She was clattering across the asphalt amid the others, leaning well forward and rhythmically swinging her relaxed arms, hurtling past with confident speed. She turned deftly, and her thigh was bared by the flip of her skirt. Then her dress clung so closely in back that it outlined a small cleft as, with a barely perceptible undulation of her calves, she rolled slowly backward. Was it concupiscence, this torment he experienced as he consumed her with his eyes, marveling at her flushed face, at the compactness and perfection of her every movement (particularly when, having barely frozen motionless, she dashed off again, pumping swiftly with her prominent knees)? Or else was it the anguish that always accompanied his hopeless yearning to extract something from beauty, to hold it still for an instant, to do something with it—no matter what, provided there were some kind of contact, that somehow, no matter how, could quench that yearning? Why puzzle over it? She’d gather speed again and vanish—and tomorrow a different one would flash by, and thus, in a succession of disappearances, his life would pass.
Or would it? He saw the same woman knitting on the same bench and, sensing that, instead of a gentlemanly smile, he had leered and flashed a tusk from beneath a bluish lip, sat down. His uneasiness and the trembling of his hands did not last long. A conversation developed, which in itself gave him a strange satisfaction; the weight on his chest dissolved, and he began to feel almost merry. She appeared, clamping along on her skates, as she had the previous day. Her light-gray eyes dwelled on him for an instant, even though it was not he but the knitter who was speaking, and, having accepted him, she turned insouciantly away. Then she was sitting beside him, holding onto the edge of the seat with rosy, sharp-knuckled hands, on which shifted now a vein, now a deep dimple near the wrist while her hunched shoulders remained motionless, and her dilating pupils followed someone’s ball rolling across the gravel. As the day before, his neighbor, reaching across him, handed a sandwich to the girl, who began tapping her somewhat scarred knees together lightly as she ate.
“…it’s healthier, of course, and, most important of all, we have a first-rate school,” a distant voice was saying when he suddenly noticed that the auburn-curled head on his left had silently bent low over his hand.
“You lost the hands of your watch,” said the girl.
“No,” he answered, clearing his throat, “that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s a rarity.”
Reaching across with her left hand (the right one was holding the sandwich) she caught hold of his wrist and examined the blank, centerless dial beneath which the hands were inserted, revealing only their very tips, like two black droplets, amid the silvery digits. A shriveled leaf trembled in her hair, very near her neck above the delicate projection of a vertebra—and during his next spell of insomnia he kept yanking off the ghost of that leaf, grasping and yanking, with two fingers, with three, then with all five.
The day after, and the days that followed, he sat in the same place, doing an amateurish but quite tolerable imitation of an eccentric loner: the usual hour, the usual place. The girl’s arrival, her breathing, her legs, her hair, everything she did, whether it was scratching a shin and leaving white marks on it, or throwing a small black ball high in the air, or brushing against him with a bare elbow as she seated herself on the bench—all of it (while he appeared engrossed in pleasant conversation) evoked an intolerable sensation of sanguine, dermal, multivascular communion with her, as if the monstrous bisector pumping all the juices from the depths of his being extended into her like a pulsating dotted line, as if this girl were growing out of him, as if, with every carefree movement, she tugged and shook her vital roots implanted in the bowels of his being, so that, when she abruptly changed position or rushed off, he felt a yank, a barbarous pluck, a momentary loss of equilibrium: suddenly you are traveling through the dust on your back, banging the back of your head, on your way to being strung up by your insides. And all the while he calmly sat listening, smiling, nodding his head, pulling at a pant leg to free his knee, scrabbling lightly in the gravel with his walking stick, and saying, “Is that so?” or “Yes, it happens sometimes, you know…,” but comprehending his neighbor’s words only when the girl was nowhere nearby. He learned from this circumstantiating chatterbox that between her and the girl’s mother, a forty-two-year-old widow, there existed a five-year friendship (her own husband’s honor had been saved by the widow’s late spouse); that last spring this widow had, after a long illness, undergone a serious operation of the intestine; that, having long since lost all her family, she had promptly and tenaciously clutched at the kind couple’s suggestion that the girl move in with them in their provincial town; and that now she had been brought for a visit with her mother, as the garrulous lady’s husband had a bit of bothersome business to attend to in the capital, but that soon it would be time to head home—the sooner the better, for the girl’s presence only irritated the widow, who was exceptionally decent but had grown somewhat self-indulgent.
