...of rage

...she continued nonetheless to advance, eyes fixed on the automobile, the sort of monstrous beetle with iron wings, with exophthalmic eyes, with shining brass mandibles, parked in front of the hotel with its driver still in a duster, his huge googles in his hand, watching her advance toward him, standing beside the old lady sitting beside a garden table and who was also watching her - it can be said that through her tears, through the shining film that covered the old, suddenly collapsed cheeks like a varnish, the silent screen of tears, she (the old lady) could distinguish anything but two bright shapes blending into the shadowy background foliage, growing larger, managing (the old lady) to stand up, to walk in the direction of that dead woman with huge eyes whose mute lips were stirring mechanically, incapable of articulating a sound, opening and closing on words whose meaning the woman trying to utter them (or not even trying: murmuring mechanically, the way a fish out of water, half asphyxiated, continues to open and close its mouth on the void) no longer (or not yet) managed to understand, words inaudible among similarly meaningless noises (the rustle of wind in the swaying branches, the gurgle of leaping water, the chirping of birds): merely assemblages of letters separated by blanks, as they would figure later not engraved in marble or stone but simply printed on the back of that grating announcement no bigger and no heavier than a playing card, her lips still moving of their own accord, faintly, agitated as though a nervous tic, a tremor, endlessly forming over and over the same phrase, the same mute lacerating howl, with no other echo than the indifferent stir of the branches, the monotonous cry of the same bird, the monotonous scraping of the hoe wielded by one of the lethargic gardeners, as if the whole lethargic universe, the earth which was continuing its slow turning, the shaggy cloud which was continuing to disintegrate, to coagulate, to disintegrate again around the jagged peaks, the mountains, the valley, were gradually diluting, absorbing, erasing, annihilating the series of words powerless to escape her throat, stammering, disintegrating, returning again, like a litany, a mad-woman's mumbled phrase: Thy will be... Thy will be... Thy will...

[The Acacia, Simon, C.]