...of phantoms

It is morning, very early, but inside the large empty house it is already warm, particularly as one climbs toward the upper floors where the sun's rays are concentrated all through the scorching afternoons of midsummer. The house looks inhabited, judging at least by the articles of female clothing hung as if in haste on the coatstands in the hall, but all is silence. And the whole place seems deserted: the immense wooden staircase with its monumental bannister, the first-floor gallery, the intricate corridors of the second floor, the successive rooms whose doors David H. throws open one after another, he too making no sound, as if hoping to catch someone just waking up, or drowsing in a world still peopled by airy phantoms, delicate silhouettes in long voile dresses and hats with broad translucent brims who glide softly through grey meadows iridescent with dew, imperceptible droplets of dew lining each blade of grass and shining against the light of the low-slanting morning sun, warm already though hardly higher than the crest of the gentle slope up which the narrow path leads to the house. The worn rope sandals D.H. is wearing are soundless on the beaten earth of the path, soundless too as he steps over the threshold, pushing open - just enough for him to pass through - the heavy door he finds ajar, soundless as he crosses the deserted hall, soundless climbing the short straight flights of the wooden staircase, soundless still as D.H. opens the door of a room and stands in the embrasure, having pushed the leaf through half its arc. Like all the other rooms in the house it looks inhabited, looks at least as if it were inhabited not long ago: an unmade bed, its tangled sheets seemingly pushed back a moment before by the young sleeper, only recently emerged from dreams that seem to linger in a drowsiness she is reluctant to shake off as her bare feet, moving with the improbable step of the sleepwalker, cross the faded flowers of the carpet to the rustic washstand where the girl slowly pours the contents of the water jug into the white china bowl, bending over the bowl after she has done so for a glimpse of her motionless face, her still sleepy but unblinking eyes, her fine features, sullen as an absent child's, her long, long neck, and one gleaming shoulder bared by the full-length, loosely cut tulle nightdress having slipped over her skin. Then, with the same slowness, she stretches out the other arm (the one with the shoulder concealed), which emerges from a flared sleeve cut off a little below the elbow, and brings the tips other long fingers closer and closer to the limpid surface. Soon her movements cease completely and she stays like that, her gaze dwelling unsleepingly on her slender, irregularly open hand, now suspended above the immaterial, solidified, inaccessible water. Some seconds, or some hours, or some years later the white hand has smashed the liquid mirror and obliterated the reflected image, the long transparent nightdress, the face bent over, the wide-open eyes. And when D.H. pushes the door the room is empty, like the rest of the house. The water in the bowl, clear of any impurity as yet, is calm again, but its surface now reflects only the tiny panes of the casement, beyond which the early-morning sun shines on the sloping meadows bright with white frost or dew where the phantom girls in long muslin dresses and sunbonnets glide with the light behind them, their feet hardly touching the iridescent grass. Inside the room, against the light, the invisible golden dust continues to descend silently through the still air, causing no more than a slight diffusion of the light, afterwards landing, at length, on every horizontal or only gently sloping surface, on the washstand with its abandoned utensils, on the carpet with its faded areas of colour forming arabesques that are already unidentifiable, on the wrought-iron bed with its intertwined white volutes, its disarranged covers, its chiffon sheets...

[Topology of a Phantom City, Robbe-Grillet, A.]