When our blood began splattering the front page of every newspaper and flowing down every sewer, Daria seemed to me to get older; she put on the expression of an embittered nun with that pursed, slightly skewed mouth, and we avoided all talk of what would have made us lie and dissemble for safety’s sake, or question everything and feel helpless, and admit that our very horror of treachery was tempting us to flee, to betray… We chatted about films and music. But once, in a cinema on the Champs-Élysées, Daria had a nervous breakdown. She seemed to be sobbing over the tragedy of Mayerling… It was right after the secret execution of the twenty-seven.
The beat of the tom-tom filled the cellar with a hectic panting. It projected an anxious din of constant celebration against the empty night; a clamor reverberating under the low vaults of the ceiling. Brown-skinned men dressed in white whipped their African instruments into an exultant frenzy. The glare of a naked lightbulb exposed sinewy arms, gleaming teeth, and the animal sadness beneath their impudent laughter. This group blocked the entrance to a private room, where a party was in full swing. A sallow boy in pantaloons and fez was carrying in a tray of liqueurs. The youngest of the musicians plunged into this secret redoubt in one effete, athletic bound… The club’s public section, linked to the street by a narrow flight of steps which one could only descend bent double, feeling along the lime-washed walls, imitated a rather dingy Algerian café, partitioned by the cellar structure into a dim maze of booths where groups and couples sat on benches covered with old carpets. The torrent of barbaric rhythms, slamming from wall to wall in brutal waves, invaded brains, throats, nerves, and eyeballs like an elementary toxin.
“I’ve been thinking about Daria and you’re right, Nadine, I have to see her.”
They were coming to the end of a depressing evening during which they had steered clear of bright plazas, cinemas, cafés, and boulevards so as not to tempt the fate that presides over chance encounters. Here they felt secure, protected by darkness as they huddled close together under a low arch; all they could see clearly of the booth next door was a pair of long legs sheathed in black silk fishnets. A woman with a mane of orange hair lay flung back against the indistinct body of a man. The reddish tip of her cigarette traveled slowly from fingers to lips. Curlicues of smoke rose and mingled under the vault. Whenever the drumming was interrupted, silence burst like a breaker exploding into countless droplets of spray; the head filled with throbbing emptiness like an undersea cave… Fortunately, this emptiness never lasted long before the trance returned.
Nadine turned an imploring face toward Sacha’s shoulder.
“Do we have to go back to that horrid hotel? It spooks me. As late as possible, Sacha.”
“But it’s a perfectly nice hotel! What more could you ask?”
“Tell me about that murder in the newspaper which interested you so much.”
“Which didn’t interest me at all, you mean. I was trying to put together a few dates”
Nadine hugged up against him. “I can’t tell you how fed up I am with murders. I see their shadow everywhere. I fancy the passengers in the Métro are thinking about murder. Some are afraid, watchful, agitated, everyone’s caught in a huge dragnet… Will it ever end?”
The stifled, stifling din of the tom-toms bore down on them with all its beneficial weight. D sniffed the air saturated with noise, smoke, breath, mold, and perspiration. The Berbers or Arabs who were making this music, the music of an oasis in heat, exuded a muscular joy… Here’s something that cerebral people have lost: the elation of leaping around a bonfire to the cadence of drums, the intoxication of feeling alive, simply. This loss must result in many strangely disastrous crimes…
“Nadine, for us it’ll be finished in just a few days.”
D was thinking: “Unless it is we who are finished… Anyway we remain on the level of victims… A semi-deliverance already… I hate the role of victim — only the opposite is worse. A necessity that resembles complicity often binds a victim to his torturer, the man on the scaffold to his executioner… It’s an unhealthy notion… Nemesis…” During the days when we were performing so many terrible deeds in order to lay the foundations of a different future, we regarded ourselves as righteous. For it was we who sought to break the vicious circle of warfare and man’s dehumanization at the hands of man. And yet we had sporadic intimations, without admitting the idea, that we deserved to be punished… That our attempts to outwit the logic of blood were merely dragging us more deeply into it. Should we have opted, then, for nonviolence? If only it were possible! (The shape of a long-dead comrade, fallen at the Far Eastern front and buried beneath the snow with what humble military honors we could provide, derisory materialist speeches of “Eternal in our memory, brother!” — this outline appeared on the inner screen. A fine, leonine figure of a man, who emerged from a victory followed by mass executions, bellowing like a drunken prophet: “Just wait and see, my friends! Winners or losers, ten months, ten years from now, we’ll all wind up shot! Necessarily.” We flung a bucket of cold water over him. The eldest of our company, reputed to be a sage, was muttering: “Nemesis.” I flew into a rage. “What does old Greek mythology — the devil take it — have to do with our Marxist revolution?” This old comrade cursed me for a fool. He was the author of long, remarkable books on the problem of culture. The books were banned. The author died of scurvy in sub-Arctic latitudes where neither knowledge nor ideas, nor culture, nor authentic stoicism are worth a warm reindeer skin.)
A dancing girl from south of Oran came in. (The reindeer civilization knew Greek dances from the Black Sea region… FinnoUgrian, Mongol, and Scythian women re-created the magic dances of the Ionian Isles… And what of the continuity, the human constant that is dance… Something to think about.) She was a vigorous dark girl, almost black, but amber-black, high-waisted, and wide-hipped, whose muscles in repose played softly beneath the skin. A saffron turban wound about her head, her full breasts held by a band of raw silk, a low-slung skirt falling to her bare toes, she began by sending out slow currents with the undulations of her cool, strong arms. Her navel quivered, and the smooth dark stomach became a concentrated vortex of female vitality. The heavy face, set into an inert smile, conveyed nothing but the blankness of animal beatitude. D observed her from a distance at first — from a different bend of the single spiral along which we all move. Gorgeous creature sold to our gazes, help me banish the troubles, the memories, the worry, and the bitterness that rise from my belly, just as the oldest temptation rises from yours! I thank you. The dancer, standing stretched like invisible palm fronds, let herself be borne upward by a lascivious violence. Belly, hips, and eyes quickened into rapture, agleam with sweat. Her arms flew up to undo the turban which now she tied around her haunches like a sash, forming a big rose of saffron silk that flicked between her thighs. She fell to her knees and arched her back, miming the swoon of passion.