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  Again he crossed the whole town, the whole resounding labyrinth full of sudden pains and shivers, the kind of stuffy, dirty blockhouse where corridors ran off in all directions the better to mislead you, where all the rooms looked alike, with their narrow slits of windows and blackish corners, where the heavy reek of stagnation and excrement ran in cross-currents close to the concrete floor.

  Roch’s heart was beating very fast as he approached his house, thinking of the delicate moment when he would open the door of his flat and all at once be restored to its cool tranquillity, to the bed, to his wife’s face, to the kitchen table and the metal tap which would slowly fill a big glass of water.

  Elisabeth would speak to him in her rather deep voice, she would push away that lock of hair that always fell over her forehead when she bent forward; and he would gaze at her for a long time, drinking her in with his eyes, and touch her skin: that would certainly make it worth while to have roamed round the streets as he had done, all burning and shivering, to have had a fight with a fool on a shady path, and to have broken TRANSTOURISM’s window, taking care to be seen so as to get the sack.

  When his house came in sight, Roch rushed towards it; he noticed nothing, neither the old woman he passed on the stairs every evening when he came down with the dustbin, nor his bicycle propped against the hot wall a couple of paces away from the door. He rushed straight in, ran upstairs and entered his flat.

  Naturally nothing went as he’d expected: the cramped little flat was empty, grey in damp dusk, with something grubby and decrepit-looking about the walls and ceilings. Elisabeth wasn’t there. The bed was unmade, just like when he had gone out, the ashtrays were full to overflowing, and the newspaper lay on the floor in separate sheets. The kitchen door was open, and Roch could see the piled-up plates and saucepans draining in the sink. All the shutters were closed, and the sun was still crawling along every slit, as slimy as a big slug. Disheartened, Roch threw himself on the bed and shut his eyes. His head ached now, near the nape and behind the eye-balls. His ears were buzzing. There were funny aches in his arms and legs, partly tickling and partly hurting him, he wasn’t sure which. And in his head, where the eyes were closed, things were mounting rhythmically, like hands with a bubble at the tip of every finger. Roch was expecting nothing.

  On the other side of the town, in all the heat and noise, Elisabeth was walking along the edge of the pavement. She was going quickly, a canvas bag with red and yellow stripes swinging in her left hand. Her rather tight green dress went into creases first on one hip, then on the other, and some ivory —or plastic—bracelets clashed together with every movement of her right wrist, making a noise exactly like that of a pencil falling on the floor. On her feet she wore gold, Italian-style sandals, whose heels clicked on the pavement. Her hair was pushed back and hung down over her shoulder-blades. Dressed like this, she was walking quickly along the pavement, amid the flashes of sunlight. She didn’t look at anyone, except for a furtive glance, now and again, at some hunchback or blind man coming towards her. She would throw him a covert look, lasting hardly a quarter of a second, and then turn her eyes away and change her direction imperceptibly so as to avoid the obstacle. She went quickly past cafés and garage doors, her feet tapping rhythmically on the tarmac, her lips parted as she breathed through her mouth. Occasionally a wide, blue-tinted shop-window reflected her as she went by, a tall, slim figure bending forward as she walked. As she passed the window she would half-turn her head to the left and take a quick look. And the window, which had so many things in it, would show her nothing except the ghostly, transparent, colourless form, like a snapshot of a moving subject, which bore her name, Elisabeth Estève. Sometimes an actual mirror had been put up on a pillar near a tobacconist’s shop, and she would see herself approaching from a distance, her face, hands and legs very pale against a background of pink sky. Men watched her approach too, men leaning against the doors of houses, with tired faces and pensive eyes. She didn’t look at them, but at the back of her mind she knew she was going through them, like that, very simply, quite smoothly.

  When she had gone by they were still there, looking at her from behind, thinking of nothing; and then she forgot about them.

  Elisabeth went up the main avenue, past the shops; just before she came to the end of it she went into a shop and bought a piece of stuff. She looked at the bales of linen, one after another.

