And then as motionless as a statue. And then Corinne, too, as motionless as a statue, trying with the same eagerness to see what was happening behind the little wood, saying without opening her mouth or turning her head or raising her voice, exactly the way she had argued with de Reixach a little earlier: “Damn flunkey.” And he so to speak totally absorbed in the huge binoculars and probably not even hearing her, or perhaps realizing that she was talking to him but not even bothering to listen, to try to understand, saying: “Yes, that was a nice break, yes, that’s it, that’s it, you have to . . . Yes: she’s, she’s going . . .” and around them the calm uproar of the crowd, the last betters flowing back towards the rail or climbing into the grandstands like a slow black tide, although most of them were running, but already not looking in front of them, all with their heads turned towards the little wood, the heads of the ones who were running facing the same way as the heads of the ones already sitting in the stands or standing on chairs dragged out into the paddock: the painted porcelain heads of mannequins surrounded by photographers, the wrinkled and papery heads of old colonels under their grey bowlers, the heads of millionaires with their horse-dealer’s look, merchants or distillers or money salesmen from father to son, usurers, owners of horses, of women, of mines, of whole districts of houses, of slums, of villas with swimming pools, of chateaux, of yachts, of skeletal Negroes or Indians, of big or little slot machines (from the ones six storeys high made out of stone, concrete and steel to the trash made out of painted tin and reflectors the colour of gumdrops): a species or class or race whose fathers or grandfathers or greatgrandfathers or great-great-grandfathers had one day found a means, by violence, trickery or constraint exercised in a more or less legal fashion (and probably more than less, considering that right, law is always only the consecration of a state of force) of amassing the fortunes they were now spending, but which, by a sort of consequence, a curse attached to the violence and the trickery, condemned them to find growing round them only that fauna which is also trying to acquire (or to profit by) those very fortunes (or merely fortune) by violence or trickery, and whom the former managed to jostle (breathing the same air, trampling the same dusty gravel, as if they had been assembled in the same salon) without even seeming to notice their presence, nor even—perhaps—to see them: the heads of the betters with dubious occupations, with dubious collars, with dubious faces, with hawks’ eyes, with hardened, pitiless, frustrated faces gnawed, corroded by passion: the North African workers who paid almost the equivalent of a half-day’s work for merely the fond privilege of seeing up close the horse on which they had bet their week’s pay, the pimps, the pedlars, the tipsters, the grooms, the chauffeurs, the concessioners, the old baronesses, and the ones who had come only because it was a beautiful day, and those who would have come anyway, trampling in the mud and shivering in the draughts, if it had rained spears, all huddled now in the stands with the sculptured gingerbread floating in the sky with the whipped-cream clouds, motionless, like meringues, that is, swollen, puffed up on top and flattened underneath as if they had been set on an invisible sheet of glass, neatly aligned in successive rows which the perspective brought closer together in the distance (like the trunks of trees along a road) to form, far away, towards the misty horizon, above the treetops and the delicate factory chimneys, a suspended, motionless ceiling, until when you looked more carefully you realized that the whole drifting archipelago was imperceptibly sliding, sailing over the houses, the incredibly green turf, the little wood to the right of which the horses appeared at last, heading now towards the gate: no longer one, three or ten but, with the varicoloured and motley patches of the silks, the undulating tails, the arrogant gait of the animals on their tiny legs no thicker than twigs, a medieval apparition, a brilliant group in the distance (and not only in the distance, at the end of the turn, but as though advancing so to speak from the depth of time, across the brilliant fields of battle where, in the space of a sparkling afternoon, of a charge, of a gallop, kingdoms and the hands of princesses were lost or won): then Iglésia saw him, he told them later, separate, dissociated by the binoculars from the anonymous motley of the colours, on that filly like a streak of pale bronze, and wearing the black cap and that bright pink silk bordering on mauve that she had somehow imposed on both of them (Iglésia and de Reixach) like a kind of voluptuous and lascivious symbol (like the colours of an order or rather the emblems of functions so to speak seminal and turgescent), able to make out between the two (between the silk and the cap) that perfectly inexpressive face, apparently empty of emotions and of thoughts, not even concentrated or attentive: merely impassive (Iglésia thinking, saying later: “Well Good God he could have let me ride. If it was to prove something, hell! What did he expect? That after that she wouldn’t sleep with anyone but him, that she’d go without being screwed by the first man to come along simply because she’s seen him on her back? But if it hadn’t been me it would have been the