“Hey, what’s the matter?” Walter asked. “Don’t you want me to tell you what we do with the feather?”
The sky visible through the hole grew whiter and whiter, hazier and hazier. The words ricocheted against the walls, flowing down me as if I were a fluid. Walter went on talking, but he was so far from me and so ethereal that he seemed no more than a pool of light in the dark, a patch of mist in the murk.
“First you stroke the girl with the feather,” I heard him say, as if in a dream. “Then you stroke yourself. . You’ve got to know these things. .”
He came up to me and started shaking me, waking me up, and slowly, ever so slowly, I came to. When my eyes were fully open, I saw Walter leaning over my pubis, his mouth pressing against my member. I could not for the life of me comprehend what was going on.
He stood and said, “There, you see? That felt good, didn’t it. . That’s the way Indians woke their wounded on the battlefield. Our tribe knows all the Indian spells and cures.”
I felt drunk and exhausted. Walter took flight, disappeared. Then I trudged cautiously up the stairs.
For a few days I sought him everywhere. In vain. There was nothing for it: I would have to go back to the cellar. But the vacant lot looked totally different when I got there: there were piles of rubbish everywhere and dead animals putrefying in the sun; the stench was horrible. I hadn’t noticed anything of the sort with Walter. I decided not to go to the cellar anymore. I never saw Walter again.
I got myself a feather, wrapped it in a scrap of newsprint, and kept it well hidden in my pocket. There were times when I thought I had made up the whole feather incident and Walter had never existed. Now and then I unwrapped the feather and stared at it. Its mystery was impenetrable. I would brush its soft, silky surface over my cheek and shudder slightly at the touch. It was as if an invisible but real person were caressing me with his fingertips. Then one fine evening, under quite extraordinary circumstances, I used it on someone else.
I liked staying outside as late as possible. That evening there was the heavy, oppressive feeling of a storm in the air. All the heat of the day was compressed into a stifling atmosphere beneath a black sky rent with lightening. I was sitting on the doorstep, watching the play of electric light on the houses — the streetlamps swaying in the wind, the concentric circles of the globes flitting along the walls, splashing like water in a swinging bucket — and the long sashes of dust that swept through the road and spiraled upward.
In the midst of all this turbulence I thought I saw a white marble statue rise into the air. No, I was as certain as I could be of anything: I had seen a block of white stone climbing rapidly, at an angle, like a balloon that had escaped from the hand of a child. In no time the statue was a simple white speck in the sky, no bigger than my fist. I also saw two white figures holding hands and gliding through the sky like skiers. My mouth and eyes must have been wide open because at that moment a girl stopped in front of me and asked me what I was looking at up there in the sky.
“See that statue flying through the air?” I said. “Look quickly! It’s about to disappear. .”
The girl screwed up her eyes and looked long and hard but told me she couldn’t see it. She was a local girl, a chubby little thing with eternally scrubbed red-rubber cheeks and sweaty hands. Until that evening I had barely spoken to her.
“I know why you tried to fool me,” she said, standing there and laughing in my face. “I know what you’re after.”
And off she hopped. I stood and followed her. I called out to her from a dark alley, and she came of her own accord. There I lifted her dress. She let me have my way, docilely holding onto my shoulders. She may have been less conscious of the impropriety of the deed than surprised at what it consisted of.
I myself was in fact more surprised at the outcome of the adventure, which took place a few days later in the marketplace. Some masons were slaking a batch of lime in a vat, and I was watching it bubble when all of a sudden I heard my name called out and a loud voice saying, “A feather, was it? Is that what you used?”
It came from a sturdy red-haired fellow of about twenty, a loathsome character. I think he lived in a house in that dark alley. I caught sight of him shouting at me from behind the vat through the steam of the quicklime, a ghost-like figure, an infernal apparition holding forth amidst fire and brimstone. Perhaps he said something else and I gave his words a meaning close to my preoccupations of the previous few days: it was hard for me to believe he could have seen anything in the pitch darkness of the alleyway (though the more I thought about it, the more I wondered whether it had been as dark as it seemed, whether I hadn’t been standing in a patch of light). I concluded that during the sexual act I had been possessed by a dream that muddled my sight and senses. I determined to be more circumspect in the future. Who knew what aberrations I was capable of? Under the spell of arousal I might well react unconsciously, like a sleepwalker, even in broad daylight.
Closely connected with the feather is another memory, that of a book — small, black, and highly disturbing. I came across it one day on a desk and leafed through it with great interest. It was a banal novel by André Theuriet. Frida was the title. It was profusely illustrated with drawings of the two main characters: a boy sporting curly blond locks and a velvet jacket and a plump girl in a flounced dress. The boy looked like Walter. Sometimes they appeared together, sometimes separately. Their encounters always seemed to take place in the nooks and crannies of a park or beneath the walls of a ruin. What did they do there? That is what I wanted to know. Did the boy have a feather like mine in his jacket pocket? I didn’t see anything like it in the drawings, nor did I have time to read the book, and in a few days it vanished without a trace. I began to look for it everywhere. I asked for it in the bookshops, but no one seemed to have heard of it. It must have been full of secrets because it was nowhere to be found.
One day I took the bull by the horns and went to the public library. Standing on a chair in the back of the room, a tall, pale man wearing spectacles that seemed to tremble ever so slightly saw me coming. There was no turning back, nothing left but to proceed to the table and pronounce the sensational word clearly and distinctly — Frid-da — thereby confessing to the myopic gentleman all my secret vices. But by the time I reached him I could muster no more than a mumble. The librarian’s spectacles started trembling more noticeably, and he closed his eyes the better to search his memory. Then he told me he had “never heard of it.” To my mind, however, the trembling spectacles betrayed a certain inner turmoil, and I was now certain that Frida contained mysterious and sensational revelations.
Many years later I ran across it again on a bookshop shelf. It was not the black cloth edition I had seen; it had a humble, dreary paper binding and yellow covers. My first impulse was to buy it, but I changed my mind and placed it back on the shelf: I wanted to keep its image intact, the image of a small black book with a whiff of the authentic perfume of my youth.
Chapter Four
In small insignificant objects — a black feather, a banal little book, an old snapshot of frail, long-forgotten figures with the suffering that comes of serious internal ailments written all over them, a dainty ashtray made of green porcelain in the form of an oak leaf and forever smelling of dead ashes — in the plain, simple memory of old man Samuel Weber’s thick spectacles, in such domestic gewgaws and trifles I find the melancholy of my childhood and the nostalgia of the futility of a world that engulfed me like a sea with petrified waves. Brute matter — in the deep, heavy masses of earth, stone, sky, or water, or in its least understood forms: mirrors, paper flowers, painted statues, glass marbles with their enigmatic internal spirals — has always kept me a prisoner bumping painfully against its walls, yet spurred me on to share in the strange and senseless adventure of being human.