  ‘I’d like something in a paler colour, at least not as dark as that,’ she told the assistant. The latter, a stout woman of about sixty, whose hair was dyed auburn, tugged laboriously at another roll of material.

  ‘Like this, mademoiselle?’ she asked.

  ‘No’, that’s too bright,’ said Elisabeth; ‘I don’t much mind what colour it is, but I’d like it to be on the pale side. No dots, no, something fairly unobtrusive. You haven’t got that one, only lighter?’

  ‘We have the same pattern in pale blue, but it’s in tergal, mademoiselle.’

  ‘It’s for a blouse,’ said Elisabeth, ‘I’d have preferred cotton.’

  ‘And this one, mademoiselle? It’s very pretty, and very young-looking, you know.’

  ‘Is that all you have?’

  ‘There are the nylons …’

  ‘No, no, in cotton.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all we have in cotton,’ said the saleswoman.

  ‘And how much does it cost?’

  ‘Eight francs a yard,’ said the saleswoman.

  ‘And this one?’

  ‘The pink?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The same price, mademoiselle.’

  ‘All right, I’ll take that one there.’

  ‘How much do you need?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, I should think a yard and a quarter would be enough.’

  ‘Do you want to have a collar?’

  ‘No, no collar.’

  ‘And sleeveless?’

  ‘Yes, of course, sleeveless. How much do you think?’

  ‘I think a yard and a quarter will be ample if you’re not having a collar.’

  ‘No, I’m not having a collar.’

  ‘Yes, then a yard and a quarter.’

  The woman unrolled the material, measured the length and ripped it off. Then she went away, saying over her shoulder:

  ‘Pay at the desk please, mademoiselle.’

  Two minutes later Elisabeth came out of the shop carrying a flat paper bag with the words FLORALIES TISSUS printed on it; at the bottom of the bag the piece of soft material, pale blue with grey stars, lay asleep, folded over on itself, like a jellyfish.

  A little further on she went into a pork butcher’s and bought some things to eat, and a packet of potato crisps. Time was passing quickly, all round her; each minute sped by with no fuss, with a succession of movements and words: walking along pavement—looking in shoe-shop window—changing bag to other hand—‘excuse me …’— going into baker’s and pastry-cook’s shop—buying wholemeal loaf + 100 grammes of salt biscuits—‘how much is that?’— ‘thank you, madame, good afternoon, madame’— sound of doorbell—putting parcel in bag—stopping to scratch left ankle with right heel— putting on dark glasses—‘excuse me …’—looking at sun and sneezing — waiting at red light—buying magazine—looking at cinema poster—‘The Searchers’, by John Ford—walking, walking—chemist’s: bottle of rhinamid and tube of aspirin—crossing street—Prisunic: hairpins, toilet soap, writing-paper and envelopes.

  Elisabeth walked quickly along every street, amid the serpentine movements of the crowd. She brushed past women and children, men, old people; her lithe body moved under her green dress, her breast rose and fell regularly, in time to her breathing, sweat trickled down the small of her back, her green eyes, sometimes hidden behind black glasses, at other times revealed, were reflecting every tiny, square facet of the townscape. Red cars passed across her pupils, curving as though their coachwork had been softened by the cool layer of tears, and black, watery shadows loomed up, only to vanish again at once. In t
he shops the electric fans stirred her black hair and her stiletto heels left round punch-marks in the linoleum. Sometimes a man would follow her for a moment, take a good look at her and then go away; or else he would speak to her. He would talk for a few seconds, walking at her side and saying this kind of thing in, a low voice:

  ‘Going for a walk, mademoiselle?’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Like to come for a run in my car?’

  ‘You’re Italian aren’t you, mademoiselle? Ragazza? Ragazza?’

  But she went straight on, without so much as a glance. And the man was lost again in the mass of people, somewhere behind her.

