Mirrors
(from the French)
Marcel Cohen
published in Mirrors (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1998; Miroirs, Paris: Gallimard, 1980)
VI
Departure by train. My mother waves her handkerchief on the platform. Not just any handkerchief: an embroidered pocket handkerchief, perfumed, that she reserved for tears and farewells. The train shoves off with a laborious clanking. My father holds me against the lowered window, standing on the seat where he has first unfolded his newspaper. My mother advances, stiffens, alone at the bend in the platform, her arm way up, accelerating the movement of her handkerchief the more she moves forward, then shaking it frantically as the locomotive breaks past the first switches, already building steam.
A small black spot hemmed with white, my mother keeps at it still, struggling in the dirty setting, a more and more tenuous image which we could draw after us a long time yet, were it not for a retaining wall that suddenly robbed us of her. The crazy thing was, that in a single stroke, we should then have to speak of her in the past.
*
VIII
The doctors had to hospitalize me for a series of tests. The status of my illness remaining unclear, I ended up with a single room. Not suffering, I felt perfectly free there and really not in much hurry to get all fixed up.
Expecting no visits, I was dozing off, overcome by the emptiness that follows the midday meal, when I was awakened by a couple of friends. The man and woman stood in the corridor near my half-open door, speaking in a low voice. I was touched by their care and I prepared to welcome them when an unsuspected sluggishness prevented me. Certainly they saw me as ill, when I hardly felt it, and that was a first variance. The wall, especially, added a considerable distance to their speech: I was there, but it was my absence that showed in their words. They were speaking of me, but never did the passage from "you" to "he" so clearly make a difference.
"Don't you find his face puffy?"
"Swollen, in fact. Too much sleep, no doubt."
"When did you last see him?"
"Barely two weeks ago. He was just back from vacation."
"Was he complaining then?"
"Not in the least."
I gripped my pillow. The words couldn't reach me, so poorly did they translate our friendship, the effervescence at work even in our silences when we were together. But, if words were so incapable of translating that pleasure, why were my friends attempting the impossible? Their whispered tone was really the mark of a secret from which I was excluded, a complicity that was larger still and which could only grow at my expense.
A ray of light ran through the room, reflected by a neighboring window. The beam stopped over my sheet. A thick dust was floating about. In the courtyard, women's laughter exploded: images of a world irremediably in pieces, yielding only shreds, while we await the miracle of a coherence, an ideal vantage point.
"I'm afraid he'll slip further and further into illness, that he won't feel like fighting back."
"He's such a fatalist! His lot doesn't interest him, in the end. He's always against himself."
I understood by the rustling of a dress, the hushed scraping of high heels over the linoleum, that my friends were going to try once more to stare at me through the small opening. Something in me turned over. I felt myself the prisoner of a vast space against which, truly, it was vain to rebel. No other way out, in short, than to close my eyes like I used to do as a child when my mother happened to come back in to see if I was really asleep. Quite freely then I could feel her breath on the nape of my neck, smell her perfume and, cutting short any explanation, remain serious before her tenderness.
Something else altogether was the matter now: I felt less irritated, certainly, but my solitude was tainted from then on by an irrepressible grayness. I saw myself so thoroughly explored down to my smallest character traits, so dispossessed of the image I had of myself, I knew my friends so convinced of the infallibility of their judgment, that in a way it was to be dead in their eyes. A simple wall between us and, in effect, it's really a bit of death that seeps out.
My friends withdrew. I heard them lighting cigarettes as they paced up and down, but I still felt the burn of their gaze. Their words had become incomprehensible. I got up, sprinkled some cool water on my face, and went out to meet them without quite managing, despite a smile that I hoped would convince, to repress a slight trembling, like the actor entering on stage who is already mechanically saying his lines while his legs could, at any moment, betray him before the immense black hole.
*
XXVII
I was waiting for the bus when I recognized her coming out of a naturalist's shop, on the Rue du Bac, a bulky parcel under her arm. Seven years since we'd seen each other, but she had the same long-legged walk ("a stork over a pile of nuts," I used to say making fun, and she'd pretend to be annoyed, pulling her bangs down over her forehead, delighted by an exaggeration that inversely proved my sincerity when I declared I thought her beautiful), the same apparent fragility, the same bewilderment: for an instant she looked around for her bag which she was holding still in her hand, changed direction, hailed a cab that was occupied, and at last remained standing on the sidewalk looking at her watch, not knowing what to do anymore.
