He was a man small in stature, with an egg-shaped head. The pointed extremity of the egg extended into a black, continually quivering little beard. The small, velvety eyes, his clipped gestures and protruding mouth made him resemble a mouse. From the very first, this impression was so powerful that it seemed only natural to me that, on hearing him speak, he pronounced each “r” sonorously and trillingly, as if while talking he were always nibbling something on the sly.
The quinine he gave me also strengthened my conviction that the physician had something mousy about him. Verification of this conviction came about so queerly and is bound to such important events in my childhood that the occurrence is, I believe, worthy of being narrated separately.
Near our house there was a sewing machine shop where I used to go every day and stay for hours. The proprietor was a young man, Eugene, who had just finished his military service and had found himself an occupation in town by opening this shop. He had a sister a year younger than himself: Clara. They lived together somewhere in an outlying district, and by day they looked after the shop; they had neither acquaintances nor relatives.
The shop was merely a private room, newly let out for trade.
The walls still preserved their living-room paint, with violet garlands of lilac and the rectangular, fading traces of the places where the paintings had been hung. In the middle of the ceiling remained a bronze lamp with a dark-red majolica calotte, its edges covered with green acanthus leaves in faience relief. It was a highly ornamented object, old and outmoded, but imposing, something resembling a funerary monument or a veteran general wearing his old uniform on parade.
The sewing machines were lined up in three orderly rows, leaving between them two wide lanes as far as the back. Eugene took care to sprinkle the floor every morning, using an old tin can with a hole in the bottom. The thread of water that trickled out was very fine and Eugene dextrously manipulated it, tracing erudite spirals and figures-of-eight on the floor. Sometimes he would sign his name and write the day’s date. The painted walls evidently demanded such delicacies.
At the back of the shop, a screen of planks separated a kind of cabin from the rest of the room. A green curtain covered the entrance. It was there that Eugene and Clara always used to sit. They ate their lunch there, so as not to leave the shop during the day. They called it “the artistes’ cabin” and one day I heard Eugene saying: “It’s a genuine ‘artiste’s cabin’. When I go into the shop and speak for half an hour to sell a sewing machine, am I not acting out a comedy?”
And he added in a more learned tone: “Life, in general, is pure theatre”.
Behind the curtain, Eugene would play the violin. He kept the notes on the table and stood hunched over them, patiently deciphering the jumbled staves as though he were untangling a knotted clew of threads in order to extract from them one single fine strand, the strand of the musical piece. All afternoon, a small petroleum lamp used to burn on a chest, filling the room with a dead light and scattering the enormous shadow of the violinist over the wall.
I went there so often that in time I became a kind of additional piece of furniture, an extension of the old oil-cloth couch on which I sat immobile, a thing with which no one concerned himself and which hampered no one.
At the back of the cabin, Clara used to do her toilette in the afternoon. She kept her dresses in a cupboard, and she would peer into a broken mirror propped against the lamp on the chest. The mirror was so old that the silvering had rubbed away in places and through the transparent spots loomed the real objects behind the mirror, blending with the reflected images as though in a photograph with superimposed negatives.
Sometimes she would undress almost completely and rub her armpits with cologne, raising her arms without embarrassment, or her breasts, thrusting her hand between body and chemise. The chemise was short, and when she bent over I could see in their entirety her very beautiful legs, squeezed by well-smoothed stockings. She wholly resembled the half-naked woman I had once seen on a pornographic postcard that a pretzel vendor had shown me in the park.
She aroused in me the same hazy swoon as that obscene image, a kind of void that swelled in my chest at the same time as a terrifying sexual hunger clenched my pubis like a claw.
In the cabin, I always sat in the same place on the couch behind Eugene, and waited for Clara to finish her toilette. Then she would leave the shop, passing between her brother and me through a gap so narrow that she would have to rub her thighs against my knees.
Every day, I would wait for that moment with the same impatience and the same torment. It was dependent upon a host of petty circumstances, which I would weigh up and lie in wait for, with an exasperated and extraordinarily sharpened sensibility. It would be enough for Eugene to be thirsty, for him not to feel like playing, or for a customer to come into the shop to make him abandon the place by the table and then there would be enough free space for Clara to be able to pass at a distance from me.
When I used to go there in the afternoon, as I neared the door of the shop I would extrude long quivering antennae, which would explore the air to pick up the sound of the violin. If I heard Eugene playing, a great calm would come over me. I would enter as softly as possible and say my name aloud on the very threshold, so that he would not think it was a customer and interrupt his playing even for an instant. In that instant, it would have been possible for the inertia and the mirage of the melody abruptly to cease and for Eugene to lay aside his violin and play no more that afternoon. For all that, the possibility of unfavourable occurrences did not cease. There were so many things happening in the cabin… During all the time that Clara was doing her toilette, I would listen for the tiniest sounds and follow the tiniest movements in fear that from them the afternoon might develop into a disaster. It was possible, for example, for Eugene to cough lightly, to swallow a little saliva and suddenly say that he was thirsty or going to the confectioners to buy a cake. From infinitesimally small events, such as that cough, a lost afternoon would emerge monstrous, enormous. The entire day would then lose its importance and in bed at night, instead of thinking at leisure (and lingering for a few minutes on each detail in order to “see” and remember it the better) about the moment when my knees touched Clara’s stockings – let me carve, sculpt, caress this thought – I would toss feverishly between the sheets, unable to sleep and impatiently waiting for the next day.
One day, something wholly unusual happened. The occurrence commenced with the allure of a disaster and culminated with an unhoped-for surprise, but in such a sudden way and with a gesture so petty that my entire subsequent joy at it was like a stack of heteroclite objects that a conjurer holds in equilibrium at a single point.
Clara, with a single step, changed the content of my visits in its entirety, giving them a different meaning and new frissons, the same as in that chemistry experiment in which I saw how a single piece of crystal immersed in a test-tube of red liquid instantaneously transformed it into an astonishing green.
I was on the couch, in the same place, waiting with the same impatience as ever, when the door opened and someone entered the shop. Eugene immediately left the cabin. All seemed lost. Clara, indifferent, continued to do her toilette, while the conversation in the shop went on endlessly. Nonetheless, it was still possible for Eugene to return before his sister finished dressing.
I painfully followed the thread of the two events, Clara’s toilette and the conversation in the shop, thinking that they might unwind parallel to one another until Clara left the shop, or on the contrary they might meet at the fixed point of the cabin, as in those cinematographic films where two locomotives hurtle towards each other and either meet or pass alongside depending on whether a mysterious hand shifts the points at the last moment. In those moments of waiting I categorically felt that the conversation was taking its course and, on a parallel path,