"… These curtains, that really are too narrow you see, are not wholly unknown to me. I have this strange habit, you see: I like to go for a walk late in the evening before going to bed. You know how it is, when you live alone… And then, I'm very observant…"
She should have interrupted him, stopped him on the brink of the next sentence… She should have let him have his way just now, accepted his kisses, given herself to him, for what he was about to say was a thousand times more monstrous. But the air was becoming heavy, like damp cotton wool, hindering gestures, stifling the voice.
"Especially with the frosts last winter, I was often worried: you have a… mm… sick child in this shack; one never knows. One evening when I was passing very close by, almost beneath your windows, I glanced your way; the curtains were drawn but they are, as I've said, too narrow… So I looked in and…
"… And I saw you, you and your son, naked, in an act of love."
No! He did not say it. She thought he was going to and the sentence immediately became real, inseparable from what had gone before. Perhaps he did then speak of their nakedness as well, of the carnal strangeness of the couple they made… She no longer knew.
"So at all events, no doubt you will understand my astonishment… I've seen worse things in my time… I'm no choirboy myself, far from it. But even so! Fortunately I'm not a gossip, otherwise, you know what the wagging tongues are like at the Caravanserai and elsewhere…
"… And when I offered you my… friendship, it was so as to be able to talk to you more freely about all this, you understand, in intimacy. And to give you the possibility of living a normal life as a woman, with a man who would enable you to enjoy…"
No! He did not speak those last words, but even so, they were real, and inescapable, for she had imagined them.
In fact, he was no longer there. She was alone, sitting on the bed, facing the mirror. He had gone, bidding her a good night and proposing that they should take a trip in a boat the next day. She had agreed, nodding several times.
That night she found herself wandering for some time in an endless, shadowy apartment, exploring its labyrinthine passages before going to lie down on a bed. Her son came in, just as she had seen him on the afternoon when he was diving-naked, his body wet, making the sheets damp and cooling them deliriously. She felt this coolness against her breast, in her thighs. He kissed her; his lips tasted of the stems and leaves of water plants. Their freedom was such that their bodies moved as if underwater, their gestures marvelously weightless. It was when she found herself on her knees, dominated by him, that she noticed that the armchair turned toward the wall in the corner of this unknown room had someone in it… She could only see the arm on the armrest-a heavy cuff link glittered in the half-darkness. And the more violent their sensual enjoyment became, the more the profile of the seated man detached itself from the back of the chair. She was on the brink of recognizing him when at last, with a cry, still choked with pleasure, she wrested herself from sleep. An object was digging into her shoulder. She switched on the light and from within the folds of the tangled sheets she plucked out a cuff link.
With a final effort at sane reasoning she formulated this eerie and incongruous thought and rejoiced in its absurdity: "There was no dragon!" That was it, she needed to speak of improbable things that had no chance of becoming real. No dragon! An unknown apartment, that man in the armchair, perhaps. But no dragon. Like that she would finally manage to distinguish the true from the false…
This exercise seemed to calm her. A respite of several minutes during which she got up, went into the book room, took down a fat encyclopedic volume, leafed through it with a clumsy, nervous hand. And quickly hit upon the engraving: "A boa constrictor attacking an antelope." The glistening body, covered in arabesques, was strangling its victim. "The dragon…," she whispered and recalled that, in the vast apartment she had just left, she had forgotten to switch off the lamp on the bedside table.
The sounds coming through the heat haze were blurred, liquid. The cries of children paddling at the edge of the river, the lowing of a herd… And the lazy plashing of oars. To push the boat clear from the low, muddy bank just now he had had to take off his shoes, roll up his pants, and step into the water. Now she could see the broad, hardened soles of his feet. And on his forehead the smear of clay he had left when wiping away drops of sweat. For her this brown streak was a particularly odd source of distress in this world of sunlight and apathy. She could not say to him, "You've made a mark on your face," still less could she dip her fingers into the water and wash his brow for him…
That would have been quite unthinkable. The man sitting facing her, his bare heels wedged against the timbers of the boat, was an utterly strange being: a man who desired her and who was taking her out in a boat on a stifling July day, fulfilling a ritual that was a prelude to the night, when he would violate her as much as he desired, as of right, without any resistance on her part. Before their boat trip, as they walked through the upper town, he had invited her into the shooting gallery. He had not missed a single target; as he walked out he had looked at her with the air of a child expecting praise… This was the very man who had materialized in a labyrinthine apartment in the armchair facing the wall, the man spying on them with a smile of connivance. She recalled the great bed, the sheets with their scent of the river, yes, precisely the same smell as this tepid water rippling beneath the low sides of the dinghy. Under this watchful gaze she and the boy, whose body was still wet, had tried to mask their love. Yes, they were searching in all innocence for some object lost among the folds of the devastated bed. But while going through the motions of this search they were embracing, exchanging kisses, giving themselves to each other…
She forced herself to listen. Golets had just spoken to her. Doubtless it was his "We really must make hay while the sun shines: because you never know," that he kept repeating every five minutes. The smear of clay on his forehead was drawing out into a long, sinuous trickle. "If only I could ask him: that apartment, that simulated search in a disordered bed-were they real?" said a hopeless voice within her. It was the "little bitch," she recognized it almost joyfully, for these words were the only ones that still linked her to this day, to this man's conversation, to life… She leaned forward, thrust her hand into the water. She was going to wash away the muddy mark on his forehead…
At that moment they touched land. Golets jumped onto the bank and drew the bow of the vessel into a little gap between the willows in the middle of the tangle of weeds. Then he helped her to step ashore and settled her in a little clearing surrounded by bushes. He did it with the care you would have for an important patient; or for a vase filled with water with a bunch of flowers in it, that you dread breaking just at the last moment. Or perhaps (the voice of the "little bitch" pierced the silence that enveloped her) yes, especially, for a person whose social standing made this riverside picnic somewhat inappropriate. "The Princess Arbyelina," the voice whispered. "That is what you still are to him. He is still susceptible to your body's added value."
Golets spread out a tablecloth and set down the bottle. From his bag he took two glasses, some bread, and a packet covered in grease stains. "Princess Arbyelina," she thought, picturing the life where the word had a meaning, where the people lived who knew her. The Caravanserai, Villiers, Paris… This world now seemed to her non-existent, beheld in a dream long since dissipated. Now there was only the damp sauna of this July afternoon, the sweetish smell of the tepid, muddy water; this woman half reclining in the grass, with a glass in her hand that she raised to her lips from time to time, yielding to the pleas of a man who talked incessantly. A man who, when night came, would crush her breasts, penetrate her, fall asleep beside her. He already had all these actions imprinted in him, in his forearms, blue with their thick veins, in his fingers with broad, yellow nails…