The Transparency
frozen horizon
It is the edge of town and the horizon is flat, it is a plain, its grasses crunch with cold under Dan’s feet, his fingers are blue, he is heading north and a cloud comes from his mouth. The afternoon is almost over, a warmthless light brightens the left side of his face.
Marie sits back against her house, arms crossed, she sees Dan, who is still so far away, who comes closer, he cuts through the air.
A third person is there.
Kazimir is heading south, the sun’s coolness brightens him too, he makes the frost crunch, and his ears are red. Dan stops in front of him, he lifts his hands to show his fingers, Kazimir has never seen fingers so blue, he then bites his lips between his teeth, he shows his ears which are very red, he points to them with his index fingers.
The bluest fingers opposite the reddest ears.
Then both turn toward Marie, they walk toward her, they pass close by her, but just before they go on, toward their separate homes, right before they disappear, they tell her that everything breaks on the ground, that everything which cracks turns into rays, they tell her that it takes eyes to see them.
cloud of dust
The warehouse is straight ahead, covered in gray metal, warehouse metal, it is a metallic sight. Air moves by, but air is not visible. And right in the middle of the warehouse, a door, also made of metal, a door that cannot open without its key, that will not open without a turn of its handle, it is a red door which shines, a door which the sun shows all the red reflections of.
Midnight was eight hours earlier.
A car approaches, its sound is at first quieter than the other sounds, then it becomes louder, the car being so close, the car now being stopped outside the door, it is a light-blue car, lighter than all the skies there are.
The steering wheel is held by two hands at the end of two arms, two arms covered in a white fabric, then a gray fabric, a gray with nothing metallic about it. The steering wheel is held by someone, who looks into the distance, at eye level, horizontal like no other level.
His right hand turns the key counterclockwise and everything stops under the hood, the six cylinders do not move at all anymore, if they keep doing nothing for long enough their temperature will fall to freezing. His left hand leaves the wheel, it finds the door handle and pulls, he steps out fully, into the air, he feels the hardness of the ground, presses down on it through his two shoe soles.
He opens the red door.
Inside, a voice says: Sam, you cannot come in here anymore, nothing else can ever turn under your key, we will change the locks, so that you, Sam, can never do anything else here, so that you cannot come here anymore.
Sam then throws his keys as hard as he can toward the voice in the warehouse, he leaves, he stands with his back to the open door, and he says something very softly: all the concrete in the world will be broken, and with its fire the sun’s rays will burn the rest.
That is all he says.
He gets back into his car, he starts it, he accelerates to spin the wheels as fast as they will go, they make a cloud of dust, and then there is a loud bang, it is the sound of the car against a concrete wall. In the entire city, there is only one wall that stands in the middle of a street, this one, which Greg walks around every day on his way to school.
The car is broken everywhere, it is distorted, the wall is not, and Sam is dead.
Greg saw it all from the start, he was the only one to see it all, he heard it all too.
Greg nears the car now, and because he comes closer he ends up in front of Sam, he sees his head, which is broken, smashed against the broken windshield, where red blood flows. Greg has never seen anything like it, he has never seen so much blood.
Suddenly, light stops entering Greg’s eyes and he falls to the ground.
Moments later his eyes open again, he sees the day, he is lying on the dusty ground next to Sam, under a gray cloud of smoke passing over the sky.
spread
The room is full of children. All of their attention is focused on the person calling each of their names, one by one. But one child does not hear his, he is in the very middle of the room, since 8:05 a.m. he has heard nothing but the sound of waves, he hears the same sound as inside a shell. The voice repeats his name, Greg, and repeats it again, then says: you, get up now, stand over there, stare at the wall, you can go back to your seat when you answer. The voice speaks to Greg but he keeps doing nothing, which is all he can do, all he does is breathe, and even this could stop, he could hold his breath forever.
Lili is sitting next to Greg, she elbows his ribs, which should make him cry out in pain but he does not cry out, all he does is silently screw up his face and twist his mouth. Lili sees Greg grimace and feels her own mouth twisting, she then stares at the wide blackboard in front of her so as not to look at Greg, but her grimace does not go away.
It is Miss Isa’s voice calling the names, she finishes her list, everyone answered except for Greg and Lili, she forgets that they exist. Then she starts to read a story as loud as she can, the story of some animals who break their jug while collecting eggs scattered along the ground, eggs which cannot enter into any vessel nor any other hollow body meant to carry them anymore, and the animals look at the pieces of broken jug, they say that porcelain is not stone and that the difference is in the debris, since shards of porcelain shine while shards of stone do not reflect.
