‘Read it,’ said Betka, handing the telegram to Veronica, who merely took it, folded it, and put it back on the desk; then Betka picked it up again and read it aloud: ‘RECEIVED NO MONEY FOR THREE MONTHS LIFE VERY HARD PLEASE TELL ME TRUTH ABOUT AJALE MARRIAGE WITH MY SISTER HAVE RIGHT TO KNOW YOUR DAUGHTER BETKA’ – followed by her address: ‘17 Quai des Orfèvres.’

  ‘Ajale was my fiancé,’ Betka added, putting the telegram down again, and abruptly picking up her raincoat.

  ‘Thank you, thank you so much!’ said Betka, her smooth face contracted by suffering. She was beautiful as a Dolorosa by Bernini would have been, if his subject had been like Betka, an adolescent with very young breasts. She was eighteen.

  Veronica went up to her and gave her a kiss.

  ‘Wait for me a second, we’ll have dinner together!’

  The storm broke loose, accompanied by a few large gumdrops of hail, just at the moment when their taxi stopped in front of the Tour d’ Argent restaurant. Merely in crossing the sidewalk they were soaked to the bones and felt that sudden and delightful cold of the gluttonous downpour of summer which made them shiver as they climbed to the summit of the tower. There they sat down at a table which Veronica purposely chose as being a little too large for intimacy, but which on the other hand stood directly in front of the inaugural crackling of a wooden fire which had hurriedly been lighted the moment the first claps of thunder had burst. At the beginning of their dinner they spoke little, like the new mate and the captain who eat their first meal together on the eve of the day when their ship hoists anchor for a long voyage. Betka and Veronica each silently watched in the depths of the other’s eyes the receding wake of the laughing foam of illusion, which the little they had lived together already stirred behind the rudder encrusted with blackish barnacles and dark algae.

  Betka, who was still unconscious of the fact that they had launched on a common voyage, and to whom the encounter appeared like the mirage of a moment, lived each second as though it were a miracle, and in each of her glances she gave everything: feeling, pleasure, and even remorse.

  Veronica, on the contrary, ‘quiet and concentrated like a blind statue’,‡ kept that restraint of apparent icy indifference which, far from being avarice or aridity of heart, was but the necessity of dividing the latter into little even slices, corresponding to each of the seconds which the continuous and uninterrupted passion of her life was to last: she would never love more than she loved at this moment, she would merely live her long cycle. Betka, on the other hand… poor moth! At each of Veronica’s steely glances Betka would laugh, while her pure teeth savagely crunched stalks of celery that broke in her mouth like icicles of spring.

  ‘I like your big mouth,’ said Veronica, leaving Betka’s childish, almost frenzied voracity in suspense.

  ‘Too big!’ the latter pleaded.

  ‘Yes, a little too big,’ Veronica continued reticently, watching for the effect of her agreement.

  ‘I know. A horror!’ Betka exclaimed, sighing, discouraged, and on the point of tears.

  ‘My angel!’ Veronica reassured her, ‘don’t you know that you are divinely beautiful?’

  ‘Yes, I think I am!’ Betka answered, with a soft inflection of regret, ‘I don’t consider myself ugly, and I might even enjoy looking at someone like me… I don’t care for my mouth, and I detest the colour of my hair… I like the rest – especially my body. But for myself, I should prefer to be like you.’

  ‘With me it’s just the opposite,’ Veronica replied, her gaze suddenly absent. ‘I don’t like myself at all, but I should like to find someone absolutely like me, whom I could adore.’

  Betka preferred to be lulled by the intoxication which Veronica’s personality communicated to her rather than try to understand and discover the strange and somewhat fateful meaning of the latter’s severe tone. Betka seemed to be listening with her lips, which were slightly parted in a semi-ecstasy of virginal innocence by which she betrayed the eminently physical character of all her feelings. This expression which was a familiar and almost constant one with her became a grimace under the impact of the slightest emotion, and then it was difficult to distinguish whether it expressed pleasure or pain, so common and interpenetrated an existence did these two tyrants of her soul lead in the flesh of the single person of her body. Nevertheless intense pleasure manifested itself in her through a more violent contraction of her facial muscles extending her mouth to the maximum in a laugh which exposed the generous and total sparkle of her teeth. Their desperate effort to remain closed rendered Betka’s expression of joy fetchingly mad and infinitely touching.

