Yes! He was certain of the dreams that swept Solange and himself along the same current. Yes, in this he still thought like a peasant. And when a peasant of Libreux would say of a new bride. ‘She’s worried because she’s afraid she will give birth to a child under the spell of the evil eye’ – a future life depending on a distant glance that could sow disorder in its spirit – how close this way of understanding phenomena was to reality, or at least to what he himself thought. Yes! A hundred times yes! The enigma of procreation: what a wonderful medium, what a magic vehicle of satanism, of temptation and of damnation! – for damned he would be. What could be a more carnal enslavement of the spirit than to use pleasure as a means of obliging the cells, the plasmas and the viscera to create a physical resemblance in the eyes, the gums and the fits of anger of a hostile being who would be moulded in the image of a woman whom one had possessed only in the spirit? And was it so utterly demented to think of engendering a son of Solange de Cléda, across the distances of an ocean, by the body of Veronica? Yes, this was as possible as to receive Solange in his brain when she would come and painfully possess it, entering into all the folds of its circumvolutions with the imperial reality of her radiant image (an imperial reality, a radiant image: what words to describe poor Solange, sick in body and in soul, far away and alone!).

  When the Count possessed Veronica in this frame of mind, did not she herself, with all her flesh, become the flesh of the other? Solange… far away and alone! But what was all this chaos of wild divagations, of impossible torments of martyred intelligence, if not the unsated and growing love for Solange that was making him delirious? With his clenched hands the Count of Grandsailles had rumpled his greying hair that fell over his darkened and stormy brow like a crown of silvery olive-leaves.

  ‘The blood myth! And I possess you wholly, your whole soul! But it is your blood that I lack, and the day when I might have had it – with you stripped naked just for this – and I could have given you mine, I made you a present only of a half-open pomegranate with rubies, idiot of an aesthete that I was! For that, too, I will be damned! But even more idiotic are the doctrines that deny those still incomprehensible laws of ‘grafting’ by which the pulp of an orange has been forced to inherit the false blood of a pomegranate; yet it would be considered an abuse of credulity to conceive the grafting of an ‘incubus’ on blood, real blood, which is not only constantly agitated by the slightest representations but above all modified and poisoned by these to the point of provoking mysterious tumours and miscarriages of the false embryos of the vaginal fibroma that require surgical attention. Cancer strangely resembles an “incarnated incubus”!’ exclaimed Grandsailles in the silence of his harassing and despairing meditations…. ‘Yes, sympathetic magic, like dreams, is in the blood, and incurable. Solange de Cléda is like a fatal cancer that is in the process of devouring me and that is growing inside my brain!’

  At this moment he felt something warm and blood-red press softly against his mouth. Veronica was timidly kissing him. The Count gave a start. How long had his wife been there beside him, probably anxiously observing him while he, plunged in his fantastic theories, had not even noticed her presence?

  He got up unsteadily, as if he had awakened from a torturing vision.

  ‘Our horses are waiting for us outside. Are you going to keep your promise of a ride in the desert?’ Veronica asked him, with a touch of bitterness in her voice. Then she began to pace around him, like a docile lion. At last she said, ‘I know that I can’t ask you what you were thinking of… I am used to it now. I’m not complaining about anything, but I should like to help you. If we have agreed that I must never share the life of your soul, which is forbidden me, allow me at least to accompany it from time to time to make it gallop and tire your troubles, perhaps put them to sleep, just as I know how to exhaust your memories by my embraces.’

  ‘If you were to approach these memories you would die of it, for they are naked memories without embraces,’ said Grandsailles, who seemed only slowly to be returning to reality, while he combed his hair again with his gold comb.

  ‘Oh, God!’ exclaimed Veronica, unhappy and rebellious, shaking her heavy blonde hair, ‘Why can’t I ever make you happy, as you make me? Why can’t my body serve at least as a dwelling-place for the spirit that haunts you? Yes! Why deny it! There is another woman in your life, who is far from you or perhaps dead. I shall never know, but since I have already accepted this from the beginning as a supposition, I should now like to become her in the flesh so that you might take me for her while your blood is still capable of being aroused by me… before the ardour of your desire begins its decline.’

