CHAPTER ONE
1
Wallas is leaning against the rail, at the end of the bridge. He is still a young man, tall, calm, with regular features. The clothes he is wearing and his idle air provide, in passing, a vague subject of remark for the last workmen hurrying toward the harbor: at this time, in this place, it does not seem quite natural not to be wearing work clothes, not to be riding a bicycle, not to look hurried; no one goes for a walk on Tuesdays early in the morning, besides, no one goes for a walk in this neighborhood. Such independence of the place and the time has something a little shocking about it.
Wallas himself thinks how chilly it is and that it would be pleasant to warm himself up by pedaling across the smooth asphalt, swept on by his own momentum; but he stands where he is, clinging to the iron railing. The heads, one after the other, turn toward him. He adjusts his scarf and buttons his overcoat collar. One by one the heads turn away and disappear. He has not been able to get breakfast this morning: no coffee before eight in that cafĂ© where he has found a room. He glances mechanically at his watch and notices that it has not started again; it stopped last night at seven-thirty, which has not made things easier for his trip or for anything else. It stops every once in a while, he does not really know whyâsometimes after a shock, not alwaysâand then starts again afterward, all by itself, with no more reason. Apparently there is nothing broken inside, it can also run for several weeks at a stretch. It is unpredictable, which is rather annoying at first, but you can get used to it. It must be six-thirty now. Is the manager thinking about going up to knock at the door as he promised? Just in case, Wallas has wound the traveling alarm clock he had taken the precaution to bring along, but he has awakened a little earlier anyway: since he was not sleeping, he might as well begin right away. Now he is alone, as though left behind by the wave of bicyclists. Before him, vague in the yellow light, extends the street along which he has just walked before turning the corner onto the parkway; to the left an imposing five-story apartment building with a stone façade stands at the corner, and facing it a brick house surrounded by a narrow garden. It was there that this Daniel Dupont was killed yesterday by a bullet in the chest. For the time being, Wallas does not know any more than that.
He arrived late, last night, in this city he scarcely knows. He had been here once already, but only for a few hours, when he was a child, and he does not have any very precise memory of the place. One image has remained vivid to him, the dead end of a canal; against one of the quays is moored an old wreck of a boatâthe hull of a sailboat? A low stone bridge closes off the canal. Probably that wasnât exactly right: the boat could not have passed under the bridge. Wallas continues on his way toward the center of the city.
Severe façades, rows of small, dark red bricks, solid, monotonous, patient: a penny profit made by the âResinous Wood Corporation,â a penny earned by âLouis Schwob, Wood Exporter,â by âMark and Lenglerâ or by the âBorex Corporation.â Wood export, resinous wood, industrial woods, wood for export, export of resinous wood, the neighborhood is completely devoted to this commerce; thousands of acres of pine trees, piled brick by brick, to shelter the big ledgers. All the houses are built the same way: five steps lead to a varnished door, recessed and with black plaques on each side showing the firmâs name in gold letters; two windows to the left, one to the right, and four stories of similar windows above. Perhaps there are apartments among all these offices? They cannot be discerned, in any case, by any outer sign. The employees, still not wide awake, who will be filling the street in an hour will have a good deal of difficulty, despite being used to it, recognizing their doors; or else maybe they enter the first one they come to, to export at random the wood of Louis Schwob or of Mark and Lengler? The main thing is that they do their work carefully, so that the little bricks go on piling up like figures in the big ledgers, preparing still another story of pennies for the building; a few hundred tons more of totals and exact business letters: âGentlemen, in answer to yours of the âŠâ, ready cash, one pine tree for five bricks.
The row is broken only at the perpendicular, identical crossroads, leaving just room enough to slip between the piles of ledgers and adding machines.
Beyond the channels and dikes, the ocean releases its hissing whirlpool of monsters whose coils are here confined between two reassuring walls. Still you have to be careful not to lean too far over, if you want to avoid inhaling themâŠ.
After a crossroad, the landscape changes slightly: the night-bell of a doctor, a few shops, the architecture a little less uniform, giving the neighborhood a more livable look. A street branches off to the right, forming an angle more acute than the preceding ones; maybe he should follow it? Itâs better to follow this one to the end, there will always be time to turn off afterward.
A wisp of smoke lingers on the ground. A shoemakerâs sign; the word âProvisionsâ in yellow letters on a brown background. Although the scene remains deserted, the impression of humanity gradually increases. At one ground-floor window, the curtains are decorated with a mass-produced allegorical subject: shepherds finding an abandoned child, or something of the kind. A dairy, a grocery store, a delicatessen, another grocery; for the time being all that can be seen is their lowered iron shutters, and in the middle, outlined against the gray sheet iron, a lace star the size of a dinner plate, like the kind children make out of folded paper. These shops are small but clean, often repainted; almost all are food stores: an ocher butcher shop, a blue dairy, a white fish store. Only their colors and the sign on their pediment distinguishes one from another.
Again, open blinds and that cheap net curtain: under a tree two shepherds in classical costume give eweâs milk to a tiny naked baby.
The only pedestrian, Wallas advances through this fragile interval. (Just as a man who has stayed up too late often no longer knows to which date to ascribe this dubious time, when his existence loses its shape; his brain, tired out by work and waking, tries in vain to reconstitute the series of days: he is supposed to have finished for the next day this job begun last night, between yesterday and tomorrow there is no place left for the present. Completely exhausted, he finally throws himself down on his bed and falls asleep. Later, when he wakes up, heâll find himself in his normal today.) Wallas walks on.
2
Without going out of his way or slowing down, Wallas walks on. In front of him a woman crosses the street. An old man drags toward a back door an empty garbage can that had been standing on the edge of the sidewalk. Behind a window are stacked three rows of rectangular platters containing all kinds of marinated anchovies, smoked sprats, rolled and loose herring, salted, seasoned, raw or cooked, smoked, fried, pickled, sliced, and chopped. A little farther, a gentleman in a black overcoat and hat comes out of a house and passes him; middle-aged, comfortable, frequent stomach trouble; he takes only a few steps and immediately turns into an extremely clean-looking café, certainly more appealing than the one where Wallas spent the night. Wallas remembers how hungry he is, but he has made up his mind to eat his breakfast in some large modern restaurant, on one of those squares or boulevards that must, as everywhere else, constitute the heart of the city.
The next cross streets intersect the one he is on at a decidedly obtuse angle, and consequently would lead him too far backâalmost in the direction he is coming from.
Wallas likes walking. In the cold, early winter air he likes walking straight ahead through this unknown city. He looks around, he listens, he smells the air; this perpetually renewed contact affords him a subtle impression of continuity; he walks on and gradually unrolls the uninterrupted ribbon of his own passage, not a series of irrational, unrelated images, but a smooth band where each element immediately takes its place in the web, even the most fortuitous, even those that might at first seem absurd or threatening or anachronistic or deceptive; they all fall into place in good order, one beside the other, and the ribbon extends without flaw or excess, in time with the regular speed of his footsteps. For it is Wallas who is advancing; it is to his own body that this movement belongs, not to the backcloth some stagehand might be unrolling; he can follow in his own limbs the play of the joints, the successive contractions of the muscles, and it is he himself who controls the rhythm and length of his strides: a half second for each step, a step and a half for each yard, eighty yards a minute. It is of his own free will that he is walking toward an inevitable and perfect future. In the past, he has too frequently let himself be caught in the circles of doubt and impotence, now he is walking; he has recovered his continuity here.
The street next crosses another canal, wider than the last, along which a tug is slowly approaching, pulling two coal barges. A man in a dark blue pea jacket and a visored cap has just clo...