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unawares on the verge of sleep. I didn’t know where I was going; to tell the truth, I didn’t really know if I was driving, or if, stretched out in this vast heat on the sheetless rectangle of my mattress, I was dreaming that I was driving, or even if I was having this sleeping-driver dream in the midst of driving, my hands inert on the black leather hoop of the steering wheel. Sleeping, I said to myself: one should write about this and about nothing else, not about people, not about me, not about absence or about presence, not about life or about death, not about things seen or heard, not about love, not about time. Already, it had taken shape. Obeying a sign shaped like a triangle, I left the highway and headed for the sea. Parking lots followed one another, monotonous, crowded with cars baking in the sun. Finally I noticed an out-of-the-way trail and took it. It led to a little stretch of beach, none too clean, but almost empty: only a few people had spread out the colored squares of their towels and were lazing about, naked and ruddy, exposed to the rage of the sun or else half-hidden under the laughable disks of little parasols. This suited me, and I too undressed and went into the water. It was warm and soft, and instead of waking me up, this monotonous, lapping expanse, swollen with a huge repetitious murmur, lulled me to sleep even more, enveloping my dormant body in the sinuous play of its forms and sounds. Naked, I floated on my back, my head borne by the waves, my eyes blind beneath the triumphant sky, pierced at its zenith by the bleak insatiable fire of the sun, and I dreamed I was swimming out to sea, calmly, with patience and rhythm, pitting without exhausting it the strength of my muscles against the inertia of this immense, shapeless, sly mass agitated by a placid, continuous violence; from time to time, my head went under water, and, with eyes closed against the biting salt, I lost all notion of space, I found myself tossed about, overcome, a dull anguish weighing down my limbs that seemed to move like seaweed, with no more force or power, each limb separate from the others and incapable of rediscovering a whole that might have served to give sense and direction to this movement; in my lungs, the air was turning sour, sucking in my ribs; then a contrary surge of the waves would hurl me back to the sky, my mouth open in a circle just above the waves, whipped by seaspray, and I resumed my regular movements, forcing my way through this endless waste. This lasted a long time, until I heard a voice, a young woman with a loud, tinkling laugh: “No, silly, you’re not swimming, you’re dreaming you’re swimming. Do you even know how to swim?”—“Of course I do,” I wanted to protest: but I opened my eyes in vain, I saw no one.
* * *
That same day, it comes back to me now, some friends had suggested celebrating my birthday; but I couldn’t remember the date, or even the sign under which I was born. I was made that way: neither sad nor merry, neither open nor private, curious about everything but not interested in anything; I knew many people, but wasn’t attached to anyone. It was not my fault; the blame falls on those who had reared me, or on my depraved nature, or else on a blow to the head I got in the fog, one fall night, on a high, dark mountain.
* * *
Scarcely had I gotten back to town than I met an acquaintance. He was coming down a broad staircase at the end of an empty rectangular esplanade, his pale suit shone in the sun; to see him better, I shaded my eyes with my hand, and he burst out laughing, exposing between his garnet lips two rows of regular, gleaming little teeth, all the while holding out his hand and taking me by the shoulder: “You don’t remember me? We’ve been friends for a long time, though.” He began chatting with me casually, about everything and nothing. It was a little surprising: I thought he had been dead for years. “Not at all! Not so far as I know, at least.”