and Georges, and Blum, finally stuffing between their lips a thin, flat, shapeless twist of paper surrounding more lint and rubbish of every kind than tobacco, and flatter and thinner than a toothpick, and sucking in the harsh, revolting smoke, and Georges: “. . .all that rot still hadn’t ruptured broken inside of us what must be like the hymen of young men opening that wound rending something that we’d never get back that virginity those fresh virginal desires lying in wait for the girl glimpsed you remember we were watching we kept looking up towards that window that net curtain we thought we had seen moving I said Look you saw her she just looked out now she’s gone again, and you Where? and I For God’s sake at that window, and you Where? and I Over there that brick house, and you I don’t see anything, and I The peacock’s still moving, there was a peacock woven into the net curtain with its long tail covered with eyes and we were ruining our own eyes watching still teasing Wack trying to imagine to divine that hidden seething of passions: we weren’t in the autumn mud we weren’t anywhere a thousand years or two thousand years earlier or later in the middle of madness murder the Atrides, riding across time the night streaming with rain over our exhausted horses to reach her discover her find her warm half naked and milky in that stable by the light of that lantern: I remember that at first she held it up at arm’s length then while we were beginning to unsaddle she lowered it gradually probably tired so that the shadows ran across her face, and finally she vanished, disappeared as if she had only waited for us there to be snatched away from us at once us in our stiff soldiers’ disguise soaked through listening in the spongy grey morning to the cries the voices the incomprehensible anger, those tragedians dressed in blue overalls sheltered under umbrellas swimming in their uniforms black rubber boots speckled with red patches, the limping man, the desgraciado holding that rifle I always thought he had killed himself with, an accident the gun going off by itself making him bloody streaming down his temple (the days when rifles fired of their own accord, went off in your face just like that without your ever knowing why) but maybe he merely wanted to fire his shot too like everyone else and Wack said You think you’re awfully smart I’m only a peasant I’m not a Yid but, and I Oh you poor fool poor fool poor fool, and he: But it’s not because I’m from the country that a city Yid like, and I: Oh you poor fool Good God you poor fool, and Wack: I’m not afraid of you you know, and I: Oh for God’s sake, and later we had walked as far as that café in the village square I mean the rectangle of black mud around the watering trough trampled by horses and cattle that was supposed to be the square, we sat down and she filled the glasses in front of us again and I said No no not for me thanks, because my head was going round I remember that it was a big tiled room with a low ceiling the walls painted blue with streaks of saltpetre there were about ten tables a player-piano a bar and on the walls the inevitable fly-specked Statute Relative to the Suppression of Public Drunkenness aperitif and beer posters with girls with red lips and affected mincing gestures or else huge breweries drawn in free perspective as though seen from a plane their chimneys smoking their roofs bright red and two coloured prints one of marquises in pastel dresses in an evanescent park the other a group of people in Empire costumes in a green-and-gold salon the men leaning over the women’s shoulders elbows on the backs of their chairs probably whispering sweet nothings in their ears, and also one of those racks for newspapers made out of rusty wire and on the bar a vase with a chipped rim, but it wasn’t to drink that we had come it was that girl that disturbance it was those cries that tumult around that momentarily glimpsed flesh the incomprehensible story divined suspected that furious and obscure unleashing of violence at the heart of violence, that lame man and the other one both in the same kind of patched boots confronting each other with something savage excessive and probably as alien incomprehensible to them as to us, what was happening to them beyond them, forcing them to defy each other at the risk of their lives, that is, one ready to (or rather burning devoured by the desire or rather the need or rather the necessity to) commit a crime and the other also prepared to be its victim and this despite his cowardice the visible fear that made him hide behind another man’s back, and de Reixach the arbiter or rather trying to calm them down, with his bored patient absent impenetrable expression, between them, he for whom passion or rather suffering took the form not of one of his kind of his equals but of a jockey with a clown’s head against whom we had never heard him even raise his voice and whom he made follow him like his shadow like those ancient what were they Assyrians wasn’t it? on whose funeral pyre they killed the houri the horse and the favourite slave so that they would still lack for nothing and be served properly in the other world where undoubtedly Iglésia and he would have gone on exchanging taciturn and occasional remarks about the only subject perhaps the only thing that really interested both of them which is to say the suitability of a ration of hay or the warming of a tendon, and if that was the case then he had managed to bring off one part of the programme I mean getting that horse killed beneath him at the same time as himself but zero for the second part, the one he was counting on, to discuss pastern swellings or the best horseshoes until the end of time, turning back at the last moment leaving him abandoning him to the flies under the dazzling May sunshine where for a second the steel of the brandished sabre had glinted, and she filled that little cone they used for a glass once again up to the brim with what do they call gin I think there they say g’nievr’, serving me with that way of showing off that they’re giving you good measure so that a little always overflows, the surface of the liquid bulging over the rim of the glass forming by capillary action or whatever you call it that phenomenon a slight convexity like a lens above the rim of the glass a meniscus that’s it trembling when I raised it cautiously to my lips my hand trembling the silvery light sparkling trembling with the colourless liquid running down my fingers burning when it went down my throat . . .”