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“C2R here,” a man or woman would answer, one of thirteen controllers on duty, each seated in front of a screen, a keyboard, a mike, and all facing the thirty-square-meter map of Île-de-France at one twenty-thousandth scale.

In the course of these transmissions, tiny points of light moved about the gigantic map, blinking on and off in a rolling trompe l’oeil wherever traffic was flowing smoothly, but elsewhere barely twinkling, or already clustered into large patches, growing at the same rate and in the same proportions as their counterparts on the real network of streets, they would enlarge, stretch, and, incidentally, retract before resuming their entropic dispersal across the map; so that eventually, having been halted by a succession of stop signs and tricolor traffic lights, the automobile population in motion reached its maximum density on the highways out of Paris into the suburbs, by which time the entire map of Île-de-France was aglow with glittering trails of luminescence: elegantly arched trajectories, some weirdly sinusoidal, other sections impeccably straight, these being the most numerous, a jumble looking like the ruins of some immense multi-columned piece of architecture.

Movement did sometimes occur in this petrified landscape. A daredevil driver, exasperated by all the delays, would tear out of his lane onto the shoulder and, in flagrant violation of the law, pass everyone on the right. Elsewhere, on one of the superhighways, a few cars in tight formation were driving at top speed, destination Paris, while in the other direction all four lanes were gridlocked. At C2R, this would appear—depending on the circumstances—as a raised dot, climbing, like some kind of reptile, or else as an oval of light in freefall, like a ripe fruit, heavy with its sudden, overwhelming attraction to the ground. Or, if vehicles began pulling away from an intersection, gradually communicating themselves into various converging lanes, the remote transmission converted this movement into an undulation that, when repeated often enough, registered on the giant map as a gracefully nimble rocking motion, as if caused by a breeze off the open sea. While responding to the umpteenth radio call, the controllers thought they could hear the steady sound of surf, the rubbing and sucking of the undertow. The more imaginative among them could feel a warm breeze on their skin. And in the control room’s artificial light, faces grew dreamy, just as bodies—sitting only minutes before in hunched and tense positions at the foot of Île-de-France—now felt weightless, supple, relaxed, as though relieved of their own gravity, spared any aches or fatigue.

An accident brought this fantasy to a rude halt.

“Location?” asked C2R.

A voice in the headset replied: “National Seven, Orly, passage under the South Terminal.

“Category?”

“Five-zero J five-five, said the voice,” which in laymen’s terms meant that a tractor-trailer had caught fire and that the road wouldn’t be clear for another forty-five minutes.

Attempts were being made to cordon off the now-impassable portion of the road. For several kilometers upstream, and as many downstream, mobile barricades prohibited any new access to the underground passage. Already, the giant electronic panels that spanned the N7 or the A108 highways at regular intervals between Villejuif and Corbeil-Essonnes were displaying the word ACCIDENT in brightly lit letters, and most of the access roads along the way had now become detours. This resulted in an anarchic swarm of automobiles filling up the entire local grid. Migratory flows intermixed, intertwined, increased, and multiplied, becoming long processions, wandering in slow motion, searching in the dusk for some alternate route. A cold rain began to fall, soaking the gray of the sky, the red of the brake lights, the white, yellow, and orange of headlights and suburban glare. Car hoods were steaming. Windows were streaming. Behind every windshield, the blurred, wavy image of the driver concealed the same fool’s fantasy: that the cars in front were going to suddenly vanish in a flash! . . . Or that the road would grow wider, they’d start moving again, pick up speed; or at very least, that they could slip into third gear and take their left foot off the shift pedal for a while.

And yet, by the thousands, car radios were making it clear that none of this was going to happen any time soon. The broadcasters counseled patience, sympathized: “Well, it looks like a real mess out there in the south suburbs.” They played sunny, cheerful music to stave off the aggravation, the boredom, the inertia that sets in after a day on the job exacerbated by a traffic jam. Or via the over-sexed voice of some female announcer, they endeavored to lull drivers into believing that the eternal feminine itself had infused the enclosed, dry, and, on the whole, cozy interior spaces of each of their vehicles: “You’re furious out there on the N7, aren’t you?” simpered one, or more often two, even four car radio speakers—for example. Or, “Looks like there’s no way you’ll be catching that plane,” and “Now, don’t you wish you’d moved to Futuna . . . ?” But all these words, from looks like to Futuna, went unheard by Madame Fenerolo, and no less so by her passenger, the former having with one finger preemptively pressed the OFF button after you’re furious.


1. 02

As quickly as a set change between scenes, all the stray shopping carts in the parking lot were gathered up, stacked together under the awning, and chained to the iron grate pulled down in front of the entrances to the SUMABA. By then, the parking lot was practically empty, except for the store-owned vans lined up along the western fence, and, about fifty meters away, the gray Opel belonging to the manager, Madame Fenerolo. She was already walking toward her car when she stopped in her tracks and wheeled around to proffer some final advice to the security guards. She is gesticulating as she speaks, pointing her car keys toward the shopping carts that have to be put somewhere else, or turned in the other direction, or more securely fastened. Standing next to the Opel, Bessie waits. The other cashiers have already left, but not Bessie, resident of Ris-Orangis, as is Madame Fenerolo, who is giving her a ride home. The tall silhouettes of the streetlamps planted in a zigzag pattern in front of Bessie, the patch of orange mist they hold suspended above the blacktop, make the parking lot look all the more deserted, flat and submerged in darkness, while on the horizon, well beyond the vans, clouds swell with a last pale hint of twilight. Bessie gazes in that direction. She’s neither humming nor moving, but simply adjusting her focus on the infinite, the way our eyes do before a seascape—night falls, the air is still, the coconut palms rise all the way to the beach, and we wonder, seeing them thus against the light, whether they might once have been human beings, contemplators of the vastness, sentinels of the millennia, fathomers of the abyss . . . And we yearn to join in their immobile ballet, at the risk of falling under the same spell that first turned them into coconut palms.

