The Fata Morgana Books

Story About Nothing

It was only the other day this story came to my mind. I was driving down the northern highway; the sun, a ball of fire boring a hole into the pale sky, was crushing everything with its light and heat, and, overcome with torpor beneath this vast summer sky, I was floating unawares on the verge of sleep. I didn’t know where I was going; to tell the truth, I didn’t really know if I was driving, or if, stretched out in this vast heat on the sheetless rectangle of my mattress, I was dreaming that I was driving, or even if I was having this sleeping-driver dream in the midst of driving, my hands inert on the black leather hoop of the steering wheel. Sleeping, I said to myself: one should write about this and about nothing else, not about people, not about me, not about absence or about presence, not about life or about death, not about things seen or heard, not about love, not about time. Already, it had taken shape. Obeying a sign shaped like a triangle, I left the highway and headed for the sea. Parking lots followed one another, monotonous, crowded with cars baking in the sun. Finally I noticed an out-of-the-way trail and took it. It led to a little stretch of beach, none too clean, but almost empty: only a few people had spread out the colored squares of their towels and were lazing about, naked and ruddy, exposed to the rage of the sun or else half-hidden under the laughable disks of little parasols. This suited me, and I too undressed and went into the water. It was warm and soft, and instead of waking me up, this monotonous, lapping expanse, swollen with a huge repetitious murmur, lulled me to sleep even more, enveloping my dormant body in the sinuous play of its forms and sounds. Naked, I floated on my back, my head borne by the waves, my eyes blind beneath the triumphant sky, pierced at its zenith by the bleak insatiable fire of the sun, and I dreamed I was swimming out to sea, calmly, with patience and rhythm, pitting without exhausting it the strength of my muscles against the inertia of this immense, shapeless, sly mass agitated by a placid, continuous violence; from time to time, my head went under water, and, with eyes closed against the biting salt, I lost all notion of space, I found myself tossed about, overcome, a dull anguish weighing down my limbs that seemed to move like seaweed, with no more force or power, each limb separate from the others and incapable of rediscovering a whole that might have served to give sense and direction to this movement; in my lungs, the air was turning sour, sucking in my ribs; then a contrary surge of the waves would hurl me back to the sky, my mouth open in a circle just above the waves, whipped by seaspray, and I resumed my regular movements, forcing my way through this endless waste. This lasted a long time, until I heard a voice, a young woman with a loud, tinkling laugh: “No, silly, you’re not swimming, you’re dreaming you’re swimming. Do you even know how to swim?”—“Of course I do,” I wanted to protest: but I opened my eyes in vain, I saw no one.

* * *

That same day, it comes back to me now, some friends had suggested celebrating my birthday; but I couldn’t remember the date, or even the sign under which I was born. I was made that way: neither sad nor merry, neither open nor private, curious about everything but not interested in anything; I knew many people, but wasn’t attached to anyone. It was not my fault; the blame falls on those who had reared me, or on my depraved nature, or else on a blow to the head I got in the fog, one fall night, on a high, dark mountain.

* * *

Scarcely had I gotten back to town than I met an acquaintance. He was coming down a broad staircase at the end of an empty rectangular esplanade, his pale suit shone in the sun; to see him better, I shaded my eyes with my hand, and he burst out laughing, exposing between his garnet lips two rows of regular, gleaming little teeth, all the while holding out his hand and taking me by the shoulder: “You don’t remember me? We’ve been friends for a long time, though.” He began chatting with me casually, about everything and nothing. It was a little surprising: I thought he had been dead for years. “Not at all! Not so far as I know, at least.” We lingered a while on these steps, talking some more; he still held my shoulder in a friendly grip, his eyes laughing. I laughed too and shook his hand, before heading home.

