That day she slunk out of Paul’s room with a broken back, and it took a very long time to heal, especially as, nowadays, she wasted far too much time hunched up over postage stamps and photographs. Her skin grew grey and dirty, and the ageing process was rapid and ruthless. She rarely looked in the mirror any more, but when she sat in with Paul for a while every morning and every afternoon, her decline was reflected in his satisfied eyes.
‘The penance did you good,’ he said, ‘you ought to go to church more often. You don’t need to crawl on your knees any more.’
More rapping. Then silence.
She planned so many things now, but her knees were still sore after her penance, and her back was far from well again. She thought about the long German bayonet hanging on the wall over his bed as she was polishing her tarnished memories. But she was on friendly terms with the new caretaker until, one day, she noticed how eagerly he was watching her with his good eye, how intimately, more so with each day that passed. He went up to her room whenever Mile Claire wasn’t at home, and one evening he tried to kiss her in the Euridyce niche upstairs. She complained to Paul, and he said, ‘That’s right, you fight for your virtue.’
This period was weighed down by shadows and insidious premonitions, darkness held sway behind the pillars of this vast house, and Claire kept the blinds down in several rooms. She complained that the dust coming in from the street was so awful. Eventually all contact with the outside world was lost, and the house stood there like a memorial stone raised over a small number of living creatures who were barely alive: only the inscription was missing. No one went out of the dead house any more, and messenger boys came round with goods which they handed over to Claire or the caretaker on the doorstep; she herself would stand high up on the landing, watching wild-eyed as a thin white beam of light filtered into the hall through the crack in the door. She had an enormous desire to scream, not because she was afraid, but she thought there were far too many silent rooms in this house. She wandered about imagining which instruments could transform them with music: the cello room, the grand piano room, a little niche for the xylophone. She imagined what kind of screams would suit some rooms but be out of place in others; she imagined for instance what a scream would sound like in Paul’s room or her own or Claire’s or the porter’s cubby-hole.
One night when everything was quiet in the house and outside in the street, and as usual she was lying wide awake in her big oak bed, she got the urge to try just a little scream, to see how it went. She opened her mouth, and it was amazing how easily it slipped out. It was a little bit louder than she’d expected, and she was so frightened when it echoed back at her that she soon fell silent and waited in fear in case somebody had heard it and would come racing up to investigate. But everything was so quiet. So she calmed down again and lay there, trying to remember what it had sounded like. She couldn’t quite remember, but she thought it had probably been a little bit too highly pitched for this dignified room; but as she didn’t really have more than one scream as yet, she had to find another room where it might be more suitable. So she crept quietly along the corridor, opening all the doors. She started with the lounge overlooking the street, then passed slowly through the five rooms, screaming in all of them. She paused for a while and pondered when she’d finished, and decided she’d have to lower her voice at least an octave before the scream was anywhere near appropriate for the sobriety and solid good taste characteristic of the furniture. She went back through the rooms in reverse order, just screaming and listening at the same time to hear whether they would do.
It still wasn’t quite right. The screams had a vulgarity of style that must have been due to her opening her mouth too wide, so she’d have to close it slightly when she tried for a third time. But there was no third time. Mile Claire and the grim-faced porter came rushing in from opposite directions, obviously as arranged in advance, knocked her to the ground, stuffed rags into her mouth and pinioned her arms. She twisted about and tried to spit out the gag so that she could explain it was all just a refurnishing exercise, but they were too strong for her, they managed to drug her somehow or other, and she woke up one day exhausted and terribly hot, and found them standing beside her bed, keeping an eye on her and each other.
‘Madame, we’re going out; we’re going to church,’ said Claire.
They went to church, but not to the one where she had done her penance. Now she took her hands away briefly, and looked up. Oh, that brick-red colour, that colour which becomes so strangely clear and bitter just as the sun is setting. The tower rose upwards through the domed clouds, the edge of the sun that hadn’t yet drowned, and the sea stretched out as lifelessly as an etching plate; the tower of the red monastery church, overshadowing all else, at times dissolving into a yellowy-red mist, the mist emanating from blast furnaces and smithies nestling down in the valleys; but it emerges again, rising up from the mists, more recognizable every time, more lovable, more painful when seen from so far away.
But a little lizard crawled out of the massive wall and, as insignificant as a beetle, it looked at first as if it might soon disappear into one of the thousands of cracks; but look: it started growing, its tail grew longer, was drawn up towards the spire, kept on spreading out sideways until its cold shell covered the whole wall. Its nasty, thin little head got closer and closer to the ground, and she slowly slumped forward, transfixed in a standing position down below, with her hands reaching up towards the spire atop the vanished tower. She wanted to yell out: gobble me up, you monster; but in her memory-dream, no words crossed her lips.
Then she was standing in Paul’s room again, but this time she had her back turned defiantly towards the window; her back was completely cured, and light was dripping in through the Venetian blinds and clinking down on to the carpet. She knew he was watching her with every segment of his eyeballs, sucking her in, although he seemed to be lying there, half turned towards the wall and stroking the cruel tip of the bayonet.
‘I’m going to have a baby,’ she said, hooking her gaze on to that of somebody else in the far distance so as not to fall, ‘I’m going to have a baby with a priest.’
He hadn’t turned round to face her, he was still lying in the same position; but she could feel in her skin, which suddenly became hot, how he was thrusting himself upon her with his eyes, those eyes which were not crippled: they could scratch and bite, they could rip and claw, and they could shadow you, sharply and ruthlessly; wherever you were in the world.
Now the house was closed like a besieged fortress, but it was the house itself which was besieged; its walls seemed to be closing inwards bit by bit, the rooms became more cramped because the ceiling was also sinking and the floor rising, it became hard to breathe, the only way was to lie down with your chest as compressed as possible and gasp for air and love, like a beached fish.