One evening Veronica and Randolph were sitting on the sand by the oasis, watching the tower which was nearing completion. They were alone. Betka was riding, some distance away, carrying her son on her own horse. The canoness, who had spent the afternoon putting away the linen, had gone off half an hour before in the supply truck, and the workers who had finished their day’s work had also left.

  Now that Veronica was sitting out in the open desert beneath an immense sky it was no longer possible (as when she was in Paris) to compare her gaze to the aridity of the desert and to the transparency of the azure sky, for her eyes were even emptier and more immense than these two elements of nature combined. Veronica had the clear eyes of ‘frustrated yearning for motherhood’. She kept her head slightly tipped back so as to feel the weight of her hair blown by the breeze, and her whole body opened to the wind, like certain plants that are fertilized by this means. Sitting thus, she was oblivious of the potent challenge of her body’s curves. Randolph held his head lowered close to her hair, and through its screen he riveted his eyes on one of her bare knees, which he saw both as Eve’s apple and as Yorick’s skull. No longer able to contain himself he began to speak, without detaching his eyes from the spot.

  ‘It’s only because you know the war is about to call me away again that you deign not to punish me whenever I can’t help worshipping you in silence. It’s only lately that you have begun to regard me with a glimmer of friendship. I’ve never gone in for inspiring pity. You’ve made me unhappy all the time!’

  ‘You are wrong, John,’ Veronica said calmly, without changing her position. After a long silence she passed her arm round Randolph’s neck, ‘I liked you the moment I saw you,’ she finally continued, ‘much more than I could have believed. I just discovered it a few days ago. No one in my place would talk to you so frankly as I am doing. You must be equal to the confidence I show you in telling you this, but listen to me….’

  Randolph remained as if paralysed. Painfully swallowing his saliva he lowered his head still further without, however, changing the direction of his gaze, and as the sun was now setting, the tip of Randolph’s ear had begun to cast its shadow on Veronica’s bare knee.

  ‘Yes, listen to me, John: though I have a very strong feeling for you, Jules is everything in life to me, and I mean to be absolutely faithful to him until I die.’

  ‘You’re contradicting yourself frightfully,’ said Randolph.

  ‘No, I am only following my nature and my destiny. What binds me to Jules is far above any feeling that can be expressed. It’s not just to him that I am being faithful, it’s much more than that. Through him and beyond him I worship a far-away image, and this image has raised my love to the realm of the absolute.’

  ‘What is that image?’ asked Randolph.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ answered Veronica, ‘and one must never speak of what is unique to oneself.’

  ‘You are deceiving yourself with words,’ Randolph exclaimed, then he said in a low voice, ‘At first I believed you were happy with Nodier. Now I know you are not!’ He had uttered the last words with vehemence, while he pressed his cheek against Veronica’s head.

  ‘I am the happiest of women,’ Veronica retorted, ‘by virtue of the very fact that I must share the tormented life of him who is dearest to me in all the world. Don’t press me so with your arm. If I have been frank it was not in order that you should take advantage of it and spoil our illusion!’

  Randolph released Veronica from what had been the beginning of a passionate embrace, and now the shadow of his ear reached the exact middle of Veronica’s knee.

  ‘May I,’ he said, ‘at least be allowed to caress you with my shadow?’

  With this he lowered his head so as to make the shadow of his ear slip down the whole length of Veronica’s leg; then he made it glide slowly, slowly up again as far as her knee. There he paused for a moment and slowly, ever more slowly, he began to move it higher, encroaching upon the very white flesh of her thigh, up to the edge of her skirt. ‘Your life is a desert!’ he exclaimed with irritation. ‘Nodier will never give you the child you yearn for. I know everything – you are like those hallucinated creatures dying of thirst, who fill their mouths with burning sand, not knowing that one elbow-length further down there flows a spring of fresh water that could save them.’

  ‘And are you that spring?’ Veronica asked mockingly, throwing her head back to look at him squarely.

