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too, in the suffocation of this drained land, for the night, the bottomless water of sleep, the glaucous water rising from the sea and contaminated with invisible monsters.
    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 them. …
     
    Soon the series of brick houses begins again. “ Rue Joseph-Janeck. ” Actually this is the same street that continues on the other side of the canal: the same austerity, the same arrangement of windows, the same doors, the same plaques of black glass with the same gold inscriptions. Silbermann and Son, exporters of pulp wood, capital one million two hundred thousand; main warehouses: four and six Quay Saint-Victor. Along a loading basin, carefully piled logs behind the row of cranes, the metal sheds, the smell of machine-oil and resin. Quai Saint-Victor, that must be somewhere over there, to the northwest.
    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? It ’ s 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 shoemaker ’ s sign; the word “ Provisions ” 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 a bandoned 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 ewe ’ s milk to a tiny naked baby.
     
    Wallas continues on his solitary way between the drawn shutters, walking along the brick walls with the same elastic, confident gait. He walks on. Around him life has not yet begun. Just now, on the parkway, he has passed the first wave of workmen riding toward the harbor, but since then he has not met anyone else: the employees, the businessmen, the mothers, the children on their way to school, are still silent inside the closed houses. The bicycles have vanished and the day which they had inaugurated has retreated behind a few gestures, like a sleeper who has just stretched out his arm to turn off the alarm clock and grants himself a few minutes reprieve before opening his eyes for good. In a second the eyelids will rise, the city emerging from its false sleep will catch up at once with the rhythm of the harbor and, this dissonance resolved, it will again be the same time for everyone.
    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 reconst itute 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, he ’ ll find himself in his normal today.) Wallas walks on.

     

 

     
     

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