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[1109] whether it was wet or whether it was fine. [1110] Men were always busy there, working at I know not what. [1111] For the garden seemed hardly to change, from day to day, apart from the tiny changes due to the customary cycle of birth, life and death. [1112] And in the midst of those men I drifted like a dead leaf on springs, or else I lay down on the ground, and then they stepped gingerly over me as though I had been a bed of rare flowers. [1113] Yes, it was doubtless in order to preserve the garden from apparent change that they laboured at it thus. [1114] My bicycle had disappeared again. [1115] Sometimes I felt the wish to look for it again, to find it again and find out what was wrong with it or even go for a little ride on the walks and paths connecting the different parts of the garden. [1116] But instead of trying to satisfy this wish I stayed where I was looking at it, if I may say so, looking at it as it shrivelled up and finally disappeared, like the famous fatal skin, only much quicker. [1117] But there seem to be two ways of behaving in the presence of wishes, the active and the contemplative, and though they both give the same result it was the latter I preferred, matter of temperament I presume. [1118] The garden was surrounded with a high wall, its top bristling with broken glass like fins. [1119] But what must have been absolutely unexpected was this, that this wall was broken by a wicket-gate giving free access to the road, for it was never locked, of that I was all but convinced, for I had opened and closed it without the least difficulty on more than one occasion, both by day and by night, and seen it used by others than myself, for the purpose as well of entrance as of exit. [1120] I would stick out my nose, then hastily call it in again. [1121] A few further remarks. [1122] Never did I see a woman within these precincts, and by precincts I do not merely mean the garden, as I probably should, but the house too, but only men, with the obvious exception of Lousse. [1123] What I saw and did not see did not matter much admittedly, but I mention it all the same. [1124] Lousse herself I saw but
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[1124] little, she seldom showed herself, to me, out of tact perhaps, fearing to frighten me. [1125] But I think she spied on me a great deal, hiding behind the bushes, or the curtains, or skulking in the shadows of a first-floor room, with a pair of field glasses perhaps. [1126] For had she not said she desired above all to see me, both coming and going and rooted to the spot. [1127] And to get a good view you need the hole in the lock, the little aperture among the leaves, all that conceals you and reveals to you only bit by bit. [1128] No? [1129] Yes, she inspected me, bit by bit, and even in my very going to bed, my sleeping and my getting up, the mornings that I went to bed. [1130] For in this matter I remained faithful to my custom, which was to sleep in the morning, when I slept at all. [1131] For it sometimes happened I did not sleep at all, for several, without feeling at all the worse for it. [1132] For my waking was a kind of sleeping. [1133] And I did not always sleep in the same place, but now I slept in the garden, which was large, and now I slept in the house, which was large too, really extremely spacious. [1134] And this uncertainty as to the times and places of my sleep must have overjoyed her, I imagine, and made the time pass pleasantly. [1135] But it is useless to dwell on that period of my life. [1136] If I go on long enough calling that my life I'll end up by believing it. [1137] It's the principle of advertising. [1138] That period of my life. [1139] It reminds me, when I think of it, of air in a pipe. [1140] So I will only add that this woman went on giving me slow poison, slipping I know not what poisons into the drink she gave me, or into the food she gave me, or both, or one day one, the next the other. [1141] That is a grave charge to bring and I do not bring it lightly. [1142] And I bring it without ill-feeling, yes, I accuse her without ill-feeling of having drugged my food and drink with noxious and insipid powders and potions. [1143] But even sipid they would have made no difference, I would have swallowed it all down with the same whole-heartedness. [1144] That celebrated whiff of almonds for example would never have taken away
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[1144] my appetite. [1145] My appetite! [1146] What a subject. For conversation. [1148] I had hardly any. I ate like a thrush. But the little I did eat I devoured with a voracity usually attributed to heavy eaters, and wrongly, for heavy eaters as a rule eat ponderously and with method, that follows from the very notion of heavy eater. [1149] Whereas I flung myself at the Eintopf, swallowed the half or the quarter of it in two mouthfuls worthy of a fish of prey, I mean without chewing (with what would I have chewed?)then pushed it from me with loathing. [1150] One would have thought I ate to live! [1151] Similarly I would engulf five or six Imperial pints of porter with one gulp, then drink nothing for a week. [1152] What do you expect, one is what one is, partly at least. [1153] Nothing or little to be done. [1154] Now as to the substances she insinuated thus into my various systems, I could not say whether they were stimulants or whether they were not rather depressants. [1155] The truth is, kinaesthetically speaking of course, I felt more or less the same