It was as he was going out that he tripped, stumbled, and rocked back on his heels. As he sought to steady himself, he placed the flat of his hand against the window for a moment. This light touch was enough. He straightened himself up and left the room. In the darkness she thought she could hear his young heart, arrested by fear, starting to beat again…
She got up often that night. Put wood on the fire, went back to bed again. No word, not even the beginnings of a thought, interrupted the silence that reigned within her. The visions that exploded silently before her eyes were inaccessible to words. She saw again the young face with its tortured and blissful rictus, the eyes closed but dazzled with light. The body assaulted by violent spurts of pleasure. But above all the knee that remained bent back, though the body was tensed like an arrow, a knee bulkier than the other, an interruption in the pure white line of his nakedness.
No, it would have been impossible to put that into words. This fusion of love with death lent itself only to mute fascination, to absolute incomprehension, more penetrating than any thought… She got up, thrust a fragment of wood into the embers, and noticed the phosphorescence of the hoarfrost on the dark window. The suppleness of her own movements astonished her. There was something almost joyful in the agility with which her body stood up, crouched beside the stove, skimmed across the room in a few steps. Without trying to put it into words, she sensed that a new bond was being formed between her own life and this death so close, so freighted with love…
That night she could still see no more in this bond than the quite physical simplicity with which, on the days that followed, she would learn how to hold within her groin this young body assaulted by waves of pleasure. He would no longer be the butterfly beating against a windowpane. He would not flee. He would remain in her until the end, until the bitterness, that would spread like the shadow of a loving hand across his face, now at peace.
In the morning the window covered in hoarfrost was ablaze with a thousand sparks of sunlight and resembled a fault in granular quartz. The rekindled fire appeared pale in these red rays that split the facets of the ice. No sound, not one birdcall, came from outside. The peace and the cold of that winter's Sunday surrounded their house just as an immense snow-covered pine forest would have done.
She spent several long minutes at the frozen window all streaked with sun. Her gaze distractedly picked out the stems and fronds that the ice had woven on the glass… Suddenly amid this capricious tapestry she noticed an astonishing contour. A hand! Yes, the print he had left the previous evening when he leaned lightly on the glass to stop himself falling. The outline of his fingers that the night had covered in delicate tendrils of frost. She brought her face closer, intending to study this crystalline design in more detail. A cold breath intoxicated her. All she had experienced since the fall was mysteriously concentrated in that chill, a single sensation of pain and joy beyond her strength. Everything, the past night, even those days buried in periods of her life she no longer ever thought about, everything returned in a single inspiration. A draft that inhaled all those nights that could not be spoken of. A gust that also breathed in the snowy scent of the immense forest surrounding their house, a forest that did not exist, but whose wintry calm was already entering her breast, dilating it still more, to infinity…
She regained consciousness several seconds later. Got up, feeling a strange heaviness in her movements, saw reflected in the mirror a long scratch filling with blood that traced a fine curve from her cheekbone to the corner of her mouth. Taking confused, dull steps, she stood a small round table upright that had been knocked over, picked up a little ceramic vase that had lost its handle but was not broken… While she did this she was living intensely elsewhere. She was walking into a great wooden mansion, a great silent house surrounded by snow-laden trees. She walked along corridors, whose walls were crowded with portraits that followed her with suspicious looks; and slipped into a tiny room tucked away on the top floor… There at a narrow window decorated with hoarfrost patterns she forgets herself for a long time. She, the growing girl, who is elated to the point of giddiness by these crystal flowers and fronds. Bringing her lips close to the windowpane she blows lightly. Through the little melted hole she sees a forest burdened with snow as far as the eye can see…
Without detaching her eyes from that moment, she wiped the blood from her cheek; chopped some wood; prepared the meal and later spoke to the people at the library; lived other nights and other days. Her gaze forever focused on the endless forest in the snow. She no longer remembered having lived any other way.
Five
The doctor, as ever, said little, but after long weeks of solitude these few sentences seemed to her like an elaborate, almost overwhelming speech. Nor was she listening to him properly. It was an old habit of hers: the doctor's observations caused pages to appear in her memory with the description of the illness, the symptoms, and the treatments, pages she knew right down to the very arrangement of paragraphs. The doctor spoke as he wrote out the prescription, breaking off to reread it, and it was into these pauses that fragments of the pages learned by heart would insert themselves: "… the softened bone began to cavitate; small pockets of dead tissue formed cysts. The bony extremities became deformed, and adopted unaccustomed postures. The joint gave rise to a progressive chronic disability…
There was nothing new to her either in what she was hearing or in the trains of thought unfolding in her mind. She could not stop herself following through these prognoses to the limit; first picturing the worst case, then the cure; the two extremes, despair and a miracle. All parents of sick children, she already knew, came to terms with their distress in this way.
The lamp on the desk flickered. In a brief moment of darkness she saw the pale ghost, her son, still half undressed, tugging at the inside-out sleeve of his shirt. And outside the window waves of drifting snow clung to the panes… The light returned, the doctor finished writing and, in his voice that always sounded as if he were irritated by incomprehension, reached his conclusion: they would have to think of an operation. "This summer, so as not to make him miss his academic year," he added in a less dry tone, turning toward the boy… The lamp went out again, they spent several moments in silence, gradually growing accustomed to the soporific blue of the night-light above the door. In the corridor cries could be heard and the drumming of footsteps.
This wait in the darkness was salutary. All morning Paris had assaulted them with too many words, too many objects, too much gesticulation. And even in this office she had suffered from the same excess: sheets of paper, files; pens, the paper knife; the doctor's voice that had to be decoded; his apparently indifferent glances, in which, nevertheless, she saw herself perceived as a woman obliged to please… The minutes they spent in the half light eradicated the brutal superabundance of sensations. They could hear flurries of snow being hurled against the windowpanes, and somewhere in the depths of the city the muffled hoot of a siren… The doctor grumbled and struck a match. The light of an oil lamp shone. They said good-bye but he chose to accompany them to the exit; that wait in the darkness had brought them closer together… As he walked beside her in the ill-lit corridor, he felt obliged to speak and uttered a sentence that was clearly meaningless but which crucified her. It was one of those very French turns of phrase that mislead foreigners with their disconcerting thoughtlessness. "At this stage in the game, you know," he sighed, "it's best to take each day as it comes." There was a note of melancholy, almost of tenderness in his voice. He abandoned the caution reflected in his customary tone, dry and feigning irritation. "In which case," he added, in an already neutral voice, as he opened the door for them, "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." He must have sensed himself that his remark was double-edged.