And Georges: “No that’s . . .”

And Blum: “And while you were so busy staring at the walls for the traces of a bullet that (if not glorious) at least was honourable, romantic, didn’t you ever see that: projected by the candle set down beside the bed, the bulging, complicated and leaping shadow of a muscular back around the loins of which are knotted—like those of a shipwreck victim clinging to a mast—the milky legs, the feet with their apricot-coloured heels, swelling (the shadow) like a mountain, monstrous, rising to the ceiling and shaken with tempestuous jolts by that furious tide that racks beneath it the species of creature with two heads, four arms, four legs and two bodies welded at the stomach by means of that common organ (or if you prefer equally alien, for doesn’t the man’s member seem to plunge into his own body as it plunges into the woman’s, to extend itself into the deepest cavern of her entrails by an equal and symmetrical member?), that muscle, that awl, that dark-red ram, gleaming and furious, appearing and vanishing between two bushy and tawny fleeces, and he (de Reixach, or rather just Reixach) suddenly appearing . . .”

And Georges: “No!. . .”