* * *

Opening the door, I saw myself in the mirror, a large round mirror leaning against the wall, reflecting the horizontal rectangle of the striped mattress, it too lying on the floor, and the vertical rectangle of the open door, red on the outside, white on the inside. In the mirror, the face framed by the jambs of this door was looking at me, smiling calmly; I found it somewhat beautiful, but of a vague, undefined, blurred beauty. Night was falling, I pressed the switch: light leapt out, harsh and bright, from a bare lightbulb hanging over the mattress, reflected in the round mirror too. I had bought this mirror, its glass all pockmarked and partially tarnished, from a second-hand dealer, and I liked it immensely. It must have had a defect that I hadn’t noticed; as time passed, a crack stretched out mysteriously from one edge; then another fissure began to branch off from the first, forming a little V at the bottom of the mirror, just like a woman’s pubis; finally, a long horizontal line came to cross this V. The mirror kept staring at me, impassive, a mute cyclops’s glum eye. Sometimes I would lay the mirror flat on the mattress and crouch along its edge, leaning on my hands. Depending on the angle, I would then see my features surprisingly abstract and very far away, or else just the lightbulb hanging on the ceiling, or else nothing, nothing at all, as if I were gazing not at a mirror but at a gaping, luminous pit, slightly purplish, carved into my bed, into which I could have tumbled head-first, to disappear forever. Sometimes too, I would put on female underclothes — stockings, dainty black lace panties, a padded bra — at times with a thin clinging dress, at others not, and for a long time I would examine this beautiful feminine form, elegant, aristocratic, its musculature subtle and well-defined, its skin white, beneath which snaked thick veins swollen with blood, losing in this way in the image all notion of time and place, of my person or of my thoughts.That a few tawdry rags bought in a hurry at the supermarket were enough to make a woman, a real image of a woman — that is what filled me with wonder, it was a spell, pure magic. Nothing could come to disturb this happiness. One time, though, a curious thing happened: a child, in the corner of my bedroom, said softly but clearly: “You shouldn’t be doing that.” I didn’t know who he was, or what he was doing there, but I replied kindly: “And why not?”—“I would prefer that you didn’t do it.” I gazed at him, smiling tenderly. In the mirror’s disk, the gossamer lace followed the arched loins of the figure reflected there, plunged between its buttocks; lower down, another band circled its thigh. I was still looking at the blond child, motionless and stubborn in his corner, his fists clenched alongside his legs; finally, without taking my eyes off him, I slowly stretched my hand out to the switch, pressed it, and everything, child and feminine form, circles and rectangles, vanished into the dark.

* * *

I also liked to go out in the street like that, with this lace underwear beneath my clothes: it produced a strange sensation in me — light and floating, as if both sexes at once were strolling in my body through the city. Sitting with a cold drink at a café terrace on a public square, I would examine the women passing by, think about their clothes, as light and airy as my feelings, about what they were wearing underneath, lace or fine fabrics, which they often showed glimpses of: for them, these delicate layers on their bodies added nothing, took away nothing, they were women in all simplicity, naked or clothed, with or without artifice, even coarsely dressed, or dressed like men, they remained women; these pieces of fabric, so maddening to me, were as natural to them as their own skin, it was just the texture of their lives, a pleasant and caressing thing perhaps, but one they could do without: at the very most, sometimes, pleasure might seize them by the throat as they slowly removed these garments in front of a man’s avid desire. As for me, they transformed me completely, they made me a free oscillation, around which my desires floated freely, coming to bear on everything and nothing, settling only to take off and settle on their opposite, before coming back or going elsewhere, and I no longer knew if I was man or woman, unless someone told me. This made me astonishingly mobile and I loved that. But it was also possible that this was all a dream, like that other dream in which I was trying to decipher notes I had made when I awoke from yet a third dream, a long wonderful story, just like this one. I could see the words, a few doodles hastily sketched out, I was trying to reconstruct this lost dream, which fled from me imperceptibly but steadily, like sand trickling from one cone of the hourglass to the other; it escaped me just as this story is escaping me. To tell the truth, I never really knew if I was asleep or awake, this too someone had to come and tell me. But reality was never lacking in people ready to determine it, however arbitrarily, like that friend, the one on the stairs who should have been dead, but who was shaking my shoulder, laughing: “Hey there, are you sleeping?” He sat down opposite me and ordered, drank, ordered another. “I have something for you,” he said, “I know you, you’re going to like it.” He took out a disk from his pocket and put it on the round table. “What is it?”—“You’ll see, you’ll see.” Already he was getting up and walking off without paying; that made me glad, I was happy for him for his trust, his freedom, his lightness. The disk, silvery in a thin, transparent square case, remained on the table, I forgot it when I left; I’d only taken a few steps before the waitress caught me by the sleeve to give it back to me. She had a beautiful smile, brown, silky skin: she too wore her body with ease, as if it weren’t a miracle.

