Marathe and Kate at Ryle's — "My story it was one day…"
‘My story it was one day at the top of a hill I had drunkenly labored for many minutes to roll to the crest, and looking out over the downhill slope I see a small hunched woman in what I am thinking is a metal hat far below at the bottom, attempting the crossing of the Swiss Provincial Autoroute at the bottom, in the middle of the Provincial Autoroute, this woman, standing and staring in the terror at one of the hated long and shiny many-wheeled trucks of our paper invaders, bearing down upon her at high speeds in the hurry to come despoil part of the Swiss land.’ […] ‘She is standing transfixed with horror of the truck—identically as I had been motionless and transfixed by horror inside me, unable to move
Context
The catalogued sighting and the rescue in one arc: the small hunched woman in the metal hat, frozen mid-Autoroute — her body's transfixed terror "identically" his depression's paralysis, the deformed woman on the road as his inner state made visible — and then the fauteuil, all scene long the emblem of restriction, becoming the instrument of the book's purest unselfish act. "I schüssch" and "wipe-outing" as written; "my wife" arrives a beat early, the story's end already inside its middle.