‘Go to sleep!’ Baba repeated, warming the back of her head with his breath.

  ‘What are my feet touching? I am walking on cherry-pits!’

  ‘Sleep, sleep!…’

  ‘I’ll tell Veronica you spent the night with me.’

  ‘Be quiet, don’t move any more, chérie, go to sleep!’

  ‘I know you’re disgusted by my blood. Turn on the light, I want to leave.’ Betka tried to get up, pulling the light cord and falling back on the electric light bulb that fastened itself to her bosom. Remaining thus motionless she felt that she could no longer make any movement. ‘I’m better now,’ she said feebly, and after a silence, ‘where is my gold box? Cover my feet….’

  ‘My love, my love, my love,’ Baba was saying to her, close to her ear, very low, as in a whisper, ‘You’re going to go to sleep….’ And by the way in which Baba leaned over her to kiss her she knew that he was going to leave. He too was cheating.

  He did in fact leave after fifteen minutes, thinking that she was at last unconscious from the effects of the drug. But it was more than the numbness of intoxication, it was the beginning of the death agony. Betka now felt all her skin lifted by armies of shudders breaking in successive waves. She felt as if her whole body was bristling with an infinity of microscopic mauve hands, shivering, stretched toward her heart, the sole hearth that was still warm. She felt the latter becoming covered with tiny, very fine hairs…. There were even ears and whiskers, like her cat’s warm little head! ‘What have I done! Why are they punishing me? Goodbye, evil father and mother!… Veronica, angel!’ She heard the horrible twittering of the awakening birds. ‘I’m going to die!’ she said to herself, and lost consciousness.

  The birds, pretending to greet the rising dawn, were only intoning in Latin the psalm for the dead, ‘Dies irae, dies irae, dies irae, dies irae, dies irae, dies irae, dies irae….’ ‘Missssseerreerree,’ growled the garbage-can down below, grinding its teeth against the sidewalk.

  The sun was rising like a cherry.

  Cherry-time was ended.

  When Veronica read Betka’s letter on the Sunday evening of her return from Fontainebleau, she said to herself immediately, ‘It smells of suicide,’ and remained for a moment holding the coppery mesh of her friend’s hair and the blue telegram receipt with the tips of her long, curved nails. Instantly conscious of her mistake, she tried to reconstitute the circumstances of the telephone call during which this confusion had occurred, so that instead of sending the promised money she had sent the receipt. And to check the certainty of this fear, Veronica went and sat down slowly before the desk in the drawing-room and opened the envelope box. Yes, there were the five hundred francs she thought she had sent. ‘It’s frightful!’ said Veronica to herself, immediately ringing for the secretary. Miss Andrews appeared, a lazy pallor ravaging her face and her dress rumpled by a barely interrupted sleep. Veronica cast her a withering glance which cut short the beginning of a yawn that Miss Andrews was obliged to compress by main force, hiding it inside her closed fist and trembling. In Betka’s study the bell rang, without anyone going to answer it; then Miss Andrews telephoned the concierge; the latter had not seen Betka come in for five days and she had been taking care of ‘la petite chatte blanche’. Miss Andrews now waited for Veronica’s fresh decisions. Finally the latter said, ‘We shall probably have to spend the whole night looking for Mademoiselle Betka. I beg you to carry out all my orders to the letter. At the slightest initiative on your part you will be dismissed. First, you’re going to go and eat.’

  ‘I can do that later, I’m not at all hungry,’ Miss Andrews blurted out, but immediately repented her eagerness.

  ‘Don’t begin to argue,’ Veronica answered severely, and continued, ‘Eat first, then you will go to the police commissariat of the Seine and arrange an appointment for me with the commissaire. Just tell him that a person’s life depends on this appointment being granted quickly.’

  Five minutes later Miss Andrews was back, announcing that the appointment was made and that Commissaire Fourrier was waiting for her.

  ‘You were very fast – you must have telephoned to gain time, didn’t you?’ Veronica asked with controlled fury.

  ‘Yes, Mademoiselle,’ Miss Andrews answered.

  ‘Yet I ordered you to do it in person!’ And as she spoke Veronica headed straight for the door to the adjoining room. ‘Get out of here!’ she cried.

