The Ravishing of Lol Stein Read Online Free PDF Page B

with pleasure, and with constant amazement. Some fresh air slips into her house, disturbs her, and drives her from it. Then the thoughts begin to come.
    Thoughts born and reborn, daily, always the same thoughts that come crowding in, come to life and breathe, in an accessible, boundless universe, out of which one thought, and only one, eventually manages at long last to make itself heard, become visible, slightly more visible than the others, pressuring Lol, somewhat more insistently than the others, to retain it.
    In the distance the ball trembles, ancient, the only wreck on a now-peaceful ocean, in the rain at South Tahla. Tatiana, when I later mentioned this to her, shared my opinion.
    "So that was why she took those walks, to have a chance to think more clearly about the ball."
    The ball revives, ever so slightly, shimmers, clings to Lol. She gives it warmth, protects it, nourishes it, and it grows, ventures forth from the protective layers, stretches, and one day is ready.
    She enters it.
    She enters it every day.
    That summer, Lol fails to see the light of the afternoon. No, she is making her way into the wondrous, artificial light of the Town Beach ball. And in this enclosure, that opens wide to her eyes alone, she begins again to live in the past, she arranges it, puts order into the dwelling place that is truly hers.
    "A real masochist," says Tatiana, "she must constantly be thinking about the same thing."
    I agree with Tatiana.
    I know Lol Stein in the only way I can; through love. It is because of this knowledge that I have come to this conclusion: among the many aspects of the Town Beach ball, what fascinates Lol is the end. It is the precise moment when it comes to an end, when dawn arrives with incredible cruelty and separates her from the couple formed by Michael Richardson and Anne-Marie Stretter, forever, forever. Each day Lol goes ahead with the task of reconstructing that moment. She even manages to seize a little of its lightninglike rapidity, to spread it out and pinpoint each second, arrest its movement, an immobility which is extremely precarious but, for her, infinitely graceful.
    Again she goes out walking. She sees more and more clearly, precisely, what she wants to see. What she is reconstructing is the end of the world.
    She sees herself—and this is what she really believes —in the same place, at the end, always, in the center of a triangular construction of which dawn, and the two of them, are the eternal sides: it is the moment when she has just become aware of that dawn, while they have not yet noticed it. She knows; they still do not. She is powerless to prevent them from knowing. And it begins all over again:
    At that precise moment, some attempt—but what?— should have been made which was not. At that precise moment Lol is standing, completely undone, with no voice to cry out for help, with no convincing argument, with no proof of how unimportant the coming day was compared to that night, uprooted and borne from dawn toward that couple, her whole being filled with a chronic, hopeless feeling of panic. She is not God, she is no one.
    She smiles, yes, she smiles at that remembered minute of her life. The naiveté of some eventual suffering, or even of some commonplace sadness, no longer plays a part in it. All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.
    And again it begins: the windows closed, sealed, the ball immured in its nocturnal light, would have contained all three of them, and they alone. Lol is positive of that: together they would have been saved from the advent of another day, of one more day at least.
    What would have happened? Lol does not probe very deeply into the unknown into which this moment opens. She has no memory, not even an imaginary one, she has not the faintest notion of this unknown. But what she does believe is that she must enter it, that that was what she had to do, that it would always have meant, for her mind as well as her body,