When I finished reading, a busy crowd surrounded me with questions and comments. A weighty gentleman started to tell me a story about another woman who had committed suicide. He wanted to express himself properly but couldn’t find the right words and kept going into roundabouts and digressions. I noticed the audience was growing impatient: we all stood there not knowing what to do with our hands. The young woman with the wavy mane came up and joined us. I looked at her and then out at the statue. I didn’t want to hear the gentleman’s story because his clumsy hunt for words was painful to me: it was as if the statue had started slapping at the pigeons. But there was no way to get out from under the dull persistence with which he droned on, as if he were trying to say: “I’m a politician and can crank out a speech or a story to suit every occasion.”
Among the listeners was a young man with a strange mark on his forehead: a dark smudge that followed his receding hairline way back, like the shadow of a thick beard that has just been shaved and powdered. I looked at the woman with the wavy mane and to my surprise she was also staring — at my hair. Just then the politician finished his story and everyone clapped. I could not bring myself to congratulate him. One of the widows had already said: “Please sit down.” We all sat with a more or less general sigh of relief, but I had to get up again when one of the widows introduced me to the girl of the wavy mane, who turned out to be her niece. I was invited to sit in the center of a large sofa, between the niece and the young man with the smudge on his forehead. The niece was about to speak, but the young man raised a hand to silence her. Addressing me, with his fingers still pointed upward like the ribs of an umbrella bent in the wind, he said:
“I’ll bet you’re the sort of lonely character who’d only make friends with a tree.”
I wondered whether he had shaved his forehead to broaden his brow and, feeling mean, answered:
“Don’t you believe it. You can’t take a tree for a walk.”
The three of us laughed. He threw his shaved forehead back and said:
“How true — a tree is the friend who’s always where you left him.”
The widows were calling their niece. She rose with a grimace, and as she walked away I suddenly realized she was heavyset and violent. I turned to meet another young man who was being introduced to me by the one with the shaved forehead. He had just combed and left droplets of water on the tips of his hair. Once when I’d combed my hair that way as a child my grandmother had asked me, “Cow lick you?” The newcomer sat in the niece’s place and started to complain:
“Oh, that endless story! What an awful man! And so obstinate!”
“And you, my dear, so effeminate,” I felt like saying, but instead I asked:
“What’s his name?”
“You still talking about. .?”
“. . that obstinate man.”
“Oh, I forget. He’s from one of those old families. He’s a politician and he’s always on the juries of literary contests.”
I caught the eye of the young man with the smudge on his forehead, who shrugged as if to say: “Such is life!”
The niece was back, pulling the effeminate young man off the sofa. While she tugged at his arm, shaking him so hard that he stood up with drops of water on his jacket, she was saying:
“Well, I don’t agree with you. .”
“Why not?”
“. . and I’m surprised you’d think a tree can’t go for a walk with us.”
“But how could it?”
“By repeating itself in long steps.”
We praised her idea and she was encouraged:
“Repeating itself along an avenue, it shows us the way. Then all the trees of the avenue join heads to watch for us. And as we approach they open up to let us through.”
She made it all sound like a joke so it wouldn’t seem too romantic, blushing with pleasure and embarrassment.
The charm was broken by the effeminate young man:
“But at night in the woods the trees attack us from all sides. Some stagger and sway as if about to fall on us, and others trip us up or reach out and grab us with their branches.”
The niece could not help exclaiming:
“Why, if it isn’t Snow White!”
And while we laughed, she said she had been meaning to ask me a question, and we went into the next room, where I’d seen the vase with flowers. She leaned across the table toward me, with her hands deep in her hair, and said:
“Tell me the truth. Why did the woman in your story commit suicide?”
“I’m afraid you’d have to ask her.”
“Couldn’t you ask her for me?”
“No more than I could ask something of a figure in a dream.”
She smiled and lowered her eyes, and I got a good look at her large mouth. It seemed the smile could go on stretching her lips forever, but I passed my eyes over their entire moist red surface with pleasure. Maybe she was watching me through her eyelids or wondering whether there wasn’t something guilty in my silence, because she dropped her head on her chest and hid her face. Now she was showing me her full head of hair. Between two waves I could see a bit of scalp and it reminded me of the skin of a hen when the wind ruffles her feathers. I enjoyed thinking of that head as a big, warm human hen: it would give out a delicate warmth and the hair would be like very fine feathers.
One of the aunts — not the one with the smoked eyes — brought us two small glasses of liqueur. The niece raised her head and the aunt said:
“Watch out for this one, he looks sly as a fox.”
I remembered the hen and said:
“But we’re not in a henhouse!”
Alone with me again, as I tasted the liqueur — it was too sweet and turned my stomach — the niece asked:
“Aren’t you ever curious about the future?”
She had puckered her mouth as if to tuck it into her glass.
“No, I’m more curious about what’s going on at this moment inside another person or what I’d be doing right now if I were somewhere else.”
“Tell me what you’d do if I weren’t here right now.”
“As a matter of fact, I’d pour my drink into this flower vase.”
I was asked to play the piano. The two widows were huddled in the parlor, the one with the smoked eyes bending an ear to receive her sister’s urgent whispers. The creaky little piano was out of tune. I didn’t know what to play, and the minute I tried some notes the widow with the smoked eyes burst into tears and we all fell silent. Her sister and her niece helped her out of the room. A moment later the niece came back in and said her aunt could not stand the sound of music since the death of her husband: they had been in love into dim old age.
Some of the guests were leaving, and the rest of us began to lower our voices in the fading light. No one had lit a lamp.
I was one of the last to go, stumbling over the furniture. In the entrance hall the niece stopped me and said:
“Will you do something for me?”
But then she just leaned her head back against the wall, holding on to my jacket sleeve.