“The Society of Shadows has spoken.”
Now she couldn’t object. The Society of Shadows always got the last word and the formula employed by Daniel meant the end of the meeting.
She seemed to have plunged into baseness with the Society of Shadows.
She was looking at herself in the mirror, her white and delicate face lost in the half-light, her eyes open, her lips without expression. She was enjoying herself, liking that sleek, so sinuous way about her, her shaded hair, her small and skinny shoulders. How lovely I am, she said. Who will buy me? who will buy me? — she’d give a quick smooch to the mirror — who will buy me: agile, funny, funny as if I were blonde but I’m not blonde: I have lovely, cold, extraordinary brown hair. But I want someone to buy me so much that . . . that . . . that . . . I’ll kill myself! she exclaimed and peering at her face frightened by the phrase, proud of her own ardor, she laughed a fake guffaw, low and shining. Yes, yes, she’d need a secret life in order to be able to exist. From one instant to the next she was once again serious, tired — her heart was beating in the shadow, slow and red. A new element, foreign until now, had penetrated in her body since the Society of Shadows had come to exist. Now she was learning that she was good but that her goodness would not impede her badness. This feeling was almost old, it had been discovered days ago. And a new desire was touching her heart: to free herself still more. To go beyond the limits of her life — it was a phrase without words that was rolling around her body like nothing more than a push. To go beyond the limits of my life, she didn’t know what she was saying looking at herself in the mirror in the guest room. I could kill them all, she was thinking with a smile and a new freedom, staring childishly at her image. She was waiting for an instant, watchful. But no: nothing had been created inside herself with the feeling provoked, neither joy nor fear. And where had the idea been born to her? — ever since the morning she spent in the basement questions were arising easily; and at every moment she was heading in what direction? moving ahead learning things whose beginnings all her life she hadn’t even felt. Where had the idea been born? from her body; and if her body was her destiny . . . Or was she inhaling thoughts from the air and giving them back as if they were her own, forcing herself to follow them? . . . There she was in the mirror! she screamed at herself brutish and happy. But what could she and what couldn’t she do? No, she didn’t want to await some condition in order to kill, if she had to kill she wished it freely without any circumstances . . . that would mean going beyond the limits of her life, she didn’t know what she was thinking. In a sudden exhaustion where there was a certain voluptuousness and well-being, she lay down on the guest bed. And like a door that closes hurriedly and without noise, she quickly fell asleep. And quickly dreamed. She dreamed that her strength was saying loudly and to the ends of the earth: I want to go beyond the limits of my life, without words, only the dark power guiding itself. A cruel and living impulse pushed her forward and she would have wished to die forever if dying gave her a single instant of pleasure, such was the seriousness at which her body had arrived. She would hand over her own heart to be bitten, she wanted to go beyond the limits of her own life as a supreme cruelty. Then she walked outside the house and went searching, searching with the most ferocious thing she had; she was looking for an inspiration, her nostrils sensitive as those of a thin and frightened animal, but everything around her was sweetness and sweetness was something she already knew, and now sweetness was the absence of fear and danger. She’d do something so beyond her limits that she’d never understand it — but she didn’t have the strength, ah she couldn’t go beyond her own powers. She had to close her eyes for an instant and pray to herself brutally with disdain until in a deep sigh, ridding herself of the final pain, forgetting at last, she headed toward the sacrifice of destiny. Because if I am free, if with a gesture I can make everything new again — she was heading through the field beneath a whitish sky — then nothing keeps me from making that gesture; that was the murky and worried sensation. While she was walking she was looking at a dog and in a gasping effort like that of emerging from closed waters, like leaving the realm of what one could do, she was deciding to kill him as she walked. He was moving his tail defenseless — she thought about killing him and the idea was cold but she was afraid she was tricking herself by telling herself that the idea was cold in order to escape it. So she led the dog with gestures to the bridge over the river and with her foot pushed him surely to his death in the waters, heard him whimpering, saw him struggling, dragged by the current and saw him die — nothing was left, not even a hat. She continued serenely. Serenely she kept searching. She saw a man, a man, a man. His long trousers were sticking to the wind, his legs, his thin legs. The man, the man was mulatto. And his hair, my God, his hair was going gray. Trembling with disgust she headed toward him between air and space — and stopped. He too halted,
