Martin moved again. He began to play with the sand. He wished he had buckets and spades, that he could make castles and sand-pies. His mind was wholly concentrated on this tiny game. There was a kind of bulb in his brain, an electric sphere through which a single phrase resounded: ‘I must dig a very deep hole in the ground.’
Martin began digging. But what happened—it was part of the game—was this: all the time Martin’s fingers were scooping sand out of the middle of the hole, the sides, being too steep, were collapsing and filling up the small pit again, so that it was almost impossible to go lower than about ten centimetres. But Martin’s hands were not concerned with this detail: this was a game, a trifling little game, and a very deep hole must be dug in the ground. Besides, after a few minutes Martin began to discover the subtle points of his work. One need only dig down quickly for a few centimetres, paying no attention to anything else. Then begin, cautiously, to remove the sand in small pinches, like that, a centimetre at a time. When you came to the exact point where you knew from experience that the whole thing would collapse, you had to be very careful. Holding your breath, studying, without seeming to, the direction and strength of the breeze, you went on, using the very tips of your fingers, gently, gently. You took the sand from the middle of the hole, almost grain by grain. You got deeper like this, a millimetre, two millimetres, three, four, five, six, seven millimetres. The sides of the hole moved a little; microscopic avalanches began to slide down the cliffs and grains of dust rolled from top to bottom, drawing other, still smaller grains in their wake. A puff of air, or the vibration of a steam-roller in the neighbouring avenue, brought down entire sections. But the hole was still there, a perfect cone, menacing, defying the rest of his desert. Then, when you had got the full enjoyment out of it, when you’d had enough of being happy, of seeing it, you began digging again, very gently. With the tip of your forefinger you took away another one, two millimetres. You pushed aside a few grains and then all at once, before you’d had time to see it happening, the disaster occurred: the sand closed over Martin’s hand like a trap, and where the hole had been there was nothing left except a vaguely uneven patch on the motionless ground, where not even the dull rumble of the collapse had been noticed.
Martin played this game several times over. It was a good one, because he scarcely had to move. Only his hands were active, fumbling in the sand, choosing particles at random, pushing aside obstacles, twigs, as nimble and precise as insects. The game was smaller and smaller, more and more unnoticeable, and it seemed in a way as though nothing could have stopped it. It was then that Martin’s fingers, sliding between two layers of sand, felt a small, round, hard object there. On bringing it up to the surface, Martin found that what he held between his finger and thumb was a kind of black seed, scarcely as big as a tiny pebble. The object was dull-surfaced and roundish. When he laid it on the palm of his left hand, Martin discovered that this object was an animal, an insect; a weevil, no doubt, or something similar. A dwarf beetle, perhaps, when one remembered that weevils are not usually found except in sacks of flour. Unless it was a lost weevil, one of those weevils that mistake grains of sand for grains of wheat. Martin bent his head towards the creature lying motionless in the hollow of his hand, and gazed at it for a long time. He saw the round, blackish body, the outlines of the wing-cases, the retracted head and antennae. By tossing it in his hand he turned it on its back, and looked at its grey abdomen and all the curled-up, delicate legs, each ending in a sort of minute, downy hook. The creature didn’t move, and one might easily have thought it had been dead for days, dried up in this inert posture. But Martin was not deceived; he realized at once that the weevil was alive, and was shamming death so as to be left in peace. He saw that at once, at the first glance, because the little animal remained so obstinately curled up, and perhaps, as well, because of an imperceptible vibrating movement in the folded antennae. This was fear, this tiny speck of dust, this poor little fruit-pip, quite black, killed on itself, time halted, body upside down, legs hugging its abdomen where the palpitating life was hidden.
Martin held his hand close to his spectacles for quite a time, staring hard at the insect. Astonishing thoughts were now being born in his brain; first of all a fierce determination to make the animal move, to make it run away, scampering along his line of life, clambering over the cushions of muscle on his hand, and disappearing up his wrist, into the stifling depths of his shirt-sleeve. Martin felt as though his eyes and his spectacles had turned into steel blades and his will was travelling along the metal, rushing with implacable violence at the little dry, black ball. Something in the nature of words, of unadulterated verbs, TO MOVE TO MOVE TO MOVE TO MOVE. Projectiles falling on the centre of the abdomen, between the puckered legs, and which would reanimate the insect’s body, break through the appearance of death and induce frenzied flight, mobile panic. But nothing came. Time was still held up, inside that carapace. Perhaps, even, the insect might have gone blind, or really died suddenly, have become a little pebble that nothing could destroy, nothing could touch. But if so, where was it now? Where had it disappeared to, that which had been the insect? Martin was trying desperately to understand what had happened. For a moment he had come so near to being a real god; he had reached the borders of a sublime condition; and now he couldn’t manage to struggle: this was flight, surrender; his mind seemed to be running back down the steps of a great staircase, faster and faster, blindly, involuntarily, four by four, carried deeper in its flight with every step. He was about to fall, to disintegrate, nothing would be left of him, and all this because of a tiny insect, a sort of incomprehensible weevil that obstinately refused to move out of the hollow of his hand. He must do something, quickly, before it was too late. Martin’s heart shrank as he felt night approaching, the shadow moving, advancing, something frozen and opaque spreading through him. He sensed the arrival of the black, volatile tide. Things were crumbling everywhere within him, inexpressible sand-castles were silently caving in. An immense disquiet was coming down like the waters of a weir. Like black fire, rushing before the wind, continually widening its circle of annihilation. He even felt his life, his meagre life, slipping away, withdrawing from him, evacuating its premises. He must do something, before he became calm, before he became a statue.