  Later, much later, when the sun was sinking behind the houses, after hours of shopping and strolling, Elisabeth sat down on a café terrace to count how much money she had left. She ordered a lemonade, took her purse from her bag, and emptied out the notes and coins. They lay there, spread out in the palm of her hand, the dirty, smelly bits of paper, showing a bewigged man writing, with a building and a river in the background. At the top was printed: Banque de France, 0059867112, Dix Francs, and at the bottom: 67112 B.10–10-1963.B.Z.24. and on the other side it said in small print:

  Under Article 139 of the Penal Code any person counterfeiting legally issued banknotes or making use of such counterfeited notes renders himself liable to imprisonment with hard labour for life. Any person introducing such notes into France renders himself liable to the same penalty.

  Another note, which was less dirty, showed a round-faced man with anxious eyes, looking to the left in front of a triumphal arch and to the right in front of a domed church. The pale yellow background was lavishly scattered with laurel leaves, lyres, rosettes, fruits, and species of flowers. Beneath the figure 1oo NF were three signatures: contrôleur général—illegible—caissier général—illegible—-and secrétaire général—illegible.

  There they were, smoothed out in the hollow of her hand, these motley scraps of paper—artless designs in drab colours, with their scribbles and figures. One could do whatever one liked with them, burn them, tear them up, or simply roll them into pellets. They were nothing, and yet a tranquil strength emanated from them, a familiar, sour smell and something like a sign of respect. From their twopence-coloured landscapes, the bewigged old men looked out at you sardonically, slyly. They were quite comfortable in their comic-strip world, they were warm and well fed, you could be sure they didn’t miss women; and besides, they knew. Elisabeth looked through the thin paper at the old man’s profile; the light revealed the phantom with the dishevelled cranium, topped by a nightcap, the three-quarter view of the face that looked like an old Redskin. Caught in its haloed prison, the face bore a slight sneer, and nothing could gainsay it; it would be there always, for roast chickens and kilos of potatoes, inscrutable, efficient, almost sad.

  Then there were the coins: bits of metal, some pale, some darker, gilded discs and others made of nickel, hardly as big as cufflinks. With their designs, their little distinctive signs, stamped on both; women with floating hair, swathed in wind-swept draperies, were striding towards a sun which was rising, or setting, one could not be sure which. Their backward-stretched fists seemed to fix them in a kind of serene balance that nothing would ever disturb. On the other side the branch of a tree, laurel or olive, perhaps, was sprouting from the final E of FRATERNITE. There were other coins too, big yellow ones with a woman’s head in profile; the metal had been rubbed shiny on her temples, cheeks and throat, so that the head, round the eyes and nostrils, was now modelled by a kind of shadow, as though there were really bones under her skin and an electric light were burning somewhere, off the coin. Dirt must collect every day in the hollows of her face, rubbed by fingers and inside pockets, and there must be milliards of microbes living comfortably there. Other coins, like these, had lived out their lives in human hands. Those who had handled them had died years ago and the round bits of metal had disappeared with them, who could tell where, buried in the earth, lost in drawers, accumulated in old toffee tins. They had clinked on tables, bought wine or yards of material, paid for goods and gratified beggars at church doors. Their sounds were forgotten, and spots of leprous green now clung to the designs stamped on the metal. Behind the head of a bearded and moustached king a helmeted woman sat on an incomprehensible junk-heap, holding a trident in her left hand. All the rest was effaced, flattened out, except for a figure, right at the bottom: 1912. They were gone, the bits of blackened, whitish, clay-coloured iron; the two-headed axes, the demigods with vertical profiles, the bees, the strange meaningless words: Suomen Tasavalta. 5 Markaa. The sow suckling her piglets, with written below: Saorstät éireann. In God We Trust. 1926. In Pluribus Unum. ONE CENT. United States of America. Umberto I re d’Italia. Juliana Koningin der Nederlanden. And on that large brown coin, polished smooth, there suddenly appeared, out of the sort of cloud produced by wearing down, the terrible form of an eagle with outspread wings, whose great talons had remained as they were first created, crushing, monumental, twin columns of feathers upholding a temple concealed by the smoke of a conflagration.

