But Georges didn’t even go back to the summer house any more now, merely defying it, spying on it without even looking at it (for he had no need to, he had no need to use his eyes for that, being able to see without needing the image printed on his retina, the mass of the body now increasingly invaded by fat, monstrous, more and more overpowered by its own weight, the face with the features more and more weighted down by the effect of something that was not only fat and which gradually was taking possession of him, invading him, imprisoning him, immuring him in a kind of mute solitude, a proud and ponderous sadness), the way he had defied him, spied on him when he came home, the scene occurring like this: Georges declaring that he had decided to work on the land, and supported (although he pretended not to hear her, although he pretended to speak to them both together, and yet turning noticeably towards her alone and noticeably turning away from his father, and yet speaking to him, and noticeably paying no attention to her or to anything she might say), supported then by Sabine’s noisy, obscene and uterine approval—and no more, in other words not a word, not a remark, not a regret, the heavy mountain of flesh still motionless, silent, the heavy and pathetic mass of distended and worn organs inside which or rather under which lay something that was like a part of Georges, so that despite his total immobility, despite his complete absence of apparent reaction, Georges heard perfectly and louder than Sabine’s deafening prattle the imperceptible sound of some secret and delicate organ breaking, snapping, and after that nothing else, nothing except that carapace of silence when Georges would sit down at the dinner table in his filthy smock, with his hands not dirty but somehow encrusted with earth and grease the evenings of the slow and empty days during which he drove the tractor, following the slow furrows, watching his shadow at each lap, first distorted, extended, slowly changing shape as it slowly revolved round him like the hands of a clock, shortening, thickening, then extending, stretching out again, enormous, gigantic finally, as the sun sank over the forgetful and indifferent earth, the perfidious world once again inoffensive, familiar, deceptive, while the images sometimes passed in confusion, Blum’s fleshless face, Iglésia cooking the pancakes, and the dim equestrian silhouette raising its arm, brandishing the sabre, falling slowly to one side, vanishing, and Corinne the way he, or rather they (but there was no one he could talk to about her now, and Sabine said she had behaved in such a way that they—that is, the ones who belonged or whom Sabine judged worthy of belonging to that milieu or that caste in which she included herself—no longer received her), the way they (that is, he, Blum—or rather their imaginations, or rather their bodies, in other words their skin, their organs, their young men’s lusting flesh) had materialized her: standing with the sun behind her at the end of the afternoon in that red dress the colour of a gumdrop (but perhaps he had invented that too, that is the colour, the harsh red, perhaps merely because she was something he thought about not with his mind but with his lips, his mouth, perhaps because of her name, because “Corinne” made him think of “coral”?. . .) silhouetted against the apple green of the turf where the horses are galloping past; and often he seemed to see her as one of those playing-card queens that he too now slid slowly through his hands as he kept his face expressionless (thinking: “In any case at least I’ll have learnt one thing from the war. I won’t have been in it for nothing. At least I’ll have learnt to play poker . . .” For he was playing poker now, joining in the back room of a café near the cattle market (going there just as he was, as he had eaten at his father’s table, in other words in his smock, his hands impregnated with earth and grease), three or four men with the same expressionless, brief, economical gestures, and who played for high stakes, emptied (with the same gestures they used for playing, in the same silent, quick, and apparently uninterested way) bottles of the most expensive champagne while two or three girls with whom each man had slept in turn waited yawning and showing each other their jewellery on the shabby banquette): nothing but a piece of cardboard, then, one of those queens robed in scarlet, enigmatic and symmetrically doubled, as if reflected in a mirror, wearing one of those half-red and half-green robes with heavy and ritual ornaments, with the ritual and symbolic attributes (rose, sceptre, ermine): something without any more thickness, without any more reality or existence than a face drawn on the white background of the paper, impenetrable, expressionless and fatal, like the face of chance itself; then—through one of the players—he learnt that she had remarried and lived in Toulouse, and so now all that separated him from her was that glass from behind which she seemed to be looking at him, talking to him, speaking words, sentences that he (and probably