For more than an hour Besson stayed in the room, listening, while the storm rose to its climax. He saw the sky clear, close in, and then lighten again, enough to let the sun’s rays struggle through. He heard the wind smash against the walls like a battering-ram, again and again, the whining, slamming rumpus of its impact. Outside even the daylight now seemed unsure of itself: it wavered intermittently, sometimes becoming so dim and overcast that one felt the flame had finally gone out altogether. But then it would pick up again, suddenly blaze out more brightly than before, flooding walls and pavements with sheets of light against which the shadows stood out black and intense.
It was comfortable up there in the room; one felt truly sheltered and protected, it might have been a ship’s cabin. The air was tranquil here, nothing stirred, no fear of stifling. The flies were all asleep, upside-down, clustering on the light-bulb or hanging from the tulle curtains.
Besson stretched out on the bed. In the kitchen the redheaded girl was busy ironing, a green apron tied round her waist. Occasionally she, too, cocked an ear at the noise the wind was making against the windows. Finally she turned on her transistor radio, and the flat was flooded with music — a cinema organ recital that floated in the air, nasal, monotonous, vulgar, sometimes rising in a run of excruciating trills, then falling back, a blurred mess of sound, only to repeat the pattern once more: endless wearisome reiterations, a kind of recurrent stutter that swathed you from head to foot, paralysed not only your movements but also your speech, your very though-processes, and finally toppled you into a kind of shallow black hole, quite helpless.
Besson heard the music right through to the end. When it stopped there was the sound of a woman’s voice, talking fast and volubly, but the radio was too far away for Besson to make out what she was saying. When the voice ceased, there was silence for four or five seconds, broken only by the crackle of static. Then came more music, but swing this time, and a woman singing to its accompaniment. The song had a slow, muted tempo, occasionally rising to a harsh crescendo, sometimes lingering softly on one word, sustaining the note. Besson tried to catch what the singer was saying, but the most he picked up were single words or mere broken syllables: ‘… me …’, ‘… I … flowers … ow ers … ’, ‘… told me …’, ‘… you knew …’, ‘… me … or people …’ ‘…ated …’, ‘… fi-i-ire …’
The song ended with a most curious sound, a sort of low-pitched throaty buzz that vibrated in the air for a long time, together with the accompaniment, and then stopped, abruptly. There followed another three or four seconds of crackling silence, and then the same voice as before began to speak again, very fast, telling an incomprehensible story in its unknown tongue. What it actually said was more or less as follows: ‘Listen, ladies, don’t worry about wind and rain and seasonal inclemencies of that sort, you can tame them, yes, you can make them your best friends, the most reliable aids to your beauty, if you just know how to get the better of them, these furious elements will freshen up your complexion, put a bright sparkle in your eye, fill you with joie de vivre, but if on the other hand you don’t take them seriously you’ll wish you had afterwards, they’ll dry up your skin and ruin your delicate complexion and give you premature wrinkles, in fact they’ll treat you as enemies, they’ll be absolutely pitiless, so get the better of this severe cold and wind and rain, ladies, learn to preserve your beauty just as you preserve your health and happiness, and to achieve this, make a rule of using Pollen Face Cream every morning, Pollen, exclusively manufactured by Boyer-Vidal, which will keep the proper quota of moisture in your skin all day, Pollen, the face cream for every occasion! Good shopping, ladies!’
Besson stayed where he was for some time, listening to the voice from the little white-and-gold plastic box. If his watch was right, it was half past three; but the clock that stood on the refrigerator, in the kitchen, made the time nearer four o’clock.
A little later the redheaded girl came in, and they talked for a while.
‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I’ve sort of got used to seeing — to seeing you around.’ She used the familiar tu, and the word came out with embarrassed hesitancy.
‘What do you mean, seeing me around?’ Besson asked.
‘Well, here. I mean to say, you’ve become a feature of the landscape, haven’t you?’
Besson tried to make a joke of it, but felt depressed despite himself.
‘That’s serious,’ he said.
The girl fumbled in her apron pocket and fished a cigarette out of a new packet.
‘Got any matches?’ she asked.
Besson offered her his box. As she took it, she grasped Besson’s hand at the same moment, then let it go again. Her hair was tousled, and its flaming red texture seemed to be reflected in her face. Even her eyes had a red glint about them, under the fine sweep of her gleaming lashes. She smoked her cigarette, watching Besson all the time.
‘You’re not in the least like him,’ she said. ‘He was always chattering, always on the move, couldn’t keep still for a second. Whereas you — well, honestly, I’ve never seen a more inert character.’