Solo Faces by James Salter Read Free Book Online Page A

come out of my hand and that would be the end.”
    “Did they find you? I alerted the mountain rescue.”
    “They flew by. I don’t know if they saw me.”
    Bray nodded. He was ashamed of what he had earlier felt, of having so easily given up someone for dead. The drained, low voice seemed to come from an inner man. The weary face touched him deeply. He recognized the defeat in it, the renunciation. At that moment something bound him to Rand, he would have liked to acknowledge it but he remained silent. Instead he picked up the bottle.
    “Want some?” he asked.
    Rand shook his head.
    “Not bad,” Bray said, drinking. “Where’d you get it?”
    “Don’t remember.”
    He fell asleep. His boots were on. He was lying in the disorder of retreat, his fingernails black with dirt. He slept for eighteen hours, people walking up and down the path. In town they were already telling his story.

10
    I N THE FALL HE found a room behind the papeterie, along the Impasse des Moulins, in a house by the river. The campground was empty, the town still. September light fell on everything. A lazy, burning sun filled the days.
    Cowbells ringing mournfully in the high meadows, the indifference of local people, the cool green forests—these seemed to spell out the season. The peaks were turning darker, abandoning their life. The Blaitière, the Verte, the Grandes Jorasses far up the glacier, he began to look at them in another way, without eagerness or confusion. There was a different sky above them, a sky that was calm, mysterious, its color the blue of last voyages.
    His hair was long, he was growing a beard—it was already fanning out, filling with wildness like a prophet from the Old Testament. They knew him in the shops where he had begun to speak a halting French. He was clean, he was dry. He walked to his room in the evening with the end of a long, narrow loaf of bread sticking out of his pack.
    Later he lived in a room behind a small museum, the Musée Loppe, which was at the end of a passageway, and then in the attic of a house near the station, a large house with green shutters and faded walls. It was entered by a garden gate in the shade of an alley. Two café tables were rusting near the door. Inside was an odor of cooking and tobacco, warm, oppressive. His room had a small skylight and balcony with a set of double doors hung with curtains that once were white. Across the way was a garage and the rear of Hôtel des Étrangers. Rain fell on the metal roof. Occasionally there was the soft clatter of a train.
    He stood outside Sport Giro, looking at boots in the window. Someone motioned him to come in—it was the owner at the door.
    “You don’t need to stand in the rain,” he said.
    “Merci.”
    “You speak French?”
    “Not really.”
    “I think you do,” Giro said.
    The salesgirl barely glanced up. If you look like that, you don’t have to speak, she remarked in French. Eventually you have to say something besides “thank you,” Giro replied. Such as? she said.
    Giro’s homely face made an expression of resignation.
    “I didn’t quite understand that,” Rand said.
    “It’s nothing.”
    The girl had turned away. She had a certain disinterest, even insolence, that annoyed him. Ordinarily he would have known how to respond but here the language baffled him.
    He thought of her the next day at the baths. The water poured over him, gleaming on his limbs. Here he was more confident, unencumbered. He dreamed of possessing her, gratifying dreams. Her hands were banging on the wall, he was wading in cries …
    The woman in her flowered wrap asked him, “Vous êtes anglais, monsieur?”
    When she found he was not, she confided in him. The English were very dirty, she said. Even the Arabs were cleaner. Had he been to England? No. Unexpectedly she smiled.
    This woman at the Douches Municipales, Remy Giro, an infrequent stranger—there were not many he talked to. There was a teller at the Banque Payot who glanced at him