Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (17 page)

"In theory, I mean," A . . . specifies, without abandoning her most amiable tone of voice.

Franck turns his eyes away toward the open-work balustrade, the last flakes of gray paint, the stuffed lizard, the motionless sky.

"I'm beginning to get used to it," he says, "with the truck. All engines are alike."

Which is obviously untrue. The engine of his big truck, in particular, offers few points in common with that of his American car.

"That's right," A . . . says, "like women."

But Franck seems not to have heard. He keeps his eyes fixed on the pinkish-gray lizard—opposite him—whose soft skin, under the lower jaw, throbs faintly.

A . . . finishes her glass of golden soda, sets it down empty on the table, and begins again to caress the three bulging nailheads on each leg of her chair with the tips of her six fingers.

Upon her closed lips floats a half-smile of serenity, rev- ery, or abstraction. Since it is immutable and of too accomplished a regularity, it may also be false, entirely made up, polite, or even imaginary.

The lizard on the hand-rail is now in shadow; its colors have turned dark. The shadow cast by the roof coincides exactly with the outlines of the veranda: the sun is at its zenith.

Franck, who was passing by and stopped in, declares he doesn't want to stay any longer. He actually stands up and sets down on the low table the glass he has just emptied in one gulp. He stops before walking down the hallway that crosses the house; he turns back to wave goodbye to his hosts. The same grimace, but swifter now, passes over his lips again. He disappears inside the house.

A . . . has not left her chair. She remains leaning back, arms stretched out on the elbow-rests, eyes looking up at the empty sky. Beside her, near the tray with the two bottles and the ice bucket, is lying the novel Franck has lent her, which she has been reading since the evening before, a novel whose action takes place in Africa.

On the hand-rail of the balustrade, the lizard has disappeared, leaving in its place a flake of gray paint which seems to have the same shape: a body lying in the direction of the grain of the wood, a tail twisted into two curves, four rather short legs, and the head cocked toward the house.

In the dining room, the boy has laid only two places on the square table: one opposite the open pantry door and the long sideboard, the other on the window side. It is here that A . . . sits, her back to the light. She eats little, as usual. During almost the entire meal, she sits without moving, very straight on her chair, her hands with their tapering fingers framing a plate as white as the cloth, her gaze fixed on the brownish remains of the squashed centipede which stain the bare wall in front of her.

Her eyes are very large, brilliant, green in color, fringed with long curving lashes. They always seem to be seen from straight on, even when the face is seen in profile. She keeps them as wide as possible in all circumstances, without ever blinking.

After lunch, she returns to her chair in the middle of the veranda, to the left of Franck's empty chair. She picks up her book which the boy left on the table when he took away the tray; she looks for the place where her reading was interrupted by Franck's arrival, somewhere in the first part of the story. But having found the page again, she lays the open book face down on her knees and remains where she is without doing anything, leaning back in the leather chair.

From the other side of the house comes the sound of a heavy truck heading down the highway toward the bottom of the valley, the plain, and the port—where the white ship is moored alongside the pier.

The veranda is empty, the house too. The shadow cast by the roof coincides exactly with the outlines of the veranda: the sun is at its zenith. The house no longer casts the slightest black band over the freshly spaded earth of the garden. The trunks of the thin orange trees also show no shadows.

It is not the sound of the truck that can be heard, but that of a sedan coming down the dirt road from the highway, toward the house.

In the open left leaf of the first dining-room window, in the middle of the central pane of glass, the reflected image of the blue car has just stopped in the middle of the courtyard. A . . . and Franck get out of it together, he on one side, she on the other, by the two front doors. A ... is holding a tiny package of indeterminate shape which immediately vanishes, absorbed by a flaw in the glass.

The two people immediately come closer together in front of the hood of the car. Franck's silhouette, larger than A . . .'s, conceals hers behind his. Franck's head is bent forward.

