“You know Noémi’s transparent eyes, their ephemeral, indecisive attentiveness, their luminous panic… Noémi is calm; she pretends, especially to herself, to have forgotten everything, not to know about the war; she pretends she has overcome the fear of fear. She reads the same books over and over, line by line, and I believe she’s not so much reading as abandoning herself to the reveries engendered in her by the words on the page. She does the housework singing to herself. Sometimes she doesn’t recognize me anymore or thinks I’m someone else. She laughs like a child: ‘You think you’re fooling me! You play him very well! I don’t hold it against you…’ I think I do play my characters very well indeed, and that no one should hold it against me. Then she changes, and sees me again. ‘Ah, there you are again, I’m happy!’ But there is a note of resentment in her tone. I believe Doña Luz keeps a double of me, a magic doll, and does to it whatever is required to bring me back from the most mysterious journeys.
“Noémi can sense the approach of earthquakes, which are frequent and harmless. She says, ‘My bones are cold, the earth is going to shiver…’ She wakes me in the night and says, ‘Listen…’ I light the candle, we look at each other and smile, alert as one body to the trembling of the mountain and the whispers of the lake. Her eyes are seldom as beautiful as at these times, and these are precious moments between us… If the earth begins to roll and pitch more, we go out into the garden, stumbling against each other; because I don’t really trust this old roof and the open air is safer. Out under the great stars, we have the sensation of walking on floating ground. Branches whip to and fro, and the birds, alarmed, fill the air with wingbeats and cries. I think of the rattlesnake, who like me must have ventured from his lair, like me reassured to observe that while the firmament seems a little wobbly, the pattern of its brilliant specks remains the same. The great comet we expect in our heart of hearts does not appear. Noémi leans her head against my shoulder… Once she said afterward that the planet must twinkle beautifully in the sky when it shakes like that. In any case, it’s a poetic thought…
“A psychiatrist would say that Noémi is schizophrenic, or that she suffers from manic depression, loss of touch with reality, personality breakdown, and the rest. Yet my feeling is that she’s made contact with a reality she finds more acceptable than the version of it commonly held. And as there’s no psychiatrist within a thousand miles, she has nothing to fear from superfluous diagnoses…”
Bruno seemed glad to be talking. Daria guessed he was releasing himself from a very long silence. Bitterness flooded up to Daria’s brain. She was restraining herself from crying out: “So that’s how you lived while… while… ! Doing nothing for anyone else in the world! And you didn’t even take your part in…” Bruno Battisti looked at her with the knowing eyes of the old days: “I know what you’re thinking. I confess that I suffered over it. That was unfair and useless. Come have supper.”
He asked her no questions. Whenever she brought up the war, he appeared to be listening merely out of friendship, as though he already knew everything. She was starting to tell him about the bombing of Altstadt; while listening, he led her over to a banana tree and pointed out its violet turgescence, the intense sexuality of the ripening fruits. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” The terrible events and their train of anxious thoughts began to lose their sharpness. After a few days, Daria succumbed to a lucid somnolence. “We’ll speak of all this again,” Bruno Battisti said, “when you are delivered. But for now, look at the mountains. Look at the baby chicks…”
“Thought must be delivered,” Daria assented suddenly.
“If it’s possible.”
Solitude shrouded the world in a light yet impenetrable veil. The excess of luminosity became blinding, erasing whatever was not this dazzle of sunlight, this reverberation of sunlight, this burning sunlight on the platinum lake, this humid jungle warmth under the tall sweet-smelling foliage of the eucalyptus trees. Noémi’s white silhouette appeared crossing an avenue of trees or crossing the terrace, present-absent, real-unreal. A cat sprang after a lizard. Doña Luz was glimpsed prowling among the coffee plants, a black silhouette with abundant white hair tumbling over the shoulders of a little girl — who might be a hundred — with bright eyes… Wide-brimmed hats appeared and disappeared atop heads of burned clay whose eyebrows, mustaches, and eyes were intensely black; white rags floating over brown bodies… Fishermen called out from one dugout canoe to another across the glassy lake — a call, a response — and that single voice seemed to reverberate through the stillness long after it died out. The fruit on the mango trees was being impregnated by the sun. Other enormous fruits were ripening inside hard spiny casings. Beautiful black spiders, their abdomens adorned with a scarlet symbol, hung suspended in the architecture of their shining threads. Under the shadow of the trees, orchids revealed their delicate, fleshy complexions. There was no imaginable finality to any of this: only a riotous disorder, stable yet changing, a mayhem of primeval voluptuousness and innocent cruelty, which, swelled by the surging of sap and blood, spilled over exultantly into the plantation and lay surrounded by the desert. No human notions retained their customary meanings.
