Her thoughts flitted among a thousand things, seeking the solace of a memory, the ghost of a day; but the summer sun hounded her, hounded her on the riverbank, toward sounds, toward voices. "How easy it is," she said to herself with sudden bitterness. "A little cotton print dress, a little coquetry, and presto, he's ready to do anything for you…" She stopped herself, this jealousy seemed too absurd. And, above all: "No, no, he didn't give a hoot for any of their dresses… He was diving to… to…"
To kill himself… She could not check the racing of her thoughts-accurate, trivial, serious, futile, essential… She needed to hit upon some idea that was logical and perfectly obvious; one that would offer her a respite. "Wait, wait. The bridge. Yes, the bridge… Well, the bridge was not as high as all that. The topmost girder was probably only six feet above the water…"
Then a surprising visual change took place. The giddy height she had observed in terror during those suicidal dives subsided in her memory, and was now scarcely as tall as a human figure. She no longer knew if she had really seen that girder poised, as it had seemed to her, high against the sky. Indeed, she was now sure that it had all been almost harmless sport, a few perfectly safe dives. She remembered the young spectators on the bank. She thought she could clearly see one of them holding hands with her son and coming back to the Caravanserai with him…
"No! He came home alone!" a very precise memory objected within her. But already the vision of the two young people on a path beside the river seemed to her to have been actually, certainly, observed, indelibly fixed in her mind. She was astonished to realize that it was enough to picture a face or a place for them to become quite naturally transformed into things experienced.
Dazed, she attempted to find some clear, indisputable reality amid the chaos of her thoughts. By an inexplicable caprice of memory this turned out to be the face of the nurse at the retirement home. The unhappy woman who took pleasure in making fun of the gift she had received, the shawl she had accepted one winter's evening… Now her face was tinged with a repentant softness, her lips trembled as she uttered words of apology. And once again this repentance seemed… no! quite simply it was completely authentic. Yes, the encounter had occurred several days previously.
For a moment she succeeded in thinking of nothing, still sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning forward slightly, her eyes half closed, expressionless. That was how she saw herself in the mirror facing the bed. A naked woman, motionless, in the middle of a spring night. This precise mirror image calmed her. She turned her head toward the window, her double in the glass did the same. Smoothed the blanket. The other one repeated her gesture with precision. It was then that the lamp caught her eye…
The scene that had since then been played out a thousand times in her memory once more embarked on its sequence of actions: a hand knocks the lampshade; an arm tries to stop it falling; that instinctive, blind lunge; his escape; and the reflection in the mirror that shows a woman lying there, more inert than a corpse… She observed this woman and noticed a new expression on her face that appeared to be more and more accentuated: a mixture of tenderness, sensuality, immodesty, and lasciviousness. Her knees remained wide apart, her belly lay exposed between long, supple thighs…
She tapped on the switch, as if swatting an insect that refuses to die. But in the darkness everything became even more real. Now there was the young face buried in the hollow of the naked woman's shoulder, the lips drowning in her breast… And now the woman's body was arching, closing about the other one, guiding it…
She stood at the French door and, without being aware of it, repeated over and over again in a feverish whisper, "No, it was never like that… never… never… never like that…" But to the slow, stubborn flow of memories her mind had just added the woman's arms embracing the fragile form of a boy; a moaning that she no longer concealed; and their newfound courage, for both of them knew that her sleeping was only pretense…
For several hours weariness interrupted the growth of this incurable tumor that was slowly swelling in her memory.
In the morning imagined reality, false, but terrifying in its truth, continued to gain ground, but calmly now, as if in a country definitively conquered… In the afternoon there were a lot of people in the library. At one moment she turned away and began drawing the curtains across the windows. "Too much sun!" she murmured, trying to keep her face hidden in the dusty folds for as long as possible… In a room lit by the flames flickering out of a stove she had just seen a woman slowly combing the thick flow of her hair, standing at a French door open onto a snowy night, out of which an almost warm breath of air was blowing. Her head was tilted, her gaze lost in the reflection in the windowpane, watching the movements of a youth who came into the room, stopped, and gazed at her in silence… She knew, she could not deny that had happened to her. She simply did not want other people to guess it by peering into her eyes.
The evening was light and long. She was in the kitchen, mechanically tearing up a letter (one of the many letters from L.M. that she no longer even read), when the front door banged with unusual haste. She did not stir, her back turned, so as to let him slip by without her seeing him. But he came in and she heard his voice, which, while striving for calm, had a childish ring to it: "Mom, I think I've just done something stupid. Could you call the… what's his name… the doctor-just-between-ourselves?"
She turned. He lifted the hand that he had been pressing against his left temple. A pocket of blood bulged over his left eyebrow; already he could not open the eye.
For the second time running she was up all night in the boy's room. At an uncertain hour, when the sky was still very dark, objects began to break free of the ties that normally held them. This made their presence more and more inexplicable. She had brought the lamp in here to have more light in case of need. Now that explanation no longer sufficed. The lamp stood beside the bed where the boy slept. Switched off and almost frightening in its silent idleness, no longer linked with brightness, but with dark, indecipherable visions… And the doctor-just-between-ourselves? He had stayed, for his help might be needed urgently. But… No, nothing… He had installed himself in the book room, in no way embarrassed about this nocturnal sojourn in their house. He had filled the little cubbyhole with his cigar smoke and was now reading or dozing. And from time to time came to the patient's bedside. Each time she gave a start, his arrival was so silken: for greater comfort he was in his stocking feet. He took visible pleasure in seeing her tremble. He smiled but at once adopted a firm and reassuring air, felt the swelling that by now almost entirely covered the boy's left eye, and went away again… At one moment in the darkness she thought she could see this man in his socks lurking at the end of the corridor, watching. She was very much afraid but then immediately woke up.
Her eyes resting on the boy's deformed face struggled constantly against growing accustomed to it: not to accept this puffy mask, to wipe it clean with the intensity of her look. She turned the compresses on the swollen brow, lifted the blanket and wiped away the trickles of sweat on his chest, in the hollow between his collarbones, on his neck. And each time she touched him, simply and almost without thinking, it woke the seething nocturnal visions within her, drew her toward a winter's night, toward a carnal encounter that was increasingly frenzied, increasingly real… Even the town outside the dark window, shimmering in a beam of light, was also an improbable ghost town, with its gigantic ruin of the wrecked bridge and the station from which, for several days now no trains had departed. "Rail strike," she repeated mentally, and the words murmured above this body on fire betokened a wide-eyed, intelligent madness… She looked at the thermometer (one hundred and four degrees, fever, as an hour earlier), switched off the lamp, closed her eyes.