again. She didn’t dare think foreseeing that thought would isolate her even more. A light on in the neighborhood was giving a slight dimness to her bedroom; the screen was seeming to shift and breathe. The flowers were trembling in the narrow jar. The little table covered with a dusty tablecloth was hovering extraordinarily still as if not making contact with the floor. She had half-leaned on the covered bed, lain on the pillow and was staring at the air of the warm night; buzzing was filling the stifled summer silence. Suddenly, in the heart of the old house a vein burst in splinters and blood, in congested joy — she sat up with a start in the bed, suppressed a scream of horror. A little band was playing in the hall below. The saxophone was piercing the meager instruments dislocating them. Motionless, clasping her blouse to her chest, she was hearing as if in a dream the hoarse and disjointed foxtrot. Someone turned on a light in the house across the way and her room lightly struck opened into vacant brightness. The music halted, moist, short claps followed one after the next in broken lines, broke off. That day with its sanctified date, businesses closed, finding men in pajamas in the hallways and in the coed bathrooms of the boardinghouse; now they were getting a band . . . Tomorrow! leave tomorrow and find somebody once and for all! she was promising herself. And that idea — how powerful she sometimes was — and that idea which she knew was a lie was calming her down, making her able to wait with a more uniform heart, consoled like a child, feeling around carefully so as not to get hurt. How necessary it was to be delicate with herself — she’d learn this ever more, with each moment she was fulfilling; to live as if she had heart problems — feeling her way around, giving herself nice good news, saying yes, yes, you’re right. Because there was an instant in the permission one gave oneself that could reach a dry and tense awe, a thing whose purpose one simply couldn’t quite say. A state in which having power would be death itself perhaps, and the only solution would be in the quick surrender of being, quick, eyes closed, without resistance. She’d spend her days in the room. While the husbands were working, the wives would wander through the boardinghouse in light and flowery bathrobes, getting together in the living room to chat, one would paint another’s nails, giving one another new hairdos and lending one another lipstick, sewing clothes, looking at magazines, like the monkeys in the zoo. Just one couple hardly ever turned up. He had low eyebrows over shifty eyes, a tiny face and wide ears like a bat’s. She was small, with little neck, a slightly protruding chest, docile, odd, and ugly. The two seemed connected through secret things, as through a sexual crime; but he’d protect her and she felt protected. She also remembered how she’d thanked almost ardently one of them who had lent her a magazine and how then she’d backed off with coldness thinking that she’d been ridiculous; she’d gone to her room and sat wondering whether she’d thanked her too little or humiliated herself too much; and then she’d tried to punish herself by not reading the magazine right away, thereby seeking perfection? yes, my God, but yes, that was what she’d sought, her big, rough child’s body, that was what she’d sought with seriousness: the perfection of herself. A child’s wide and mysterious life — that was what she’d always seemed to experience with big cold eyes. She also remembered how in the silence of the new apartment whatever it was she didn’t lack would so often arrive every month and how in that way life would follow life inside her body, impassible, following a rhythm that she would watch proud and restless, cautious. She remembered how she’d sit after dinner at the table, sweetly watchful, her heart pierced by fear and by waiting; a light wind would run across the surface of her body, chilling the air, the new curtain snapping blindly. A presence with frightened white lips was languishing in the air, the silence was inhaled in a dizziness, she’d lower her brow, a sound was coming from afar in the street, born of movements and words: yes, yes . . . , her breath was panting weakly, her eyelids blinking. Yes, yes . . . , in a surprised fatigue some thing was not being carried out, sliding like the wind and disappearing forever; a cold apprehension was making her shudder; the long and tense silence was uselessly sharpening her senses . . . She’d spend her days understanding herself. She finally remembered how one afternoon, scratching the tablecloth with her nail, she thought she heard someone knocking on the door. She got up and opened it onto the empty hallway. Finding no one had frightened her so that she’d cringed, closed the door quickly without noise and pressed herself to the wall feeling her heart beat dizzy and brusque, that feeling of error that never would explain itself, an inevitability chiming in the clock with courtesy and precision. The solution was in the quick surrender of her being, yes, yes, with eyes closed, without resistance. That really was existence. So that was existence — she’d always need to repeat it to herself and thus could live with a certain absorbed happiness, amazed. How to seek the joy in the center of things? no matter that on some remote and nearly invented occasion she’d found and lived in that very center. Now she was possessing the responsibility of an adult and unknown body. But the future would come, would come, would come.
Her berth was above a blind lady’s. A smiling and scrutinizing face that would seem extraordinarily lively, intelligent. She offered her help with lukewarmness without managing to suffer with the woman. The blind woman responded with a
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