Autumn storms were slumbering along the perimeter of the plateau. He pointed out an indentation in the sky, between two snowy masses of cloud. It was in the shape of a leaf; it was a nocturnal green, and through the color one saw the infinite depths appear.

“Do you remember having held a bay leaf in your hands?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the color of the leaf?”

“Yes.”

“As dark as night?”

“Yes.”

“But green, all the same.”

“Yes.”

“A kind of green that seems to come from very far away, that rises up through the dark color, as though the leaf itself were a world?”

“Yes.”

“As if chasms were opening up in the leaf?”

“Yes.”

And so, suddenly, she had that indentation of the sky in her hand; she felt the chasms in the sky grow deeper in her hand; she saw them right before her eyes. The world wasn’t the same anymore: She knew that she was very small, that the sky was infinite; but now it was she who was infinite, and the sky very small. Simply because she had once held in her hand a bay leaf, whose flesh is the same as that vast, dusty cloud of dark, green sand: the night. And above all, because a voice had just named it for her, had fused the two images, had shed light on them.

He made the woods come closer. Had she ever seen a wood the way he was making her see it?

“No.”

He revolved it for her, turned it upside down, turned it inside out: the eastern edge, the western edge, the mysteries of the north and the south, the moss, the fungus, the scent, the color.

“Had you seen it?”

“No.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Yes.”

He sent the woods back to where they’d come from. They retreated, shrank, lay down again at the rim of the horizon. Had she really noticed the birches with their horsehide bark?

“No.”

He summoned the birches. And the birches came. She felt them, not just right next to her, as if she was in an ordinary field and had leaned against one; she felt them in her heart. He took hold of the tree with its sticky sap, its sound, its smell, its shape, its leaves, its four seasons, and . . . there was no telling how he did it, but she felt the tree in her heart and, at the same time, she could touch the bark. She’d never had a sensation as pleasurable as that of her empty hand imagining it was touching the birch and sensing, through it, the things he was saying.

He said to her, “Look at the water in those little marshes.” The water moved closer, with its rushes, its tadpoles, its frogs, its moorhens, its ducks, its kingfishers, all of its bird feathers, its cottony, flowering canes, its muck, its smell of rain. “Hold on, let’s stay with the smell of rain, you’ll see.”

He sustained everything else, only he lowered its register, as if he were lifting off, ever so slightly, the pressure from the pedal of a big cathedral organ. The birds, the fish, the frogs, the canes, the whole of the muck-filled marsh droned together as a basso continuo accompaniment from the vaulted recesses of the earth; and he made the smell of the rain sing as a fugue. All the old showers that had slanted down, through the ages, over the whole face of the earth, rose up again like stalks in an enormous field of wheat. She remembered the rains of her childhood, Sunday afternoons in the attic with the smell of rats, old installments of tales of chivalry, movements from clocks that no longer kept time and clockwork toys whose movements were broken, the chests covered with goatskin, the smell of rain-washed roofs, and the rain falling over the silent town, where everyone was at church.