But then his disoriented thoughts, running down the twisting and comfortless alleys of this world, suddenly snagged on an old wound, and Pierre decided to go in search of Jeannette.
It was the first time in months (years?) that he had set off walking in a straight line. He walked for a long time down paths of alleys intersecting at every possible angle, which some mysterious giants had strewn with the enormous gravel of cobblestones. Everything here was different. People jostled each other as they ran, unchoreographed and haphazard, free, it seemed, of any mutual regulations, as if circulating in a chimerical world of absolute liberty. Navy-blue police officers rose here and there at the boulevard intersections like majestic statues; with one flick of their miracle-working fingers the flood of vehicles stopped and then were set in motion, indicating that another mechanism was at work, one too complex and intangible to fathom.
When Pierre found himself at Place Vendôme, the clock was striking twelve, and through the half-open sluice gates of the warehouses a clamorous wave of midinettes came bubbling onto the street. Pierre desperately strained his eyes to find Jeannette amidst the crowd. The stragglers slowly began dispersing.
The warehouse was as stark as an orangery. He was told that Jeannette hadn’t been to work for some time.
He went back out to the street feeling disconcerted, as though his last lead had failed him. He felt that Jeannette had vanished into the black forest of the city, vanished forever, that he would never manage to find her again.
A crowd surge pushed him onto the road, then a wave of automobiles threw him onto a slender stone island where a haughty little man peered down onto the spray lashing below from the summit of a giant bronze column, helpless as a sparrow on a telegraph pole.
Across the way, along a wide stretch of road, a dense herd of huffing, breathless automobiles battered against the low embankments of the sidewalks, ready to boil over at any moment.
Behind the front-running, purebred, and greyhound-sleek Hispano-Suiza, with its shifty headlight eyes and feminine gasoline juices, sped a motley, rabid pack of dogs, barking and squealing, snapping at one another, vainly struggling to stick their nostrils under its feminine taiclass="underline" the majestic Rolls-Royces, stout as Great Danes, the Amilkars, squat as dachshunds, the Fords like dirty, stray mutts, and little Citroëns like short, docked fox terriers. The tumult rose above the street, a choking estrous odor, the scream of a maddened chase, the stupefying vapors of a scorching summer afternoon.
Pierre watched this frenzy of bodies with eyes wide in horror, searching in vain for some missing thread, a trail leading out of this deluge of rampant carnality that had him caught, irrevocably, with no hope of salvation, unable to resist.
Warm waves swept him away like a splinter of wood and carried him off blind, with no compass. Thus began again the pointless days, the aimless drifting over the swaying oceans of the streets, the nights underneath the mystic umbrella of the stars, a loneliness unknown to even Alain Gerbault, that laughable Sancho Panza rocked on the shoreless sheets of the Atlantic for months on end.
The old, familiar hunger was building itself a nest in the sinews of his bowels. Like a gull in the tangled rigging of an abandoned ship, it gave him not a single moment’s rest. Pierre made no attempt to shoo it away. The useless pneumatic vacuum of entrails he carried around inside him was like a city whose entire population was quarreling, and there would be no hand to toss in a crinkling packet of food.
One night, wandering down the knotted labyrinths in search of a warmer recess to sleep, and drawing close to something he at first took to be a comfortable crate, Pierre spotted a dark, hunched figure in the gloom. The figure leapt to one side, flashing the ominous whites of his eyes and baring a predatory swath of teeth. From the recess wafted the heavy, nauseating odor of decomposing waste. Then Pierre realized that what he had taken for a crate was in fact a row of enormous garbage bins, emptied in the morning by the sanitation vehicles that circulated through the city.
The figure rooting through the containers came menacingly toward Pierre, his body shielding the foul contents. From his bared teeth came a hoarse rattle:
“Scram! It’s mine! Go look somewhere else!”
Then, like a bolt from the heavens, a simple revelation struck Pierre. In the gateways of buildings there were sure to be scraps of food in the garbage bins!
He obligingly went back in search of other gateways. He soon discovered, however, that a revelation ceased to be the privilege of the individual in a democratic society; it was common property. In each and every gateway he was confronted by the same ominous whites of the eyes and bared teeth of the first finders, rearing up from fragrant containers filled with mysterious treasures.
Passing by a long line of alcoves, Pierre finally hit upon one that was… empty! The bins that lay inside had been ransacked top to bottom, a clear sign that some lucky fellow had beat him to it.
Pierre was undaunted – he greedily threw himself upon them, carefully digging through everything once again.
His trophy for this long search was a box of preserved meat with some scraps left and a veal rib that could still be gnawed. Placing this paltry meal on a low wall, he licked it eagerly, in no way taming his hunger, only jostling it out of its numb stupor.
Exhausted and resigned from further searching, he drifted down a boulevard and plopped down on the first bench he came to. Sleep tucked him in under a tattered, hole-filled rag.
Through the holes in the rag he saw the stars twinkling high above, blinking on and off with the flick of an invisible switch, advertisements for remote heavenly hotels, summoning lovelorn souls through their gates, couples gone astray in outer space.
VII
His eyes were forced open by a powerful tug. Instead of a navy-blue policeman, Pierre saw a healthy, ruddy face with a high forehead staring down at him from under the visor of a cap.
It was already day. The man bending over him had clearly been shaking him for some time. The young, happy voice revived him like a stream of cool, crystalline water.
“Pierre! Why, of course it’s Pierre! I recognized you at once!”
The voice was familiar, round and polished like a billiard ball that, having ricocheted around the table of his consciousness, suddenly arrived at the right pocket, as if it had been specially carved out for the ball to land in. But when had it been carved there?
Pierre squeezed his eyes shut, vainly trying to peek through the pocket into the depths. At first he saw only blackness. Then when his inner eyes adjusted he started to make out a slender, tentative shaft of light. It seemed as though he were starting to distinguish the vague contours of objects, like staring through a keyhole:
The narrow, extended silhouette of a bell tower in a red top hat of burnt roof tiles. A thin straw man in a black perforated cap, tipped rakishly onto the spot where people normally have their left ear. A scarecrow with some ragged clumps of straw peeking out of his shirtsleeves, standing erect before the green background of a creaking, freshly painted window shutter. A crooked well green with age, its crank hunched astraddle, wrapped all about with the links of a ruddy, rusted chain, a wooden pail at one end, reeking of damp. How comfortable it would be to ride it down into the depths of the black well, with its smell of decay and moldy earth, the creak of the ascending chain, eyes trained on the small, round window of sky up above, the heart pounding fiercely, a chill of fear running down the spine, and in the breast – such joy that the throat contracts, so long as the burble of water down below doesn’t let you know, with a sudden, terrifying shudder, that it’s time to yank on the chain for all you’re worth. Then the centuries-old, geriatric chain, groaning and lamenting, pulls you slowly, laboriously upward, along the black, moldy, fungus-coated walls, toward the sky, toward the flat space, rolled out like dough as far as the eye can see, toward the jolly, chuckling voice, ringing so wide across the panel of the horizon, round and smooth like a gramophone record.