The Fata Morgana Books

In Quarters

The outbursts of the children’s laughter were so shrill that I gave up reading. Sighing, I closed the book on my finger and, discouraged, leaned my head back on the chaise longue. The laughter kept erupting, followed by a long, piercing scream; from inside the house came calls, women’s voices. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the tingling sensation in my face, warmed by the sun. But it was useless and I opened my eyes again. I was sitting at the back of the garden; at my feet, the grass glowed gently, a large triangle of light against the darker green of the hedge and the tall, dense trees outlined against the white sky, their leaves moving in a light breeze. Behind me, a chaotic stampede was approaching, interrupted by shouts of joy; a child rushed past my chaise, overturning the little table on which I had rested my glass, fortunately empty. I sighed again, set my feet on the ground and bent over to straighten the table and replace the glass. I also put down my book, whose mint-green cloth binding stood out like a small, luminous rectangle on the dark wood of the table. Nearby, the children were rolling on the grass, shouting; a little further away, a little blond girl wearing a short mustard yellow dress was watching them pensively, lying on her stomach and resting on her elbows, a long blade of grass in her teeth. I skirted round them all and entered the house. In contrast to the daylight the rooms seemed plunged in darkness; momentarily blinded, I blinked my eyes as I groped my way along the long hallway.The sun fell slanting through the tall windows and traced fine blades of light on the waxed floor. Undecided, I walked my fingers over the cream-colored wallpaper, its floral motifs interlaced with gilt threads, before pausing in front of a framed reproduction representing a haughty young lady from the past, her face pale and severe like an ivory mask pinned over all emotion, hiding forever the secret movements of her body. Once again, the children’s laughter resounded toward the back of the hallway, came closer; everything seemed solid to me, much too solid. I entered a room, chose a book at random and sat down on the edge of the bed. Above the ornate brass headboard there hung a painting, an original work this time, showing a group of people dressed in dark brown, pink and white, scattered throughout a shady garden. A girl, seated, looked sideways at the spectator; another, laughing, was leaning her head and her crossed hands on the powerful shoulder of a man in a jacket; the cloth of her thin summer dress, artfully painted, hinted at a supple, agile body, which held itself in a curious torsion, one leg under the other, as if she were about to spin round with a leap to make her dress swirl around her hips. I opened the book and leafed through it, distracted by the cries resounding behind the door, piercing shouts of glee interlaced with childlike laughter, mingled from time to time with snatches of adult voices, amused or scolding, first quite close and then further away, lost in the depths of the vast house. A child came in, a blond boy with short hair, also looking for a book. He didn’t so much as look at me; I watched him in silence as he searched through the library, roughly pushing back the volumes he didn’t want until he finally made his choice, and then left without a word. Was he my child? In all honesty, I couldn’t have said. I looked at the pages of my book, but the words floated in front of my eyes, empty of meaning. Finally I put it down on the embroidered bedspread and went out too, continuing down the hallway to the big living room. A little girl, maybe the same one from before, maybe another, was speeding toward me, her bare feet hammering on the floor; she crashed into my leg, burst out laughing, and continued on her way without pausing. In the living room, the blond boy was reading at a table, between two large windows through which light flooded in; his golden hair shone, but his serious, focused face was in shadow, and I couldn’t see his eyes, fixed on the open pages. In front of him on the table was a large bowl of fruit; without lifting his head, he reached out, grabbed a plum, brought it to his lips, and bit into it, sucking in the juices. A little above his head, between the windows, hung a canvas in a simple wooden frame, a pensive girl in a pink blouse, seated at a long table, holding a peach. The interior, very white with dark, understated furniture, resembled the one in which I found myself; but this girl with her gaze at once serene and playful had her place there, whereas I was wandering like a shade among these quarters full of life. Near me, sitting with a cat on a long burgundy leather sofa, two young women were chatting as they drank their tea: “Did you see the weather report?”—“Yes, they were predicting rain.”—“It doesn’t look like it, though.” The cat, purring, stretched and then fell asleep quite suddenly, its pointy head resting on its two outstretched paws. I walked a little forward, to the center of the big red rug that filled the room; they continued talking without paying attention to my presence, I hesitated, tracing with my foot the black and white patterns, interlaced with blue, on the rug, then moved almost backwards toward the large buffet that stood in the rear of the living room and poured myself a cup of tea. It was still hot; I set down the heavy ceramic teapot and blew on the cup as I listened absent-mindedly to the two women’s chatter; my gaze wandered among the different paintings that decorated the room, going from one to the other and then back again, until it finally came to rest again on the child with the sun-filled hair. Absorbed in his reading, he wasn’t paying any attention to what was around him, neither to me nor to the two women conversing and laughing, one of whom might have been his mother. His gaze, running over the printed lines of the book, perceived nothing but a flood of internal images, much more real and absorbing for him than anything in this house; at the same time, though, he was living his child’s life in perfect harmony with this setting, the large, airy, luminous rooms of the vast house were like an extension of his small body, as varied and mysterious as his moods. As for me, I watched these people around me, I watched them attentively, but they remained out of my reach, like an image seen through a glass pane; even if I pressed my face against it, it was impossible to pass beyond it, to break this invisible surface or, on the contrary, to plunge into it as into an expanse of cold water; and behind it, things, equal to themselves, arranged themselves in a great mute tranquility, a harmonious design of colors, light, and movements, which organized into one single peaceful but inaccessible image blond child, sleeping cat, chatting women, and the young girl with the peach.

