The Fata Morgana Books (6 page)

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My friend had invited me to celebrate his birthday. Reaching the foot of his building, I rang several times at the number I had been told: finally, an oldish-sounding lady replied, in a reedy, almost inaudible voice: “It’s not here.”—“But this is the address I was given!” I said indignantly.—“I know, you’re not the first one. But it’s not here.”—“Where is it, then?”— “I don’t know.” In fact, it was the apartment right across the landing; shrewdly, I waited in the street, smoking, until other people arrived to show me the way. “Ah, you brought something to drink, excellent!” my friend exclaimed, brushing off my complaints about his mistake: “It’s nothing, it’s nothing.” The apartment was small, the crowd dense, noisy; people were drinking, talking, there was no music. I didn’t know many people here, no one actually, aside from my friend. But the people were drunk and excited and it wasn’t difficult to strike up a conversation with them. I found myself talking with a young woman, a Russian. She was drinking a lot and laughing, a brittle laugh, but an agreeable one; one of her white arms had a series of scars on it, thick uneven strokes, which she told me she had inflicted herself, without really explaining either how or why in a way I could make sense of. But maybe she didn’t really want to say. A fat blond woman, rather vulgar, had come in and was kissing her; this was her mother, already drunk, accompanied by a much younger man, his goatee carefully trimmed. “My stepfather,” the Russian girl smirked; I went on drinking. In the hallway, another woman, the mistress of the house I think, caught me by the neck and greedily kissed my mouth. I gently pushed her away. “No? You don’t want to?” She gave me a startled, frightened look.—“No,” I replied, smiling kindly, “I don’t want to.”—“It’s nothing,” she snapped, continuing heavily toward the kitchen. In the living room, the Russian girl’s mother was emitting loud, guttural laughter and shaking her full breasts in front of her companion’s dazzled gaze. Her daughter was sitting at a low table; together with two of her friends (twins, seemingly identical, but who revealed surprisingly contrary characters as soon as you talked to them—one gentle, attentive, and patient, the other harsh, almost enraged, nursing a secret resentment that cast a shadow over all her words), she was taking cocaine, indifferent to her mother who was toying with her lover’s curly hair and drinking. She was drinking too, methodically, she must have already been completely drunk yet she remained lucid, clear, friendly. I too was probably very drunk, like her. She spoke to me a lot; yet she didn’t seem especially interested in me, she would disappear suddenly in the middle of a sentence, leaving me with her two friends or else my friend. I tried to talk with him, but he was completely incoherent, I couldn’t understand anything. His brother, who was seven years younger than he but whose birthday we were also celebrating—one was born before midnight, the other after, and we had thus moved seamlessly from one birthday to the other—was nodding and chuckling knowingly; from time to time, he would take a little packet out of his pocket and pour some cocaine onto the table, inviting the guests to help themselves with a sweeping gesture. When I could, I resumed my conversation with the Russian girl. Her mother had disappeared, the woman who had wanted to kiss me was slumped next to the table, staring at me with mean and greedy eyes, I responded with a smile and kept talking with the girl. She was looking for more to drink. All the bottles were empty, now she was grabbing the glasses left on the table and without hesitating poured their contents into her own, laughingly mixing the different wines and drinking without respite. Finally, I managed to convince her to leave. In the street, the sky was turning pale, she immediately dragged me into a bar where I bought her several drinks; she had moved on to beer, while I was still drinking shots of vodka. When she looked at me, curiously, her pupils reflected not just my face, puffy and sagging from drink, but also seemed framed by the reflection of the window behind me, two little black marbles set in two luminous squares. I was trying to convince her to come back to my place, but she gently yet firmly refused my offers; she was filled with alcohol and cocaine, they made her thin body vibrate with a wicked joy; yet she remained completely in control of herself: “That’s not how it’s done,” she said with a clear, slightly broken laugh. I laughed along with her, we understood each other very well. Outside, it was daylight. As I got into the taxi, I offered at least to drop her off on the way, but she refused this too and finally pushed me somewhat abruptly into the car. As it was starting up she walked off with long strides, waving a last goodbye with a broad, brittle smile, fragile and happy. I rapidly developed a vivid passion for this girl. I would call her on the phone, and we would chat about trivial, inconsequential things; she always kept the same friendly distance. I invited her to the pool: she refused, citing an allergy to chlorine, and nothing could convince her to go to the sea. At night, we would get drunk together. She was learning Persian: happy at this incongruous pretext, I held forth on the evolution of the Indo-European languages, a subject I actually knew not much about, but enjoyed a lot. Sometimes, in her confident, precise way, she would interrupt me and abruptly go on to a different, completely unrelated subject; an hour later, just as abruptly, she would come back to it, only quickly to drop it again. While she spoke, I would look at her. She was not, strictly speaking, pretty; but the ease and confidence with which she inhabited her body and face delighted me. Her laughter pealed, the glasses and the ice clinked, the lighters scraped and clacked, the coins jingled on the zinc of the round tables, oh, sweet idyll. At the end of the night, she would always leave me in the same way, cordial, laughing, firm and cheerful.