she) didn’t listen to, exactly as if he had been standing on the other side of the aquarium glass, looking at her, still thinking: “I’m going to do it. She’ll slap me, call someone and have me thrown out, but I’m going to do it . . .” and she—that is, her flesh, stirring imperceptibly, that is, breathing, that is, dilating and contracting as if the air penetrated her not through her mouth, her lungs, but by the entire surface of her skin, as if she were made of a substance like that of sponges but with an invisible texture, dilating and contracting like those sea anemones those denizens of the deep halfway between vegetable and animal, those madrepores, palpitating delicately in the transparent water, breathing, and he still not listening, not even bothering to pretend to be listening, staring at her, while she tried again to laugh, observed him from behind her smile with that kind of circumspection, that mixture of curiosity, suspicion and perhaps fear, as if he might have been something rather like a ghost, a phantom, he himself able to see himself in the cloudy depths of the glass behind her, with his sunburnt face, his starved dog’s expression, thinking: “Oh yes! That’s just about what I must look like! As if I wanted to bite . . .” and she still saying whatever came into her head: How tan you are Have you been on the beach a lot? Do you like the sea? and he: What? and she: You’re so tan, and he: The sea? Why . . . Oh! No, I work on the land you know I spend the whole day on the tract . . . then his own hand coming into his field of vision, that is, as if he had thrust it into the water, watching it move forward, away from himself, with a kind of astonishment, a stupor (as if it had separated itself from him, detached itself from his arm by the effect of that slight deviation of the light rays when they cross the surface of a liquid): the thin brown hand with the long, fine fingers, out of which he had not managed in eight years despite the handles of pitchforks, of shovels, of pickaxes, the earth, the grease, to make a peasant’s hand and which remained hopelessly slender and fine, making Sabine say lovingly and proudly that he had pianist’s hands, that he should have been a musician, that he had certainly spoilt, wasted a gift, a unique opportunity (but he didn’t even bother to shrug his shoulders now), excluding the image, Sabine’s voice, while he still watched his own hand now become something alien to himself, in other words belonging—like the trees, the sky, the blue, the green—to that alien world, sparkling and incredible, where she (Corinne) stood, unreal, incredible despite her heavy perfume, her voice, breathing more quickly now, her breasts rising and falling like those birds’ breasts, palpitating, the air (or the blood) rushing in rapid pulsations while her voice sounded more urgent now, rose a half-tone perhaps, saying: Well I’m happy to have seen you I have to go now I think it must be rather late I have . . . but still not moving, his hand far away from him now (like in cinemas when people sitting in the balcony near the projection booth wave their arms, their hands, the five spread fingers thrusting into the luminous beam, projecting their huge and moving shadows across the screen as though to possess, to reach the inaccessible shimmering dream), completely detached now, so that when he touched her (the bare upper arm a little below the shoulder) he felt at first the strange sensation of not really touching her, the way it feels when you take a bird in your hand: that surprise, that astonishment provoked by the difference between the apparent volume and the real weight, the incredible lightness, the incredible delicacy, the tragic fragility of the feathers, the down, and she saying: What . . . what are you . . . and apparently as incapable of finishing her sentence as of moving, only breathing faster and faster, almost panting, while she went on staring at him with the expression of fear, of impotence, and something between his palm and the silky skin of her arm, something no thicker than a leaf of cigarette paper, but something intervening, that is, the sense of touch somehow slightly retarded, as when the fingers numbed by cold come to rest on an object and perceive it only through a film, a kind of shell of insensitivity, and both of them (Corinne and Georges) perfectly motionless, staring at each other, then the hand closing over her arm, squeezing, and he could close his eyes now, smelling only that flowerlike odour, hearing her breathe, pant, the air passing in and out of her lips quickly now, then she uttered something like a sigh, a moan, saying: You’re hurting me, saying: Let me go you’re hur . . . Let me go . . . until he realized that his hand was squeezing now with all its strength, but he did not let her go, merely relaxing his muscles a little, realizing at the same time that he was trembling now, continuously, imperceptibly, uncontrollably, and she saying: Please My husband might come in Please Let go of me Stop but still not moving, panting a little, repeating in a monotonous, mechanical, frightened voice: Please Now stop Please Please . . . Georges merely leaving his hand where it was now, not doing anything more, and he too absolutely motionless, as if not between them now, but round them, enclosing them, the air had that fallacious consistency, the alarming fragility of glass, invisible and brittle, and then standing there (Georges) without making a move, without daring to move, trying to hold his breath, to calm the deafening murmur of his blood, the green and transparent May twilight like glass too, and in his throat that kind of nausea he tried to choke down, swallowing, thinking between two deafening rushes of air: It’s from running too much, thinking: But maybe it’s all that alcohol?