* * *

At dinner, it was more of the same. The children shrieked, guffawed, giggled, spilled their glasses on the table, wiped their mouths with their sleeves or rubbed oily fingers on their pants, the women scolded them, wiped them off, then served them more, all in a continuous racket of cutlery, dishes, and noisy chewing. If I wanted some wine, I had to wait for someone to serve another person to try to catch a few drops in passing, my glass stretched across the table; to eat, I pricked the tip of my fork haphazardly into neighboring plates, a green bean here, a piece of meat there, no one seemed to notice. From time to time, taking advantage of a brief pause in the conversation, I timidly hazarded a sentence, but it went unnoticed, the flow of words and shouts continued ceaselessly.The children got up with a loud scraping of chairs, went off to play, then came back to eat standing up before they were made to sit down; they drank while letting juice dribble down onto their chins and shirts, dug their hands into their plate to throw unwanted pieces into their neighbor’s plate, then leapt up again to return to their games, deaf to any orders. For dessert, everyone rushed to the living room with his piece of cake; overwhelmed, I quickly swallowed some leftovers abandoned on the plates as the table was cleared around me. In the living room, visitors were arriving; they were served drinks and cigarillos as they struck up conversation interlaced with pleasantries and flatteries; I looked for a chair, so I could at least sit down and listen, but in vain, none was free; it seemed better to withdraw. I found myself in a large, completely white and blue bathroom; three little girls were splashing about and laughing in a great bathtub filled with bubbles, but as I tried to pass by, they began squealing and waving their arms, sending huge sprays of water through the room that forced me to step back to keep from getting soaked. The blond child was playing the piano in another room, a simple little nursery rhyme whose notes he picked out as he marked time under his breath. I wanted to reach out and play a few notes with him; without noticing me, he slammed the lid down on my fingers and rushed out in a noisy clatter of footsteps. I opened the piano and tried to sketch out the beginning of a piece, but my swollen hands no longer remembered the fingerings. Above the piano, the portrait of an old, noble-looking and somewhat bitter man contemplated me with an air of reproach, his lips pinched as if to let me know I had no place here. Fatigue overwhelmed me, I decided to go to bed; but I didn’t know where to sleep: I visited several bedrooms, all equally clean and handsome, and finally chose one at random. I got undressed at the foot of the bed, carefully folding my clothes, which I arranged on a chair; as I slipped under the sheets, I glimpsed the reflection of my body in the large round mirror hanging opposite the bed, a white body, seemingly in good shape, but as if completely foreign to me. I put out the light and stretched out on my side, one hand under my cheek, the other pressed against my chest. But I couldn’t manage to find sleep. Through the wooden door more children’s shouts resounded, the noise of footsteps, bursts of voices. They seemed to come from all sides of the house, moved from one place to the other, grew distant, then returned all at once to swoop down on me. Merriment had turned into anger, I heard weeping, curt, gruff phrases, but didn’t know what they were about. Things calmed down, then started up again; finally the voices grew brighter, more cheerful. A woman laughed in fits and starts, a man joined in, the children too laughed calmly in another part of the house. A little later on — I still wasn’t sleeping — the door opened and a bright light streamed from the chandelier on the ceiling. I squeezed my eyes shut and burrowed into the pillow. Nearby, someone was getting undressed; I heard the rustle of cloth, then the sound of a brush being pulled through long hair. Finally the person slid into the bed next to me and, turning its back to me, switched the light off. From her smell, I understood it was a woman; her body, warm and soft, surrendered itself quickly to sleep, her breathing became even, then filled with a very slight snore. Annoyed, I turned onto my back and opened my eyes. Little by little, they grew used to the darkness; shifting them to the side, I could just make out the curve of the sheet, drawn over the woman’s shoulder, and the dark mass of her hair. Once again, I looked at the ceiling, examining in the penumbra the long oak beams and the chandelier, whose cut glass facets on yellow brass branches caught vague luminous reflections. The woman next to me slept without moving; the sheets rose and fell to the regular rhythm of her breathing. But sleep continued to elude me, my anxious thoughts refused to grant it to me. When finally I saw the sky grow pale behind the window, I rose soundlessly and dressed in the half-light. The woman had turned onto her back; I could make out her arm under the sheet stretched out across her belly, her hand nestled between her legs. I went out and gently closed the door. I soon got lost in the disorder of the rooms: in one, four children were sleeping in bunk beds, their little heads barely protruding from the sheets and the piles of stuffed animals; in another, an old woman was snoring, tucked in a narrow iron bed pushed against the wall; even further on, there was a couple, the head of the woman nestled in the hollow of the man’s shoulder, the embroidered sheet thrown back, revealing a white breast with a large pink areola, milky against the darker chest on which it rested. In the hallways, already lit by daylight, dusty paintings stood out from the darkness, outlining little rectangles of color on the walls covered with eggshell, pale green and off-white cloth, enhanced by brown or gold. Finally I found the way out and slipped through the door, which I closed carefully on the sleeping house, taking care not to disturb anyone.

