•
When they park by the bar, Humbert realizes that the gas tank is almost empty. They have coffee at a small table by the window. It is beginning to snow. The room smells of boiled cabbage. An extraordinarily fat black cat, like a balloon about to burst, saunters between the tables, rubbing up against the legs of the people sitting there. Humbert finds the animal so disgusting that, when it comes near, he gets up from the chair and goes to sit at another table. Hildegarda shoots the cat a ferocious glare. The cat turns tail and goes over to Humbert’s new table. Humbert gets up and goes to the other end of the room. The cat is so bloated that he think just touching it will leave his fingers slathered with lard. If he squashes it, he thinks, he will splatter the walls of the place with grease. When the cat comes over to him yet again, Humbert goes back to Hildegarda’s table, asks for the check, and pays, fleeing from the animal’s slow and constant gait, that trails him wherever he goes. When Hildegarda opens the door to leave, he closes it instantly, fearful it will follow them out.
In the next town, he also parks on what appears to be the main street. They go into a movie house. In the vestibule, the woman who sells popcorn is eating a chocolate-covered cake. In the theater, once their eyes have adjusted to the dark, they realize there is no one else there. They talk about movies. Though Hildegarda hasn’t seen many of the ones he mentions, the few she has seen she really likes. Happy to be alone, they allow themselves to speak in a completely normal tone of voice, in a movie house.
When they leave, the woman who sells popcorn is eating a sandwich and drinking orange juice. It is still snowing. He gets back into the car. Humbert announces that they have been running on empty for quite some time and that they should fill up as soon as they see a gas station.
A little ways beyond the town, to the right, Hildegarda sees the lake. They veer off onto a little road and park lakeside. They kiss and embrace, isolated from the outdoors by the coat of snow that is blanketing them.
•
When they try to start the car, it won’t start. Hildegarda says they should have filled the tank. Humbert says, “Ah.” They have two alternatives: wait for the snowstorm to peter out or try to walk back. They opt for the latter. Humbert considers offering to go to the gas station himself, but he thinks she could also have offered. They pull up the collars of their coats, pull their hats down over their ears, give each other a hug, and start walking.
When they arrive, over an hour later, they are completely soaked. They buy a can of gasoline and ask the person in charge if he knows anyone who can drive them back. He knows someone who lives in the next town over and runs a taxi service. He arrives twenty minutes later. He takes them on a search that seems unending because in that snowstorm all the roads look alike, and at each fork in the road they end up choosing one side practically at random, only, in the end, to have to turn back and try the other. It is hours before they find the car.
Exhausted and aggravated, they go back to the hotel. They go up to their room and get into bed. Humbert turns over to embrace Hildegarda. She says not right now.
Feeling restless, Humbert tries to figure out if he can get any notes out of all that. Finding nothing, he tries to sleep. Hildegarda asks him if he’s sleeping. He says no. Then she starts talking non-stop: somehow out of context, he feels; she tells him that years before she had been involved with a stage actor, precisely at the same time she was a member of a mime troupe. And now she has the same feeling she had when she started losing interest in the opera: she feels she isn’t going anywhere with her painting. She asks him if he really thinks she isn’t any good. Humbert alleges that he hasn’t seen her work and thus has no way of judging. Hildegarda says that the same thrill of satisfaction she had once got with mime, and then with the opera, she was now getting (more and more strongly) with jazz. She asks him his opinion as to what instrument she should try. Humbert, acting as if he were thinking it over, wonders how to evade this monologue that doesn’t interest him in the slightest. In his little notebook (which he had left on the night table, just in case) he manages to write: “Woman tells boring story that doesn’t interest me at all.” He continues to listen until he falls asleep and dreams that he is going out with a girl who had been Heribert’s girlfriend but isn’t Hildegarda. Since Helena is at his house, they go to hers, but when they open the door, they find it full of cockroaches. Humbert then proposes that they go to his house, where there have never been any roaches, and they would find some pretense for Helena. They go there and the house is a hotel, which greatly reduces the danger of their being found out by Helena. They are so certain that no cockroach has ever entered that house that they are taken by surprise when, upon turning on the lights in their room, a roach appears right in the middle of the bed. When he immediately proceeds to crush it, the juice that oozes out is like thick semen, which obliges them to take off the sheet. They lie down without touching. They fall asleep. Humbert, in the dream he is dreaming in the dream, dreams that he is in a car at Hildegarda’s side. She is driving, and she announces that something is wrong with the car. In what appears to be the ideal solution for such cases, she has connected the car with wires to a (disgusting, fat, enormous) dead cat. But Hildegarda tells him that they have to massage the cat; otherwise, the contraption doesn’t work. Humbert goes to massage the cat; when he touches it though, its flesh, soft and putrid, disintegrates and falls off. Humbert realizes that this is only natural, because they hadn’t boiled it first. In cases like this, you had to boil the cat so the car could keep going. So they boil it, then, as all these people look on. Thousands upon thousands of roaches start to stream out of it. A spider appears and approaches. The spider is laughing. It goes up to the pot, looks in, and rests a leg on the rim. The people bat it away. It goes off, but remains within eyeshot. From there it observes the scene with disdain. Then it comes close again: dozens of hairy legs in motion, that stupid laugh. . It sticks its head in the pot again, to see the dead cat (which, dead and all, is surreptitiously laughing) boiling and the roaches streaming out. The people bat it away again, and it exits laughing. Then, in the dream, he awakens from the other dream because the weight of the woman’s body (who has rolled over on top of him in her sleep) is smothering him. He gets up to have a drink of water, and a red roach comes up out of the drain of the sink.
•
He wakes up because the weight of Hildegarda’s body (who has rolled over on top of him in her sleep) is smothering him. He’s thirsty. He remembers woolly fragments of his dream: the weight of a body, a man with the face of an arachnid. He gets up, goes into the bathroom, turns on the faucet, lets the water run a little, looks at himself in the mirror, and, in the silence of the night, hears the sound of the stubble when he runs his hand over his chin. When he lowers his head to drink from the faucet, he sees a cockroach hiding behind the bowl of the sink. He tries to kill it, but can’t. Using all his might he manages to separate the sink a bit from the wall (fearing that the tiles, or the sink itself, will crack) forcing it to flee down the tiles to the floor. There he crushes it and stands immobile, looking out of the corner of his eye, expecting a vengeful coalition of hotel roaches to appear. What if he gets into bed and one of those repugnant creatures decides to stroll across his pillow and his face? He gets into bed, covers his whole body with the sheets (cotton sheets, still smelling of detergent), so fresh that no cockroach would ever dare come in contact with them, he thinks, to reassure himself.