Baba remained there, standing, motionless, looking at her intently, till Betka finally asked him in a friendly tone. ‘Why do you look at me that way? It embarrasses me!’ Then Baba smiled in the same surprising way that had struck her so much in Veronica, and that she now understood: it was hardness.

  ‘If you turn me down I’ll simply despise you,’ said Baba as he nonchalantly seated himself astride the sack of coal, and trying deliberately by his tone to make himself as pretentious as possible, he continued, ‘It’s usually difficult for weaklings to endure the contempt of handsome creatures…. On the other hand if you accept… I can’t promise you right away a great passion… but I can become very gentle, very “agreeably” tameable….’ As he spoke he had picked up in his hands Betka’s little white cat, who when Baba had sat down had begun to crawl up to him, fascinated by the fixity of the stare of his sapphire cuff-links.

  ‘Come,’ said Betka in a tone of amused impatience, ‘what are you getting at?’

  ‘I have calculated that you are going to give me twenty-five francs… for the Spanish Loyalists; you’ll get your receipt, stamped with the committee’s seal.’

  While saying this, Baba nonchalantly went over to the table where Betka had had her breakfast and wiped away the breadcrumbs, using for this the little kitten, who mewed as she stiffened her tail. Then he opened his account-book, took out a metal box containing an ink-pad; finally, from his handkerchief pocket he pulled a stamper which he applied to the pad, and waited.

  ‘Well,’ answered Betka, ‘you’ll get the twenty-five francs, but I’ll dispense with your making love to me, even though I find you very handsome and you’re probably quite good at it…. How did you know I was an anti-fascist?’

  ‘I carefully check your mail every morning at the concierge’s,’ Baba responded with great naturalness.

  Betka felt an impulse of indignation, but she could only laugh at the dandyish tone in which Baba continued his sentence, as if trying to justify himself. ‘You see. I’ve brought with me from London one charming and very English trait; I assume the right to do anything I please!’ Then, going over to Betka, he took her in his arms. ‘Be a sweet girl, and if some evening you feel yourself dying of boredom you can slip me a word under my door on the sixth floor. I have no telephone, and I don’t like the concierge’s indiscretions either… I’ll take you wherever you want – for an ideological walk in the Bois, or do the chichi thing with champagne, or else something in the poor comrade style, a dubiously clean little twelve-franc hotel room where we’ll make believe each pays for himself.’

  Since that morning of their first encounter Betka had not seen Baba again. Hunted unceasingly by the cares of her daily life, she had not even had time to think of him except when she was reminded of him by her kitten each time it darted through a bright patch of sunlight after a fly, or repeated those quick movements of concupiscence with which it had clutched at Baba’s cuff-links with its claws. She would then say to herself that he had been all ready to adore that angel of a kitten!

  Now Betka felt herself delightfully chained to the rendezvous she had just made: midnight at the bar of the Coupole. And that still distant midnight began to glow, for already her desire, fumbling its way in the darkness of an unknown hotel room, had deposited its tiny wristwatch on the marble top of an after-midnight table…. Soon the hands would mark nearly one o’clock! Then that little figure ‘one’, barely perceptible, more slender than an incandescent flea, sufficed in Betka’s faltering imagination to light up all her blood in a single burst, with an agony of honey and of phosphorus. The bag of cherries that she had just eaten had only excited her hunger; she thought of buying two more, but a sudden repugnance at having really eaten something solid assailed her, and she was terrified to think that she had sometimes been able to eat steaks as thick as dictionaries. It seemed to her now that her state of fasting was specially, wonderfully propitious to the kind of thing she wanted to do…. Nevertheless, in the first good café she came upon she would have an icecream. Before the hour of her rendezvous there were still six hours and a quarter. She had just counted and recounted them – quarter-past seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Meanwhile she was going to make the most of each of the seconds of that precious interval, of that stretch of free time which must be dense and sticky like a glue made of liquid amber and hardened cachalot’s sperm.

  Then Betka, getting up from her seat, with a pair of cherries dangling from her teeth, turned toward the west and went down the road that leads to the flesh.

  She followed the course of the muddy river of human flesh in full ferment which filled the Boulevard Montmartre at half-past seven on this holiday evening. Each of these creatures bore inexorably attached to his person two ears, two cheeks, two hands…. She had never yet been struck by this double aspect of the anatomy of beings. Each human appeared to her now like those symmetrical and bloody blots that insects leave when one crushes them in the fold between the pages of a book. She in turn felt herself ‘everywhere’ double pressed, crushed by the animate and inanimate mass, thrilling to feel her desire become depersonalized in the swarming throng without distinction, beauty, age or sex; instead of one gaze, all gazes; instead of two bodies, all bodies, all spasms and moans at once. Betka, lightened by her fast, feeling as though she barely touched the ground, followed the heavy steps of this holiday crowd which appeared to her rather as one composed of grave and mystic peasants in a kind of grotesque and suppliant procession, of wretched and unsatisfied bundles of flesh in which each person carried in his left hand the painful heavy stigma of his cut-off right hand as an expiatory object, as his liturgical offering. She then imagined that avalanche of fanatics continuing to walk thus inexorably in the granite desert on which it would throw itself prostrate; and they would all pass, trampling her, the sinful Betka, fragile and facile, with their imperturbable step; asphyxiating her with their libidinous mass and crushing her till they caused the ultimate arborescent decalcomania of all her vital juices and plasmas to burst forth from the compressed tissues of her feeble organism so that at last, after the bestial passage of the humans over her minced body, the sun’s rays might annihilate by evaporation the last liquid traces of her impurity.

