She’s talking to Billy. He’s very elegant, very slim. Hair, I notice, turning grey along the sides. Everything else has become gold, the chaste gold of cufflinks, a gold watchband, the mesh dense as grain, a gold lighter from Carrier. I don’t know what they’re talking about, nothing, I’m sure it’s nothing because I’ve had a thousand conversations with him myself, but still he can hold her there somehow, Billy, to whom Cristina used to whisper in those early days that she wanted to leave the party and go make a little boom-boom. He has that white line of a scar on his mouth. One’s eyes always fall to it. He lights her cigarette. Her head is bent forward a little. Now it straightens up. They continue to talk. I notice she’s never really still. She seems to writhe in one’s gaze with slight, almost imperceptible movements.
I wander away towards more quiet regions of the apartment which is very large. The ceilings become silent, the voices fade. It seems I am entering an older, a more conventional household. The dining room is empty and dark. The table is just as it was, not cleared. The cloth is still spread on it, the chairs are in disarray. Glass plates bear the remnants of brie and the halves of pears already becoming brown. In front of the windows is a zone of tall plants, a conservatory through which noise does not penetrate, through which, in the daytime, the light diffracts. It is a room in which I can imagine the silence of leisurely mornings, the pages of Le Figaro turning softly as Maria Beneduce glances over them, the pages of the Herald Tribune. She is in a short robe printed with flowers. She drinks black coffee stirred with a tiny spoon. Her face is natural and unpainted. Her legs are bare. She is like a performer backstage. One loves this ordinary moment, this pause between the brilliant acts of her life.
Suddenly someone is behind me.
“Did I scare you?” Cristina says, smiling.
“What? No.”
“You jumped about a foot,” she says. “Come on, I want you to meet somebody.”
A friend from Bristol, Tennessee, she tells me as she leads me back. No, but I’m going to like her, she’s very funny. She’s married to a rich, rich Frenchman. She puts flowers in all the bidets. He gets furious. Already I dread her.
People are still coming in, even this late, appearing after other dinners, the theatre. Beneduce is guiding a handsome trio into the room, a man and two stunning women in suede boots and tightly belted coats. Mother and daughter, Cristina tells me. He’s marrying them both, she says. Near the bar Anna Soren listens to the conversation around her with a wavering, a translucent smile. She doesn’t always know who’s speaking. She looks at the wrong person. Her false eyelashes are coming loose.
“You know something?” Cristina says. “You’re the only friend of Billy’s I like.”
It pleases but disturbs me, this remark. I’m not sure what it means, I just have the feeling it will prove to be fatal. I don’t want to answer or even to appear as if I’ve heard.
“They’re all illiterates,” she tells me.
Through the crowd a woman is approaching.
“Isabel!” Cristina cries. It’s her friend.
There is no way to begin except with admiration for Isabel who is forty and dressed in a beautiful, black Chanel suit with silver buttons and a ruffled, white shirt. On her finger is a ring with a large diamond, a perfectly round diamond that catches every piece of light, and her smile is as dazzling as her clothes. There’s a young man with her whom she introduces.
“Phillip…” Her hand flutters hopelessly, she’s forgotten his name.
“…Dean,” he murmurs.
“I’m the worst in the world,” she says, the words drawling out. “I just seem to forget names as fast as people can tell them to me.”
She laughs, a high, country laugh.
“Now, don’t take it to heart,” she tells him. “You’re the best-looking thing in this room, but I’d forget the name of the President himself if I didn’t already know it.”
She laughs and laughs. Phillip Dean says nothing. I envy that silence which somehow doesn’t disgrace him, which is curiously beautiful, like a loyalty we do not share.
“He’s been traveling in Spain,” she says, “isn’t that right?”
“Spain!” Cristina says.
His face seems to show it. There still remain the faint, lustrous tones of journeys in an open car.
“I love Spain,” Cristina says.
“You’ve been there?”
“Oh,” she says, “many times.”
“Barcelona?”
“I love it.”
“And Madrid…”
“What a city.”
“We went to the Prado every day,” he says.
“I love the Prado.”
“What is it?” Isabel says.
“The museum.”
“The museum?” she says. “Why, I love it, too. I forgot what it was called.”
“It’s the Prado,” he says.
“Why, that’s right. I remember it now.”
“What were you doing in Spain?” Cristina asks.
“I was just traveling,” he says.
“All alone?”
Images of a young man in the dun-colored cities of late afternoon. Valencia. Trees line the great avenues. Seville at night, the smell of dust that has settled, the smell of oleander, richer, green. In front of the big hotel two porters are hosing the sidewalk.
“No, I was with my father,” he says.
Suddenly I like him. Cristina can’t take her eyes away. She asks when he was born, and it turns out he’s a Sagittarius which is a very good sign.
“Really?”
“It’s one of the best for me,” she says. “Scorpio is the worst.”
“I’m a Libra,” Isabel says and laughs. “Isn’t that right?”
Dean has a small, straight mouth and wide-set, intelligent eyes. Hair that the summer has dried. It’s of schoolboy heroes that I am thinking, boys from the east, ringleaders, soccer backs slender as girls.
“You have a great face,” Cristina says. She is seized with a sudden gaiety. “You know, I’d like to do a painting of you.”
Isabel laughs. The evening has only begun.
At three in the morning—Cristina never goes to bed when she’s drinking—we are wandering through the disorder of les Halles. The air is chilly at this hour, noises seem to ring in it. The workmen glance up from their crates at the unmistakable sound of high heels. Isabel is talking. Cristina. They are pointing everything out. We trail foolishly between great barricades of fruit and produce, past empty bars, through the carts and trucks. Finally we emerge at the roaring, iron galleries where meat is handled. It’s like coming upon a factory in the darkness. The overhead lights are blazing. The smell of carnage is everywhere, the very metal reeks with an odor denser than flowers. On the sidewalk there are wheelbarrows of slaughtered heads. It’s right out of Franju and that famous work which literally steams of it. We stare down at the dumb victims. There are scores of them. The mouths are pink, the nostrils still moist. Worn knives with the edge of a razor have flensed them while their eyes were still fluttering, the huge, eloquent eyes of young calves. The bloody arms of the workers sketch quickly. Wherever they move, the skin magically parts, the warm insides pour out. Everything is swiftly divided. An animal which two minutes ago was led to them has now disappeared. Cristina draws her white coat around her like a countess.