The long sandy beach, deserted on this weekday, was rather dirty, with waxed paper, plastic wrappers, and cellophane from cigarette packs scattered here and there. The women went right off for a swim, but he said he’d rather wait awhile, that he didn’t like to fling himself into the water just like that. I then asked him to translate a few of the passages in the catalog that I hadn’t entirely understood. After the preface he began to translate the titles of his paintings as well. I told him that those I’d understood but he continued all the same and suddenly, when he’d just read Vuole dire caos and Paura clandestina, he stopped. He was still holding the catalog open in his hands and seemed to be still reading the titles to himself when suddenly he told me that at Dachau they had hung him by the wrists until he fainted. Maybe he would have told me more, but just then the two young women, one Greek and one Spanish, merged from the waves and came back to us, wringing their hair. Drops of water slid from their raised elbows and disappeared into the tufts of their armpits. The drops also slipped down from their bathing suits over their thighs, where they snaked along in thin silvery streams, sometimes suddenly changing direction. He stood up and said he was going to swim a little. He had a powerful, athletic body, and despite the choppy sea he swam with a butterfly stroke. After that, he never again spoke of his arrest, the prison, or what he had undergone in the camp. His centurionlike face, his very slight Italian accent when he spoke French. A few years later I learned that he had died at the hospital in Milan, in unclear circumstances (there was some question of counterindicated medication taken after minor surgery—someone intimated that he had committed suicide). I remember seagulls flying overhead, some of them virtually motionless, their wings outstretched, turning their heads right and left, weightless, held aloft by the light sea wind. From time to time they let out hoarse cries. One of them landed very close by and began to tear at a piece of wax paper half buried in the sand with its beak. I was surprised at its size, its enormous hooked beak, its wild, rapacious look.
—Claude Simon, The Jardin des Plantes, p. 91, translated by Jordan Stump.