“Say, didn’t you mention that she was selling off some sort of furniture?”
This question (with its continuation) he had prepared during the night and tried out sotto voce on the ticking silence; having convinced himself that it sounded natural, he repeated it the next day to his newfound acquaintance. She replied affirmatively and explained in no uncertain terms that it wouldn’t be a bad idea if the widow made a little money—her medical care was costing and would continue to cost a lot, her resources were very limited, she insisted on paying for her daughter’s upkeep but did so rather sporadically—and we’re not rich either—in a word, the debt of honor, apparently, was considered already extinguished.
“Actually,” he continued without missing a beat, “I could use certain pieces of furniture myself. Do you suppose it might be convenient as well as proper if I…” He had forgotten the rest of his sentence, but improvised most adroitly, as he was beginning to feel at home with the artificial style of the still not fully comprehensible, many-ringed dream with which he was already so indistinctly but so firmly entwined that, for instance, he no longer knew what this thing was, and whose: part of his own leg or part of an octopus.
She was obviously delighted, and offered to take him there that very moment if he wished—the widow’s apartment, where she and her husband were also staying, was not far, right on the other side of the electric-railway bridge.
They set off. The girl walked in front, energetically swinging a canvas bag on a string, and already everything about her was, to his eyes, terrifyingly and insatiably familiar—the curve of her narrow back, the resilience of the two round little muscles farther down, the exact way the checks of her dress (the other, brown, one) tightened when she raised an arm, the delicate ankles, the rather high heels. She might be a little introverted, livelier of movement than of conversation, neither bashful nor forward, with a soul that seemed submerged, but in a radiant moistness. Opalescent on the surface but translucent in her depths, she must be fond of sweets, and puppies, and the innocent trickery of newsreels. Such warm-skinned, russet-sheened, open-lipped girls got their periods early, and it was little more to them than a game, like cleaning up a dollhouse kitchen…. And hers was not a very happy childhood, that of a half-orphan: this stern woman’s kindness was not like milk chocolate, but like the bitter kind—a home without caresses, strict order, symptoms of fatigue, a favor for a friend grown burdensome…. And for all this, for the glow of her cheeks, the twelve pairs of narrow ribs, the down along her back, her wisp of a soul, that slightly husky voice, the roller skates and the grayish day, the unknown thought that had just run through her head as she glanced at an unknown thing from the bridge… For all this he would have given a sack of rubies, a bucket of blood, anything he was asked….
Outside the building they ran into an unshaven man with a briefcase, as unabashed and as gray as his wife, so the four of them made a noisy entrance together. He expected to find a sick, emaciated woman in an armchair, but instead was met by a tall, pale, broad-hipped lady, with a hairless wart near a nostril of her bulbous nose: one of those faces you describe without being able to say anything about the lips or the eyes because any mention of them—even this—would be an involuntary contradiction of their utter inconspicuousness.
Upon learning that he was a potential buyer she immediately ushered him into the dining room, explaining, as she proceeded slowly and with a slight list, that she had no need for a four-room apartment, that she was moving that winter into a two-room one, and that she would be glad to get rid of that extension table, the extra chairs, that couch over in the parlor (when it had done its duty as a sleeping accommodation for her friends), a large etagere, and a small chest. He said he would like to see the last of these items, which turned out to be in the room occupied by the girl, whom they found lolling on the bed and gazing at the ceiling, with her knees, drawn up and encircled by outstretched arms, rocking in unison.
“Off the bed! What’s the meaning of this?” Hurriedly concealing the soft skin of her underside and the tiny wedge of her taut panties, she rolled off (oh, the liberties I would allow her! he thought).
He said he would buy the chest—it was a laughably cheap price for access to the house—and probably something else as well, but he had to decide just what. If it was all right with her, he would drop by for another look in a couple of days and then have everything picked up at the same time—here, by the way, was his card.
As she saw him to the door she unsmilingly (evidently she smiled seldom) but quite cordially mentioned that her friend and her daughter had already told her about him and that her friend’s husband was even a little
