The Stone Raft (Harvest Book) Read Online Free Page B

The Stone Raft (Harvest Book)
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about tranquil Orbaiceta nor about the River Irati, now cut off,
sic transit gloria mundi
and of Navarre. The journalists, some of whom were women, swarmed on to the crucial site in the Eastern Pyrenees, fortunately endowed with excellent means of access, so many and so excellent that within a few hours everyone who mattered was assembled there, people had even come from as far away as Toulouse and Barcelona. The highways were congested, and by the time the police on both sides of the border intervened to divert the flow of traffic it was much too late, the cars stretched for kilometer after kilometer, mechanical chaos, it soon became necessary to take drastic measures, to make everyone turn back in the other lane, which meant pulling
down barriers, jamming the sides of the road with cars, an inferno, the Greeks had good reason to locate hell in this region. Particularly useful in dealing with the crisis were the helicopters, those flying constructions or airships capable of landing almost anywhere, and, whenever it proves impossible to land, they imitate the hummingbird, drawing close until they almost touch the flower, the passengers do not need a ladder, a little jump and that is all, they enter the corolla at once, amid the stamens and pistils, breathing in the aroma, frequently that of naphtha and charred flesh. Heads lowered, they set off running, anxious to find out what has happened, some of them have come straight from the Irati, already experienced in structural geology, but not equipped to cope with anything quite like this.
    The crack cuts across the road and the entire parking area and runs on, thinning out on both sides, heading toward the valley, where it disappears from sight, and winding up the mountain slope, until it finally vanishes among the bushes. We are standing right on the frontier, the real one, the line of separation in this nameless limbo between the stations of the two police forces, the
aduana
and the
douane, la bandera
and
le drapeau.
At a prudent distance, for one cannot rule out the possibility of a landslide if the edges of the ruptured area should cave in, technicians exchange phrases devoid of any meaning or purpose, one cannot refer to that babble of voices as dialogue, and, to make matters worse, use loudspeakers to hear each other better, while the experts, inside the pavilions, speak on the telephone, one minute among themselves, the next with Madrid and Paris. No sooner have they landed than the journalists are off to discover what happened, and they all pick up the same story with some embroidered variants, which they will embellish further with their imagination, but in simple language, the person who vouched for the occurrence was the motorist who, passing through as darkness fell, sensed his car give a sudden lurch, as if the wheels had bounced across a pothole in the middle of the road, and he got out to see what it was, thinking they might be resurfacing the road and had unwisely forgotten to put up a warning sign. By this time, the crack was half a span wide and at most some four meters long. The man, who was Portuguese, called Sousa, and
traveling with his wife and parents-in-law, went back to the car and told them, It looks as if we're already in Portugal, would you believe it, there's an enormous pothole in the road, it's a miracle it didn't flatten the tires or snap the axle. It was no pothole, nor was it enormous, but the words, as we have written them, have one real advantage, simply because they are exaggerated, they allay fear, calm the nerves, why, precisely because they dramatize. The wife, without paying much attention to what he said, replied, You'd better take a look, and he decided to heed her advice, although that was not her intention, the woman's words were more an exclamation than an order, one of those exclamations that often serve as a reply, he got out of the car again and went to check the tires, fortunately there was no apparent damage. Within the next

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