"Laetitia!"
Frowning, she headed toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain. I would have liked to follow her, putting off till the end the moment to approach her, thus taking an advantage where nonetheless affection had its place: it was a matter of letting her purest traits emerge, just as one waits for muddy water to settle. Had I wanted to see her again? For a long time and passionately: we knew each other too well not to withhold some answers finally. Never, at any rate, had the end of a relationship left me with such a precarious feeling, the past sold off, almost assassinated.
"Laetitia!"
She had reached the intersection of Bac and Saint-Germain while I was still waiting for the traffic to abate. For a moment, the temptation to lower my arms masked the pinch I felt at the thought of seeing her disappear into a taxi: too far away already, and how to approach her really? Yet, the idea of an evening spent thinking about her, with no other response, seemed intolerable to me. The supple locks of hair bouncing on her neck drew me on like a magnet as though I could, without preliminaries, pass my hand there.
At the other side of the crosswalk, she hesitated once more about which direction to take and started up the Boulevard Raspail when my light changed to green. Ten feet away from her, I caught my breath. Strange, this final reticence to lift the veil. I felt almost guilty of premeditation.
"Laetitia!"
She nearly dropped her parcel, stammering. I took her arm. I had no ready phrases, but the danger was precisely to get distracted by words, to let the moment escape us. No doubt she felt the same, content to smile shaking her head. Still, she was the one who broke the silence, as if those weighty seconds had caught her up too much now.
"Do we have time?"
I suggested the terrace of a café. We ordered, lingering a little, to gain a few seconds. She was still smiling, but on edge.
"Seven years..." I said.
"Almost eight," she corrected staring at the ashtray.
I thought she would say no more, that out of pride she wouldn't be able to. Brave, yet that is the word that came to mind.
She had settled in her chair, like she used to curl up long ago in the seats at movie theaters. With her strict gray suit, when I had known her in blue jeans, it emphasized a slightly forced nostalgia that erased the confession in a way. I hadn't wanted to stare at her too openly so as not to raise the question, albeit inevitable, of her age. Once again she took the lead, bravely, as to deprive me now of the advantage of this new silence.
"Older? No. More beautiful certainly," I said. "Besides, you know very well..."
And, as I was looking at her bag, her pearl necklace:
"A lawyer. We have a six-year old daughter. A butterfly collection: that's her birthday present."
Then she suddenly sat up, lifting her head to gaze at the rooftops on the other side of the boulevard. I thought she was cold. She shook her head "no," asked for a cigarette and grabbed the lighter out of my hands so as not to have to show her face. After which she took up her stiffened pose again, blowing the smoke out in front of her, her head and shoulders excessively straight, as one does to control a cramp or nausea.
I would have liked to take her hand. It might have only embarrassed her, and I wasn't sure she'd accept. An ambulance siren blotted out the noise of the boulevard. I thought at that instant the past was giving up its soul like a dying person we'd grown used to seeing sometimes blinking softly. Everything, of course, had happened too quickly. Imagining the encounter, I saw Laetitia at her most superior, a bit weary perhaps, but able to sweep away the past, to make some coherence spring forth when there had only been endless repetition on either side. Above all, we neglected not a single detail when the time now was crumbling away without offering the slightest hold.
In the renewed silence, Laetitia bent her back and seemed to relax but without ceasing to search about the rooftops with her eyes:
"Did you try to see me again?"
"You decided to break up," I said. "Have you forgotten? I didn't want to bother you..."
She slid back all the way in her seat and crossed her legs:
"Two or three times, on the phone, I thought it was you. Someone who hung up very quickly, even before I could answer sometimes..."
"Yes," I said. "Two or three times. That's all..."
I looked at her profile, sharp against the light, the short locks of hair on her neck: a proud face, almost hard had it not retained the liveliness of an adolescent. She hadn't changed, it's true, except for that sort of bravery, once again, which she knew so well now turning against her.
"And you?"