* * *

The gate locked behind me with a gentle click and I emerged into the pale dawn. The road was wet from the streetcleaners’ trucks; along the sidewalk, the still-hesitant leaves of the plane trees masked a whitening sky streaked with yellow and orange glints. I walked with a carefree step, examining with a burst of pleasure the cement of the sidewalk, applied in grand, sweeping strokes, as if with a paintbrush, then broadening my gaze to take in the greys of the pavement, the façades of the houses and the vanilla-marbled trunks of the plane trees, the absinthe-green of the leaves in the glow of early morning, the coral red, navy blue, canary yellow, or white of the parked cars. When I reached the building, I inserted my flat key into the lock high up in the heavy wooden door, and leaned on it with all my strength to push it open and penetrate the narrow entrance hall. Already I felt more vigorous: I was regaining solidity, my body was finding its forms and limits and was once again occupying space. In front of me stood the door, painted olive green, of an always absent neighbor; to my right, the lavender-colored stairway, covered in a worn old red plush carpet fixed to the steps by small brass bars, led to the landing where my doors were. There, I hesitated between the one on the left, painted black, and the one on the right, a cardinal red; but my reinvigorated body was reminding me of its own demands, and I made an about-face and went back out into the street, in search of an open café. A little further up there was a small square lined with plane trees; a waiter in a black vest with gold stripes was setting out onto the sidewalk some round greenish marble tables and little straw-colored wicker chairs, woven with red and black, two of which were already occupied by men in dark coats. One of them was reading the paper, whose headline, of which I could see only half, mentioned a country known for its hostility to us; the other suddenly raised his head: under the brim of his soft hat, tinted, tortoise-shell glasses masked his gaze. I entered the café as the waiter was placing two small white cups in front of them, and ordered a coffee and some buttered toast, which I ate slowly at the counter before having another coffee and smoking a cigarette, happily enjoying the rediscovered feeling of my body.

* * *

Outside, at the street corner, I glimpsed a shadow behind one of the plane trees. I leaped over and seized it by the wrist: “What do you want? What are you doing here? Are you spying on me?” She glared rebelliously at me and tried to free her arm, but I held it firmly. “Come with me.” Without letting her go, I brought her back to the apartment; she followed me unprotesting to the sky-blue door, which stood out from afar in the midst of the building’s wide, dirty brick façade. Opening it, I noticed that the paint was peeling: It needs repainting, I said to myself as I pushed in the door, perhaps in a color that matches the stairway better. I pulled the girl, who was still not protesting, up the steps to the narrow landing, where once again I hesitated in front of the two doors. Finally I chose the one on the left, the black one. The room was dark until I turned on the light: everything, the furniture, the floor, the loft where the bed was, was covered in large plastic sheets, dirty but transparent. One of the sheets, draped over a stool, formed a bulge on which a set of building blocks was placed, an assemblage of red, yellow, blue, black, and white pieces, the only touch of color in this grey, abandoned room, a room that looked as if it were waiting for repairs forever delayed. I contemplated the window with dismay; behind it the white wall of the air shaft gleamed weakly. “So, the other room, then,” I finally conceded with regret, without looking at the girl who remained silent. This room was more open, I could see right away; the window, here, looked out on a brick wall, so close you could almost touch it, but the long narrow room didn’t look dark, and it suited me. The walls were pale, they must once have been white, but time had stained and dirtied them, you could even see indistinct traces of color, and they were covered in pictures, photographs, newspaper clippings, old sepia prints, pages torn from books, tacked on or stuck there with yellowed Scotch tape. I had no idea who could have assembled this clutter of images, perhaps another tenant, perhaps me, at another time, hard to say. Near the door stood a blondwood board resting on metal trestles, on which lay scattered a few books, most of them with their covers torn off, and some piles of papers; on the other side, a low, round table with a chair occupied the space in front of the bed, so wide that it left only a narrow passageway to reach the bathroom door, painted the same red as the entry door. I motioned the girl to the bed: “Go on, lie down there.” She skirted round me with a childlike laugh and crossed the mahogany-colored floor as if she had no feet; in front of the bed, she spun round in a fluid motion and let herself fall back, her arms outstretched, scattering her Venetian blonde hair on the lilac expanse of the sheets, without taking off her apple-green raincoat, which revealed smooth, slim legs. I sat down at the round table, poured myself a drink from a bottle there, and lit a cigarette.The girl laughed in crystal-clear tones and leapt up. “You’re funny!” she laughed. She let her raincoat slip to the bed; underneath, she wore a short, eggplant-colored summer dress, chiffon possibly, which barely reached below her upper thighs. She ran her fingers through her thick shoulder-length hair and walked lightly forward. I stretched out my hand to caress her thigh in passing, but she smoothly dodged it, and my fingers just grazed the thin, rustling cloth of her dress as she slipped behind the desk and began playing with the papers, leafing carelessly through the piles. “Don’t touch,” I scolded, amused. — “Why don’t you offer me a drink?” she asked, smiling, still looking at the papers. I poured her a glass and brought it to her; she drank a mouthful and suddenly raised her large, dark eyes to me, deep and laughing. “Will you run me a bath?”—“Run it yourself,” I retorted rudely, sitting back down at the round table. She burst out laughing, straightened up and crossed the room, undoing the hooks on the back of her dress, which she slipped smoothly over her head and threw onto the sheets to join the green raincoat. Aside from the dress, she wore nothing but a pair of tiny, salmon-colored panties made of an almost transparent tulle; I admired the long curve of her back, the radiance of her golden skin, the slender nape of neck under her short hair. “You are a boor!” she called out to me before turning round, hands on her hips. “Do you think I’m beautiful?” she went on, her laughter intensifying. Her brown nipples stood out on small breasts, I could make out her thick pubic hair under the thin cloth of the panties; she fluffed out her hair with her hands and smiled wide, young, splendid, and proud. I didn’t say anything, happy simply to look at her. “Boor!” she repeated, still laughing. She opened the bathroom door and busied herself near the enamel bathtub; water gushed out from the big white faucets. I watched her through the half-open door: she straightened up, took off her panties, lifting first one foot, then the other; then she disappeared from my sight and I heard a liquid tinkling, softer and shriller than the jet gushing out of the faucets. As the sound continued I let my gaze wander over the photographs covering the walls. There were some strange images: a pregnant woman walking proudly in front of soldiers standing at attention; a crowd of men massed together, fists raised, each with a striped cover tied across his shoulder; two men in black suits standing in front of a hedge, multicolored umbrellas raised above their heads, the lower part of their faces covered with surgeons’ masks. One of the images in particular held my attention: an Asiatic soldier, in the midst of a crowd wearing old-fashioned oriental outfits, was completing a sweeping movement with his sword as the head of a condemned man kneeling in front of him lifted from his shoulders, in a thick spurt of blood. It was the perfect capture of a twofold instant, carried out like a sport: the one where the blade slices through the neck with a perfected gesture, synchronized with the one when the finger of the photographer presses the shutter release, the moment of the execution articulated with the moment of the creation of the image, the dreamed-of, unprecedented, fully achieved image, in all its banal repetition (for there were hundreds of such images, as I knew well), of the instant of a man’s death. Still perched on the shoulders, the head hesitated, the mouth deformed in a silent cry and the eyes closed to the unfathomable fact, just as the condemned man’s life hesitated, still and forever suspended in the brief click of the shutter. The girl, naked, had emerged from the bathroom, and was idling in front of the bed vigorously brushing her teeth, like a little girl, a thin film of white foam on her lips. She glanced over at me, smiled through the foam, then returned to the bathroom. I finished my cigarette while gazing once again at the image of the decapitated Chinese man, then went to join her. She was already lying in the bathtub; the water, still agitated, blurred the lines of her body; only her narrow face and the tips of her breasts rose above the bluish water. “Yes, you are beautiful,” I sadly acknowledged as I sat on the edge to test the temperature of the water.

