True, this slimy reptile, swollen with brown blood, did exist. It was this that her mind, now cleared, retained, like the proof of a moment of madness. And even the voice of the "little bitch" had fallen silent, terrified by what had just been sensed.
Now her gaze was riveted on the young stranger who was nonchalantly leafing through a notebook open on the table in the brightly lit kitchen. It was her son!
But before she could grasp how he could have grown up to this extent, the child of seven that, after so many years, he still remained for her, there occurred in her vision a kind of rapid adjustment that hurt her eyes. The face of the young man bent over the notebook and the face of the child that lived within her mind trembled at the same instant, swam toward one another, and melted into intermediate features. Halfway between one thing and the other: those of a fourteen-year-old boy.
The young man, she now understood, had appeared at the moment of her giddiness, his face and body matured by the horror of the mosaic that had revealed the unthinkable. Yes, this very young man, slim, pale with the transparent, almost invisible shadow of his first mustache, belonged to the world of the mosaic that, once thought about, was transformed into a glistening reptile, with glassy, enigmatic eyes. A world that was horrifying but could neither be thought nor spoken.
The light between the curtains went out. In the darkness, following the wall with her hand, she made her way toward the door. She caught her foot against clods of earth and uprooted stalks. She felt as if she were returning to the house after several years… In the hall the patterns on the wallpaper amazed her, as if she were seeing them for the first time. She bent down and automatically performed the action she repeated almost every day. Picking up a pair of dusty shoes she thrust her hand into first one, then the other, feeling the insides. To detect the point of any nail lurking in the sole. Suddenly she lost her grip on the shoe and it fell to the ground. Her hand had slipped inside the worn leather quite easily. She realized she was still living with the memory of her fingers, that used to have to wriggle painfully into the child's narrow shoes.
She stood up and her hand retained the sensation of the shoes growing gradually broader. "Fourteen. He's fourteen…," she caught herself murmuring softly. The face of the adolescent whom she had recognized as her son was very deeply embedded in her eyes. She perceived in it the invisible mutation linking the face of the child to that of the young man. Everything in his features was still malleable, everything still had the softness of childhood… And yet he was a new being. And almost as tall as she! Indeed, in a few weeks he would be the same height… So a whole period in her son's life must have passed unnoticed!
She put the shoes away and went out into the darkness again. "I didn't notice him growing up… He was an endlessly silent, discreet child… An absent child. When his father left it froze him at the age he was then. And after that there was the war, those four empty years. And, above all, there was his illness: I paid more attention to a scratch than to him growing three inches. And his shy independence. And his isolation. And this benighted spot, this Villiers-la-Forêt…"
The words reassured her. She prolonged their exaggeratedly reasonable flow because she did not know what she was going to be able to do when they dried up. She simply did not know. She was walking in the dark on the grassy slope that lay between their house and the river. And whispering these explanations that, she sensed, would never express the essence of the bond between them, her and her child. The branch of a willow tree suddenly checked her. A branch that stroked her cheek with a caress that felt alive. Olga stopped. There was the willow with its silent cascade of branches. In their net a few stars. The reflection of the moon in the hollow of a footprint filled with water. The fresh, nocturnal scent of the reeds, asleep at the water's edge, the scent of the wet clay…
"Suppose I stayed here? Not to return, not to go back into the life of that house… To walk endlessly on this silvery grass…" But her footsteps were already leading her back toward the door. As she climbed the little wooden steps she pictured again the strip of freshly dug earth along the wall where she had been gardening scarcely an hour earlier. That time now seemed remote to her and filled with a paradisiacal happiness and simplicity.
In the hall, hooked onto the coatrack, hung her son's jacket, one of its sleeves screwed up comically short. Olga gave it a rapid tug, as if discreetly to correct a blunder. No gesture could have been more innocent…
She pressed the switch and put her hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp, so reduced in size did the interior of the kitchen seem to her. The figure of the young man, even when invisible, imposed itself on the walls and the furniture, shrinking them, as in those bad dreams where you are propelled into a familiar apartment, which contracts as you watch and ends up like a little house for the figures on a music box… Indeed, halting in the middle of the kitchen she felt as if she were examining the inside of a dolls' house, whose smallness, at once enchanting and unnatural, was obscurely menacing. Even the little saucepan on the range looked smaller than before and at last revealed its true shape-slightly bell-shaped, potbellied.
Olga knew that she would shordy strain off the infusion's brownish liquid and throw away the sediment of the flowers. She turned on the tap, preparing to wash her hands, but at that moment her eye Ht upon the orange crayon that had been slipped as a bookmark into the notebook left on the table by mistake. She took it out, and studied the color. "No action could be more innocent," she repeated in a whispered echo. And swiftly, without her being able to offer the least resistance, the fragments of the mosaic, seen when she had her attack of giddiness, began to come together: a nervous hand hovering over the range; the cat in the first snapshot watching a woman asleep; the open door through which the animal had slipped in; the young man who from now on would be living under the same roof as she… She felt a great mass of slimy, lumpy skin swelling in her head. The reptile… The mosaic coalesced more and more quickly: the hand above the infusion; her deathlike sleep on certain days; the child who was as tall as she was; the orange crayon… One more round and these fragments were going to become fixed in an inescapable certainty.
She glanced at the range. The flowers that had been steeped for too long, had turned brown: under a shallow layer of liquid they resembled the damp skin of a hunched beast, the same one that, grotesquely bloated, was tearing at her brain. The mosaic began its round again: the hand; the young man near the range; the sleep…
Olga seized the little vessel and with a febrile gesture poured the infusion into the big bowl and gulped it down… The mosaic vanished. The reptile in her brain died noiselessly, thrusting a multitude of red needles under her eyelids. The kitchen resumed its normal dimensions. She felt pathetically relieved, as if she had just convinced a skeptical interlocutor.
Walking along the corridor, she noticed a light inside the book room. A lamp on a narrow table squeezed between the sets of shelves had been left switched on. Her eye was caught by an engraving on the page of a large old book that had been left open. It was one of the volumes of the zoological encyclopedia her son liked to leaf through. She leaned over the engraving and read the caption: "A boa constrictor attacking an antelope." The engraving, punctilious in its realism, had an unexpected effect, like all excesses of zeal. For even though the smallest tufts of hair on the antelope's spotted hide were visible, its whole aspect was evocative of a vaguely human form: the expression of the eyes, the position of the body surrounded by the coils of the gigantic snake. As for the boa constrictor: its muscular body, covered in arabesques and prodigiously thick, resembled the broad thigh of a woman, a rounded leg, indecently plump and clad in a stocking ornamented with patterns…