“Don’t you find that certain moments seem to repeat themselves?” I asked Maryse.
“Yes, especially the bad ones,” she replied, still in a foul mood. The previous night, as we slept in a roadside inn, the gypsies had stolen Maryse’s excellent carriage horses from the stable, hitched them to their wagon, and disappeared, leaving an old mule and a sick bear by way of compensation. I had never seen my friend so irate; she swore like a soldier and unfairly accused the innkeeper of having been an accomplice to the theft. Nothing would calm her down, not even my offer of money to buy new horses.
“What bothers me the most, goddammit, is that I’ve always defended the gypsies!” she shouted, furiously kicking hay about the stable. Finally, realizing that it was growing late, she informed the innkeeper that he’d pay dearly were anything to happen to her carriage, and then she’d climbed into mine, followed by Claudette.
At last we arrived at Baden-Baden, where we’d been invited for a few days’ work in the municipal theater. In those days, the city was nothing like what it is today—to judge from what I read in the newspapers. Not only was it a gathering place for European aristocracy, it was where the French nobility, fleeing the Revolution, had emigrated. Sitting in a box seat with Françoise, I watched as the theater filled up with those pathetic courtiers who, in order to demonstrate their allegiance with the Monarchist cause, dressed in the old style, delicately taking their snuff and behaving with the same affectation as if they were attending a palace soirée. I would later find out that their numbers were dwindling. Feeling themselves at risk under the new Confederation of the Rhine—Baden had become a grand duchy under French protection—many sought refuge in Austria, Russia, England, and even America. But traveling was expensive, and while there were those bankers and dandies who had managed to escape with their fortunes intact and who could permit themselves the luxury of settling wherever they saw fit, others, less fortunate, had resorted to gambling in the hope of, one day, imitating them. The result was that Baden-Baden, best known for the virtues of its thermal springs, had, in a very few years, become a city full of gamblers, and was now attracting people from all over, including Italy, Switzerland, and the Rhineland.
After the show, we went out into the hallway that led to the staircase. The crowd was so dense we could hardly move. Fanning myself was useless; I could feel the sweat dripping down my body. It seemed like no one was leaving the building and, when I complained of this out loud, a woman with a tall coiffure turned around and informed me that the majority of the people were headed to the game rooms. At last we made it to the first floor, where Maryse, Claudette, and a few of the Italians were waiting for us at the entrance to the restaurant. After waiting more than half an hour we finally managed to secure a table. The food was well prepared despite the huge number of diners, but I couldn’t help but notice how high the prices were. Andrea Morini, who played the role of Harlequin, suggested that we visit one of the game rooms. But at the thought of being suffocated once again by the crowd, I declined.
“Perhaps tomorrow,” said Maryse, agreeing with me. “My head hurts and I need to rest. Those damned gypsies have ruined my whole day.”
When I awoke and saw the sun lighting up the room, I decided I was finished with dressing in mourning. The unusual heat of that June cried out for cool, white clothes, and further, I realized that black was no longer an accurate reflection of my state of mind.
I began to regret the decision the moment I went down to breakfast. Andrea and Piet stared at me with such insistence that I flushed bright red. It was clear that, to them, I had ceased to be a bereaved widow. As I ate breakfast, surrounded by their flirtatious attentions, I realized that I needed to come up with a defensive strategy before any unpleasantness arose. My feet were already being sought under the table, and I did not wish to allow things to go any further. But what might be the most effective way to discourage my two sudden admirers? And it wasn’t that I was entirely indifferent to them. They were both intelligent and attractive, each in his own way. It was just that, after Robert’s death, no man seemed to warrant my affections. My desire still belonged to him, to the point that I sometimes awoke with the pillow pressed between my legs and an urgent need to feel him inside me. When this happened, I would close my eyes and, straddling the pillow, evoke his body, his voice, his kisses, his caresses, trying to recover one of our nights in Vienna or Munich or Berlin.
After the show that evening, I went with Maryse and Professor Kosti to the theater manager’s office to collect our money. Professor Kosti, whose real name was Erich Kraft, had volunteered as the troupe’s bookkeeper. He was from Berlin, tall, and middle-aged, with pale eyes which, magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses, intimidated anyone who didn’t know him well. In his youth he had been fruitlessly obsessed with demonstrating some geometric property or another of parallel lines. Frustrated in his aspirations, he had instead succeeded in training a horse in such a way that it appeared to know arithmetic. His most popular act had two parts to it: in the first, he would ask the audience for two numbers of up to six digits each, which he would then multiply and divide by each other on the spot, without the aid of paper and pencil, coming up with the answers minutes before anyone in the audience could calculate them; in the second, one of the tightrope walkers would appear on stage dressed as an Amazon, leading Pythagoras by the bridle. The horse would then be asked to solve any mathematical problem—including square and cubic roots—so long as the answer was not longer than a single digit. Once he had arrived at the number, Kosti would move to the horse’s ear, translate into horse language the operation to be carried out, and Pythagoras would give the answer by elegantly raising and lowering his right hoof.
After she’d received the money owed us for the two nights of performances and distributed it among the members of the company, Maryse collected five francs from each of us so that Kosti could play roulette—after studying the game, the mathematician believed he had hit upon a winning system. Roulette was still a novel game in those days, having been brought to Baden-Baden by exiled aristocrats. The advantage it held over rouge et noir, a card game that had also been introduced by the French, was that, in addition to being faster, more players could participate at once, making it more like a raffle or a lottery. The roulette room was so packed with players that we had a difficult time even getting through the door. Since the Germany of those days included dozens of states, and the largest of them minted their own money, the game room cashier used the new franc as the base currency of exchange. So as to avoid confusion, one didn’t play with real money but with tokens made of bone, with a different color corresponding to each player.
Aside from the rounds of faro that I had played with Robert, the only purpose of which had been to prove that I could beat him, I had never been interested in gambling. Raised in accordance with Aunt Margot’s customs, I had always preferred outdoor pastimes. Nevertheless, I tingled with impatience and excitement in anticipation of watching my friends play. Would Kosti’s system work? Could studying the diagram on the roulette wheel for a few hours really be sufficient to uncover the secret to the game? Could it be true that the probability that the marble would fall on a given number was predetermined by a law of mathematics? If that were so, I thought, the future would be predictable and those who understood numbers would take the place of astrologers and fortunetellers. Suddenly, my memory took a kind of leap and I remembered a forgotten episode: as a child, in Toulouse, a Spanish gypsy had read in my palm that I would marry three times, none of them in France. “Les jeux sont faits, rien ne va plus,” she’d said in a mechanical voice. I looked over Maryse’s shoulder toward the roulette table: the ball jumped from one number to the next until at last coming to rest. “Nine, red,” announced the croupier. Maryse could not repress a cry of joy: she had won seven hundred francs.
Standing behind my friends—only those playing were permitted to sit—I watched them play for a while. Kosti’s system did not appear to be such a miraculous thing. Though he did win more than he lost, his winnings did not amount to more than a hundred francs. As for