—thinking that he should have tried to vomit the way Iglésia did a little while ago in the field, thinking: But vomit what? -trying to remember the last time he had eaten oh yes that piece of sausage this morning in the forest (but was it in the morning or when?), his stomach full of the gin he seemed to feel inside him like an alien body, unassimilable, a solidified ball or rather half-solidified and heavy, something like mercury, so a little while ago he should have put a finger down his throat and vomited, at least he would have been relieved, when they were in the house putting on their uniforms again, and then standing (again stiff, heavy, exhausted, in his stiff, heavy cocoon of cloth and leather) alone in the room, still wondering if he was going to vomit or not and where could Iglésia have gone, while out of the window he watched the engineers’ trucks retreating down the road, no bigger than toys, following each other in a regular, hurried flight, then Iglésia there again without his being able to say when and how he had returned (any more than when he had vanished), Georges starting, turning round, looking at him with that same exhausted, incredulous look, and Iglésia: “Those poor nags, after all they have to eat too,” and he thinking: “Good God, he’s even managed to think of that. Almost dead drunk. Like the other one this morning to let them drink. As if . . .” then no longer thinking, not finishing his train of thought, no longer interested in it, turning and looking at what Iglésia’s bulging, yellowish, astonished and incredulous eyes were looking at now, both of them standing there motionless for a minute while in the distance beyond the sloping fields the little toy cars went on following each other: then jogging down the staircase, running across the farm’s deserted courtyard and taking the lane they had followed that morning, but in the opposite direction—and all he could see now (lying flat on his belly in the grass of the ditch, panting, still trying to choke down the terrible wheezing sound in his chest) with the narrow horizontal strip to which the world now reduced itself limited above by the visor of his helmet, below by the crisscrossing of the blades of grass in the ditch just in front of his eyes, vague, then more distinct, then no longer blades of grass: a green blur in the green twilight, thinning out then stopping at the place where the lane joined the road, then the stones of the road and the sentry’s two black boots, carefully polished, with their shiny accordion pleats at the ankle, the axis of the boots forming the base of an inverted V in the opening of which, on the other side of the road, the dead horse appeared and disappeared between the wheels of the trucks jolting across the cobbles, still in the same place as that morning but apparently flattened out, as though it had gradually melted during the day like those snowmen who seem to sink imperceptibly into the earth, as though attacked at their base, gradually shrinking with the thaw until finally only the largest masses and the struts are left -broomsticks, laths—that have served as an armature: here the belly, enormous now, swollen, distended, and the bones, as if the middle of the body had absorbed the whole substance of the endless carcass, the bones with their round heads holding up as well they could the crust of peeling mud that served as an envelope: but no more flies now, as if they had abandoned it, as if there were nothing left to take from it, as if it were already—but that wasn’t possible, Georges thought, not in one day—no longer rotten and stinking meat, but transmuted, assimilated by the deep earth that hides beneath its hair of grass and leaves the bones of every defunct Rosinante and every defunct Bucephalus (and the defunct riders, the defunct coachmen and the defunct Alexanders) reverted to crumbling lime or . . . (but he was wrong: suddenly one flew out—this time from inside the nostrils—and although he was more than fifteen yards away he saw it (probably thanks to that nauseating and minute visual acuity drunkenness affords) as distinctly (hairy, blue-black, shiny, and though his ears were splintered by the incessant racket of the trucks moving at high speed, hearing it too: its impetuous, voracious, furious buzzing) as the nailheads in the four horseshoes lying on the edge beside the road and now, in relation to Georges, in the foreground) . . . reverted, then, to