  Champagne was poured. Veronica wriggled in her chair as though she were about to pounce on her friend, but feeling the latter so confident and defenceless that she kept delaying the moment of aggression with voluptuous delight. Finally she confronted her point-blank with the long-premeditated question, thee- and thou-ing her for the first time: ‘Tell me, chérie, are you a virgin?’

  Betka did not answer and merely looked at her, her face beet-red, humble and yet proud, making her all the more attractive.

  ‘Eat!’ Veronica cried to her with a sigh, as she cut the string that held a little strip of bacon surmounted by a large muscat grape between the open legs of a rum-glazed quail. Veronica lightly seized the grape with her fork and offered it to Betka as if to console her.

  ‘Here, angel, catch this!’ And Betka reached her head forward and crushed the smooth, sweet grape between her teeth, as two bitter tears flowed down her cheeks. Veronica knew perfectly well she was not a virgin! But she felt pacified now at having succeeded so quickly, so easily in making her weep.

  To reward her, Veronica was immediately going to confide in her, and still later, over the dessert, she was going to blot out every trace of bitterness making the enchanted cavalcade of her inexhaustible seductive imagination sweep past her dazzled eyes, as she could do when she set out to please and to enslave.

  Having decided to resort to these charms, Veronica moved back her chair a little from Betka’s, wishing her to get the full impact of all her impetuous gestures, often incomprehensible and always fascinating like those used in spells; abandoning her habitual immobility, she gave herself over to an amazing exhibition of equivocal mimicry. ‘I am a virgin,’ she said softly, in a troubling tone of innuendo, and still more softly, ‘I swear I am! And yet I don’t weep, as you see!’ With a solemn gesture she pretended to wipe her eyes to show that they were dry.

  Betka laughed.

  ‘And now,’ continued Veronica, ‘look at the proof of what I’m telling you,’ and she slowly, very slowly raised her closed hand till it was higher than her head. Then she opened it maliciously, and meaningfully shook her ring-finger which had a little gauze bandage held in place by a strip of pink adhesive tape. ‘You see? A wound!’ she said blinking her eyes.

  Betka was utterly bewildered, but she blushed nevertheless, accentuating her weakness by shaking her head with a charming look of annoyance that was meant to disavow her blushes. Then Veronica brought her chair close to Betka’s in sign of tenderness and as she was preparing to begin her confidences she gave Betka her injured finger to hold.

  ‘Take it,’ she said, ‘but don’t press unless I make you blush.’

  Betka took the finger with her two hands and lifted it to her lips, barely grazing it with a kiss. Veronica then began her tale with diabolical animation.

  ‘I, Veronica Stevens, am a virgin – married and chaste. I am a virgin, because instead of being married to a man I am married to a woman. You know her – Barbara, my mother. We sleep together whenever she feels like weeping. This happens about twice a week; I have to console her, from time to time, for the heavy burden of her frivolity; she comes running into my bed and makes me put something on; otherwise she would feel shame; then I have to snuggle up to her from behind, hold her tight, rest my cheek against the back of her neck to warm it. That makes her sleep. Then immediately I slip out of my pyjamas and get rid of them; and if she wakes up in the middle of the night she screams with fright as if my body were a demon’s. Will you believe that my mother never kisses me? She cares for me only as a warm hot-water bottle that sometimes calms her insomnias. Just as she can’t stand the direct contact of hot-water bottles either. She always has to have everything covered.

  ‘The day after our curious love-nights, I always receive a present; I let Mama give me all these presents in the same way that Mama lets me love her – that is to say, without noticing it. Here is the most recent of these presents,’ and she showed Betka the belt she was wearing, whose clasp was a gold padlock.

