America by Yves Bonnefoy

I

Back then I lived in a small house among several others, on an isolated sand hill sown with short, bright-green grass. I set out early every morning and headed for a restaurant visible a mile or so away, just across the road that hugs the Pacific coast. I loved to watch the cars as they streamed by silently below, skirting the open countryside, on that long ribbon of road. I enjoyed watching the windows of the restaurant too, still lit up for night despite the golden dawn. Shadows crossed the sheets of glass - cast by a car pulling up, or one or two people approaching a door. I strolled down the path on an easy slope, toward that life from another world; though at some point, its sounds became audible, gradually louder. The events of those peaceful minutes were little more than a bumper's sudden star, as it nicked a sunbeam; or the transient flare of a mustard field on the low blue mountain to my right. In short, I shared the everyday existence of the light: a bit as though I'd intruded on its privacy but found right away it reassured me and wished me well. The light was my friend, and would stay with me the whole day through.

But then, after all those mornings that had always been the same - a way for time to flow by noiselessly, like rivulets left on the beach by an ebbing tide - what a change took place on day, a Sunday. From my distant perch, the view was clear for miles; but now I couldn't see a single car. Instead of the usual traffic, today I made out what seemed to be children: countless groups of children, all walking in the same direction, spilling over the horizon from the north and dipping out of sight to the south. They appeared to spring from no humdrum reality: all the more since they spent their whole passage on earth amid a fantasy, moving huge balloons across the sky, staggered at different heights. Their colors were wildly varied, often bright, and their shapes were even more astonishing. Some were pure: the five solid bodies of geometry; a perfect beauty of planes and angles, formed from a lucid material - some kind of cloth, not doubt. Others were tangled and complex - even, at times, vaguely clownish. They sprouted growths that defied any purpose: arms adorned with bracelets, or legs wearing shoes of light. The children held on to these balloons with strings that allowed them a semblance of freedom, savored with bonhomie. While some of the frail aerostats merely coasted ahead, straight above their puny guides, others reeled and tottered with laughter, like clumsy, good-natured dragons. Still others seemed to wander here and there in the parade, or even to veer widely, on either side of the road. The silken strings glistened, and now and then a purplish blue, pomegranate red, or yellow turned opaque. The curving sheets bulged like sails, and some of the ballons jostled in midair.

On the ground, intermittently, a gap appeared - several feet of pavement, empty of anyone or anything. Children stopped, retraced their steps, or joined a different group; but the procession soon filled in again, as densely as before. More and more astounded the nearer I drew to the road, I now discerned the crowd was truly enormous. Its ranks held a range of small enigmas I hadn't suspected before. Some were not pedestrians but cyclists, tugging their string with only one hand; even so, the aerostat they trailed might be fairly immense - a kind of hot-air balloon, spitting fire. Other boys and girls were pushing or pulling open carts, where statues nodded and swayed. The shoulders of these effigies also gave off flames, or smoke at least - russet fumes, thick with an incense I could already smell. The line was endless, and so were the occasions for surprise. Still beyond my hearing, this grand cortege impressed me by its absolute strangeness; but my delight at the infinity I sensed in it was just as deep. Locusts sweeping down on the gardens of a city, the last before the desert, are no less mysterious, I imagine: tiny lives, eyes shut beneath their tiaras, like monarchs without a kingdom. Even more than amazement, what seized me was gladness, the joy that's born when something overtakes us that we have no way to grasp: the hope of breaking the chains of insights that always bound us until now - the joyous hope that by no longer knowing, we will at last more fully be.