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To tell the truth, it wasn’t really this girl I loved, but another one. I had dreamed of her one night, alone in the my high room, a long, tender, profound dream that swelled me with so much happiness that my awakening was like a sword-blow to the neck, inflicted with precision by the pitiless day. She was dark-haired, this I am pretty sure of, dark-haired and full of friendship and joy and madness; I didn’t know who she was, I had never seen her before, nonetheless I knew her, I was certain of this, and she too knew me and was waiting for me, in the meantime whiling away her days however she could, freely making use of her body and her time and her beauty, which should have been saved for me, her sad knight of Aquitaine. She did nothing to please or displease me, and it was all the same to me; her friends and her lovers, big joyous violent men, I ignored them and never invited them into my home. I had known others like them, before, in the East, during bloody wars that resembled festivals, I had laughed and drunk with them while they killed each other, keeping my opinions to myself, always free. That may be why she had loved me: but I had never received anything from her, either good or bad, she had never granted me any rights or done me any wrongs; what she had given me, she had given freely, just as she had taken it back from me, and there was nothing to say to that, even though I was burning from head to foot, in a fire of ice that left no ash. At the same time I couldn’t have cared less about her. I had met another girl, far nicer and more beautiful, a girl both lively and amusing, her superior by far. This was on the occasion of yet another celebration, a great popular festival, the streets were swarming with people, their bodies sweaty, happy and tired, who scattered like sparrows before the onslaught of columns of roaring devils, armed with wheels of fire that sprayed fans of sparks all around, followed by drummers lined up in rows as they steadily beat out the measure, frenzied, throbbing, maddening; behind them, the crowd formed again, laughing, jostling each other, whirling round, and then it all began all over again. I spent the night dancing with this girl I didn’t know; one by one, the people around us left, overcome by exhaustion and alcohol. In the morning, I brought her back to my place, but instead of putting her in my bed, I took her in my arms and toppled with her onto the sofa, overwhelmed by uncontrollable laughter. I kissed her and she kissed me too, laughing too and protesting softly, I caressed and breathed in her long wavy hair, her beautiful lively body, I kissed her neck, the back of her neck, her little ear. When my hand tried to slip into her pants, though, she seized my wrist, with a firm and calm gesture; I kept insisting, between kisses I slipped my fingers here and there, then slowly returned to the elastic; once again, she put up a gentle but unshakable resistance. Finally I began caressing her through the thin fabric of her pants, beneath which I could feel the rougher texture of her underwear; she let herself go, her breathing caught in her throat, giving way to a long happy moan. I was happy too, for making her happy filled me with delight, I kept rubbing her delicately, she moved slowly beneath me, following in little circles the patient rhythm of my fingers, and I closed my eyes and plunged my face into her beautiful fragrant hair, right next to her ear, drinking in its smell mingled with the faint, acrid smell of her sweat, as very slowly her hands came down and undid my belt and pants, unhurriedly, button by button, and freed my cock to hold it between her palms, caressing it lightly, with minute movements, just for the pleasure of feeling it between her fingers as pleasure gripped her young body.

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To this story, there’s nothing else to add. Not really knowing where it comes from, I don’t know what it means, or to whom it could be addressed; already, it is showing me to the door; nothing remains now but for me to send it to someone, who will send it to someone else, further on somewhere, with no hope of a return, no hope of a counter-key that could put an end to my dispossession. At the very most I would have liked it to leave behind the taste of lime sorbet, cool, light, tart, enjoyed in sunlight at the edge of a large pool, in the clear water of which bathers plunge their bodies just as you plunge into the bitterness of life, without looking back.