  ‘Give me your mouth,’ Randolph commanded, clasping her in his arms and snatching a savage kiss.

  Veronica let herself be kissed without kissing in return, then she got up. ‘You’ve satisfied your little urge. Now leave me.’

  ‘I am desperately looking for a little gentleness in you,’ said Randolph getting up in turn, ‘and now I shall have only your contempt. I know I’ve spoiled everything by letting my feelings get the best of me. I shall leave tonight.’

  ‘You won’t need to,’ said Veronica, in a frightfully detached and icy tone, ‘for tomorrow morning Jules and I are coming to live in the tower. It’s your duty to remain with Betka a little longer, if only to keep up appearances. But never again expect of me the look of friendship and tenderness, and perhaps something more, which I foolishly let myself convey to you. You did not deserve it.’ Veronica got on her horse and set off at a gallop.

  Grandsailles had come down from his room for the first time in a fortnight. He took Veronica in his arms and held her in a long embrace.

  ‘Today,’ she said, ‘I would like to stay in my room!’

  ‘I’ll keep you company,’ he said. ‘I have so many, many things to tell you. It’s as if I were returning from a very long voyage.’

  ‘For me it has been an eternity,’ sighed Veronica, ‘a real desert!’

  ‘And tomorrow the oasis,’ said the Count, his lips brushing away a large tear that flowed down his wife’s cheek.

  The following morning before the departure Betka came to see Veronica in her room. ‘John has told me everything – what happened between you last night. He is utterly miserable, and he wanted me to ask you to give him a chance to ask your forgiveness.’

  ‘I don’t want to see him again,’ said Veronica. ‘My forgiveness he has. For that matter, he kisses like a child! It can’t even be considered a sin.’

  Betka felt somewhat offended by this slight to Randolph’s powers of seduction, ‘You surprise me,’ she remarked, ‘you make it sound like a case of sour grapes.’

  Veronica pretended not to notice the challenge, embraced her as usual and left.

  In the oasis tower their projected Paradise Regained was beginning badly. For the first time since their marriage, Veronica seemed distant and listless in her husband’s presence; she was dreamy, answered without listening and spilled the bag of millet seed on the floor each time she went to restock the bird-cage.

  ‘Aren’t you happy here?’ the Count asked her as they finished dinner on the third day.

  ‘Why yes, I’m perfectly content!’ Veronica answered.

  ‘Be frank,’ Grandsailles rejoined, ‘for you act as if you missed someone.’

  At these words Veronica, who never blushed, turned so red that the rush of blood to her habitually pale face made her eyes weep for pure shame, while her brow and the area around her lips became beaded with a perspiration of anguish. Her bosom swelled with resentment at feeling herself thus betrayed in her feelings, and she lost all countenance. ‘Don’t suppose that for a moment,’ she exclaimed, thinking to forestall the suspicions under which she assumed Grandsailles to be smarting, ‘there is nothing between John and me!’

  ‘I should never have thought of asking you that,’ answered Grandsailles, approaching her and trying to embrace her. But Veronica, who had suddenly become irritable, eluded his clasp, mounted the few steps that separated her from the door to the tower where their room was, and before she disappeared turned round to face Grandsailles, ‘But there is someone we miss,’ she said, and there was hatred in her voice, ‘ – our son!’ Then she shut the door noiselessly behind her.

  At this moment the canoness appeared, carrying the bird-cage in her hands, and Grandsailles turned to her. ‘Did you hear that, my good canoness?’ he said. ‘You hold it against me too, don’t you, that I have not had a son, but you, I know, would have preferred him to be Solange de Cléda’s!’

  ‘As long as it’s a boy I don’t care whom you have him by – even if it were the devil!’ Thereupon the canoness blew on the feeders filled with millet seeds to get rid of the chaff, but she blew so hard that it flew into her face and some of it got into her right eye, the one that was always running. She put the cage down on a table for a moment and with a corner of her apron tried to remove the particle.

