What are you talking about now, the lame man screamed Go to bed! She started suddenly moved away huddled in silence at the other end of the bench still making gestures signals grimacing her eyes still staring at me raising her eyebrows while her silent mouth formed the words saying soundlessly Nasty, Nasty, twisting her hideous goat face) . . . then the bed sank again under her weight I still kept them closed trying to keep to preserve that limitless darkness under my eyelids it changed from brown to reddish then to purple then black with streaks vague blurry patches forming and fading slipping pale shaggy suns lighting up and going out I knew she had left the light on and that she was looking at me examining me with that piercing and close attention they have sometimes I buried my cheeks my forehead in her armpit able to hear the air enter her lungs now at each breath then come out, her heart still beating fast then gradually it slowed down, my eyes still closed I let myself slide down her body along her side her belly rose and fell fluttered like a bird’s delicate throat (the whole peacock trembling with the curtain its curved S-shaped neck ending in the tiny blue head crowned with a fan of feathers, the curtain still swaying after she had let it fall back fluttering like something alive like the life hiding behind it, I had looked up a fraction of a second too late had I seen hadn’t I seen only thought I saw half a face the hand that had suddenly been pulled back letting it fall back now only the bird’s long tail still continued to sway then it too became motionless and the next day we didn’t see her either, the horse had died during the night and we buried it in the morning in a corner of the orchard whose trees dripped in the damp air, their black branches shellacked by the rain, almost completely stripped of their leaves now: we hoisted the body onto a cart and dumped it into a ditch and while the shovelfuls of earth gradually filled it up I looked at it bony lugubrious more insect more praying mantis than ever with its front legs bent its enormous woebegone and resigned head that gradually vanished taking with it under the slow dark mound of earth that our shovels threw on it the bitter grin of its long teeth as if it were jeering at us from the other side of death prophetic strong with the knowledge of an experience we did not possess, the disappointing secret which is the certainty of the absence of any secret and all mystery, then the rain started falling again and when the order to leave came it was falling heavily interposing between the other slope of the valley and us a grey almost opaque veil while sitting in the barn with our packs on the horses saddled we waited for the signal watching the curtain the sheet of silver in the doorway that poured down from the roof hollowing a thin furrow in the ground parallel to the doorstep and a little ahead (directly under the roof line) where the pebbles looked naked washed bare, the air penetrating damp freezing a thick bluish mist escaping from our mouths when we talked, on the curtain the peacock still remained motionless enigmatic, while we were talking we glanced up at it furtively, Blum’s pale face like an aspirin tablet under his black hair with only the two spots of his dark and feverish eyes he was holding his helmet in his hand his head his thin neck came out of his coat collar strangely naked against that soldierly equipment the stiff cloth the leather of the straps inside of which he seemed to be as fragile and delicate as though inside a carapace