The irregularities of the glass obscure the details of their actions. The living-room windows would give a direct view of the same spectacle and from a more convenient angle: both people seen side by side.

But they have already separated, walking side by side toward the door of the house, across the gravel of the courtyard. The distance between them is at least a yard. Under the precise noonday sun, they cast no shadows.

They are smiling at the same time, the same smile, when the door opens. Yes, they are in good health. No, there was no accident, only a little difficulty with the car which obliged them to spend the night at the hotel, waiting for a garage to open in the morning.

After a quick drink, Franck, who is in a great hurry to get back to his wife, stands up and leaves. His steps echo down the hallway tiles.

A . . . immediately goes to her bedroom, takes a bath, changes her dress, eats lunch with a good appetite, and returns to the veranda where she sits down under the office window whose blinds, three-quarters lowered, permit only the top of her hair to be seen.

The evening finds her in the same position, in the same chair, in front of the same gray stone lizard. The only difference is that the boy has added the fourth chair, the one that is less comfortable, made of canvas stretched over a metal frame. The sun is hidden behind the rocky spur which comprises the western boundary of the chief section of the plateau.

The light rapidly fades. A . . ., who can no longer see clearly enough to continue reading, closes her novel and puts it down on the little table beside her (between the two groups of chairs: the pair with its backs against the wall beneath the window, and the two other dissimilar chairs placed at an angle nearer the balustrade). To mark her place, the outer edge of the shiny paper jacket protecting the cover has been inserted in the book, approximately a quarter of the way into it.

A . . . asks for today's news on the plantation. There is no news. There are only the trivial incidents of the work of cultivation which periodically recur in one patch or another, according to the cycle of operations. Since the patches are numerous, and the plantation managed so as to stagger the harvest through all twelve months of the year, all the elements of the cycle occur at the same time every day, and the periodical trivial incidents also repeat themselves simultaneously, here or there, daily.

A . . . hums a dance tune whose words remain unintelligible. It may be a popular song she has heard in town, to whose rhythm she may have danced.

The fourth chair was superfluous. It remains vacant all evening long, further isolating the third leather chair from the other two. Franck, as a matter of fact, has come alone. Christiane did not want to leave the child, who has a little fever. It is not unusual, nowadays, that her husband comes without her for dinner. Tonight, though, A . . . seemed to expect her; at least she has had four places set. She orders the one which is not to be used to be taken away at once.

Although it is quite dark now, she orders the boy not to bring out the lamps which—she says—attract mosquitoes. In the complete darkness, only the paler spots formed by a dress, a white shirt, a hand, two hands, soon four hands (the eyes getting used to the darkness) can be even guessed at

No one speaks. Nothing moves. The four hands are lined up parallel to the wall of the house. On the other side of the balustrade, toward the hillside, there is only the starless sky and the deafening racket of the crickets.

During dinner, Franck and A . . . make a plan to go down to the port together, someday soon, for various reasons. Their conversation returns to this projected trip after the meal, while they are drinking their coffee on the veranda.

When the violent cry of a nocturnal animal indicates its proximity—in the garden itself, at the southwest corner of the house—Franck suddenly stands up and walks with long strides to this side of the veranda; his rubber soles make no noise on the flagstones. In a few seconds his white shirt has completely vanished into the darkness.

Since Franck says nothing and does not return, A. . . doubtless supposing he sees something, also stands up, supple and silent, and moves away in the same direction. Her dress is swallowed up in its turn by the opaque darkness.

After quite a long time, no word has yet been spoken loud enough to be heard at a distance of ten yards. It is also possible that there is no longer anyone in that direction.

Franck has left now. A . . . has gone into her bedroom. The interior of this room is lit, but the blinds are entirely closed: between the slats filter only a few tiny lines of light.

The violent cry of an animal, shrill and short, echoes again in the garden below, at the foot of the veranda. But this time it is from the opposite corner, facing the bedroom, that the signal seems to come.