* * *

When it came down to it, I liked this girl. She was cheerful, light-hearted, she said yes to everything. But something in her always escaped me. In my arms, naked, she trembled like a bird flapping its wings, my gestures drew from her body long sighs that became stifled moans, but no matter how much I touched her, caressed her, spread her supple limbs to burrow into her, I never managed to grasp her, and the feeling of her constantly slipped between my fingers. I came too, in long whitish streams on her golden skin, then I lay down next to her, gathered her in my arms, slept a little; when I woke up, everything began again, without end, without conclusion, without appeasement. When we spoke, she answered me laughing, with words as light as her, not really empty, but without any consistency, like a pleasant punctuation to my statements. We ate whatever fell into our hands, in bistros or diners chosen at random; I swallowed the dishes with appetite but without discernment, to regain my strength before I brought her back to the room. As for her, everything was the same to her, she took her pleasures without concern, in the lightness of the moment, at once greedy and indifferent. But she couldn’t tell me anything, and I could never be sure of her, of her body or her words. Nonetheless, in this room with its walls covered with photographs, I felt entirely myself, a being equal to others, living its own life, according to the general rules, like everything that exists. Only the girl escaped this unexpressed harmony, her presence remained a constant dissonance, forever oblique. Her very vivacity turned her into an apparition, a little moth that flutters between four walls and then dies in the dawn light. I never tired of her, it wasn’t a question of that, but I didn’t know what to do with her, where or how to place her to ensure even a temporary equilibrium, I ran into the angles of her small mobile body as into disjointed surfaces, unable to place her in the same space as me, even for an instant.

* * *

I joined my friends in the train compartment with some satisfaction. One of them had called me, laughing: “You haven’t forgotten, have you? It’s tomorrow morning, the train leaves at 8:43. I have your ticket.”—“What’s the weather like, there?”—“I don’t know. They’re still predicting rain, but for now it’s nice.”As I closed the red door of the room, I realized I hadn’t brought a bag; as for the girl, I didn’t really know where she was; it was possible that she had stayed in the bed, and that I hadn’t seen her, or she might have left before me, I don’t know. In front of the door to my building stood two men in dark suits: one, his foot resting on a step, was jotting something down in a notebook; the other stopped me for a second to ask for a light. On the way, I passed large modern apartment buildings, constructions of cubes with bluish, brown and rust tones, where the windows alternated with metal strips to form long vertical bands, divided in sections of varying width. The streets were getting crowded; I passed many people, men and women hurrying to work, lost in their thoughts; from time to time, however, a young woman would raise her eyes and smile at me, and I would return the favor, but it was rare. In the station’s concourse a cheerful agitation reigned; my friends, in the compartment we had reserved, were trading books; I went to order a sandwich in the café car and settled on a tall stool.The train had gotten underway with a grinding noise, behind the window the city’s buildings were already rushing by, then increasingly disorderly and dirty suburbs, which finally gave way to the first trees and to fields dotted with pretty little cemeteries. The sky was clear, luminous, streaked with long white contrails; in the distance a few clouds were gathering, casting large shapeless shadows on the fields of wheat and pale barley. It wasn’t I who had chosen the destination but the friend who had called me the night before; she had enumerated the charms of this little provincial town one after the other, as well as the pleasure of the crowd that filled its streets at night, in this season: everything, she said, made it an ideal goal for our excursion. She had picked the hotel as well: my room was all white, with an ivory carpet and a white bedspread, a black leather chair, and as sole decoration the picture of a red square framed over the bed. The shower, tiled in white and grey, was roomy; I stood under the water with pleasure, vaguely regretting that the girl wasn’t there, for this shower would have pleased her, I was sure of it; but I forgot this thought as soon as it had arisen, abandoning myself to the burning stream hammering the back of my neck.

