bringing the raging flames under control, had broken a young apple tree, and of course nobody had gotten any sleep. Just then
“Everything could have caught fire!” she exclaimed, raising her rosily illumined face with the shadows of foliage on her forehead and goggling her eyes, in which shimmered the liquidly transparent reflections of sun and garden.
She contentedly held onto his arm as they entered the house behind its loudly talking mistress—and the spontaneity had already evaporated, already he was awkwardly bending his arm (or was it hers?)—and, at the door to the parlor, where resounded the monologue that had preceded them accompanied by the opening of shutters, he freed his hand and, feigning an absentminded caress (but actually totally engrossed for an instant in a good, firm feel, complete with dimple), he patted her on the hip—as if to say, run along, child—and then he was already sitting down, finding a place for his walking stick, lighting up, looking for an ashtray, saying something in answer to a question, filled all the while with a savage exultation.
He refused tea, explaining that at any moment the car he had ordered at the station would arrive, that it already contained his luggage (this detail, as occurs in dreams, had a certain glimmer of meaning), and that “you and I will be off to the seashore”—which he almost shouted in the direction of the girl who, looking back in mid- step, nearly crashed into a stool, but instantly regained her youthful balance, turned, and sat down, covering the stool with her settling skirt.
“What?” she asked, brushing back her hair with a sidewise glance at the hostess (the stool had already once been broken). He said it again. She joyously raised her eyebrows—she had no idea it would happen like this, today.
“And I was hoping,” lied the hostess, “that you would spend the night with us.”
“Oh, no!” cried the girl, rushing over to him with a parquet slide, and then continued with unexpected rapidity, “Do you think I can learn how to swim soon? A friend of mine says you can, right away, all you have to do is learn not to be afraid first, and that takes a month….” But the woman was already nudging her by the elbow so she would go finish packing, with Maria, the things that had been laid out in the left section of the wardrobe.
“I confess I don’t envy you,” she said, turning over her tutelage, after the child had run out. “Lately, especially after her flu, she’s been having all kinds of outbursts and tantrums; the other day she was rude to me— it’s a difficult age. All in all I think it would be a good thing if you hired some young woman to look after her and, in the fall, found her a good Catholic boarding school. As you can see, the death of her mother has not been too much of a shock to her—of course, she may be holding it in, for all I know. Our shared existence is over with…. By the way, I still owe you… No, no, I won’t hear of it, I insist…. Oh, he doesn’t get home from work till around seven— he’ll be very disappointed…. That’s life, what can you do. At least she has found her peace in Heaven, poor thing, and you are looking better too…. If it hadn’t been for our encounter… I simply don’t see how I could have kept supporting someone else’s child, and as for orphanages, they lead directly you know where. That’s why I always say—you never know in life. Remember that day, on the bench—remember? It never occurred to me she could find a second husband, and yet my feminine intuition told me that something in you was longing for just that kind of refuge.”
A car materialized behind the foliage. In we get! The familiar black cap, coat over her arm, a small suitcase, help from red-handed Maria. Just wait, you’ll see the things I’ll buy for you…. She insisted on sitting next to the driver, and he had to consent, concealing his chagrin. The woman, whom we shall never see again, was waving good-bye with an apple-tree branch. Maria was shooing the chicks in. We’re off, we’re off.
He sat leaning back, holding his stick—a very valuable, antique thing with a thick coral head—between his knees, gazing through the glass partition at the beret and the contented shoulders. The weather was exceptionally warm for June, a stream of heat rushed in through the window, and soon he took off his tie and unbuttoned his collar.
After an hour the girl looked around at him (she was pointing at something beside the road but, although he turned, open-mouthed, he was too late to see anything—and, for some reason, with no logical connection, the thought crossed his mind that there was, after all, an age difference of nearly thirty years). At six they stopped for ice cream, while the talkative chauffeur drank beer at the next table, sharing various considerations with his client.
On we go. He looked at the forest that kept approaching in undulating hops from hillside to hillside until it slid down an incline and tripped over the road, where it was counted and stored away. “Shall we take a break here?” he wondered. “We could have a short walk, sit for a while on the moss among the mushrooms and the butterflies….” But he could not bring himself to stop the chauffeur: there was something unbearable about the idea of a suspicious car standing idle on the highway.
Then it got dark and their headlights imperceptibly came on. They stopped for dinner at the first roadside eatery, the philosophizer again sprawled nearby, and seemed to be glancing over less at his employer’s steak and potato croquettes than at the profile of the hair screening her face and at her exquisite cheek…. My darling is tired and flushed from the trip, the rich meat course, the drop of wine. The sleepless night with the rosy glow of the fire in the darkness is taking its toll, her napkin is slipping off the soft hollow of her skirt…. And now all this is mine…. He asked if they had rooms available—no, they did not.
In spite of her increasing lassitude she resolutely refused to exchange her seat in front for support in the car’s cosy depths, saying she would get carsick in back. At last, at last, lights began ripening and bursting amid the hot, black void, a hotel was immediately selected and the agonizing journey paid for, and that part was done with. She was half asleep as she crawled out onto the sidewalk, halting numbly amid the bluish, coarse-grained darkness, the warm burnt fragrance, the roar and throb of two, three, four trucks taking advantage of the deserted nighttime street to descend with appalling speed from behind a bend that concealed a whining, straining, grinding upgrade.
A short-legged, macrocephalous old fellow in an unbuttoned waistcoat—sluggish, dawdling, explaining at length and with guilty benevolence that he was only standing in for the owner who was his eldest son and who had had to leave to attend to family matters—searched for a long time in a black book, then announced that he did not have a free room with twin beds (there was a flower show in town, and many visitors) but that there was one with a double bed, “which amounts to the same thing, you and your daughter will be even more—” “All right, all right,” interrupted the traveler, as the hazy child stood off by herself, blinking and trying to focus her languishing gaze on a doubling cat.
They headed upstairs. The help apparently went to bed early, or else they were absent too. Meanwhile, the stooping, groaning gnome tried one key after another; an old woman with curly gray hair, in azure pajamas, her face tanned to a nutlike hue, emerged from the toilet next door with an admiring glance at this tired, pretty girl in the obedient pose of tender victim, whose dark dress stood out against the ocher of the wall where she leaned her shoulderblades, her tousled head thrown slightly back and slowly turning from side to side, and her eyelids twitching as though she were trying to unravel her excessively thick lashes. “Come on, get it open,” irritably said her father, a balding gentleman, also a tourist.
“Is this where I’m going to sleep?” the girl asked indifferently, and when, struggling with the shutters, squeezing tight their eyelike chinks, he replied affirmatively, she took a look at the cap she was holding and limply tossed it on the wide bed.
“There we are,” said he after the old man had dragged in their suitcases and left, and there remained in the room only the pounding of his heart and the distant throbbing of the night. “There, now it’s time for bed.”
Reeling with sleepiness, she bumped into the corner of an armchair, at which point he, simultaneously sitting down in it, took her by the hip and drew her close. She straightened, stretching up like an angel, for a split second tensed every muscle, took another half step, and softly descended onto his lap. “My sweetheart, my poor little girl,” he spoke in a kind of general mist of pity, tenderness, and desire, as he observed her drowsiness, her wooziness, her diminishing smile, palpating her through the dark dress, feeling, through the thin wool, the band of the orphan’s garter on her bare skin, thinking how defenseless, abandoned, warm she was, reveling in the animate weight of her legs as they slithered apart and then, with the faintest corporeal rustle, recrossed at a slightly higher level. She slowly entwined a somnolent arm, in its snug little sleeve, around his nape, engulfing him with the chestnut
