Julien Gracq - A Dark Stranger

For Roger Veill

They that have power to hurt and will do none,

That do not do the thing they most do show,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,

Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;

They rightly do inherit heavens graces,

And husband natures riches from expense;

They are the lords and owners of their faces,

Others but stewards of their excellence

Sonnet XCIV

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

During these fleeting, drifting days of late autumn I recall with special fondness the paths on that little beach at the close of the season, suddenly strangely overwhelmed by silence. Its barely alive in its itinerant idleness, that hotel where the influx of women in light dresses and unexpectedly triumphant children will recede with the equinoctial tides and, like September breakers, suddenly reveal the brick and concrete caves, the rocky stalactites, the childish, appealing structures, the over-groomed flower beds that the sea breeze will devastate like dried-up anenomes; everything which, suddenly abandoned to a vacant heart-to-heart with the sea will, for want of reassuring frivolity resume its unassailable and loftier status of a ghost in broad daylight. On the seafront, dead, glassed-in verandas, their wrought ironwork eaten away by the salty scourge, fret themselves like looted jewellers shopssuddenly, incredibly, the worn out, washed out blue of shutters closed on unseeing windows holds back the ebb of life thats responsible for this decay. Yet in the sourish sunlight of the October morning, sounds spring up, strangely detached from the silence in the same way the solemn movement of a sleeper frees him from a dreamthe white gate of a wooden fence creaks, a doorbell echoes loudly from one end of the eager street to the other. I must be dreaming. Who has come calling here with such ceremony? Theres no one here. Theres no one anymore.

I disappear behind the rows of villas above the amphitheatre of the beach, walk up and down avenues buried beneath the trees on soft brown soil muffled by sand and pine needles. As soon as I turn the corner of the beach an equivocal silence sets in. The rumbling of thesea reaches the depths of these avenues hollow green pathways only hesitantly, stirring me like the rumble of rioting at the bottom of a sleepy suburban garden. On this background of dark mineral greenery, of pine and cedar, silver birches, poplars suddenly blaze out, reduced to faint golden smoke, spreading their red flames like fiery caterpillars consuming a piece of paper. Soon the great maritime grisaille will restore this whole scene to primary colourshere and there a subtle pigmentation takes hold, puddle by puddlesalt blanches the surface of walls, turns metal railings a jarring red, the sea breeze scatters sand on floors through cracks in the doorsa sudden, unexpected encroachment pervades this little town, harsh and grey like the salt and the coral, with the vague traces of a fire gone cold, of a dried-up tidal wave.

There are colourless afternoons, closed off, sunk beneath hopelessly unchanging skieslike the poor fairy-tale world inside the glass walls of a conservatorydeprived of that changeable layer of skin that the sun creates for them and which prepares them as best it can for life, when the consciousness of the all-powerful reserve of things wells up in me to the point of horror. Just as after the performance is over I sometimes imagine slipping back into an empty theatre at midnight and, in the dark auditorium, catching the scenery refusing to play the game for the first time. Streets emptied for the night, a theatre that reopens, a beach abandoned to the sea for a season weave conspiracies of silence, wood and stone as effective as five thousand years and all the secrets of Egypt for unleashing spells over an open tomb. Hands distracted, holding keys, playing with rings, hands skilled with weights that make tombstones turn, move the bezel which makes you invisibleI became this ghostly stealer of mummies when, as a gentle breeze blew in off the sea and the sound of the rising tide was suddenly more perceptible, the sun finally vanished into the mist on that afternoon of 8th October 19