  Grandsailles sketched a gesture of protest and Veronica, drawing close to him, pressed her cheek to the Count’s chest and said, ‘Yes! I know it! You already love me less.’

  Grandsailles answered her with a long kiss, and when he raised his head he saw the canoness cross the patio, casting a flashing, hateful glance at him as she passed. ‘Why has she been looking at me that way recently?’

  At the door that led out to the desert their two horses were waiting. The one was white as frost, the other black as sin. The white one was in the shadow and the black one lighted by a bar of sunlight.

  ‘Which do you choose?’ asked Veronica smiling maliciously, and answering her own question, ‘I know – sin! He resembles the devil, doesn’t he, that horse?’ As she spoke she stroked the horse’s muzzle.

  ‘How graciously you remind me that you promised me to repeat our sin today!’ said the Count to her in a low voice.

  Veronica seemed upset for a moment. ‘Why do you insist on calling that odd, but violent kind of love by such a name? For me, on the contrary, it is like fiery water from heaven, the golden rain of Danae.’

  ‘What a desire to embellish, chérie,’ said the Count, troubled in turn by the resolve to carry out a plan that had kindled in his brain.

  ‘What need have you Latins, who are such aesthetes, to make ugly everything that pertains to the strangeness of desire? Does it matter through what gate one enters, as long as one reaches the paradise of the flesh? Why must you see the demon in all things?’

  ‘Because the devil exists!’ answered Grandsailles, mounting on his black horse and making him rear with a sharp touch of his spurs. At this moment the canoness who was squatting on the ground with her back turned to them, in the midst of cleaning a bird-cage, leaned far forward and perched on all fours, thus exposing her legs up to the thighs. Casting a last glance at the canoness’s calves gleaming very white in the sunlight, the Count whipped his horse and set off into the desert at a full gallop. Veronica followed him, but she caught up with him only at the end of two hours. He had stopped to get off his horse on the edge of a small oasis which he had never discovered before. When Veronica in turn had got down she immediately came and threw herself in the Count’s arms and they held each other in a long embrace while the black and white rumps of their horses steamed. Around them, within a two-hour radius, there was not a living creature and even the characteristic flora of the California desert was absent – nothing but a wholly mineralized terrain, without grasses or cactus, nothing but chunks of blackish and rusty rocks, like meteors that had burst into fragments and fallen from heaven, and the sky, smooth, ardent, like ignited iron oxide, calcinating and crackling all this with fissures of sterility from so much solitude…. And suddenly, in the midst of this vehement desolation of an extinguished planet, the frenzied twittering of thousands of birds that rose from a luxuriant, fresh and ‘emeraldine’ clump of centenary vegetation.

  ‘It’s a paradise,’ said Veronica. ‘Never on earth have I seen a more beautiful spot than here.’

  They entered the oasis – a small pool of tepid water, so transparent that one could see the tiniest pebbles that formed its bed and also, at the spot where the palm-trees grew most densely, an old abandoned well. Veronica looked at the bottom and let a stone drop into it which broke the moon of sky that was reflected in it. The late sun was still burning and the Count had sat down in the shadow of an uprooted tree-trunk.

  ‘Look, Veronica, how clear, how transparent the air is around that tallest palm-tree! There I seem to see an invisible tower – that of our bedroom.’

  Veronica had taken off all her clothes and stood naked in the middle of the small pool, the long blonde columns of her limbs rising smoothly out of the water whose shimmering reflections, like tongues, lapped at the uptilted roundnesses of her breasts. She looked up to where Grandsailles pointed. ‘Yes, I see it, too!’

  The black horse who had come over to the edge of the pool plumped his right foot into the water and drank.