Greg cannot hear any of this, all he hears is waves, all he hears is the shells of his ears. And next to him, Lili and some others start to hear as if in shells too, they feel dizzy, their vision is blurry, and things are not things anymore. There is a limit around Greg and four other children, it separates dizziness and the absence of dizziness.
Miss Isa talks about a bird now, she says that everyone should know, that everyone must have already heard of it, and that everyone will recognize the branch, the cheese and the red creature that lives on the ground. Yes, everyone knew but none can tell her what is happening anymore, what happens next. There is no sound, no arm raises, no head nods, nothing.
The whole room is Greg, he is sitting in the middle and is sitting everywhere, the limit is gone, dizziness fills the classroom.
None answer Miss Isa and she sits.
Then a few more words, she says that Max is absent, or else he is very hard to see, present but invisible, she goes on about Max the oddball, about Max the little weirdo, and that is all she says, she does not move anymore, she is behind her desk, her arms on top of it and laid flat on it. She is still, she is Greg, the whole room is Greg, he is all the way into the walls, into the passing time, he is every second and every speck of dust in the room.
And it goes on like this until the bell rings, which is the same as every day, but which is usually a knife that cuts them off. Today it is nothing, because nothing and no one does anything at all or moves even a little, the bell has nothing to cut off and no one understands that class is over because there is nothing to end.
All the children stay seated, Miss Isa stays seated, and Greg is still everywhere, he is and will continue to be, there can be nothing else for now, nothing except for hearing waves.
wind blows
In the west of the city is the industrial park, the gray-metal building park, it is where the vacant lot is.
One of these buildings has a red door, there are tire marks on the dusty pavement out front, they end at a wall, and on this wall is another mark. What could a wall be doing in the middle of the street, why only build a wall.
Some liquid has spread along the road, it is engine oil, and oil is viscous, it is slick and very hard to remove from any surface, sand must be applied and well, and this oil has been covered with sand, since no one wants to walk on pure viscosity.
Olga does not care about the oil or the wall. She is here for only one reason, she came to throw her plane into the wind. Her plane is light, it is made of little wood pieces on the inside and thin orange plastic outside.
In this city the wind is everywhere, it blows hardest in vacant lots because there is nothing to stop it, it pushes bodies from every direction.
The wind lifts what is too light to stay on the ground, much higher than the tallest buildings in the city of heights.
Olga is not afraid of the wind, so she plants her feet in the dirt of the vacant lot and throws her plane, it pierces the air, turns, glides behind her, it has already risen dozens of feet high, become a speck, it circles above the building with the red door, it is a wood and plastic eagle.
All eagles have prey except this one.
Icy wind can cut skin, Olga’s face is full of scrapes but her eyes are full of sunshine.
The plane is back over her head, it is very high, it is a little orange cross against the blue. It turns in wide circles, Olga loves when her plane flies, she loves the vacant lot.
But then she sees her plane suddenly fall in a long arc, it slides down the air without turning, it lands gently and comes to a stop in the middle of the vacant lot.
She picks it up and throws it as hard as she can, it flies a very short straight flight and lands again.
Nothing else whips against Olga’s skin, her hair does not move anymore, she knows what is happening: it is the disappearance of the wind.
This disappearance is a silence that can be spoken in.
At school, in the city of heights, they learn that all vacant lots are full of wind and that the opposite does not exist.
But today the opposite does exist.
Olga picks up her plane and goes home, it is dinner time, she sits in front of her plate of mash, she tells her parents that the wind fell to the ground today and will never rise to the air again.
Her parents turn to each other, they say that the day has come, as it was written in the book, the one which everyone owns. There are twenty-five thousand people here, there are more than twenty-five thousand books.
This is the book of the city, it explains how the world works.
It is made of lines that meet and never bounce back, every line is absorbed by what it meets, from there another line forms and goes off in a straight line, until it meets something else, which absorbs it and this thing forms another line, and so on.
This is all there is to know about absorption, since it is a matter of little microscopic particles that combine with the lines.
These lines are the substance of the world.
This substance is called the great radiation.
The book also describes events. One day, an illness like the plague was to come, it came. One day, this illness was to disappear, it disappeared. Later, grasshoppers were to eat the fields, they did.
There are also mistakes. It was written that one day the wind was to blow hard enough to kill everyone, but this day never came. And because nothing written about the wind has happened yet everyone assumed that the book was always wrong about it, everyone assumed that the wind would never end.
But today, the wind stopped
Olga’s mother is not eating, she flips through the book for the part about the wind, she reads that when the wind ends the sky will stop moving, that in the blue sky there will be a single white cloud and that outside the city limits the sky will change as always.
