I arrive at the marketplace. In the center stands a fortresslike red brick building. The small, dust-covered turrets at the corners are supported by brown Atlases. Sky-blue plaster loincloths conceal the private parts of these squat giants, who seem to smile under their burden. Plump pigeons are preening themselves in the nooks and crannies of the brick facade. Down below shopkeepers are gesticulating in their doorways. Along my way, sausages splutter in frying pans, cheeses display their functional sculpture, suspended rabbits swing to and fro, and catfish yawn in glass tanks. Pigs’ kidneys, strips of tripe and pigs’ feet are laid out in aluminum trays; shops are cluttered with crates of apples, tubs of sauerkraut, and sacks of onions. It takes me several minutes to escape from the magic attraction of rugs with rhymed inscriptions, brass-and-tinsel rings, potato peelers, wonder glues, string ties, china deer, gingerbread hearts, trick cigarettes, obscene wooden dolls, and magnetic mouse traps. Customers are still drifting about, though the foreheads of the plaster giants are already darkening in the twilight, and the market will soon be packing up. The hyacinths get a last watering, the fish are fed a beetle or two, the geese are stowed away in the icebox. The sausages make a last splutter in the pan, the mottled pumpkins are put back into their sacks, and a jet of water rinses the blood from leather aprons and marble slabs. The crash helmet, the corn cutter, and the nutcracker won’t be sold until tomorrow. A birch-twig broom raises a whirl of dust, iron gates crash to, metal chairs are folded up, electric switches are shut off. A stall keeper bellows as a mechanical street-sweeper crashes into his display of feather dusters, but the sweeper with its revolving yellow light clatters on, describing a slow rectangle around the stall keeper as he appraises the damage. Two mounted policemen with brick-colored faces arrive in the marketplace, and a corridor of stony glances opens up before them. On the side, the truculent street sweeper lurches and cavorts like a clown; on the other, the two geldings raise their legs above the gun holsters and s— with leaden dignity. And all around the square, the neon beacons of conciliation light up over the movie house, shops, restaurants, and bars.
Under the canopy of vapor lights, late shopping baskets, battered dinner pails, torn leatherette bags pass by. Homecomers are sucked forehead first into gateways; their coats covered with dust, husband and wife flounder homeward as though trudging over sand dunes. The activities of the square impose an itinerary that is difficult to vary. By day the movement is regular and unswerving, but now in the twilight it is enlivened by irrational currents and eddies. On the sidewalk I am sometimes inclined to think that I can go wherever I please, cut across here, turn in there, or loop eccentrically around the block; but I fight off this paranoid temptation and submit to the regulations that confine me to the common stream. The street commands the pedestrian, the doorway the incomer, the stairway the upgoer, the table and chair, glass and knife the homecomer. And if, somewhere in this conveyor belt of obedience, there is a breakdown and the body digresses from the appropriate order of things, the policeman is there — and so am I — to put it right with a few swift and well-tried stratagems.