* * *

My friends wished to visit a church, then go for a stroll; as for me, I opted for the museum, and agreed to meet up with them in the early evening. The sky, above the maze of narrow streets that led to the museum square, was turning grey, and I told myself I should have listened to the forecasts and brought an umbrella, or at least a raincoat. The museum, still little known, had just recently opened its doors: a local eccentric millionaire, whose only daughter, they said, had hanged herself, had left his collection to the city, along with a large enough endowment to ensure its preservation and exhibition. The rooms were not large, but they were tall and filled with light, white like my hotel room, which gave a feeling of space conducive to meditation.There weren’t many visitors, the rare sounds remained hushed, even footsteps scarcely echoed on the waxed floor. I passed through these rooms aligned like chapels, casting my gaze over the images hanging there, most of which, in fact, said nothing to me. They were beautiful paintings, painted with talent and vigor; the figures, rendered according to all the rules of art, seemed endowed with life and movement, but they didn’t speak to me, and I kept moving. I finally came to a halt in front of a large, almost square canvas, slightly taller than me, a red background on which was painted a large black rectangle, then below it another narrower rectangle, red too but darker than the background, and more irregular. This indeed was not much, but what struck me is that if you stood your ground for a moment as you contemplated them, these rectangles began to move, to float forward or to withdraw, vertiginously. When I stepped back a little, the black rectangle advanced gently toward me, as if it were inviting me to join it; but as soon as I took a step forward, it speedily withdrew and passed far behind the background, revealing itself as a gaping abyss into which I nearly fell. Overcome with fear, I would stumble back, and immediately it leaped forward, recovering in an instant its place suspended in front of the background, opening up to me with a light, silent smile. As for the lower rectangle, it evaded me more mischievously: for instance, if you took one or two steps to the side, it changed color, veering to orange, a more muted, slightly burnt color; otherwise, it danced from side to side, always a little behind the large black rectangle. This surprising painting acted as if it were the one looking at me, it was a face, smiling seriously and kindly, a face that was watching me watch it, without taking its gaze off me, preventing me from moving away or even looking elsewhere. Finally, a guard had to come over to tap me on the shoulder: “We’re closing, sir, it’s time.” Freed by his intervention, I joined the last visitors heading for the exit. Outside, a few drops had begun to fleck the grey stone of the sidewalk; one hit me on the forehead, another on my hand. Just opposite, a store was closing its doors; the storekeeper, quite politely, allowed me to buy a felt hat from her before she pulled down her metal grate. On the square where I was supposed to meet my friends, the crowd was dense, compact and noisy, the first signs of rain discouraging neither its cheerfulness nor its animation. I found my friends at the covered terrace of a café and ordered a drink as they made fun of my hat, which, however, was quite practical. We drank and smoked as they described the church in detail; for my part I was silent, happy to hear the excited sound of their voices. When we left the bistro, the rain had intensified; umbrellas in the crowd unfurled one after the other and began to bump against each other, so that I sometimes had to duck my head to avoid being hit in the eye. Little by little, in the heart of this crowd, I lost sight of my friends; finally they disappeared altogether, and I found myself alone. I wasn’t worried: It’s not such a big town, I said to myself, I’ll find them again soon. I was walking alongside a curved stone parapet; behind, I knew, flowed the river in whose bend the town nestled, but it was too dark on that side to see anything. Two men in raincoats were approaching me, walking at the same pace, their faces invisible beneath their large black umbrellas. I found their appearance vaguely threatening; but as they reached me, they separated without a word, passing on either side of me to join up again behind me. Further on, the street rose and widened, leading to a broad stone bridge that connected this bank to the new part of town; at the entrance to the bridge, I turned back, picking a narrow street that rose toward the squares further up. But I didn’t find my friends there either. Dodgy-looking figures in long coats were clustered in little groups beneath the trees, whispering furtively; cars with tinted windows came and went in an incessant ballet; sometimes, one would pull up next to one of the groups, a door would open, a few words would be exchanged, or else a man would get in, slam the door, and the car would start up again. Above the streets and the little squares, lamps hanging from wires shone in the night, their gleam, under the now continuous rain, forming large, ovoid haloes. There are strange things going on here, I said to myself as I avoided these groups of suspicious-looking men; as for my friends, no matter how much I paced up and down the streets, there was no sign of them; as it got late, passersby grew more and more infrequent, but still I persisted, searching each corner with a growing feeling of unease. I thus found myself in a little park nestled between some old houses; tall old trees grew between the paths, perched on mounds surrounded by metal gates; set a little back, in a recess, one could make out the opening to a sort of bower, accessible by a few steps and feebly lit; I stuck my head in, in the vain hope of finding my friends chatting away, sheltered from the rain, but on the stone benches there were only three soldiers, in officer’s uniforms with wet epaulets; they were smoking cigarettes and speaking loudly, without paying any attention to me. “Frankly, they’re going too far,” one of them was saying, his grey mustache, yellow with nicotine, quivering over his unpleasant mouth. — “Yes, that’s for sure. They’re provoking us,” declared the second one,lifting his cap to scratch his forehead. “We can’t let them get away with it,” gravely concluded the third. “We have to react.” I left them to their discussion and regained the street, profoundly discouraged. My hotel, I knew, wasn’t far away; perhaps it would be better to go back and wait there, rather than wander like this in the rain. And also, all these sinister figures had me a bit worried. In fact, two of them, hands in pockets, were standing in front of the hotel; despite the night and the rain, which was still falling in small, thin droplets, they wore dark glasses, as if they were playing cops, or spies. I walked past the entrance without stopping; they followed me with their gaze, but didn’t move. The street dipped down to join the main street; here the crowd grew thicker, but I kept catching glimpses of one of the sinister gentlemen standing beneath a tree or seated behind the window of a diner. At the end of the main street stood the station; a train was leaving within the hour, I bought a ticket and took a seat with relief, wiping with the back of my sleeve the damp felt of my new hat.

