Free Trio by Robert Pinget

still a danger threatening their teaching, and that is the superstitious survival of scientifico-historical notions which no longer correspond in any way to the evolution of their minds. Hence, in university lectures, frequent confusions and anachronisms. A distinguished professor recently risked the statement that the druids used to immolate the azimuths and centipedes of Reason. This is regrettable. But I am optimistic, in spite of these aberrations. For they do no harm to anyone except the academic young, who in any case are more and more losing their memory.
    June 13
    In the burying-ladies’ huts, there is room for only one person. When you are going home at night, you are only too glad to stop at one of them. Their occupant is rarely there. Her task requires her presence elsewhere, among the bushes, or the ravines, which she examines at dusk. A strange task! So you go into the shed, where digging tools, hoes, and grappling-irons are piled up pell-mell. The cutting-up hemp has been rammed into a crate, it’s merely the work of a moment to throw it onto the fire and thus thaw yourself out a little. This custom of cutting up corpses with hemp goes back a long way. By dint of unremitting friction on the joints, the burying-ladies finally manage to detach the flesh, which they stuff with bits of lint before tying them to the grappling-irons. Next, they pitch them down, simultaneously, into the bottom of the twelve or so surrounding wells. It is only the carcass and the viscera that are interred, and not by the burying-lady herself, but by her nearest neighbor. They travel leagues through the woods in order to meet each other, and sink waist-deep into the bogs.
    The grubs that they fatten up in these marshes are as big as sausages when they come to eat them.
    But their existence can only be called wretched. It consists in sleeping standing up in their shacks, suffering from cranial rheumatism—at the frontoparietal suture, which is very slack—from which they have no respite, fighting against the blisters that periodically erupt on their epidermis—and these may sometimes attain the dimensions of the shack and the strength of its framework—and living in fear and trembling night and day in case they’ve left a grappling-iron down a well   …  
    They mate amongst themselves, without the slightest desire, and give birth to edible daughters who are a kind of saprophyte.
    July 28
    “You can take it or leave it”: an injunction frequently used by hairdressers. Their clients make no bones about it. The poor women know their duty; they hang their heads. To prevent the spread of dandruff, they are scalped. Then their cranial periosteum is curled. The slum kids adore this calcined odor. During the operation they hang outside the windows in bunches. They get dispersed with insecticide. But since the hairdressers’ salons are located under the ballast in the stations, and the upper parts of their heating pipes serve as buffers for the freight cars, the kids don’t go far. They wait for the next client, perching on the gauges. And every time, it’s the same to-ing and fro- ing. The railroad employees have signed petitions. Waste of effort! The wives of the minister responsible are all clients.
    July 29
    When you make an inventory of your matches, one thing strikes you: how few there are. What! this derisory portion allotted to each national is the sole source of light in the country? Judging by the light they diffuse—and there is never any shortage of it either in the built-up areas or in the countryside—there must be some sort of magic at work.
    They often maintain that God has too much pleasure. And from there to doing without daylight by having recourse to this makeshift expedient, there is but a step. Potential rebellion? Ill-disguised rancor? I’m merely making an observation. The natural light is suspended. Polyhedral receptacles, mounted on steel shafts, keep it prisoner. These pseudo-street lamps, whose