I shake my head. That is not the meaning of the story, but what is the use of arguing? I am like an incompetent schoolmaster, fishing about with my maieutic forceps when I ought to be filling her with the truth.
She speaks. "You are always asking me that question, so I will now tell you. It was a fork, a kind of fork with only two teeth. There were little knobs on the teeth to make them blunt. They put it in the coals till it was hot, then they touched you with it, to burn you. I saw the marks where they had burned people."
Is this the question I asked? I want to protest but instead listen on, chilled.
"They did not burn me. They said they would burn my eyes out, but they did not. The man brought it very close to my face and made me look at it. They held my eyelids open. But I had nothing to tell them. That was all.
"That was when the damage came. After that I could not see properly any more. There was a blur in the middle of everything I looked at; I could see only around the edges. It is difficult to explain.
"But now it is getting better. The left eye is getting better. That is all."
I take her face between my hands and stare into the dead centres of her eyes, from which twin reflections of myself stare solemnly back. "And this?" I say, touching the worm-like sear in the corner.
"That is nothing. That is where the iron touched me. It made a little burn. It is not sore." She pushes my hands away. "What do you feel towards the men who did this?" She lies thinking a long time. Then she says, "I am tired of talking."
There are other times when I suffer fits of resentment against my bondage to the ritual of the oiling and rubbing, the drowsiness, the slump into oblivion. I cease to comprehend what pleasure I can ever have found in her obstinate, phlegmatic body, and even discover in myself stirrings of outrage. I become withdrawn, irritable; the girl turns her back and goes to sleep.
In this moody state I pay a visit one evening to the rooms on the second floor of the inn. As I climb the rickety outside stairway a man I do not recognize hurries down past me, ducking his head. I knock at the second door along the corridor and enter. The room is just as I remember it: the bed neatly made, the shelf above it packed with trinkets and toys, two candles burning, a glow of warmth coming from the great flue that runs along the wall, an odour of orange-blossom in the air. The girl herself is occupied in front of the mirror. She gives a start at my entry, but rises smiling to welcome me and bolts the door. Nothing seems more natural than to seat her on the bed and begin to undress her. With little shrugs she helps me bare her trim body. "How I have missed you!" she sighs. "What a pleasure to be back!" I whisper. And what a pleasure to be lied to so flatteringly! I embrace her, bury myself in her, lose myself in her soft bird-like flurries. The body of the other one, closed, ponderous, sleeping in my bed in a faraway room, seems beyond comprehension. Occupied in these suave pleasures, I cannot imagine what ever drew me to that alien body. The girl in my arms flutters, pants, cries as she comes to a climax. Smiling with joy, sliding into a languorous half-sleep, it occurs to me that I cannot even recall the other one's face. "She is incomplete!" I say to myself. Though the thought begins to float away at once, I cling to it. I have a vision of her closed eyes and closed face filming over with skin. Blank, like a fist beneath a black wig, the face grows out of the throat and out of the blank body beneath it, without aperture, without entry. I shudder with revulsion in the arms of my little bird-woman, hug her to me.
When later in the middle of the night I ease myself out of her arms, she whimpers but does not awaken. I dress in the dark, close the door behind me, grope my way down the stairs, hurry back home with snow crunching underfoot and an icy wind boring into my back.
I light a candle and bend over the form to which, it seems, I am in a measure enslaved. Lightly I trace the lines of her face with my fingertip: the clear jaw, the high cheekbones, the wide mouth. Lightly I touch her eyelids. I am sure she is awake, though she gives no sign.
I shut my eyes, breathe deeply to still my agitation, and concentrate wholly on seeing her through my blind fingertips. Is she pretty? The girl I have just left, the girl she may perhaps (I suddenly realize) smell on me, is very pretty, there is no question about that: the acute-ness of my pleasure in her is sharpened by the elegance of her tiny body, its manners, its movements. But of this one there is nothing I can say with certainty. There is no link I can define between her womanhood and my desire. I cannot even say for sure that I desire her. All this erotic behaviour of mine is indirect: I prowl about her, touching her face, caressing her body, without entering her or finding the urge to do so. I have just come from the bed of a woman for whom, in the year I have known her, I have not for a moment had to interrogate my desire: to desire her has meant to enfold her and enter her, to pierce her surface and stir the quiet of her interior into an ecstatic storm; then to retreat, to subside, to wait for desire to reconstitute itself. But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave in some ways like a lover-I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her-but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.
It is not that something is in the course of happening to me that happens to some men of a certain age, a downward progress from lib-
ertinage to vengeful actions of impotent yearning. If a change in my moral being were occurring I would feel it; nor would I have undertaken this evening's reassuring experiment. I am the same man I always was; but time has broken, something has fallen in upon me from the sky, at random, from nowhere: this body in my bed, for which I am responsible, or so it seems, otherwise why do I keep it? For the time being, perhaps forever, I am simply bewildered. It seems all one whether I lie down beside her and fall asleep or fold her in a sheet and bury her in the snow. Nevertheless, bending over her, touching my fingertips to her forehead, I am careful not to spill the wax.
Whether she guesses where I have been I cannot decide; but the next night, when I am lulled almost to sleep by the rhythm of the oiling and rubbing, I feel my hand stopped, held, guided down between her legs. For a while it rests against her sex; then I shake more of the warm oil on to my fingers and begin to caress her. Quickly the tension gathers in her body; she arches and shudders and pushes my hand away. I continue to rub her body till I too relax and am overtaken with sleep.
I experience no excitement during this the most collaborative act we have yet undertaken. It brings me no closer to her and seems to affect her as little. I search her face the next morning: it is blank. She dresses and stumbles down to her day in the kitchen.
I am disquieted. "What do I have to do to move you?": these are the words I hear in my head in the subterranean murmur that has begun to take the place of conversation. "Does no one move you?"; and with a shift of horror I behold the answer that has been waiting all the time offer itself to me in the image of a face masked by two black glassy insect eyes from which there comes no reciprocal gaze but only my doubled image cast back at me.
I shake my head in a fury of disbelief. No! No! No! I cry to myself. It is I who am seducing myself, out of vanity, into these meanings and correspondences. What depravity is it that is creeping upon me? I search for secrets and answers, no matter how bizarre, like an old woman reading tea-leaves. There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars. How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman's body anything but a site of joy? I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!