It is, of course, impossible to see anything, even leaning as far out as possible, the body halfway over the balustrade, against the square column, the column which supports the southwest corner of the roof.

Now the shadow of the column falls across the flagstones over this central part of the veranda in front of the bedroom. The oblique direction of the dark line points, when it is extended to the wall itself, to the reddish streak which has run down the vertical wall from the right corner of the first window, the one nearest the hallway.

The shadow of the column, though it is already very long, would have to be nearly a yard longer to reach the little round spot on the flagstones. From the latter runs a thin vertical thread which increases in size as it rises from the concrete substructure. It then climbs up the wooden surface, from lath to lath, growing gradually larger until it reaches the window sill. But its progression is not constant: the imbricated arrangement of the boards intercepts its route by a series of equidistant projections where the liquid spreads out more widely before continuing its ascent. On the sill itself, the paint has largely flaked off after the streak occurred, eliminating about three-quarters of the red trace.

The spot has always been there, on the wall. For the moment there is no question of repainting anything but the blinds and the balustrade—the latter a bright yellow. That is what A . . . has decided. . .

She is in her bedroom, whose two southern windows have been opened. The sun, very low in the sky now, is already much less warm; and when it strikes the façade directly, before disappearing, it will be only for a few seconds, at a raked angle, its beams entirely without strength.

A ... is standing motionless in front of the writing table; she is facing the wall; she therefore appears in profile in the open window-recess. She is rereading the letter received in the last post from Europe. The opened envelope forms a white rhombus on the varnished table top, near the leather writing-case and the gold-capped fountain pen. The sheet of paper which she holds spread out in both hands still shows the creases where it has been folded.

Having read to the bottom of the page, A . . . puts the letter beside its envelope, sits down in the chair, and opens the writing case. Out of the pocket of this, she takes a leaf of the same size, but blank, which she puts on the green blotter provided for this purpose. She then takes the cap off the pen and bends forward to begin writing.

The shiny black curls tremble slightly on her shoulders as the pen advances. Although neither the arm nor the head seems disturbed by the slightest movement, the hair, more sensitive, captures the oscillations of the wrist, amplifies them, and translates them into unexpected eddies which awaken reddish highlights in its moving mass.

These propagations and interferences continue to multiply their interactions when the hand has stopped. But the head rises and begins to turn, slowly and steadily, toward the open window. The large eyes unblinkingly endure this transition to the direct light of the veranda.

Down below, in the hollow of the valley, in front of the patch shaped like a trapezoid, where the slanting rays of the sun outline each frond of the banana trees with extreme distinctness, the water of the little stream shows a ruffled surface which gives evidence of the swiftness of the current. It takes this last sunlight to reveal so clearly the successive chevrons and crisscrossings which the many interwoven ripples create. The wave moves on, but the surface remains as if petrified beneath these immutable lines.

Its brilliance is similarly fixed, and gives the liquid surface a more transparent quality. But there is no one to judge this on the spot; from the bridge, for instance. In fact, no one is in sight anywhere near. No crew is at work in this sector, for the moment. Besides, the workday is over.

On the veranda, the shadow of the column is still longer. It has turned. It has almost reached the door to the house now, which marks the middle of the façade. The door is open. The hallway tiles are covered with chevron-shaped grooves, like those of the stream, though more regular.

The hallway leads straight toward the other door, the one that opens onto the entrance courtyard. The big blue car is parked in the middle. The passenger gets out and heads at once toward the house, without being inconvenienced by the gravel, despite her high-heeled shoes. She has been visiting Christiane, and Franck has brought her back.

The latter is sitting in his armchair, beneath the first office window. The shadow of the column moves toward him; after having diagonally crossed more than half the veranda, moved along the bedroom for its entire length, and passed the hallway door, it now reaches to the low table where A . . . has just put down her book. Franck is staying only a minute before going home; his workday is over too.