* * *

The rain streaked the train’s windows; beyond, everything was dark, opaque, unreachable. It was still raining when I got out, a firm, sustained shower now; I reached my apartment soaking wet, a little annoyed. The girl, wearing nothing but cotton panties, chartreuse green with thin red stripes, was leafing through a magazine, lying on her belly on the lilac rectangle of the bed. “What are you doing here?” I asked, surprised, shedding my wet clothes. She smiled at me as I was struggling with my pants: “Well, I was waiting for you.”—“You could have turned on the heat, at least,” I grumbled. “It’s freezing in here.” Although she was nearly naked, she didn’t seem to notice, whereas I was shivering; I hurried to pull on a dry pair of pants, then a shirt and a sweater. That didn’t help much and I sat down at the round table to pour myself a drink. The girl had sat up and, sitting cross-legged, was looking at me with an amused air: her smile, her thin waist, her pert little breasts, the bones of her knees, everything in her was like a rebuke addressed to me, friendly and indistinct. Glass in hand, I rose and went to sit down behind the desk. The girl fell back, her head in the pillows, her knees touching and forming, with her feet flat on the violet sheets, an unstable triangle that she swung quietly from side to side. “Come here, if you’re cold.”—“No, not now,” I answered distractedly as I fiddled with a pen and shifted some papers, running my gaze over the countless pictures adorning the walls without really seeing them. “Take a hot bath, then,” she suggested. I rubbed my shoulders: “No, not now.” A little glass egg, opaque and rather rough, had made its way into my fingers; I weighed it, slid it over my palm, then lifted it to the light: it glowed with a warm, red, dark, shifting light, as if it were filled with blood, or else incubating a mysterious creature intimately linked to fire. I finished my drink and looked around for the bottle, but the girl, I’m not sure how, had gotten hold of it and was rolling it between her legs, laughing: “You want it? Come and get it.”—“Oh, you’re annoying.” My shoulders were shuddering in spasms: I must have really caught cold. The rain was still falling heavily behind the window, darkening the space, almost masking the brick wall even though it was quite close. I got up and headed for the bathroom; the girl had taken up her magazine again and was turning the pages, toying with the bottle between her feet. I stood in front of the mirror and examined my face: it looked strangely vague to me, half erased, I couldn’t seem to grasp its workings; mystified, I rubbed it, but it was as if the skin were peeling away between my fingers, leaving me even more insubstantial. I preferred not to see this so I returned to the room; the girl was still reading, quite alive and absolutely real with her thin bones and delicate joints, her warm, golden skin, her hair with its reddish reflections, her dark, always slightly amused eyes. I was afraid of touching her, it seemed to me as if my fingers would pass through her skin, or else would crumble against her like wet sand. I returned to the desk after grabbing the bottle, poured myself another glass, and began reading the pages piled there. The handwriting was not at all unlike my own, I myself must have written these lines, these pages of text, but they said absolutely nothing to me, and I could barely grasp their meaning. It was a kind of story: the narrator, a lost shade, was wandering through a vast house whose rooms echoed with the laughter of small children. The setting seemed vaguely Russian, it could have been a story by Chekhov if it had had the slightest psychological substance; in any case, it had nothing to do with me. Perhaps it was a translation I had done and then forgotten? Or the copy of a text I had come across? I had no idea, and it didn’t matter. On the bed, the girl seemed to be sleeping, her breasts hidden under the overturned magazine, her head on its side, her face half masked by her hair. She is taking up more and more room, I said to myself, soon she’ll be treating this place like her own. I was still very cold, my whole body was trembling, but I didn’t want to lie down next to her, I was afraid of hurting myself on her sharp bones, her hard, piercing body; so I stacked the papers, went out into the hallway, and opened the second door, the one on the left. I crossed the room, walking on the plastic tarps, climbed the ladder to the loft, and slipped under the tarp that covered it, rolled into a ball, my eyes closed, my legs racked with long shivers. How long did this last? I couldn’t say, an eternity of sand and lava, my body had rid itself of all solidity and all presence, it was floating very high up on the fever as if on a funeral barge, traveling over the years all the seas of the world, unable to find its way, neither toward life, nor toward death. When at the end of this centuries-long journey I opened my eyes, the tarp had disappeared; I was lying beneath a thick comforter wrapped in a beige cover, completely soaked with my sweat. I turned over and examined the room: all the tarps had been removed, the floor was covered in a thick sky-blue carpet spotted with dark blue patterns, everything looked crisp and clean, the colorful toy was still resting on the stool. Against the wall stood a tall rectangular mirror, set in a thin orange frame: I looked for my reflection in it, but could only see that of the toy, which looked bigger and more elaborate than the one I remembered, as if it had grown during the long night. I heard a door open under the loft, I had never noticed there was one, and the girl appeared on the blue carpet. This time, she wore a lightweight pair of dark-brown pants and a red tank top with a large black circle across the chest. “That’s better, isn’t it?” she said, raising her head toward me and smiling widely. “You should knock down the wall, or at least put in a double door, that would give you more space.” I didn’t have the strength to tell her to keep her advice to herself and I closed my eyes, rolling onto my back and stretching my aching legs. My clothes, I noticed only then, had disappeared along with the tarps, I was lying naked under the comforter, and I felt a sudden shame at this, as if I had been turned into a plucked bird, bristling and scared. “Where are my clothes?” I asked in a murmur, but if she heard me, she didn’t reply, she had disappeared again. A vague sound of water reached me, she was probably running a bath, on the other side; all of a sudden, the sound became clearer, and even before she reappeared I understood that the mysterious door must communicate with the bathroom, allowing passage between the two contiguous rooms. This time, she was holding a green apple, which she brought to her nose before biting into it. She held out to me another one which she had kept hidden behind her back: “Here, take it.” Since I didn’t react, she insisted, shaking the apple almost in front of my face: “Go on, it’ll do you good.” I didn’t move and she bit again into her own apple, chewing slowly and carefully as she slipped the other one into her pants pocket. “The bath will be ready. Are you coming?” I couldn’t take my eyes away from the round ball on her hip; finally, I raised my eyes to the mirror, which reflected in its orange frame the long supple line of her body. “Where are my clothes?”—“Oh, what a pain you can be!” she laughed. “They’re here, on a chair. I added some clean underwear, you hadn’t put any on.” She went back under the loft and closed the door. I listened to her busying herself behind the wall, she had turned off the water and must have been undressing, then I heard her body slide into the bath. She kept eating her apple; the water made little lapping sounds. Then I squirmed out from under the comforter and managed with difficulty to reach the ladder, which creaked beneath my weight as I somehow descended, holding on with all my strength so as not to fall. My clothes were indeed where she had said; but my hat was still in the other room, along with my jacket, wallet, and cigarettes. Yet passing through this bathroom, which I imagined completely overflowing with this girl’s excess of life, was beyond me, and the key to the hallway door was precisely still in my jacket pocket. I tried to consider my situation, but my thoughts, foggy, kept shredding apart and contradicting one another in turn; the rain, still drumming in the air shaft, complicated things even more, since going out in the downpour in just a shirt was unthinkable, but as for confronting this impossible girl once again, I was incapable of it, and no other options presented themselves to me for the moment. I could have stayed there for a long time pointlessly turning over these thoughts, but every time I moved, the large mirror set against the wall sent back a reflection, too fragmented and aggressive to be my own, which put me ill at ease. Undecided, I opened the hallway door: a large tan canvas umbrella stood there, open and overturned,soaking the old red carpet with water. That solves everything! I exclaimed joyfully, grasping the black leather handle. Leaning against the railing, I shook it, sprinkling the carpet and the lavender floor with a rainfall of droplets, then closed it and started down the steps, leaning with all my weight on the handle in a vain attempt to control my legs which, lost, were each trying to move in a different direction.

