It was like a cabin on a luxury liner, even with a small window, closed with a nickel handle, shimmering behind a curtain embroidered with white birds. The scent of sweet perfume had faded the velvet curtains and bedspread to a bitter cherry hue. The singer moved forward into the jellylike air and pulled the curtains over the image of the yellow house next door. With the click of a lamp in the penumbra, the dark became red. Small Chinese vases and coffee cups lay in a crystal box, inlaid with walnut, with marquetry depicting warmly glittering lilies. Mioara gently lifted the lid of a gramophone and set a disk on the turntable. The chrome arm grated its needle over the black and red disk until they heard a tango that Maria recognized immediately:
When the depths of your eyes I miss
I sip from their dream rays at night
Little stars call me to you in whispers
They hunger for love’s paradise …
There weren’t any chairs, so after Mioara took off her shoes and lay over the bed, crossways, with a bare arm under her head, Maria sat on the bed, too. “Your place is so beautiful,” she whispered, enchanted. On the wall, a black velvet mask peered at her intensely, with hatred in its obliquely cut eyes. The singer lit a cigarette and, looking at the ceiling, where a coquettish glass majolica lamp was barely visible, slowly exhaled the smoke, which mixed with the transparent garlands on the arms of the lamp. Then she rose on one elbow and looked Maria long in the eyes again, hers half closed, as she had beneath the streetlight. The girl felt that nothing else in the world existed outside of this room where the two of them gazed at each other. Her heart suddenly become heavy, without knowing why, and when Mioara reached out her arm, like a pale snake that had a grown woman’s fingers, she suddenly broke into a sweat.
They remained silent until the end of the song. When the needle began to grate again over the glossy ebonite, the singer hopped up and closed the gramophone. Then she revealed (it had been covered with a flowery cashmere scarf) the toilet mirror in the green darkness, where the two of them appeared, whitish-brown, with sparkling eyes. “Help me take off my dress,” said Mioara, and Maria, obedient as a maid, came up behind her and began to unbutton it, revealing the singer’s neck and back, while she took off her earrings and bracelets, which left red lines over her elbows. Mioara pulled the dress over her head and remained in her slip, girdle and silk stockings, all as sparkling black as her short cropped hair. “That’s much better,” she whispered and lay back across the bed. Although she was skinny, the performer had large, round breasts and a firm bottom, and she seemed more womanly and more attractive the more she undressed. Maria looked shyly at the glistening skin of her protector’s thighs, between the edge of the fringe of her slip and the garter holding her stocking. All of the girls she had ever seen naked, by the river, the Tântava, had, like she did, like her sister, legs full of little lines of hair, but Mioara’s thighs were like ivory. And when the singer took off her stockings, rolling them, tinted like glass, toward the tips of her toes, the girl saw that her entire leg was white and clean, with painted toenails. “Take off your dress, too,” she said to the other in passing, once she dropped the rest of her dessous. Fear and confusion rose in Maria. Why had the singer undressed? Why wasn’t she embarrassed to show everything, everything? She had hair there, too, it was the only place on her body where she was like all girls, like all women. Maria had never seen such a beautiful woman. She lit up the room, and even her darker parts, the cherry-red coins of her nipples and the black triangle between her thighs glowed strangely in the air as thick as syrup. Embarrassed, not knowing what to think, feel, or do, she said: “But I’m not warm, it’s not that warm.” “No, but you’ll feel more relaxed.” As Maria hesitated, the singer stood, took a few steps over to a small, carved walnut sideboard and retrieved a bottle and two stemmed glasses. She poured a glass of an almost-black liquor and handed it to the girl. She turned the gramophone disk over, and they listed to “Zaraza”:
When you, señorita, came to the park that evening
With lily petals in your wake
You had eyes of tender passion, with lights of sin
And the body of a feline snake.
The taste of the drink was deceitful, sweet and fragrant, camouflaging the flame of alcohol which stole into her before long, through her veins, changing her mood, quieting her anxiety and increasing her delight in being there, in the scent-impregnated alcove, beside the unbelievable diva. When she bent for the bottle, Mioara had two deep folds in the soft skin of her belly; the vertebrae of her spine arose like islands of luminous skin, and her vulva, under heavy buttocks, was black as a mare’s in the spiderweb of curly hair. The girl was beginning to feel herself unravel in the stale air of the room, when she saw Mioara approaching. Mioara embraced Maria and kissed her neck passionately, burying her mouth and chin in the hollow of the girl’s collarbone, the way she had only seen men do, in movies, to women they loved. “Don’t be afraid, little one, ah, how I long, how I long for you,” the actress sighed, lying over her and caressing her buttocks with one hand. The girl only stopped her when she tried to kiss her mouth. Then the singer rose, panting, to her knees and began to pull the clothes from the girl’s body, taking out her small breasts almost without nipples, yanking on her blouse until the buttons shot across the room, pulling down her cheap skirt and leaving it crumpled at her feet. She turned her face toward the girl’s hips and pounced on them savagely. Maria no longer defended herself. Something sweet and grave flooded her body — it was the way she felt when one of the more daring apprentices told her a story about love, about what it’s like when you’re being undressed. True, the one undressing was always a man. After he undressed you, he spread your legs and put in the thing that men have where you have nothing. So what would happen now? Could you do it with a woman? (But who was thinking these things, since Maria felt like she was looking down from somewhere above the two women spread across the bed.) Squeezing her hips in her hands, Mioara gazed, with her face contracted in desire, at the girl’s pubis, mounded between her thighs, under her ordinary, proper panties. She took them gently in her teeth, and pulled them down until she glimpsed the line of hair.
Abandoned and giddy with drink, Maria felt the actress stiffen and catch her breath. Her excited breathing stopped, and for a few seconds, only the empty scratching of the needle on the record came from the corner of the room. Disfigured with fear, the actress turned her face toward Maria, her eyes wild, her hair bristling over her ears. Mioara leapt to her feet and pressed against the wall with the black velvet mask, which now grinned menacingly, next to her cheek. “Forgive me,” she screamed, “forgive me! Forgive me!” She wasn’t screaming, in fact, they were short howls crazed with fear, pushed until her vocal cords would break, as though, in her ravished bed, instead of the young apprentice, a spider bigger than a person had appeared. Frightened, the girl stood up too. “No!” cried Mioara. “Stay away! Forgive me!” She curled up in a corner of the room, like a child, and crossed her arms over her face. Then she collapsed onto one side and lay on the rug. Shaking, Maria approached. She bent down and tried to rouse Mioara from her faint. But the singer’s muscles were clenched like stone, her face was ashen, and her eyes were open like a dead woman’s. Only her jugular vein throbbed softly beneath the skin of her neck.