  ‘As usual, I didn’t notice it,’ Veronica continued. ‘I had made a date with a man, a Frenchman, in his apartment. He immediately noticed it, and while he was pouring a cocktail he said to me. “I feel that destiny has chosen me to free you of your chastity belt.” I didn’t answer. I like the reputation of being a cold and inaccessible woman. For me love must be severe, like a kind of military pact between two conquerors, and no confusion of the senses must precede the signing of the treaty. Perhaps it was in the spirit of this kind of treaty that I went to his apartment. I was wearing a sober tailored suit, cut like armour, and he received me in slippers. I recognized immediately by these slippers that he was not “the one”. Instead of a treaty he simply tried to wrench his pleasure from me and he went about it so awkwardly that he couldn’t undo my belt, whose new clasp was a little hard to open. I told him to wait a moment, that I would take it off myself, and I stepped back two paces and tried. In the clumsiness of his haste he had only succeeded in jamming the buckle, and I had to press so hard that the clasp cut my finger. But nothing in the world could have stopped my growing exertion just then, and I finally could feel the metal enter to the bone like a Gillette blade. None the less. I carried out this whole operation with so much calm and stoicism that he had no suspicion of my pain. I saw him standing there in front of me, very pleased with himself, his two hands stuck in the pockets of his cashmere dressing-gown, and yet trembling with desire like a leaf. Then I pressed on the lock even harder, and it was my bone that finally released the spring. The sound of it made him shudder, as well as my look, and without having had time to realize what I was about to do he was already drawing back. At that I grabbed the end of my belt and struck his yellowish feet so hard that with a single blow I made him fall on his knees, at my knees…. You see? I guess I can’t have any temperament….’

  Betka, who had been looking at her worshipfully during the whole telling of her story, again lifted the injured finger to her lips to kiss it.

  ‘I never want to think of love,’ Veronica went on, putting some sugar in Betka’s coffee, ‘I feel that in my case it’s too important. The day he comes it will be terrible, and if I began I should never let go, to the end. But I won’t change the look in my eyes. You understand, Betka? For me the sensation of love is that of a single glance which has become emotionless through so much, so much confidence, just as a red-hot iron turns white! You see? A kind of burning calm. What about you, Angel?’ Veronica then asked her, obliging her to lose herself in the depths of her eyes to tear from her all her sincerity.

  ‘With me,’ Betka said, yielding with a fragile smile by which she implored her pity, ‘with me it’s only a kind of continual toothache in the heart!… without let-up.’

  How it was raining outside now!

  The dessert arrived, borne in triumph on a beribboned silver chariot adorned with huts with illuminated marzipan windows, wax roses and sugar squirrels.

  Veronica laughingly exclaimed, ‘Now you’ve got something for your teeth and for your heart ache!’ And immediately she became tyrannical. Betka had to try everything, from the melancholy chocolate tart’s sentimental flavour of a Viennese Sunday interior lighted by the rays of a pagan sun, to the Smyrna figs stuffed with walnuts, and the pastries drunk with rum, passing through the surprises of the melting and Mohammedan skies of liquor-filled candies and reaching at last the voluptuous and slightly nauseating suffocation of the ultimate petit-four. During all this time, as she had likewise premeditated, Veronica bewitched her friend by the unbridled galloping of the thousand-and-one nights of her fantasy with which she would eventually enchain her friend’s wonder-starved spirit. It was a kind of delirious fairy-tale, with just two fairies: the two of them.

  Veronica had the idea of projecting coloured moving pictures on Betka’s teeth, with a different film on each tooth! She was going to make her a present of a dress that would be lighted from within by mercury rays that would make the whole surface of the body erogenous. She was going to lend her a salve by virtue of which one could appear at a dinner with one’s head invisible. She would show her obsidian earrings into which living cholera microbes had been inserted; she knew how to carve a love poem in the immaculate white of a tender almond, just as it was shaping: later, when she broke it and removed the skin her handwriting would appear on it! Also how to provoke dreams of flight at will, how without sleeping to see a man advance, masked in white. Betka, dumbfounded, with teeth clenched, tried to follow this dizzy flight of images, and as when one approaches certain too rapid turns, she would often shut her eyes and, smiling at her fear, would reopen them immediately after each of these dangerous curves.

