The Ruined Map (34 page)

On the left-hand side was a high protective wall where rocks were piled up on a slight incline. To the right, beyond a little ditch, rose an almost perpendicular cliff. Its surface was screened by a similar protective wall, but from there the road made a wide curve to the left and soon came to the plateau at the top of the slope. If one advanced five or six more paces, the view would suddenly open up and the town on the plateau would be visible. There was no room for doubt. It was a road I was so used to taking that I passed by quite oblivious to its very existence as long as nothing drew my attention. The road had become completely familiar after how many hundreds of times I had been over it. Now I was going over it as usual … and I was returning to my own house.

Unexpectedly I came to a halt. I paused as if forced back by the spring of the air. I halted, in spite of myself recoiling at the strangely clear impression I had of the sloping road that I usually took no notice of. The reason for my stopping was clear, of course, to me alone, but it was hard to believe. Why, no matter how I tried, could I not remember the scene
that must lie beyond the curve just ahead, the scene which I must know by sight as well as I did this stretch of road now before my eyes?

It was not yet anything to make me feel uneasy, though. When I thought about it, I had the feeling that I had many times before experienced similar lapses of memory. I would wait a minute. I had had the experience of having my eyes go out of focus and of losing my sense of distance as I gazed at a wall covered with small square tiles. Nor was it especially strange for me suddenly to forget, for no reason at all, the name of an acquaintance. I put my left heel on the ground, steadying myself; it should not take too long and I would wait until the focus was right. For I was certain that beyond the curve lay the plateau with its town, and in it my house. Although I could not remember it, its existence was an indisputable fact.

The sky was covered over with a thin smooth blanket of blue-gray cloud, typical of the season, making the time—4:28 by my watch—an ambiguous early evening. The street was light enough for me to be able to make out the five-inch-spaced grooves, yet not light enough to cast shadows. On the protective wall to the left—doubtless due to its material—the moss, mottled with dampness, was rapidly absorbing the darkness, changing the surface into a mass of shadow. At the top of the wall a vague, weathered line diagonally blocked my view; only there was the sky suddenly bright. It was, of course, impossible for me to see what lay beyond, but, if I remembered rightly, there were only three small wooden houses and a building surrounded by clumps of trees that seemed to be an inn or a lodging house, forming a cluster half way up the slope. Another road led away from the foot of the slope, and as I had seldom been there it was not
surprising that my memories of it were somewhat hazy. I wanted to pin my hopes on the fact that such contours of memory, vague as they might be, had been preserved. If the scene before my eyes was not opening up some avenue to the past, such memories would never have arisen. Actually, if I was imagining I recognized a completely unknown place, shouldn’t all the worlds outside my vision completely disappear? But it was only the town on the plateau beyond the curve that had vanished.

The low ground at the foot of the cliff on the north side—ha! I could even give the direction, though I couldn’t ascertain the position of the sun—was already well known to me. At this point a row of houses lay below, and I could see only a labyrinth of vegetable plots formed by the roofs of thatch and tile, a forest of antennae absorbing electric waves, and the chimney of a public bath, standing almost as high as the stone wall in front of me. But I was confident that I could faithfully follow in my memory the entire stretch of road that led to the public bath at the end, in the middle of the labyrinth. The street that the old men, smoking their cigarettes, sitting in front of the bath, waiting to be first in, used to like to walk down … the street where after three o’clock, women would hurry along, wash basins in hand. And the roundabout way by the edge of the cliff where the little trucks carrying fuel came and went. I seem to recall that once the broken handles and frames of placards had grown to a large pile by the side of the road.

Shifting my weight, I tried to reduce my breathing little by little. As I reduced it an uneasiness gradually welled up within me. Or was it perhaps that my breathing slowed down because the uneasiness had come welling up? Far from coming into focus, the town on the plateau beyond the curve
became more and more of a blank as if continually erased by some supereraser. The color vanished … the contours, the forms vanished, and ultimately its very existence seemed to be negated. A sound of someone walking up the slope drew closer. An office-worker type passed me, carrying a document case under his left arm and an umbrella in his right. He was leaning forward, walking on the balls of his feet, and with each step he swung the handle of his umbrella forward. Apparently the snap was broken, for the folds of the umbrella opened and closed quite as if it were breathing. Of course, I did not have the courage to address him, but for an instant I felt inclined to follow him. Perhaps it was best to forge ahead unfalteringly like that. In any event, I should be able to see beyond the curve in five or six more steps. If I could make certain the reality of the scene with my own eyes, I felt that things would resolve themselves quite simply, as easily as flushing down with water a pill that has stuck in one’s throat. Now the man was just rounding the curve. His figure disappeared, but I could hear no scream. Perhaps the town on the plateau existed, as the man was convinced it did. What he could do should not be impossible for me. Anyway, it was a question of a bare five or six steps, and a loss of scarcely ten seconds of time. It was not worth considering that it might come to nothing.

But was it really not worth considering? If I went ahead without waiting for my memory to return, and if by chance the scene turned out to be one I didn’t know, how would I bring things under control? Even this scenery on the slope, which I thought I knew so thoroughly, might suddenly be transposed into an unknown world for me. There was the possibility. Perhaps the row of houses midway up the slope was merely an imaginative collage, and even the memory of the labyrinth at the foot of the cliff could be called a very
ordinary association of ideas coming from the chimney of the public bath. I suppose I could easily infer from the way the slightly dirty moss was growing, extending its oozing domain from the protective wall to the concrete pavement, that this was the northern side of the slope.

