The music came to an end and the dancers disappeared.
A rectangular opening appeared in the ceiling to let out the poisoned air, and through it the sharp breeze of early morning entered and a patch of clear blue sky became visible. In the garden a bird sang a few notes, as cheerful, sharp and ironic as an epigram.
The sleepers started. Kalantan, lying prone on a rug, mumbled: “Close it.”
It was closed.
The only persons who were awake and almost normal were Tito and the painter.
“I have a very high opinion of your art,” Tito said, “and I’m delighted that the public follows you.”
“It’s not the public that follows us, but we that unconsciously follow the public, though apparently it’s the other way about,” the painter replied. “Haven’t you ever seen a flea circus at a fair, with tame fleas pulling tiny aluminum carts? The flea seems to be pulling the cart, doesn’t it? But actually the cart is on an incline and pushes the flea ahead of it. I should never have believed that the time would come when I would paint the portraits of Asian monarchs and presidents. I thought I’d always remain a caricaturist for humorous journals or a magazine illustrator or a painter of cabaret scenery. That’s why I adopted the absurd pseudonym of Triple Sec. But adopting a pseudonym is like being tattooed; you do it lightheartedly, and then you’re stuck with it for life. I have many journalist friends, and if I’ve been a success it’s partly due to them, because of the publicity they gave me. In the absence of publicity merit isn’t enough.”
“I know,” said Tito, who was ceasing to see things straight. “Publicity’s essential. If Jesus Christ became famous, it was thanks to the apostles, his twelve great publicity agents.”
When Pietro Nocera heard Tito mention Jesus Christ he pulled himself together, went over to him and said: “When you start referring to the Bible, you have more cocaine than gray matter in your head. Sit down.”
And with a push that was more vigorous than gentle he caused him quietly to subside between two piles of cushions.
An invisible fan began to hum. The astronomer, puzzled, looked all round him as if he were wondering whether it was an auditory illusion. But the man who always went to sleep awoke at that moment and said of the steady hum:
“Those butterflies would have done better to stay at home on the Orinoco.”
The painter knelt beside Tito and said: “I’ve also been greatly aided by women. Women are a great help in getting on in the world. If you don’t know what to do in a difficult situation, ask a woman.”
“I know,” said Tito, muttering indistinctly, leaving out syllables and alternating between low tones and a high falsetto. “I know. From crimes of high treason, in which international hetairae are used to wheedle their war plans out of enemy generals, all the way back to Eve, who acted as intermediary between the serpent and man, women have always and at all times been highly successful at the dirtiest deeds. And I’m not surprised that they should have helped a pig of a painter like you.”
The painter did not react. He wouldn’t have had the strength, and besides, cocaine gave him a sense, not just of euphoria, but of boundless optimism, and a special kind of receptivity to insults, which were converted in his ears into courteous compliments.
He smiled.
Everything in the room had become phantasmagoric: human voices gave forth non-human sounds; the light coming from numerous sources and reflected again and again had the wavering liquid transparency of an aquarium; straight lines bent; a vague, flowing motion replaced solidity and seemed to breathe life into lifeless objects; and all the people, with their slow, flaccid movements, who drooped, fell and writhed on the floor among the multi-colored cushions with disheveled hair, half naked and surrounded by broken glasses, were like creatures in an aquarium whose liquid environment softened and slowed down every movement.
The greenish carpet, splashed with spilled liquor, was like a muddy ocean floor on which the cushions were shells and the women’s loosened hair the fibrous tufts of byssus or the fabulous vegetation of submarine landscapes.
Meanwhile the excited and exciting music went on. A blind violinist was playing a melancholy gypsy tune without realizing that he was performing to an audience of corpses. No one talked now. Every so often there would be some sinister noise: the impact of a knife on a statue, or a barely audible moan. Was someone dying in the room? The shaggy curtains that acted as a doorway trembled, concealing who knew what menacing mysteries. The light floor that separated the room from the basement underneath seemed to be affected by a slow, rhythmical breathing — low notes lowered it and high notes raised it. If for any reason the light had gone out at that moment, all the people in the room would have gone mad, and when the light came back the big mirrors might well have been splashed with blood.
Kalantan lay on the floor with her face, breast, stomach, thighs, knees and the instep of one foot on the carpet. The other foot rested on the ankle. Her pose was perfectly symmetrical, as if it had been designed by an artist who liked balanced composition. The thin ankles and slender calves were favored with graceful tendons and healthy muscles; squeezing them would surely have made the same sound as squeezing fresh bread.
Tito lay near her, with his face close to her legs. His eyes were flooded with green, the iridescent green of her silk stockings. The closeness of his eyes to the silk and flesh on which he was concentrating produced a fantastically distorted image; that shining, emerald green object, suffused with a warm feminine perfume, was a sweet cyclopic hill, where the atmosphere was filled with the odor of young flesh.
The woman was plunged in an almost cataleptic sleep.
Slowly, with hesitant fingers, he raised her skirt to halfway up her thigh to savor the progressive revelation. Her stockings were held up by a light chain of platinum and pearls with a buckle decorated with Armenian symbols. Gently, religiously, as if he were shelling an almond or uncovering a sacred relic, he folded the stocking back on itself, rolled it back halfway down the calf, and contemplated the charming concavity at the back of the knee — concavities in women are far more exciting than convexities; its boundaries were marked by two tendons as slender as bow strings.
It formed a magnificent goblet.
A glass of champagne, still untouched and unbroken, was waiting humbly beside him. There were traces of foam at the edges, and rare bubbles rose and disappeared when they reached the surface. With trembling hands Tito took it by the slender stem and poured the contents into that sweet cavity without spilling a drop; the woman did not move; the back of her knee was as big as an open mouth.
“Kalantan,” he moaned.
He bent over that mouth of white flesh and with closed eyes took the champagne into his own feverishly dry mouth.
“Kalantan,” he moaned.
He seemed to be drinking from a magnolia.
“Kalantan, beautiful, marvelous Kalantan.”
The woman did not even tremble when Tito collapsed on top of her with his mouth on her flesh, moaning: “Kalantan.”
Someone again opened a glass rectangle in the ceiling. It was nearly dawn; the last stragglers among the stars flickered exhaustedly in the absinthe-colored sky.
A motor-horn sounded reveille in the Avenue des Champs Elysées. Aurora’s two horses, Lightning and Phaeton, are no longer enough for her; to announce the arrival of day she needs the eighty horsepower of a long, open tourer, gliding on soft tires, which she drives herself with her “rosy fingers,” made still more rosy by the enamel of a skilful manicure.
5