* * *

I climbed back up into my tall square tower, suspended high above the city. Down below, behind the last buildings, grey, metallic, the sea stood like a long wall beneath the pale summer sky; when a big ship passed by, it looked almost as if it were flying slowly beyond the city. Many cranes, blue or green, crisscrossed the sky with their stalks; to the right, the round mass of a small mountain rose to hide the line of the sea. I turned my computer on and inserted the disk my friend had left me. It was a short pornographic movie, made not by professionals but evidently by the people in it, two men and a woman, along with a fourth, the one holding the camera, who was never shown. Of the two men, the first was still young, with a massive body and closely cropped hair; the other was already settling into a hairy layer of fat, and wore long, rather outdated sideburns joined to his moustache. The woman wore black stockings and a red mask, and her coarse body showed signs of age; when she lowered her head, her chin formed thick folds with her neck; but she had magnificent hair, black and heavy, tied back at the neck by a rubber band. The two men were caressing her body; then the younger one began to fuck her, while the other dragged his cock over her lips. She was groaning softly, full of her pleasure but also attentive to the scene. The relationships between the characters intrigued me: there must have been a husband involved, or at least a lover, that seemed to me unavoidable, for this was obviously no callgirl paid for the pleasure of the two men, on the contrary, it was the men who had been placed at the service of this woman’s pleasure, yet something in their attitudes, especially in hers, passive in her pleasure, suggested that she had not organized the scene herself, but that it had been organized for her by another, who was thus sharing her pleasure. But who was it? The fat one with the sideburns, more open, less hurried in his gestures than the young one? Or the one holding the camera, whose lens remained focused on the body of the woman and what was happening to her? But one couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility that the camera was held by another woman. Yet to these four actors had to be added a fifth, the main character of this little movie: the gaze. The entire spectacle had been staged with it in mind. There was of course the gaze of the man or woman holding the camera and studying the scene through his or her viewfinder, just as there was my own, contemplating it on my computer screen; but the gaze of the three naked figures on the green sheets was also put into play, redoubled not just by the expectation of the film to come, but also right then and there, by a large mirror that occupied the entire wall next to the bed, where they took turns observing themselves. At one point, a man — the fat one, or the one filming? — uttered a phrase in a language that I did not understand, Italian perhaps or some local dialect, and this phrase seemed to me to say: “Do you like what you’re seeing?” for the woman, still being fucked by the young one, was attentively watching herself being fucked and filmed in the big mirror. “Yes, yes,” she panted; and the camera was no longer filming the three intertwined bodies, but just their reflection in the mirror, where the woman, sprawled in her pleasure, her eyes like black marbles in her red mask, gazed at herself panting, her mouth open, her tongue out like that of a bull exhausted by the matador’s elusive red cloth, obscene and beautiful in her obscenity. She contemplated herself this way for a long time; then, slowly, she rolled her head over to the prick offered to her mouth. Afterwards, it went on, they moved her around, took turns penetrating her; and she, while giving in to their arms and bodies, to their greedy members, was also constantly observing herself in the mirror, as if to assure herself, Yes, that’s really me, that sublime whore there, with the beautiful hair and this body that’s so heavy and so female, being fucked by these two men, ah what happiness. The men too looked at themselves, but shiftily, snickering at times. It ended ritually, with their sperm on the woman’s mouth, her face, her mask, her breasts, a brief orgasm frightfully meager after her own, which overflowed this little twenty-minute-long movie.

