And Blum: “And then . . .” (But this time Iglésia wasn’t there any more: that whole summer they spent with a pick (or a shovel, when they were lucky) in their hands, working on embankments, then at the beginning of the autumn they were sent to a farm to dig potatoes and beets, then Georges tried to escape, was caught (by accident, and not by soldiers or police sent after him but—it was a Sunday morning—in a wood where he had fallen asleep, by civilians out hunting grouse), then he was brought back to the camp and put in a cell, then Blum reported sick and went back to the camp too, and both of them stayed there, working during the winter unloading the coal wagons, wielding the huge pitchforks, straightening up when the sentry walked away, shabby and grotesque figures with their caps pulled down over their ears, their coat collars turned up, their backs to the wind the rain the snow and blowing on their fingers while trying to transfer themselves by proxy (that is, by means of their imagination, that is, by assembling and combining all they could find in their memory by way of things seen, heard or read, so that—here, among the wet and gleaming rails, the black wagons, the black and soaking tree trunks in the cold pale daylight of a Saxon winter—summoning up the iridescent and luminous images by means of the ephemeral, incantatory magic of language, words invented in the hope of making palatable—like those vaguely sugared pellets disguising a bitter medicine for children—the unmentionable reality) in that futile, mysterious and violent universe in which, in the absence of their bodies, their minds moved: something without any more reality than a dream, than the words that came out of their lips: sounds, noises to conjure away the cold, the rails, the livid sky, the sombre pines.) “And then he—I mean de Reixach . . .” (and Georges: “Reishak”, and Blum: “What? Oh, yes . . .”) “. . .wanted to ride that chestnut too, that is, to tame her, because he probably also thought that she . . . (This time I mean the woman-chestnut, the blonde female he couldn’t or wouldn’t . . . and who had eyes—and apparently other things besides eyes—only for that . . .) In short: perhaps he thought that he would kill, so to speak, two birds with one stone, and that if he managed to mount the one he could control the other, or vice versa, that is, that if he controlled the one he would also mount the other victoriously, that is that he would lead her to the stake too, that is, that his own stake would lead her victoriously to where he had probably never managed to lead her, would make her lose the taste or the desire for another stake (am I expressing myself clearly?) or if you prefer of another stick, that is if he managed to use his own stick as well as that jockey who . . .” and Georges: “All right, stop! Are you going on like that until . . .” and Blum: “Fine, sorry. I thought you enjoyed it: you’re always sifting, supposing, embroidering, inventing fairy tales where I bet no one except you has never seen anything but an everyday piece of sex between a whore and two fools, and when I say . . .” and Georges: “A whore and two fools, and here we are looking like corpses, and about as deprived as corpses, and maybe tomorrow corpses for good in case one of these lice swarming all over us carries typhus or some general feels like bombing this depot, so what can I, what can we do, what else can I think of except . . .” and Blum: “Fine, fine, nice speech. Bravo. So go on. So he—I’m still talking about de Reixach—so he . . .” and Georges: “Reishak: x like sh, ch like k. For God’s sake, how long are you . . .” and Blum: “Fine, fine: de Reishak. Fine. If you insist on being as boring as Iglésia . . .” and Georges: “I don’t . . .” and Blum: “But you weren’t wearing his livery after all. You weren’t working for him, were you? He never paid you to take care of the people who were giving him a bad name? Unless you think you were offended, wronged too? Unless out of deference for your common progenitors, in memory of that other cuckold who . . .” and Georges: “Cuckold?” and Blum: “. . .theatrically put a bullet through his head with a revolver . . .” and Georges: “Not a revolver: a pistol. The revolver hadn’t even been invented yet. But cuckold?” and Blum: “All right: pistol. Which doesn’t make it any the less theatrical, doesn’t keep the scene from being any the less picturesque: didn’t you say he had called in a painter for the occasion? In order to perpetuate for the use of his descendants, and in particular to supplement the conversation of your lady mother when she receiv . . .” and Georges: “A painter? What painter? I told you the only picture that exists of him had been made long before . . .” and Blum: “I know. And completed, bloodied later by time, rot, the erosion of the years, as if the bullet that went through his head and whose traces you spent your childhood looking for on the walls had then struck the painted and eternally calm face, I know—and then there was that engraving too . . .” and Georges: “But . . .” and Blum: “. . .representing the scene that you interpret according to your mother, that is, according to the version most flattering to your familial pride, and probably by virtue of the law that states that history . . .” and Georges (unless it was still Blum, interrupting himself, clowning, unless he (Georges) wasn’t having this dialogue under the cold Saxon rain with a little sickly Jew—or the shadow of a little Jew, and who was not much more than a corpse—one more corpse—of a little Jew—but with himself, that is, his double, all alone under the grey rain, among the rails, the coal wagons, or perhaps years later, still alone (although he was lying now beside a woman’s warm flesh), still having a dialogue with that double, or with Blum, or with no one): “There we are: history. I’ve been waiting for it the last few minutes. I was waiting for the word. It’s an odd thing if it doesn’t put in an appearance now and again. Like Providence in the sermon of a Dominican priest. Like the Immaculate Conception: a shimmering, exalted vision traditionally reserved to simple hearts and strong minds, the good conscience of the informer and the philosopher, the incorruptible fable—or farce—thanks to which the executioner feels he has a sister-of-charity’s vocation and the victim the boy-scout cheerfulness of the first Christians, torturers and martyrs reconciled, sprawling together in a pathetic debauchery that we could call the vacuum cleaner or rather the ‘dispose-all’ of the intelligence ceaselessly adding to that enormous mountain of rubbish, that public drain in which figure prominently—along