  Her face suddenly darkening, Veronica said, ‘I shouldn’t have drunk champagne. I have my migraine; and here I’ve been talking like a madwoman!’

  Veronica dropped Betka at the Quai des Orfèvres, gave her a rapid kiss and flung out the words, ‘I’ll telephone you tomorrow!’

  Betka went to sleep delightfully exhausted, in a happy confusion from which emerged a single gaze and a single head of hair – Veronica! But she awoke late and frightfully anguished, and an absurd fear immediately assailed her: she would not see her friend again. Betka said to herself, ‘How is she going to be able to telephone me? I didn’t give her my address.’ This animated her for a moment, justifying her, she thought, in telephoning her herself, but she immediately became gloomy, convinced that Miss Andrews did in fact have her address and telephone number. What a day to look forward to! All her hours taken, and so it was always – never anything, then all of a sudden everything happened to her at once! She had waited for months, she had written, forced herself into offices, telephoned and re-telephoned without results, all in vain. But since yesterday everything got into motion at once: she had to be at Mademoiselle Chanel’s to try out as a model, be at half-past four at the Propaganda Bureau for a radio test, then she had had to drop in at the editorial office of La Flèche to do some typing, and so on and so forth! Yet she had already resolved not to go out on any pretext before Veronica’s telephone call, for it would come as always just at a moment when she was out.

  Toward four o’clock Betka said to herself, ‘I’ll wait another fifteen minutes. If she hasn’t called, I’ll phone her.’

  But at seven neither of them had called the other and Betka, stretched out on her bed, reflected that the meeting with Veronica had occurred at the most critical and unhappy moment of her life. Not that her childhood had been happy, quite the contrary. But now it was as though the persistent rains of the bitterness of her childhood were oozing through the walls of the present prison of her guilt-feelings; how dearly, with what hell of anguish and remorse she had to pay for every little bit of pleasure that her body managed to snatch from her daily life so harassed with cares! As an adolescent in love with love, she had feared pleasure; now pleasure goaded her with new fears, the lugubrious fears of disappointment and disenchantment. Never yet had she had the courage to ‘begin again’ with the same person, so hideous did these experiences become in her memory. The only pleasure without shame that she had found in her whole life, she knew it now, was that of her meeting with Veronica; aside from this, ever since she had acquired the use of reason, she had known only the anxiety of her body and a fearful wish to end everything. She remembered having felt an irresistible urge to suicide. It was when she was eight years old, in a little village near the Russian frontier, that she had lived her martyrdom. All the visions of this period had the gall-taste of punishment and she had had more than sufficient motives to convince herself that the life she endured with her brothers was not a happy one! Their mother mistreated them pitilessly with words and acts; one day she strapped Betka’s big brother to the bars of his bed and threatened to put out his eyes with her red-hot curling iron. Yet her mother was an intelligent and very beautiful woman, with fiery red hair. She was refined in manner, and for all who did not know her domestic furies she must have appeared to be a creature full of distinction. Seeing her appear among her friends, the soft curves of her bosom swelling from her low-cut dress and her eyelids, always half shut, bespeaking gentleness, no one in the world would have suspected her inhuman cruelty, her systematic, persevering and meticulous way of making her children suffer. She was astute, possessed a will of iron and was a fanatic on cleanliness, which did not prevent her from having a peculiar smell, as of burnt coffee. With her strange instinct that enabled her to discover all the most vulnerable points in the little souls of her children, she would contrive to sink the needles of her arbitrariness into them, pinning them to the four walls of her bedroom, papered in a pattern of corn and poppies, where she would lock them up and exercise her despotic domination. Never were they allowed to go out and play! Oh, thistles by the roadside, evening star!