The youth — how peskily beautiful he was, and how wonderfully his obstinate wickedness succeeded in aping the contemptuous disregard, the draped toga, of dignitaries betrayed, — the youth, having arrived, at a deceleratingly hurried pace, at the corner, from where he was supposed to flit across the square, stopped. He stopped, having preceded this with three embarrassedly apologetic little steps, the third of which was the first on the serpentine course of the hope he denied. He turned to face the seated man: he unfastened his pupils from him and harnessed them to the mystery of the café’s green window boxes of rhododendrons. He didn’t dare step forward or walk away. His gaze, which knew another’s was lying in wait for it, hunkered down beneath the shrubbery, as if down a vertical scale whose regular segments it was now slowly creeping along all the way to the upper end, from which it was now just a blind leap, one that it will sure as hell make if it is cunningly aimed. From the right corner of his mouth, an uninterrupted pyrotechnic display of bashful smiles; they fester on his lower lip into an ironic disillusionment that dribbles dolefully downward. But the eyes proceed, and the line of sketched smiles thickens markedly. As if they suspected that they were passing by without leaving a trail. Someone amazed, someone whose eyes see while no longer having to look, is devouring these smiles. He is amazed at the mind that has already surmised the harm that has been inflicted, at the blood that is still resisting faith, at the senses aroused by a heretofore unknown prickling. He has studied the deceit of mendacious eyes; he knows full well that it’s not alluring eyes, but merely proffered eyes, that deceive; he is not misled by the proposition’s frightened hypocrisy, so while it might irritate him, while it might cause him shame, he suspects that both his ire and his shame were in league with that other fellow and against him in whom they had been kindled. Now! At last! Again they are eye-to-eye. All momentum was concentrated in their gazes: the bodies stiffened; but the eyes were like lunatic ants on a ruined anthill. They remain in each other’s eyes, hypnotized and so alert that they manage to answer questions that haven’t even been uttered yet, and ask questions for which an answer has long since been ready. . The youth’s face has turned to stone; hurl the harshest insult at it and the hieraticized injuries will fall numb upon this mask; the beauty, prostituted, made-up, yet triumphant over the morning sun, bedazzled in its triumph, is on the lookout for its own gender, which no longer applies. From the corners of his mouth, lizardy smile upon lizard-like smile. From the eyes of the one seated, frantic shot after shot, in vain: the lizards fall, and there’s no fewer of them.
In the door out to the terrace from the café stands a waiter: the hands folded behind his back are waving a napkin; he inspects the points of shoes worn of their elastic; he casts a glance here and there; his puckered lips vacillate between contempt and petulance.
Opposite, across the street, there’s a jeweler’s. The proprietor is on the doorstep. He’s turned toward the shop. (A few words.) A woman is surprised by a man taking her around the waist, her eyes were moving along an asymmetrical imaginary triangle: from the doorstep to the seated man, from there to the youth — who, as if chasing after himself, was already walking away again — and from this manifest, triumphant Sodom, so alluring that she suppressed her derision and reprimand, toward the nape of her husband’s wrinkly neck, where she smacked a kiss that undresses.
The following morning, when he arrived for breakfast, the stranger had already drunk half his coffee. He was reading a newspaper and ferreting around. And having ferretted him out, he immersed himself tenfold in his reading.
He went in and ordered. — The waiter’s original intention was a half-turn away, but something very strong and evil stopped him halfway.
The waiter extended his index finger, despite its black nail, and the index finger indicated a table that was already occupied.
“Would you like to take your repast here?”
The guest’s eyes popped out.
“No!” he said, and he added more quietly: “Why?”
The attendant brought a small plate and a glass. He flung them upon the table without a word. — And it was a good while before he returned with the coffee pot. He poured with his back to the youth; and as he poured:
“I thought. . Given what happened yesterday. . And that you’re both always alone. .”
He was saying this as if to himself, well aware that the new guest was looking. But that didn’t confound him. Yet, when he had finished pouring, he put down the carafe, leaned his hands on the table, picked up the service key, and said, this time actually to him, “You are the gentleman from Benedictine Mill, yes?” whereupon he gathered up the coffee pot again, and, going back inside, stood momentarily on the doorstep with his torso twisted in such a way that it almost hurt, with these two words: “That’s right!”
He disappeared; just at that moment, however, the young man sort of came to. Having wandered the environs and ascertained that they were alone, all alone with each other (even the street was abandoned), he turned his face toward him, so permissibly that it might be that we’re only looking at our brother, at that beloved brother whom we have sometimes allowed, with a mute look, always to tell us who we really are. And this face was inundated with a smile; a smile-flood.
“I knew it. .”
But there are dams against flooding. Sometimes.
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, pardon,” the youth said, “I see that you’re a stranger here, as am I. .”
But he wasn’t averting his gaze. He wasn’t! On the contrary, he started staring like a fisherman at a line when it has begun twitching. And this look, even though it was as though irremediably stuck, was attempting an appropriate retreat. It had, after all, been suddenly, astonishingly satisfied, and it moved on.