as usual, viz — betrayal! — so terror-stricken that in a sense I lost the power of feeling, not to say consciousness, and drowned in a deep and merciful torpor shot with brief abominable gleams, I give you my word. [1156] Against such harmony of what avail the miserable molys of Lousse, administered in infinitesimal doses probably, to draw the pleasure out. [1157] Not that they remained entirely without effect, no, that would be an exaggeration. [1158] For from time to time I caught myself making a little lep in the air, two or three feet off the ground at least, at least, I who never leaped. [1159] It looked like levitation. [1160] And it happened too, what was less surprising, when I was walking, or even propped up against something, that I suddenly collapsed, like a puppet when its strings are dropped, and lay long where I fell, literally boneless. [1161] Yes, that seemed to me strange for I was used to collapsing thus, but with this difference, that I felt it coming, and prepared myself accordingly, as an epileptic will when he feels the fit coming on. [1162] I mean that knowing I was going
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[1162] to fall, I lay down, or I wedged myself as I stood so firmly that nothing short of an earthquake could have dislodged me, and I waited. [1163] But these were precautions I did not always take, preferring the fall to the nuisance of having to lie down or stand fast. [1164] Whereas the falls I suffered when with Lousse did not give me a chance to circumvent them. [1165] But all the same they surprised me less, they were more in keeping with me, than the little leps. [1166] For even as a child I do not remember ever having leaped, neither rage nor pain ever made me leap, even as a child, however ill-qualified I am to speak of that time. [1167] Now with regard to my food, it seems to me I ate it as when and where it best suited me. [1168] I never had to call for it. [1169] It was brought to me, wherever I happened to be, on a tray. [1170] I can still see the tray, almost at will, it was round, with a low rim, to keep the things from falling off, and coated with red lacquer, cracking here and there. [1171] It was small too, as became a tray having to hold a single dish and one slab of bread. [1172] For the little I ate I crammed into my mouth with my hands, and the bottles I drank from the bottle were brought to me separately, in a basket. [1173] But this basket made no impression on me, good or bad, and I couldn't tell you what it was like. [1174] And many a time, having strayed for one reason or another from the place where the meal had been brought to me, I couldn't find it again, when I felt the desire to eat. [1175] Then I searched high and low, often with success, being fairly familiar with the places where I was likely to have been, but often too in vain. [1176] Or I did not search at all, preferring hunger and thirst to the nuisance of having to search without being sure of finding, or to ask for another tray to be brought, and another basket, or the same, to the place where I was. [1177] It was then I regretted my sucking-stone. [1178] And when I talk of preferring, for example, or regretting, it must not be supposed that I opted for the least evil, and adopted it, for that would be wrong. [1179] But not knowing exactly what I was doing or
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[1179] avoiding, I did it and avoided it all unsuspecting that one day, much later, I would have to go back over all these acts and omissions, dimmed and mellowed by age, and drag them into the eudemonist slop. [1180] But I must say that with Lousse my health got no worse, or scarcely. [1181] By which I mean that what was already wrong with me got worse and worse, little by little, as was only to be expected. [1182] But there was kindled no new seat of suffering or infection, except of course those arising from the spread of existing plethoras and deficiencies. [1183] But I may very well be wrong. [1184] For of the disorders to come, as for example the loss of the toes of my left foot, no, I am wrong, of my right foot, who can say exactly when, oh uninvited! the fatal seeds were sown. [1185] So all I can say, and I do my best to say no more, is that during my stay with Lousse no more new symptoms appeared, of a pathological nature, I mean nothing new or strange, nothing I could not have foreseen if I could have, nothing at all comparable to the sudden loss of half my toes. [1186] For that is something I could never have foreseen and the meaning of which I have never fathomed, I mean its connection with my other discomforts, from my ignorance of medical matters, I suppose. [1187] For all things run together, in the body's long madness, I feel it. [1188] But it is useless to drag out this chapter of my.... existence, for it has no sense, to my mind. [1189] It is an udder at which I tug in vain, it yields nothing but wind and spatter. [1190] So I will confine myself to the following brief additional remarks, and the first of which is this, that Lousse was a woman of an extraordinary flatness, physically speaking of course, to such a point that I am still wondering this evening, in the comparative silence of my last abode, if she was not a man rather or at least androgynous. [1191] She had a somewhat hairy face, or am I imagining it, in the interests of the narrative. [1192] The poor woman, I saw her so little, so little looked at her. [1193] And was not her voice suspiciously deep. [1194] So she appears to me today. [1195] Don't be tormenting