‘Can’t you sleep?’ I asked, after first clearing my throat, so as to warn her of my presence in two stages, one following on from the other.
She turned and gave a faint, wan smile. She didn’t just turn her head, but her whole body, thus revealing much of her strong thighs, since she was sitting with her legs crossed. (Which is also why I didn’t manage to see anything more than that.) Not as much thigh as the civil servant Celia had revealed in the taxi, but quite a lot. She indicated the glass of whisky, as if to excuse herself, for she was not a heavy drinker.
‘Yes, I’m just seeing if this will do the trick,’ she said. ‘But I’m not very used to drinking whisky.’ Then she added: ‘I’m sorry I woke you up. I sometimes forget you’re here at night too, now that you’ve been appointed my sentinel. Although you’ve stayed over on other nights too. You don’t seem very happy at home.’
It had not escaped her notice that I spent more time than necessary in the apartment, but the remark was a neutral one, it didn’t come across as a hint or a complaint about my too frequent presence. She also knew what my role there was in Muriel’s absence, while he was six hundred kilometres away filming his bizarre scenes.
‘No, I’m fine,’ I said, ‘but I do sometimes miss a little company, and there’s plenty of that here. I hope I’m not making a nuisance of myself, not bothering you. Do tell me if I am.’
She shook her head as if to say: ‘Of course not, don’t be silly.’ As if my concern were a bit of nonsense not even worth trying to dissipate with words.
‘Now that I’ve woken you up, come and sit here with me for a while, until I get sleepy.’ And she pulled over another stool and placed it next to hers. I sat down to her left and, from that angle, had a partial view of her décolletage, that is, a partial view of her right breast and, of course, her cleavage, I no longer felt ashamed that my eyes should give priority to such things, but I still only looked out of the corner of one eye, it’s best not to be too impertinent initially, a certain degree of dissembling is required on all occasions, even when you know how things will end or why you have come, why two people have come together. Not that this was the case then, not at all. I had no idea (I was merely accumulating elemental desires, if such a thing is necessary when one is young), and at that point, nothing of the sort would have occurred to her either, she was merely fighting against her insomnia and perhaps thinking about nothing; and ignoring everything else and barely noticing the outside world is enough of an occupation in itself. She was forty-one or forty-two, and very few women then bothered to undergo absurd, counter-productive surgical operations, and what I could see of her décolletage was natural, it moved, rose and fell with every breath, was simultaneously firm and soft, still firm and abundant, tremulous and apparently soft, and yet Muriel found this repellent, or perhaps not; after all, on that other night, he had groped her breasts, although his intention then had been to humiliate and belittle. I would never have touched her like that, certainly not, not on that night or this night or any other. The tips of my fingers were itching to touch her just then, no, they weren’t, that’s just a manner of speaking. She remained silent for a few seconds, busy lighting her cigarette, then she inhaled deeply and her breast rose visibly, that is, both breasts rose, but I had to make do with imagining her left breast under her nightdress; and then she referred for the first time to my intervention: ‘So, you saved my life. You were the one who stole me from death.’
The verb ‘stole’ seemed a strange one to use (but, then, insomnia does have a strange effect on the mind and the vocabulary that passes through it) and it made me wonder if she intended her words as a reproach or as an expression of gratitude or neither; perhaps she was merely stating a fact. At least she hadn’t said ‘who snatched me from the jaws of death’, which would have sounded both affected and accusatory.
‘Well, only indirectly. It was pure chance that I happened to see you go into the hotel.’ Chance had nothing to do with it, but no one knew that I had taken to following her on some afternoons, and had it not been for that habit of mine, she would have moved towards her end without witnesses. ‘But I wasn’t the one who realized what that meant, it would never have occurred to me. It was lucky, I suppose, at least for us. Whether it was lucky for you, I’m not sure. But I hope it was.’