* * *

These images, so clumsy and ordinary, filled me with joy: transported into rapture, as if by the sweetness of a ripe peach, I felt as if I were about to lift off from the ground. Outside, now, it was dark; the city’s lights shone in front of sky and sea confused into a single vast endless black surface. I watched the video several times; each time, it stuck in my gaze, nailed all my desires, usually so fluid, to a single blind point before which I found myself transfixed, breathless.

* * *

However, as I rather quickly discovered, this was just a poor sample of a considerable series, mass-produced by a production company a little savvier than the others; yet this knowledge changed nothing, absolutely nothing: these images remained what they were, frozen in the eternal repetition of their so violently human perfection. I no longer left my room, I hardly even moved from my mattress; I could just barely get up when I felt an urgent need. Eating, drinking, they no longer concerned me; of course I was ill, but I had no way of knowing that unless someone told me; but no one came, I stayed there alone in the midst of my funhouse mirrors, which altered not the image they reflected, but the very person who was mirrored. The same friend finally gave me, by telephone, some good advice: “You should go find a doctor.” I had two doctors — thin, stiff women in their long white smocks, one still young and quite attractive, the other much older and more talkative too. “You definitely do not look well,”she said with birdlike gestures.Together,they had me undress, listened to my chest, palpated me, examined the various orifices of my body, with comments that were cryptic to me, but no doubt rich in meaning for them. In the end, I found myself lying on my belly, with the older doctor, who had pulled on latex gloves, delicately parting the cleft of my buttocks, and the two women stood leaning over my anus as if over a well, calmly discoursing on what they saw there. They sent me home with some medicine, somewhat randomly selected I think, and I took it at random too, in the following spirit: if my condition got better, then the remedy was good, and if it got worse, then it was bad.

* * *

Despite my poor health, I still occasionally watched the little film. I had finally realized something: more than the sight of it, which had so absorbed me, it was the sound of this scene that moved me so violently. I made this discovery entirely by chance; by mistake, I had cut the sound on my computer; muted, these images were nothing more than grotesque gesticulations. Whereas all I had to do was close my eyes and listen to the groans, the gasps, the broken, stammered words, the interrupted breathing, to find myself rapt again: a dazzling, almost blinding discovery, this, but limited nonetheless, in that the echo of these sounds, which at first opened the way, itself ended up forming an elusive obstacle, flexible but insuperable; caught in its snare, I found myself once again rejected, brutally returned to myself, and thus everything began all over again, in a crazy whirling that only rooted me deeper in my own impossibility.