* * *

Walking in the rain, my head and upper body well protected by the unfurled umbrella, I was overcome with a childlike happiness, albeit slightly tinged with anxiety: I looked around me, examining the trees and cars parked along the sidewalk, but I saw nothing out of the ordinary. The rare passersby, also protected from the downpour by umbrellas or sometimes just a newspaper held over their heads, walked quickly, each had his own goal and no one paid me any mind. Having reached the house, I unlocked the gate, and, closing it carefully behind me, crossed the small garden to ring the doorbell. My shoes and pant cuffs were soaked, but that didn’t bother me; absentmindedly, ringing again, I noticed that I was already standing much more easily. A woman, no longer young, opened the door: “Oh, it’s you! We were wondering where you were. The little one is sick.” Closing the umbrella and placing it in the large stand meant for that purpose, I followed her down the hallway, decorated with reproductions, to the children’s room, leaving traces of wet footsteps on the wooden floor. The boy was lying under several dark covers, curled up, his whole body shaking in long spasms. I reached out and touched his forehead, which burned beneath my fingers, then stroked his hair soaked with sweat. “Has the doctor come?” I asked, without turning, the woman who stood a little back at the entrance to the room. — “Yes. He gave him an injection.”—“When?”—“It was this morning.” I noticed a bottle of pills at the bedside, picked it up, read the label, and put it back down. “Did the doctor leave this?”—“Yes. He said to give him one every four hours.”—“And that’s been done?”—“Yes, you can count on us.” Next to the medicine, on the low table, there was also a carafe of water and a glass; I carefully rolled the child onto his back and lifted his head, carrying the glass to his lips: “Drink,” I said to him, “you have to drink.” He didn’t open his eyes but parted his lips; I brought the glass to them, but his mouth was trembling too much, the glass clinked against his teeth, the water dribbled down his chin. I put his head back onto the sweat-soaked pillow and stroked his hair again. “Bring me a basin of water. With a sponge, or a washcloth.” The woman withdrew wordlessly, then returned with what I had asked for. I placed the basin on the floor, soaked the washcloth, squeezed it out, and, sitting on the edge of the bed, spread it over the child’s forehead. He raised his hand and placed it over my own, it was as light as a cat’s paw, dry and burning. I re-soaked the washcloth and repeated the gesture several times in a row; little by little, the long shivers began to calm down; finally, I managed to get him to drink a little. The woman, behind me, was watching me in silence. I got up and looked at her: “The sheets are soaking, his pajamas too. Change them. Can you do that?” She avoided my gaze and nodded. I went out and headed for the large living room. Several people were there, exchanging pleasantries without much conviction; at the table near the window, some children were listlessly playing cards, a few girls and another boy, younger than they; above their heads, the young lady in pink was still contemplating me with her calm, almost complicit gaze, as if she wanted to invite me to share her peach. I poured myself a glass of wine and took a seat on the sofa, crossing my legs and authoritatively grasping the hand of the woman seated next to me. Whenever a new subject was introduced, I gave my opinion in a firm, clear, decisive voice; the people gathered around me gravely nodded, without ever contradicting me. In the evening, the doctor came by; I had in the meantime washed and changed, and put on a clean suit with a vest and even a tie made of crocheted wool, brown like the suit. I accompanied the doctor to the boy’s room and stood next to him as he examined him, auscultated him, and took his temperature. Several others had followed us into the room, women and men and even a little girl, they couldn’t stand still but came and went aimlessly, without saying a word but fortunately keeping their distance. The doctor finally delivered his prognosis, which coincided exactly with my own: continue the pills and compresses, watch over the child, make him drink. “Did you hear that?” I called out to the people huddling around. “Make him drink, that’s important, that’s what I said.” I thanked the doctor and escorted him to the front door; we separated with a frank handshake, and he promised to return the next morning, early.