same. Because she was in heat. And the weather didn’t make it any better. So even before she started she was soaked to the skin!. . .”), able to see as if he had been only a few yards away the filly’s neck covered with a grey lather at the place where the reins rubbed it, the group, the hieratic and medieval group still heading for the stone wall, having crossed the centre of the figure eight now, the horses hidden again up to the belly by the border hedges, half-disappearing so that they seemed cut off halfway up, only their backs still visible, seeming to slide along the field of green corn like ducks on the motionless surface of a pond, I could see them as they were turning right he at the head of the bunch as if it had been 14th July one then two then three then the whole first group then the second the horses calmly following each other like those petticoat horses children used to play with those aquatic animals floating on their bellies propelled by invisible webbed feet slipping slowly one after the other with their identical arched chess-piece necks their identical riders with their identical arched bodies swaying half falling asleep probably although it had been daylight for some time the sky pink with dawn the countryside still half-asleep too, there was a kind of vaporous moistness there must have been dewdrops clinging to the blades of grass which the sun would evaporate I could easily recognize him in the distance out ahead by the way he had of sitting straight up on his saddle contrasting with the other limp figures as if for him fatigue simply didn’t exist, about half the squadron caught when they flowed back towards the crossroads like an accordion as though under the pressure of an invisible piston pushing them back, the last ones still advancing while the head of the column somehow seemed to retract the noise coming only afterwards so that there was a moment (perhaps a fraction of a second but seeming longer) when in the complete silence there was only this: the little petticoat horses and their riders thrown back in disorder, one against the other, exactly like chess pieces collapsing in a row the sound when it came with that slight delay in time with the image itself exactly like the hollow sound of the ivory pieces drumming falling one after the other on the chessboard like this: tac-tac-tac-tac-tac the bursts of gunfire superimposed accumulating apparently then on top of us the invisible plucked guitar strings weaving the invisible chain of deadly silky torn air also I never heard the order shouted seeing only the bodies in front of me collapse closer and closer while the right legs moved one after the other over the rumps like the pages of a book flipped backwards and once on the ground I looked for Wack to hand him the bridle at the same time that my right hand was struggling behind my back with that damn rifle hook then it came on us from behind the thunder of hoofs the galloping of wild horses riderless now eyes huge ears flat stirrups empty the reins whipping the air twisting like serpents and two or three covered with blood and one with his rider still on his back screaming They’re behind us too they let us get through and then they, the rest of his words carried away with him leaning over the neck his mouth wide open like a hole and now it was no longer with the rifle hook that I was struggling but against that nag trying to break away head high neck stiff as a mast the pupil entirely blank as though she were trying to look behind her ears stepping back not by fits and starts but so to speak methodically one foot after the other and me pulling at her hard enough to tear off her jaw saying All right All right as if she could even hear me in that racket gradually shortening the reins until I could reach her neck with one hand patting her repeating All right All right Theeeeeere . . . until she stopped, standing motionless but tense strained trembling in every limb her hoofs stiff and wide apart like stilts and probably there had been another order shouted while I was struggling with her because I realized (not seeing because I was too busy watching her but sensing, divining) in that disorder that uproar that they were all remounting getting close to her then (still as stiff as strained as if she had been made out of wood) as gently as possible watching carefully in case she kicked or reared or broke into a gallop just when I would have a foot in the stirrup but she still didn’t move just trembling where she stood like a motor idling and she let me get my foot in the stirrup without doing a thing, only when I seized the pommel and the cantle to lift myself up the saddle turned over, I was expecting that too for three days I had been trying to find a girth to exchange for this one that was too long for her after I had had to leave Edgar behind but you can’t get a thing out of those peasants it was as if asking them to switch girths was trying to rob them and Blum’s was too long too so it was really the perfect moment for a thing like that to happen to me when there was shooting on all sides at once but I didn’t even have time to swear not even enough breath not even enough time to get out a word just enough to think of it while I was trying to get that damn saddle on her back again in the middle of all those men who were passing round me at a gallop now and then I saw that my hands were trembling but I couldn’t stop them any more than I could stop her body from trembling I stopped