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I had risen well before dawn, without having really slept, and, as I approached the sea, I had caught it still in its vigilant, nocturnal sluggishness. I had swum in the midst of a darkness rhythmed by long silent waves, gradually losing all awareness of what awaited me, all memory of the country massed behind the coastline ("America," "Florida," a perplexed voice within me proclaimed), all co
I had stood up when I noticed that the sand was begi
The sun-drenched silence of the place, sheltered by the dune and, behind it, the scrub, filtered out the sounds one by one: now a shout coming from the beach, now a car passing beyond the trees. These sounds seemed to come from very far away, isolated by distance, like signals from an alien world. This world, another holiday morning, was waking up all around me, routinely genial in its ways, making my presence here more and more incongruous. I was a man who had come from a forgotten age to demand satisfaction from a vacationer who, but for my arrival, would have been playing with his two children, making sandcastles or catching shellfish. One could hear voices more frequently and more distinctly, carried up from the beach by the wind. The hum of vehicles was becoming more continuous. There was a tone of triumphal tranquillity in the rhythm with which the sounds of the day were gradually coming together. I was a ghost whose presence could make absolutely no difference to it.
But a brief jolt in these cadences drew me out of my drowsiness. The sound of a car stopping and driving off again at full tilt. It all happens so quickly that I am not aware in what order the noises come. "Someone's opened a bottle of champagne," suggests one thought numbed by the sun. But before this dull pop, suddenly matched by a burning pain in my shoulder, before this pain there is a leap: two adolescent boys come ru
At the hospital reception desk it took me quite a long time to prove I was creditworthy. The receptionist explained to me in detail what type of medical insurance I needed in order to be admitted. The towel on my shoulder was no longer holding the blood and this was trickling down my arm. I managed to get her to accept my credit card. She telephoned a superior for reassurance. On the walls I looked at the photos showing off the most high-performance equipment the hospital had at its disposal. While she was talking the receptionist was wiping my card with a Kleenex tissue to remove the bloodstains, then she wiped her fingers with a swab soaked in alcohol.
In the corridor where they made me wait I came upon a whole row of young cooks in their white uniforms, some of them with their hats on their heads. Each of them, all in identical postures, was holding an injured hand wrapped in an emergency bandage. They looked as if they were the victims of a mad killer bent on exterminating all kitchen staff. Tiredness at first stopped me realizing that these were simply accidents at work. Hundreds of restaurants along the coast, knives that cut a finger at the same time as a slice of steak. As I awaited my turn I thought again about Vi
The nurse who came to fetch me thought I had lost consciousness. I was sitting motionless, my eyes closed, the back of my neck against the wall. In the questio