She looked at me plainly for the first time, as though she were demanding my surrender under the same conditions. I remained vague and she didn't insist.
"Yes," I said. "On second thought, you're no longer quite the same. I'm looking for the word: less cruel perhaps, braver."
"Uselessly brave, is that it? Like the bull in the arena?"
She looked at her watch, but without concluding anything, to signify rather that everything was said, that it was better not to fall into idle chatter now. Yet, for a long moment we remained silent, as though we could still hope for a word, a clear and precise note. I told myself perhaps a gesture would suffice for our stiffness to give way, but, no doubt we felt it with the same absolute conviction, the crumbled edifice of our lives would leave us too worn out.
We stood up. Laetitia kissed me clumsily, encumbered as she was by the box of butterflies, and dashed out among the pedestrians set free by the red light.
*
XXXII
The truck driver who was taking me from Kabul to Ghazni had stopped in a village of the plain to visit his family. The square, the streets were empty at siesta time. I entered a teahouse to wait for him. The proprietor was fanning himself behind his samovar. Two men were sleeping on a partition, their faces covered up by a cloth. Tired of chasing flies in vain, I went back out to walk around.
The packed earth shook under my heels. Not a sound: beneath that heat, in that valley which was consistently gray, life's noises seemed to vanish in an invisible moraine. Here, nothing would ever weigh enough. Far from discouraging, such fragility induced a person to penetrate further, as if by intention those empty minutes could be held back in extremis.
At the cross streets, where the air traveled more freely, I looked on amazed at the slow erosion of the dry earthen walls. A slight whirlwind was playing at the top. As the puffs subsided, the dust slid all the way down the surface, along tiny channels to form small mounds at the base, which were in turn leveled by the wind. Made of corrugated iron over a wooden frame, the doors produced the only sound. A dog forcing his snout into the opening, a splatter of earth raking the metal, were enough for a person to feel assaulted. I reached the last houses. In the distance a donkey was turning his water wheel, pushed by a child in a white robe. Among the cultivated fields even the rare trees were gray, like beside a cement factory.
A woman appeared, in a mauve veil. She was carrying a jerrycan on her shoulder, sliding along more than walking, erect and proud like a fallen queen. A "promised" apparition, as though suddenly, the vice loosening, it opened onto the austere and worthy life one had been dreaming of. I loaded my camera and ran to meet the woman. How could she not see me coming? She screamed, dropped the can which fell over, rushed toward a dark alley. Was that photo so important to me? I had acted out of idleness, but also to "celebrate." Watching the woman flee, but with a sort of resigned slowness, as though clearly the worst was not to be overtaken, I felt stupid now. Better yet: I felt punished. Not for an instant, at any rate, had I imagined the strange power which the camera granted me in her eyes. I stood the jerrycan back up, its water still trickling out, when a door opened: three men appeared, daggers in their hands. I only knew to run, realizing too late how I was making matters worse for myself.
Hot air churning against my face. Damp hands. Shirt stuck to my skin. Panic, in the cross streets, at the idea of getting further from the center. Absolute conviction that if I cried out, in the main square, almost within sight of everyone, they "wouldn't dare." The truck was there. Perhaps the driver was waiting for me already. He would explain. To wait. To run. Still, nothing erased this certainty anymore: I had to leave the three men a chance, not to push them all the way. That's how it was. There was no escape. Still, my composure surprised me: it was my clumsiness that scared me, not the consequences. The irreparable remained a question of attitude. Could they really kill in cold blood? There remained that limit beyond which my pursuers would consider every audacity permitted since I continued to defy them.
I had my back against a wall. "Above all, do not move anymore." The three men were there, sweating as well, out of breath, almost grateful: "A sheep that would bare its neck," I thought. The blades sparkled. The men spoke quickly and loudly. The camera. They wanted to open the camera. I unwound the bobbin. They blinked their eyes holding the film up to the sun. Where had they learned that gesture? The knives returned to their belts. The men were hovering about the case now. Children ran up. Other men too. A real crowd, noisy, confused. We were suffocating in the smell of sweat and dust. Each person wanted to see the camera. In the distance, dogs were howling. Children forced their way into the circle, found themselves smack under the first ones there. Quarrels. Someone stretching out his arms, pushing back the crowd with authority, but in vain. A torrid air seemed to rise from the ground. Hands extended above heads, in order to snatch it up. Time jumped the rails, didn't finish.