trying I began running alongside her holding her by the bridle she starting to canter with the saddle now almost directly under her belly among the horses—with riders or riderless—that were passing us the deadly network of plucked guitar strings stretched like a ceiling over our heads but it was only when I saw two or three fall that I realized that I was in the ditch of the road while they were too high on horseback so they got shot down like ninepins then I saw Wack (things happening paradoxically enough in a kind of silence a void in other words the sound of the bullets and the explosions—they must have been using mortars now or those little tank cannons—once accepted admitted and somehow forgotten neutralizing themselves somehow you heard absolutely nothing no shouts no voices probably because no one had time to shout so that it reminded me of when I was running the 1,500 metres: only the whistling noise of the breathing the swearing itself choked before it came out and then came a jostling as if the lungs were seizing all the available air to distribute it through the body and use it only for useful things: looking deciding running, things consequently happening a little as though in a film without its soundtrack), I saw Wack who had just passed me leaning over the neck of his horse his face turned back towards me his mouth open too probably trying to shout something which he didn’t have air enough to make heard and suddenly lifted off his saddle as if a hook an invisible hand had grabbed him by his coat collar and slowly raised him I mean almost motionless in relation to (I mean animated by almost the same speed as) his horse that kept on galloping and me still running although a little slower now so that Wack his horse and I comprised a group of objects among which the distances were modified only gradually he being now exactly over the horse from which he had just been lifted wrenched slowly rising in the air his legs still arched as though he were still riding some invisible Pegasus who had bucked and made him fall slowing then and somehow making a kind of double somersault on the spot so that I saw him next head down mouth still open on the same shout (or advice he had tried to give me) silent then lying in the air on his back like a man stretched out in a hammock and letting his legs hang down to the right and left then again head up body vertical his legs beginning to come together hanging parallel then on his stomach arms stretched forward hands open grabbing snatching something like one of those circus acrobats during the seconds when he is attached to nothing and liberated of all weight between the two trapezes then finally the head down again legs apart arms outstretched as though to bar the way but motionless now flat against the roadside slope and no longer moving staring at me his face stamped with a surprised and idiot expression I thought Poor Wack he always looked like a fool but now more than ever he, then I no longer thought, something like a mountain or a horse falling on me throwing me to the ground trampling me while I felt the reins wrenched out of my hands then everything went black while thousands of galloping horses went on passing over my body then I no longer even felt the horses only something like a smell of ether and the dark my ears buzzing and when I opened my eyes again I was lying on the road and not one horse and only Wack still on the slope head down still looking at me his eyes wide open with that shocked look but I was careful not to move waiting for the moment when I would begin to suffer having heard somewhere that the worst wounds create a kind of anaesthesia at first but still feeling nothing and after a moment I tried to move but nothing happened managing to get onto my hands and knees my face towards the ground I could see the earth of the road the stones looking like triangles or irregular polygons of a slightly bluish white in their matrix of pale ochre earth there was something like a carpet of grass in the centre of the path then to the right and the left where the wheels of the cars and carts passed two bare ruts then the grass growing on the sides and raising my head I saw my shadow still very pale and fantastically elongated thinking Then the sun’s up, and at that moment I was aware of the silence and I saw that just beyond Wack there was a man sitting on the roadside: he was holding his arm a little above the elbow his hand hanging all red between his legs but it wasn’t a man from the squadron he said They’ve got us, I didn’t answer he stopped paying any attention to me and went on looking at his hand, in the distance there were still a few bursts of gunfire I looked at the road behind us in the direction of the crossroads I saw brownish-yellow heaps on the ground that didn’t move and horses and near us a horse lying on its side in a pool of blood its legs still twitching feebly and spasmodically then I sat down on the slope beside the man thinking But it was only just dawn, I said What time is it, but he didn’t answer then there was a burst of gunfire very close this time I threw myself down into the ditch I heard the man say They’ve got us again, but I didn’t turn round I crawled down the ditch to where the slope stopped and after that I began running bent double to a grove of trees but no one fired and no one fired when I ran from the grove of trees to a hedge I crawled through the hedge on my belly pulling myself out the other side by my hands