‘Excuse us – we have no other place to dress.’

  ‘Are you an acrobat?’ asked the second brother.

  Betka did not answer. With a cigarette in her mouth, she was waiting for Marco to find his matches.

  ‘She is a journalist,’ said Marco, lighting Betka’s cigarette with assurance. ‘She wants pictures of us for a newspaper.’

  ‘That’s what we need,’ continued the second brother, ‘a pretty copper-haired blonde like you to complete the triple wheel of Pharaoh! We can kill ourselves putting on a good act, we can wear ourselves ragged-no chance of success without a pretty blonde!’

  ‘That’s an idea to be looked into,’ said Betka in an amused and friendly tone. ‘I’ve had some experience as a dancer.’ But as she tried to get up on her toes her shoe slipped on a cherry-pit and she let herself fall into the arms of the tallest brother, who took her by the waist, exclaiming with stupefaction, ‘Look! Never in my life have I seen a more slender waist!’ To prove it he completely circled it with his hands, with the same elegance as a soldier taking a gun to present arms. And holding her thus, he cautiously lifted her till she touched the ceiling. Betka, having become gentle again, smiled throughout this ascent without ceasing calmly to smoke her cigarette. Now Montouri tipped Betka forward and she, holding herself rigid, passed her legs on each side of his head, opening her arms as if to imitate the wings of a plane. At this moment Betka distinctly heard gurglings in her empty stomach, and wishing to dissimulate them she burst out laughing, uttering crystalline cries as if Montouri’s hands were tickling her irresistibly in this new position.

  ‘Let’s try the siren act,’ said Marco, putting one knee to the floor and getting his arms ready to receive Betka’s body. But Montouri, without obeying, made two dizzy turns upon himself and deposited Betka on a couch. She was dazed, and she lifted a pale hand to her forehead as if to keep herself from feeling her head spin round, while she leaned unselfconsciously with one arm on the bare shoulder of Marco, who was kneeling at her feet. Betka was drenched with perspiration. How hot it was! And now she said to herself, ‘Three more minutes to rest, and then I’m leaving.’ But already she felt her members incapable of obeying her, bound to the couch by the lascivious chains of a triple desire. The tallest of the brothers had just seated himself dose beside her, the third remained standing opposite her and all three watched her with a stupid stare, without blinking, like three dogs waiting to see which would be the first to catch a piece of meat. Then Betka’s face turned pale, her little nose sharpened in the waxen transparency characteristic of the dead, and, as if obeying a command against which her will was powerless, she slowly passed her other arm round the neck of the tallest of the Montouri brothers, brought the heads of the two brothers together till they joined and, pressing them gently to her bosom she kicked off her shoes one after the other.

  ‘Shut the door!’ she said in a colourless and barely audible voice to the one who stood in front of her.

  Then the third of the Montouri brothers staggered as if drunk over to the door and with a supreme effort of his athlete’s shoulders, causing all the fibres of the wood to crack, obliged it at last to shut in a long and final grating.

  … Three thousand pits of white death… three thousand triple cherries… three thousand triple Pharaoh’s wheels… and two flakes of fine snow… in the hollow of her cheeks!

  Thus Betka felt the coming of the dreaded cold. She was walking now in the night illuminated by the distantly spaced lights of the Quai Voltaire. Perhaps it was hunger – but would she ever eat again?… Each of her sore members was slowly congealing, while a kind of sleep without desire to sleep came over her… a light weight of winter on each eyelid, like crystallizations of frost deposited on the cornices of her gaze.

  Toward the upper end of the Gothic Rue de Seine Betka gave fifty francs in alms to a poor legless cripple. She bent over and peered at him with an impure smile that would have wilted the freshest flower. The cripple looked like a noble Roman bust of a ragged old Aesop, and like the latter he was hunchbacked.

  ‘You can touch my hump if you like,’ snickered the old man, ‘others do it without paying anything.’