the state of crumbling lime, of fossils, which he himself was probably becoming out of immobility, watching, impotent, the slow transmutation of his own substance starting with his arm that he could feel dying gradually, growing numb, devoured not by worms but by a slowly mounting tingle that was perhaps the secret stirring of atoms in the process of permutating in order to organize themselves according to a different structure, mineral or crystalline, in the crystalline twilight from which he was still separated by the thickness of a leaf of cigarette paper, unless it wasn’t a leaf of cigarette paper at all but the contact of the twilight itself on his skin for such, he thought, is the exquisite delicacy of women’s flesh that you hesitate to believe you’re really touching them, the skin like feathers, grass, leaves, transparent air, fragile as crystal, so that he could still hear her panting faintly, unless it was his own breathing, unless he was now as dead as the horse and already half swallowed up, taken back by the earth, his flesh mingling with the moist clay, his bones mingling with the stones, for perhaps it was a simple matter of immobility and then you simply became a little chalk, sand and mud again, thinking that was what he should have told him, seeing him as he undoubtedly was at that same moment, in the dimness of the twilight summer house where through the coloured glass panes the world looked as though it were made of a single and simple material, green, mauve or blue, reconciled at last, unless it was one of those May evenings that were too warm to stay in the summer house, in which case they would have been—he and she—still sitting under the big chestnut tree where they took their tea, the chestnut tree in bloom then, its white clusters like candelabra glowing softly in the twilight, the heavy shadows tinged with blue, falling over them now, covering them like an opaque and uniform layer of paint, he and his eternal sheets of paper spread in front of him on the table beside the tray he had pushed aside, a saucer set on top of them to keep the breeze from scattering them, for now he could probably no longer even make out the fine handwriting that covered them, probably contenting himself now or at least trying to content himself with the knowledge that those characters, those signs were there, the way a blind man in the darkness knows—recognizes—the existence of the protecting walls, of the chair, of the bed, though if need be he can still touch them to experience the certainty of their presence—when the day, or the light (Georges thought, still lying in the ditch, watchful, stiff, now completely numb and paralysed with cramps, and as motionless as the dead nag, his face buried in the thick grass, the hairy earth, his whole body flattened as if he were trying to vanish between the lips of the ditch, to melt, to slip, to sink altogether through this narrow crevice to rejoin the original matter (matrix), remembering the evenings when they ate out of doors and when, at this hour, Julien brought the oil lamp and, while they set the table, his father went on working, enclosed—he and those scribbled sheets with their dog-eared corners that had somehow become a part of himself, a supplementary organ as inseparable from him as his brain or his heart, or his heavy old flesh—in that protective cocoon, that egg, that yellowish sphere the light of the lamp created in the darkness of the lawn and the humming of the mosquitoes), when the light, then, would bring no other certainty than the disappointing reappearance of the scribblings without any other real existence than that attributed to them by a mind (also without any other real existence) in order to represent the things it imagined and that were perhaps as lacking in existence, and in that case it was better to listen to her henlike cackling, her clanking necklaces, her perpetual and senseless verbiage which at least had the virtue of existing, even if only by sound and movement, supposing that sound and movement were not also futile and illusory forms of the contrary of existence: which is what he would have had to know, what he would have had to be able to ask the horse, and perhaps it was a problem Georges could have solved if he had been less drunk or less exhausted, and besides, perhaps the question would solve itself any moment now by the mere effect of a bullet, in other words by the fact that matter’s natural inertia would be reversed for an instant (a combustion, an expansion, a projectile violently expelled from the interior of a tube), transforming him for good into a simple pile of horselike matter which only its shape would distinguish from that of the nag, provided it occurred to this sentry walking back and forth from one side of the lane to the other parallel to the road’s edge to walk instead perpendicular to the latter about a dozen yards up the path, and of course he (Georges) could still try firing first, which, granting that he managed to do so fast enough and then that he jumped fast enough over the fence, would give him time enough to taste for one last time that