A new commotion: the truckdriver was in front of me, trying to make himself heard, to find a bit of room. Finally, raising his arms to show he was powerless:
"They want to see the woman you stole. They say she's no longer in the camera. The camera, you can keep. It's the woman they want."
The truckdriver went away again. In the distance, he raced his engine. The top of the cabin stood out above their heads. With clusters of children hanging onto the running boards, the vehicle gently pushed the crowd forward. The door opened when it reached me: a small cleft, just enough to drive the children back a little against the wall. Push, enter. As we were rolling, fists hammered the body of the truck now. Grimacing faces. The crowd screaming, demanding vengeance, but more and more tenuous in the roar of the engine. When we managed to gain a little speed, the children let themselves slide off to the ground. Others were still running in the dust. In the side mirror, I saw some who were throwing stones.
Already thrust upon my memory was the stolen outline of the woman water-carrier (better preserved, and forever, than its poor representation in a dog-eared photo), the mauve veil held back by her mouth, so lithe her bearing, her single uncovered eye seized in all its nuances of surprise and anger, but also the idea that the woman, in a manner that was so touching, so right, imagined herself a bit absent from now on and figured out some way to dream of what befell her.
*
LX
From time to time, the headlights of a car swept the room. The glimmer swelled up in a corner of the ceiling, then traveled over the wall and the shadow of the Venetian blinds began to waver. Finally, gray and yellow stripes lacerated the dark in a rolling movement and in the mirror I saw Lidia lying beside me, motionless, eyes closed, arms resting on the sheet, but really proceeding from that same giddy drifting.
In the darkness once more, I silently questioned Lidia's troubling face. She wasn't sleeping, her breathing proved it well enough. Why, then, that retrenchment, that forsaken image offered up ostentatiously when I took care to indicate, by slight movements, that I was really awake like her? The next morning, how could she hope with a single smile to dissipate that considerable distance, to erase the proof of her conspiracy?
(from the French)
Marcel Cohen
published in Mirrors (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1998; Miroirs, Paris: Gallimard, 1980)
VI
Departure by train. My mother waves her handkerchief on the platform. Not just any handkerchief: an embroidered pocket handkerchief, perfumed, that she reserved for tears and farewells. The train shoves off with a laborious clanking. My father holds me against the lowered window, standing on the seat where he has first unfolded his newspaper. My mother advances, stiffens, alone at the bend in the platform, her arm way up, accelerating the movement of her handkerchief the more she moves forward, then shaking it frantically as the locomotive breaks past the first switches, already building steam.
A small black spot hemmed with white, my mother keeps at it still, struggling in the dirty setting, a more and more tenuous image which we could draw after us a long time yet, were it not for a retaining wall that suddenly robbed us of her. The crazy thing was, that in a single stroke, we should then have to speak of her in the past.
*
VIII
The doctors had to hospitalize me for a series of tests. The status of my illness remaining unclear, I ended up with a single room. Not suffering, I felt perfectly free there and really not in much hurry to get all fixed up.
Expecting no visits, I was dozing off, overcome by the emptiness that follows the midday meal, when I was awakened by a couple of friends. The man and woman stood in the corridor near my half-open door, speaking in a low voice. I was touched by their care and I prepared to welcome them when an unsuspected sluggishness prevented me. Certainly they saw me as ill, when I hardly felt it, and that was a first variance. The wall, especially, added a considerable distance to their speech: I was there, but it was my absence that showed in their words. They were speaking of me, but never did the passage from "you" to "he" so clearly make a difference.
"Don't you find his face puffy?"
"Swollen, in fact. Too much sleep, no doubt."
"When did you last see him?"
"Barely two weeks ago. He was just back from vacation."
"Was he complaining then?"
"Not in the least."
I gripped my pillow. The words couldn't reach me, so poorly did they translate our friendship, the effervescence at work even in our silences when we were together. But, if words were so incapable of translating that pleasure, why were my friends attempting the impossible? Their whispered tone was really the mark of a secret from which I was excluded, a complicity that was larger still and which could only grow at my expense.
