‘Qu’y a t-il, Fanny?’
‘Quelques livres pour Monsieur…’
‘Do we need to pay?’
‘They have been paid for.’
‘Qui…’
‘C’est bien. Donne le pourboire au garçon.’
The maid took a few coins from a tray to give to me, and I said:
‘I don’t take tips from anybody.’
The maid angrily withdrew her hand, and the courtesan understood my gesture. I believe she did, at any rate, because she said:
‘Très bien, très bien, et tu ne reçois pas ceci?’
And before I could avoid her, or rather, before I could ready myself to receive it fully, the laughing woman kissed me full on the lips, and I saw her disappear, laughing like a little girl, through the hidden door.
Stinking God has woken up and is starting to get dressed, that is to say, to put his boots on. Sitting on the edge of the cot, dirty and unshaven, he looks around him with a bored expression. He stretches out one arm and takes his hat, pulling it over his head down to his ears; then he looks at his feet in their baggy red socks, and then, burying his little finger deep into his ear, he twists it rapidly, producing an unpleasant sound. Then he pulls himself together and puts his boots on; and then, bent over, he walks to the door of the little room, turns round, looks at the floor, finds a cigar butt and picks it up, blows the dust off it and lights it. He leaves.
I hear him dragging his feet on the terrace tiles. I relax. I think, no, I don’t think, I rather receive into my interior some sweet nostalgia, a suffering that is sweeter than a lover’s uncertainty. And I remember the woman who gave me a kiss as a tip.
I am overwhelmed with vague desires, vague as mist, which fill my whole being, make it almost airy, impersonal, winged. For a few moments the memory of a scent, of a white breast, pierce me, and I know that if I am ever at her side again I will faint from love; I think that it will not matter to me to think that she has been possessed by many men before me and that if I found myself next to her once more, in that same blue room, I would fall on my knees on the carpet and put my head in her lap, and for the joy of possessing her and loving her I would do the most shameful things and the sweetest things.
And as my desire develops, I reconstruct in my mind the clothes the courtesan would wear to beautify herself, the well-proportioned hats she uses to cover herself and make herself even more seductive, and I imagine her next to her bed, in a state of semi-nakedness more terrible than complete nudity.
And as my desire for this woman, for any woman, grows slowly within me, I go again and again through my actions and imagine how happy a love of this kind would make me, with its riches and its glory; I imagine the sensations that will fill my body if from one day to the next, having become a wealthy man, I should awaken in that bedroom with my young semi-naked beloved putting on her stockings next to the bed, as I have on occasion seen in dirty magazines.
And suddenly my whole body, my poor man’s body, calls out to the Lord of Heaven:
‘And I, I, my Lord, will never have a lover as beautiful as the ones from the dirty magazines!’
A feeling of disgust began to irritate my life as I spent time in that cavern, surrounded by people who vomited forth nothing more than words of greed and fury. I was contaminated by the hatred that ran across their ugly mugs and there were moments when I perceived inside the box of my skull a slow-moving red mist.
A terrible tiredness crushed my arms. There were times when I wanted to sleep straight through two days and two nights. I had the sensation that my spirit was becoming filthy, that the skin of my spirit was tainted by the leprosy that accompanied these people; a leprosy that cut dark caves into my spirit. I went to sleep half-wild; I woke up silent. Despair swelled my veins, and I felt, growing between my bones and my skin, a force that I had never before sensed. I spent hours with my bitterness, sunk in painful abstractions. One night, Doña María ordered me in a rage to clean the toilet because it was disgusting. I obeyed in silence. I believe I was looking for motives to lead me to some obscure conclusion.
Another night, Don Gaetano, for a joke, put one hand on my stomach and another on my chest when I wanted to leave, just to make sure I wasn’t stealing books, keeping them hidden close to my body. I couldn’t smile or get angry. This was how things had to be, yes, just like this; it was necessary that my life, that life nurtured for nine months in sorrow in a woman’s belly, should suffer all these excesses, all these humiliations, all this anguish.
I started to go deaf at this point. For a few months I lost the ability to perceive sounds. A sharpened silence — silence can even take the shape of a knife — cut at the voices in my ears.
I did not think. My understanding was nothing more than a bowl-shaped pit of grievance that grew deeper and thicker each day. This was how my grievance began to build up.
They gave me a bell, a cowbell. How funny it was — praise be! — to see a lummox of my size performing such a menial task. They set me at the door to the cavern during the hours when there were most people in the street and I rang the cowbell to call people’s attention, to make people turn their heads and look at me, to make people know that this was a place that sold books, beautiful books… and that the noble stories and tales of famous beauties could be purchased from the sly-looking man or the fat, pale woman. And I rang the cowbell.
Many eyes stripped me slowly. I saw faces of women that I would never forget. I saw smiles that still ring in my eyes like jeers…
Ah! The truth is I was tired… but isn’t it written that ‘you will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow’?
And I mopped the floor, asking beautiful women to move their delicate little feet so that I could wipe the spot where they had been standing, and I went shopping with an enormous basket; I was an errand-boy… I suppose that if they had spat in my face then I might have peacefully wiped it away with the back of my hand.
A darkness fell over me, growing ever thicker. My memory began to lose the shapes of faces that I had loved with tearful affection; I began to imagine that my days were separated by wide tracts of time… and my eyes were too dry to cry.
Then I repeated the words that had until now only had a vague meaning in my life.
‘You will suffer,’ I said to myself, ‘you will suffer… you will suffer… you will suffer…
‘You will suffer… you will suffer…
‘You will suffer…’ My words faded away.
This is how I grew more mature during that hellish winter.
One night, in July, just as Don Gaetano was pulling the metal shutter over the door, Doña María remembered that she had left a bundle of clothes that had been brought from the laundry that afternoon. So she said:
‘Che, Silvio, come on, we’ll get it.’
While Don Gaetano turned the lights back on, I accompanied her. I remember it exactly.
The bundle was in the centre of the kitchen, on a chair. Doña María, her back to me, grabbed the bundle by its topknot. As I looked around, I saw some coals still glowing in a brazier. And in that briefest of instants I thought:
‘Here we go…’ And without hesitation, grabbing a coal, I threw it into a pile of papers that were next to a heavily laden bookcase, while Doña María began walking away.