  ‘The devil,’ Grandsailles repeated dreamily, ‘perhaps he is the only one by whom I could have one. Have my black horse saddled – I feel like riding. I couldn’t sleep now.’

  When he was gone the canoness picked up the bird-cage again. ‘It’s white flesh he should be mounting,’ she said ‘but according to the law of God and in obedience to his dictates.’

  The following evening Veronica and Grandsailles had a worse scene than the night before. The latter must have behaved violently, for as they both left their room in the tower, Veronica said to him, ‘From now on, I don’t want you in this room any more. It used to fill me with such high hopes, and now it means only disappointment. After this the room shall be consecrated to my solitude. You have asked my forgiveness a hundred times. Well, I forgive you on one condition: give me the key! I want the key to this room, which is now the room of my sorrow and where you will never have the right to enter on any pretext. You must respect this solitude whenever it needs me, or I need it. You have a secret which you have kept in your heart-and this I have countenanced. But you have also locked the door to our room without my permission. All right! I never told you that I didn’t have a secret, too. I am going to become suspicious, like you!’

  ‘I won’t go into your room if that is your wish. I promise you,’ said Grandsailles, and he went and sat down by the fireplace. A moment later Veronica was sitting close beside him. She put her hand on his.

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ said Grandsailles, taking it and pressing it.

  The canoness entered, bringing a new bellows and a box with giant matches. She got down on all fours and began to light the fire. The kindling that she arranged in peasant fashion around two large logs began instantly to crackle joyously, but soon a thick puff of smoke blown down the chimney entered the room.

  ‘That’s only because the chimney is cold,’ said the canoness, her irritated red eyes streaming with tears. She added wood-shavings, fanned the fire with the bellows, and now the flames, enveloping the two logs, rose high. But suddenly, as if blown down by a gust of wind from the outside, another, much thicker puff of smoke entered the room. Grandsailles got up, coughing, and went to open the window.

  ‘The chimney is surely stopped up,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to call the mason tomorrow and have him attend to it.’

  ‘Just leave it,’ said Veronica to the canoness, ‘it won’t burn. We’ll wait till tomorrow.’

  The next day the chimney was checked by the mason, but he claimed that everything was in order, that nothing obstructed it. Nevertheless he had a man climb up inside it and install a little revolving tin vent at the top to protect the chimney from counter-draughts. ‘It must surely have been the wind,’ said the man to the canoness, ‘but with the little cap I put on you won’t have any more trouble with smoke.’ Then the man had left.

  But in the evening when the canoness got down on all fours in front of her fire, again great puffs of smoke blew, one after another, into the room.

  ‘And today there is not a breath of wind,’ the canoness sighed in utter bewilderment, and straightening up on her knees, with her hands on her hips, she exclaimed. ‘It looks like the evil work of sorcery.’

  Sorcery or no sorcery, and however incredible it might appear, the fact was that in spite of the masons’ consultations and alterations, at the end of a week the fireplace in the large library adjoining Veronica’s tower-room still worked no better than on the first day.

  It must have been at about half-past eleven in the evening that the Count of Grandsailles and Veronica, sitting before the extinguished fire in the fireplace, were finishing a game of chess. Veronica had just picked up a black knight with the pink, blue-tinged pincers of her long fingers, and at the moment when she was lifting it slowly from the chessboard in deep thought she suddenly became motionless. She turned her head toward the door leading to the patio, which had unexpectedly opened. In the doorway stood an old cowboy dressed like a beggar, his grey moustache drooping over his lips, his eyes smoke-coloured, his skin very wrinkled like an Indian’s, his hat respectfully held in front of his chest while with his other hand he held a gnarled stick. At the end of this stick dangled a little bundle wrapped in a very clean white handkerchief.

  Grandsailles and Veronica looked at him questioningly and the man finally said in a far-away voice, full of tenderness, ‘I am the smoke-man! I have come a long way, and I always travel on foot.’

  ‘You’re what man?’ asked Grandsailles, not quite sure he had heard right.