* * *

During the meal, the banal, disjointed conversation continued; without arrogance but firmly, I discouraged useless discussions, put an end to pointless controversies with a fair opinion, warned off those who got too excited, supported those who spoke sensible words. It wasn’t that I took myself so seriously, on the contrary, I felt like a kid playing at being an adult, but playing seriously, so seriously that no one suspected, and when I commented in detail on the grave foreign policy crisis brewing, everyone listened to me attentively, drinking in my words without interrupting me. The children ate in silence, with just a slight clink of silverware, at times asking politely, in the interludes between subjects, for salt, or water, or some more food. A boy brought his hand to his lips: I looked at him, he blushed and grabbed his napkin to wipe his face. Their meal over, the children excused themselves and cleared their places; I poured more wine for the grownups and handed out cigarillos to those who wanted them. The woman seated to my left, who kept her beautiful clear eyes fixed on me as she listened to my words in silence, raised a lighter and lit it; I brought her hand to the tip of my cigar, thanking her with a smile, holding her fingers delicately so the flame wouldn’t tremble. She contemplated me with boundless gratitude, but at the same time a vague anxiety disturbed her gaze, making her indistinct and rarefying her features, just as was the case for all those gathered around this table. I heard a noise and raised my head: the blond child was standing in the doorway, his feet bare, pale as a sheet. I put my cigar down in the ashtray, got up, joined him and took him in my arms before heading for one of the empty rooms where I placed him on the embroidered bedspread. He murmured a few indistinct words, I brought my ear closer, the words took on strength and began to form phrases, I listened attentively, he spoke in a loud voice now, his eyes wide open and focused on a point that I couldn’t locate, his words had become clear but I was incapable of grasping their meaning, he was uttering sentences whose syntax was impeccable but whose key word, the one that would give meaning to all the others, remained incomprehensible, a group of syllables seemingly significant but tied to nothing, or else there came a word perfectly comprehensible, obvious, but inserted into a completely scrambled sentence, incapable of supporting its signification. I spoke too, calm and peaceful words, I answered his statements without thinking, trying to bring him back to a sense of reality, but each time his words only placed themselves in the wake of mine in order to overtake them and then race away again in the opposite direction, to a dizzying distance, at the depths of which they turned round and came back, following the opposite path with the same implacable logic. I had asked for the basin and applied cold compresses to him, stroking his back and speaking gently; in spite of that, terror was overcoming him, his features contorted, I repeated my reassuring words with a smile, his eyes remained open but I had no way of judging if he saw anything, I didn’t know if he had awakened or if he was still sleeping and dreaming out loud, incorporating my words into his dream, I didn’t want to startle him, I kept wetting his forehead and his head and trying to bring him back to reason, to the reality of the room where we were. Slowly, the flood of words slowed down, the phrases spaced out; finally, the child closed his eyes and his wet head fell against my chest, where I held it in my palm, which seemed immense next to his little face. With a towel someone gave me, I dried his hair, then lay him down in the bed, before lying next to him without even taking off my shoes. Pacified, he breathed with a whistling but regular noise, his eyelids, swollen and translucent, quivering over his eyes. I put my arm around him and stayed for a long time next to him. Much later, the child was deep in a regular sleep and I got up: “You, stay with him,” I said to the first person I met in the hallway. The others had scattered throughout the house, I glimpsed one or another of them through a half-opened door or at the end of a hallway; it was all the same to me, I returned to pick up my extinguished cigar and, relighting it, sat down beneath the portrait of the girl with the peach, opening the newspaper lying there to study the latest declarations of the foreign leader who was threatening us in such an incomprehensible manner.

* * *

At breakfast, the people gathered around the table seemed even less substantial, even more ephemeral than the day before. The woman who had spent the night with me twirled a teaspoon in a soft-boiled egg, without raising her eyes to me; her body, under a batiste robe, must have kept some traces of our nighttime games; it may have been she who had held out the light for me at the previous night’s dinner, but I couldn’t be sure. The children were silent and swallowed buttered toast and glasses of fruit juice; for my part, I leafed through the morning paper, full of still more unsettling news on which I found it hard to concentrate, so much did the feeling of my own presence distract me: I felt so solid that my joints ached. The doctor was announced: I joined him in the hallway and in a few words filled him in on the night’s events. “There’s nothing to worry about,” he affirmed, “it happens at that age, with strong fevers. The main thing is to bring the temperature down, as you’ve rightly done.” In the bedroom, he examined the child, who submitted with a tired air, without protesting; the doctor tried to ask him some questions, but he didn’t remember anything. The fever had diminished. “He should eat a little,” the doctor decreed, putting his instruments back in his bag. “Broth, stewed fruit, a little white rice if he can.” Outside, it was still raining, and I took the large brown umbrella to escort him to his car, stepping aside to let him pass through the gate in front of me while protecting him from the rain. Alone in the street, with my back to the gate, I hesitated: what if I returned to the apartment? I looked at the street in that direction and my throat tightened when I glimpsed the two men in black, each armed with an umbrella. They held them very high up, which allowed me to see with a growing fear their shining, lifeless eyes, and their lips open in wide predatory smiles. With calm, even, resolute steps, they advanced toward me.