A ray of light ran through the room, reflected by a neighboring window. The beam stopped over my sheet. A thick dust was floating about. In the courtyard, women's laughter exploded: images of a world irremediably in pieces, yielding only shreds, while we await the miracle of a coherence, an ideal vantage point.
"I'm afraid he'll slip further and further into illness, that he won't feel like fighting back."
"He's such a fatalist! His lot doesn't interest him, in the end. He's always against himself."
I understood by the rustling of a dress, the hushed scraping of high heels over the linoleum, that my friends were going to try once more to stare at me through the small opening. Something in me turned over. I felt myself the prisoner of a vast space against which, truly, it was vain to rebel. No other way out, in short, than to close my eyes like I used to do as a child when my mother happened to come back in to see if I was really asleep. Quite freely then I could feel her breath on the nape of my neck, smell her perfume and, cutting short any explanation, remain serious before her tenderness.
Something else altogether was the matter now: I felt less irritated, certainly, but my solitude was tainted from then on by an irrepressible grayness. I saw myself so thoroughly explored down to my smallest character traits, so dispossessed of the image I had of myself, I knew my friends so convinced of the infallibility of their judgment, that in a way it was to be dead in their eyes. A simple wall between us and, in effect, it's really a bit of death that seeps out.
My friends withdrew. I heard them lighting cigarettes as they paced up and down, but I still felt the burn of their gaze. Their words had become incomprehensible. I got up, sprinkled some cool water on my face, and went out to meet them without quite managing, despite a smile that I hoped would convince, to repress a slight trembling, like the actor entering on stage who is already mechanically saying his lines while his legs could, at any moment, betray him before the immense black hole.
*
XXVII
I was waiting for the bus when I recognized her coming out of a naturalist's shop, on the Rue du Bac, a bulky parcel under her arm. Seven years since we'd seen each other, but she had the same long-legged walk ("a stork over a pile of nuts," I used to say making fun, and she'd pretend to be annoyed, pulling her bangs down over her forehead, delighted by an exaggeration that inversely proved my sincerity when I declared I thought her beautiful), the same apparent fragility, the same bewilderment: for an instant she looked around for her bag which she was holding still in her hand, changed direction, hailed a cab that was occupied, and at last remained standing on the sidewalk looking at her watch, not knowing what to do anymore.
"Laetitia!"
Frowning, she headed toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain. I would have liked to follow her, putting off till the end the moment to approach her, thus taking an advantage where nonetheless affection had its place: it was a matter of letting her purest traits emerge, just as one waits for muddy water to settle. Had I wanted to see her again? For a long time and passionately: we knew each other too well not to withhold some answers finally. Never, at any rate, had the end of a relationship left me with such a precarious feeling, the past sold off, almost assassinated.
"Laetitia!"
She had reached the intersection of Bac and Saint-Germain while I was still waiting for the traffic to abate. For a moment, the temptation to lower my arms masked the pinch I felt at the thought of seeing her disappear into a taxi: too far away already, and how to approach her really? Yet, the idea of an evening spent thinking about her, with no other response, seemed intolerable to me. The supple locks of hair bouncing on her neck drew me on like a magnet as though I could, without preliminaries, pass my hand there.
At the other side of the crosswalk, she hesitated once more about which direction to take and started up the Boulevard Raspail when my light changed to green. Ten feet away from her, I caught my breath. Strange, this final reticence to lift the veil. I felt almost guilty of premeditation.
"Laetitia!"
She nearly dropped her parcel, stammering. I took her arm. I had no ready phrases, but the danger was precisely to get distracted by words, to let the moment escape us. No doubt she felt the same, content to smile shaking her head. Still, she was the one who broke the silence, as if those weighty seconds had caught her up too much now.
"Do we have time?"
I suggested the terrace of a café. We ordered, lingering a little, to gain a few seconds. She was still smiling, but on edge.
"Seven years..." I said.
"Almost eight," she corrected staring at the ashtray.
I thought she would say no more, that out of pride she wouldn't be able to. Brave, yet that is the word that came to mind.
