People were arriving, alerted who knows how, greeting one another with furtive little nods; and the whole crowd, composed of neighbors, acquaintances, and relations, froze before this inconceivable sight: a man lying there with a broad brown mark on his bald head, his mouth open, his eyes glassy; and a woman seated on a great worm-eaten tree stump, washed up by the river, a woman whose beauty and lack of modesty hurt your eyes.

And this was the sensation experienced by everyone on that bank. An ocular discomfiture, as if an eyelash had slipped under your eyelid and blurred your vision. This dead man whom no one dared to touch before the police arrived, this woman with her breasts scarcely hidden by a few shreds of cloth-two extraterrestrials landed on this day in the summer of 1947, the summer which all the newspapers had proclaimed to be that of "the first real vacation of peacetime."

Amid this uneasy stasis a movement was finally made that broke the spell. An old lady bent forward and removed a long, fine strand of waterweed that clung to the dead man's brow. Releasing all its pent-up energy, the crowd erupted into an angry hissing: nothing must move before the police got there! And at last it became clear to them that the whole scene really was happening. In a book, as several people remarked, everything would have been resolved much more quickly. But in the reality of that banal July day there was this long wait, extending absurdly beyond any acceptable limit. There was the strand of weed and the shirt that finally dried on the victim's body. Groups formed; words even more pointless than usual were uttered; "Loo-loo" wept; the men directed increasingly bold stares at the half naked breasts of the unmoving woman. And when they managed to tear their eyes away from the drowned man, with his face covered in duckweed, to which they were attracted, as if magnetically, it was the figure of the postman on his bike that could be seen in the distance. Such was the nauseating equanimity of real life, that has no concern with plot development and often actually ruins it with its glutinous slowness.