  ‘We shall build the walls of the house all around these palm-trees like a belt. From the outside, to anyone coming upon it in the desert, its high circular wall broken only by little windows to make it secure against the wind will seem poor, like those of a refuge of beggars, anguishing as a barracks in which everyone has died of the plague, or like an asylum of lepers in the heart of the most ferocious sterility.’

  ‘Or like a convent of swans,’ said Veronica.

  ‘Within,’ continued Grandsailles, ‘each of the rooms will open on this paradise of palms shuddering with fornicating birds and sparkling water.’

  ‘And it is in this paradise that you dream of the hell of our sins,’ said Veronica.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Grandsailles, ‘the blessed have always occupied the middle, and so have the damned: hell or heaven is always in the centre. Here we are in the middle.’

  ‘For me it will always be heaven,’ said Veronica, looking at the sky.

  ‘The acts of our passion,’ Grandsailles added, ‘are ashamed of the presence of the common which is always profane. How can what is unique belong to other than unique hearts?’

  Veronica, cupping her hands together, scooped up some water from the lake and sprinkled the black horse with it, and he immediately shied away and stretched himself out on the moss. Veronica went over and lay down on him as on a living cushion.

  ‘I told you that horse is the devil!’ exclaimed Grandsailles, ‘he makes himself so completely the accomplice of our desire.’

  Playfully Veronica mingled her blonde hair with the black mane; she plunged her face into it, but it was rather to screen out Grandsailles’ face, which now was close to hers and of which she would have liked to eliminate all but the eyes, and these eyes dazzled her so much that it hurt – as though the rays they shot had been sharp arrows to which Veronica’s gaze served as a target for them to sink their points into one after another.

  ‘Never have we been more alone than today. We might slit each other’s throats, and no one would hear our cries.’ The Count enveloped her whiteness like a cloak, and they set free the lions of their love….

  The silence was broken only by the occasional shudder of palm-leaves, the crackling of a twig, the deft movement of a light-footed, invisible creature. Then, between the arid sky – its deepening blue fading into the mineral yellows and oranges of sunset – and the parched desert, the sound of three crystalline splashes at tired intervals shattered the serenity of the pool, startling reflections so pure that they seemed to cleanse away all traces of the Count’s depravity.

  Stepping out of the pool, Veronica slipped into her clothes and mounted her white horse.

  Twilight had descended, and before starting back Grandsailles said, ‘We no longer seek each other, but let us continue to lie to each other. For no embraces can bring us closer, though we feel them in the very depth of our flesh. For we do not know who we are.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Veronica. ‘All I have seen of you is your eyes, and that cross which I gave you and which you now wear around your neck. When you are too close for me to see it because it is imprisoned between our two chests or when I feel it dig into my back I shut my eyes and can still see it shining in their depths.’

  ‘What a strange destiny!’ said Grandsailles after another silence. ‘We love and don’t know whom we love.’

  ‘Do I love you, or the one you were in my memory? Do you love me or her? I don’t want to know – I want less and less to know; but let us both build something lasting around the precious uncertainties of our confusions. I want a house here!’ Veronica concluded, pointing with her crop to the violent traces in the ploughed-up sand and the torn moss which marked the bed of the black horse after he had got up again.

  They started back at a walk, each holding his free arm around the other.

  ‘We touch the flesh,’ said Grandsailles, ‘and we embrace chimeras. We touch it to assure ourselves that we deceive and are deceived.’

  ‘We embrace the unknown, we claw, seize and caress it, to assure ourselves that everything is chimerical,’ concluded Veronica, ‘and perhaps this is why we caress, embrace and claw with such violence – to see if we are capable of awakening to reality.’

  ‘We walk beneath the same yoke,’ said the Count.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Veronica, ‘we don’t see each other’s faces, but when our two bodies touch they strike each other hard and persistently. I once saw oxen on the dusty roads of Portugal walking in this way, and their bony sides where they touched were all covered with ulcers.’

