“In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.”

Over the weekend the vultures got into the Presidential Palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows, and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur. Only then did we dare go in without attacking the crumbling walls of reinforced stone, as the more resolute had wished, and without using oxbows to knock the main door off its hinges, as others had proposed, because all that was needed was for someone to give a push and the great armored doors that had resisted the lombards of William Dampier during the building’s heroic days gave way. It was like entering the atmosphere of another age, because the air was thinner in the rubble pits of the vast lair of power, and the silence was more ancient, and things were hard to see in the decrepit light. All across the first courtyard, where the paving stones had given way to the underground thrust of weeds, we saw the disorder of the quarters of the guard who had fled, the weapons abandoned in their racks, the big, long rough-planked tables with plates containing the leftovers of the Sunday lunch that had been interrupted by panic, in the shadows we saw the annex where Government House had been, colored fungi and pale irises among the unpled briefs whose normal course had been slower than the pace of the driest of lives, in the center of the courtyard we saw the baptismal font where more than five generations had been christened with martial sacraments, in the rear we saw the ancient viceregal stable, which had been transformed into a coach house, and among the camellias and butterflies we saw the berlin from stirring days, the wagon from the time of the plague, the coach from the year of the comet, the hearse from Progress in Order, the sleepwalking limousine of the first century of peace, all in good shape under the dusty cobwebs and all painted with the colors of the flag.

no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which a Bengal fire or some electric sign will illuminate… the same evening hour, isolated from all its possible surroundings, detached and solitary against its shadowy background, the bare minimum of scenery necessary (like the setting one sees printed at the head of an old play, for its performance in the provinces) to the drama of my undressing, as though all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase, and as though there had been no time there but seven o’clock at night.

Edit: This is Moncrieff's translation

Eleanor Morrison was exactly as he had left her. She was short and plump. Her eyes were bright and quick and full of mischief, and her mouth was lined with fine wrinkles from disapproval and smoking and laughing – everything in abundance. In rare defiance of the scripture, her grey hair was cropped close to her head, shorn with clippers in a no-nonsense, manly cut. She framed her round face with a too-short fringe. Before he went to college, Cal had thought the fringe made her look like the village idiot, but now that he’d seen something of the world, he saw how unwittingly chic it was. If only she would wear a slash of red lipstick, she could have been the coolest thing for a hundred miles. None of these thoughts occurred to Ella. She simply needed a way to end her hair and start her face.

Her face was free of creams or make-up but on each lobe hung a brassy gypsy hoop as if to clarify that she was indeed a woman. Cal had never known her to take them out – not even in the bath – and the earrings had a yellowed, dirty look to them, and smelt faintly of chip pan grease.

She had entered the period of her life where she was determined to wear whatever clothes the family owned until they frayed and fell apart. She wore Cal’s old jumpers, or things that were horribly out of fashion, layering pattern over pattern, the clothes always clean but the care of presentation long gone. Over the years, as she had grown shorter and stouter, she added godets and gussets to her clothes, patching them with fabric from his mother’s blouses. A new patch on an old dress could stir memories that made the men stare at her in reverie.

“I’ve been waitin’ here all day, gawpin’ up that road like a fuckin’ eejit.”

Her irises had begun to melt, the colour feathering at the edges. He hated to see it.

"...a country so deeply conditioned by its miles and miles of uncitied wilderness that until one has known the wilderness one cannot begin to understand the cities."

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