  Betka, carried along and rocked by this floor of grandiose and childish thoughts, disembarked, so to speak, at the entrance to a music hall all illuminated in red, situated on the confines of the Porte Saint Martin. She stopped before a large photograph hand-coloured in aniline tints representing the Three Montouri Brothers, ‘fanciful athletes’; they all three appeared naked under their leopard capes and helmets; they had slim bodies with muscles carved out of steel, and only the one in the centre was slightly too corpulent. He had the head of a sphinx tattooed in the centre of his chest. The bill-board announced ‘The Double Pharaoh Wheel’. The intermittent whirring of an electric bell with its insistent invitation to a continuous performance pecked like a sewing-machine needle on the rhinoceros-skinned neck of indifference of the crowd that filed past without even being aware of it.

  Betka went in, took a seat at a table situated in a corner far from the orchestra and ordered a glass of vodka. The place was ugly and pretentious. On the floor a pair of dancing couples stirred like shadows. The show had not yet begun, the few spectators were scattered, so far apart and so hidden in the discreetly lighted corners of the loges that circled the floor that the place gave the impression of being almost empty. The syphilitic musicians, dressed like silk gauchos, attacked the Argentine tango ‘Renacimiento’ and the first notes of this melody provoked in Betka’s weakened organism an emotive state similar to that of intoxication, which gave her sudden and irresistible urges to burst into tears. To prevent her tears from flowing, Betka pressed a cherry-pit that she had kept in her mouth for the last half-hour so hard between her teeth that it broke, severely biting her tongue. As the latter was bleeding a little she spat into the silk handkerchief that she had wrapped round her small gold box. She took advantage of the occasion to inhale a strong whiff of heroin. Then she emptied her cornucopia of cherries into a dish, began to eat some and, plunging her agile wounded tongue from time to time in the vodka as she watched the dancing, she gradually let herself relax.

  Her impulse to weep now gave way to a state of acute lyricism that allowed her to contemplate this commonplace spectacle as imbued with an ultra-Romantic significance, and while trying to bemoan her own fate she compared the inconstancy of her broken life to the persistence of certain frivolous melodies clinging to the tottering walls of an epoch like ivy… ‘Renacimiento’…. She had heard this tango in Roumania… then in Milan, during the troubled period that preceded the March on Rome…. In Barcelona on an evening of general strike. And as she saw the tango-dancing couples pass back and forth before her. Betka said to herself that in no matter what circumstances, whether it be war, pestilence, imperialist victories or the dishonouring defeats of country, there always existed in the shelter of history, in the twilight of a sophisticated and slightly tawdry setting, a couple of livid tango dancers, pressed cheek to cheek, their bodies united without love, aroused without passion by conventional poses in the rhythmic nectar of nostalgia, expressing all the condensed despair of the crowds of their time by a simple disdainful contraction of their superciliary arches. The handsome professional tango couples are the only ones who by their slow glides and mathematical stops know how to follow and to mark the slow-motion cadences that correspond exactly to the accelerated beats of the violent muscles of the hearts of those predestined to suicide. And this is why Betka watched the tango with complete fascination, with the hypnotic absorption of a paralysed bird following the languorous and precise movements of a snake. For she wanted to kill herself….

  The music stopped, and Betka let a cherry-pit drop into a shiny black ashtray; this pit was clean and slightly greenish, and exactly resembled Countess Mihakowska’s small head. Betka now dipped each cherry before eating it into the new glass of vodka that had just been brought her; soon the ashtray was filled with cherry-pits. She said to herself then, ‘It looks messy!’ And glancing about her to make sure no one was watching, she took all the pits in the hollow of her hand, wrapping them in her silk handkerchief, at the same time seizing the opportunity to open her box and take a new whiff of heroin that she inhaled till she was out of breath.

  Absorbed by these small operations, Betka had not noticed the ‘entrance’ of the three Montouri brothers. When she looked up she was struck at seeing in the centre of the dance-floor, lighted by all the crudeness of the reflectors, the three Montouri brothers welded together in an act in which they seemed to unfold in the explosion of a single three-pointed star of flesh streaming with sweat and throbbing with arterial pulsations. The star suddenly fell apart, and three brothers stood in a row, motionless for a few seconds, panting in statuary poses, their arms raised in a Roman salute. All three were naked and wore only sketchy flesh-coloured trunks, very shiny and fitting their bodies so snugly that instead of dressing them they rather accentuated the impudicity of their appearance. Each time they were about to begin a new act, and while the strongest one took his stance in a rigid pose bordering on that of catalepsy, the other two approached, swaying in step to the muted strains of a little melody that the orchestra was playing, their eyes seeming to pick out the parts of their brother’s anatomy to which they intended to join their own members. Then for a few seconds their iron hands gripped the supporting points they had selected to assure themselves of their solidity, immediately releasing their hold and saluting for the last time before finally giving themselves over to the execution of their act. One could then see, contrasting with the prevailing deep colour of their empurpled flesh, the pale yellow traces left by their holds. And it was precisely there, on the still livid flesh, that the hands of the two Montouri brothers now tapped several times in succession before seizing it and at last gripping it inexorably, with all the trembling and inaugural tension of their contractions. At this moment the taps resounded as lugubriously as a series of smacks administered to a corpse.