  There was silence. The Count of Grandsailles plunged headlong into his thoughts of tenderness for Solange de Cléda and Veronica thought of the man with the hidden face of her memory whom she thought to be he, and thus, holding each other close, they went on into the deepening night as if joined and forming a single mass.

  At dinner-time Betka was not yet back from her ride, and Veronica and the Count sat down at the table. This table was round and of about the same dimensions as the one in the refectory of the Moulindes Sources, but instead of being of plain and mouldy wood covered by a deep chocolate-brown cloth it was of frantically polished mahogany, in whose reddish grain the dazzling new silverware was pitilessly and savagely reflected. This loud ostentation was entirely Barbara Stevens’ taste, but to a certain extent also it was what Veronica had inherited from her.

  ‘For me,’ said Grandsailles, ‘luxury is absolutely the contrary of this fake place in which we are living, I have always dreamed of a house where all the door-handles would be of solid gold, but so oxidized and tarnished that no one would ever be able to notice it. Passion surrounded solely by oxidized aridity: that is luxury.’

  ‘That is also how I wish you to build our walls around the oasis,’ said Veronica. ‘I feel utterly uncivilized next to you, with your refined tradition… I want to learn to see all the things you see. You have pointed to a tower in the sky and I have seen it. And everything you have told me – a tower for our common room, and tiny windows overlooking the reaches of the desert… I have seen our four eyes leaning on these like real persons dressed in white and crystal, looking out over the horizon. With your unparalleled gift of suggestion you have already erected before my waking eyes a dream more beautiful than anything which my own sleep could ever have invented for me.’

  At this moment, through the tall windows overlooking the patio and barely distinguishable in the shadows, they saw Betka approaching on her horse, accompanied by a tall masculine figure, who was also mounted. Betka came and sat down at her place at the table after giving Veronica a hurried kiss on the forehead. She could hardly conceal her intense emotion.

  ‘Who was your tall, gallant escort?’ Veronica asked quizzically. ‘Is he the same one who was with you yesterday evening?’

  The oppression Betka had felt in anticipation of this question seemed suddenly to vanish. ‘Yes,’ she answered with steely assurance while she scrutinized Grandsailles to observe whether he would register the slightest reaction. ‘He is the same fellow who went with me yesterday. His name won’t mean anything to you – he is a captain of aviation who is back from Africa on a long furlough. I knew him in Paris. His name is John Randolph.’

  ‘John Randolph,’ Grandsailles repeated. ‘No, I don’t know him.’ Then after a brief silence he asked Betka, ‘Why don’t you invite him for dinner tomorrow night? Veronica and I would enjoy it. We haven’t the slightest desire to make you share our unsociability. The chair next to you is always frightfully empty.’

  Veronica took Grandsailles’ hand, pursuing his train of thought. ‘And there will be complete happiness in this house only when this chair is permanently occupied by a creature as exceptional as Betka.’

  ‘And as beautiful – I feel very strongly about that,’ the Count added with an exacting mockery.

  ‘A more handsome creature would be hard to find,’ said Betka, half joking, eyeing Veronica while an irresistible smile pressed her mouth, like earrings of malice hanging from her dimples at the corners of her fleshy lips.

  The following evening Betka and Randolph shortened their ride in order to await the Count’s and Veronica’s return from their second visit to the oasis, which they had already definitely decided to buy for the desert retreat which they would build there. Instead of cocktails Betka had icecold vodka and dubrovka with buffalo-grass suspended in it served before the fireplace, and the little Filipino servant also served some highly spiced anchovies on hot toast. Randolph’s impassive face did not undergo the slightest deforming effect of intoxication as he calmly drank these burning beverages. He was one of those rare people not made ugly by fire. On the contrary the red reflections from the crackling logs, like anger, instead of carbonizing his face seemed to give him the ruddy purity of a rose – and who knows if the intact coolness of this flower is not precisely fire, cold fire and violence combined in a serene unfolding?