with the oak-leaf kepis and the police handcuffs—the dressing gowns, the pipes and slippers of our thinkers, but on the crest of which the gorillus sapiens nevertheless hopes some day to attain a height which will prevent his soul from following him, so that he can finally savour a happiness guaranteed to be incorruptible, thanks to the mass production of fridges, motor cars and FM radios. But go on: after all there’s no law against imagining that the air expelled by the bowels full of the good German beer fermenting in the guts of that sentry produces in the general concert a minuet by Mozart . . .” and Blum (or Georges): “Are you done?” and Georges (or Blum): “I could go on,” and Blum (or Georges): “So go on,” and Georges (or Blum): “But I must also bring my contribution, participate, add to the heap, augment it by some of those coal bricks . . .” and Blum: “Fine. So that law that says that history . . .” and Georges: “Eat!” and Blum: “. . .that history leaves behind it only a residue excessively confiscated, disinfected and finally edible, for the use of official school manuals and pedigreed families . . . But actually what do you know? What else besides the prattle of a woman more concerned to protect the reputation of one of her own kind than to polish up—a job usually reserved for servants like Iglésia—an escutcheon and a name somewhat tarnished and that . . .” and Georges: “Oh, do you suppose that pile of coal will begin walking all by itself if we don’t at least pretend to look like we’re helping it before that Mozartian bundle of guts over there begins looking at us and starts . . .” and Blum: “. . .so that that pathetic and noble suicide might well be . . . Yes: that’s it, that’s it!” (the pathetic and absurd figure beginning to move, wriggling, struggling, racked with sudden jolts, until it managed to load the fork with four or five soaking lumps, then the fork describing a rapid arc, the lumps in the air for a moment, weightless, circling slowly then falling back with a muffled noise on the back of the truck, then the fork vertical again, the tines down, Blum’s hands together at the top of the handle and his chin leaning on it so that when he speaks again it isn’t his—fixed—lower jaw but his whole head that rises and sinks in a movement of sententious approval at each word:) “. . .Because you say that that half-naked girl glimpsed at an open door, the breast and the face lit from underneath by a candle, so that she looked like one of those plaster Mariannes in a schoolroom or a town hall where the dust that no feather duster ever disturbs accumulates in grey layers on every projection, reversing the relief or rather the light and even the expression since, with the eyeballs in shadow, darkened on their upper part, they seem to be sending their eternal blind stare towards the sky—you say then that that woman would run in behind the man you’ve called the valet or the servant woken up by the shot, and who’s maybe only her lover—not the servant girl’s for she’s no such thing but actually the wife, the spouse, that is, your common great-great-great-grandmother, the man—the lover—belonging moreover to the race of domestics as you call it, if only she had also shared in sexual matters those plebeian or rather equine tastes, I mean the same dispositions, I mean the same tendency to choose her lovers from the stable side . . .” and Georges: “But . . .” and Blum: “Besides, didn’t you tell me that there existed as a pendant to the other bloody portrait a painting executed at the same period and representing her in the costume not of a huntress matching her husband’s but stamped (the dress, the pose, the style, the way of staring boldly at the painter who reproduced her features and later at whoever was questioning them) with a kind of insolence, of defiance, of controlled violence (particularly since she was holding in her hand something much more dangerous than a weapon, a mere hunting rifle: a mask, one of those Venetian Carnival faces both grotesque and terrifying, with a black velvet screen around the eyes and an enormous nose that made people look like monstrous birds still further accentuated by those capes whose pleats fluttered around them or, in repose, enveloped them like folded wings), and sticking out of the opening of the blouse something impalpable, a foam, the delicate and complicated lace escaping as if it were the very perfume of her flesh, of her breasts hidden further down in the silken darkness, exhaling the secret flowery breath of her flesh . . .” and suddenly the voice changed, discordant, two tones higher, breaking, saying: “So that Dejanira . . .” and Georges: “Virginia,” and Blum: “What?” and Georges: “Name was Virginia,” and Blum: “Good name for a whore. So that virginal Virginia panting and naked, or more than naked, that is, dressed—or rather undressed—in one of those nightgowns that were probably only invented to let the hands imprisoned underneath slip across the liquid warmth of the belly, folding up, raising above the breasts, accumulating in folds a silky foam above the hips so as to denude, present—like those displays of boutique shops where the precious, delicate and fantastically expensive objects are shown in a seethe of satin—that hidden, secret mouth—a woman not only stretched out but overthrown in the true sense of the word, that is, as if her body had made a half-turn starting from that ancestral position in which she crouched to satisfy her needs—because she has only one position to satisfy them all, this creature: legs folded back, thighs pressed against her sides, the knees rising to touch the shadowy armpits—but now as if the ground had shifted, tipping her back, presenting now not to the earth but to the sky (as though expecting one of those legendary fecundations, some tinkling shower of gold) her twin buttocks, that mother-of-pearl, that bush, that eternal wound already streaming even before being forced open and so shamelessly offered that she seemed to be waiting for an act of a precision and a nakedness if not surgical, as is suggested by the notion of something that pierces, penetrates, thrusts into the firm flesh, at least almost medical inasmuch as it (the act itself physical, naked, without emotional significance) derives of course from the physiological domain: hence the abundance, the variety of that equivocal imagery in which the enema serves as a pretext for countless variations on the theme of the introduction of an object that is not only hard but capable of spraying shedding projecting violently outside itself and as a liquid extension of itself that impetuous milt, that spurt, that . . .”