  Betka pressed the hump with her hand and felt his heart beating within it. Then she went on her way, but soon slowed her steps, realizing that she was being followed by the beggar who propelled himself forward on the ground by means of his hands. Betka imparted a lascivious lilt to her walk, and each time she stopped she heard the beggar’s panting breath nearer to her, and now already he was beseeching her, drooling. ‘Take your money back if you want, but come with me. Let me take you to Père Frandingue’s. I’ve got a corner on his barge. I’ve got some money hidden! Let me take you to Père Frandingue’s! I’ve got some money hidden!’

  It was close to midnight on the Place d’Iéna. Huddled against the iron fence of the Luxembourg Garden Betka was weeping, pressing her turned-in lower lip with all her muscles in order to help make her tears flow in a continuous stream. ‘All that is good! All that is good! All that is good! Provided I end it all!’

  When Baba met Betka at the bar of the Coupole at midnight, she was so drugged that she barely noticed his coming. She began to talk as though they had been together for a long time. ‘You won’t go away from me any more now! Why did you leave me alone?’ Betka complained in a honeyed intonation. For some time she had been deliberately exaggerating her state, now imagining she had become her kitten, now Cécile Goudreau, and now both at once.

  ‘What’s come over you? You’re drunk!’ said Baba severely.

  ‘Why, of course I’m drunk – shouldn’t I be?’ asked Betka, dragging out her words, maliciously separating each syllable from the rest. Brusquely she got up and with a dramatic gesture hid her face in Baba’s shoulder, exclaiming in a half whisper. ‘I beg you, dear, take me away from here! Far from this horrible electric light – somewhere outside in the dark… with a lot of leaves… I want to catch cold! Feel, how cold I am,’ said Betka when they were in the street.

  ‘You’re like ice, what have you been doing?’ asked Baba, kissing her two closed fists.

  ‘I’ve been playing… I’ve been playing… there were three of them,’ said Betka, as if trying painfully to remember something pleasant; she smiled and went on dreamily, ‘there were three of them…. Have you seen the triple Pharaoh wheel? They’re all silver and all three of them catch fire at once!’

  ‘Why are you crying?’ said Baba, stopping her and pressing her cheeks as if to oblige her to confide in him.

  ‘How do I know?’ answered Betka, breaking away from the embrace and continuing to talk.

  They went and sat down at a solitary café terrace opposite the Tour Saint Michel; the clock in the tower struck half-past twelve.

  ‘At one o’clock,’ said Betka to herself, feeling her throat tighten with the tyrannical pressure of her plan.

  ‘There! This is fine.’ Baba had said as he stopped. ‘An icy nip in the air, perfect for you to catch your pleurisy, and here are your leaves, besides! Lots of leaves! With that old ivy-covered wall it’s more like Oxford than Paris. Do you like the atmosphere?’ As he spoke Baba tore off a long ivy branch which he placed over the quivering shoulders of Betka, seated on the grating skeleton of a white iron chair, her two fists resting in the very centre of the marble of the table. Baba now formed a hoop with another branch of ivy and cautiously placed it on Betka’s head and said. ‘And here we have a perfect Pre-Raphaelite crown to adorn your frustrations!’ He mispronounced the word ‘Pre-Raphaelite’, and laughed. Betka pushed off the crown with a wretched movement of her closed little fist.

  ‘I can stand it, I’m well dressed,’ Baba said then, sitting down and raising his coat-collar, ‘and I assure you,’ he added, ‘that tomorrow I shall leave for Spain without a cold… perhaps I’ll catch just a little of your spring fever, then I’ll have to scratch myself a little in the train. I’m as susceptible as you are!’

  ‘You’re disappointed to find me in the state I’m in this evening; you disapprove of me, eh,’ said Betka with resignation.

  ‘Open your hand,’ Baba demanded, ‘what are you squeezing in your hand? Don’t be so tense all the time!’

  Betka slowly opened her hand, which was filled with wet cherry-pits sticking to one another; she could not remember how long she had been holding them in this way.

  ‘It’s messy, isn’t it? Does it disgust you? I know, I look like a madwoman….’

  ‘And in the other hand? What have you got in it? Open your other hand!’

  ‘No!’ said Betka, pressing more tightly, ‘that I won’t show you!’

  Baba, without insisting, was now wiping Betka’s hand with his handkerchief.

  ‘There—clean!’ he said, as if arming himself with patience.

