Sunday

This morning I consulted the Railway Guide: assuming that she hadn't lied to me, she would be leaving by the Dieppe train at 5.38.  But perhaps that fellow of hers would drive her to the coast, I wandered through the streets of  Ménilmontant all morning, and then along the quays in the afternoon.  A few steps, a few walls separated me from her.  At 5.38 our conversation of yesterday would become a memory, the plump woman whose lips had brushed against my mouth would join in the past the thin little girl of Meknès, of London.  But nothing had gone yet, since she was still there, since it was still possible to see her again, to persuade her, to take her away with me for ever.  I didn't feel alone yet.

      I wanted to stop thinking about Anny, because, as a result of imagining her body and her face, I had worked myself up into a highly nervous condition: my hands were trembling and icy shudders kept running through me.  I started looking through the books on display in the second-hand boxes, and especially the obscene ones, because, in spite of everything, that occupies your mind.

      The Gare d'Orsay clock struck five, I was looking at the pictures in a book entitled The Doctor with the Whip.  There wasn't much variety about them: in most of them a tall bearded man was brandishing a riding whip above huge naked rumps.  As soon as I realized it was five o'clock I threw the book back on the rest and I jumped into a taxi, which took me to the Gare Saint-Lazare.

      I walked up and down the platform for about twenty minutes, then I saw them.  She was wearing a heavy fur coat which made her look like a lady.  And a short veil.  The man had a camel-hair coat.  He was suntanned, still young, very tall, very handsome.  Obviously a foreigner, but not an Englishman; possibly an Egyptian.  They got on the train without seeing me.  They didn't speak to each other.  Then the man got off again and bought some papers.  Anny lowered the window of her compartment; she saw me.  She looked at me for a long time, without any anger, with expressionless eyes.  Then a man got back into the carriage and the train left.  At that moment I had a clear vision of the restaurant in Piccadilly where we used to lunch together in the old days, then everything went blank.  I walked.  When I felt tired, I came into this café and I fell asleep.  The waiter has just woken me up and I am writing this while I am still half-asleep.

      Tomorrow I shall go back to Bouville by the midday train.  Two days there will be enough for me to pack my bags and settle my account at the bank.  I imagine the Hôtel Printania will want me to pay a fortnight extra because I haven't given them notice.  I shall also have to return all the books I have borrowed from the library.  In any case, I shall be back in Paris before the end of the week.  And what shall I gain by the change?  I shall still be in a town: this one is cut in two by a river, the other one is bordered by the sea, apart from that they are very similar.  You take a piece of bare, sterile land, and you roll some big hollow stones on to it.  Inside these stones smells are held captive, smells which are heavier than air.  Now and then you throw them out of the window into the streets and they stay there until the winds tear them apart.  In bright weather, noises come in at one end of the town and go out at the other, after going through all the walls; at other times, they go round and round between these stones which are baked by the sun and split by the frost.

      I am afraid of towns.  But you mustn't leave them.  If you venture too far, you come to the Vegetation Belt.  The Vegetation has crawled for mile after mile towards the towns.  It is waiting.  When the town dies, the Vegetation will invade it, it will clamber over the stones, it will grip them, search them, burst them open with its long black pincers; it will blind the holes and hang its green paws everywhere.  You must stay in the towns as long as they are alive, you must never go out alone into that great mass of hair waiting at their gates: you must let it undulate and crack all by itself.  In a town, if you know how to go about it, and choose the times when the animals are digesting or sleeping in their holes, behind the heaps of organic detritus, you rarely come across anything but minerals, the least frightening of all existents.

      I am going to go back to Bouville.  The Vegetation is besieging Bouville on only three sides.  On the fourth side, there is a big hole full of black water which moves all by itself.  The wind whistles between the houses.  The smells stay for a shorter time than anywhere else: driven out to sea by the wind, they race over the surface of the black water like little frolicsome mists.  It rains.  Plants have been allowed to grow between four railings.  Castrated, domesticated plants, which are so thick-leaved that they are harmless.  They have huge whitish leaves which hang down like ears.  When you touch them, it feels like gristle.  Everything is fat and white at Bouville, because of all that water which falls from the sky, I am going to go back to Bouville.  How horrible!

      I wake up with a start.  It is midnight.  Anny left Paris six hours ago.  The boat has put out to sea.  She is sleeping in a cabin, and on the deck the handsome suntanned fellow is smoking cigarettes.