When Besson could no longer see the bird, he got up and made his way back down the path. At the foot of the hills lay the sea, under a blanket of mist. The sun had almost reached its zenith, and the wind had fallen. The chill in the air slowly turned to heat, drying off the rocks and forming dust in every cranny. Cars came tearing full pelt along the highway; the roar of their engines set Besson’s teeth on edge.
He set off along the shoulder of the road again, till he reached a clump of houses. The cars slowed down here, because of traffic lights. A little way off the highway Besson saw a square, with old men sitting on benches. In the middle of the square a jet-hose was spitting over a patch of green lawn, and pigeons swarmed everywhere. The sidewalks were also occupied by dogs, and cats with raw scabs on their backs, and sparrows. The houses were ugly and decrepit, with barred shutters. At a pinch, he thought, one could live here, too: marry, and have children, and call them names like André or Mireille. Twice a week the town hall was turned into a cinema: there were the posters on the walls—The Plainsman, The Crook who Defied Scotland Yard. The tobacconist’s name was Giugi; the doctor was called Bonnard, and the local lady of easy virtue Marie de Cavalous. From time to time there was a robbery, or some other crime. The village idiot was the deputy mayor’s illegitimate son. None of this mattered very much.
Everyone stared at Besson as he went by. He stopped at a bar and ordered a glass of lemonade over the counter, staring with great concentration at the yellow plastic surfaces and the chromium plating on the coffee-machine. At the far end of the room a juke-box started up: a raucous woman’s voice, supported by chorus and rhythm group, singing a mutedly vibrant number that went:
C’est bien la plus la
C’est bien la plus la
C’est bien la plus belle
Celle qu’on appelle la
Celle qu’on appelle la
Celle qu’on appelle la belle
La belle Isabelle
Besson drank his lemonade and paid for it. Then he stayed for a moment with his elbows on the counter, staring out at the street. Flies were busily sipping at the spilt water on the tables. Down the far end of the bar someone sneezed twice, and blew his nose.
Besson walked on out of the village. He had hardly seen anyone there.
Half a mile or so further on he went over a level-crossing and took a road that led down to the beach. The whole site was dotted with huts, shut up now, where they sold ice-cream, and peanuts during the summer. There were one or two notice-boards, too, which said things like CAMPING SITE or THIS WAY TO THE SEA or ALTITUDE ZERO or FIESTA BEACH. Besson stopped for a moment to look at the beach, and the headlands that enclosed it on either side of the horizon. The long stretch of shingle was deserted; incoming tides had forced it up into a high ridge. To the left, some way off, there was a concrete jetty, with groups of anglers dotted along it. To the right, in the distance again, there was what looked like a sewage dump. It was in this direction that Besson now proceeded, stumbling along over the warm shingle, breathing in the tangy smell of the sea. Everything had become white, grey, or pink, except the sea, which was so blue it hurt one’s eyes to look at it. Occasional patches of crude oil glistened in the sunlight, and along the tide-mark, small heaps of vitreous blubber, lay a number of stranded jellyfish.
When Besson had got almost as far as the sewage dump, he sat down on the shingle for a breather. It was now decidedly hot, so hot that he had to remove his coat and shirt. He leaned back on his elbows, watching the waves roll gently in. Time dragged, and the second-hand of the watch on Besson’s wrist moved forward in a series of tiny jerks, on and on. Eventually this irritated him so much that he unstrapped the watch, laid it on a flat stone, and then hammered it into tiny fragments with a sharp flint. Bits of spring and fragments of broken glass were scattered over the beach. He examined them with interest.
There was no longer a cloud in sight; they had all been absorbed into the azure expanse of the sky — all, that is, except the long white trail left by a jet aircraft flying at about 40,000 feet, though this too soon melted away. The bird had flown away, and there were no people around any more. Nothing remained except the sun, now at its zenith, beating down on land and sea as though through a burning-glass.