  Betka then put her hand on Baba’s knee and felt the angles of the bones that formed it, small and pointed, through the very light material of his trousers. Presently, with their hands joined, they looked at each other in silence and Betka discovered for the first time the infinite resources of tenderness that there can be in such a caress. Harried and distraught, always snatching frightful shreds of pleasure from a life gnawed by anxiety, she had had to feel the void of eternity open before her in order to experience at last the mystery of the passion of two hands that press each other, each of the naked bodies of the joints of each finger slowly shifting its position a hundred times, tirelessly interweaving in endless combinations, lubricated by tears, without relinquishing their hold a single moment.

  ‘Tell me,’ Betka repeated, ‘tell me you disapprove of me…. But you promised me everything, you let me choose all the conditions of our meeting. Swear you won’t leave me before dawn!’

  Baba who had just glanced up at the time on the Tour Saint Michel clock, answered, ‘I’ll stay with you till half-past seven. My train leaves for Spain at eight, and if you were only able to listen to me I would persuade you to let me take you with me to Barcelona. I could make you a little red queen. You would wait for me in Cerbère just long enough for me to go to Barcelona and arrange for your passport, you would stay there with some friends of mine who would take care of you as if you were their daughter – sun, red wine, tiny little black olives…’

  The waiter brought two more whiskys with Perrier water.

  ‘You said yes, but you didn’t swear you would stay with me,’ said Betka without paying any attention to Baba’s plans, to his seductive tone, ‘I know, you cheat like everybody.’

  ‘I swear to you! I shall stay with you till daylight! But don’t expect me to console you,’ Baba concluded harshly, slowly sipping his whisky. Then he went on aggressively, stopping at each sentence as if to give the passion that was beginning to inflame them time to cool, ‘Pity is not my speciality. Early in the war – it was the hottest part of summer, sixty degrees centigrade – I had received my new rata,|| very ugly, but efficient. The village had just been destroyed and Malaga was being bombed. Some hundred women had run out to the airfield and surrounded our plane. They came followed by a cloud of flies and carrying four or five children who had been killed, wrapped in black coats. In their collective hysteria it was impossible to tear them from the plane. They displayed their horrible burdens, and kept handling them with fiendish insistence; they held up to us pieces of bodies fringed with coagulated blood. “Mira! Mira! Mira!” they cried in chorus, vying with one another in selecting the most horrible exhibits, as if in this way the better to implore vengeance for their dead. We had to take off quickly; there was no time to be lost. My second, who had jumped to the ground twice to disperse them, had had difficulty getting back in again. A bad wind coming from the desert was already raising the dust in the plain, shaking the distant olive trees. I yelled three times, “Get away! Get away! Get away!” There was nothing to be done. The poor women clung to the plane all the harder… like people drowning! Then I started the motor, and the propeller of my rata put an end to the hysteria… and to the rest! Never, never had I felt as I did that day when I was face to face with the enemy how right I was. Since then I became that indeterminate thing called a hero,’ said Baba calmly, finishing his whisky.

  Then he went on, as he regained his coolness, ‘There is no audacity in heroism. Never do you think you’re going to die. When you hold a machine gun tight it’s as if its jolts made the fleas of your fear jump off… I miss my rata too much! The fog of Paris disgusts me even more than that of London… it’s more subtle…. Here people talk too much and too well about everything. You become monstrously intelligent, everything gets mixed up-the ugly seems beautiful, criminals are saints, or sick people, the sick are geniuses, everything is double, ambivalent! In the pitiless light of Spain it’s different. Inside my rata everything again becomes inexorably certain; it must be the same for the others, for courage is equal on both sides – what does it matter? The important thing is to feel yourself become once more a drop of albumen, of instinctive and vulnerable life in the centre of a mica shell in the middle of the sky! Instead of thinking, your brain functions, the systole and the diastole of your heart, the chemical combustions of your liquids nourish the wings of your plane – well, all that is not literary! You feel really yourself, from deep inside your viscera to the tips of your nails-you are the eyes and entrails of your plane, and then there is no more Paris, nor more surrealism, no more anguish, do you hear? All your fears, all your remorse, all your theories and laziness, all the contradictions of your thought and all the dissatisfactions accumulated by your doubts disappear to give place to the furious jet of a single and unique certainty, the continuous and crackling sheaf of fire of your machine gun.’

