MS-WU-MSS008-3-51-1

[0135] I watched him recede, overtaken by his anxiety, at least by an anxiety which was
not necessarily his, but of which as it were he partook. [0136] Who knows if it wasn't
my own anxiety overtaking him. [0137] He hadn't seen me. [0138] I was perched higher than the
road's highest point and flattened what is more against a rock the same colour as
myself, that is grey. [0139] The rock he probably saw. [0140] He gazed around as if to engrave
the landmarks on his memory, and must have b^seen the rock in the shadow of which I
crouched like Belacqua, or Sordello, I forget.

[0141] But a man, a fortiori myself, is[k]n't^n't
exactly a landmark, because. [0142] I mean if by some strange chance he were to pass that
way again, after a long lapse of time, vanquished, or to look for some forgotten
thing, or to destroy something, his eyes would search out the rock, not the haphazard
in its shadow of that unstable fugitive thing, still living flesh.

[0143] No, he certainly
didn't see me, for the reasons I've given and then because he was in no humour for
that, that evening, no humour for the living, but rather for what doesn't stir, or
stirs so slowly a child would scorn it, let alone an old man. [0144] However that may be,
I mean whether he saw me or whether he didn't, I repeat I watched him recede, at
grips (myself) with the temptation to get up and follow him, perhaps even to catch
up on him one day, so as to know him better, be myself less lonely.

[0145] But in spite of
my soul's leap out to him, at the end of its elastic, I saw him only darkly, because
of the dark and then because of the terrain, in the folds of which he disappeared
from time to time, to re-emerge farther on, but most of all I think because of other
things calling me and towards which too one after the other my soul was straining,
unmethodical, distracted.

[0146] I mean of course the fields, whitening under the dew, and
the animals ceasing from wandering and settling for the night, and the sea, which
I won't qualify, and the sharpening line of crests, and the sky where without seeing
them I felt the first stars tremble, and my hand on my knee and above all the other
wayfarer, A or B, I don't remember, wisely going home. [0147] Yes, towards my hand also,
which my knee felt tremble and of which my eyes saw the wrist only, the heavily
veined back, the pallid rows of knuckles. [0148] But that is not, I mean my hand, what I