* * *
My friend had invited me to celebrate his birthday. Reaching the foot of his building, I rang several times at the number I had been told: finally, an oldish-sounding lady replied, in a reedy, almost inaudible voice: “It’s not here.”—“But this is the address I was given!” I said indignantly. — “I know, you’re not the first one. But it’s not here.”—“Where is it, then?”— “I don’t know.” In fact, it was the apartment right across the landing; shrewdly, I waited in the street, smoking, until other people arrived to show me the way. “Ah, you brought something to drink, excellent!” my friend exclaimed, brushing off my complaints about his mistake: “It’s nothing, it’s nothing.” The apartment was small, the crowd dense, noisy; people were drinking, talking, there was no music. I didn’t know many people here, no one actually, aside from my friend. But the people were drunk and excited and it wasn’t difficult to strike up a conversation with them. I found myself talking with a young woman, a Russian. She was drinking a lot and laughing, a brittle laugh, but an agreeable one; one of her white arms had a series of scars on it, thick uneven strokes, which she told me she had inflicted herself, without really explaining either how or why in a way I could make sense of. But maybe she didn’t really want to say. A fat blond woman, rather vulgar, had come in and was kissing her; this was her mother, already drunk, accompanied by a much younger man, his goatee carefully trimmed. “My stepfather,” the Russian girl smirked; I went on drinking. In the hallway, another woman, the mistress of the house I think, caught me by the neck and greedily kissed my mouth. I gently pushed her away. “No? You don’t want to?” She gave me a startled, frightened look. — “No,” I replied, smiling kindly, “I don’t want to.”—“It’s nothing,” she snapped, continuing heavily toward the kitchen. In the living room, the Russian girl’s mother was emitting loud, guttural laughter and shaking her full breasts in front of her companion’s dazzled gaze. Her daughter was sitting at a low table; together with two of her friends (twins, seemingly identical, but who revealed surprisingly contrary characters as soon as you talked to them — one gentle, attentive, and patient, the other harsh, almost enraged, nursing a secret resentment that cast a shadow over all her words), she was taking cocaine, indifferent to her mother who was toying with her lover’s curly hair and drinking. She was drinking too, methodically, she must have already been completely drunk yet she remained lucid, clear, friendly. I too was probably very drunk, like her. She spoke to me a lot; yet she didn’t seem especially interested in me, she would disappear suddenly in the middle of a sentence, leaving me with her two friends or else my friend. I tried to talk with him, but he was completely incoherent, I couldn’t understand anything. His brother, who was seven years younger than he but whose birthday we were also celebrating — one was born before midnight, the other after, and we had thus moved seamlessly from one birthday to the other — was nodding and chuckling knowingly; from time to time, he would take a little packet out of his pocket and pour some cocaine onto the table, inviting the guests to help themselves with a sweeping gesture. When I could, I resumed my conversation with the Russian girl. Her mother had disappeared, the woman who had wanted to kiss me was slumped next to the table, staring at me with mean and greedy eyes, I responded with a smile and kept talking with the girl. She was looking for more to drink. All the bottles were empty, now she was grabbing the glasses left on the table and without hesitating poured their contents into her own, laughingly mixing the different wines and drinking without respite. Finally, I managed to convince her to leave. In the street, the sky was turning pale, she immediately dragged me into a bar where I bought her several drinks; she had moved on to beer, while I was still drinking shots of vodka. When she looked at me, curiously, her pupils reflected not just my face, puffy and sagging from drink, but also seemed framed by the reflection of the window behind me, two little black marbles set in two luminous squares. I was trying to convince her to come back to my place, but she gently yet firmly refused my offers; she was filled with alcohol and cocaine, they made her thin body vibrate with a wicked joy; yet she remained completely in control of herself: “That’s not how it’s done,” she said with a clear, slightly broken laugh. I laughed along with her, we understood each other very well. Outside, it was daylight. As I got into the taxi, I offered at least to drop her off on the way, but she refused this too and finally pushed me somewhat abruptly into the car. As it was starting up she walked off with long strides, waving a last goodbye with a broad, brittle smile, fragile and happy. I rapidly developed a vivid passion for this girl. I would call her on the phone, and we would chat about trivial, inconsequential things; she always kept the same friendly distance. I invited her to the pooclass="underline" she refused, citing an allergy to chlorine, and nothing could convince her to go to the sea. At night, we would get drunk together. She was learning Persian: happy at this incongruous pretext, I held forth on the evolution of the Indo-European languages, a subject I actually knew not much about, but enjoyed a lot. Sometimes, in her confident, precise way, she would interrupt me and abruptly go on to a different, completely unrelated subject; an hour later, just as abruptly, she would come back to it, only quickly to drop it again. While she spoke, I would look at her. She was not, strictly speaking, pretty; but the ease and confidence with which she inhabited her body and face delighted me. Her laughter pealed, the glasses and the ice clinked, the lighters scraped and clacked, the coins jingled on the zinc of the round tables, oh, sweet idyll. At the end of the night, she would always leave me in the same way, cordial, laughing, firm and cheerful.