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 and fusing by pulverizing the narrow pavement that still separated them.
“‘In my truck bouncing along,’ thought John De Maria in the grips of a growing euphoria, ‘I am the needle of a sewing machine, the thread of the surgeon suturing a wound, the metallic zipper that simultaneously secures their separation and their coitus (John De Maria has a PhD in philosophy from a good American university in the Midwest), and I weave between these two missives to assure the impermeability of two worlds. I am the watershed. Or else, the opposite,’ he continues in his increasing delirium, ‘I am the razor’s edge that will at last allow them to unite the two edges of the horizon into one immense field destined, in a few months, for an abundant harvest.’
“Inspiration came bit by bit to this young man, besotted with poetry, occasional weed smoker, henceforth restricted to working in the postal service. Two months earlier, during one of his university courses, he had invoked the names of writers banned from the curriculum. Some of his students had been offended by it: formal complaints to the administration, a warning from the Director of Studies, repeat offense, great rage, insults, lay off.
“‘These fields situated on both sides of the road,’ continues John De Maria, ‘are wings. My cockpit, a cabin. And I am Hermes, the messenger of the gods transporting news destined for unlucky mortals. Or else, Daedalus or his son Icarus escaping on their wings from the labyrinth of Crete.’ The inspired postman drives faster and faster. He believes that he will soon take off, escape gravity, finally fly. However, left and right, the countryside appears immobile: still the same snow-filled furrows. The monotonous black and white stripes are disproportionate quills canceling out his speed.
“Accelerating even faster, he thinks of all those parcels of existence he’s transporting, of the immense wings and their imperceptible flapping, of an egg swollen with thousands of hopes. John De Maria thinks of a divine surprise falling from the sky, of palpitating antennae awaiting a favorable response, of a fulfillment, of a return of fortune or simply recent news. Then, the opposite, he senses behind him in the truck just as much anonymous coldness, disembodied words, routine sentimentalities, notices, bailiff threats, reports from the litigation department, requests for administrative information, complaints, dubious contracts, death announcements, last wills and testaments, various scams, final notices, stiff and moralizing prose, thinly veiled threats, bad checks, marketing leaflets, tempting propositions, administrative forms, a swarm of black ravens obscuring the sky, throwing their large shadows over the earth and its fields, all that in his command, he the white and blue messenger, the lugubrious bird of misfortune. The haruspex of antiquity would begin his ritual by cutting out an imaginary frame in the sky with a staff, thus delineating a space where the birds of destiny would appear. If they came from the right, it was good luck; from the left, ominous. The postal service Januses salute you. Two ticket counters, two telephone numbers for singing telegrams: heartrending melodies, lugubrious requiems, lessons of darkness, church organ, tearful voices, or else “Ode to Joy,” “Spring” by Vivaldi, or else “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Been Down So Long It looks Like Up to Me,” Offenbach, “La Vie Parisienne,” a French Cancan song, some salsa or bossa nova (John has a fondness for exotic music genres). A vast array of choices, unlimited repertoire, all types of music, a horde of specialized performers in the full spectrum of human emotions. We listen to them, entertained, standing in a doorway or behind a window, seated in a comfortable rocking chair or sipping whiskey, lying on a soft bed, we think we’re in a variety show or a play, or listening to a beautiful actress fallen from the screen cooing her divine melody for you alone, in the intimacy of your ear, or else a grieving baritone and his funereal aria coils through your right eardrum. Perhaps I should paint black the left half of my truck, that bird of misfortune that too often sows sorrow and consternation …
“Soon, these turbulent images take hold of his feverish spirit and he thrusts the accelerator to the floor