Rue Esprit-des-Lois is dark and silent. The white glow of the few streetlights meant to illuminate it is immediately swallowed up by the fog.
I pull my suitcase along by its handle, and the rattle of the casters on the uneven sidewalk seems loud enough to wake the whole street, but the soot-colored façades show no sign of life. I’ve put on my high-heeled ankle boots for the trip. The sound of the heels on the concrete is the kind that foreshadows a crime. That click-clack, so feminine, so tempting. I hurry along as fast as I can, my chest tight. But then the frantic hammering of my heels expresses my fear, and so makes it worse.
I can’t go on living in this city. It scares me, it’s killing me a little at a time. Let me at least get away before it can clutch at my heels to pull me down!
I’m completely breathless by the time I reach the Place de la Bourse. There, the orange-tinted lights are so plentiful and so powerful that they cut through the fog and cast a bright blaze over the vast square, over the cold splendor of the restored, magically white façades. This excess of uncanniness makes my head swim. An empty square so brilliantly lit—oh, to what end? I ask myself.
My footsteps resound even louder on the new white paving stones. Nowhere could one be more obviously in the center of the arena. Dragging my big lurching suitcase, I scurry across the square to the tram stop. I see the tram coming from the Place des Quinconces, or rather I sense it, an incandescent mass, as if white-hot from its own lights, which liquefy the fog all around it.
I step toward the tracks. I gracelessly raise my hand, all the while telling myself there’s no need, that the tram surely stops at every station.
It races by, so fast that the rush of cold air makes me stagger. I take a step back. He must not have seen my hand, I tell myself—I was too half-hearted about raising it. He or it? The driver, whom I didn’t even see, or the tram itself?
I sit down on the bench, shivering. For all I know that tram wasn’t in service, for all I know the cars were all empty. It came up too fast, wreathed in a light far too dazzling for me to see anything inside.
In front of me, beyond the street and the quay, the river is steaming with fog. I can smell its silty breath, the malodorous cold rising up from the black water.
The hiss of another oncoming tram makes me jump to my feet. I reach out, shake my hand—again the tram zooms right by me, again its extraordinary speed and the pallid blaze of its windows leave me dazed. Soon a third, then yet another glide by, right before my eyes, ignoring my signals—none of them stop at the Place de la Bourse.
I’ll miss my train if I wait any longer, so I decide to stop trying. I set off down Quai Richelieu, pulling my suitcase behind me. The night is still pitch black. Many trams go by, in both directions. After a hundred yards or so I cautiously turn around and see a tram at the stop I’ve just left. A handful of passengers are getting off, glowing like torches under the lights of the square.
Don’t all the trams stop at the Place de la Bourse?
I’m not making much progress. The train station is still far away, my legs are limp. For the first time in a long while, I feel violently humiliated.
Because just when I was placing all my faith in the tram, all my hope, that very tram rejected me.
Suddenly I just want to give up, turn around and go home, back to Ange, lie down at his side and slip with him into mindless slumber, interrupted only by Noget’s furtive appearances to stuff us with food. And yet I keep walking, knowing I’ll go on even when contrary ideas urge me to turn back. I still love life, stupidly, brutally. Oh no, I’m not tired of living, and isn’t that what now repels me most about my dear, my very dear Ange: his untellable, avid, disgruntled traffic with death, the way he’s giving his body over to decay? I never want to see that again.
Finally I turn away from the quays and onto Rue Domercq, which leads straight to the Saint-Jean station. Several times the tram goes by, filled with passengers clearly bound for the station, since that’s the last stop on the line. Approaching a stop just as a tram is slowing down to open its doors, I wonder if I should try one last time to get on, encouraged by the sight of the little knot of people in the shelter, shielding themselves as best they can from the damp cold of the fog. No malign force will spot me among all these people, I tell myself. For that matter, I think I see several faces and shapes just like mine. In the old days, I would never have noticed that those two women, and maybe that man too, had the first thing in common with me. Now, inspired by a new, subtle sense, I can see it. Just as I can immediately tell the difference between two smells I know well, or two familiar tastes, I can distinguish the people I look like from the crowd I once thought I belonged to, who have with perfect sincerity stopped seeing us—Ange and me and others—as in any way their equals.
If those three dare to assume they’ll be let on the tram, I tell myself, if they feel sure enough of it to voluntarily wait in this clammy, almost fetid cold, why on earth shouldn’t I? I come closer, pressing my suitcase to my leg. The last few steps to the shelter I walk backward. Just as the tram opens its doors, I change my mind and hurry away, almost running, amid the breathless clamor of my high heels and the suitcase casters. You idiot, you simpleton, I furiously chide myself, do you really think it’s enough just to hide away in a crowd, just to go unnoticed for a few minutes? That’s childish, it’s stupid. You’ll never be able to get on. And if they can, that’s because for them things are somehow different. Maybe you’re worse than they are, or at least your punishment’s more severe. Or you’re just worse, yes, why not?
I shudder with fear and anguish as I imagine the spectacular obstacle that would have stopped me this time, so close to my goal, from boarding the tram. A vicious blow, a terrible fall, something painful and humiliating—how moronic, when I’m only five hundred yards from the station!
The tram glides close by me with a mocking little chirp. Pressed together in the back of the tram like the flowers of a tragic bouquet, a sad, dark nosegay destined to be crushed underfoot, my fellow-creatures’ three faces look out at me in sorrow, in pity—poor woman, having to walk, and so fat, too, so ungainly, red with cold and fatigue! That forlorn fellowship makes me angry and ashamed. How ugly they are, how wretched and defeated, I tell myself, dismayed to think those same words might come to their minds when they look at me. But are they, like me, also thinking: I want nothing to do with all that?