Olga and her parents open the window, they stick their head outside, they look at the sky, they see the cloud.
And everyone in their building has their head out their window, and so do the neighbors across the street.
In the book there is an image of a cloud, it is this exact same cloud.
Olga turns to her mother who tells her that today is the day, she turns to her father who tells her the same thing.
But already no one knows what else to say about the cloud, everyone looks at one another, everyone gestures with their eyebrows, gestures with their mouth, they turn their head, but no one has anything left to say.
Above Olga, a man shouts loudly for attention, then he says that the air is not the wind, that there is still air but this air will become hard to breathe, so hard to breathe that they will have to leave the city.
None answer, the windows close, it is cold outside, very cold with a bit of frost, the vacant lot crunched under Olga’s feet. Now her plane will hang on her bedroom wall, it will not fly very high anymore, not without a motor, but Olga does not know what a plane motor looks like, she only knows about propellers.
She was in Greg’s class for the first silence.
She was in the vacant lot for the second silence.
Everyone knows: silences are never the same.
This one does not prevent speech but does cause fatigue, the whole building yawns, the whole city wants to sleep, but it is still early, it is only 7:45 p.m. and yet there has never been such fatigue. As was written in the book of the city: the absence of wind will cause the most intense fatigue, an unlived day will follow, the year will only have three hundred and sixty-four days, it will be the shortest of any year.
Olga goes to bed, her parents do too, as does the whole city, the whole city feels tired and now everyone is in bed.
passage
For a long time, Lise has not left home.
She is scared.
That is what she says.
She lives at the edge of the city, she has been watching the house across the street since morning.
This house is half in the city of heights, half in the other city whose name is not worth mentioning.
For a letter to be delivered here, it must be addressed to both cities, otherwise it will be lost.
Decades ago, a couple built this house, its exterior is tiled entirely in blue, in little sky-blue tiles, little tiles from old swimming pools.
The two people who built this house each came from one of the cities, and neither wanted to leave theirs, they would say: I was born in this city and I will sleep in it forever. And the other would answer: me too.
But they wanted to spend their life together, so they built their house across the two cities, it is split in half by the city limit, which runs straight down the middle of their bed.
Both of them died twenty-five years ago. Their child would not live alone in the house, he did not think he could, there had to be two to live there.
The house was sold.
Pam and Sam bought it.
People always ask Pam: what city are you from? And same for Sam. They answer: both cities. They say: our address is double, and what happens to one, happens inversely to the other.
Today, if Pam looks out one window, she would see a beautiful sky, so beautiful that it is blue. If she looks out another window, she would see a terrible storm.
And Lise, across the street, can see on one side of the limit one half of a house that is normal, and on the other side one half of a house that is caught in the storm. She also sees Pam pacing from one side of the house to the other, her face in one window, then in another, and so on.
Every house that Lise has ever seen has a roof covered in shingles, but all the shingles are almost gone from half of this house, they are torn off, they are lifted into the air then fall to the ground where they break, on top of cars which they dent, they would fall on peoples’ heads if people went outside, they would kill those people with their speed and their weight.
Because of the missing shingles, water pours into the house with the little blue pool tiles, and this water does not stay in just one part, nothing stops it from spreading to the other half of the house, it flows across the floor.
Lise does not see Pam pacing anymore, now she sees her step into the city of heights, water flows outside when she opens the front door. The city of heights is flooded by the city next door because a passage runs through this house from one city to the other, it is the special house, it is the only house in the city that can do this, it is the only house that is two but one, the only house where the rain from one city can run into the other, it is the house with the little blue tiles.
It is the pool-house.
Lise worries that half of the house will be carried away in a tornado, lifted into the sky like a bird, flying faster than a plane, and that when the tornado stops, the house will fall so fast that when it hits the ground it will explode, will shower across the ground like a pool filled with dynamite, she thinks that the streets will smell like chlorine, and Lise loves the smell of chlorine, it is her favorite smell, but because she is scared she cannot go to the pool anymore, Lise can only take twenty steps down the street before she gets scared, and twenty steps for Lise makes thirty feet.
But Lise does not see a tornado, because there is none, half of the house does not lift off, it just keeps losing its shingles, water is still pouring in through the roof and flowing out through the front door.
Pam stands outside, under the blue-sky city, she holds a photo of Sam.
She watches the water flow, the street which was once so dry is now covered in a thin layer of water, Pam jumps on it with both feet, she jumps and jumps again, by jumping she makes miniature rain showers which fall inches above the ground, it is the only kind of rain that requires neither umbrella nor hood.
Pam shouts that it is raining in the city, shouts that the wind will return thanks to her house with the little blue pool tiles.