Martin bent a little closer to the palm of his left hand. His spectacles were so close to the weevil that he could no longer see it distinctly. The motionless creature was a vague, coal-black speck in the mass of pink flesh. When his face was only about ten centimetres away from the animal, Martin slowly pursed his lips and blew. The stinking breath enfolded the insect completely; it held out for a few seconds and then, threatened with suffocation, rolled over on to its belly and began to walk. Martin had got the better of it. With instinctive repulsion he dropped the insect on the sand and watched it crawling. Something base and painful rose up in his mind; Martin whispered: ‘Anima … Anima …’ and began laughing.
Later, Martin picked up the little creature, made a hole in the sand and placed it in the middle. Without hesitation, the weevil began climbing up the side. But the sand kept slipping under its feet, and it fell back to the bottom of the hole. It remained there for a moment, as though dazed by its fall, or pretending for no reason to be dead; then it began climbing up the crumbly wall again. Its tiny legs were moving at a frenzied pace, its head drove in among the grains of sand, its antennae groped feverishly in all directions. Martin watched the insect’s behaviour with close attention; he couldn’t tear his eyes away from its blackish body, as though all the life in the world had been placed at the bottom of that hole, with no hope of getting out. Sometimes, as it climbed, the weevil brought an avalanche of sand down on itself. An entire stretch of wall would totter and collapse on the insect, the grains of sand completely covering it. At such times it would remain motionless for a few seconds, clinging to some scraps of the grit. Then, once the avalanche had stopped, it would resume its ascent, toiling, making progress, going higher and higher
. Blocks would break away under its feet and it would nearly fall backwards. But none of all this disappointed it, nothing halted it. It kept on, up and up. Then, when it was about one-third of the way up the cliff, all of a sudden, the ground ceased to give it a foot-hold; it went on paddling desperately, but in vacancy. The entire wall gave way, and there was a sudden fall, higgledy-piggledy, amid torrents of sand. Every time, Martin thought the creature would give in, surrender its body to misfortune: such a light puny body, a body which would surely be useless in face of death. But the insect didn’t give in. It had scarcely touched the bottom of the chasm before it set off again, nearly always attacking the same side of the wall. So there must be a god for insects as well, a messiah for the coleoptera and the arthropoda, a jet-black, shell-backed saviour, all antennae and legs, who had given his magic order once and for all! A god for each of these monsters, for the rhinoceros-beetle and the dynastes hercules, for the staphylina and for the pyralis that lives on the vines, for the great emperor moths and for the centipedes! Or was there no one for that world, no one for this hole dug in the sand? The whole earth was like the pedestal on which Martin was sitting—little Saharas, great Saharas. Holes, landslides. Legs paddling, antennae groping, and warm and comfortable inside the creaking shells, close-packed organs, recesses quivering with mysterious rage.
Martin stopped watching the weevil, which was beginning its 264th climb, and looked at his hand, spread out in front of him. He moved his fingers, one after another, thumb, index, ring-finger, middle finger, the thumb again. He closed his fingers. He opened them again. He plunged them into the sand, bent his knuckles, brought his hand out again. There was some sand imprisoned in it. Martin unclenched his fingers and the sand trickled gently out. Martin rose to his knees in the sand. Overhead, night was approaching. The sky was covered with thick, vitreous clouds that must have soaked up all the light.
Things were like this. One must be alive, feel oneself alive down to one’s most forgotten depths, caught up in the dusk, in this town, on this stretch of inhabited earth, in the centre of a courtyard, a kind of council-house troglodyte. One must have full possession of one’s whole body and soul, alone in the middle of a concrete desert, yet at the same time flowing slowly on with all the rest of the universe. A body like a spring of water, unique and spreading all around, a body like a leaf, lying there, yet at the same time scattered about, a positive dwelling with regular walls, divided into rooms, kitchen, bathroom, cupboards, with doors and windows, proffered in its entirety. Then, night could come, the street-lamps and lighthouses would be kindled placidly, one after another. The crowd would jostle its way home along the streets, the bars would light up, the locked and barred shops would blink, loud-speakers would begin to bellow out monotonous tunes. Something mysterious would glide in everywhere, a sort of customary slumber, and the animals would return to their corners to sleep. All this would soon be happening, no doubt. It was written in people’s bodies, on their nerves, on their fibres, deep in their flesh. It was drawn everywhere, on the pavements, along the walls, inside the electric bulbs, to sleep, sleep, like a little invisible cross, the mark of life.