She had settled in her chair, like she used to curl up long ago in the seats at movie theaters. With her strict gray suit, when I had known her in blue jeans, it emphasized a slightly forced nostalgia that erased the confession in a way. I hadn't wanted to stare at her too openly so as not to raise the question, albeit inevitable, of her age. Once again she took the lead, bravely, as to deprive me now of the advantage of this new silence.
"Older? No. More beautiful certainly," I said. "Besides, you know very well..."
And, as I was looking at her bag, her pearl necklace:
"A lawyer. We have a six-year old daughter. A butterfly collection: that's her birthday present."
Then she suddenly sat up, lifting her head to gaze at the rooftops on the other side of the boulevard. I thought she was cold. She shook her head "no," asked for a cigarette and grabbed the lighter out of my hands so as not to have to show her face. After which she took up her stiffened pose again, blowing the smoke out in front of her, her head and shoulders excessively straight, as one does to control a cramp or nausea.
I would have liked to take her hand. It might have only embarrassed her, and I wasn't sure she'd accept. An ambulance siren blotted out the noise of the boulevard. I thought at that instant the past was giving up its soul like a dying person we'd grown used to seeing sometimes blinking softly. Everything, of course, had happened too quickly. Imagining the encounter, I saw Laetitia at her most superior, a bit weary perhaps, but able to sweep away the past, to make some coherence spring forth when there had only been endless repetition on either side. Above all, we neglected not a single detail when the time now was crumbling away without offering the slightest hold.
In the renewed silence, Laetitia bent her back and seemed to relax but without ceasing to search about the rooftops with her eyes:
"Did you try to see me again?"
"You decided to break up," I said. "Have you forgotten? I didn't want to bother you..."
She slid back all the way in her seat and crossed her legs:
"Two or three times, on the phone, I thought it was you. Someone who hung up very quickly, even before I could answer sometimes..."
"Yes," I said. "Two or three times. That's all..."
I looked at her profile, sharp against the light, the short locks of hair on her neck: a proud face, almost hard had it not retained the liveliness of an adolescent. She hadn't changed, it's true, except for that sort of bravery, once again, which she knew so well now turning against her.
"And you?"
She looked at me plainly for the first time, as though she were demanding my surrender under the same conditions. I remained vague and she didn't insist.
"Yes," I said. "On second thought, you're no longer quite the same. I'm looking for the word: less cruel perhaps, braver."
"Uselessly brave, is that it? Like the bull in the arena?"
She looked at her watch, but without concluding anything, to signify rather that everything was said, that it was better not to fall into idle chatter now. Yet, for a long moment we remained silent, as though we could still hope for a word, a clear and precise note. I told myself perhaps a gesture would suffice for our stiffness to give way, but, no doubt we felt it with the same absolute conviction, the crumbled edifice of our lives would leave us too worn out.
We stood up. Laetitia kissed me clumsily, encumbered as she was by the box of butterflies, and dashed out among the pedestrians set free by the red light.
*
XXXII
The truck driver who was taking me from Kabul to Ghazni had stopped in a village of the plain to visit his family. The square, the streets were empty at siesta time. I entered a teahouse to wait for him. The proprietor was fanning himself behind his samovar. Two men were sleeping on a partition, their faces covered up by a cloth. Tired of chasing flies in vain, I went back out to walk around.
The packed earth shook under my heels. Not a sound: beneath that heat, in that valley which was consistently gray, life's noises seemed to vanish in an invisible moraine. Here, nothing would ever weigh enough. Far from discouraging, such fragility induced a person to penetrate further, as if by intention those empty minutes could be held back in extremis.
At the cross streets, where the air traveled more freely, I looked on amazed at the slow erosion of the dry earthen walls. A slight whirlwind was playing at the top. As the puffs subsided, the dust slid all the way down the surface, along tiny channels to form small mounds at the base, which were in turn leveled by the wind. Made of corrugated iron over a wooden frame, the doors produced the only sound. A dog forcing his snout into the opening, a splatter of earth raking the metal, were enough for a person to feel assaulted. I reached the last houses. In the distance a donkey was turning his water wheel, pushed by a child in a white robe. Among the cultivated fields even the rare trees were gray, like beside a cement factory.
