Walter laughed once more.
“How old are you? Don’t you know what men do to women? Don’t you have a feather? Look at mine”.
He took from the pocket of his tunic a small, black, bird’s feather.
In that moment I felt that I was being overwhelmed by one of my usual crises. Perhaps Walter would not have taken the feather out of his pocket had I continued to bear that cellar’s air of complete desolation to the very end. In an instant, however, the isolation took on a painful and profound meaning. I now realised how far the cellar was from the town and its dusty streets. It was as if I had grown distant from myself, in the solitude of the subterranean depths beneath an ordinary summer’s day. The black, glossy feather Walter showed me meant that nothing else existed in my familiar world. Everything entered a fainting fit where it gleamed strangely, in the middle of a strange room with damp grasses, in the darkness that inhaled the light like a cold, ravenous mouth.
“What’s up with you?” Walter asked. “Let me tell you what we do with the feather…”
The sky outside, through the mouth of the cellar, became whiter and whiter, more vaporous. The words tapped up against the walls, they softly slid down me like some fluid creature.
Walter went on talking to me. But it was as if he was so far away from me and so ethereal that he seemed a mere clear space in the dark, a patch of mist palpitating in the shadow.
“First you stroke the girl”, I heard him as though in a dream, “then, also with the feather, you stroke yourself… These are the things you have to know…”
All of a sudden Walter drew closer to me and began to shake me, as though to wake me from sleep. Slowly, slowly, I began to come round. When I had fully opened my eyes, Walter was bending over my pubis, with his mouth tightly stuck to my sex. It was impossible for me to understand what was going on.
Walter stood up.
“See, that made you better… In the war, the Indians wake their wounded like that and in our gang we know all the Indian spells and cures”.
I awoke groggy and exhausted. Walter ran off and vanished. I too climbed the steps, cautiously.
In the days that followed, I sought him everywhere, but in vain. It had been agreed that I should meet him in the cellar, but when I went there it seemed wholly altered. Everywhere there were heaps of garbage, with dead animals and putrefaction that reeked dreadfully in the sun. With Walter I had not seen anything of this. I gave up going to the cellar and thus I never met Walter again.
*
I procured a feather, which I kept in great secrecy, wrapped up in a piece of newspaper in my pocket. It sometimes seemed to me that I myself had invented the whole story with the feather and that Walter had never existed. From time to time I would unwrap the feather from its newspaper and gaze at it for a long while: its mystery was impenetrable. I would brush its silky soft gloss across my cheek and that caress would cause me to shudder a little, as though an invisible, albeit real, person were touching my face with his fingertips. The first time I made use of it was one beautiful evening, in circumstances that are quite extraordinary.
I liked to stay outside until late. That evening a heavy and oppressive storm had sprung up. All the heat of the day had condensed into an overpowering atmosphere, under a black sky slashed by streaks of lightning. I was sitting on the threshold of a house and watching the play of the electric light on the walls of the lane. The wind was shaking the light bulb that illuminated the street, and the concentric circles of the globe, casting shadows onto the walls, were rocking like water sloshing in a pot. Long streamers of dust were being whipped up in the road and rising in spirals.
All of a sudden within a shroud of wind it seemed to me that a white marble statue was rising into the air. There was in that moment a certitude that was unverifiable, like any other certitude. The white block of stone was rapidly receding into the air, in an oblique direction, like a balloon released from a child’s hand. In a few moments the statue became a mere white patch in the sky, as big as my fist. Now I could distinctly see two white figures, holding hands and gliding across the sky like skiers.
In that moment a little girl came to a stop in front of me. I must have been sitting open-mouthed and gazing wide-eyed aloft because she asked me in astonishment what it was I could see in the sky.
“Look… a flying statue… look quick… soon it will vanish…”
The girl looked carefully, knitting her brows, and told me she could not see anything. She was a girl from the neighbourhood, plump, with ruddy cheeks like medicinal rubber, her hands forever moist. Up until that evening I had spoken to her only rarely. And as she stood there before me she suddenly began to laugh:
“I know why you tricked me…” she said, “I know what you want…”
She started to move away from me, hopping. I stood up and ran after her; I beckoned her into a dark passageway and she came without resistance. Then I lifted up her dress. She allowed herself to be manhandled, docilely holding onto my shoulders. Perhaps she was more surprised at what was happening than aware of the immodesty of the deed.
The most surprising consequence of this occurrence took place a few days later in the middle of a square. A few builders were slaking quicklime in a bin. I was looking at the seething quicklime when all of a sudden I heard my name called out and someone said loudly: “With the feather, you mean to say… with the feather… eh?” It was a lad of about twenty, a ginger and insufferable lout. I think he lived in a house down that passageway. I glimpsed him for no more than a moment, shouting at me, on the other side of the bin, emerging fantastically from the vapours of the quicklime like a hellish apparition, speaking in the midst of fire and cracks of thunder.
Perhaps he said something else to me, and my imagination lent his words a meaning about which I was preoccupied in those days; I could not believe that he had really seen me in the compact darkness of the passageway. Nonetheless, thinking about this thing more carefully, it occurred to me that the passageway was not as obscure as it had appeared to me and that everything had been visible (perhaps we had even been standing in the light)… all these were as many suppositions which strengthened my conviction that during the sexual act I was possessed by a dream that muddied my sight and my senses. I imposed greater prudence upon myself. Who knows to what aberrations I was capable of abandoning myself, in broad daylight, in the thrall of excitement and possessed by it like a heavy sleep in which I moved unaware?
Closely connected to the memory of the feather a very disturbing little black book also comes to mind. I had found it in a row of books on a table and leafed through it with great interest. It was a banal novel, Frida by André Theuriet, in an illustrated edition with a great number of drawings. In each drawing recurred the image of a young boy with curly blond hair, in velvet garb, and a plump little girl, in a flouncy dress. The little boy resembled Walter. The children appeared in the drawings now together, now separately; it was plain to see that they met above all in the nooks of a park and beneath ruined walls. What did they do together? This is what I would have liked to know. Did the young boy have a feather like mine, which he kept in the pocket of his coat? In the drawings this thing was not visible and I had no time to read the book. A few days later, the little black book vanished without trace. I began to seek it everywhere. I asked at bookshops but it seemed that no one had heard of it. It must have been a book full of secrets given that it was not to be procured anywhere at all.
One day I plucked up courage and went into the public library. A tall, pale man with slightly quivering spectacles was sitting at the back of the room and watched me as I approached. I could no longer turn back. I had to advance as far as the table and there pronounce distinctly the sensational word “Fri-da”, like a confession, before that myopic man, of all my hidden vices. I approached the lectern and murmured in a hushed voice the name of the book. The librarian’s spectacles started to quiver more noticeably on his nose; he closed his eyes as though he were seeking something in his memory, and he told me that he had not heard of it. The quivering of his spectacles nevertheless seemed