The Tunnel
Скачать
Начало книги
A twenty-four-year-old man, fat, who in order to prevent the horror he saw behind the scenes from coming too close (that was his ability, perhaps his only ability) liked to stop up the holes in his flesh, since it was through them that the monstrousness could stream in, and did so by smoking cigars, Ormond Brasil 10, and by wearing a pair of sunglasses over his regular glasses, and wads of cotton in his ears; this young man, still dependent on his parents, and enrolled in some nebulous course of study at a university that could be reached by railroad in two hours, boarded his usual train one Sunday afternoon, time of departure 5:50 p.m., time of arrival 7:27 p.m., in order on the following day to attend a seminar that he had already decided to cut. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky when he left his place of residence. It was summer. The train ran between the Alps and the Jura mountains, past rich villages and small towns, then alongside a river, and after a little less than twenty minutes, shortly after Burgdorf, it dipped into a small tunnel. The train was overcrowded. Having entered in the front of the train, the twenty-four-year-old man laboriously worked his way through the crowds to the back, sweating and making a somewhat befuddled impression. The travelers were crowded together; many of them sat on suitcases. The second-class compartments were filled up as well; only the first-class cars were sparsely booked.