While the Gods Were Sleeping Read Online Free PDF Page A

before she left the house, with her regal quantities of fur; the feathers in her hat and her parasol paused for a second in the hall and looked at my father to check that everything was in order.
    I believe that I am only now capable of seeing the splendour of it all, the shimmering of the morning light on the marble in the hall, the awesomely fine textures of all the material with which the woman who was my mother clothes, decorates, arms herself.
    The expectancy on her face seems to extend farther than the prospect of her weekly excursion, as if she suddenly knows she is free from my sarcasm and irritation, because for a long time I considered her a pitiful marvel of the petit-bourgeois fear of life, which was only distinguished from a fossil by the fact that it occasionally moved—but now, now, now…
     
    When she suddenly turns up here and presses her cheeks, hidden behind the grey-white veil of one of her summer hats, against the cheeks of Tatante, my father’s younger sister, that is, and stretches out her arms, with her fingers in gloves of wide-meshed crochet work, as we said goodbye, that summer, when we left for our annual vacation with our relations in northern France…
    If I suddenly remember her now, in the sepia light that the panes of the glass roof, which have become dulled by soot and dust, strew onto the platform, where the engine spews clouds of steam and hissing sounds from its joints, and the porters load the skips and cases that pursued us like a stream of associations whenever we made the journey, with my brother and me somewhere in between, reduced to luggage that must not be left behind…
    Am I capturing her in these syllables, or are the words, which are never simply ours, making a place free in the great throng of things, a well-circumscribed empty space, in which she can here and now take up residence?

     
    W HERE ELSE COULD SHE BE? None of the places where I spent my childhood still exists. I needn’t imagine that I can hear the crumbly earth crunching under the soles of my shoes again, on one of the country roads around the house where she was born, with on both sides the bright yellow stubble or newly mown barley under a blue sky from which memory has sifted all impurities, or that I can hear the drumming of the hail on the battered glass of the station concourse, when my brother Edgard and I returned to our town after years away—I can hear it whenever I want. Some travellers dived for cover when the hailstorm struck, but my brother took my hand in his and said, with unusual lyricism by his standards: “These are the wings of Nike.”
     
    We went to see her side of the family every summer. I didn’t have a particularly weak constitution as a child, indeed I was reasonably robust, like my brother, but we lived in town, under the belching smoke of industry. It could do no harm, she felt, to build up our strength for a few months in the healthy air of her native region just over the border with France, where in the summer above the horizon in the west there hung the typical azure of sky over sea. I could look at it for ages, at the window of my room on the top floor of the house, which the local people had dubbed the Crooked Château.
    It hung between two forms of living, between the utilitarian and the ostentatious, as if it had at some time got stuck ina difficult metamorphosis from farmstead to country house. But the eccentric combination of the living quarters, in their half-faded grandeur of pilasters and fluting and heavy pediments above the windows, with the much older sections of more sober stables and barns that surrounded them, marked off a spacious inner courtyard, partly planted with ash and beech, partly paved with hard bluestone, on which on August afternoons the sun could blaze down so fiercely that the heat came close to ecstasy.
     
    “Child, for goodness’ sake go and sit in the shade,” I hear her call out, while in the cool under the trees she bends over the tub