There was no one else present. The tables had remained in the courtyard, their spruce boards now exposed. The dawn was sullen and cold. The wind blew the colored chocolate wrappers through the deserted yard. How had Paul’s bride held her head? Had she leaned it on his shoulder? Some waxworks had female figures with a device that enabled them to bend their heads to one side and close their eyes.
The streets of the town had lost all semblance of reason. The chill had got under my coat: I was cold and sleepy. When I closed my eyes, I could feel the wind placing its colder cheek against mine and from inside my eyelids it felt like a mask, the mask of my face, whose inside was as dark and cold as the back of an actual metal mask. Which house along my way was due to explode? Which lamppost was about to twist like a rubber truncheon into a grimace directed at me? Nowhere in the world, under no circumstances, did anything ever happen.
When I got to the marketplace, I found men unloading meat for the butcher shops, their arms laden with sides of red and purple beasts glistening with blood, as tall and proud as dead princesses. The air was redolent with flesh and urine. The butchers hung each beast head down, the black, globular eyes fixed on the ground. They were lined up along the porcelain-white walls like scarlet sculptures carved from the most diverse and delicate material. They had the watery, iridescent shimmer of silk and the murky limpidity of gelatin. The gaping stomachs were edged with the lace of muscles and the weighty necklaces of beads of fat. The butchers stuck their red hands in and extracted the precious innards — round, broad, rubbery gobbets of hot flesh — which they spread out on a table. The fresh meat had the velvety sheen of a monstrous, hypertrophic rose.
The dawn had turned a steel blue; the brisk morning sang a deep organ stop. The carthorses observed the humans with their ever tearful eyes; a mare let loose a hot stream of urine onto the cobblestones. The sky made deep, dark inroads into the now foamy, now pellucid bog, and everything became distant, desolate. It was morning. The men were unloading the meat; the wind was piercing my clothes; I was trembling with cold and lack of sleep. What sort of world did I inhabit?
I raced through the streets like a madman. The sun had appeared, already red, at the edge of the woods, but darkness still reigned in the streets lined with buildings, and only at intersections did the glistening light burst through as through doors ajar along a deserted corridor.
I passed the Webers’ house. The heavy upper-story shutters were closed; everything looked abandoned and sad: the wedding was over.
Chapter Nine
With Edda’s arrival the upper story of the Weber house was brightened with cool air and shadows, as clearings in a deep wood are burnished by a green light deepened by the foliage. The first thing she did was to curtain the windows and carpet the floors, thereby dampening all the echoes the empty rooms had been prey to. The entire story took on an ineffable scent that altered its content, as an essence added to an alcoholic beverage alters its taste.
I spent every morning up on the terrace, making an inventory of myriad strange, bogus items from various glass-fronted cabinets. Ozy and I would wipe them off conscientiously only to toss them into a box or the rubbish. Edda came and went, wearing a blue dressing gown and slippers whose heels clicked with every step. Sometimes she rested her elbows on the balustrade and, half closing her eyes, gazed up at the sky. The perfection of the light was always about to burst open like a bud that must break through its integument to breathe fresh air.
All these changes made so unforeseen and abrupt an appearance in my life, and were so isolated by their contours from the past, that I was unable to fathom them. Edda became one more object, a simple object whose existence beleaguered and tormented me like a word repeated many times, a word that becomes more and more unintelligible even as the need to understand it increases urgently.
There was something going on during those summer mornings on the terrace, and I strained every part of my being to get at it. In preparation for the encounter with Edda I had armed myself with all the bitterness, humiliation, and ridicule required for an adventure.
One day, the Weber residence underwent a sea change: white linen bound with bright ribbons made its way into the glass-fronted cabinets — a four-character pantomime came to revolve around Edda: Paul turned earnest and steadfast; old man Weber bought himself a new cap and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles; Ozy would wait, panting, for Edda to summon him upstairs, and I would simply stand there, my watery gaze lost in the void.
Every Saturday we gathered in the front room, where the gramophone played the oriental melodies of Kismet and Edda served us half-sweet, half-bitter pastries made with honey and almonds. There were always nuts in a bowl, and Samuel Weber, who was especially fond of them, would swallow them slowly, peacefully, bit by bit, his Adam’s apple bouncing up an down like a puppet on a rubber band. He would keep his legs crossed, which was totally incongruous with the profession of grain merchant and more like an actor on stage, and when he spoke he would purse his lips to hide his gold teeth. He was afraid to rest his hand on the smallest thing, and when he walked through the bead portières he would turn and quietly bring the two halves together to avoid the slightest clicking noise. Ozy’s deformity was heightened by the constant tension he was under: his hump seemed to stick out more, as if going into contortions to catch her every word, to be there in advance. Only Paul strode back and forth with equanimity and self-confidence, with economy and grace, and when he took her in his arms we were all perfectly happy: he did it better than any of us.
As for me, I don’t know what was going on in me at the time. On one of those afternoons I was reclining in an armchair, my head weighing heavily on the material, its tiny prickles gouging my face and producing a rather painful sensation. I suddenly felt a burning desire — as absurd as it was sublime — for heroism, one of those ridiculous thoughts that surges into one’s mind only on a lazy Saturday afternoon when one is listening to music on the gramophone. I pressed my head down even harder, and as the pain grew more intense my desire to withstand it grew more tenacious.
Perhaps there exist other forms of hunger and thirst than the organic ones, and something inside me was seeking relief in a simple, acute pain. Deeper and deeper I ground my cheek into the material, grinding it into the hard bristles, tormenting myself with a suffering that was becoming excruciating.
Suddenly Edda, who was walking past with a record in her hand, stopped and stared at me, stupefied. The silence enveloping us made me extremely uncomfortable.
“What in the world has happened to him?” she asked.
I looked in the mirror. I looked ridiculous, utterly ridiculous: I had a purple patch on one cheek with drops of blood oozing out here and there. Staring at my bleeding cheek in the mirror, I could not help thinking of how I allegorically resembled a representation of the Russian tsar on the cover of a popular book: the victim of an assassination attempt, he was shown pressing his hand to his cheek. More than the pain in my cheek it was the miserable destiny of my heroism that plagued me now: it had ended up as an episode in The Mysteries of the Petersburg Court.
Edda dipped a handkerchief in alcohol and wiped my face with it. I shut my eyes, the better to withstand the smart. My skin felt as though it were in flames.