“You’d never know the days were getting longer,” says Madame Fenerolo.

And again she says: “I’m going by way of Fontenay, there’s less traffic than on the N20,” and then, “I like your new cardigan. Where’d you get it?”

She applies her thumb mindlessly to her keychain to unlock the car doors. She’ll already have taken the Fontenay road before declaring, again, “I’m taking the Fontenay road.” And without waiting for an answer to her question about the cardigan, she’ll have segued into, “We might be opening a seafood department. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it, a seafood department?”

“Yes, that’d be nice,” Bessie concedes.

They’ve passed Croix de Berny. Traffic has slowed down considerably. Between Fresnes Prison and the next highway interchange, Madame Fenerolo leans on her steering wheel and, pressing a finger against the windshield, she points to a large apartment building.

“I almost moved to this area. It was a house right behind the big building there.”

Bessie cranes her neck, indifferent, while mumbling something like “uh huh” or “um hum.” Because of the proximity of the prison, she doesn’t quite understand which big building Madame is referring to. Madame has no regrets—obviously, Fresnes would have been closer to the SUMABA than Ris-Orangis, but she likes Ris, and Bessie does too, doesn’t she . . . She starts another sentence—“The trouble with,” or “What’s good about”—which she interrupts to listen to the dirge on the car radio.

“Oh no . . . !”

From Fresnes, heading south, the A106 and N7 are momentarily inaccessible.

And: tomorrow, like today, Île-de-France will shiver, cough, sneeze, and ache all over.

Both women are complaining now, Bessie about the degradation of the local climate, denouncing it as a symptom of the whole planet being out of whack, while Madame Fenerolo rages against how much time is being wasted on the drive—she hesitates: turn around and catch the A6? Keep on going to Rungis, Belle-Épine, Thiais, and who knows where else, at this rate?

Near Thiais, she turns off the radio, letting off some steam in the process, glad for some quiet . . . A brief respite. The complete halts are growing longer, more frequent; the driver’s fingers start drumming on the steering wheel, her shoe is tapping the mat, her eyes dart about jerkily, seeking escape via the rearview mirror or alternatively one of the side windows, even trying to pierce the opacity of the roof before admitting defeat and returning to their initial fixed position, to the great disappointment of the rest of her body.

“Worse than ever!” sighs the driver.

And Bessie seated next to her: “Usually, by this time . . .” A pause before continuing—“traffic’s moving,” or, “you’d have already dropped me off.” And again, she waits a beat before coming back with: “But tonight, well, this is something else . . . !”

On the dashboard clock, the blinking of the little orthogonal sticks means that time’s numbers are parading by much faster than those on the odometer. A display of a similar type shows that the outdoor temperature is 33°F, while the inside reading is above 72°. To Bessie, who has kept her coat on over her cardigan, Madame Fenerolo says it would have been wiser to take it off, that staying bundled up like that for too long is the surest way to catch a cold. She doesn’t say take off, however, but remove, and not coat, but wrap. “Your wrap, Bessie; you should have removed it.” And without another word, combining a rotation of her head and a raising of her eyebrows, she indicates the back seat, where, from the beginning of their journey, her own pelisse has lain carefully draped.

And likewise from then on, for the sake of ease or precision, or because, in the present circumstances anyway, a gesture is more comforting than words, Bessie, given the choice, resorts to the former rather than the latter.

“And what about Ti-Jus?” Madame Fenerolo asks her.

Bessie stares at the glove compartment, shaking her head in silence before repeating “Ti-Jus,” half exclaiming, half questioning in turn, leaving the whole matter hanging in mid-air. Then her hand opens, rises, and falls back flat on her thigh, where it sits inert. Her voice finally adds: “It’s hard for young people today,” and Madame Fenerolo agrees: with all the problems we’re having here at home—she says exactly that, “here at home . . .” These are hardly well-considered choices of words, just some of the usual pat phrases that cross the mind and then slip out whenever they become germane to a conversation in progress. They could easily have been replaced by other such phrases, these commonplaces. And been identical to each other. Even been inverted. Bessie could have said: “With all the problems there are today!” and Madame Fenerolo: “Yes, it’s not easy for young people . . .” Their voices, however, the looks on their faces, their faces themselves, the most minute details of their faces—anything about a person that is perceptible from the outside—would nevertheless have registered a significant difference between the two spoken statements: that one meant exactly what its words said, literally, sufficient unto itself; while the other contained a shade of anxious intimacy—where was Ti-Jus? what was he doing? what was to become of him?—and bore the traces of many tender pet names, one after the other, like “Ti-Jus, my baby!” Or, “My boy, my son, my beautiful boy, my Ti-Jus!”