In the final analysis, supposing this sensation of familiarity was actually not really memory, supposing it was merely the false sense of
déjà-vu
disguised as memory, then even my conclusion that I was now on my way home became similarly merely a pretext for rationalizing this feeling of
déjà-vu
. If that were true, my very self would be open to doubt, something I could not call me.

Unable to hold my breath longer, I let it out. Passing by the man with the umbrella who had overtaken me, a young girl in a long green jacket went hurrying down the slope with a springy step, jingling the coins in the purse which she clutched in her hand. As if by sleight of hand, someone was constantly vanishing beyond the town that was out of sight, and appearing from it. Using the fact that I had come to a halt as an excuse, I took out a cigarette and put it between my lips, fussing purposelessly and interminably over striking my match. I would have been glad if some acquaintance had chanced by. But supposing, as with the town on the plateau, even faces which I should know by sight were to change into unknown strangers, what then?

Nausea rose in my gorge. Perhaps it was because I had strained my eyes, trying to force myself to see something invisible. In addition to the nausea, I was dizzy. Whatever, I had been hesitating much too long. If I did not have the courage to round the curve, I would have to resolve to act differently. The instant I began to change directions, a comical blast on a horn sounded behind me. A dented three-wheeled truck loaded with vegetables was coming up the
hill, sending up a cloud of white exhaust. But was it an illusion? I wondered. I tried to avoid it by moving toward the protective wall, and from one instant to the next the three-wheeler was nowhere to be seen. But that was not the only thing to vanish. The forms of people instantly were suspended and the surroundings were completely depopulated. I was overcome by an unbearable sense of loneliness. I was wretched, as if I had had ink eradicator poured over me, and I rushed full speed down the road I had just come along. However, the abrupt slope was much harder to go down than to climb up. The smooth concrete paving gave poor footing and the antislip grooves were almost useless for pedestrians. I had to keep my balance by knee action. The protective wall, which had shifted now to my right, gradually grew higher, and the street lights were lit at the point where the slope leveled off. A sign with the name of the town, white letters on a blue ground, was nailed to a lamp pole. I felt it was the name I had expected, but the self-confidence I had experienced before was gone.

                 S
UDDENLY
the road broadened out and led into a main thoroughfare with sidewalks. The lights at the foot of the slope were on, but scarcely ten yards from there the streets were still light. Yet in whatever direction I looked, it was deserted, and I was overcome by an unspeak
able terror. It was as if I were trapped in a landscape where the painter had forgotten to put in the people. And since there were no people, naturally no cars were to be seen. All the same, there were signs of living beings right over there. For instance, the smoking butt of a cigarette lay by the edge of the sidewalk. From the length of the ash, it gave the impression of having been tossed away a few seconds before.

First I began running to the right. I could see the entrance to a subway and felt that the main part of town lay in that direction. Surely the intersection with its traffic light would seem to be the center; there were also an insurance building, a bookstore, and some small food shops. In every one the door was open and the goods spread out in apparent expectancy of customers, but neither customers nor clerks were to be seen. The traffic signal changed from green to yellow, from yellow to red, and from red back again to green, but there were neither moving cars nor stopped cars. However, the smell of exhaust gas in the air was almost the same as usual. Apparently people and cars had vanished but an instant before.

I looked into the subway entrance. The deadly silence had returned. Even the stirring of the air reverberating in the long tunnel was inaudible. There was a snack bar close by and I looked in through the half-open door. No one was there, but some uneaten curry stew on the table was still giving off steam. I began to run. I ran back toward the foot of the slope. Stopping, I looked up at the top, and when I had made sure that my memory of what lay beyond the curve would not return I called out, first in a quite weak voice and then somewhat louder. The sound melted into the deserted, blank scene and was absorbed by it; not even a deadened echo came back.

Again I passed by the foot of the slope and ran back into
the town. I passed through the passage beneath the elevated tracks and turned left at the corner, beyond which one after the other stood a tobacconist’s, a plumbing store, and a cleaner’s. When, at the next intersection from the gas station, I saw a parking lot I thought I had reached the place that somehow fitted in with my own feelings of how things should be. Perhaps that was not my destination. But I had the feeling it was some kind of starting point. I stood in front of the entrance to the parking lot, looking in; the tall chimney of a public bath rose up at an angle beyond the street and before it stood a coffee house. It was a scene that had remained tucked in my memory, clear as a picture postcard. My heart beating in anticipation, I cut obliquely across the street and thrust open the door to the coffee house. Then, exactly as I had expected, I was at last able to come face to face with a living human being. Seated high on a stool at the front of the shop was a woman with a girlishly slender neck, her legs crossed. Apparently she had just turned on the radio as I was coming in, for suddenly a cacophonous sound welled up. When I looked back over my shoulder, I could see, through the black mesh curtain, people coming and going in the street and a solid stream of cars. The relief made me forget for a moment the lost town at the top of the slope. It was, of course, only a fraction of an instant. I had been unaware that outside the evening dusk was gathering; the sky was still lighter than the skyline of buildings, but the cars had already turned on their lights. I had no idea where time was going. When I thought about it, it seemed strange that my breathing was almost unaffected, although I had been running for so long.