* * *

“Come with us!” my friend had called out, peremptorily— how to resist such a command? Thus I found myself with a whole company of people in another city, where a feria was taking place. Jubilation reigned in the streets, borne by a huge crowd, happy and overexcited, maddened as much by the liberties allowed on these few days as by the sun, the alcohol, the laughter, and the disordered jostling of bodies. We walked about aimlessly; whenever we felt like it, we would drink some chilled wine, standing in the street or packed into crowded cafés. Toward evening, my friend announced: “Come, let’s go and see the bullfight.” But I needed a cigar for that, and so I went into the first tobacco shop I saw, where the shopkeeper barked out: “A cigar, sure, but which one? What kind do you want?”—“Whichever you like, as long as it lasts through six bulls.” In the arena, people were crammed into the stone tiers; the ring spread out at our feet, a pale disk surrounded with red by a bright barrier of painted boards. Nothing could trouble its calm orderliness: not the shouts and gesticulations of the crowd, not the music started up by the brass band, not the succession — by turns measured and frenzied — of figures formed and dissolved by the men in glittering costumes around the bull, a black, brutal monster overflowing with vigor, and yet so quickly killed. When the mules dragged away its body, the blood inscribed a long red comma on the sand; men quickly raced forward with rakes to erase it, so that nothing would come to disturb the placid surface that reflected the glory and triumph of the killer of bulls. Everything delighted me, the movements that won roaring ovations as well as those that elicited boos, and I paid as much attention to the long ash on my cigar as to the horn of the animal, appearing and disappearing in the undulating folds of the pink and yellow capes. Already the fifth bull was charging out of the depths of the arena. The man who had to kill it was, apparently, famous for his talent, the purity of his style and of his movements. When the bull stopped, panting, nervous, confused, he provoked it from very far away, almost the opposite side of the red circle, before moving forward with tiny steps, stiff and with his back arched, using his voice and his cape to encourage the animal to charge, which it always ended up doing; then, motionless, feet together and chest proudly flung out, the man would calmly make the animal flow around him, like a current eddying around a rock. I had, of course, had the rules of the game explained to me: nothing required the man to remain in place, to offer his belly or his loins to the horn, so close sometimes that it snagged the gilt decorations on his costume; it was a question of etiquette, which in this affair was everything; wounds or death weren’t taken into consideration. And now the man was getting ready to kill the bull; drawn up onto the tips of his toes, turned sideways, he was aiming his long curved sword at the back of the bull’s neck, straight between the horns of the exhausted animal, doomed but still raging; his left hand with its piece of red flannel crossed in front of his body, he dove straight in; a moment later, he was bouncing on the horns, a limp puppet, a rag doll, grotesque in his beautiful gilt costume, as if he were to remain caught up there forever, while his assistants rushed in shouting and vainly waving their capes. Finally he fell to the ground, the men drove the animal back, others tried to carry away the wounded man; “It’s nothing,” he seemed to say as he got up and grasped the sword held out to him, “it’s nothing.” He returned to stand facing the bull. His face, his hands, his shining outfit were coated in blood; arched back, in profile, he held his sword up with his fingertips, in a perfect triangle with his arm, as if to salute his adversary, and he stared at it with two round, black eyes, empty of all thought except the perfection of the gesture to be repeated, eyes that gazed at the animal to be killed the same way they would have gazed at a mirror. Then he made one swift gesture, and already he was turning his back on the staggering bull, dragged into the ballet of capes thrown under its muzzle, the sword planted to the hilt in its neck; he walked away without turning back, toward the red barrier, as the animal collapsed heavily behind him, its four hooves in the air, pointed at the sky.

* * *

That night, I found myself in a cellar; on a stage in the back, some men dressed in black, sitting on simple wooden chairs, their feet flat on the stage, were playing music. It was very beautiful; but to tell the truth, what I especially liked was the curtain drawn behind them, a long curtain with folds of garnet velvet, illumined with a bright light. Someone had handed me a drink, red also, in a tall, straight glass, I didn’t really know what it was, wine perhaps; I was sitting at a little round table, in the company of many people, I didn’t quite know who they were; my friend must have been there, but maybe he had gone away. After a while, a few young women came out onto the stage, wearing long black dresses spangled with red dots, like fat blood-red moons scattered across a night sky; they danced with stiff movements, yet their stiffness was strangely supple, forming and then unmaking squares and circles; when they twirled, upright and proud, their ample skirts flew around their fine muscular legs, opening up into large fluid circlets, like the wheel of a cape spun out behind his back by a haughty matador ending a series of passes by bringing his bull to its knees. The women stood out from the red curtain like shadows, they whirled round clicking their heels; they were made even more present by these rhythmic sounds and the figures they formed, static, almost clumsily linked figures, like the poorly connected passes of a novice still unsure of his animal, than by their bodies eclipsed behind the cloth of the moon-dresses; only the sweat soaking their armpits, visible when they raised their arms to snake their wrists around and snap their fingers, reminded one from time to time of their materiality. I was slowly getting drunk, and this drunkenness made me euphoric; yet at the same time, just like the bullfighter’s gestures in the center of the arena’s red circle, just like the movements of the dancers on the rectangle of the stage, it too, I realized, was a form of communion, the step beyond that imperceptibly opens up the road to the world of death, revealing to the one taking it that it already stretches far behind him, and always has.