lying flat until I managed to catch my breath again there wasn’t any more firing now I heard a bird singing the shadows of the trees grew longer ahead of me across the meadow I crept on all fours along the hedge perpendicular to the shadows of the trees until the corner of the field then I began climbing up the hill on the other side of the meadow still on all fours against the hedge my shadow in front of me again now and when I was in the forest walking among the flakes of sunlight I was careful to keep the sun in front of me calculating as the time passed that I would have to keep it in front of me and slightly to the right at first later on to the right but still ahead of me, there were cuckoos in the forest other birds too I didn’t know their names but especially cuckoos or maybe it was because I knew their name that I noticed them maybe too because of their more characteristic cry the sun through the leaves cast my leafy shadow that moved on ahead of me then slightly to the right, walking a long time without hearing anything except the cuckoos and those birds whose names I didn’t know, finally I got tired of walking through the woods all the time and followed a path but my shadow was on my left then, a moment later I found a path that crossed it I took that one and my shadow was ahead of me again and to the right but I calculated I should follow it longer than the first one to compensate for the digression I had had to make and then I was hungry and I remembered the piece of sausage I was carrying round in my coat pocket I ate it while I was walking I ate the skin too down to the stub knotted by the thread I threw that away then the forest stopped collided so to speak with the empty sky opening on a pool and when I lay down to drink the little frogs jumped in they didn’t make any more noise than big raindrops: near the edge where they had jumped in a tiny cloud of grey mud hung in the water then dissolved between the reeds they were green and no bigger around than my little finger the surface of the water was covered with little round pale-green leaves about the size of confetti that was why it took me a moment to realize they were coming back I saw one then two then three breaking the pale-green confetti letting just the tips of their heads stick out with their tiny bulging eyes like pinheads staring at me there was a faint current and I saw one drifting slowly letting itself be carried between the archipelagos of agglutinated confetti the same colour as it was it looked like a drowned man its arms outstretched the head half out of the water the delicate little webbed hands open then it moved and I didn’t see it any more I mean I didn’t even see it move, it simply wasn’t there any more except for the tiny cloud of mud it had stirred up, the water was viscous with a viscous fishy taste I pushed aside the little confetti when I drank being careful not to drink the mud my face raised among the reeds and the broad lance-shaped leaves then I stayed there sitting at the edge of the woods behind the thickets listening to the cuckoos calling to each other among the silent tree trunks in the spring green air looking at the road that followed the pond and then skirted the trees from time to time a fish jumped with a plop I never saw one, only the concentric circles growing wider and wider round the place where it had jumped once some planes passed over but very high in the sky I saw one or rather something a silver point hanging motionless sparkling a fraction of a second in a blue hole between the branches then disappearing their noise seemed to be suspended too vibrating in the light air then it gradually faded and again I could hear the delicate rustling of the leaves and again the song of a cuckoo and a little after at the turn of the road two officers came out walking their horses but maybe they didn’t know there was a war on they were walking calmly in step chatting when I saw they were wearing khaki and not green I stood up thinking of the face they would make when they saw me and when I told them that the panzers were strolling up the road six or seven kilometres from here probably someone had forgotten to warn them I stood up in the middle of the road in the woodland peace where I could still hear the cuckoos and occasionally the sudden invisible and lazy leap of a fish out of the unalterable mirror of the pond then I thought Good God Good God Good God Good God, recognizing him recognizing the voice that reached me now or rather that fell on me arrogant distant calm with something playful almost gay in it saying So you managed to get out of it too? saying as he turned towards the short second lieutenant You see they’re not all dead There are still some who got out, saying again in my direction Iglésia’s leading two horses You take one, I could hear the water murmuring where the pond made a little waterfall the rustling of the leaves stirred by the imperceptible breeze, on a level with my eyes I saw the knees press almost imperceptibly and the horse start forward passing in front of me the boots sparkling the mahogany flanks covered with dried sweat the rump the tail then again the calm pond across which the breeze stirred the broad lance-shaped leaves with a papery rustle, his voice as he moved away reaching me again (but it was not me he was talking to now he had resumed his conversation with the short second lieutenant and I could hear him slightly bored distinguished nonchalant) saying: . . .bad