...of dismay

But Georges didn’t go back to the summerhouse any more now, merely defying it, spying on it without even looking at it (for he had no need to, he had no need to use his eyes for that, being able to see without needing the image printed on his retina, the mass of body now increasingly invaded by fat, monstrous, more and more overpowered by its own weight, the face with the features more and more weighted down by the effect of something that was not only fat and which gradually was taking possession of him, invading him, imprisoning him, immuring him in a kind of mute solitude, a proud and ponderous sadness), the way he had defied him, spied on him when he came home, the scene occurring like this: Georges declaring that he had decided to work on the land, and supported (although he pretended not to hear her although he pretended to speak to them both together, and yet turning noticeably towards her alone and noticeably turning away from his father, and yet speaking to him, and noticeably paying no attention to her or to anything she might say), supported then by Sabine’s noisy, obscene and uterine approval; and no more, in other words not a word, not a remark, not a regret, the heavy mountain of flesh still motionless, silent, the heavy and pathetic mass of distended and worn organs inside which or rather under which lay something that was part of Georges, so that depsite his complete absence of apparent reaction Georges heard perfectly and louder than Sabine’s deafening prattle, the imperceptible sound of some secret and delicate organ breaking, snapping, and after that nothing else, nothing except that carapace of silence when Georges would sit down at the dinner table in his filthy smock, with his hands not dirty but somehow encrusted with earth and grease the evenings of the slow and empty days during which he drove the tractor,…

[The Flanders Road, Simon, C.]