I looked about and the waiter came, a spry cadaver nearly as old as myself, bringing the bill, his moist fish-eye not quite looking at the girl's hand and mine where they lay together on the wine-stained tablecloth amid the empty coffee cups and the greasy glasses and the bristling ashtray. Cass Cleave had turned aside again to gaze at nothing, expressionless now. What was she thinking, what could she be thinking? Her hard hand, bird-warm, beat softly in mine, as if it contained a tiny heart of its own. Its serious weight was a sudden, shocking reminder of how much of my life was gone. I was wearing out, I, and my world as well. A wave of bitterness and anger washed over me, taking my breath away. So many of the tilings were blunted now that in my youth would have pierced me like… like what? I did not know, I had lost the thread of the thought. I let go of the girl's hand and stood up quickly, knocking over my chair, and this time she did reach out to help me, and it was as well she did, for otherwise I am sure I would have fallen down. I leaned on her arm, swearing, and beat at my dead leg furiously with my fist. The ancient waiter shuffled forward to assist me, clucking as at a misbehaving child. I shoved past him and staggered to the door. Outside, in the sun, I walked a few steps and had to halt and lean with my back against a wall. I looked up at the sky; it seemed to be throbbing, slowly, hugely. I felt dizzy, and had again that sense of displacement, of shifting and separation, that I had experienced the previous day before the mirror in the hotel bathroom, but more strongly now. I wondered without alarm if I were undergoing a heart attack, or suffering a stroke. Cass Cleave was trying to take my arm again. "It's nothing!" I cried. I vented gas from my rear end without restraint, not caring if she heard, or smelt. I was laughing, laughing and coughing, in a euphoria of drunkenness and dizziness and rage. There sleeps in me another self who at moments such as this will start awake in amazement at all that is happening, all this life, the unlikeliness of it. The girl stood before me, frowning on my disarray. I swore at her. Another flash of light struck my eyes – was it coming from inside the doorway of that church? Ave, Deus caecans! I fumbled and let fall my walking stick, it made a rattling as of bones. She crouched to pick it up and I would have kicked her had I not been afraid that if I did so I would lose my balance and fall headlong on the pavement. My heart was clenching like a fist. I snatched the stick from her hand and turned and poled myself off along the pavement, cursing.
Fury, fury and fear, these are the fuels that drive me, mixed in equal measure: fury at being what I am not, fear of being found out for what I am. If one day one or other of these forces should run out the violent equilibrium sustaining me will fail and I shall collapse, or fly off helplessly with farts and whistles, like a slipped balloon. Even when I was young… but no, no, I do not want to start remembering all that, I am sick of all that. I am done with the past; at a certain point when I look back a line is drawn stark across the view, as if a landslide had happened there. The girl was following me at a careful, fixed distance. Whenever I stopped she too would stop and turn her head away and stare at something intently. The dark dress and thonged sandals that she wore gave her an Attic look: Electra astray in the city of tombs. I pushed myself onward, and presently arrived again in the little piazza before the Cari-gnano palace. The afternoon had woken from its lunchtime torpor. Little cars buzzed in and out of busy streets. Here was the bronze plaque on the wall I had been seeking. Three steps led up to a narrow, tall door. When I pressed the bell a voice squawked at me from the grilled mouth of a metal box on the wall and the door lock clicked. I stepped inside. Grey walls, and the musty, hot smell of an airless indoors. Cass Cleave was still crossing the street; I considered letting the front door swing shut in her face, as I had tried to let the door of the caffè knock over Carrot Head, but I relented, and held it open for her, grudgingly. Yet as we climbed the stairs I saw myself in my imagination stop and turn and take her in my irresistible grasp and rip apart her clothes to press the length of myself against her. Even her nakedness would not be enough, I would open up her flesh itself like a coat, unzip her from instep to sternum and climb bodily into her, feel her shocked heart gulp and skip, her lungs shuddering, clasp her blood-wet bones in my hands. At the top of the third flight the ferrule of my walking stick lodged itself in a crevice in the scuffed marble step and as I levered it wrathfully back and forth in the effort of freeing it I had a vision of the entire building rocking and swaying and tearing loose of its foundations and crashing forward in an avalanche of falling masonry into the astonished and cowering piazza.