The last time he heard signs of human activity was when these two children passed close by him, talking in loud voices. The little boy was called Robert, and the little girl’s name was Blanche.They strolled along slowly, stopping every two or three yards to discuss something. Without sitting up so that he could see them, Besson lay and listened to their conversation.
‘Blanche! Blanche!’ Robert called out. ‘Come and look here!’
‘Found a monk?’ Blanche enquired.
‘No. Come and see.’
‘It’s a candlestick,’ Blanche said.
‘Pretty, isn’t it?’
‘Not bad. That’s one more you’ve got. What’s your total now?’
‘Three,’ Robert said.
‘I’ve got two candlesticks and about ten monks,’ said Blanche.
‘Yes,’ Robert said, ‘but one of them’s no good: it hasn’t got a stripe.’
‘It has got a stripe! You can’t see it very well, but it’s got one.’
‘Anyway,’ Robert said, ‘I’ve got a candlestick with something written on it.’
‘What sort of thing? Show me.’
‘Wait a tick — it says Farge, or Farga, something like that.’
‘Here, let me see,’ Blanche said, and then, after a pause: ‘It’s Forge. That’s what’s written on it. Forge.’
‘No it isn’t, that’s an A there, not an O. It’s Farga.’
‘Going to let me have it?’
‘I found it, didn’t I? Down there in the rubbish-dump.’
‘If you give it me, I’ll swop you half my monks.’
‘Nothing doing. You can pick up monks anywhere.’
‘Even one with three stripes?’
‘If you want my candlestick, it’s because it’s worth more.’
‘Oh keep your silly candlestick, then. Anyway, I’ve got two already.’
‘Yes, but they haven’t got anything written on them.’
‘I don’t care. Anyway, Farga doesn’t mean anything. Hey, look, over there — another monk.’
‘That’s just what I was telling you, you can find monks anywhere.’
‘Yes, but you don’t.’
‘Monks are just pebbles, anyway.’
‘Well, so are candlesticks.’
‘That’s not true. Candlesticks are more like cement.’
‘Well, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?’
‘Anyway I prefer candlesticks. At least they’re useful for something. Come on, let’s have a look further on—’
The voices dwindled and faded. Silence closed in again, there was nothing but heat and brightness. Besson gradually began to perspire.
This moment had been a long time coming. Besson had been waiting for it for years, perhaps for centuries. Today the curtain of rain and cloud had suddenly been torn apart, to reveal the sky in all its nakedness, the blinding circle of the sun. The agonizing beauty of this hard landscape, all rough and stippled with crosshatching, was so intense now as to be quite unbearable. The light had become a bright and burning abyss into which one had to plunge head first. The town, the highways, the noisy airfields, the blocked-out pattern of fields and woodland, the steep mountainsides, animals watchful or sleeping, women and children — all had led here, to the place and moment chosen by the gods for the expiatory sacrifice to be accomplished. Every line had been traced so as to converge on this one point, this beach of grey pebbles, this particular day and hour. He could not escape. He could not go back: time had stopped for this event, there was no possibility of either advance or retreat. It was there, and now. The things had to happen. Like a sequence of events the action of which progresses by its own impetus towards its first and final crux, so Besson’s life (as he was well aware) had been orientated towards this. As though to avoid the moment of reckoning, he tried, briefly, to conjure up old memories. Faded snapshots flashed through his mind. Here was a picture of a child leaning against an iron balustrade, in a village the name of which had vanished beyond recall. Here was the seated figure of a mother, her hair braided up round her head, with a tiny bald grimacing doll held in the crook of her right arm. Other shapes and figures, absurd figments of his imagination, flickered across the blood-red screen of his closed eyelids: wolves with pointed ears, runaway horses, monsters wearing steel-rimmed spectacles. He was shut in the spider-haunted cupboard, the gleaming texture of a porcelain flower-bowl held and mesmerized him through the drowsy evening, while the voices went on talking, talking, in the flat exhausted accents of those who have nothing to say. He was back in the shut rooms of his childhood dreams, that fearful, hermetically sealed chamber in which the walls were at once so close and so remote.