dreamed of a return that would take them back into the blizzard of twenty years ago… Nobody had any illusions. We knew that it was not just a radio station that was disappearing but our era itself. All that we had said, written, thought, fought against, defended, all that we had loved, detested, feared – all those things belonged to that era. We were left with a vacuum, like waxwork figures in a cabinet of curiosities, relics of a defunct empire.
On board the train taking me to Paris I tried to find words to describe all the years spent far away from Saranza. Exile as a mode of existence? Brute necessity of life? A life half lived and mainly wasted? The meaning of those years seemed to me obscure. So I tried to convert them into what men consider to be sound values in life: recollections of dramatic changes of scene ('In those years I have seen the whole world!' I said to myself with childish arrogance); the bodies of women they have loved…
But the recollections remained drab, the bodies strangely inert. Or occasionally they emerged from the dimness of memory with the wild insistence of a shop dummy's eyes.
Those years were nothing more than a long journey for which I managed from time to time to find a goal. I would invent it just as I was leaving a place or already en route; or sometimes on arrival, when I had to explain my presence that day, in one particular town, in one particular country rather than another.
A journey from one nowhere to another, yes. As soon as the place where I was staying began to exert a hold on me, to establish me in its pleasant daily routine, I had to leave at once. My journey knew only two moments: arrival in an unknown town and departure from a town whose facades hardly trembled as I looked at them… When I had arrived in Munich six months before, as I walked out of the railway station, I was already prudently telling myself that I must find a hotel, then an apartment, as close as possible to my new work at the radio…
That morning, in Paris, I had the fleeting illusion of a real return: in a street not far from the station, a street still hardly awake in that misty dawn, I saw an open window and the interior of a room that exuded a simple, everyday, but for me mysterious calmness, with a lamp lit on the table, an old dark wood chest of drawers, a picture on the wall coming slightly unstuck. The warmth of this glimpsed intimacy seemed to me suddenly both ancient and familiar, so much so that I shivered. To climb the stair, knock at the door, recognize a face, be recognized… I hastened to banish this sensation of rediscovery, which struck me then as nothing other than a vagrant's sentimental moment of weakness.
Life was rapidly exhausted. Time stagnated, measurable from now on only by the wearing out of heels on the wet asphalt, the succession of sounds, soon learned by heart, that the drafts carried along the corridors of the hotel from dawn till dusk. The window of my room looked out on an apartment block under demolition. A wall covered with wallpaper stood there amid the rubble. Fixed to this colored surface a mirror, without a frame, reflected the delicate and ephemeral depth of the sky. Each morning I wondered whether I was going to see this reflection again when I drew open my curtains. The daily suspense gave a rhythm to the stagnant time, to which I was becoming more and more accustomed. And even the idea that one day I must quit this life, that I must make a break with what little still bound me to those autumn days, to that city, kill myself, perhaps – even such a notion soon became habitual… And then one morning – when I heard the dry sound of collapsing masonry, and outside the curtains, in the place of the wall, I saw an empty space smoking with dust – the idea seemed to me like a marvelous way of leaving the game.
I remembered it several days later… I was sitting on a bench in the middle of a boulevard soaked in drizzle. Through the numbness of a fever I felt within myself a kind of silent dialogue between a frightened child and a man: the adult, himself troubled, was trying to reassure the child, speaking in a falsely cheerful tone. The encouraging voice told me that I could get up and return to the cafe; drink another glass of wine and stay out of the cold for an hour. Or go down into the clammy warmth of the Metro. Or even try to spend another night at the hotel without having anything left to pay with. Or if need be, walk into that pharmacy at the corner of the boulevard and sit down on a leather chair, stay still, say nothing, and when people gather round me, whisper very softly, 'Leave me in peace for a moment, in this light and this warmth. I will go soon, I promise you…'
The keen air above the boulevard condensed and began to fall as a fine, dogged rain. I got up. The reassuring voice had fallen silent. I felt as if my head were wrapped in a cloud of red-hot cotton wool. I dodged a passerby who was walking along holding a little girl by the hand. I was afraid I might alarm the child with my inflamed face, and the cold shivers shaking me… Wanting to cross the road, I stumbled against the edge of the pavement and waved my arms like a tightrope walker. A car braked and just avoided me. I felt a brief grazing of the door handle against my hand. The driver took the trouble to lower his window and hurl an oath at me. I saw his scowl, but his words reached me with a strange cotton-wool slowness. At the same moment a thought dazzled me with its simplicity: 'That's what I need. That impact, that encounter with metal, but much more violent. An impact that would shatter my head, my throat, my chest. That impact, and then instant, final silence.' Several whistle blasts pierced the fog of the fever that burned my face. Absurdly, I got the idea that a policeman might have set off in pursuit of me. I sped up my pace, floundering on a saturated patch of lawn. I could not breathe. My vision broke up into a multitude of sharp-edged facets. I had an urge to burrow in the ground like an animal.
I was drawn in by a misty void, which opened up into a broad avenue, beyond a wide-open gate. It seemed to be floating between two lines of trees, in the dull air of the twilight. Almost at once the avenue was filled with strident whistle blasts. I turned into a narrower path, skidded on a smooth stone slab, and plunged between strange gray cubes. Finally, without strength, I crouched behind one of them. The whistle blasts rang out for a moment, then fell silent. From a long way off I heard the grating sound of the gate's metal bars. On the porous wall of the cube I read these words, without immediately grasping the sense of them:
Somewhere behind the trees a whistle blast rang out, followed by a conversation. Two men, two keepers, were walking up the avenue.
I got up slowly. And through the weariness and the torpor of the start of my illness, I felt a flicker of a smile on my lips; 'mockery must enter into the nature of the things of this world. By the same token as the law of gravity…'
All the gates of the cemetery were now closed. I walked round the family vault behind which I had collapsed. The glass door yielded easily. The interior seemed to me almost spacious. Apart from the dust and a few dead leaves, the paving was clean and dry. My legs would not support me any longer. I sat down, and then stretched out full length. In the darkness my head brushed against a wooden object. I touched it. It was a prie-dieu. I rested my neck on its faded velvet. Oddly, its surface seemed warm, as if someone had just been kneeling on it…
For the first two days I left my refuge only to go and look for bread and to wash. I returned at once, stretched out, and sank into a feverish numbness from which I was only roused for a few minutes by the whistle blasts at closing time. The great gate creaked in the fog, the world was reduced to these walls of soft porous stone, which I could touch if I spread out my arms in the form of a cross; to the reflection of the ground glass panes of the door; and to the resonant silence, which I believed I could hear beneath the paving stones, beneath my body…
I rapidly became confused about the sequence of dates and days. I remember only that one afternoon I finally felt a little better. Walking slowly, screwing up my eyes in the returning sunlight, I was going back… home. Home! Yes, that was my thought: I surprised myself thinking it, and started to laugh, choking in a fit of coughing that made the passersby turn. This family tomb more than a century old, in the least- visited part of the cemetery, where there were no famous tombs to honor – my 'home.' With amazement I told myself I had not used the word since my childhood…
It was during that afternoon, by the light of the autumn sun shining into my vault, that I read the inscriptions on the marble tablets fixed to its walls. It was, in fact, a little chapel belonging to the Belval and Castelot families. And the laconic epitaphs on the tablets retraced their history in outline.
I was still too weak. I read one or two inscriptions and then sat down on the paving stones, breathing as if after a great effort, my head buzzing with giddiness.