futile and illusory form of life which is movement (the time to cover some ten or fifteen yards in his turn) before knowing what the flies did not yet know, what they would know in their turn one day, what the whole world would end up knowing but which neither horse nor fly nor man had ever come back to tell to those who still didn’t know it, and then he would be dead for good, and if the sentry were faster, he wouldn’t even have time to get up, so that he would be in that same place, and the only difference from now would be that he wouldn’t be completely in the same position any more since he would have tried to raise his gun to his shoulder and aim, and that was all, for ultimately it would still be the same calm and warm May evening with its green smell of grass and the slight bluish moisture that was beginning to fall on the orchards and the gardens: there would have been only one or two shots such as you hear in September after the opening of the hunting season, when a farmer has taken a gun and decided to go out walking in the direction of the place where he startled that hare the other day and this time the hare was at the rendezvous and he shot it, with this difference that no one would pick him (Georges) up by the ears, but he would still be there, in the same place, completely and definitely motionless then, with Wack’s expression of stupid surprise, his mouth stupidly open, his eyes open too, staring blindly at the narrow strip of the universe that stretched in front of him, that same wall of dark-red bricks (the bricks short and thick, made of some grainy substance, the lightest ones rust-coloured, the darkest ones the colour of dried blood, brownish purple occasionally shading into a dark mauve that was almost blue, as if the material they were made of had contained ferruginous slag, as if the fire that had baked them had somehow solidified—bloody, mineral and violent—like meat on the butcher’s block (the same tinges shading from orange to purplish), the heart, the hard and purple flesh of this earth to which he was pressed belly to belly so to speak), the lighter joints made of a greyish mortar in which he could see the grains of encrusted sand, a wild weed of some delicate shade of green growing against the base of the wall (as though to conceal the line joint, the dihedron formed by the wall and the ground), and a little in front of it the heavy stems whose tops the visor of his helmet kept him from seeing (perhaps rose mallows or young sunflowers?): almost as big around as his thumb, with stripes or rather longitudinal grooves of a lighter green, almost white, and covered with a fine down, not flat, but growing perpendicular to the stem, the leaves nearest the bottom already withered and dried, hanging limp like wilted lettuce leaves, their edges yellowed, but the higher leaves still firm, fresh, their veins distinct and branching like a symmetrical network of streams and tributaries, the substance of the leaves themselves elastic, downy, something (silhouetted against the rough mineral and bloody bricks) incredibly tender, immaterial, the virtually motionless blades of grass merely stirred occasionally by a faint shudder, the vigorous stems of the tall plants absolutely motionless, the broad leaves trembling gently from time to time in the calm air, while from the road that gigantic racket still continued to fill his ears: not the cannons (which could be heard now only in the distance, sporadically, in the calm and clear twilight, like the last shocks, without conviction, straggling and conventional, of battle -like that facsimile of work, that show of activity which employees lazily produce while waiting for the office closing time), but the war itself rushing on with an uproar like—only exaggerated—the noise of a railway station, echoes of clashing couplings, iron machinery jolting, unexpected and disastrous; then, farther to the left, springing just out of the ridge of the joint as though out of a fissure between the ground and the wall, was one of those weeds: a tuft or rather a corolla of leaves spread in a crown like a fountain cascading down, torn, ragged and bristling (like those ancient weapons, or those harpoons), dark green, shaggy, then the stem—the latter bent slightly to the right—of another of the same tall plants, then, fastened to the wall by an iron bolt (probably there was still another one higher up, but he couldn’t see it either), the jamb or rather the wooden coping on which was hinged a chicken-wire gate to the henhouse: the bolt rusted into the brick wall, the cement round the thick iron tongue forming a creamy flange in which you could still see the traces of the trowel which in smoothing down the mortar had left a seam (a slight uneven swelling of the compressed substance), the coping—the door jamb as well as its frame—discoloured by the rain, greyish and flaky, like the ash of a cigar, the frame half coming apart, one of the two wooden pegs that held the lower corner together almost out of its fastening, the whole thing out of kilter, the lower crosspiece making an angle with the coping that was not right