MS-WU-MSS008-3-49

[0281] my feet on the ground, my arms on the handle-bars, my head on my
arms, and I waited until I felt better. [0282] But before I leaf^ve this
earthly paradise, suspended between the mountains and the sea,
sheltered from certain winds and exposed to all that Auster vents,
in the way of scents and langours, on this accursed country, it
would ill become me not to mention the awful cries of the corncrakes
that run in the corn, in the meadows, all the short summer night
long dinning their rattles.

[0283] And this enables me, what is more,
to know when that unreal journey began, the second last but one
of a form fading among fading forms, and which I here declare
without further ado to have begun in the second or third week of
June, at the moment that is to say most painful of all when over
what is called our hemisphere the sun is at its pitilessmost and
the arctic radiance comes pissing on our midnights.

[0284] It is then
the corncrakes are heard. [0285] My mother never refused to see me,
that is she never refused to receive me, for it was many a long
day since she had seen anything at all. [0286] I shall try and speak
calmly. [0287] We were so old, she and I, she had had me so young, that
we were like a couple of old cronies, sexless, unrelated, with the
same memories, the same rancours, the same expectations.

[0288] She never
called me son, fortunately, I couldn't have borne it, but Dan, I
don't know why, my name is not Dan. [0289] Dan was my father's name
perhaps, yes, perhaps she took me for my father. [0290] I took her for
my mother and she took me for my father. [0291] Dan, you remember the
day I [rescued] ^saved the swallow. [0292] Dan, you remember the day you buried
the ring. [0294] I remembered, I remembered, I mean I knew more or less
what she was talking about, and if I hadn't always taken part