During the course of that day, amid all the flurries of our sudden dashes for survival, our eyes would collide with a quick glance, without words, grasping in a flash all that our life was and all that awaited us. These glances, when our eyes met, comprehended everything up to the very end. But translated into thought, words whispered inside one's head, this comprehension became improbable: "This woman who is so dear to me will fall, die within an hour, within a couple of hours."
They were already fighting on the staircase outside the restaurant door. What could be heard in the shouting was the hysterical ferocity of those who are certain they have won. The bursts of gunfire were shorter, people were being finished off. They were no longer fighting, they were hunting down, flushing out, finishing off. The smoke now smelled of the steam from water poured on flames. Outside the window night was falling, encouraging the soldiers to fight it out as fast as possible before dark.
For a few instants our weariness, our remoteness, made us invisible. The soldiers streamed into the dining room, riddling the nooks and crannies with bullets wherever darkness and smoke lingered, transforming the kitchen into a long cascade of shattered glass. And yet there we were in front of them, by the broken window where one could breathe, standing pressed against each other. For us everything came down to this embrace, to a few words guessed at through the gunfire, from the movement of our lips.
An instant later they discovered our presence. The barrel of an automatic rifle began to poke me in the back, a butt struck us across the shoulders, as if to separate us. Then they drew back, noting the distance necessary for the execution, to avoid getting themselves sprayed with blood. After three days of siege and three sleepless nights the world outside our bodies was blurred, flaccid. The mind floundered, trying to grasp the hardness of death amid this softness and, without growing alarmed, fell back into somnolence. The only fragment of lucidity was the soldier's arm, seen in a sidelong glance, when I lifted my face from yours for an instant: he was wearing a slender leather bracelet on his wrist. "This one won't shoot," I thought with irrational conviction. "No, he won't shoot us."
Like us, they noticed the sliding beneath their feet. For some time now the electric current had been restored and the restaurant was revolving. The picture window framed the fire in the port and, a moment later, the minaret and roofs of the old town. The tape deck struck up again the same flow of weary notes. Its breathy rhythms isolated us even more. We were alone and for a little time still remained in this life, but already felt detached from our entwined bodies, which the yelling soldiers were manhandling. They needed two ordinary condemned people, two bodies standing with their faces to the wall. Our embrace made them uneasy. For them we were a couple of dancers on a tiny island defined by the tea-colored light, the table with a bunch of artificial flowers, the saxophonist's breathy notes. The brassy swaying of the music suddenly took off into a dizzying flight: it was simultaneously laughter, shouting, a sob. Anyone who followed it, in its madness, could only have fallen to his death from this vibrant cliff. There was a click from a magazine being engaged. You raised your eyes toward me, very calm eyes, and said to me, "Till tomorrow, then."
His voice, disdainful and very sure of itself, cut through the bawling of the soldiers. Later you referred to him as an "extraterrestrial." My first impression was precisely that: a cosmonaut captured by the denizens of some planet. He was a GI, escorted by Africans, who made his way into the dining room. His equipment surpassed even what could be seen in films about intergalactic warfare: a helmet with a built-in microphone and a transparent visor, a flak jacket, and a belt that looked like a chastity belt, for it extended down at the front to protect the genitalia; thick padded leggings that covered his knees, gloves with ringed fingers; and, in particular, an infinite number of little balls, capsules, and bottles attached to his webbing, or thrust into the innumerable pockets of his jacket. No doubt these were all the possible antidotes and serums, all the flashlights, all the filter pumps. He stood a head taller than his indigenous escorts, who surrounded him respectfully and watched him as he spoke. Confronting our perplexity, they all began shouting at the same time, demanding a reply from us. It was simply their din that now stopped us understanding. And I heard myself exclaiming, still a stranger to myself, "Look, first tell your bodyguards to keep quiet!"
I saw you smiling, realized what an absurd expression I had used, and laughed as well. "Bodyguards" had just slipped out.
Later on we often found ourselves picturing this military novelty: the intrepid American warrior flanked by a dozen bodyguards, a new method of going to war. And, in truth, the United States was terrified of the idea of having to send body bags back to America, especially during presidential elections.
These long underground passages of our remembered past would often open out onto the smiling banality of the present and, on that day, onto a reception room and a woman trying unsuccessfully to dislodge a tiny pastry, a petit four topped with a drop of cream, which she was being offered by a waiter. While tormenting this pastry, which was stuck to the others, she went on talking to me and her voice, already smoothed off by the triviality of social conversation, became completely automatic: "It was, you know, so moving. And awfully well documented… All those clips from the archives…" What brought me back from the past was not her words but the glass in her left hand that was tilting and on the brink of spilling its contents. I grasped her hand. She smiled at me, finally succeeding in capturing the petit four. "You know, there's a great deal in what he says. It's, you know, incredibly powerful!" Her mouth rounded as she spoke, and her tongue slipped out delicately and captured a morsel from the petit four. At last I realized where I was, in this room next to a woman praising a film that had just been shown in preview. Back in the underground tunnel of my memories I was still seeing the soldier who had been shot a moment before and whom we covered with a tablecloth; the smell of that African city in flames was still in my nostrils; and in the deepest galleries, in the most remote years, other cities appeared, other faces frozen by death. The woman seemed to be waiting for me to reply. I agreed with her, echoing her last remark. I must return to the present.
To get my bearings again in this Parisian present, all I needed to do was to identify old acquaintances in their new guise. The blond woman talking to me about the film was always the same blonde. I had encountered her a hundred times at gatherings like this, where I hoped to discover traces of you. Since our previous encounter she had simply grown ten years younger, altered the color of her eyes and the oval of her face, lengthened her nose, altered her name and profession. She was a different person, of course, but still a perfectly formed specimen of this golden feminine type, smiling and so vacuous as to be almost agreeable. A little farther off, in a polite scramble around the tables, I saw the ex-ambassador, that massive, graying man who on this occasion was an ex-minister. He had less hair and had adopted a more nasal, but still ironic, voice. Making deft use of a pair of tongs, he was serving his wife as she held out her plate. He was making jokes and the people around him were smiling, even as they struggled to slip their forks through the bobbing and weaving of arms to obtain their slice of cake or their portion of salad.