but slightly obtuse, so that it must have raked the ground when someone opened the gate, the grass round the base of the coping growing in thick, close-set tufts that were lower at that point, only a flat surface with a few blades lying on the ground’s surface, short and stunted, then the bare earth striped with concentric curves corresponding to the bulges on the lower crosspiece of the gate where it had rubbed the ground around the coping, the chicken wire not in much better condition, although it had apparently been replaced quite recently (more recently in any case than the wood of the gate itself) for it wasn’t rusty yet (though the little horseshoe nails that held it to the frame were) but only staved in and distended, making a bulging surface, a deep sag (perhaps the consequence of the kicks necessary to close the henhouse gate) having formed in the lower part, distending or rather irregularly stretching the hexagonal mesh, the grass growing round the foot of the second wooden coping in close-set tufts, and continuing along the fence beyond, Georges’s field of vision stopping there, that is, not distinctly: ending in that kind of fringe that extends to the right and left of what we see and inside which objects are not so much seen as glimpsed in the form of blurs, vague outlines, too exhausted (Georges) or too drunk even to turn his head: he saw no hens inside the fence, or perhaps they were already roosting since they’re supposed to go to bed with the sun, and when he heard Iglésia whispering he didn’t understand at first, repeating: What? Iglésia touching him on the thigh this time, saying: . . .the chickens. I bet they’ll come to get some. It’s dark enough, isn’t it? . . . So they began crawling backwards, their field of vision enlarging as they moved, the house gradually appearing, dark-red and squat, and to the left the henhouse and above the place where they had been lying the moment before a window with a blue enamel pot set on the sill, but the window, although open, empty, dead, black, and the two upstairs windows empty and black too, Georges and Iglésia still crawling backwards in the ditch, then standing up when they reached the turn, dashing forward, balancing on top of the fence and falling on the other side, lying there for a second, motionless, listening to their own breathing that was uneven now, and for a moment unable to hear anything else, then—nothing happening—crossing the little garden bent double, crossing a second fence, and after that (it was an orchard) crouching again one behind the other against the hedge, and again their breathing, their tumultuous blood, but still not moving, the slow darkness gradually thickening, and behind him Iglésia’s voice whispering again, hoarse and furious, stamped with that kind of childish indignation (and no need to turn round to see his big fish eyes full of that same stupefaction, sullen, outraged): “Engineers’ trucks! Hell!. . .”, Georges not answering, not even turning round, the indignant, reproving and plaintive whispering coming again: “Christ. One more step and we’d have walked right into them. What were you looking at?”, Georges still not answering, beginning to retreat along the hedge without taking his eyes off the corner of the brick house that was dark now between the shadowy branches of the apple trees: but no more trucks were going by now and all he could see was the light made by the pink rag hanging on the hedge not far from the horse, but not the horse, and not the sentry either, only the pink patch gleaming faintly in the darkness, then not even the rag any more, because they had crossed another hedge, still walking backwards, their heads always facing the road, bumping into the hedge, their hands groping behind them, raising their legs, straddling the hedge for a minute, bodies bent over, and landing on the other side without taking their eyes off the corner of the house, their heads and their bodies absorbed by different problems, each acting on its own account or rather dividing up what had to be done, their limbs spontaneously accomplishing under their own authority and control the series of movements to which their brains seemed to be paying no attention, the darkness almost complete now, the frightened cackles suddenly exploding in the henhouse in a burst of flapping wings, the absurd and discordant protest filling the twilight for a moment, terrified and furious, like a parodic appendix to the battle: men swearing, clumsy arms flailing the air among the vague reddish balls fluttering, colliding, squawking, until the unequal combat also subsided, ending on a last terrified, strangled, pitiful squawk, then nothing more, except in the empty henhouse the slow and silent descent of the scattered feathers falling, drifting down, and Iglésia’s voice saying: “Christ,” and a moment later saying again: “That’s at least a division that went by under our noses. I never thought there were so many! I never thought they could go so fast. If they’re fighting the war sitting on those seats, what the hell are we doing with our damn nags? What the hell did we look like . . .”