"Erwin? He… He fished me out of the sea!" she said at last, unsmiling. With that, she left me standing there and dove into the blue lagoon where she spent most of her time.
I never go anywhere without a good pair of binoculars. Thanks to them, I feel like I'm flipping through a picture book rather than observing reality. The general outline of things looks different. Planes of vision remain distinct instead of blending into one another. A clearly decipherable world emerges, with the false and beautiful lucidity of childlike perception. I liked to follow Ligeia with my binoculars from my room. To say she swam like a dream was an understatement. But I wasn't simply struck by the excellence of her front crawl. In the water, her face conveyed a tranquility totally lacking on land. Another woman revealed herself, resurfaced, far from the world of men…
One morning, as I was spying on her movements from my room, an incident occurred. Having swum the lagoon from one end to the other, along the craggy and impassable original shore, I saw her plunge a few dozen yards from the edge. She often went skin diving. I expected to see her come back up at any moment, but time went by and I began getting impatient. I soon panicked, dropping the binoculars and picking them up again, straining my eyes to spot the figure that would convince me my fears were ungrounded. Without success. Had I just seen someone drown? Perhaps there was still time to do something? A feeling of responsibility oppressed me. I spotted Laurencais talking to a gardener in the path beneath my balcony. I called out to them, and tried to communicate the fear that gripped me. Faced with their incomprehension, I jumped down onto the path to reach them more quickly and explain myself.
"What? Someone drowned?"
"Maybe. Over there. Ligeia-"
"Ligeia? Impossible! Where did you say?"
"Over there!"
Laurencais turned to look where I was pointing. A vague worry left his face. "Have no fear, my friend. If you saw her disappear over there, she's completely safe!"
"But-"
The Venezuelan clapped me kindly on the shoulder. "Don't worry! She went for a rest in the grotto. It's an artificial lagoon, as I'm sure you re aware…
He dismissed the gardener with a look.
"When they were digging the lagoon," he said, "I had them make an underwater grotto… We all have a fantasy like that, about one thing or another. Now that mine has been satisfied, I hardly ever go there. Besides, Ligeia's sort of made it her own private spot. She spends a lot of time there."
A submarine grotto, with lighting, decorations, and a sound system, no doubt. I'd forgotten I was dealing with a billionaire.
Laurencais took a cell phone from his pocket. "Let's check, just to be sure."
He dialed and waited, shooting me a sideways glance. "You can visit if you'd like. There's a stairway, too, of course! Now, what can she be doing-ah! Hold, eres tu? Como estas? Muy Bien! Figa to que el senor…"
The conversation was brief.
"She had a good laugh when I told her you'd seen her drown," he said, putting the phone away.
"She's quite an individual… individual!" I said. "What does she do in life?"
"What does she do in life? Since you're a writer, I assume you've already pondered the strangeness of that expression, right?"
"Indeed I have."
"Indeed, it reveals the full extent of its strangeness when applied to a creature like her. What does Ligeia do in life? What do lions do in life? Or wild geese?" He laughed with relish. "Ligeia swims in the lagoon, she haunts the underwater grotto, and when she comes back to the surface she snorts and falls asleep in the sun. Vila!"
"But how did she come into your life?"
"It was I who came into hers, to her misfortune, I fear." He fell silent. He'd intrigued me, of course.
"What do you mean by that?"
"No more for today I must confess something. I didn't ask you here for the same reasons as the others" He gestured offhandedly toward the buildings where the demigods were lazing about. "I collect stars. For me, these people are objects I line up on a shelf in my head. Handsome items, of course! Mostly. But you're something else. I have a story I can't keep to myself. I can't imagine dying without having told it to someone. And you're one of the people I plan to tell. However, it isn t time yet.
"If you've read my work," I said, "you must know I'm not much interested in true stories."
"Precisely. Precisely!"
"I'm leaving soon. You'll have to make up your mind."
"The main thing is knowing what you'll make of this story"
"Probably another story, if it sets the little wheels in my mind spinning.
"There you have it! Another story! And I'll also tell two or three of your professional brethren, who will do the same, I'm sure. Thus Ligeia's true story will give birth to three or four fictional ones. People will read this one, or that, in New York, or Mexico, or Paris, without knowing they're reading a variation on a true story. Anyway, no story is entirely true, or entirely false. I want Ligeia's story to make its way around the world. I want it to escape the dangerously close circle of those who know it. When the time comes, you'll help me!"
To keep my curiosity at bay in the days that followed, I settled for Cindy/Christie. She had to have a story, too. I undertook to make her tell it. But the life of Cindy/Christie, as told by hers truly, was but a humongous, incoherent, and wildly proliferating lie. She'd gone through every conceivable kind of upbringing, every kind of misfortune, and every excuse, but also every rebellion, every ambition, and every kind of courage. She was Juliette, the victim of universal lust; she was Justine, priding herself on challenging the status quo by displaying her own infectious lubricity. Then she turned sweet and amusing when you stopped analyzing her soul to concentrate on her boo-boos and ailments.
Laurencais knew life and in lordly fashion assessed the loss of earnings a week of inactivity implied for the sacred monsters he hosted. A practical lord: the lavish gifts he gave his guests at their farewell party could easily be converted into cash. We could choose to keep them, or exchange them for dollars, yen, or Swiss francs, in which case they'd be used for the next lucky visitors. How many guests with their checks in their pockets had pretended to gush over a Sevres vase or contemporary sculpture they'd leave behind without regret?
When it was my turn, I played the game as sanctimoniously as anyone else. I found myself faced with a check, or selections from The Odyssey. Flustered at first, I clapped like a child when, beneath a sorrylooking binding, all sooty and crumbling, I recognized an authentic incunabulum, all the more precious because ancient authors, along with their great contemporaries, were the least well served during the first century of printing. I set out to look for Laurencais and thank him. He was nowhere to be seen, which surprised me, since the party was in full swing and he should've been the life of it.