I begin to visit the girl at the inn regularly. There are moments during the day, in my office behind the courtroom, when my attention wanders and I drift into erotic reverie, grow hot and swollen with excitement, linger over her body like a moony lustful youth; then reluctantly I have to recall myself to the tedium of paperwork or walk over to the window and stare into the street. I remember how in the first years of my appointment here I used to roam the obscurer quarters of the town toward dusk, shadowing my face in my cloak; how sometimes a restless wife, leaning over the half-door with the hearthfire gleaming behind her, would answer my gaze without flinching; how I would fall into conversation with young girls promenading in twos and threes, buy them sherbet, then perhaps lead one away into the darkness to the old granary and a bed of sacks. If there was anything to be envied in a posting to the frontier, my friends told me, it was the easy morals of the oases, the long scented summer evenings, the complaisant sloe-eyed women. For years I wore the well-fed look of a prize boar. Later that promiscuity modulated into more discreet relations with housekeepers and girls lodged sometimes upstairs in my rooms but more often downstairs with the kitchen help, and into liaisons with girls at the inn. I found that I needed women less frequently; I spent more time on my work, my hobbies, my antiquarianism, my cartography.
Not only that; there were unsettling occasions when in the middle of the sexual act I felt myself losing my way like a storyteller losing the thread of his story. I thought with a shiver of those figures of fun, fat old men whose overburdened hearts stop beating, who pass away in the arms of their loves with an apology on their lips and have to be carried out and dumped in a dark alley to save the reputation of the house. The climax to the act itself became remote, puny, an oddity. Sometimes I drifted to a halt, sometimes went mechanically through to the end. For weeks and months I would retire into celibacy. The old delight in the warmth and shapeliness of women's bodies did not desert me, but there was a new puzzlement. Did I really want to enter and claim possession of these beautiful creatures? Desire seemed to bring with it a pathos of distance and separation which it was futile to deny. Nor could I always see why one part of my body, with its unreasonable cravings and false promises, should be heeded over any other as a channel of desire. Sometimes my sex seemed to me another being entirely, a stupid animal living parasitically upon me, swelling and dwindling according to autonomous appetites, anchored to my flesh with claws I could not detach. Why do I have to carry you about from woman to woman, I asked: simply because you were born without legs? Would it make any difference to you if you were rooted in a cat or a dog instead of in me?
Yet at other times, and particularly in the last year, with the girl whose nickname at the inn is The Star but whom I have always thought of as a bird, I felt again the power of the old sensual enchantment, swam out into her body and was transported to the old limits of pleasure. So I thought: "It is nothing but a matter of age, of cycles of desire and apathy in a body that is slowly cooling and dying. When I was young the mere smell of a woman would arouse me; now it is evidently only the sweetest, the youngest, the newest who have that power. One of these days it will be little boys." With some distaste I looked forward to my last years in this bountiful oasis.
Three nights in succession, now, I visit her in her little room, bringing presents of cananga oil, sweets, and a jar of the smoked fish-roe I know she loves to wolf down in private. When I embrace her she closes her eyes; tremors of what seem to be delight run through her. The friend who first recommended her to me spoke of her talents: "It is all playacting of course," he said, "but in her case the difference is that she believes in the role she plays." For myself, I find I do not care. Captivated by her performance, I open my eyes in the midst of all the fluttering and shivering and moaning, then sink back into the dark river of my own pleasure.
I spend three days of sensual languor, heavy-lidded, sleekly aroused, daydreaming. I return to my rooms after midnight and slip into bed, paying no attention to the obdurate form beside me. If I am woken in the morning by the sound of her preparations, I feign sleep till she is gone.
Once, happening to pass the open kitchen door, I glance in. Through wraiths of steam I see a stocky girl seated at a table preparing food. "I know who that is," I think to myself with surprise; nevertheless, the image that persists in my memory as I cross the yard is of the pile of green marrows on the table in front of her. Deliberately I try to shift my mind's gaze from the marrows back to the hands that slice them, and from the hands to the face. I detect in myself a reluctance, a resistance. My regard remains dazedly fixed on the marrows, on the gleam of light on their wet skins. As if with a will of its own, it does not move. So I begin to face the truth of what I am trying to do: to obliterate the girl. I realize that if I took a pencil to sketch her face I would not know where to start. Is she truly so featureless? With an effort I concentrate my mind on her. I see a figure in a cap and heavy shapeless coat standing unsteadily, bent forward, straddle-legged, supporting itself on sticks. How ugly, I say to myself. My mouth forms the ugly word. I am surprised by it but I do not resist: she is ugly, ugly.
I come back on the fourth night in a bad temper, thrashing about my rooms noisily, not caring who is woken. The evening has been a failure, the current of renewed desire is broken. I throw my boots on the floor and climb into bed spoiling for a quarrel, longing for someone to blame, ashamed too of my childishness. What this woman beside me is doing in my life I cannot comprehend. The thought of the strange ecstasies I have approached through the medium of her incomplete body fills me with a dry revulsion, as if I had spent nights copulating with a dummy of straw and leather. What could I ever have seen in her? I try to recall her as she was before the doctors of pain began their ministrations. It is impossible that my gaze did not pass over her as she sat with the other barbarian prisoners in the yard the day they were brought in. Somewhere in the honeycomb of my brain, I am convinced, the memory is lodged; but I am unable to bring it back. I can remember the woman with the baby, even the baby itself. I can remember every detaiclass="underline" the frayed edge of the woollen shawl, the patina of sweat under the wisps of fine baby-hair. I can remember the bony hands of the man who died; I believe I can even, with an effort, recompose his face. But beside him, where the girl should be, there is a space, a blankness.
I wake up in the night with the girl shaking me and the echo of a thin moan still hanging in the air. "You were shouting in your sleep," she says. "You woke me up."
"What was I shouting?"
She mumbles something, turns her back on me.
Later in the night she wakes me again: "You were shouting."
Thick-headed and confused, angry too, I try to look into myself but see only a vortex and at the heart of the vortex oblivion.
"Is it a dream?" she says.
"I cannot remember any dream."
Can it be that the dream of the hooded child building the snow-castle has been coming back? If it has, surely the taste or the smell or the afterglow of the dream would linger with me.
"There is something I must ask you," I say. "Do you remember when you were brought here, into the barracks yard, for the first time? The guards made you all sit down. Where did you sit? Which way did you face?"