WorksProse

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Edgar Brau

The Journey
(excerpt)

Translated by Donald A. Yates

Etonnants voyageurs!
Baudelaire, Le voyage, III

At the hour when night seems to gather in its tapestries to the tinkling of frozen crystal, and the weakest of the stars throw themselves toward the still-darkened earth, terrified by the inminent catastrophe of daybreak, at that hour, propitious for the plotting of outrageous things and for the bubbling up of fantasy, precisely at that hour, the brief tolling of a bell, sterile and seemingly veiled  in cobwebs, shook the sleeping town. Just when the familiar silence of the ordinary is about to return, another peal, equally brief, rouses the sleepers, whose drowsy attention is inmediately solicited by two or three additional tollings that seem to be testing the metal integrity of the bell. But after another especially intense stroke of the clapper, followed by others in hurried succession, the bell emits a high-pitched and continuous boom that, turning its sound waves into a lengthened serpent, begins first to course through the town´s streets with implacable sinuosity, and then, by means of its necessary and repeated forkings, assaults the doors, rattles tehe windows and, slipping through cracks, draws  out into the streets with the furor of a wartime levy the amazed occupants who do not yet understand but nonetheless cannot ignore the irresistible command of the bell that back at the station continues to toll.

It takes only a moment for the main street, which has slightly tilted so as to facilitate the procession, to overflow with the growing hubbub of the crowd advancing, at different paces, toward the station. To be sure, the procession is disorderly. The children run ahead screeching and swerving from one side of the street to the other; some women carry their dogs in their arms; others drag suitcases behind them, sidestepping the perplexed people who, falling back, are muttering curses. Occasionally, someone turns around, as if to determine if he is the only person responding to the call; he disappears immediately, swallowed up by the multitude that is frantically pushing ahead amid clouds of dust.

Finally, the mob, gasping with astonishment, stops in front of the station. There, straddling the rusty rails, dark and shining, a locomotive trembles impatiently, trying to communicate with snorts and whistles and vibrating connecting rods its eagerness to depart. The coaches, that stretch along the entire length of the platform, are also straining and their bright metal surfaces dazzle the sleepy crowd that can do nothing but stare.

After a moment, the most intrepid of the group climb up the boarding stairs to take a look at the inside of the coaches, which, to judge from their shouts, are empty. Suddenly, a cry of surprise greets the appearance, on top of the locomotive, of the engineer, a man of rosy complexion with a long mustache, whose chubby hands are stroking constantly at his blue uniform. From his vantage point he greets the crowd with broad gestures and then, with a playful smile, pulls a lever releasing a thick cloud of smoke that rises several feet in the air and then suddenly, just as it is about to assume the shape of  a genie or some such creature, drops onto the people below, who run off in terror in all directions. But it is merely a joke, a frightening specter made of smoke that promptly dissipates to the amusement of the engineer as well as the relieved townspeople, who nonetheless immediately back off again, since next to the engineer, amid traces of smoke, as if emerging from a swamp, has begun to appear the figure of the fireman, whose presence, once he has risen to his full height, draws an exclamation of fright from the crowd. And in fact his appearance is frightening: extraordinarily tall, a true titan, his muscular body strains at his tight-fitting clothes, which are completely covered with soot, as is his enormous head, crowned with kinky hair that looks like a spider´s nest. His face, dark and shiny, is fixed in an evil grin, calculated and self-sure, in whose presence each person feels himself confronted with an old, uncertain fear.

From Casablanca and Other Stories
MSU Press, 2006

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