Here was a door of frosted glass. I rapped on the pane with the handle of my stick. No response. I cleared my throat, Cass Cleave cleared hers. I pointed to the name painted on the glass of the door in gold lettering. "Fino," I said, nodding. "You see? That is the family who rented him a room." We waited. I knocked again, and at last the door was opened by a diminutive, homuncular voung woman wearing a drab dress like Cass Cleave's and old-fashioned spectacles with heavy black frames. She sidled forward and quickly drew the door to behind her, closing off whatever might have been glimpsed of the room, although a faint smell of something cooking did escape. She greeted us diffidently and stood looking sidelong down at our feet, incurious and still. She held her hands joined before her, moving them about each other in a slow, caressing, washing motion. I asked if we might be allowed inside to see the room where the philosopher had lived. She frowned, and her hands stopped moving. "Nietzsche," I said, loudly. "Friedrich Nietzsche!" The name sounded absurd, like a sneeze; it was swallowed in the stairwell and rang back an echo that seemed to snigger. The young woman pondered, still with her eyes on the floor. There was a small, furry mole beside her left nostril toward which my eye kept straying. She shook her head slowly. No one of that name lived here, she said. She had a strange, low, sibilant way of speaking, pausing for a second on a word and making it buzz deep in her throat, a sound like that which a cat makes when it is being stroked. "I don't mean now," I said, fairly bellowing. "A long time ago! He lived here. Ilgrande filosofo!" I pointed again to the name on the door, I mentioned the plaque on the wall outside. She would only keep on shaking her head, remote, unapologetic, immovable. Once she raised her eyes sideways for a second and with a flicker of interest took in Cass Cleave's naked throat and the twin pale folds of freckled flesh where the sleeveless dress pinched her at each bare armpit. The landing was a narrow, hot space, and we had to stand close together, we two tall ones and the tiny woman, swamped in each other's heat and the cooking smell that was coming more strongly now from behind the closed door. I cast about for something more to say but could think of nothing, and instead swivelled on my heel and set off in mute fury and frustration down the stairs. At the first landing I stopped and turned and saw Cass Cleave and the dwarf woman still standing up there where I had left them, neither looking at the other, both with their eyes cast down, saying nothing, simply standing, motionless as a pair of manikins.
I was in the hall, waiting inside the door, when she came down at last, stepping from stair to stair with careful deliberation, watching herself as she did so, as if descending like this were a skilled manoeuvre she had only lately learned to execute. I thought, jarringly, of Magda. Slowly the girl came to meet me, avoiding my eye, or no, not avoiding, but looking through me as though I were not there. Yet I knew she knew what I would do. I seemed to be no longer drunk; on the contrary, I felt violently sober. She stood in the circle of my arms quite still and stiff; I might have been a cascade of water falling about her but not wetting her. Her lower lip stood a little prominent of the upper, so that she seemed in permanent expectation of receiving a drop of some sacred distillate from above, yet now when I leaned my head forward I had trouble finding her mouth; when I did, I took that soft, protruding bud of flesh between my teeth. As I kissed her she did not close her eyes, and neither did I, and so we stood and stared into each other, surprised, almost aghast. I caught again from her skin that faint, flat, medicinal smell. It reminded me of something: violets, was it? Her shoulder blades flexed under my hands like hard, stiff wings, flexed, and were still. Clear as if it were being projected before my wide-open eyes I saw myself in the house on Cedar Street sitting opposite Magda at the table in the breakfast nook, feeding her the tablets, picking them up one by one from my cupped palm and dropping them into her offered mouth. It was at midnight, I could faintly hear a clock chime in the next-door house; a moth was bumping against the black and shining window. All around was silence, not a sound save of that baffled, winged thing blundering against the glass. Magda's hands rested flat before her on the table; her fingernails were chipped and there was grime under them. How calm she was, how docile, watching me steadily, with keen interest, it might be, as I poured out the glass of water and put it into her hands. Here; drink. I had told her the tablets were a special kind of candy. They were violet-coloured. I released Cass Cleave from my embrace. Still she did not stir, but stood and looked at me, calmly attending me and the possibility of what I might do next, with Magda's very gaze.