...of a telephone booth

...Contrasting with the luminous reflections of the pedestrians passing by on the sunlit sidewalk (among whom the group formed by the woman and the child, standing there motionless, can still be seen), the row of severed legs, with their vague resemblance to prosthetic devices, seems to have been put in storage there, like stage props of a grotesque, artificial, nocturnal world whose colour has faded in the daylight. Several elderly ladies in outlandish getups are seated in a row on one of the benches in the foyer of the hotel with the thick red carpeting and marble columns. From inside the telephone booth he can see their withered, painted faces and the flowered hats atop their heads, like huge begonias in soft colours, pastel pink or pale blue. In the distant silence at the other end of the line the telephone keeps ringing at regular intervals. In between rings he can hear the silence slowly flowing, with a slight hissing sound, like thick layers of time fleeting, continuously and inexorably. The airplane seems to be suspended motionless in a space without a single point of reference above the vast stretch of gently rounded clouds ahead and behind, to the right and to the left...

[Conducting Bodies, Simon, C.]