  Betka was not listening to him, but Baba’s involuntary verbal exaltation was slightly repugnant to her. How many illusions! ‘Veronica was colder than he,’ she thought, observing him. Then she asked him, ‘Do you know Veronica Stevens?… Not even from photographs?’

  Baba looked at Betka for the first time with curiosity: she had paid no attention to him; she was thinking of something else.

  ‘Who is Veronica? And why do you ask me that?’ He was intrigued.

  ‘She looks like you…. Oh, if you knew her! You would like her better than me….’

  In fact the resemblance with Veronica suddenly appeared to her so striking that she could no longer distinguish in what respects they differed, and she remembered now Veronica’s remark that had made such an impression on her on the evening of their dinner at the Tour d’Argent, ‘I don’t like myself, but I should like to find in my life someone who resembles me absolutely, to be able to adore him.’ This being was Baba, she was certain of it, no longer able now not to imagine them together. And in no matter what context she tried to represent them to herself, whether amid the hundreds of vague and half-obliterated creatures of her memories or amid the crowd she had seen most recently, which had filled Solange de Cléda’s drawing-room a few days before, the two haunting blond figures of Veronica and Baba stood out from all the rest, with the same anguishing fixity as the two figures of the famous ‘Angelus’ painted by Millet. One might say that around Veronica and Baba, too, there could be only silence and solitude, vanishing across the deserted horizontal line of fields.

  Now Betka felt herself observed by Baba. Scrutinizing, silent, distant once more, he had shut himself up in the armour of his indifference and closed the chiselled visor of his silence through which the glitter of his eyes again appeared impenetrable. Betka now compared the hardness of Baba’s gaze with Veronica’s, just as one might have done with crystals, rubbing them together to find out which was capable of streaking the other. She felt those two gazes equally hard and hostile to hers, so feeble that it was about to close, voluntarily, forever. She compared her approaching end to Baba’s; he at least was going to die in the heart of what he loved most in the world, his rata… spitting fire amid the clouds. ‘I, all alone, in a twelve-franc hotel room.’

  As she said this to herself she found herself reading and rereading over and over again the sign of the hotel across the street, ‘Avenir Marlot’. The name could be worse; at least it was a future that meant nothing – a Marlot future! And as the clock on the Tour Saint Michel had just struck one, Betka said resolutely, and as if continuing her reverie aloud, ‘Chéri! I’m willing… now… take me.’

  ‘You will? You’re coming with me to Barcelona?’

  Betka, as though she were unable to answer, shook her head and finally said in a choked voice, ‘No, across the street!’

  In the room Betka had a slight revulsion; sitting on the bed she imagined Baba and Veronica together after her death, and she felt herself grow faint with jealousy toward them both, but for the moment the fact of knowing that Baba was in the room seemed to her already a way of deceiving Veronica, of being unfaithful to her, of taking revenge on her. ‘You’ll see! You’ll see!’ she kept repeating to herself. But almost immediately Betka felt an infinite tenderness for Veronica being reborn.

  At half-past one, Betka had swallowed some pills and was lying fully dressed beside Baba, who had reassured her once more, promising her not to leave her before dawn. In the darkness of the room each was absorbed in his own thoughts, imagining the hour of his own end. He with his long arms stretched over Betka’s body, felt the shadow of the membranes of black wing-sheaths grafted to his shoulders with platinum roots springing from the depth of his heart. The moment the latter would be hit everything would contract, and it would be like two great hands of frost closing over him to protect him from the fire. For Betka-the opposite… the white death, and she now moved her head as if trying to draw nearer to an invisible flame; then Baba’s long hands hovered for a moment over Betka’s hair, as in a night flight, and came to rest on Betka’s closed fist, inside which there was also death.

  Baba could not unclench that hand. Betka was rattling in an incipient delirium, ‘Don’t leave!’ She had just clutched Baba’s hands, and bringing them to the back of her neck she begged him, ‘Hold me here! Press here. Bite me here to make me die!’