Itague was bored. This Black Mass had attracted the usual complement of nervous and blase. Porcepic's music was striking, as usual; highly dissonant. Lately he had been experimenting with African polyrhythyms. Afterward, Gerfaut the writer sat by a window, discoursing on how for some reason the young girl - adolescent or younger - had again become the mode in erotic fiction. Gerfaut had two or three chins, sat erect and spoke pedantically, though he had only Itague for an audience.
Itague didn't really want to talk with Gerfaut. He wanted to watch the woman who had come with them. She sat now in a side pew with one of the acolytes, a little sculptress from Vaugirard. The woman's hand, gloveless, and decorated only with a ring, stroked the girl's temple as they spoke. From the ring there sprouted a slender female arm, fashioned in silver. The hand was cupped, and held the lady's cigarette. As Itague watched she lit another: black paper, gold crest. A small pile of stubs lay scattered beneath her shoes.
Gerfaut had been describing the plot of his latest novel. The heroine was one Doucette, thirteen and struggled within by passions she could not name.
'A child, and yet a woman,' Gerfaut said. 'And a quality of something eternal about her. I even confess to a certain leaning of my own that way. La Jarretiere . . .'
The old satyr.
Gerfaut at length moved away. It was nearly morning. Itague's head ached. He needed sleep, needed a woman. The lady still smoked her black cigarettes. The little sculptress lay, legs curled up on the seat, head pillowed against her companion's breasts. The black hair seemed to float like a drowned corpse's hair against the cerise tunic. The entire room and the bodies inside it - some twisted, some coupled, some awake - the scattered Hosts, the black furniture, were all bathed in an exhausted yellow light, filtered through rain clouds which refused to burst.
The lady was absorbed in burning tiny holes with the tip of her cigarette, through the skirt of the young girl. Itague watched as the pattern grew. She was writing ma fetiche, in black-rimmed holes. The sculptress wore no lingerie. So that when the lady finished the words would be spelled out by the young sheen of the girl's thighs. Defenseless? Itague wondered briefly.
II
The next day the same clouds were over the city, but it did not rain. Melanie had awakened in the Su Feng costume, excited as soon as her eyes recognized the image in the mirror, knowing it hadn't rained. Porcepic showed up early with a guitar. He sat on the stage and sang sentimental Russian ballads about willow trees, students getting drunk and going off on sleigh-rides, the body of his love floating belly up in the Don. (A dozen young gathered round the samovar to read novels aloud: where had youth gone?) Porcepic, nostalgic, snuffled over his guitar.
Melanie, looking newly scrubbed and wearing the dress she'd arrived in, stood behind him, hands over his eyes, and caroled harmony. Itague found them that way. In the yellow light, framed by the stage, they seemed like a picture he'd seen somewhere once. Or perhaps it was only the melancholy notes of the guitar, the subdued looks of precarious joy on their faces. Two young people conditionally at peace in the dog days. He went into the bar and began chipping away at a large block of ice; put the chips into an empty champagne bottle and filled the bottle with water.
By noon the dancers had arrived, most of the girls seemingly deep in a love affair with Isadora Duncan. They moved over the stage like languid moths, gauzy tunics fluttering limp. Itague guessed half the men were homosexual. The other half dressed that way: foppish. He sat at the bar and watched as Satin began the blocking.
'Which one is she?' The woman again. In Montmartre, 1913, people materialized.
'Over there with Porcepic.'
She hurried over to be introduced. Vulgar, thought Itague, and then amended it at once to 'uncontrollable.' Perhaps? A little. La Jarretiere stood there only gazing. Porcepic looked upset, as if they'd had an argument. Poor, young, pursued, fatherless. What would Gerfaut make of her? A wanton. In body if he could; in the pages of a manuscript most certainly. Writers had no moral sense.
Porcepic sat at the piano, playing Adoration of the Sun. It was a tango with cross-rhythms. Satin had devised some near-impossible movements to go with it. 'It cannot be danced,' screamed a young man, leaping from the stage to land, belligerent, in front of Satin.
Melanie had hurried off to change to her Su Feng costume. Lacing on her slippers she looked up and saw the woman, leaning in the doorway.
'You are not real.'
'I . . .' Hands resting dead on her thighs.
'Do you know what a fetish is? Something of a woman which gives pleasure but is not a woman. A shoe, a locket . . . une jarretiere. You are the same, not real but an object of pleasure.'
Melanie could not speak.
'What are you like unclothed? A chaos of flesh. But as Su Feng, lit by hydrogen, oxygen, a cylinder of lime, moving doll-like in the confines of your costume . . . You will drive Paris mad. Women and men alike.'
The eyes would not respond. Not with fear, desire, anticipation. Only the Melanie in the mirror could make them do that. The woman had moved to the foot of the bed, ring hand resting on the lay figure. Melanie darted past her, continued on toes and in twirls to the wings; appeared on stage, improvising to Porcepic's lackadaisical attack on the piano. Outside thunder could be heard, punctuating the music at random.
It was never going to rain.
The Russian influence in Porcepic's music was usually traced to his mother, who'd been a milliner in St. Petersburg. Porcepic now, between his hashish dreams, his furious attacks on the grand piano out in Les Batignolles, fraternized with a strange collection of Russian expatriates led by a certain Kholsky, a huge and homicidal tailor. They were all engaged in clandestine political activity, they spoke volubly and at length of Bakunin, Marx, Ulyanov.
Kholsky entered as the sun fell, hidden by yellow clouds. He drew Porcepic into an argument. The dancers dispersed, the stage emptied until only Melanie and the woman remained. Satin produced his guitar; Porcepic sat on the piano, and they sang revolutionary songs. 'Porcepic,' grinned the tailor, 'you'll be surprised one day. At what we will do.'
'Nothing surprises me,' answered Porcepic. 'If history were cyclical, we'd now be in a decadence, would we