* * *

I returned to the arena; beneath the flaming wheel of the sun, the red barrier was gleaming, its sweeping curve diagonally sliced by the line of shadow. Yet I passed from one circle to the other: for when I plunged my gaze into the circle formed by the arena, I finally found myself faced not with the bull and its horns, but with myself, my pale, distraught face, reflected in the dull halo of the mirror in my bedroom; and the flesh the bull’s horn gouged, when it caught the unfortunate matador in the muscular triangle inside the thigh, almost by chance and in exactly the same way I sometimes happened to catch the soft, vulnerable triangle of a girl chance drove into my arms, this flesh then was in a way probably none other than my own, offered naked, without any protection — neither the ridiculous covering afforded by lace underwear, nor the dazzling and sovereign protection signified by the matador’s fabulous suit of light — possibly only the protection of endless desire, flitting back and forth like a muleta shaken by the wind, a bloody, elusive, derisory rag, confusing all these forms into one impossible gesture, only to separate them forever.

* * *

In my bedroom, I would spend hour after hour resting, lying on my mattress, the curtains drawn but the French door wide open, letting the breeze play over my bare skin. My head turned to the wall, the round mirror reminded me of its presence; it no longer reflected my body, but its circle was filled with the dark, rumpled folds of the curtain, constantly agitated by the wind. When some need or other came over me, I would get up. The water, stretched out far beyond my windows, drew me; all of a sudden, I desired it passionately, frantically, but this desire brought with it neither the patience to leave the city again, nor the courage to confront the crowds and the noise and dirtiness of the beaches at the bottom of the streets. Further along, though, up the little hill, there was a swimming pool, a simple solution to these difficulties, and to get there, the metro. At one stop, a young couple came and sat down next to me, first the boy, then, on his lap, her back to his chest, the girl. She wore white overalls cut short and was greedily devouring a banana; from the side, I could see her freckles, she seemed rather ordinary, but lively and high-spirited. I couldn’t see the boy at all: with his hand, he was caressing his friend’s belly, and at each movement his smooth, downy arm brushed against my own, as if we were all three taking part in this affectionate gesture, as if without consulting each other they wanted to include me with them, and I was delighted at this, I was grateful to them for this friendly presence. The girl had finished her banana; taking advantage of another stop, she leaped out of the car to throw away the skin, then quickly flung herself back inside, laughing, and returned to slide down onto the legs of the boy, who resumed his caresses. Their image was reflected in the rectangle of the window opposite, I observed the girl, now slumped back in her man’s arms, leaning on him with all her weight, happy. At the pool, a large open-air blue square overlooking the city, I gaily plunged my body into the cool, clear water; as I paddled about, or leaned on the edge, my eyes could run over the vast expanses of buildings, piles of blocks confusedly heaped up by a clumsy child, or else, drifting on my back, I could lose myself in the immense wavering dome of the sky. All around me rang out laughter, happy shouts, the sounds of water; bare bodies glistened in the sun; nearby, in another pool, bold, graceful children were attempting acrobatic dives from high diving boards of various heights. They always dove in groups, the girls with the girls and the boys with the boys; their temerity filled me with wonder: never would I have been capable of such beautiful, precise, courageous movements. When I climbed out of the water, I sat down still dripping at a little round table and ordered a dish of lime sorbet; I let the sun dry me as I ate the ice and watched the children dive. Two little girls had placed themselves at the edge of the highest diving board, a dozen meters above the water, with their backs to the pool, their arms alongside their body, their little muscles distinct and taut: as if on cue, they simultaneously let themselves topple backward into the void, stiff as boards; suspended in mid-air, they slowly unfolded their arms to form a point above their heads, just in time to break the surface of the water like a powerful arrow. Already other laughing kids were taking their place, I happily finished my sorbet, with each little spoonful savoring the wait before returning to the sweetness of the water.

