"And why not standing up in a hammock? Or on skis?" retorted Belmondo.
It was too silly for words! Wonderfully silly! Astounding! The captain began to laugh heartily. The headmistress, no longer able to resist the laughter welling up, did the same, pressing a lace-edged handkerchief to her lips…
And once again the city could be seen rising out of the waters of the lagoon, but this time arrayed in its nocturnal beauty. Belmondo appeared, caught in that fleeting moment of a tremor of the soul between two adventures. He was sitting on a granite parapet, with a muted look and a melancholy air. We had always taken these moments to be a necessary pause between the action sequences. But two solitary spectators read quite a different meaning into this silent parenthesis… It was then that the captain, turning his head slightly toward his neighbor, repeated dreamily: "Venetsia. "
As for the rest of us, gawking onlookers fascinated by the Western machine on that day in May, the extent of the upheaval provoked in our lives by Belmondo was clearly borne in on us. If a car newly emerged from one of his films could rip up the frozen perspective of Lenin Avenue and transform our headmistress into a creature of fantasy, something had changed forever. The gray uniforms, we knew, would invade the streets again; the Communard barbed-wire factory would increase its productivity and exceed the plan; winter would return… But nothing would be as it was before. From now on our lives would open out into an infinite elsewhere. The sun, trapped among the watchtowers of the camp, would gradually resume its majestic pendulum swing back and forth.
Nothing would ever be as it had been before. Oh, how we longed to believe this!
17
When did it finally happen?
That young female body taking me, shaping me, inhaling me, absorbing me into its scents, into the ephemeral suppleness of its skin, into the dark smoke of its hair spread out upon the grass. With the strong, warm wind of early summer blowing, the wind from the steppe – such a contrast with the ice-cold torrent of the Olyei, whose crystalline waters in spate surrounded us on all sides. And the hammock swaying in the wind… Yes, a hammock! We had forgotten nothing, Belmondo! That wind. The sky overturned in her slanting eyes, blinded with pleasure, her breathless moaning… When was it?
Belmondo s arrival had interrupted the regular passage of time.
Winter no longer implied endless sleep. Nor the evenings – because of the films – quietude at the end of the day. The hour of six-thirty had imposed itself on everyone with apparent universality. We lived subject to these new rhythms, finding ourselves in Mexico one day, in Venice the next. Any other concept of time was obsolete…
It is impossible for me to remember now whether it was Year One or Year Two of our new chronology. Impossible to say whether I was fifteen, as in that spring when we absconded to the Far East; or sixteen – that is, a year after Belmondo's arrival. I simply do not know. In all probability, however, it was the second spring. For I could not have lived through all that I did in a single year. My heart would have exploded!
Fifteen, sixteen… These methods of reckoning are in any case so relative, given the vibrant intensity of our passions. Here is what I lived through: the age of the night in the red-haired woman's izba; the age of my first mouthful of cognac; the age of the salt taste of the Pacific. The age when I discovered that the fragile beauty of a woman's knee could cause devastating pain, could be blissful torture. The age when the soft white flesh of an aging prostitute haunted me with its insurmountable physicality. The age of the unveiled mystery of the Transsiberian. The age when a woman's body taught me its language, word by word, gesture by gesture. The age when childhood had become no more than a faint echo – like the memory of that great frozen tear in the eye of the wolf stretched out full length on the blue-tinted snow of the evening.
Fifteen, sixteen… Here is what I was. A strange alloy of the winds, silences, and sounds of the taiga, of places visited or imagined. Someone who already knew, thanks to Olga's library, that feudal chatelaines had long bodices, like the bodice of the unhappy Emma Bovary. That the shoulders of a bathing odalisque were tinged with amber… And that only a real boor, like that country squire in Maupassant, would ask a hotel manager to prepare the bed at midday, thus revealing his intentions with regard to his crimson-faced young wife… Having studied Musset, I knew that romantic lovers always choose a cold, sunny morning in December to part forever – the clarity of past passions now spent, the vivid bitterness of feelings now subdued. I was somebody who observed the monstrous decomposition of the flesh of Zola's Nana, shaking my head in violent deniaclass="underline" No, no, beyond this human clay doomed to disintegration, there is something else! There is that song that arose from the depths of the snow and poured out into the dark-purple April sky… And in that hotel bedroom at the Golden Lion I was to perceive something that many readers in the West had not even noticed: on the mantelpiece, glimpsed in a brief phrase, there were two big seashells. You had only to hold them to your ear – had Emma done it? I often wondered – and you could hear the faint roar of the sea. With our mad dreams of the Pacific, how close we felt at such moments to that adulterous woman!
Belmondo gave to the alloy that I was a structure, a movement, a personified outline. With all his joyful strength he brought our present and our dreams closer together. I was at an age when this fusion still seemed possible…
So it must have been at the start of summer. An evening filled with a blue wind from the steppes. On an island in the middle of the river in spate – a narrow grassy strip with a ruined izba and the remnants of an orchard, several apple trees foaming with white blossom.
In the distance, in the golden haze of the sunset, rose the taiga, its feet in the river, reflected in the somber mirrors of the water that now reached into its shady recesses.
The little island floated in the glow of the evening. The noisy rippling of the current mingled with the rustle of the wind in the blossoming branches. The cool little waves lapped insistently, breaking against the sides of the old boat I had moored to the rail of the flooded izba steps. The day was slowly fading, the light was turning mauve, lilac, then violet. The darkness seemed to refine the living harmony of the sounds. "We could hear the slight scraping of the boat against the wood of the steps now, the serene cry of a bird, the silky whispering of the grass.
We were stretched out at the feet of the apple trees, lying against each other, our eyes wandering amid the first stars. Naked, she and I, the warm wind enveloping our bodies with its breeze steeped in the aromas of the steppe. And above our heads, fastened to the great stunted branches, a hammock swung gently in the wind. Yes, we had remained true to Belmondo, down to the smallest details of the setting for our love scene. We had climbed into that unstable craft and tried to stand up, embracing each other and quickly losing our heads… But either our desire was too violent or the erotic savoir faire of the West still escaped us…
We found ourselves in the grass, scattered with white petals: we hardly noticed our fall. We felt we were still falling, still flying, still loving each other in flight…
Her supple body slipped away, escaping in our fall through the air. I did not succeed in holding onto it. With my frenzied heaving I was pushing it along on the smooth grass toward our island's ephemeral frontier at the water's edge. I had to wrap the cascade of her hair around my fist. As the cossacks used to do in the old days, lying on bearskins in their yurts. My desire had a memory of that gesture…
She was Nivkh, a native of the forest of the Far East where we had once seen a tiger, blazing in the snow… Her face was framed with long, glossy black hair; she had slanting eyes, the enigmatic smile of a Buddha. Her body had skin that seemed to be covered with a golden varnish and the reflexes of a liana. When she sensed that I would not let her go, her body twined around me, molded me, absorbed me through all its trembling vessels. She permeated me with her scent, her breath, her blood… And I could no longer make out where her body merged into the grass filled with the wind from the steppes; where the savor of her round, firm breasts mingled with that of the apple blossom; where the sky of her dazzled eyes ended and the somber depths glistening with stars began.