He said: ‘I want to hear about your father. Tell me what he does, what kind of man he is.’
She smiled. ‘He’s just an ordinary sort of man, like anyone else.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Louis.’
‘How old is he?’
‘I’ve no idea. He must be a bit over sixty. Sixty-two, I think.’
‘What does he look like? Describe him to me.’
This time she laughed quite openly. ‘What does he look like? Wait a moment, let’s think. He’s tall, and grey-haired. He’s got very pale eyes, but that’s a symptom of old age — every time I see him I’m astonished by the colour of his eyes. They’re translucent, grey-blue, touches of green as well. Oh, and he’s got lines there, on each cheek. And another vertical one between his eyebrows. Maybe he’s got rather too strong a nose, but I think he’s very handsome. No, really, it’s true, for his age he looks pretty good.’
‘What’s his character like? All right?’
‘Some people would say No. Some people would call him very bad-tempered. But he’s always been terribly gentle with me. He let me do just as I liked.’
‘Then why don’t you live with him?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I couldn’t before, because — well, because of him. And now I’ve got used to living here. But maybe I’ll go back to him one of these days. I just don’t know.’ She eyed him with some curiosity, and added: ‘Now what about you? Tell me about your father.’
‘He’s a very reasonable sort of man,’ Besson said, simply. ‘I suppose you’d call him a disciplinarian, but I’m very fond of him. He’s got his fads, but then so has every—’
‘And your mother?’
Besson hesitated. ‘My mother? She’s my mother, that’s all. What else is there to say about her?’
‘Don’t you like her?’
‘I love her to distraction, I loathe her guts, I despise her, I believe in her. She’s — well, she’s my mother, don’t you understand?’
‘You live with your parents, and you—’
‘Yes, I know. You’re right. But it’s only a temporary arrangement. As soon as I get a new job I’ll rent a bedsitter somewhere in town. Unless you felt like offering me bed and board.’
She looked at him quite seriously. ‘Why not?’ she said. She began to trace a pattern on the oilcloth with her nail, in a mechanical fashion. Besson saw that she drew a series of parallel lines, and then filled the spaces between with them crosses.
‘Maybe it would teach him a lesson,’ she added, as an afterthought.
Besson said: ‘He wouldn’t send you any more money-orders.’
‘Don’t be so sure. He’d be rather proud of a situation like that. He’d look as though he was thinking: Well, there you are you see, what a woman — but my son’s my son, regardless. Let her do what she likes, it won’t make any difference.’
‘Anyway, you can’t stop yourself thinking about him, can you?’
She looked at him, her eyes still serious: but this time there was something almost tragic about her expression. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s true. I can’t. Let’s talk about something else.’
They went on chatting, with intervals of silence, still sitting at the kitchen table, arms on the green oilcloth. At one point she got up to go to the toilet, and Besson heard the solemn sound of flushing water. Then she came back and made some more coffee. Besson watched her moving close beside him. Her tawny hair was tousled; there were dark smudges under her eyes, and a strange light gleamed in the pupils, something akin to impatience. Her fine, slender hands moved nervously, with glints of yellow reflected light flashing off the ring marked J.S. From one unidentifiable source — perhaps the neon strip-lighting that flickered in the middle of the ceiling — a halo of quivering, palpable radiance had descended on her, permeating every last inch of her body, electrifying her hair and nails, the outline of her face, each movement of her fingers. Harsh light sparked continually from the fuzzed woollen surface of her beige dress, as though it were a second skin. Every element in her was dry and clearcut. Neither hot nor cold: electric. Faintly, as in a dream, Besson heard her voice speaking. It was different now, it had become fierce and raucous. Without rising from his chair he took the hand with the golden ring gleaming on it, and drew it towards him. The rest of her body followed easily, it was like pulling a go-cart. It hung poised and motionless for a moment, at the point of balance: then, suddenly, they slid down together, dropping softly and easily on to the linoleum flooring, where the harsh light was reflected like the sky in a pool of water. Before he plunged into the abyss Besson heard the voice whispering, close to his ear yet at the same time immeasurably distant: ‘We mustn’t … No, don’t … Mustn’t …’
‘My name isn’t Paul Thisse,’ Besson said. ‘My name is François — François Besson—’
But it was already too late. She did not hear him. So Besson entered the sphere of action, alone amid a gigantic rosette of expanding hieroglyphs, all of which bore the same identical message.
During this time night had fallen over the town. Darkness had covered the high relief of the buildings and the deep crevasse-like streets. Wrapped in silence, the ruins rose straight into a sky where clouds scudded invisibly past. The sea had become opaque, impenetrable, with the hardness of a vast polished steel ball, so that the earth could no longer slip softly by along the strand which divided them. Street-lamps glowed steadily amid a halo of mosquitoes and butterflies. Far away, over the roof-tops, the beam from a lighthouse intermittently slashed through the curtain of rain and darkness. The night was teeming, black, rich with the smell of smoke and momentary glimmers of light. Nothing could break down its barriers. Occasionally something would happen — a car travelling slowly through the streets, a bat flitting after a swarm of insects. But such moments did not last. The blind, heavy mass, like a tide of jam or molasses, would close over these brief points of action and at once obliterate them. One was caught in the trap, and nothing one could do would get one out of it. This whole sector of the earth was wrapped in the same vertiginous and glacial abyss, was held captive by its static immensity. No landmarks, no lights, no scintillating warmth: nothing but the dryness and barren expanse of the desert, crystalline hardness, opaque transparency, the diamond quality of utter nothingness, the void.
What difference did it make if there were a few patches of moisture here and there, one or two small warm humid droplets? They would not last long. Soon, too soon, they would be absorbed by that gigantic ever-thirsty mouth, always sucking, consuming. Minuscule sparks were born in the darkness, and floated swiftly away into space, so swiftly that they might have been mere illusions. What mattered, the only reality, was this eternal blackness, this silence, this unfathomable and all-engulfing infinity. Blackness. Blackness. An ocean of boundless shadows, where invisible waves surged to and fro from one edge of eternity to the other; an ocean activated by a slow, constant ground-swell; the great black flag ceaselessly covering all moving objects with its folds, gathering in and appropriating everything. An indescribable flux, the breathing of some never-to be-recognized giant. In the space of one-tenth of a second he could consume everything, so greedy was he for living sustenance. Water, fire, rocks, pale stars and red stars, disintegrating suns, delayed explosions and torrents of lava — all this he would devour without ever being satisfied. Time, the dimension of attrition, was made out of these elements. Seconds, seconds — grains of salt falling gently on top of one another. Whole years of honey, fat centuries dissolved magically in floods of acid. Nothing remained. Nothing here was left in peace any longer. Meals chased one another interminably, the process of digestion never reached an end. And in this expanse of darkness there was no more measure or proportion. Continents, whole galaxies were as grains of dust. High and low merged indistinguishably into one another: circles and angles, parallel straight lines and spirals, colours, distances, weights — all these, even when you examined them closely, were reduced to tiny identical points. Things that had been really hard-textured, like concrete or marble floors, opened up under the pressure of foreign bodies and engulfed them gently, like a quicksand. Everything had been reduced to a common, formalized identity, and the world might just as well have been nothing but a page of writing.