* * *

My friend had invited me to celebrate his birthday. Reaching the foot of his building, I rang several times at the number I had been told: finally, an oldish-sounding lady replied, in a reedy, almost inaudible voice: “It’s not here.”—“But this is the address I was given!” I said indignantly. — “I know, you’re not the first one. But it’s not here.”—“Where is it, then?”— “I don’t know.” In fact, it was the apartment right across the landing; shrewdly, I waited in the street, smoking, until other people arrived to show me the way. “Ah, you brought something to drink, excellent!” my friend exclaimed, brushing off my complaints about his mistake: “It’s nothing, it’s nothing.” The apartment was small, the crowd dense, noisy; people were drinking, talking, there was no music. I didn’t know many people here, no one actually, aside from my friend. But the people were drunk and excited and it wasn’t difficult to strike up a conversation with them. I found myself talking with a young woman, a Russian. She was drinking a lot and laughing, a brittle laugh, but an agreeable one; one of her white arms had a series of scars on it, thick uneven strokes, which she told me she had inflicted herself, without really explaining either how or why in a way I could make sense of. But maybe she didn’t really want to say. A fat blond woman, rather vulgar, had come in and was kissing her; this was her mother, already drunk, accompanied by a much younger man, his goatee carefully trimmed. “My stepfather,” the Russian girl smirked; I went on drinking. In the hallway, another woman, the mistress of the house I think, caught me by the neck and greedily kissed my mouth. I gently pushed her away. “No? You don’t want to?” She gave me a startled, frightened look. — “No,” I replied, smiling kindly, “I don’t want to.”—“It’s nothing,” she snapped, continuing heavily toward the kitchen. In the living room, the Russian girl’s mother was emitting loud, guttural laughter and shaking her full breasts in front of her companion’s dazzled gaze. Her daughter was sitting at a low table; together with two of her friends (twins, seemingly identical, but who revealed surprisingly contrary characters as soon as you talked to them — one gentle, attentive, and patient, the other harsh, almost enraged, nursing a secret resentment that cast a shadow over all her words), she was taking cocaine, indifferent to her mother who was toying with her lover’s curly hair and drinking. She was drinking too, methodically, she must have already been completely drunk yet she remained lucid, clear, friendly. I too was probably very drunk, like her. She spoke to me a lot; yet she didn’t seem especially interested in me, she would disappear suddenly in the middle of a sentence, leaving me with her two friends or else my friend. I tried to talk with him, but he was completely incoherent, I couldn’t understand anything. His brother, who was seven years younger than he but whose birthday we were also celebrating — one was born before midnight, the other after, and we had thus moved seamlessly from one birthday to the other — was nodding and chuckling knowingly; from time to time, he would take a little packet out of his pocket and pour some cocaine onto the table, inviting the guests to help themselves with a sweeping gesture. When I could, I resumed my conversation with the Russian girl. Her mother had disappeared, the woman who had wanted to kiss me was slumped next to the table, staring at me with mean and greedy eyes, I responded with a smile and kept talking with the girl. She was looking for more to drink. All the bottles were empty, now she was grabbing the glasses left on the table and without hesitating poured their contents into her own, laughingly mixing the different wines and drinking without respite. Finally, I managed to convince her to leave. In the street, the sky was turning pale, she immediately dragged me into a bar where I bought her several drinks; she had moved on to beer, while I was still drinking shots of vodka. When she looked at me, curiously, her pupils reflected not just my face, puffy and sagging from drink, but also seemed framed by the reflection of the window behind me, two little black marbles set in two luminous squares. I was trying to convince her to come back to my place, but she gently yet firmly refused my offers; she was filled with alcohol and cocaine, they made her thin body vibrate with a wicked joy; yet she remained completely in control of herself: “That’s not how it’s done,” she said with a clear, slightly broken laugh. I laughed along with her, we understood each other very well. Outside, it was daylight. As I got into the taxi, I offered at least to drop her off on the way, but she refused this too and finally pushed me somewhat abruptly into the car. As it was starting up she walked off with long strides, waving a last goodbye with a broad, brittle smile, fragile and happy. I rapidly developed a vivid passion for this girl. I would call her on the phone, and we would chat about trivial, inconsequential things; she always kept the same friendly distance. I invited her to the pool: she refused, citing an allergy to chlorine, and nothing could convince her to go to the sea. At night, we would get drunk together. She was learning Persian: happy at this incongruous pretext, I held forth on the evolution of the Indo-European languages, a subject I actually knew not much about, but enjoyed a lot. Sometimes, in her confident, precise way, she would interrupt me and abruptly go on to a different, completely unrelated subject; an hour later, just as abruptly, she would come back to it, only quickly to drop it again. While she spoke, I would look at her. She was not, strictly speaking, pretty; but the ease and confidence with which she inhabited her body and face delighted me. Her laughter pealed, the glasses and the ice clinked, the lighters scraped and clacked, the coins jingled on the zinc of the round tables, oh, sweet idyll. At the end of the night, she would always leave me in the same way, cordial, laughing, firm and cheerful.