  ‘The smoke-man,’ he repeated.

  ‘The smoke-man,’ Veronica repeated in turn as if it were more natural to her.

  Grandsailles got up and had him sit down, shutting the door that the smoke-man had blithely left open.

  ‘I passed through this way because the servants would not have let me come in. I heard in the village that your fireplace doesn’t work.’ He cast a glance full of malice at the extinguished fire, and it seemed as if in the depth of the misty smoke of his eyes sparks of fire were kindled in the exact centre of each of his pupils. ‘I am the smoke-man – I get rid of the smoke in fireplaces when no one else can. I know the winds of this region. My aged father died in this very oasis. He used to have an adobe hut here, and I lived here till I was thirteen. He taught me everything. He would make fires in the desert, and from him I learned to observe how the smoke rises, what kind of humidity and land winds – the eddies of unfavourable moons, the hot sunset gusts and midnight dews – make it go down; and how to set up the strong draughts that suck it straight up into the sky.’

  Suddenly Veronica and Grandsailles had the feeling that all their hope lay in this smoke-man who seemed to have descended from heaven, and they called the canoness to have her bring him a glass of sherry.

  ‘My good man,’ said Grandsailles, ‘you can begin your experiments with our fireplace whenever you please. The masons have in fact experimented and exhausted the resources of their science to no avail. I am quite convinced that this all has to do with some unique, imponderable climatic anomaly of this locality. I myself have already wondered about the concentration of moisture that must be created by such a small oasis surrounded by the reverberating mineral desert, with the rocks that keep their warmth far into the night.’

  The smoke-man nodded his head benevolently and smiled as if Grandsailles had been no nearer to the truth than other mortals.

  ‘I shall begin my work tomorrow – but on just one condition,’ said the smoke-man, ‘and that is that Monsieur shall pay me nothing, not a single cent, unless I am completely successful. The cement, bricks, hardware, tools – all are to be at my expense. I don’t eat much, and I can sleep anywhere. I want to set an example for those in the village who make fun of me! When you no longer have any smoke you can reward me as you see fit, and I shall be satisfied.’

  They were entering the second week since the smoke-man had begun his labours and he was still struggling unavailingly with the obstinate smoke in the library fireplace. Nothing, nothing, nothing worked!

  ‘I feel sorry for the poor fellow,’ the canoness had confided to the Count. ‘I’ve been observing him. I can see him getting thinner every day. He no longer eats, he no longer sleeps, and what is worse, he spends all his meagre savings buying funnels, extension pipes, wire – and I’ll telling you, he’ll never succeed in getting that confounded smoke out of the chimney!’

  ‘We’ll let him work two more days. He has already done so much damage that a little more won’t make any difference. We will reward him for his work just the same. We might have suspected that he was a little crazy.’

  ‘But it’s a fact,’ replied the canoness, ‘that the others weren’t able to get rid of the smoke either.’

  The smoke-man would pass from a state of exaltation, of almost delirious hope, to prostrations of despair, lashed into a new frenzy by an idea that would keep him awake all night. Early in the morning, sometimes at dawn, he was already on the job, appearing on the scene loaded with heterogeneous objects that he had had made at a metal-shop in the village, building little supplementary chimneys within the chimney itself, as if to lead the smoke to the roof by stages and there expel it definitely, once and for all, into the free air. That confounded draught! How it was going to draw now – this time it could not fail. Then he would drop to the floor on all fours to light the fire, his hands trembling as in a fit of epilepsy, crumpling up newspapers, striking matches, burning his fingers. The fire would catch in whirls of flame, rise victoriously as if sucked up by a powerful siphon. His heart would pound, savagely thumping his old man’s chest, and he would hold his breath in anxious expectation. Yes! This time it would work…. But no! Suddenly an ignominious puff of grey, thick smoke would, as on all the other occasions, come and spit in his face, and the tears of his fathomless bitterness would add their sting to his smoke-scorched eyes.