  Never mind; they had been created for that; to disappear, one day or another, to be carried away, buried, spoilt by time. To be left with nothing but scraps of their markings, fragments of noses and chins, half-effaced dates. For the living people who shut them up in their purses they had the sounds and shapes of death; something shabby and decomposed, which kept the tally of their years and told them that they too must pass away. For a long time these bits of metal had been gently wearing down. The bronze ass with the two-headed Janus on one side and the prow of a ship on the other, the drachmae, the gold sixty sestertius pieces, each confining in its little round cage an eagle that would like to fly away, the Greek imperials minted at Cyzicus and bearing Vespasian’s effigy, the aureus with the head of a smiling Augustus and the word ‘Caesar’ written on one side and ‘Augustus’ on the other; the denarii of Brutus and Cassius, the Oscan libra, had all been finished for centuries. Bets had been made with those scraps of iron and bronze, people had been wealthy with them, had owned villas, slaves, cattle. Wars had been fought for them, and men murdered. Now they were bones, ruins. Certainly not worth talking about.

  The people on the café terrace were different by this time. Newcomers had sat down at the tables and were placidly sipping their drinks, their beer or fruit-juice, as they chatted or looked round them. From the depths of the room behind them came vague sounds of music which mingled with the noise made by the traffic and the crowd on the pavement. Here and there men and women were smoking, and the smell of their cigarette smoke drifted through the air as the currents bore it away. One might have tried to identify the different brands— Virginia near here, Peter Stuyvesant or Camel over there, filter-tipped Gitanes in another direction. Elisabeth, sitting very straight on her chair, took a little mirror and a lipstick out of her bag and carefully made herself up. As she raised her eyes again she noticed a man leaning on a balcony on the far side of the street, opposite the café, and looking down. His arms were propped on the wrought-iron hand-rail and his head was bent forward, regardless of the tiles that might fall any second on the back of his head, thus exposed. A little later a young woman, pregnant and ragged, began going the round of the café tables, begging. She stopped in front of Elisabeth and turned on her a pair of coal-black eyes that shone in her dirty face; then she extended an arm, a thinnish arm with the veins showing, and the end of the arm was an open hand, the palm glistening with sweat. Without much conviction she muttered a few unintelligible words, probably ‘for the baby, please’, and waited. Elisabeth took out one of the coins she had just been looking at, and put it into the hand. The beggar-girl closed her hand and moved away like an automaton to the next table. Some people shook their heads, some looked in the other direction or began reading their newspapers. After a few seconds the pregnant woman went away without a word, and it felt as though a positive abyss of discomfort and filth had at last departed. Further on, somewher
e on the outskirts of the town, near the gasworks or the garbage dump, there was a place where the abyss could go no further. It had settled down there with children and mangy dogs, in corrugated-iron shanties, and it reigned supreme there, all the time.

  Elisabeth drank her lemonade to the last drop, clenching her teeth to keep out the pips; then she spooned up the sugar from the bottom of the glass and ate that. When she had put down the glass she picked up the ticket and looked at the price: ‘1.50 service compris—tip included’. She rolled the scrap of paper between her fingers for a moment, until she had made a kind of cylinder out of it. Then she unrolled it and laid it on the table, with one corner under the ashtray to keep it from blowing away.

  A little time before Elisabeth got up to go, a man came and sat down at the table on her right. He ordered a coffee, and sat smoking for a moment, staring straight ahead of him through dark glasses. Then, all of a sudden, he turned to Elisabeth and said:

  ‘Do you like painting’?

  Elisabeth looked at him in surprise. He spoke again:

  ‘You’ve nothing against drawing, I suppose?’

  ‘Er—no, but …’ said Elisabeth.

  ‘My name’s Tobie,’ the man went on, ‘I’m a painter. I want to do a portrait of you.’

  And without more ado he produced a drawing-block and a charcoal pencil out of a portfolio and set to work. Elisabeth tried to protest:

  ‘No, I’d rather you didn’t, why draw me?’

  The man made no reply; he was bent over his sheet of paper, making bold strokes with the charcoal, his brows drawn together in concentration. A few seconds later he raised his head and looked at Elisabeth’s left cheek.