They catch a cab. Humbert thinks he’ll have to have his car shipped from the Chicago airport. Hiledgarda sees a great deal of frolicking in the street. She asks the driver what day it is. The driver looks at them in the rearview mirror as if they were drunks who were trying to be funny. But, finally, he says New Year’s Eve. Hildegarda suggests they go to Tiziana’s house, where there was going to be a party.
When they arrive, midnight has long since passed. For them, though, Tiziana sets the clock back and everyone toasts again, and at each stroke of the clock, they all eat a grape. Humbert puts all the grapes in his mouth at once and chews them, forming a mass of skins that he delicately spits into a planter. A really young guy (who can’t quite carry off the perverse role he is affecting) tells him that he likes the exotic custom of eating grapes on the last twelve strokes of the old year. Humbert’s champagne glass is empty, and for a moment, he isn’t sure it if had been full a short time before, or if it was already empty when they handed it to him, which seems more than improbable. He goes up to a girl (wearing a magician’s hat covered in cardboard stars and a golden sun) next to a table (full of objects it takes a while for him to recognize as plates, forks, glasses, hors d’oeuvres, salads, sandwiches, drinks. .) who has a bottle of champagne in her hand. He hands her his glass, and the girl fills it up and asks him how it’s going, if he’s having a good time at the party. He doesn’t know what to say, so he says yes. He begins to think that he’s going to have to come up with a repertoire of topics of conversation. He thinks he’ll have to make a list, with all the topics recorded, quite clearly, in a logical order that will ease passage from one to the next without any brusque transitions. A brilliant idea crosses his mind, but he doesn’t really feel like taking out his little notebook and writing it down. When he tries to remember it, thirty seconds later, he can’t do it: the idea has vanished completely. He lifts the glass of champagne to his lips, sips, swallows the liquid, smiles at the girl, wipes the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, dries the back of his hand on his pants, sits down on the windowsill, and hears the sound of a bottle of champagne breaking as someone pours champagne all over him. He thinks of writing down: “Painting divided into two parts: in the first, one man pours champagne over another’s suit; in the second, the other gets up and sticks a dagger into the body of the first,” but to write all that down seems like such an effort — such a tremendous effort — that he lets the idea slip away. He thinks of writing down “Man from whom ideas get away, or who lets ideas get away from him”, but it seems like such a boring idea, so inane. .
He gets up. He tries to cross the room discreetly, to the corner where the bar is set up. On the way, he greets four painters with mustaches who are chatting with one another, a couple of critics, an Ethiopian sculptor whose show has just opened (why, all of a sudden, are there so many people from the art world at the party?), three women he has never met before (two of whom are twins), and two expressionless men with drinks in their hands, who are leaning against the wall and contemplating the goings-on, seriously, with drinks in their hands. He finds Hildegarda, behind a ficus, arguing with an illustrator; they’ve both pierced the same canapé. He gives her (Hildegarda) a kiss, with the uncomfortable feeling that he’s done this before.
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 laugh; Humbert, annoyed, gets up from his chair, and without thinking twice, he slams his fist into the critic’s face. Short, and quite astonished, the guy loses his balance and, trying to grab 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, and Hildegarda telling him to calm down. Humbert sits down on the windowsill he had been sitting on a long time before (he feels as if hours have gone by), before getting up to try and discreetly cross the room over to the corner where the drinks are. He closes his eyes and decides to count to a thousand. When he has reached about eight hundred, he notices that someone is spilling champagne on him and immediately begging his pardon. He keeps his eyes closed and goes on counting. He overshoots, though, and reaches 1001. When he opens his eyes, he sees Hildegarda drying off the champagne spot on his shirt with a paper towel. He does the same thing: he grabs the paper towel and dries an imaginary spot of champagne on her. She says:
“What are you doing?”
He responds:
“What are you doing?
When she puts her hands on her hips and looks questioningly at him, he puts his hands on his hips and looks questioningly at her. She says to him:
“What are you up to?”
He answers:
“What are you up to?”
She says:
“Are you mimicking me?”
He says:
“Are you mimicking me?”
When she thumbs her nose at him, he thumbs his nose at her. When she slaps her cheek, he slaps his cheek. When she sticks out her tongue at him, he sticks out his tongue at her. When she raises her fist as if she’s about to take a swing at him, he raises his fist as if he’s about to take a swing at her. When Tiziana asks them what they’re doing, Hildegarda points at him and says:
“This nut is mimicking me, like a little kid.”
“This nut is mimicking me, like a little kid,” says Humbert, pointing at her.
In the early morning, when they leave the party, they give goodbye kisses and say the same parting phrases to every guest, successively. Out in the street, they both stick out their arms to flag a cab. When Hildegarda announces the name of the town they’re going to, Heribert repeats it.