The car climbed steadily towards the top of the hill, headlights full on, negotiating hairpin bends and passing through shadowy stretches of woodland. From time to time houses showed up by the roadside, great black masses pierced by a single yellow window. The hill was a vast outcrop of rock and trees, a deeper black than the night. It dominated the town, rearing up beyond the flatness of sea and plain in all the might of its great arched ridge, so full and solid that it might bave heen a living creature. Riddled with wells, a bristling mass of shrub and undergrowth, it loomed up through the night like some gigantic stray animal, with its steep scree-covered slopes, its patches of waste ground, its scored, deep-cut water-channels, bare and arid, rain streaming softly down its flanks, dust-particles frittering away, quivering on its foundations. Here one climbed towards stillness, past streets winding or stepped, all lights out now, a slow ascent to that flat summit — not a tree, not even a ruined house — whence all other sounds had been banished by the wind, skirting invisible obstacles fissures, abandoned tracks, masses of rock half broken away from the soil but still hanging at a crazy angle; passing deep pools of water, compact bubbles of darkness, the rain dancing on their surface like bullets. More private property, barbed-wire fences, but nothing behind them save faint fluttering mystery, a kind of cloud, wisps of drifting mist. Crumbling chateaux, hidden cathedrals, floating towers. Then the road came out on the cliffs above the sea, and the bright red point of a lighthouse beacon became visible, drilling at regular intervals through the flux of the elements. Everything seemed to hinge around this light, according to its own metallic rhythm, as though each wink of that red beam, glimpsed through the curtains of rain and darkness, advanced the march of time, of knowledge, promised days of intense sunlight, a hard bare landscape stripped back to the bone by brightness and heat. The hill was rising still, its road stretching away ribbon-like between knolls and hollows. There were straggling bushes with a dense, rounded mass of foliage, pressed down now by sheer weight of water, and weird stunted plants with wide-spaced branches. Ruined walls, boundary-fences, and sometimes other blurred shapes which belonged to no recognizable order of things, but simply sprang up out of the darkness in a casual fashion that was both graceful and somehow alarming. Phantoms propped against each other, not people, not houses, but small dingy figures, decrepit possessions, stake-fences, skeletons planted in the earth and undulating fluidly as one glimpsed them going by, perhaps animated from within by some mysterious respiratory movement.
Higher still the hill was hollowed out towards its summit like the crater of a volcano. The road ran its lonely course ringed in by a circle of rocks, through strata of chilly air. The darkness was total — not a glimmer of light anywhere, not even a solitary street-lamp from which to take one’s bearings. The ground was invisible, it merged with the shadows, and the trees seemed to float above it. Besson found himself plunging into this empty blackness on foot, half paralysed by fear, struggling forward through the mud, not able to recognize anything, eyes searching the void, feet clumsily sliding on loose shale, frightened stiff by the darkness and the power it contained. Onward now across the vast shifting plateau, searching for the right path, walking into gusts of icy wind blown from the uttermost ends of the world, whistling razor-sharp over the hillside. Down now among silo-like rock-formations, endless wells with no walls, no bottom, no entrance. Down, down, falling maybe. The rain seemed to bounce back off the ground, shoot vertically skywards. Or perhaps everything was gone — no more sky, no more rocks, no more hill, nothing. Nothing but this vast fluid emptiness, this impalpable void, in which sombre patches of colour continued to spread and multiply.
Then, suddenly, as though seen from a parapet, the whole city appeared below, a shimmering carpet of light, so far below that it was as though it no longer had any real existence. There it lay, vivid and resplendent, a pool of brightness rippling on the earth’s surface, with its myriad windows, its pin-bright street-lamps and twinkle of crawling headlights, all exposed in the cold and the stillness; exquisite, remote, a vision so magnified and transmuted that one felt one had never seen anything remotely comparable to it.
Behind Besson a voice suddenly called: ‘François! François! Where are you?’ And a moment later: ‘Hi, François! Fran-çois!’
It was a strange feeling of apprehension which made Besson turn back. His clothes sodden through, he made his way — more by luck than judgment — to the point in the middle of the hollow where the car had stopped. He saw the dumpy lines of its bodywork, and the girl still sitting inside it. He was aware of himself moving forward towards the centre of the basin, and with a stab of delight he saw that it was no longer black but white all over, with the radiant whiteness of hoar-frost, a dazzling landscape of snow and marble where silence grew and spread with the wind. He got back into the car.
‘Where were you?’ Josette asked. ‘What were you doing?’
‘Nothing — over there,’ Besson muttered. ‘Come on, let’s get moving.’
When she started the engine the headlights came on, and the two converging shafts of yellow light picked out the shadowy figure of a man crouching beside a bush. Two peeping-tom eyes glinted for a brief moment, and then the man made off across country. Besson, watching him go, felt how much he, too, would have loved to be free just then, able to observe other people when they came up here to make love, secretly, in this milky nocturnal landscape.
Chapter Four
François Besson watches the sleeping woman — He sketches the map of her body — The noise — A chained mongrel in a garden prowls round in the rain — Conversation with the blind paper-seller — In which we are concerned with a person who lived in a barrel
ON the fourth day François Besson awoke fairly early. He found himself lying in a double bed, with a comfortable box-mattress and brand-new sheets. The pillow, where his head was not actually resting on it, felt cold, and the whole place gave off a damp and disagreeable atmosphere, heavy with the smell of stale breathing. Through the slats of the shutters a pale half-light filtered into the room. The ceiling above the bed was flat, almost colourless, and there was no electric light cord. It looked as though there was no one else apart from himself in this room: nothing but a pale ceiling suspended in space, a vast and plain-like expanse stretching further than the eye could reach.
Then, suddenly, in the cold grey depths of the room, Besson heard a noise approaching: a slow, soft, powerful sound, that sprang from nowhere, travelling from the furthest bounds of silence beyond sleep, a rasping, saw-like note, light, regular, unemphatic, seemingly produced by some mechanical task that called for great persistence and effort. Besson listened carefully, and almost at once identified it as the breathing of a woman — Josette — who was stretched out in bed beside him. The deep, even note rose and faded peacefully in the still air: Besson lay and listened to it without turning his head.
It began with a tiny, almost inaudible whistling sound, which gradually swelled to a crescendo, growing rougher as it did so, then dwindled away once more: there followed a kind of raucous gasp, and the sound repeated itself (no doubt in the opposite direction), tenuous at first, then rising, a solemn droning descant, to dwindle and sink once more, this time into complete silence. For a fraction of a second silence would reign in the room, and reach up to blanket the greenish surface of the ceiling. Then the sound would repeat itself as before, powerful and inescapable, with a hoarse, musical edge to it that penetrated every last square inch of air in the dimly-lit apartment.