  Miss Andrews went as far as the door, then fell on her knees and said,

  ‘Mademoiselle, I didn’t dream of disobeying you, I beg your pardon….’

  ‘Get out of here!’ Veronica repeated, even louder.

  Miss Andrews got up and left.

  Veronica calmly let herself be dressed by her maid. Motionless, by the impassivity and the spirit of domination of her attitude Veronica resembled a blond Philip II of Spain, and she might have repeated to the woman who was dressing her the famous remark which he was in the habit of making to his valet on the eve of grave and decisive circumstances: ‘Dress me slowly, because I’m in a hurry.’

  Veronica knew that an evening dress and diamond rivières would be more effective in awakening zeal in the commissaire’s imagination than clumsy insinuations as to her social importance, and at the same time would spare her from dwelling on the thorny subject of a bonus. At half-past ten Veronica was being escorted out to the door of the commissariat by Commissaire Fourrier who as he pensively rolled a cigarette assured her, ‘If she’s in Paris we shall have located her within three hours.’

  Out in the street Miss Andrews was waiting for her, looking like a whipped dog. ‘Of course you haven’t eaten yet,’ said Veronica in a tone of reprimand. ‘Well, now it’s too late. This is what you’re to do right away.’ She listed a series of names and addresses where she was to call – she was to inquire about Betka at various other police stations as a check on the official force; at the same time she was to let Cécile Goudreau and the Prince of Orminy know what had happened, for Veronica was beginning to detect the characteristic odour of opium in this whole business.

  Betka was found toward three o’clock in the morning, and at the end of two days she awoke in the American Hospital at Neuilly. Her first sensation was that of summer, on catching a glimpse through the half-open door of a man wearing a straw hat. This disconcerted her for two long minutes; yet she knew that it was summer! A corpulent doctor, all dressed in white, came and sat down beside her, and resting his hands on both knees asked her, ‘Come, now, why did you do it?’

  ‘I was bored,’ Betka answered.

  ‘Well, well, she says she was bored!’ the doctor repeated, with a harsh American accent, shaking his head and getting up to take the thermometer from the hands of the private nurse.

  In the afternoon Veronica was given permission to see her for fifteen minutes. Her explanation was more than convincing. Betka accepted it as though it could not have been otherwise. She added merely, ‘I no longer wanted to live in a world in which everyone cheats.’

  The following evening, when she was moved to her apartment on Quai des Orfèvres, Cécile Goudreau came to see her. The morning after, Betka had a stormy telephone conversation with Veronica who tyrannically reproached her for this visit.

  ‘I couldn’t refuse to see her; she had sent me flowers to the hospital every day,’ Betka protested.

  ‘Shut up! I’m coming to see you!’ said Veronica furiously, hanging up the receiver.

  The sun appeared and vanished in the window-panes of Betka’s studio apartment on Quai des Orfèvres. Veronica was sitting on the bed, and Betka was kneeling at her feet, weeping, and trying to keep her body upright, separate from her friend’s. Veronica’s hands were clasped round her neck, her cold fingers plunging into the copper-coloured hair and her nails digging into the hollow of the nape of Betka’s neck, caressing it. Veronica let Betka struggle feebly, willingly following the harmonious generosity of her arms, the brusque gestures that her friend made to extricate herself. But at the same time Veronica held her prisoner, pressing her ribs with all the inquisitorial force of her slender muscular thighs.

  ‘Enough weeping!’ Veronica finally ordered. ‘The meeting of creatures like us is so rare… we must cling to each other so close that nothing coming from us can ever disappoint us any more. Swear to me that we won’t ever leave each other again, that you won’t take opium any more!’ Veronica commanded, relinquishing her hold.

  ‘Yes, I promise!’ Betka cried, raising her head and offering her double row of teeth in a fixed and resolute smile. Veronica slowly drew Betka’s face close to her own and, pressing her lips to her half-open mouth, gave her a long kiss on her motionless, clenched teeth… and…

  Three years passed – 1937, 1938, 1939…

  * According to a very ancient peasant superstition, ‘if a girl peels an apple and continues to the end without once breaking the strip of skin, she will marry the first man she meets’.

