Friday 25 April 2014

...of Sunday afternoons

My neighbours are silent. After the tart, Marlene serves them prunes and the woman is busy, gracefully laying stones in her spoon. The husband staring at ceiling, taps out a rhythm on the table. You might think that silence was their normal state and speech a fever that sometimes takes them.
"Where do you want me to get it?"
"Buy some."
I close the book. I'm going out for a walk.
It was almost three o'clock when I came out of the Brasserie vezelise; I felt the afternoon all through my heavy body. Not my afternoon, but theirs, the one a hundred thousand Bouvillois were going to live in common. At this same time, after the long and copious Sunday meal, they were getting up from the table, for them something had died. Sunday had spent its fleeting youth. You had to digest the chicken and the tart, get dressed to go out.
The bell of the Cine-Eldorado resounded in the clear air. This is a familiar Sunday noise, this ringing in broad daylight. More than a hundred people were lined up along the green wall. They were greedily awaiting the hour of soft shadows, of relaxation, abandon, the hour when the screen, glowing like a white stone under water, would speak and dream for them. Vain desire: something would stay, taut in them: they were too afraid someone would spoil their lovely Sunday. Soon, as every Sunday, they would be disappointed: the film would be ridiculous, their neighbour would be smoking a pipe and spitting between his knees or else Lucien would be disagreeable, he wouldn't have a decent word to say, or else, as if on purpose, just for today, for the one time they went to the movies their intercostal neuralgia would start up again. Soon, as on every Sunday, small, mute rages would grow in the darkened hall.

[Nausea, Sartre, J-P.]

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