“Say yes.”
“Yes.”
“When can we meet?”
“I’ll come to your studio.”
“No, not to the studio. I’ll do studies of you on the street. I see this as something alive, completely spontaneous. .”
Hildegarda tells him that another painter had asked her to pose for him, a long time ago.
“But he must not have done anything with the paintings in the end, because I’ve been waiting for him to do a show, to see if I had been an inspiration to him, but he’s never done another exhibition. You don’t hear anything about him these days. We were good friends. Maybe you know him. .”
Humbert looks at her: she is wearing a black wool pullover with a deep V-neckline front and back, a straight gray skirt, big earrings, a wide, shiny leather belt, black gloves, gray stockings with seams, shoes with five-inch heels, with a great big black bag under her arm.
•
“I have to go. How could you start sketching me now? Call me at home tomorrow.”
Tomorrow was too late, Humbert thought. They are sitting on a bench in a park, and Humbert is surprised that there are still pigeons around at that time in the afternoon. Over by another bench a pigeon and a squirrel are staring each other down, motionless.
Humbert asks her if she’d like to go to Chicago with him, to a show he’s doing there, which he hadn’t planned to go to, and wouldn’t, he had just decided, unless she came along. Hildegarda keeps laughing, saying over and over that he’s crazy. He takes her hand, looking at her lips, which are so dark red it almost hurts. As he moves in to kiss her, she asks him (without backing off so much as an inch) if he doesn’t think he’s moving a bit fast. Humbert doesn’t know whether to continue along the road leading to those lips, or to turn back. He sees her floating in the air, soaring over the buildings.
She agrees to go to Chicago, though. But they won’t be able to leave together, she says, since her husband, who is an opera singer, is in the city now, and he will definitely want to take her to the airport to say goodbye, particularly since the following Wednesday he will be starting his European tour. It would be easy for her to find an excuse for going off suddenly to Chicago: so many years of marriage have created a network of tacit ellipses and accepted ploys that amply justified sudden leave-takings. Humbert confesses that he, too, is married. She kisses him hard, not just closing her eyes, but squeezing them shut, with such ardor that Humbert feels weak and aroused at the same time, seeking closer contact, which she does not want. As they walk toward the place where the car is parked, they set the date. She will go by plane, he will go by car. When they say goodbye, besides kissing, they feverishly caress each other’s backs.
•
The problem is how to explain this sudden change in plans to Helena, how to justify his repeatedly having refused to go over the past few weeks, only to change his mind so unexpectedly. He pushes open the door to the house, vaguely certain, though, that it won’t be all that hard for him to find a way. There is a surprise awaiting him at home: the whole room is full of people he knows, and some he doesn’t, drinking, laughing, and talking at the top of their lungs, inaudible under the waves of music. When he isn’t able to locate Helena at first glance, he tries to cross the room discreetly, to the corner where the drinks are set up. Along the way, though, he greets four painters with mustaches who are chatting with one another, a couple of critics, an Ethiopian sculptor whose show has just opened, three women he has never met before (two of whom are twins), and two expressionless men, who are leaning against the wall and contemplating the goings-on, seriously, with drinks in their hands. Finally, he finds Helena, behind a ficus, arguing with an illustrator; they’ve both pierced the same canapé. He gives her (Helena) a kiss and takes her aside. What are they celebrating?
“Xano. He was supposed to be back today with the latest news, live, about the Japan show, but he hasn’t gotten in yet.”
Humbert struggles, successfully, to avoid being included in a discussion of art deco, rationalism, and the Nazi aesthetic. At one point, trying to catch a rest from the din in one of the bedrooms, he encounters a luxuriant couple. In the kitchen he finds traces of jam in the mustard pot. Someone must have stuck a knife in without cleaning it. He finds a woman’s shoe in the freezer. In the hall, having taken out his notebook to jot down a few impressions, he runs into the double giggle of the twins, who carry him off into one the bedrooms, undress him, and subject him to all manner of abuses. On his return to the living room, dressed only in a Japanese kimono (too short and too tight for him), he finds a cardboard rocking horse in the hall, a whiskey bottle among the potted plants, a turbot in the fruit bowl. They were playing the lying game. The person who seems to have proposed the game is a short guy who is so drunk he can only keep his balance by holding on to the curtains. For a while everyone tells lies that give them away, lies that seem like the truth, boring lies, brilliant lies, pointless lies. Then a critic, who was sitting on top of the television set and nudging a peach someone must have stepped on after it had fallen on the floor with his foot, tells him that his work is extraordinary, that the utilization of diverse methods, styles, and media is neither impoverishing, tacky, nor the greatest farce in the history of art, but rather an enrichment; what’s more, it wasn’t full of contradictions, as some said; on the contrary: it was one of the most solid oeuvres of the century, probably the body of work that was destined to link this century with the next, to make that leap for contemporary art which the great creators of other times had made for their own. The people laughed; Humbert, annoyed, gets up from his chair, and slams his fist into the critic’s face without missing a beat. Short, and quite astonished, the guy loses his balance and, trying to clutch on to something, encounters the curtains, which he brings down with him in his fall. Then there is a mass of arms trying to keep Humbert and the critic apart, one or two shrieks, the giggling of the twins, Helena telling him that what he has done is deranged, and Humbert alleging that the critic was out for blood, and even a child would have been offended if someone telling a lie had gone on about how good he was. Helena tells him that maybe he should develop a little humility and self-control and get used to tough criticism. Humbert tells her that, by the way, he has decided to go to Chicago the next day.