  † The apple of sin in the terrestrial paradise: Adam and Eve.

  The apple of beauty in the judgment of Paris.

  The apple of sacrifice: William Tell and his son.

  The apple of physics: that of Newton’s law of gravitation.

  ‡ Federico Garcia Lorca, speaking of his friend.

  § Meyer method: A mnemotechnic method invented by the Viennese professor. Dr Meyer, which according to him economizes time and avoids all distraction in the problems of daily life. Betka’s mother claimed to use this method in all circumstances, and even before punishing her children would exclaim, ‘Come now, the Meyer method, the Meyer method!’.

  ¶ The White Death: A former Russian religious sect in which thousands of adepts, living in common in piety and prayer, finally offered up their lives in sacrifice by letting themselves be burned alive in barns filled with hay. This burning was preceded by an orgy in which all the families belonging to their community gave themselves over, naked, to the deliria of fornication in a total promiscuity, without distinction of sex, family or age.

  || Rata in Spanish means ‘mouse’. The nickname given because of their speed and their black appearance to the pursuit planes that the Soviet Union sent to Spain during the civil war.

  PART TWO

  Nihil

  3

  Postponement of a Ball

  En este mundo troidor

  nada es verdad ni mentira

  Todo es sagun el color

  Del cristal con que se mira.

  calderon de la barca

  … In betka’s studio-apartment on Quai des Orfèvres the sun appears and vanishes in the window panes.

  … Betka stands with her body inclined over Veronica’s kneeling figure. The heads of the two friends are at the same level, pressed together cheek to cheek, their hair interweaves. Betka’s bare foot rests on Veronica’s unshod one, and both of them bend their bodies over the pulled-back sheets of the bed and look breathlessly at a child barely two years old, who with awkward movements of his plump and wrinkled little hands tries to unbutton Veronica’s blouse, seeking the roundnesses of her bosom that Betka seems to want to offer him. This confusion charms the two friends, and each fresh effort of his is greeted with laughter.

  After this play of maternal identification has gone on for some time, Betka with a proud movement unbuttons her blouse, baring her heavy milk-filled breasts which she dangles over her son’s face; immediately the baby’s hands reach up gluttonously to play with them, and at each grasp into the air or into her flesh Betka laughs with delight, as though the very proof of her maternity lay in the turbulent avidity which she arouses in her child. Lovingly she flexes her arms, and her breasts, brought together by their own weight, slowly, slowly descend. For a moment the baby seems frightened by the sudden shadow on his face, but as soon as his mother’s breasts graze him he no longer moves. Continuing to lower her bosom, Betka lets the soft fullness of her turgescent flesh rest more and more on her child’s face, and he accepts the warmth of this heavy caress with a voluptuous immobility so ecstatic that the sight brings tears of tenderness to the two women’s eyes – tears that immediately turn to those of wild laughter when Betka’s son, choking, suddenly reacts with the baffled movements of a drowning creature, struggling with all the energy of his precociously muscular arms.

  The sun, re-emerging from behind a cloud, shines directly on that glorious flesh, which becomes so dazzling that the whole room seems lighted by its reflection. Betka’s breasts are elongated, with extremely prominent tips, such as one associates with the Roman decadence, and their skin is as glowing as that of polished statues and specked with highly pigmented freckles that look deceptively like the flecks of golden moss which, as it happens, cover the marble of certain fragments of sculpture left exposed to the inclemencies of the Pontine countryside.

  A fly has just alighted on the tip of one breast, and none of the child’s movements seem to distract it or make it leave that somewhat tumefied point of the breast which suckling has monstrously distended. A whole series of other satellite granulations, one-fourth as large, surround the central suction knob with brown, swollen protuberances in a fairly even circulary border. The child touches these supernumerary nipples one after the other, and sometimes presses them stubbornly with his small forefinger, pulling all the flesh in a rotating movement as though trying to make the whole turn round like a telephone dial.

  Now the baby’s hand rests motionless on his mother’s breast, and the fly that clings to its spot between his open fingers leaves him indifferent, for he has just fallen into a deep slumber. Without apparent reason the two friends have suddenly become anxious and Betka, straightening her stiff back, utters a deep sigh. The fly has flown off, and the sun no longer beats down on the bed, but on the parquet floor beside it, where purplish little wads of dust emerge between the cracks.

