he like?’
‘… He’s praying … No—He’s laughing … He’s laughing loudly. I feel like laughing too … I don’t understand—I don’t understand why Jesus is laughing … In front of me … It’s funny … With such a white face … Like my father … And his arms stretched out … Sweat pouring down his forehead … Drops of blood pouring down his forehead … He’s still laughing … There are people round him … Women …’
‘Women?’
‘Yes, Martha, Mary … I can see them … They’re laughing too … And Jesus … Is wearing a helmet … He has armour that shines like gold … His teeth are shining like gold … Like gold …’
‘What’s he doing now?’
‘I don’t know … He’s disappeared … No, he’s coming back … With pillars, there, round him … The women are touching his robe … I can hear his heart beating … Everything is rising into the air … It’s smoke … There are balconies … Children—Doors … And windows … With light …’
‘And Jesus? What’s he doing?’
‘He’s singing … I’m singing with him … With him …’
‘You can hear him?’
‘Yes, yes … I can hear him … For me … He’s singing … With my voice …’
‘What else is there?’
‘His hands are bleeding … And the blood is falling down as precious stones … rubies … They’re glittering everywhere … I can pick them up in my hands … They’re warm … The red … Is … Warm … Rubies … Topazes … There, in the water … And the flowers, and—The gold, the gold, pouring out … Through the windows … With the army … of the knights … In white … The crosses, the crosses … The pillars in the grass … Gold everywhere, everywhere … It’s mounting up … It’s burning me … I want … To laugh … With Jesus … Again … Ah … Ah …’
The old woman’s voice died away in a sort of moan; the soft, sad murmur entered into Joseph’s head and paralysed him. With throbbing heart and hands damp with sweat, he could only hear it, hear it without pause, without defence. The sound nailed him to the spot like this for another few seconds. Then it stopped, silence leapt into the kitchen and separated everything.
Hours had gone by, and Joseph was walking in the town. To begin with he had hung about the streets near the shabby house where the old woman was alone, asleep in her wicker armchair. He had not met anybody, except perhaps some groups of children playing, and two or three Arab workmen who were employed in a builder’s yard. For a moment he had thought hesitantly of going home, to be with his parents. Then he had gone on along the streets, strolling with his hands in his pockets, his mind a blank. A sort of small anguish was occupying his spirit; it made him see things clearly, the minutest details of the scenery, the unevenness of the ground, the twisted shapes of the houses with their open windows. He looked at it all with burning, empty eyes, and it was as though he were walking inside himself, with no noise, no colour, no hatred, along a road enclosed in a glass box, down endless paths where his feet sank in deep and were held fast.
Perhaps he was no longer himself, now; perhaps it had really become meaningless to refer to himself by his name, Joseph Charon, son of Frédéric Charon, house-agent, and Mme Gertrude Charon, née Ciabarelli. What matter if he were tall or short, thin, fat, blue-eyed or brown-eyed? Bound to the moving features of one single old woman, impotent as she was —linked to her glassy, melancholy gaze, stripped of all strength by the memory of her sagging muscles and flaccid skin, treacherously invaded by the whole of that derelict body, in cold and dizziness and silence, Joseph was, so to speak, being lived by her. He was living like a picture, something in the nature of a damp reflection, exposed every second to annihilation and evaporation. That was the real danger. Somewhere beyond the plots of ground and the low houses, in a kitchen, an old woman might depart from the world almost without noticing it.
She would pass easily, in the midst of a shudder, and with her would go all the secrets, all the hopes, all the odious mysteries of life. Those one had to know. Those that were of great value.
