I can do that right away, of course, if you want me to, replied Margit Huber almost indifferently, and one after the other snapped up the found hairpins with her lips so that with her free hand she could pin up the crown of hair again. I beg your pardon, she said rather mockingly, speaking through hairpins and clenched lips. Je te demande bien pardon. But if you allow me, I’d love to have a repentant smoke.
Please, je t’ai pardonné il y a longtemps, answered Mária Szapáry. Go ahead, no problem at all.
Margit Huber had stood up from the leather sofa; they looked into each other’s eyes, long and cold, and did not know what to do with their mutual hatred. Everything turned cool. Médi kept herself busy with her hair, pinning it back with blasé nervous little movements, but she realized there weren’t enough pins; she was observing herself with Szapáry’s critical eyes. Her flame-red thick soft-leather belt was askew, her blouse had slipped out from under it, she had rumpled her snow-white petticoat, which somehow was stuck to the calico skirt, and with her tears she had smeared her makeup.
Before you tell me I look ridiculous I’ll go tidy up.
It won’t do you any harm, replied Mária Szapáry.
Médi, offended, hurried to the bathroom while Mária Szapáry and Irma Arnót remained, awkwardly, at the table. Elisa, hungry and jealous, was watching them. They could not know whose partners they would be in the card game or where they should sit. The spilled drink did not spread on the green felt table cover nor did the felt absorb it. It lay before them on the table, convex and opaque, like an antique cameo waiting to be worked on. This image occurred to Mária Szapáry because only a few weeks ago she had pawned her penultimate cameo and had been waiting for the mailman every day to see if they could make it on that money until the end of the summer. Now she has only one left, the most beautiful of her cameos. They neither said anything nor looked at each other. Elisa again injected a little whimper into their silence, slyly and quietly. Perhaps the tension in the wordless moments hurt her. Long minutes went by until Margit Huber returned and offered a cigarette to Irma, who smoked occasionally. On top of it all, Margit smoked Gauloises, and when people asked her how she could be so inconsistent she would answer, moving not a muscle in her face, that she did not have to sing, her students did, and she wasn’t teaching them with her throat — and she’d tap her forehead with her fingers. She’d obviously given herself only as much time in the bathroom as it took to tidy up her clothes and makeup. She did not want them to wait so long that they might have the impression she’d fought with Dobrovan in the bathroom.
Which, of course, she had.
Singers and dancers brought her Gauloises from distant cities and airports, sometimes from places where none of them had ever been or ever would be.
The two women lit up with great pleasure, both of them longing for the first deep puffs.
In the silence not only the clicking of the gilded leather-covered lighter could be heard but also the burst of its flame and then the crackling of the tiny tobacco embers. Mária Szapáry could not bear cigarette smoke, but every night she politely placed an ashtray on the tea trolley for the two neurasthenics. She glanced at the trolley and was surprised to see that a small Urbino dish used as an ashtray was still intact. If she wanted them to come to her house she had to be lenient in matters that were not quite to her liking.
Finally Dobrovan came back too, swishing in her silk dress, but she was equally silent. She held out a wet washcloth for Mária to wipe her sticky fingers on. When that was done, with quick, surprising, and unjustified agitation she blotted up the opaquely glistening cameo. In her swishing silks she hurried out with the washcloth. She walked as if carrying an important object. She heard the shout, as if hearing it again over the distance of several decades. The other women stared after her. Suddenly she felt herself inside the brilliant plum-blue silk costume with shoulder straps, her knees bare. She shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, then rose on point and with rapid little steps hurried forward and became blinded by the footlights. Pas de bourrée with the feet lightly alternating devant, derrière. She stretched her arms ahead of her; on turned-up palms she was carrying the bluebird of happiness. It took wing. Left her here on earth but with the strength of flight she was on her toes again. She’d love to fly away with it, how she’d love to. She gazed at her empty hands en désespoire. She did not understand how she could so sharply recall that shout of long ago, et c’est fini.
She was barely twenty-one years old when at a rehearsal for her first major role a loosened batten crashed down on her.
It happened that in those days she was with a man — who took care of her, of whom her family knew nothing of course, who taught her how to talk again, but whom she did not take seriously until this accident, or rather whose proximity she did not want to acknowledge. She took him for one of those people who hang around theaters, a very good-looking penniless nobody who attached himself to her as he would to someone else tomorrow, and until then she deigned to accept his services but did not think much of him. In the evenings, during longer breaks in rehearsals or on endless spring Sundays, it would have been devastating to remain alone in the huge city.
Loneliness had eaten away at her suppleness and the smoothness of her style.
And she couldn’t commit herself to this sad young man because she was always, hysterically, on guard lest he make her pregnant.
He or anyone else.
Not to get pregnant, not that, for God’s sake, and certainly not by this character. Let him have his gratification on his own account; let him squirt his fluids somewhere else, anywhere, in any way.
The small puddle usually wound up on her belly or became long stripes running down her neck, into her face, her hair; she didn’t care where.
He was a frail, sickeningly white-skinned, easily injured person whose dark hair, twisting in little waves and curls, continually fell over his shiny, large, pale forehead. She had never met anyone so poor as this man and listened to his stories with aversion, though this made her feel ashamed because a poor man was, after all, still a man. It seemed as if his poverty also meant that he had all sorts of venereal diseases. She was always anxious, worried about catching some of them, she constantly observed herself, stuck out her tongue in front of the mirror or, with the help of another mirror, studied the roof of her mouth, her throat, to ascertain that fatal blisters had not appeared. He might be Lithuanian, maybe half Polish, even Russian, she couldn’t tell. He’d run away from a Warsaw orphanage when he was sixteen, and except for his grandmother, who had raised him until he was ten, didn’t know anyone.
At most she loved his mouth strictly for aesthetic reasons, but she was ready to forgo his kisses.
She was afraid of minor infections, even the common cold, anything that might take her off her feet. She liked his eyes too, somewhat, his deeply melancholic countenance, a little disguised by his way of retreating under the protection of his eyelashes or by the unexpected vehemence of the movements with which he straightened the myriad curls of his hair. She looked for no lasting relationship with anyone because every little change disturbed her concentration.
Once a week she would wait for Médi in front of the Conservatoire, or the two of them together waited on the quai Malaquais for Médi’s love, another destitute young man, ramrod-straight, with a bad stutter, who was also Hungarian and studied painting in a studio at the École des Beaux Arts or was a model at other ones. Frankly, she didn’t want to see even these people, especially not Médi and her boyfriend, because their presence drew her attention to her lack of romantic feelings for anyone. Not even the man with whom she reached her gratification.