It is true, the pool-house is a secret passage for the water and inside water there is always wind, Lise opens her window to tell Pam.
Lise shuts the window, she has never spoken to Pam before and now she starts to tremble, she shuts the curtains, she waits, she checks the clock, it is 1:00 p.m., minutes pass, it is now 1:15 p.m.
It has been fifteen minutes, Lise has fifteen colored pencils in her pencil case, she has fifteen marbles, she has a fifteen-thousand-piece puzzle, she has fifteen thousand puzzle pieces.
It is now 1:20 p.m., she looks between the curtains, through a gap the exact size of her eye, she sees Pam in the middle of the road, Pam lifts a hand to say hello.
Lise shuts the curtains again.
She counts to fifteen, she opens the curtains again, Pam is pressed against the window, she shouts: open up or else I will break your window with this. She lifts her hand to reveal a hammer.
Lise backs into a corner of the room, she is against the wall, she cannot move anymore, the hammer strikes and the window breaks, she sees shards of glass drop below the curtain, the hammer drops too, and in climbs Pam.
She goes up to Lise and says: careful, there is glass in your room, I came to tell you, your bare feet cannot step on shards of glass because skin is soft, skin is a million times softer than glass, only one small piece and the blood will flow, and you do not want a pool of blood in your home, so stay off the floor, stand on a chair, stay on the chair long enough, and once the glass has disappeared you can get down, then come see me across the street and I will show you how to break windows, I will show you real fear.
Pam does not wait for an answer, she leaves the room through the window.
Lise has almost stopped breathing entirely, she listened to everything Pam said, she waits on the chair with a colored pencil in her right hand, she snaps it in two and throws the pieces to the ground.
A colored pencil is either used, or it is broken.
Lise does not use her colored pencils.
Pam is back home, she looks around her house. Unless she does something it will end up growing mold, fungus will eat through the walls and everything will crumble. So she starts pushing the rest of the water toward the front door, she pushes with her hands, she is on her knees, and she chases out the water, she tries.
This is not so easy so Pam decides to cast a spell: water, you are nothing but wet sky, out you go the same way you came, get out of my house little liquid, out of my sight army of droplets, may the warm and dry replace the cold and damp.
If the spell works, the floor will dry on its own in less than a minute.
If the spell does not work, it will not dry.
She waits a minute, her watch keeps very good time, one of the three hands moves ahead once every second, she counts sixty.
The floor has not dried at all.
She will have to keep pushing the water with her hands, but she is not kneeling anymore, she has lost all her strength and lies on her back on the floor, water seeps through her clothes and to her skin. She also feels the wind coming from the other city, it blows through the roof, it moves around her, the wind is so fine that it fits between the floor and her back, which is more frozen than frost.
Lise does not see any of this, how could she see through the walls.
Someone sitting on a chair cannot go through walls.
Nobody can.
Pam feels the other city’s rays around her, they bounce off the walls, off the floor and ceiling, they go out the door.
The rays rumble longly, even if Pam is too tired to look at her watch she can tell a length of time.
All at once everything stops rumbling.
The storm is over.
The rays start to soften.
Lise climbs down from her chair, she puts on her shoes to go to the window without cutting her feet. She sees the cloud traveling across the blue sky, and sees other clouds entering the city.
The small cloud moves in one direction, the others move in the opposite direction, the smallest cloud disappears into all the others.
Through her broken window, Lise feels the wind on her face and in her hair.
Wind that would make snow fall if it were up in the clouds.
Lise’s neighbor appears, she always sees him go out at 1:55 p.m., he has a yellow hat on, he has his hands in his pockets, he stands in the street, he looks toward the neighboring city. The first flake lands on the bill of his hat, and then more, and his hat quickly turns white.
It is Tuesday, it is 2:00 p.m., it is snowing, Lise is cold, glass shards do not cut her shoes, a colored pencil is broken, the pool-house is wet, Pam lies on her back in the midst of the rays, half of the roof is missing, snow is falling, it settles inside Pam’s house, the sky is moving once again, there is wind, it should not have come, it came all the same.
state of things
The cities are very quickly covered with snow.
It attracts attention but causes all to be forgotten, it conceals what has happened, hides the days.
Places full of debris are covered just the same as those with none.
The snow’s rays are strongest.
But snow disappears.
The air and the dirt can pull it away.
There is no debris in the city of heights, but there are things to hide, because the sky was still, because the wind went away and came back.
There is nothing left to say, it is not to be spoken of anymore.
None of this is visible now but is locked inside everyone.
All will remember the sky and the storm.
When the snow has disappeared the city limits will reappear.