Joseph reached the main road, turned left and began to walk along by the grass bank. Cars rushed past in groups of three or four. As they went over a slight rise, their wheels shivered and clanked. When they reached the bend they changed gears, because after that there was a short, steep hill. Joseph watched them as he went along; he saw red ones, blue ones, black ones, grey ones; all makes; all shapes; some of them had bumps on their coachwork, usually along the mudguards. Inside these hermetic shells people sat huddled together, their heads poking forward slightly. For a split second one saw their pale faces, their dark glasses, their hands clutching the wheel. Some of them threw a quick sideways glance in Joseph’s direction; then they went on, straight ahead, as though drawn along rails. The sound of their engines rapidly diminished, and stopped before they reached the bend, far down the road. There was something hard and malevolent while these cars rushed straight along the flat road; an obstinacy, a stiff, almost painful force. Uninterruptedly they streamed by, in groups of three or four, like that, and with noises that didn’t remain. Their rounded metal rumps drew away, shining, side-slipping all the time, like heavy, clumsy insects. The hard meteors flashed across the scene, brushing past Joseph, and turned the corner. Leaving no trace, not digging the slightest furrow. An independent phenomenon, sliding past, full of malice and chaos. Each self-contained, each taking the bend towards its own domain, with its own time and space, and these stretches of road swallowed up and paid out under its belly. Inside the little prisons with their open windows, the scenery marched past together with the wind. Each of them carried death in it, the brutal pylon that would split open the metal crust and search down to the man’s heart, to the depths of his shattered breast, quickly, very quickly, no longer than was needed for him to open his mouth with a cry cut short at once. That was certain. As cruel and sharp as fear. For these people, these fat men in their cloth suits, nothing mattered except the leakage of minutes and of money, like this, down to the last second of their paltry lives, without cohesion, irrationally.
A small stone got into Joseph’s right shoe and slid under the sole of his foot. As he walked, the boy could feel it working through his sock and scratching his skin. He went on for a few yards, limping slightly, trying unsuccessfully to wriggle the stone down to the tip of his sock by curling his toes and shaking his foot. Then, when he realized that the scrap of gravel would stay where it was and, if he didn’t take care, would grow huge, a suppurating wound, and soon fill all his thoughts, he stopped on the edge of a kind of pavement and took off his shoe; he turned it upside down, and with a brief tinkle the stone fell into the gutter and vanished among a sea of other little stones, all looking alike. Joseph put on his shoe again and walked away.
He came to the beginning of the bend. There was a grocer’s shop there, with a queue of people; along the pavement outside the shop there was a row of big earthenware vases with geraniums in them. Joseph stopped and stood leaning against the wall of the grocery. It was shady here; the pavement, the road, the opposite houses, were full of a queer melancholy that hovered over the whitewashed walls, the rough concrete surfaces, the windowless curtains where there was a single, black, quite motionless gleam. One didn’t know what to do. There was dust everywhere, and the sound of the cars changing gears was interspersed with bursts of twangi
ng music, an accordion or perhaps a mouth-organ. The telegraph poles rose up stiffly towards the cloudy sky, planes often flew above the roofs. There was no means of guessing the time, nothing caught or arrested one’s attention. It was all bare, rapid, poverty-stricken. Concrete; cubes of concrete jumped together, with here and there some kind of earthy fissures where shrubs were trying to grow. Joseph watched all this without moving. Suddenly, with no warning, the air began to stir. The wind began to blow from the far end of the road; a very cold, continuous wind that blew down towards the town and broke on the objects it met. It whistled in the boy’s ears, rushing straight in his stubborn direction, flattening his clothes against his body and making his flesh quiver. It ruffled his hair, raised the dust and threw it in his eyes, causing hot tears which evaporated at once. Its invisible presence covered the flat surfaces of the earth, constantly filling up all hollows and unevern places. Noiselessly, or almost, except for this long-drawn-out whistle that seemed to penetrate the very substance of things, to mingle with it until nothing certain, dissociable remained, between that emptiness and that fullness, the wind blew, advanced yet remained, slid like a sheet of water, undecided at times and then flapping in sharp gusts, searching down into the depths of the flesh for everything cold and stupid so as to bring it back to the surface and score a victory.
Joseph, still leaning against the wall outside the grocery, saw the landscape slowly changing into a desert; he felt the continual movement of the air entering his lungs, edging into the most secret depths of his organs. Icy breezes began to blow inside his body; his bones grew weak, his muscles ceased to obey him. His clothes hung loosely on him like tattered rags, as though upon a scarecrow, and his hands, their fingers mottled, opened and closed several times, meeting only emptiness. The wind was blowing in his head as well; it had tightened into a sort of icy, restless, tumultuous ball, which had scattered all his ideas. The whole landscape had got into his skull, a great scene of nakedness and cold, where the street lay motionless, lined with white houses, where the pavements were taken up by earthenware pitchers in which geraniums shivered with tiny vibrations, where every object, moving, calm and ferocious—the cars, the black-glinting window-panes, the translucid sky, the concrete telegraph poles, the road—was set there as though to all eternity, immovable, disorderly, crushing in its weight and silence, stable and savage in the corridor through which the wind was rushing.
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