Télécharger le PDF - Formules

with him at long last.” He couldn’t understand why tears began to run
on her cheeks at that, but he felt that there was something superfluous
or beside the point in his statement. “I am sorry,” he said, “were you a
close friend, too?” It did not really look like a burial in an American movie
—no priest, no widow in black veils, no chauffeur-driven limo waiting
behind a row of stone monuments—, there were plenty of greyish broken
plastic bottles mixed with seaweeds and driftwood washed ashore by a
recent storm, one’s shoes were quickly filling with warm sticky sand.
But still it was a funeral of sorts, a farewell they would not forget, the
last picture with THE END written on it in sober white block letters.
Suffering and meditating were appropriate to the occasion. Life, as they
say, had taken over.
After the ceremony, as Peter and Wanda were crossing the Harbour
bridge, the Sydney tower, aglow with six o’clock splendour, was towering
higher than ever over the rest of the city skyscrapers. Or rather, more
than an abstract symbolic feature, it had become Sydney itself. On the
way back to their respective flats in Coogee Bay Rd., Babette and Jill,
driven by a sincerely afflicted Richard, could see that James Cook was
still standing undisturbed before the Pizza Hut at the corner of Belmore
and Avoca Rd., just opposite the Coles store, provocatively holding his
folded telescope in his right hand like an empty beer bottle. He was safe
from mockery behind the dark green railing which protected his pedestal
from taggers and free speech. Jill thought that James Neighbour, whose
ashes were now at sea, although he had never discovered the meaning of
this land, had come closer to it, after all. Future generations will tell, if
and when they publish his papers, rejoined Babette. It was a pet maxim
of Jacques that there is no end to interpretation, but today for a while
it seemed that text and commentary had become separate and were to
remain for ever distinct:
220
“Take care brother,
See you soon on the moon.
Don’t worry tonight,
Everything is under control”.