Debris on one side.
None on the other.
The stopped sky will return as memories.
It has not left them.
The wind can stop at any time. From now on something must be asked every day: does it still whip things into faces, does it still stir dead leaves and hair.
What happens, even only once, could repeat.
Something that disappears can always return, there are no disappearances.
last look
The plain’s grasses are covered in snow, they have their color, it is the color green, but white is all there is, it is an entire horizon of green grass under the white of snow.
Not one blade of grass has disappeared.
Marie is sitting, her hands rested one on top of the other, she wears gray gloves, a gray scarf, a black velvet coat, a black t-shirt, black pants.
She looks at the sun which is directly in front of her, it is rising, it is orange as the snow, it is white but orange. Marie feels this disk of light settle somewhere inside her, she closes her eyes, she still sees the disk of light.
The light fades, then disappears, and she opens her eyes.
She speaks for the horizon: you are big and flat, so far away that the distance between us does not exist.
Marie knows the horizon, she knows how to say what it is.
But the horizon is something that cannot hear what is said.
Every morning, she says a few things to it anyway, she stays seated afterward, just to hear nothing.
She sees Dan and Kazimir, they walk together in the plain every morning and evening, then they go their separate ways, even in the full sun they are never blinded by the light, because there is brightness more intense than the day’s.
They leave.
The plain is all that is left, and if watched for long enough and from far enough away one might make out the transparency that hangs over it, and in this transparency there is all that exists, all that dies, and all that is born.
Translator’s Note
Adrien Lafille’s stories operate within their own defined limits and do not call upon what is external to them. His style is minimalist, it is rhythmic yet stilted in a way that heightens the incantatory and enigmatic nature of his prose. I like to think of Lafille’s work as falling somewhere in the Venn space of Heraclitus, David Lynch, and Gertrude Stein. Poetic and philosophically-charged, Lafille’s second novel, la transparence (The Transparency), may be summarized in one word: estranging.
In broad strokes, The Transparency can be divided into two distinct parts: 1) a character witnesses a tragic accident and falls silent, perhaps bottling within himself a trauma which nonetheless emanates from him and spreads (i.e. the silence), first throughout his classroom to his peers and then across the entire city; and 2) the city’s sky freezes in place, englobing all the characters under a second silence: the silence of the sky. These two parts make up this polyphonic novel’s thirty-two chapters. Each is a node: a (nearly) self-contained portrait of one or more characters—of their habits, actions, interactions, in a place at once strange and familiar, set within the limits (for the most part, at least) of a city at times cloistered and at others boundless.
The “city of heights” is, in fact, very much a character of its own (one that contains all the other characters within a multiplicity): not only is it acted upon by its inhabitants, but it, in turn, acts upon them with a violence and tenderness of its own. As Lafille details the commonplace elements of this city—its water, grass, wind, trees, branches, concrete, etc.—down to their most infinitesimal parts—rays, sounds, particles—the extraordinary appears at every turn, creating a tapestry of converging and diverging potentialities. In his second novel, Lafille creates a world of floating and plural relations; a world governed by an omnipresent transparency.
While my translation of these seven chapters cannot capture the full range of habits, actions, sensations, etc. that make up The Transparency, I hope it gives readers a taste of Lafille’s unique style. It is, however, important to note that the style of this piece is largely an invention of translation. One might quickly notice the complete—and, to some, perhaps nagging—lack of contractions throughout. French does not contract as English does, which makes this quirk something that was found in translation. This is a stylistic choice I’ve made that was almost purely intuitive, a matter of knowing-feeling that often arises when poring saccadically over parallel source and translation. To my ear, this choice helps to echo the prose-poetic simplicity in Lafille’s work. It is this, Lafille’s crystalline rhythm, that produces a kind of transparency of its own, a kind of silence of its own (the silent transparency of the universe?).
Adrien Lafille was born in 1986 in the Paris region, where he now lives and works. He has a master’s degree in philosophy from Paris Nanterre University. Before his most recent publications with Éditions Corti, Le feu extérieur (2024) and La maladie de l’eau (2026), he published two novels with Éditions Vanloo, milieu (2021) and la transparence (2022). Along with Anaël Castelein, he is the co-author of :kappa: (2022), published by Rrose éditions. He also regularly publishes in journals, and edited one called Confiture.
Dawson Ford Campbell lives in Vancouver, Canada. He received his master’s degree in Translation Studies from Concordia University in 2022. Dawson translates literature from France and from Quebec, for which he was awarded an emerging translators mentorship from ALTA in 2025. His work has appeared in carte blanche, World Poetry Review, and Hopscotch Translation.