The outbursts of the children’s laughter were so shrill that I gave up reading. Sighing, I closed the book on my finger and, discouraged, leaned my head back on the chaise longue. The laughter kept erupting, followed by a long, piercing scream; from inside the house came calls, women’s voices. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on the tingling sensation in my face, warmed by the sun. But it was useless and I opened my eyes again. I was sitting at the back of the garden; at my feet, the grass glowed gently, a large triangle of light against the darker green of the hedge and the tall, dense trees outlined against the white sky, their leaves moving in a light breeze. Behind me, a chaotic stampede was approaching, interrupted by shouts of joy; a child rushed past my chaise, overturning the little table on which I had rested my glass, fortunately empty. I sighed again, set my feet on the ground and bent over to straighten the table and replace the glass. I also put down my book, whose mint-green cloth binding stood out like a small, luminous rectangle on the dark wood of the table. Nearby, the children were rolling on the grass, shouting; a little further away, a little blond girl wearing a short mustard yellow dress was watching them pensively, lying on her stomach and resting on her elbows, a long blade of grass in her teeth. I skirted round them all and entered the house. In contrast to the daylight the rooms seemed plunged in darkness; momentarily blinded, I blinked my eyes as I groped my way along the long hallway.The sun fell slanting through the tall windows and traced fine blades of light on the waxed floor. Undecided, I walked my fingers over the cream-colored wallpaper, its floral motifs interlaced with gilt threads, before pausing in front of a framed reproduction representing a haughty young lady from the past, her face pale and severe like an ivory mask pinned over all emotion, hiding forever the secret movements of her body. Once again, the children’s laughter resounded toward the back of the hallway, came closer; everything seemed solid to me, much too solid. I entered a room, chose a book at random and sat down on the edge of the bed. Above the ornate brass headboard there hung a painting, an original work this time, showing a group of people dressed in dark brown, pink and white, scattered throughout a shady garden. A girl, seated, looked sideways at the spectator; another, laughing, was leaning her head and her crossed hands on the powerful shoulder of a man in a jacket; the cloth of her thin summer dress, artfully painted, hinted at a supple, agile body, which held itself in a curious torsion, one leg under the other, as if she were about to spin round with a leap to make her dress swirl around her hips. I opened the book and leafed through it, distracted by the cries resounding behind the door, piercing shouts of glee interlaced with childlike laughter, mingled from time to time with snatches of adult voices, amused or scolding, first quite close and then further away, lost in the depths of the vast house. A child came in, a blond boy with short hair, also looking for a book. He didn’t so much as look at me; I watched him in silence as he searched through the library, roughly pushing back the volumes he didn’t want until he finally made his choice, and then left without a word. Was he my child? In all honesty, I couldn’t have said. I looked at the pages of my book, but the words floated in front of my eyes, empty of meaning. Finally I put it down on the embroidered bedspread and went out too, continuing down the hallway to the big living room. A little girl, maybe the same one from before, maybe another, was speeding toward me, her bare feet hammering on the floor; she crashed into my leg, burst out laughing, and continued on her way without pausing. In the living room, the blond boy was reading at a table, between two large windows through which light flooded in; his golden hair shone, but his serious, focused face was in shadow, and I couldn’t see his eyes, fixed on the open pages. In front of him on the table was a large bowl of fruit; without lifting his head, he reached out, grabbed a plum, brought it to his lips, and bit into it, sucking in the juices. A little above his head, between the windows, hung a canvas in a simple wooden frame, a pensive girl in a pink blouse, seated at a long table, holding a peach. The interior, very white with dark, understated furniture, resembled the one in which I found myself; but this girl with her gaze at once serene and playful had her place there, whereas I was wandering like a shade among these quarters full of life. Near me, sitting with a cat on a long burgundy leather sofa, two young women were chatting as they drank their tea: “Did you see the weather report?”—“Yes, they were predicting rain.”—“It doesn’t look like it, though.” The cat, purring, stretched and then fell asleep quite suddenly, its pointy head resting on its two outstretched paws. I walked a little forward, to the center of the big red rug that filled the room; they continued talking without paying attention to my presence, I hesitated, tracing with my foot the black and white patterns, interlaced with blue, on the rug, then moved almost backwards toward the large buffet that stood in the rear of the living room and poured myself a cup of tea. It was still hot; I set down the heavy ceramic teapot and blew on the cup as I listened absent-mindedly to the two women’s chatter; my gaze wandered among the different paintings that decorated the room, going from one to the other and then back again, until it finally came to rest again on the child with the sun-filled hair. Absorbed in his reading, he wasn’t paying any attention to what was around him, neither to me nor to the two women conversing and laughing, one of whom might have been his mother. His gaze, running over the printed lines of the book, perceived nothing but a flood of internal images, much more real and absorbing for him than anything in this house; at the same time, though, he was living his child’s life in perfect harmony with this setting, the large, airy, luminous rooms of the vast house were like an extension of his small body, as varied and mysterious as his moods. As for me, I watched these people around me, I watched them attentively, but they remained out of my reach, like an image seen through a glass pane; even if I pressed my face against it, it was impossible to pass beyond it, to break this invisible surface or, on the contrary, to plunge into it as into an expanse of cold water; and behind it, things, equal to themselves, arranged themselves in a great mute tranquility, a harmonious design of colors, light, and movements, which organized into one single peaceful but inaccessible image blond child, sleeping cat, chatting women, and the young girl with the peach.