first that door which I had first to reach and then walk through, seeing it reflected in the mirror over the bar one of those rectangular mirrors like the ones you can see or rather in which you can see yourself at the barber’s the upper corners rounded the frame not enamelled white like in barber shops but covered with a coat of brown paint, threadlike reliefs like noodles decorating the moulding like astragals asterisks starting with a central honeysuckle motif in the middle of each side, and since the mirror was tilted the verticals reflected in it were also tilted, starting at the bottom with the row of necks and spigots of bottles lined up on the shelf immediately underneath then the raw wood floor that seemed to tilt upwards at an angle of about twenty degrees, grey in the shadow, yellow in the rectangle of sunshine extending obliquely from the door open onto the street, the two jambs tilted too as if the wall were falling in, the doorstep a stone block then the pavement then the long rectangular stones forming the kerb then the first rows of cobbles in the street to which I had my back turned

and probably because of the drunkenness, impossible to be visually aware of anything but that that mirror and what was reflected in it my eyes clinging to it so to speak the way a drunkard clings to a lamp-post as to the only fixed point in a vague invisible and colourless universe from which only voices reached me probably that of the woman (the proprietress) and of the two or three men who were there, and then one of them saying The front has collapsed but sounding to me like The runt has collapsed, able to see the little dead dog floating downstream with the current its pink-and-white belly swollen the hair stiff already stinking

then the rectangle of sunlight on the floor disappearing then reappearing then disappearing again but not entirely: this time I could see thanks to the mirror the bottom of the woman’s skirt her two calves and her two feet in slippers all tilted as if she were falling over backwards

then her voice coming from outside coming into the café over her shoulder probably talking with her head half-turned in other words if the mirror had been high enough I would have seen her in profile; that way she could go on watching what she had just seen and still be heard from inside the café saying Here come some soldiers

and this time I found myself managing to get up clinging to the table hearing one of the conical glasses overturn roll across the table describing what was probably a circle round its base until it reached the edge of the table and fell hearing it break just as I reached the woman and looked over her shoulder seeing the grey car with the strange top like a kind of coffin with square-cut sides and four backs and four round helmets and Good God those are . . . Good God you