business. Apparently they use those tanks as . . . then he was too far away I had forgotten that such things are merely called a “business” the way you say “that business” when you mean “fighting a duel” a delicate euphemism a more discreet more elegant formula well so much the better not all was lost since we were still among well-bred people say don’t say, example don’t say “the squadron has been massacred in an ambush”, but “we had a bad business outside the village of”, then Iglésia’s voice and his clown’s face looking at me with his round eyes his offended impatient and vaguely reproving expression saying Then you’re riding yes or no? All the time I’ve been dragging these two nags behind me, it isn’t funny I can tell you! I got in the saddle and followed them I had to trot to catch up with Iglésia then I slowed the horse down to a walk I could see him from the back now with that little second lieutenant beside him walking calmly the horses moving with that tremendous slowness, that complete absence of haste that you find only in those beings or things (boxers, serpents, planes) capable of striking, moving or changing position with lightning-like speed, the sky, the calm cottony clouds still drifting by at a speed that was also almost imperceptible in the opposite direction (so that between the graceful, medieval and elegant silhouettes that kept advancing towards the right where, with his whip in his hand, the starter was waiting for them, and the clouds, one of those infuriating slowness contests seemed to be in progress, a demonstration in which each entrant vied with the rest for majesty, unconcerned with that feverish and futile impatience that made the crowd seethe: the stiff, delicate and foolish thoroughbreds, capable not of reaching but of becoming in the wink of an eye something not released at a tremendous speed but which would be speed itself, the slow clouds like those proud armadas apparently resting motionless on the sea and which seem to move by leaps and bounds at a fantastic speed, the eye exhausted by their apparent immobility abandoning them, discovering them a moment later, still apparently motionless, at the other end of the horizon, thus covering fabulous distances while beneath them, tiny and ridiculous, parade cities, hills, woods, and under which, without their ever seeming to have moved, still majestic, puffy and imponderable, still other cities, other woods, other absurd hills would parade, long after the horses, the public had abandoned the racetrack, the grandstands, the green turf speckled and soiled by the thousands of betting tickets lost like so many tiny stillborn corpses of dreams and hopes (the marriage not of heaven and earth but of earth and man, leaving it soiled by the persistence of that residue, of that kind of giant and foetal pollution of tiny furiously torn scraps of paper), long after the last horse had kicked up the last clod of the turf and had left, surrounded by more servants, more attentions, precautions and care for its nerves than a film star, and the echo of the last and furious cries had fallen over the silent stands abandoned to the clean-up crews, no longer echoing save to the faint and prosaic rustle of the brooms), Corinne no longer watching what was happening at the end of the turn, stamping furiously again, saying: “Couldn’t you stop watching for a second? Do you hear me? There’s nothing to see now. They’re going back to the gate. They . . . Do you hear me, or don’t you?” and he reluctantly taking the binoculars away from his face, turning his great fish eyes towards her, the lids blinking, the pupils cloudy, a little blurred from the effort he was making to focus at this proximity, saying in his frail, timid, whining voice: “You . . . You shouldn’t have. He . . .”, his voice dying away, swallowed up, submerged (beneath the brutal and piercing ringing of the bell) by the kind of long sigh rising from the relieved crowd, swooning and voracious (not exactly an orgasm, but somehow a pre-orgasm, something like the moment when the man penetrates the woman), while far in the distance, they could see now a kind of elongated and motley blur moving quickly across the turf, at the level of the ground, the horses shifting without transition from their casual semi-immobility to movement, the bunch running fast without fits and starts, as though it were mounted on a wire or on rollers, like those children’s toys, all the horses soldered together in a single block cut out of a piece of cardboard or painted tin that was being slid along the slot arranged for this purpose in a trompe-l’œil painted and varnished landscape, the jockeys all leaning forward at the same angle, the horses hidden up to the belly by the border hedges: then they came out onto the junction of the track and for a moment you could see their legs coming and going fast, like compasses opening and closing, but always to the same mechanical, regular and abstract rhythm of a spring-operated toy; then again there was nothing else to see, behind the little wood, except for the silks passing behind the tree trunks the branches like a handful of confetti and which seemed—perhaps because of their material, their brilliant colours—to gather up, to concentrate in themselves all the sparkling light of the dazzling afternoon, the tiny pink spot (and yet under which there was a man’s body, the flesh, the tense muscles, the tumultuous afflux of blood, the organs abused and forced) in fourth position: