Jealousy and in the Labyrinth (18 page)

It is almost time for cocktails, and A .. . has not waited any longer to call the boy, who appears at the corner of the house, carrying the tray with the two bottles, three large glasses and the ice bucket. The route he follows over the flagstones is apparently parallel to the wall and converges with the line of shadow when he reaches the low, round table where he carefully puts down the tray, near the novel with the shiny paper jacket.

It is the latter which provides the subject for the conversation. Psychological complications aside, it is a standard narrative of colonial life in Africa, with a description of a tornado, a native revolt, and incidents at the club. A . . . and Franck discuss it animatedly, while sipping the mixture of cognac and soda served by the mistress of the house in the three glasses.

The main character of the book is a customs official. This character is not an official but a high-ranking employee of an old commercial company. This company's business is going badly, rapidly turning shady. This company's business is going extremely well. The chief character—one learns—is dishonest. He is honest, he is trying to re-establish a situation compromised by his predecessor, who died in an automobile accident. But he had no predecessor, for the company was only recently formed; and it was not an accident. Besides, it happens to be a ship (a big white ship) and not a car at all.

Franck, at this point, begins to tell an anecdote about a truck of his with engine trouble. A . . as politeness demands, asks for details to prove the attention she is paying to her guest, who soon stands up and takes his leave, in order to return to his own plantation, a little farther east.

A ... is leaning on the balustrade. On the other side of the valley, the sun rakes the isolated trees scattered over the brush above the cultivated zone. Their long shadows stripe the terrain with heavy parallel lines.

The stream in the hollow of the valley has grown dark. Already the northern slope receives no more light. The sun is hidden behind the rocky spur to the west. Outlined against the light, the silhouette of the rock wall appears distinctly for an instant against a violently illuminated sky: a sudden, barely swelling line which connects with the plateau by a sharp-pointed outcropping, followed by a less emphatic second projection.

Very quickly the luminous background becomes more somber. On the opposite hillside, the clumps of banana trees grow blurred in the twilight.

It is six-thirty.

Now the dark night and the deafening racket of the crickets again engulf the garden and the veranda, all around the house.

IN THE LABYRINTH

This narrative is not a true account, but fiction. It describes a reality not necessarily the same as the one the reader has experienced: for example, in the French army, infantrymen do not wear their serial numbers on their coat collars. Similarly, the recent history of Western Europe has not recorded an important battle at Reichenfels or in the vicinity. Yet the reality in question is a strictly material one; that is, it is subject to no allegorical interpretation. The reader is therefore requested to see in it only the objects, actions, words, and events which are described, without attempting to give them either more or less meaning than in his own life, or his own death.

A.R.-G.

I am alone here now, under cover. Outside it is raining, outside you walk through the rain with your head down, shielding your eyes with one hand while you stare ahead nevertheless, a few yards ahead, at a few yards of wet asphalt; outside it is cold, the wind blows between the bare black branches; the wind blows through the leaves, rocking whole boughs, rocking them, rocking, their shadows swaying across the white roughcast walls. Outside the sun is shining, there is no tree, no bush to cast a shadow, and you walk under the sun shielding your eyes with one hand while you stare ahead, only a few yards in front of you, at a few yards of dusty asphalt where the wind makes patterns of parallel lines, forks, and spirals.

The sun does not get in here, nor the wind, nor the rain, nor the dust. The fine dust which dulls the gloss of the horizontal surfaces, the varnished wood of the table, the waxed floor, the marble shelf over the fireplace, the marble top of the chest, the cracked marble on top of the chest, the only dust comes from the room itself: from the cracks in the floor maybe, or else from the bed, or from the curtains or from the ashes in the fireplace.

On the polished wood of the table, the dust has marked the places occupied for a while—for a few hours, several days, minutes, weeks—by small objects subsequently removed whose outlines are still distinct for some time, a circle, a square, a rectangle, other less simple shapes, some partly overlapping, already blurred or half obliterated as though by a rag.

When the outline is distinct enough to permit the shape to be identified with certainty, it is easy to find the original object again, nor far away. For example, the circular shape has obviously been left by a glass ashtray which is lying beside it. Similarly, a little farther away, the square occupying the table's left rear corner corresponds to the base of the brass lamp that now stands in the right corner: a square pedestal about one inch high capped by a disk of the same height supporting a fluted column at its center.

The lampshade casts a circle of light on the ceiling, but this circle is not complete: it is intersected by the wall behind the table. This wall, instead of being papered like the other three, is concealed from floor to ceiling and for the greater part of its width by thick red curtains made of a heavy velvety material.

Outside it is snowing. Across the dark asphalt of the sidewalk the wind is driving the fine dry crystals which after each gust form white parallel lines, forks, spirals that are immediately broken up, seized by the eddies driven along the ground, then immobilized again, recomposing new spirals, scrolls, forked undulations, shifting arabesques immediately broken up. You walk with your head a little farther down, pressing the hand shielding your eyes closer, leaving only a few inches of ground visible in front of your feet, a few grayish inches where your feet appear one after the other and vanish behind you, one after the other, alternately.

But the staccato sound of hobnail boots on the asphalt, coming steadily closer down the straight street, sounding louder and louder in the calm of the frostbound night, the sound of boots cannot come in here, any more than other sounds from outside. The street is too long, the curtains too thick, the house too high. No noise, even muffled, ever penetrates the walls of the room, no vibration, no breath of air, and in the silence tiny particles descend slowly, scarcely visible in the lamplight, descend gently, vertically, always at the same speed, and the fine gray dust lies in a uniform layer on the floor, on the bedspread, on the furniture.

On the waxed floor, the felt slippers have made gleaming paths from the bed to the chest, from the chest to the fireplace, from the fireplace to the table. And on the table, the shifting of objects has also disturbed the continuity of the film of dust; the latter, more or less thick according to the length of time the surfaces have been exposed, is even occasionally interrupted altogether: as distinct as though drawn with a drafting-pen, a square of varnished wood thus occupies the left rear corner, not precisely at the corner of the table but parallel to its edges, set back about four inches. The square itself is about six inches on each side, and in it the reddish-brown wood gleams, virtually without any deposit.

To the right, a simple shape that is vaguer, already covered by several days' dust, can nevertheless still be recognized; from a certain angle it is even distinct enough so that its outlines can be followed without too much uncertainty. It is a kind of cross: an elongated main section about the size of a table knife but wider, pointed at one end and broadening slightly at the other, cut perpendicularly by a much shorter crosspiece; this latter is composed of two flaring appendages symmetrically arranged on each side of the axis at the base of its broadening portion— that is, about a third of the way from the wider end. It resembles a flower, the terminal widening representing a long closed corolla at the end of the stem with two small lateral leaves beneath. Or else it might be an approximately human statuette: an oval head, two very short arms, and the body terminating in a point toward the bottom. It might also be a dagger, with its handle separated by a guard from the wide, rounded, double-edged blade.

Still farther to the right, in the direction indicated by the tip of the flower, or by the point of the dagger, a slightly dusty circle is tangent to a second circle the same size, the latter not reduced to its mere outline on the table: the glass ashtray. Then come uncertain, overlapping shapes probably left by various papers whose successive changes of position have blurred their outlines, which in some places are quite distinct, in others obscured by dust, and in still others more than half obliterated, as though by a rag.

Beyond stands the lamp, in the right corner of the table: a square base six inches on each side, a disk tangent with its sides, of the same diameter, a fluted column supporting a dark, slightly conical lampshade. A fly is moving slowly and steadily around the upper rim of the shade. It casts a distorted shadow on the ceiling in which no element of the original insect can be recognized: neither wings nor body nor feet; the creature has been transformed into a simple threadlike outline, not closed, a broken regular line resembling a hexagon with one side missing: the image of the incandescent filament of the electric bulb. This tiny open polygon lies tangent at one of its corners to the inner rim of the great circle of light cast by the lamp. It changes position slowly but steadily along the circumference. When it reaches the vertical wall it disappears into the folds of the heavy red curtain.

Outside it is snowing. Outside it has been snowing, it was snowing, outside it is snowing. The thick flakes descend gently in a steady, uninterrupted, vertical fall—for there is not a breath of air—in front of the high gray walls whose arrangement, the alignment of the roofs, the location of the doors and windows, cannot be distinguished clearly because of the snow. There must be identical rows of regular windows on each floor from one end of the straight street to the other.

A perpendicular crossroad reveals a second street just like the first: the same absence of traffic, the same high gray walls, the same blind windows, the same deserted sidewalks. At the corner of the sidewalk, a street light is on, although it is broad daylight. But it is a dull day which makes everything colorless and flat. Instead of the striking vistas these rows of houses should produce, there is only a crisscrossing of meaningless lines, the falling snow depriving the scene of all relief, as if this blurred view were merely badly painted on a bare wall.

Where the wall and ceiling meet, the fly's shadow, the enlarged image of the filament of the electric bulb, reappears and continues its circuit around the rim of the white circle cast by the lamp. Its speed is always the same: slow and steady. In the dark area to the left a dot of light appears, corresponding to a small, round hole in the dark parchment of the lampshade; it is not actually a dot, but a thin broken line, a regular hexagon with one side missing: another enlarged image, this one stationary, of the same luminous source, the same incandescent thread.

It is the same filament again, that of a similar or slightly larger lamp, which glows so uselessly at the crossroads, enclosed in its glass cage on top of a cast-iron pedestal, a gas light with old-fashioned ornaments that has been converted into an electric street light.

Around the conical base of the cast-iron pedestal that widens toward the bottom and is ringed by several more or less prominent moldings, are embossed the slender stems of a stylized spray of ivy: curling tendrils; pointed, five-lobed, palmate leaves, their five veins very prominent where the scaling black paint reveals the rusted metal. Slightly higher a hip, an arm, a shoulder are leaning against the shaft of the lamppost. The man is wearing a faded military overcoat of no particular color, perhaps once green or khaki. His face is grayish; his features are drawn and give the impression of extreme fatigue, but perhaps a beard more than a day old is largely responsible for this impression. Prolonged waiting, prolonged immobility in the cold may also have drained the color from his cheeks, forehead, and lips.

The eyelids are gray, like the rest of the face; they are lowered. The head is bowed. The eyes are looking at the ground, that is, at the edge of the snow-covered sidewalk in front of the base of the street light and the two heavy marching boots with rounded toes whose coarse leather shows scratches and other signs of wear and tear, more or less covered by the black polish. The layer of snow is not thick enough to yield visibly underfoot, so that the soles of the boots are resting—or virtually resting—on the level of the white snow extending around them. At the edge of the sidewalk, this surface is completely unmarked, not shining but smooth, even, delicately stippled with its original granulation. A little snow has accumulated on the upper edge of the last projecting ring that encircles the widening base of the lamppost, forming a white circle above the black circle by which the latter rests on the ground. Higher up, some flakes have also stuck to other asperities of the cone, accenting the successive rings and the upper edges of the ivy leaves with a white line, as well as all the fragments of stems and veins that are horizontal or only slightly inclined.

But the bottom of the overcoat has swept away several of these tiny agglomerations, just as the boots, changing position several times, have trampled the snow in their immediate vicinity, leaving in places yellower areas, hardened, half-raised pieces and the deep marks of hobnails arranged in alternate rows. In front of the chest, the felt slippers have cleared a large gleaming area in the dust, and another one in front of the table at the place that must be occupied by a desk chair or an armchair, a stool or some kind of seat. A narrow path of gleaming floor has been made from one to the other; a second path goes from the table to the bed. Parallel to the housefronts, a little closer to the walls than to the gutter, a yellowish-gray straight path also indicates the snow-covered sidewalk. Produced by the footsteps of people now gone, the path passes between the lighted street light and the door of the last apartment house, then turns at right angles and disappears in the perpendicular cross street, still following the line of the housefronts about a third of the way across the sidewalk, from one end of its length to the other.