It seemed that through the mirror Clara was looking at me and smiling.
She soon finished rounding off the contour of her lips with carmine and powdering her cheek with the puff one last time. The perfume that diffused through the cabin had dizzied me with lust and desperation. At the moment when she passed by me, the thing I was least expecting occurred: she rubbed her thighs against my knees the same as every other day (or perhaps harder? but this was an illusion of course) with the indifferent air that nothing was going on between us.
There is a complicity of vice deeper and quicker than any verbal understanding. It instantaneously pierces the body like an inner melody and entirely transforms thoughts, flesh and blood.
In that fraction of a second, when Clara’s legs touched mine, immense new expectations and new hopes had come to birth in me.
*
With Clara, I understood everything from the very first day, from the very first moment; it was my first complete and normal sexual adventure. An adventure full of torments and expectations, full of disquietudes and gnashing of teeth, something that would have resembled love had it not been a mere continuation of aching impatience. To the same extent that I was impulsive and daring, Clara was calm and capricious; she had a violent way of arousing me and a bitchy joy in seeing me suffer – a joy that always preceded the sexual act and formed part of it.
The first time when the thing for which I had been waiting so long happened between us, her provocation was of such an elementary (and almost brutal) simplicity that that meagre phrase she then uttered and that anonymous verb she employed still preserve in me even today something of their former virulence. It is enough for me to think about them a while longer in order for my present indifference to be bitten away as though by an acid and for the phrase to become as violent as it was then.
*
Eugene had gone into town. We were both sitting silently in the shop. Clara in her afternoon dress, cross-legged behind the window, was absorbed in her knitting. A few weeks had passed since the occurrence in the cabin and between us a severe coldness had suddenly arisen, a secret tension that translated as extreme indifference on her part. We would sit in front of each other for whole hours without uttering a word, but nonetheless in that silence there floated a perfectly secret understanding like the threat of an explosion. I lacked merely the mysterious word that would puncture the membrane of conventionality; I would make dozens of plans each evening but the next day they would strike up against the most elementary obstacles: the knitting that could not be interrupted, the lack of a more favourable light, the silence in the shop, or the three rows of sewing machines, too neatly lined up to allow any significant exchange in the shop, be it even one of a sentimental order. All the while I would be clenching my jaws; it was a terrible silence, a silence that in me had the definiteness and the outline of a scream.
It was Clara who interrupted it. She spoke almost in a whisper, without raising her eyes from her knitting: “If you’d come earlier today, we could have done it. Eugene went into town straight after lunch”.
Up until then, not even the shadow of a sexual allusion had filtered into our silence, and lo and behold now, from these few words, a new reality gushes up between us, as miraculous and extraordinary as though a marble statue had risen in the midst of the sewing machines, sprouting from the floor.
In an instant I was beside Clara, I clasped her hand and violently caressed it. I kissed her hand. She snatched it away. “Hey, leave me be”, she said, annoyed. “Please come, Clara…” “It’s too late now, Eugene is coming back, leave me be, leave me be”. I was feverishly touching her shoulders, her breasts, her legs. “Leave me be”, protested Clara. “Come now, we still have time”, I implored. “Where?” “Into the cabin… come on… it’s good there”.
And when I said “good” my chest swelled with a warm hope. I kissed her hand once more and forcibly tugged her off the chair. She reluctantly allowed herself to be led, dragging her feet across the floor.
From that day on, the afternoons changed their “customs”: it was still a case of Eugene, still a case of Clara and of those same sonatas, but now the playing of the violin became intolerable to me and my impatience lay in wait for the moment when Eugene would have to leave. In the same cabin, my disquietudes became different, as though I was playing a new game on a board with lines traced for an already familiar game.
When Eugene left, the true wait would begin. It was a harder, more intolerable wait than hitherto; the silence of the shop would turn into a block of ice.
Clara would seat herself at the window and knit: every day this was the “beginning”, and without a beginning our adventure could not take place. Sometimes, Eugene would go out leaving Clara almost undressed in the cabin: I thought that this might hasten events, but I was wrong. Clara would accept no other beginning than that in the shop. I would have to wait pointlessly for her to dress and go into the shop in order to open the book of the afternoon at the first page, behind the window.
I would sit on a stool in front of her and begin to talk to her, to beg her, to implore her for a long time. I knew it was useless; Clara would accept only rarely and even then she would make use of a ruse, in order not to grant me perfect liberty:
“I’m going into the cabin to take a powder, I have a terrible headache, please don’t come after me”.
I would swear not to and then follow in an instant. In the cabin, a veritable battle would begin, in which, obviously, Clara’s forces were inclined to surrender. Then she would tumble all in one piece onto the couch, as though she had tripped up. She would put her hands under her head and close her eyes as though she were asleep. It was impossible to budge her from that position so much as an inch; just as she was, lying on her side, I would have to tear the dress from under her thighs and press myself to her. Clara put up no resistance to my gestures, but nor did she give me any assistance. She was as inert and as indifferent as a block of wood, and only her intimate and secret warmth revealed to me that she was mindful, that she “knew”.
*
It was during this period that the physician who prescribed me quinine was consulted. Confirmation of my impression that there was something mousy about him came in the cabin, and, as I have said, in a manner wholly absurd and surprising.
One day, as I was sitting pressed up against Clara and tearing off her dress with feverish hands, I felt something odd moving in the cabin and – more with the obscure but finely honed instinct of the extreme pleasure I was nearing, which admitted no alien presence, than with my real senses – I guessed that a living creature was watching us.
Frightened, I turned my head and on the chest, behind the box of powder, I glimpsed a mouse. It stopped right by the mirror at the edge of the chest and fixed me with its beady black eyes, in which the light of the lamp placed two gleaming golden pips, which pierced me deeply. For a few seconds, it looked into my eyes with such acuity that I felt the gaze of those two glassy points boring into the depths of my brain. It seemed as though it were meditating on a harsh rebuke to me or merely a reproach. But all of a sudden the fascination was shattered and the mouse fled, vanishing behind the chest. I was certain that the doctor had come to spy on me.
The same evening, when I took the quinine, my supposition was bolstered by a perfectly illogical albeit, for me, valid reasoning: the quinine was bitter; on the other hand, in the cabin the doctor had seen the pleasure Clara suddenly offered me; in consequence, and for the establishment of a just balance, he had prescribed me the most unpleasant medicament that could exist. I could hear him nibbling the judgement in his mind: “The grrreater the pleasurrre, the morrre bitterrr the pill!”
A few months after the consultation, the doctor was found dead on the floor of his house; he had fired a bullet into his brow.
My first question on hearing the sinister news was:
“Were