“He’s going to die—­in one hour from now, or two.  He’s in such a state that to-morrow morning he’ll be rotten.  He must be taken away on the moment.”

At nine in the evening they say that, and then they put the lights out and go away.  I can see nothing more but him.  There is the one lamp, close by, watching over him.  He pants and trickles.  He shines as though it rained on him.  His beard has grown, grimily.  His hair is plastered on his sticky forehead; his sweat is gray.

In the morning the bed is empty, and adorned with clean sheets.

And along with the man annulled, all the things he had poisoned have disappeared.

“It’ll be Number Thirty-six’s turn next,” says the orderly.

I follow the direction of his glance.  I see the condemned man.  He is writing a letter.  He speaks, he lives.  But he is wounded in the belly.  He carries his death like a fetus.

* * * * * *

It is the day when we change our clothes.  Some of the invalids manage it by themselves; and, sitting up in bed, they perform signaling operations with arms and white linen.  Others are helped by the nurse.  On their bare flesh I catch sight of scars and cavities, and parts stitched and patched, of a different shade.  There is even a case of amputation (and bronchitis) who reveals a new and rosy stump, like a new-born infant.  The negro does not move while they strip his thin, insect-like trunk; and then, bleached once more, he begins again to rock his head, looking boundlessly for the sun and for Africa.  They exhume the paralyzed man from his sheets and change his clothes opposite me.  At first he lies motionless in his clean shirt, in a lump.  Then he makes a guttural noise which brings the nurse up.  In a cracked voice, as of a machine that speaks, he asks her to move his feet, which are caught in the sheet.  Then he lies staring, arranged in rigid orderliness within the boards of his carcass.

Marie has come back and is sitting on a chair.  We both spell out the past, which she brings me abundantly.  My brain is working incalculably.

“We’re quite near home, you know,” Marie says.

Her words extricate our home, our quarter; they have endless echoes.

That day I raised myself on the bed and looked out of the window for the first time, although it had always been there, within reach of my eyes.  And I saw the sky for the first time, and a gray yard as well, where it was visibly cold, and a gray day, an ordinary day, like life, like everything.

Quickly the days wiped each other out.  Gradually I got up, in the middle of the men who had relapsed into childhood, and were awkwardly beginning again, or plaintively complaining in their beds.  I have strolled in the wards, and then along a path.  It is a matter of formalities now—­convalescence, and in a month’s time the Medical Board.