“So there’s really nobody, nobody to talk to?” Daria asked one evening, as they sat on after supper in the low-ceilinged dining room, watching the cat play with her kittens.
Noémi raised her pale irises whose pupils were always too large.
“Talk, what for, Dachenka?”
“Nobody,” Bruno Battisti said placidly. “We are alone. Like stones being stones. The thing is to wait.”
“What do stones wait for?” Daria thought.
“You’re bored,” said Bruno. “Would you like to play a game of chess? Harris is probably coming over tomorrow.”
Harris came over two or three times a week. This young American lived in a solitude even greater and more parched than their own, a good hour’s trek from the plantation, in the heart of the forest, where he occupied a big, tumbledown adobe dwelling hemmed in by ferocious, resplendent agaves. “As far away from two-legged creatures as I can get,” he’d say. Harris was generally a man of few words, but when in a philosophical mood he might explain: “Man, attempting to change his fate, has come up with only one liberating invention: scotch whiskey!” This gave rise to commentaries verging on the profound, allowing one to recall that the ancient barbarian civilizations, in this land so close to the present, made their liquor by fermenting the milk of the agave plant. “Scotch is better,” Harris declared, “but if that’s the only proof of the white man’s superiority, it’s a feeble one…” Harris was a steady drinker who never lost his self-control. But until he was loaded with “the right dose of gunpowder,” all you saw of him was a big brute with ruddy-brown hair — a rather mournful, listless lout who yawned a lot and sometimes bit his nails. Having been a sailor, he nursed a grudge against the sea, like an old betrayed lover. “A big wet desert, right? The most inhuman place in the world, along with factories. And every ship’s a floating prison or a floating cathouse. Or else a floating fortress, packed with poor dumb suckers. And not easy to sink!” Their being hard to sink seemed to have left him with malevolent regrets. He had fought “honorably” in the Pacific Islands, but whether he had come home with medals or a warrant for his arrest, he did not say. “The sea and the war: two big piles of shit…” You could easily imagine him, with his hard, fleshy face, his round boxer’s shoulders, his cynical expression and clouded eyes, in some mobsters’ dive, as ruthless as the worst of them and as snappy a dresser, with that slightly louche elegance; then later dressed like them in a striped suit breaking up rocks on a chain gang. All purely imaginary, of course, since flipping a coin would be the best way to decide whether his past was ordinary or adventurous… He read nothing but hard-boiled thrillers, the kind with lots of killing, where at the end they’re going to hang the seductive heroine who for three hundred pages seemed to be the most mysterious, the most desirable, the most tantalizing young woman in distress… But on page 287, when her wickedness has emerged beyond any reasonable doubt, the detective gives in and kisses her on the lips, gently takes her hands — and brings out the handcuffs… She’s been had, the vixen, and so have you, dear reader, since only then did you understand that the roots of crime lay here, in this melting gaze, this soft disarming flesh… Harris reveled at the idea of the pleasure he would have kicking in the teeth of that detective or of the author, that dirty “son of a bitch!”[32] When he was finished reading, Harris would toss the book onto the little heap of paperbacks, each offering a detective puzzle to be deciphered for twenty-five cents. This library gathered dust in a corner; the hens pecked around it sometimes, attracted by — what? What could these birds find to peck at in or under all these nasty stories? Harris poured himself a shot of tequila. Harris called out: “Monica! Mon-i-ca!”