The Scent of Your Breath

Twenty

“Do you want to?” the man asked me.

He was tall, quite sturdy, with two burning black eyes and curly black hair that thinned over his forehead.

He was holding out a half-open wooden box with one hand; in the other he held a hundred-Euro note and a slim box cutter.

I stared at him and imagined that he was the chief of an African village, simultaneously offering me the treasure of his land and handing me the sacrificial dagger with which I was to cut my finger and mingle my blood with his.

“It’s really good, excellent stuff,” he went on.

I imagined the men of the village digging the dark, dry earth to remove the precious, crystalline material.

He gestured to me to accept his gift.

I stared into his eyes and saw he wasn’t really there. He saw me, but he wasn’t looking at me.

He wasn’t fully in control of his faculties, and he didn’t understand that he was looking at a little girl who was barely of legal age and who looked at least four years younger than she really was.

I shook my head.

He smiled at me and tipped his powder onto a silver tray, splashed here and there with a few drops of champagne. He wiped away the droplets with his shirt cuff and muttered something.

All of a sudden he sniffed. He raised his head and threw it back and closed his eyes, twitching his nose like a rabbit.

For a moment I thought I saw his body turning transparent; I saw his skin melting and his internal organs becoming visible. They were darker than his eyes, and here and there the mucous membrane was torn by an ulcer. The crystal powder spread all the way through his body, branching like a river into different streams, and it looked almost like a divine spring, a purifying fountain.

Then a large belly appeared, followed by the rest of the body of a beautiful woman, who walked over to African-chief-guy and stroked his hair, asking him if it was good.

He took a deep breath, widening his nostrils, and replied, “Divine.”

The woman pulled a face, as though to say, “A shame I’ve got a brat in my belly, otherwise…”

Then she looked at me and asked me, “You’ve never tried it, have you?”

I shook my head and answered, “No, I don’t like it.”

She nodded, walked toward a big chest of drawers, opened one of them, and took out a joint, already rolled.

She looked at it as I might look at a particularly fine penis and then she sighed.

She lit it and lay back on the bed, smoking with gusto.

A few weeks later I saw her acting in a film; her hair was longer and she didn’t have the belly yet. Her pupils were tiny pinpricks.