The Erasers (6 page)

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
café
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 why—sometimes after a shock, not always—and then starts again afterward, all by itself, with no more reason. Apparently there is nothing broken inside, it can also run for several w
eeks at a stretch. It is unpre
dictable, 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 facade 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
boat—the hull of a sailboat? A low stone bridge closes off the canal. Probably that wasn
’
t exactly right: the boat could not have passed under the bridge. Wallas continues on his way toward the center of the city.

Having crossed the canal, he stops to let pass a streetcar returning from the harbor, its new paint gleaming—yellow and red with a gold coat-of-arms; it is completely empty: people are going in the other direction. Having reached Wallas, who is waiting to cross the street, the car stops too, and Wallas finds himself facing the iron step; then he notices beside him the disk attached to a lamppost:
“
Streetcar Stop
”
and the figure 6 indicating the line. After ringing a bell, the car starts up again
slowly, its machinery groaning. It seems to have finished its trip. Last night, as he came out of the station, the streetcars were so jammed that he was unable to pay his fare before getting off; the conductor could not walk through the car because of the suitcases. The other riders informed him, with some difficulty, of the stop nearest this Rue des Arpenteurs, of whose existence most of them seemed quite unaware; someone even said that it was not in this direction at all. He had to walk a long time along the badly lighted parkway, and once he found it, he noticed this
café
that was still open, where they gave him a room, not very luxurious of course, but good enough. He was quite lucky actually, because it would not have been easy to find a hotel in this deserted neighborhood.
“
Furnished Rooms
”
was written in enamel letters on the window, but the manager hesitated before answering; he seemed annoyed, or in a bad mood. On the other side of the embankment Wallas turns into a street paved with wood, which must lead toward the center of town;
“
Rue de Brabant
”
is written on the blue plaque. Wallas has not had time, before leaving, to get hold of a map of the city; he plans to do so this morning as soon as the stores open, but he is going to take advantage of this respite he has before going to the police station, where normal service does not begin until eight, to try and find his way alone through the labyrinth of streets. This one seems important despite its narrowness: apparently long, it dissolves into the gray sky in the distance. A real winter sky; it looks as though it were going to snow.

On either side stretch rows of what seem to be brick houses, all similarly constructed, without balconies or cornices or ornament of any kind. Here there is only what is strictly necessary: regular walls pierced with rectangular openings; it does not suggest poverty, only work and economy. For the most part, moreover, these are office buildings.

Severe fa
ç
ades, rows of small, dark red bricks, solid, monotonous, patient: a penny profit made by the
“
Resinous Wood Corporation,
”
a penny earned by
“
Louis Schwob, Wood Exporter,
”
by
“
Mark and Lengler
”
or by the
“
Borex Corporation.
”
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 firm
’
s 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:
“
Gentlemen, in answer to yours of the
…
”
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.

***

But here is the deeper trench which the water carves through these brick days; along the quay rises the gables
’
line of defense, where the openings instinctively grow more myopic and the ramparts thicker. Down the middle of this cross street flows a canal, apparently motionless, a straight corridor men have
left to the original basin, for barges loaded with wood that slowly move down toward the harbor; last refuge, 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.

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 back
—
almost 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 imp
ression 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.