Before the alcohol suddenly wore off, I staggered around the party, letting myself be towed by the hostess, mumbling some blather in response to questions that seemed to me to be (and perhaps actually were) increasingly stupid. (“But how do you come up with your ideas?” I don’t come up with ideas: ideas live in my brain, they’ve pitched their tents inside me like nomads on the steppes of the Caucasus; I don’t summon them, they’re already there, and they bounce around without paying me any attention, they live their primitive life and I watch them from afar.)
People looked at me and smiled, for some reason; I could no longer pronounce certain consonants, my tongue refused to tap against my palate or my teeth, and my voice was drowning in a dull, distant buzz. But Elisabetta Renal was laughing and looking at me merrily: I made her forget her fear, and that was what kept me standing; otherwise I would have let go and shut my eyes and dropped to the ground in the crowd, curling up to sleep in a flower bed. Actually, there was one specific spot that I wanted to disappear into, and it was a square inch of Elisabetta’s skin, a soft, white, tender spot.
I didn’t make a good impression. Thinking back on it, I realized I could have signed up some new clients (Witold would criticize me for that later), and the client that I picked up shortly afterward didn’t count, because it wasn’t my doing. At a certain point Elisabetta grasped my necktie, tugging on it like the pull chain of an old toilet so that I had to lean toward her, and murmured in my ear that the knot was dreadful; I didn’t need to be told twice — I felt as if I had a cowbell hanging from my neck — so I undid the knot and slipped the tie into my pocket. I began to moo, and, since that made Elisabetta laugh, I went on to bark at a woman’s back, and then I growled and startled another woman. I can’t establish exactly the order of the events that followed the animal noises. I know only that I spilled a Bellini on my shirt, and right after that I overturned a plate of risotto on my hostess’s arm, and that she laughed, her eyes tearing up (maybe partly because she was scalded). We went into the house to clean up.
The kitchen was bustling. She must have been drinking too — I hadn’t noticed — or maybe it was her laughter that destabilized her: she leaned against my arm while I cleaned my shirt with a wet towel, and my own knees were out of control, so I had to find something solid to hold on to. Talking about animals made me think of the twins; I hadn’t seen them all evening, and I did an imitation of their usual look, a stunned and perplexed expression — the kind of imitation that’s terribly difficult unless you’re drunk.
Elisabetta asked me if I’d ever seen where they slept.
“Are they somewhere else tonight?”
She shook her head. “They’re here.”
“Then I don’t want to see,” I told her. Even drunk, I thought that would be too much, but she had taken my hand and I didn’t have the strength to resist that pressure, to resist the red silk dress and what it hid. We went down the stairs to the ground floor, behind the greenhouse, Elisabetta leading the way to the twins’ apartment, and I following her naked back above all, the movement of her hips, and the tiny toes that peeked out, rosy and perfect, from her sandals. At that moment, if I had a choice, I would have taken her feet instead of her décolleté as my pillow.
She threw open a door and turned on the lights, and I saw a big brass double bed, two marble-topped night tables, a crucifix centered over the bed, and blue-striped pajamas folded on each of the two pillows. I wasn’t laughing anymore. Elisabetta watched me with a bright look.
I took two steps toward the bed. When I heard her shut the door, I turned to see what she intended to do.
“Why did you follow me?”
It was the first time she used the familiar tu with me. She wasn’t talking about this evening: she wasn’t asking why I’d followed her into the twins’ room. She wouldn’t have used that tone.
“Tell me why,” she repeated.
“No.”
Maybe she expected me to account for it, or to make up some story. She stiffened. Then she smiled. She approached the pillows, picked up one of the pairs of pajamas, and rumpled it.
“Just one. It’ll drive them crazy.”
“Come,” she added after a moment.
She took me into a little room where there was a character dressed like me, sitting on a swivel chair in front of a pyramid of small TV monitors; Elisabetta completely ignored him. “Alberto had these cameras installed for our security,” she said. She pointed to a screen. In the greenish aquarium of the infrared picture, one of the twins could be seen, dressed as a hunter, patrolling around the cistern. On other monitors, I recognized the garden we were building, seen from various angles, and some stretches of the entrance driveway: more or less the spot where I ran over the dog the first day and, yes, the spot where I had pissed that evening when I came to dinner.
I said I understood. The security guard shot me a suspicious look.
Elisabetta was hypnotized by the monitors. They must have spoken to her somehow, spoken of a prison that she had to flee from — or maybe not, maybe that was just what I’d hoped.
“We have to go back up,” she said finally.
As soon as we got outside she abandoned me, and I found myself standing with Receding Hairline and his aquiline nose and pale eyes, along with the small, solid type I’d also met at the Blue Dahlia. Elisabetta was leaving me in good hands, she said, while she had to go sit in the front row. Receding Hairline was Mr. Mosca, and the other was named Giletti, but Giletti was a sort of shadow: he always stood silent and half hidden behind Mosca. We three sat down near the balustrade, waiting for Rossi and an eminent mustachioed historian to take their places on the dais to talk about Alfredo Renal’s book. The atmosphere had changed: the guests were whispering now instead of chattering loudly, and they’d put down their plates and glasses and composed their expressions as if at a funeral.
At first I hardly listened to Mosca, because I was so offended that Elisabetta had left me in the lurch this way: I’d been having fun like a little kid when she suddenly shattered the toy, and then, to top it all off, she had left me with her lover, if that was what he was — if not, who was he? He was a guy who talked like Rossi, and I could have listened to him, too, for days without registering a word, just for the pleasure of hearing him talk, watching his gestures, admiring the confidence they expressed. I think he was asking me to design a hanging garden for him, for his penthouse in the city, or else he asked me later — maybe early on in the conversation he was just telling me how much he loved plants, and I was nodding, trying hard to stay pinned to the center of my seat instead of slumping over.
At a certain point he begs my pardon and says that he didn’t catch my name. I pull out a business card, and he begins to mutter, “Fratta, Fratta, Fratta,” as if he’s praying, fingering the beads on a rosary. I feel a warm breeze stroking my face, like when you’re driving with the window open, in summer, and you slow down for a red light and a backwash of warm air floods the car and envelops you. Everything around us slows down, we brake, the temperature rises.
“Did you used to be an interior designer? For some reason I associate your name with furniture.”
His heavy words drop into the pond of my attention and sink quickly; I hear the thud and the splash, and I feel the concentric waves that fan out and break against my temples, the stab of a migraine.