  Cécile Goudreau had kept as a memento of Countess Mihakowska a bizarre orthopaedic apparatus of black felt and gilt aluminium which had been used only for a short time to compress the tissues where the breast had been removed. This rather sinister object was now used as a vase in which the brightness of a few bizarre flowers would appear from time to time adorning a kind of little makeshift altar, in very bad taste, composed of the worm-eaten Polish icon and the portrait of the Countess dressed in riding-clothes, very Hollywoodesque, in a leather frame of a red so aggressive, new and bestial that even the dying light of the tiny oil-lamp which softened the whole could not humanize it. However, as the latter was no longer regularly tended, it would remain unlit for days and weeks on end.

  From the time of the bloody events of the Sixth of February on the Place de la Concorde until the ‘September equinox’ when the Munich pact was concluded one might have said that nothing, or almost nothing, had happened. Everyone was absorbed, body and soul, in making the most of his minute allotment of felicity. Going out to a restaurant became a thing-in-itself. One no longer planned. One got up late to make the wings of ambition lazy and one dared not go to bed till even later for fear of awakening those of remorse. That cowardly feeling of being motionless, of curling up and turning round once more deep within the sheets of irresponsibility, became accentuated, assuming a tinge of perverse pleasure from the fact of knowing that one’s historic neighbours of Spain were massacring one another in one of the most frightful civil wars of history. Everything was accepted and compromised for the sake of putting off an immediate decision. The important thing was to be able to add to the emptiness of one day the nothingness of the morrow. People cheated, took drugs, waited…. ‘Things are very bad – if only they will last!’

  And it was as though in those crucial moments one single being in the world, sucking the energy of all like a vampire, were capable of decision. This being was the great paranoiac of Berchtesgaden, Adolph Hitler.

  As in the menacing calms that precede the violence of the unleashed elements, it seemed that each being remained paralysed and anaesthetized, as it were, by the crushing imminence of war. But this instant of electric tension which, before the breaking of great storms, arrests the majestic movements of the millenary oak and the awkward pecking of the newborn chick for the short interval of a few seconds, this instant had now lasted three long years during which the heart of Paris simulated death beneath the dangerously close jaws of the panting beast.

  People immobilized themselves thus in the intuitive semiconsciousness of the catastrophe which must inevitably come while each one, beneath his inert aspect, slowly crystallized in the forms most apt to resist the ferocious and decisive constraints of the great ordeal. Each one, therefore, while obscurely transforming himself in the silent depth of his lethargic sleep, was only sharpening his peculiar mechanism of defence and perfecting the ruses of unsuspected systems of reaction, while with all the superhuman strength of his ancestral instinct of survival each one, with the avidity of a suckling babe, drew upon the unfathomable resources of that germ of common magic which is buried in the depth of the origins of all biology.

  Confronting the hell of the inevitable reality each being, guided by his regressive desires of intra-uterine protection, shut himself up in the paradisaic cocoon that the caterpillar of their prudence had woven with the soothing saliva of amnesia. No more memory – only the chrysalis of the moral pain of things to come, nourished by the famine of future absences, by the nectar of fasts and the leaven of heroisms dressed in the immaterial banners of sterile sacrifices and armed with the infinitely sensitive antennae of martyrdom. This chrysalis of misfortune begins to stir, for it is getting ready to burst the silk walls of the prison of its long insensibility, to appear at last in the unparalleled cruelty of its metamorphosis at the hour and the exact moment which will be signalled to it by the first cannon shot. Then an unheard-of being, unheard-of beings, will be seen to rise, their brains compressed by sonorous helmets, their temples pierced by the whistling of air waves, their bodies naked, turned yellow by fever, pocked by deep vegetal stigmata swarming with insects and filled to the brim with the slimy juices of venom, overflowing and running down a skin tiger-striped and leopard-spotted by the gangrene of wounds and the leprosy of camouflage, their swollen bellies plugged to death by electric umbilical chords tangling with the ignominiousness of torn intestines and bits of flesh, roasting on the burning steel carapaces of the punitive tortures of gutted tanks.