A woman appeared, in a mauve veil. She was carrying a jerrycan on her shoulder, sliding along more than walking, erect and proud like a fallen queen. A "promised" apparition, as though suddenly, the vice loosening, it opened onto the austere and worthy life one had been dreaming of. I loaded my camera and ran to meet the woman. How could she not see me coming? She screamed, dropped the can which fell over, rushed toward a dark alley. Was that photo so important to me? I had acted out of idleness, but also to "celebrate." Watching the woman flee, but with a sort of resigned slowness, as though clearly the worst was not to be overtaken, I felt stupid now. Better yet: I felt punished. Not for an instant, at any rate, had I imagined the strange power which the camera granted me in her eyes. I stood the jerrycan back up, its water still trickling out, when a door opened: three men appeared, daggers in their hands. I only knew to run, realizing too late how I was making matters worse for myself.
Hot air churning against my face. Damp hands. Shirt stuck to my skin. Panic, in the cross streets, at the idea of getting further from the center. Absolute conviction that if I cried out, in the main square, almost within sight of everyone, they "wouldn't dare." The truck was there. Perhaps the driver was waiting for me already. He would explain. To wait. To run. Still, nothing erased this certainty anymore: I had to leave the three men a chance, not to push them all the way. That's how it was. There was no escape. Still, my composure surprised me: it was my clumsiness that scared me, not the consequences. The irreparable remained a question of attitude. Could they really kill in cold blood? There remained that limit beyond which my pursuers would consider every audacity permitted since I continued to defy them.
I had my back against a wall. "Above all, do not move anymore." The three men were there, sweating as well, out of breath, almost grateful: "A sheep that would bare its neck," I thought. The blades sparkled. The men spoke quickly and loudly. The camera. They wanted to open the camera. I unwound the bobbin. They blinked their eyes holding the film up to the sun. Where had they learned that gesture? The knives returned to their belts. The men were hovering about the case now. Children ran up. Other men too. A real crowd, noisy, confused. We were suffocating in the smell of sweat and dust. Each person wanted to see the camera. In the distance, dogs were howling. Children forced their way into the circle, found themselves smack under the first ones there. Quarrels. Someone stretching out his arms, pushing back the crowd with authority, but in vain. A torrid air seemed to rise from the ground. Hands extended above heads, in order to snatch it up. Time jumped the rails, didn't finish.
A new commotion: the truckdriver was in front of me, trying to make himself heard, to find a bit of room. Finally, raising his arms to show he was powerless:
"They want to see the woman you stole. They say she's no longer in the camera. The camera, you can keep. It's the woman they want."
The truckdriver went away again. In the distance, he raced his engine. The top of the cabin stood out above their heads. With clusters of children hanging onto the running boards, the vehicle gently pushed the crowd forward. The door opened when it reached me: a small cleft, just enough to drive the children back a little against the wall. Push, enter. As we were rolling, fists hammered the body of the truck now. Grimacing faces. The crowd screaming, demanding vengeance, but more and more tenuous in the roar of the engine. When we managed to gain a little speed, the children let themselves slide off to the ground. Others were still running in the dust. In the side mirror, I saw some who were throwing stones.
Already thrust upon my memory was the stolen outline of the woman water-carrier (better preserved, and forever, than its poor representation in a dog-eared photo), the mauve veil held back by her mouth, so lithe her bearing, her single uncovered eye seized in all its nuances of surprise and anger, but also the idea that the woman, in a manner that was so touching, so right, imagined herself a bit absent from now on and figured out some way to dream of what befell her.
*
LX
From time to time, the headlights of a car swept the room. The glimmer swelled up in a corner of the ceiling, then traveled over the wall and the shadow of the Venetian blinds began to waver. Finally, gray and yellow stripes lacerated the dark in a rolling movement and in the mirror I saw Lidia lying beside me, motionless, eyes closed, arms resting on the sheet, but really proceeding from that same giddy drifting.
In the darkness once more, I silently questioned Lidia's troubling face. She wasn't sleeping, her breathing proved it well enough. Why, then, that retrenchment, that forsaken image offered up ostentatiously when I took care to indicate, by slight movements, that I was really awake like her? The next morning, how could she hope with a single smile to dissipate that considerable distance, to erase the proof of her conspiracy?