The houses now stand packed close against one another. Their roofs form a continuous, compact surface of red and brown, open to dust and rain: a new sort of regular-patterned floor that calls for a certain crazy extravagance in the user.
Trucks pass down the streets, wheels close to the sidewalk; the sky, heavy with clouds, tilts square to the vertical. The horizon is hemmed in by those volcano-like mountains, with vapour rising on their flanks. In some secret den or underground cave there must be men held prisoner, stifling from confinement. The sidewalk throws up people who have been buried alive, bodies steeped in bituminous deposits, which the worms refuse to eat. Everything has a suffocating air of impenetrability. Down there a hundred children are jostling each other in the dust of a gymnasium.
These were the things one could see, at that moment in time, if one climbed the hill where the cemetery stood. At the top of the gardens there was a landmark-indicator, together with a marble slab on which were inscribed the main references to the area, such as couplets by Byron or Lamartine. This, then, was the moment to lean over the balustrade, and listen to the sound of the artificial waterfall, and look at everything with an avid intensity, as though one were condemned to die immediately afterwards, or at the very least to go blind.
When you got down to it, there could have been no worse setting for love than this town; yet before love could be achieved, there had to be knowledge and understanding, one had to acclimatize oneself to this empty void, this sad mockery of freedom.
If only it were possible, one ought to be left to oneself again, among the stones and trees, the names, the shop-windows, the traffic; among the great close-packed crowd of men and women, among the shouts and smells and passionate emotions. Prepared long since, matured in antechambers charged with thunder and lightning, where the tension had swiftly become more shattering than the face of a god revealed, the atmospheric drama was now gathering to its climax. Now clouds were bursting in their dozens, the sky streamed with water like a plate-glass window. Burning perfumes gathered in clusters, began to revolve about each other like constellations; people caught at the storm’s centre hurriedly took shelter in doorways, anxious to avoid being left out in the open. Earth and buildings alike took on a bluish tinge, perilously liable to attract lightning and the plastic elements of water. And the same storm, dry, intangible, began to gather in men’s hearts; buildings, to all appearances intact, were collapsing internally of their own accord; every drop that fell from the sky took a small fragment of reality with it briefly tapping out a rhythmic pattern, a vague suggestion of something — conscious awareness, perhaps — before dissolving into nothingness. Very soon these palatial buildings and columns would vanish, leaving nothing but white ruined shells. But what was appalling, unbearable even, was that this process of destruction never reached completion: it went on continually, in every direction, over and over again, but never succeeded in exhausting the resistance of matter. The houses were nothing any longer, yet they still existed; movements, colours, desires — none of them had any further meaning, yet movements, colours and desires continued as before. Men were brute beasts of the void, mindless and bloodless, set in their ways — yet they still existed. You could walk down every street, even out into the stony, rain-rich countryside beyond, and nowhere would you discover true solitude, the fulfilment of that haunting passion for the absolute. Nowhere would you find complete silence.