* * *

To tell the truth, it wasn’t really this girl I loved, but another one. I had dreamed of her one night, alone in the my high room, a long, tender, profound dream that swelled me with so much happiness that my awakening was like a sword-blow to the neck, inflicted with precision by the pitiless day. She was dark-haired, this I am pretty sure of, dark-haired and full of friendship and joy and madness; I didn’t know who she was, I had never seen her before, nonetheless I knew her, I was certain of this, and she too knew me and was waiting for me, in the meantime whiling away her days however she could, freely making use of her body and her time and her beauty, which should have been saved for me, her sad knight of Aquitaine. She did nothing to please or displease me, and it was all the same to me; her friends and her lovers, big joyous violent men, I ignored them and never invited them into my home. I had known others like them, before, in the East, during bloody wars that resembled festivals, I had laughed and drunk with them while they killed each other, keeping my opinions to myself, always free. That may be why she had loved me: but I had never received anything from her, either good or bad, she had never granted me any rights or done me any wrongs; what she had given me, she had given freely, just as she had taken it back from me, and there was nothing to say to that, even though I was burning from head to foot, in a fire of ice that left no ash. At the same time I couldn’t have cared less about her. I had met another girl, far nicer and more beautiful, a girl both lively and amusing, her superior by far. This was on the occasion of yet another celebration, a great popular festival, the streets were swarming with people, their bodies sweaty, happy and tired, who scattered like sparrows before the onslaught of columns of roaring devils, armed with wheels of fire that sprayed fans of sparks all around, followed by drummers lined up in rows as they steadily beat out the measure, frenzied, throbbing, maddening; behind them, the crowd formed again, laughing, jostling each other, whirling round, and then it all began all over again. I spent the night dancing with this girl I didn’t know; one by one, the people around us left, overcome by exhaustion and alcohol. In the morning, I brought her back to my place, but instead of putting her in my bed, I took her in my arms and toppled with her onto the sofa, overwhelmed by uncontrollable laughter. I kissed her and she kissed me too, laughing too and protesting softly, I caressed and breathed in her long wavy hair, her beautiful lively body, I kissed her neck, the back of her neck, her little ear. When my hand tried to slip into her pants, though, she seized my wrist, with a firm and calm gesture; I kept insisting, between kisses I slipped my fingers here and there, then slowly returned to the elastic; once again, she put up a gentle but unshakable resistance. Finally I began caressing her through the thin fabric of her pants, beneath which I could feel the rougher texture of her underwear; she let herself go, her breathing caught in her throat, giving way to a long happy moan. I was happy too, for making her happy filled me with delight, I kept rubbing her delicately, she moved slowly beneath me, following in little circles the patient rhythm of my fingers, and I closed my eyes and plunged my face into her beautiful fragrant hair, right next to her ear, drinking in its smell mingled with the faint, acrid smell of her sweat, as very slowly her hands came down and undid my belt and pants, unhurriedly, button by button, and freed my cock to hold it between her palms, caressing it lightly, with minute movements, just for the pleasure of feeling it between her fingers as pleasure gripped her young body.

* * *

To this story, there’s nothing else to add. Not really knowing where it comes from, I don’t know what it means, or to whom it could be addressed; already, it is showing me to the door; nothing remains now but for me to send it to someone, who will send it to someone else, further on somewhere, with no hope of a return, no hope of a counter-key that could put an end to my dispossession. At the very most I would have liked it to leave behind the taste of lime sorbet, cool, light, tart, enjoyed in sunlight at the edge of a large pool, in the clear water of which bathers plunge their bodies just as you plunge into the bitterness of life, without looking back.