Martin knelt in the sand, listening to the manifold cries criss-crossing in the air around him. He heard the hoarse screams of children, the horns of motor-cars, the whistles of trains, the dull thuds that shook the ground, the full-toned tumult from television sets, rending sounds, crackling sounds, belching sounds, all these voices mounting up, replying to one another from end to end of the town, and having no precise meaning, only perhaps the same ineffable little shudder rising out of the hollow within oneself, gently enfolding the whole body, mounting, radiating out, and turning by degrees into joy, certain joy, sweetness, a ringing cantata of joy.
When the sky was quite dark and covered all over with clouds, the rain began to fall on Martin, but he paid no attention to it. He stayed where he was, kneeling in the sand-pit, his arms dangling at his sides, the tips of his fingers touching the sand. The rain fell in big drops on the top of his head, his shoulders, his legs. Each drop burst violently on his skin, projecting a thin, cool mist around it. Martin didn’t move; he was staring into the distance now, at the flat line of the wall and the rolling-shutters of the garages. To the right of the garages, next to the dustbin shed, there was an opening in the building, through which the roar of traffic and the sound of car-horns came in.
It was from that point that he saw the bulky figure of this woman walking towards him; she wore a raincoat and carried an umbrella. It was his mother. She came over to the sand-pit and stopped about a yard away. Martin saw she was carrying some garment under her arm. He looked his mother straight in the face, through his spectacles over which the water was beginning to trickle. She looked at him, too, for a minute, with a kind of shyness or sadness. Then she came a few steps nearer.
‘Martin?’ she said.
Martin went on staring at her. She said again:
‘Martin?’
She held out the garment; it was a raincoat.
‘Martin, I brought you this. It’s raining.’
‘Yes,’ said Martin; ‘thank you.’ He put the raincoat down beside him on the sand.
She came still closer. Martin saw her tired, almost bloated face. Her greying hair, her thick-hipped body. The grey-blue raincoat she was wearing, and the umbrella, a big black umbrella swaying slowly above her head, with the raindrops pattering down on it very fast. He saw that her whole figure had something indefinably childish and tragic about it, wrinkles round the mouth, dim eyes, a red nose, countless signs of ugliness and old age, which it was impossible to look at without curiosity.
She came still nearer, up to the stone rim round the sand-pit.
‘Martin,’ she said hesitantly, ‘Martin—You ought not to stay out here—It’s raining hard, you know. You’ll catch cold. Put on the raincoat I brought you.’
Martin didn’t answer. He picked up the garment and put it on quickly, without doing up the buttons. Then he sat down on the rim of the sand-pit and scooped up some sand, mechanically.
‘What have you been doing all this time?’ she asked. ‘You’ve been sitting on this sand-heap for more than two hours. You ought to come indoors now.’
She hesitated, then changed the umbrella to her other hand.
‘Come along,’ she said; ‘your dinner’s been ready for quite a time. Don’t you want it?’
Martin shook his head:
‘No, not yet.’
‘It’s quite dark now. You ought to come in.’
‘I can’t come just yet,’ said Martin.
‘Why not? It’s raining, you’ll catch cold.’
‘No, I’m not cold. I must—I must stay here a bit longer.’
‘Aren’t you hungry?’
‘No,’ said Martin; ‘I must—I still have to think about some things. And I’m comfortable here. I’m not cold, I can stay.’
‘Won’t you come indoors? You could work upstairs.’
‘No, I couldn’t. I have to stay here.’
‘It isn’t sensible,’ said his mother. ‘Really, you’d do better to come in. It’s going to rain very hard, presently. And it’s late. You know what time it is?’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Martin. ‘I have to stay here.’
‘You’ll be drenched.’
Martin looked at the sand lying in his palm; it was already very wet, blackish, and the grains had coagulated into a sort of mud.
‘What have you been doing all this time?’ asked his mother.
‘Oh—nothing,’ said Martin.
‘You’ve been here a very long time, really a very long time,’ said his mother pensively. ‘I was wondering what on earth you could be doing, I mean, what you were thinking about, and all that … And just now I saw you out of the window. Did you see me?’
Martin didn’t reply.
‘Yes, I saw you, just now. In fact I waved to you. You looked as if—You looked as if you were enjoying yourself?’
‘Yes, I wa
s enjoying myself,’ said Martin.
‘Really? And you weren’t thinking about anything?’
‘No, not a thing.’
She pushed back a lock of greyish hair that was sticking to her forehead.
‘I wish so much—’ she began. Then she stopped. She hesitated for a few seconds, and when she spoke again, it was in other words:
‘You—you’re not tired?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure you’re not cold?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I—’
She said nothing more for a minute. They both stayed where they were, motionless, in silence, except for the sound of the raindrops pattering down on the umbrella. The rain was falling on the sand, too, at Martin’s back, but with a padded sound. The earth gave off queer smells as the water gradually soaked into it, smells of roots, phosphates, of old, rotting leaves.
‘There’s a smell of wet paper,’ said Martin.
His mother shifted from one foot to the other. She looked up at the house-front; all the windows were lit up, and dark silhouettes moved across them every now and then. One could hear human voices calling out, too, the rattle of crockery, kitchen noises. The meals were coming to an end, up there in the stifling lairs.
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