stinks of DDT … I will not give my opinion on this novel within a novel. The reader can make his or her own judgment. But I will take advantage of my subordinate position, of my liberty, and of David’s melancholic stroll on the deserted Long Island shore after Doris’s departure (“Air France Flight 875 to Paris-Charles de Gaulle, immediate boarding at gate 34,” announces the robotic female voice) to add this new seaside scene to the text:
“Beneath a white sky specked with a motionless helicopter, the waves slowly move away from the thin black horizon line, they approach, accelerate, reach the shore, and unfurl there, immediately replaced by other waves that come to crash on the pebble beach endlessly, filling that large strip as my lines succeed each other at the bottom of the page.”
A bit farther on, I insert:
“The sand is littered with debris in varying states of decomposition: pieces of colored glass, bits of plastic that are impossible to identify, shells of crabs in the shape of horseshoes, large spiral shells that are rarely intact, whitish drooping jellyfish, as if dead, heaps of brown or beige shredded kelp, flat pebbles, tempting to throw like spinning tops toward the surface of the ocean so that they bounce and ricochet more and more rapidly before sinking abruptly. David Grey goes down toward the part of the beach covered by the low tide. He stops suddenly and kneels down in front of the little hills made up of fine and supple strands of sand intertwined like tiny rigging. In the shallows, the razor clams await the rising tide. David remembers an ingenious strategy for catching them: all you have to do is leave a pinch of salt on the hole beneath the hill and the mollusk, lured by that crystalline asterisk and that suddenly salty water, will wrongly conclude that the tide has already risen, that it should come out of its hiding place to poke its nose above the sand, and then you simply snatch it up. But Grey has no salt on him: the razor clams can wait in peace for the real rise of the tide. In the same way, couldn’t a cheating weight lifter, with a large magnet hidden above him in the rafters … ? (Trickster’s Net)
*
* Once Doris is on her plane, David Grey leaves New York to go to Chicago by night train. He reserved a sleeper seat, at the very bottom of a cramped compartment, almost level with the ground. There is little space between his sleeper seat, which is more of a narrow bench, and the one above it, occupied by a corpulent man with a wheezing breath. Exhausted after all those days of work and love spent with Doris, in the grips of the sweet melancholy of idleness and amorous solitude, he immediately falls asleep despite the snores above. He sleeps for an unknown amount of time, then is awakened with a start by the silence which has brusquely replaced the regular hypnotic din of the freight car wheels. His neighbor above has even stopped snoring. David sits up on his narrow sleeper seat, reaches for the metallic bar of the closed window and lifts it halfway up. The train has stopped in the middle of nowhere, there isn’t a single house visible in the white early morning glow. The pale sky remains hidden by the canvas rectangle.
In a sleepy stupor, the traveler notices the straight and uniform furrows, parallel to the tracks, of an immense field surrounded by the vertical supports of the window. It snowed. The bottom of the furrows are a blinding white, while the crests of earth, black and irregular, separate the immaculate lines, sometimes skinny, sometimes bigger, thus constituting a repetitive contrast, a fluttering like venetian blinds, a rapid hand playing with the horizontal slats. In the distance, a blue-and-white mail truck drives along the straight line of the road. David thinks then of his own translation work, of the curious layout of (N.d.T.), Prote’s novel, of all those lines of text assembled at the bottom of each page, like the elevated pedestal of an absent statue. Raising his eyes toward the half-raised blinds, he notices, almost at the center, slightly to the right, a small immobile spider.
Lost in the crazed contemplation of this landscape striped with snow, David soon remembers his recent dream, from which he was wrested by the abrupt silence of the train: he is walking with Doris on an immense deserted beach that looks like the beach on Long Island. The two of them suddenly hear, amid the clamor of the surf, a distant and irregular rumble that gradually grows louder. They turn their heads toward the foaming waves that the horizon endlessly regurgitates. Then to the sky, where the clouds keep rolling as if in a fogged-up mirror. Soon, Doris points at a black spot, like a midge or a small asterisk, which grows bigger before their eyes in the white sky, but without changing place, as if the flying object were heading straight for them.
“A plane!” cries David.
“No,” Doris corrects him, “a helicopter.”
The regular hammering intensifies. It sounds like a train, an express train charging straight toward the terrified spectator curled up in his movie theater chair. It is in fact a helicopter. A large bumblebee, a flat beetle, metallic and chubby, the rhythmic humming becomes so deafening and menacing that David and Doris press their hands to their ears, then, panicked, throw themselves into the sand with a beautiful synchronization. Then the aggressive flying machine unleashes a swarm of letters over them, like a load of leaflets or confetti that falls relatively slowly, spinning toward the beach. David sits up. Doris has disappeared. The bird of misfortune with her. David looks at the deserted beach covered in violet envelopes, all seemingly identical. Each one bears a crimson marking in the shape of a Z. He leans down and picks up the envelope at his feet. The name of the sender is on the back, or rather their initials: A.P. Associated Press? Surely not. Agent de Police? Impossible. Aéroports de Paris? No, even in David’s dream there is no doubt about the sender: these messages are directives from Prote, sending a deluge of instructions to his translator, advice and orders for the American version of (N.d.T.).
David Grey no longer hears anything, not even the din of the waves. However, he soon discerns hoarse gasps. He turns around and discovers with amazement a troop of ungainly seals that, right up close to him, emit husky screeches, a concert of wheezing breaths, of irregular puffing and panting. The island of Pharos, certainly. The Nile Delta. The droves of Poseidon, guarded by Proteus. Then David notices that he himself is one of those seals. Transformed by an evil spirit, he lets out a marine trumpeting with his fellow creatures that live sometimes in the water and sometimes in the air. Suddenly, without any transition, everything goes silent again. David wakes up. He sits up on the sleeper seat, he raises the canvas shade on the window, and …
After remembering his recent dream, after calmly contemplating the black-and-white furrows of the immense field, David Grey pulls the shade back down to the bottom of the window, thus banishing the vision of the snowy landscape to that region of memory that welcomes images so unlikely that you ask yourself later whether you dreamed them or actually glimpsed them. (Train Night)
*
* A curiously similar scene takes place in Scattered Figments, my author’s second novel. Given the deplorable quality of the translation of the book, I thought it best to retranslate the entire passage in question. Here it is:
“The blue-and-white mail truck was driving at full speed through the open countryside. In the distance, a train of travelers stopped on the rails seemed to be waiting for the signal authorizing it to take off again. The early morning was throwing a pale light on the parallel furrows of the fields covered in a thin layer of snow that extended as far as the eye could see. The driver of the mail truck was wearing a blue uniform paired with a blue baseball cap; on his vest, a badge displayed his name: John De Maria. As he was driving on the little road, from time to time he imagined two similar immense, handwritten letters, laid out to the misty horizon. Letters destined for stratospheric fighter pilots, for astronauts or inhabitants of the moon, he thought, amused. It was as if these two gigantic letters were on the verge of melting into one to bring together their nearly conjoined signatures, separated by the thin black edging of the paved road, two giants on the verge of uniting
