With a kind of glum intensity he bent over the outstretched body and began to examine it. He studied every square inch of pale flesh, each separate hair, each brownish line scored across the skin, every mole and pimple. Then he made what might be called a mental map of it all, to ensure that he never forgot what he had seen. When he had taken in every visible detail, he got out of bed, leaving the girl’s body as it was, exposed to the cold air. When Besson left the apartment she was still lying there on the stripped bed, still breathing, utterly alone, ghastly in her pallor, deep in that heavy sleep, as though after some act of profanation.
Besson walked along the street just as he had done on the previous days, between groups of pedestrians and passing cars. It was Saturday, or Sunday perhaps, and a great deal of activity was going on. The rain had almost completely stopped, leaving large muddy puddles everywhere, so opaque they reflected nothing. People had rolled up their umbrellas, and the windscreen-wipers were enjoying a rest. Wind-blown clouds scudded across the sky, high above the roof-tops, and from time to time the pale disc of the sun glided into sight from behind them.
Besson passed a church where some kind of funeral procession was assembling. Then he walked down towards the sea, and came out on a square jam-packed with stationary vehicles. A removal van had broken down, and as a result all the traffic had ground to a halt in the adjacent streets. Besson found himself caught up in a dense crowd, and did not even attempt to extricate himself from it. He simply let himself go with the tide. When he had reached a point near the sidewalk someone asked him what was going on.
‘I have no idea,’ Besson said.
‘An accident, most likely,’ the man remarked. He was a short person with a cloth cap and a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. Then a movement of the crowd separated them.
It was at this point that the noise made itself heard over the square. It began in the far distance, with one or two warning signals. The roar of engines seemed to increase in volume, and from somewhere only a few hundred yards away there came an incomprehensible explosion. Besson shrank back against the wall, mustering all his strength in preparation for the approaching din. He felt it steadily mounting as it got nearer, like a hurricane. The shining cars that blocked every corner of the square had all begun to sound their horns by now: the separate notes merged in a single ear-shattering cacophony. Deep and shrill simultaneously, vibrating in the bass register at ground-level while drilling shrilly through the upper air, like a jet engine, the sound-waves surged outwards, bouncing off the surrounding buildings, until they filled every last cubic inch of empty space. Beneath their metal coverings rows of engines were revving up, and the sound of their exhausts swelled and intensified, echoing all around. Human voices were drowned by this collective uproar, faces grimaced inaudibly: it was as though the entire world had become deaf, or dumb, or perhaps both at once.
The phantom aircraft seemed to remain over the square for an interminable period, shifting on from cloud to cloud with sluggish reluctance. Its thunderous racket blasted the whole district, formed an invisible cone which pressed down on every exposed surface, kept the whole maelstrom of sound shut in, as though a lid had been clapped over it. In the space of a few seconds the scene had changed from normality to nightmare, had become a vast, congested, frozen expanse, an area littered with steel or stone objects and quiveringly racked by this all-pervasive, agonizing din. Individual noises no longer existed, there was only a kind of solid vortex pressed continually against one’s ear-drums, forcing them inwards. People themselves seemed temporarily bereft of movement; they stood there in the street staring blindly at nothing, held captive by the blast of sound passing over them. The uproar was anchored to the earth’s central core, whirled round and round with its motion through space. It had permeated every reflection, each source of light. It had its own individual smell, you could touch it. It was a stony matrix that lay like a dead weight on your chest, made your heart palpitate. It hurt your eyes to watch the way it beat down in the light, a grey and white sound that exploded on the pavements and in the sky like some vast snowfield. Outlines and colours abruptly melted, ran, realigned themselves. Cars floated airborne above the asphalt, and the windows of every building were ablaze together. When the intensity of the noise rose to 135 decibels, or thereabouts, Besson felt as though he were about to vanish down some deep hole.
Slowly, with a vast effort, he managed to raise his hands as far as his ears, and held them there for a moment. The din tried to penetrate his very skin, humming and vibrating like a swarm of wasps. But when Besson at last removed his hands, the awful din had vanished, leaving only the normal abundance of sharp-edged, delicate, individual sounds. Colours had gone back to something very like normal, and people were beginning to move along the sidewalks once more. Cars moved off one behind the other, haloed with hot, shimmering exhaust fumes. The jet aircraft was no longer audible.
François Besson moved away from the vicinity of the square with one or two unimportant lesions in the cells of his nervous system. He was on the look-out for some narrow, shabby backstreet, and found himself hugging the wall as close as he could while he walked. He was a little jumpy at the moment, and the slightest unexpected noise — a motor-cycle back-firing round the corner, for instance — was liable to make his heart beat faster. Without making it obvious, he began to concentrate minutely on avoiding contact, keeping objects at arm’s length.
In this manner he walked back up towards the town centre, not paying overmuch attention to where he was going. Men hurried past him, wrapped up to the chin in damp overcoats. He met young women, old women, the occasional beauty, all their faces cruel and expressionless under the make-up they wore. He walked by electrical repair shops, bookshops, furniture stores, chemists and florists. He saw what looked like shell-holes in the pavement, and machines pumping out the drains. He passed stretches of wall with vast posters plastered all over them. One of these showed an orange the size of a car, cut in two, with a drop of juice forming on its yellow pulp, and a monstrously vast baby’s head, that must have covered several square yards, with its fat pink cheeks and bald skull and bubble nose, and two big black eyes shiny as metal balls, with the juicy inside of the orange reflected in them. Lower down, under the picture, there was written, in bold lettering: AN ORANGE IS WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD FOR GOOD HEALTH. The houses across the way were flanked by rows of tall wooden fences, now much dilapidated, and small gardens chock-a-block with mud and rubbish. Clumps of irises sprouted amid a litter of grey stones: water dripped down on leaves and old piled-up packing-cases.
Life had strictly limited horizons here: the rest of the world remained an unknown quantity. In one of these abandoned gardens, beneath blank, empty windows, a mongrel was going round and round on his chain, while the rain drizzled down on him. He no longer even bothered to bark. It occurred to Besson that he too might have shut himself up in the middle of some waste lot, beside an old wooden shack, and gone prowling round the same ancient slate-coloured prison, occasionally glancing at the pitch-black sky, with neither hopes nor expectations.
As he passed by a recessed doorway Besson noticed an old man sheltering under it, with a pile of newspapers beside him, and sitting very still. He was not all that old, in fact: perhaps sixty at the outside. But there was a broken, defeated look about his face and posture. He sat on a folding camp-stool, with the pile of papers close to him, waiting, waiting, his head leaning back against the door-jamb. People came and went on the pavement in front of him, but he never called out to them. He might have been deaf and dumb; he just sat there, huddled in a lumber-jacket, its collar turned up over his ears. He wore a sou’wester, and his eyes were hidden behind thick tinted glasses.