  The acts continued before Betka’s hallucinated gaze. Now the smallest of the Montouri brothers, the one she liked best, lying rigid on the floor, each of his muscles strained to the maximum, his two arms held tightly along his body, his feet engulfed between the thighs of his two brothers, raised himself slowly, slowly to the high noon of verticality while the other two, their torsos glued together and arched, their heads bent back, the veins of their necks swollen to the bursting point, seemed to be fused in a hideous mixture of quartered flesh.

  Betka since her childhood had cherished a golden dream of being annihilated with the world in a cosmic catastrophe. Later, how many times she had identified herself with the mystics of ‘the White Death’,¶ the collective death by fire after collective pleasure. Repelled and attracted by the three streaming bodies of the Montouri brothers, she felt herself seized with the mad dizziness of wanting to throw herself, with her eyes shut, into the heart of the visceral wheel formed by all the intermingled steel muscles of those three athletes, so as to be caught in the cogs of their movements, crushed by the fury of their contractions and ground by the frenzy of the shock of their bones into a hot and burning paste of ‘White Death’.

  The effect of the heroin had made Betka’s glance bold and bright, and she kept it steadily fixed on the smallest of the Montouri brothers. The latter, who had not failed to notice Betka’s preference, now threw his leopard cape over his shoulders and, leaving the centre floor, went and leaned against a column while he pretended to watch his two so-called brothers continue the performance – for there was no other kinship between the three than the animal one of their leopard skins. At this moment two lackeys appeared, dragging out onto the floor two large silver wheels between whose spokes were fastened a large quantity of contraptions containing rockets and Bengal lights. The smallest of the Montouri brothers, taking advantage of the suspense created in the hall by those two unusual wheels, went and sat down on the edge of the chair next to Betka, on the pretext of lighting his cigarette, and said to her very low and fast, in a metallic voice.

  ‘My name is Marco, I’m through with my act. It’ll take my two partners another twenty minutes to finish their “Pharaoh’s Wheel” stunt. Do we skip out together?’

  Betka did not answer him, but got up and followed him. Marco stopped at the door to his camerino. ‘Wait for me here. It’ll just take me five minutes to get dressed!’

  Betka, without obeying him, followed him in and said drily.

  ‘I’m staying here.’

  At this moment she felt a slight attack of colic that made her thrill: she instantly remembered that her mother always forbade her to eat cherries, claiming that it would upset her; but in Betka’s mind for the first time in her life the cherries that she had eaten were free of the little worm of remorse. Marco, disconcerted, hesitated to dress in front of Betka.

  ‘Idiot!’ she cried to him, seized with a sudden fury. ‘In another minute you’ll disgust me!’

  ‘You wanted me just now,’ answered Marco, nonplussed.

  ‘And I do now’, Betka burst out, ‘but right away! Shut the door!’ And as she spoke she whisked out her box intending to take a sniff, causing the cherry-pits she had kept in her handkerchief to fly out; the pits rolled to the cement floor in all directions. Marco thought she was going crazy, but he was seized by the contagion of desire.

  ‘I don’t have this room alone,’ he answered, in an altered voice, prepared to obey her, ‘—they’ll be coming in to dress presently.’

  ‘Shut the door! Shut the door!’ Betka repeated in a choked voice, while she went through the motions of beginning to unbutton her skirt.

  Marco pushed the door, and there was a horrible grating sound; it remained half closed, jammed by a cherry-pit that had become wedged between the wood and one of the irregularities in the cement. Nothing would budge the door. Marco struck it like a battering ram, but at each new push the cherry-pit was caught more firmly, and the door which had closed only a few inches now remained solidly and as if permanently soldered to the floor, and could be budged neither one way nor the other.

  ‘Cretin! Imbecile!’ Betka cried in a fury. At this moment through the frosted and undulated glass panel of the door they both saw the rapidly approaching silhouettes of the other two Montouri brothers. Unsuspectingly they tried to push the door open with their thighs, but it did not yield. Then, flattening themselves to pass through the gap between it and the jamb, the two brothers squeezed their way with difficulty into the room, one after the other, each carrying in each hand two bottles of beer coated with a frosty film and specks of straw.

  ‘Are we disturbing you?’ said the tallest of the Montouri brothers, putting his four bottles on the floor and rubbing two long scratches that the wood of the door had made across his stomach. He looked at Betka.