Magda puts her fleshy hands around his neck, having crept up behind him unnoticed. Come on, out with it! He doesn’t move, continuing to say nothing. He didn’t go far, and suddenly the house came into view: large iron gates, white gravel paths, flowerpots with swords. . Are you angry?
He told her he wasn’t, scarcely moving his lips. She uncoiled her arms from his neck and stood up straight again, with the usual swaying movement that emphasized her broad hips. Valentin was smiling — an idiotic smile that was supposed to be ironical. Magda sat at her desk and inspected her nails. She was frowning. What a strange man! Although she’d hinted numerous times that she’d like to go to the movies or to a play with him some afternoon or Sunday, he’d never invited her — and in fact, once, when she had queued up for an hour to buy tickets for them, he had turned her down flat on the pretext of having to visit a sick uncle. Nor did he want to visit her at home: he always left work like a shot, heading to the trolleybus stop, yet he wasn’t married and lived alone somewhere on the outskirts of the city; no one had ever been to his place. When do you see all these movies? Magda asked, raising her plump arms above her head in a comical gesture of despair. Valentin started to laugh, but then he furrowed his brow, clammed up, and buried his head in those bulging files.
Come on, she begged, tell us some more. What happened next?
. . in the end she ran off with a man in a long, bright red car — a tall guy with a mustache and the face of a crook. The girl’s father had been an army colonel and was a great stamp collector; he had a strange, three-colored stamp in the form of an equilateral triangle, issued by a former British colony in Africa and showing a native spear flying toward a lion. After his daughter left, the colonel got drunk on whisky every evening and looked at the stamp for hours on end; it seemed to take on a life of its own, and the lion began to run with the spear in its side as if it were a skeletal wing. But at night the kid crept into the room of the china shop salesgirl, nor was he the only one. They climbed the stairs fearfully, or anyway rather mistrustfully, pausing at each step to look left and right. Sometimes in the evening or late at night, but also during the day, they would pass each other like ghosts in the corridor. Everyone spied on everyone else, watching with grave, curious expressions as they went up and down the stairs between the third and fourth floors. And then?
And then, well, the young man who worked as a bank clerk went out one evening for a walk and dropped into a cinema, where he didn’t have the patience to stay until the end of the picture; it was a pretty boring movie, in which images kept being repeated obsessively, a kind of collection of gestures, I’m not quite sure how to describe it. . He lost patience, stood up, and left. On the way out, he had a little contretemps with the usherette, who tried to start a conversation with him — there was something vulgar and repulsive about her, although she wasn’t exactly ugly — and he cut her short. He began to wander the streets aimlessly, each one darker and more remote than the last, until he found himself in front of a large iron gate behind which he glimpsed the implausibly white gravel of a path, while on the terrace of the house — or rather villa, since it was very grand, as if money had been no object. .
He broke off because Mr. Petrache had come into the office, frowning in his usual way. He began to leaf through the papers in a file that he had in front of him. Valentin coughed. Only Magda seemed unperturbed: she took a sandwich from a drawer and began to eat it at a leisurely pace.
There was no point in hurrying: it would no longer make any difference. He looked at his dusty shoes and tried to wipe the toe caps at least on the cherry-colored carpet, which the feet of so many office workers had worn down over the years. He could hear stifled laughter and tapping sounds from the typists’ room — the same sounds every morning, the same morning every day, the same day. . He looked behind him: the corridor was long and empty. He was late, no doubt about that, but he couldn’t work out how late: half an hour, an hour, two hours, maybe even more. He didn’t stop in front of the door, just pushed the handle down and walked in. Petrache was there, seated before the window: tall and thin, arms folded across his chest. Magda was filing her nails, Valentin was writing in a large, green-covered register; he put his pen down and stared at him. He probably looked terrible: unshaven, eyes red from lack of sleep, tie undone and hanging over his lapel. Magda too looked at him and shook her head, reproachful but also concerned. He dropped his eyes, whispered good morning, and crept over to his desk. He stole a furtive glance at Petrache, who hadn’t replied to his greeting and kept his eyes fixed on the window. He took some files from a drawer, then some more from another, put one file back, took another one out, closed the wicket with a bang. Valentin jumped and looked up for a few moments, while Petrache remained silent. He was guilty and had run out of excuses: clock, trolleybus, crowds — any one of them would have sounded ridiculous.
His best course would have been to spill every last detail, or at least to describe the gloomy house — a real villa, with its terrace where swords flashed in the moonbeams, its white gravel paths, its black iron gate — and his escape through the streets, his fear, his lack of courage to switch on the light and look in the mirror. He should tell them as soon as possible, get one step ahead, without waiting for Mr. Petrache to speak — because then he wouldn’t be able to interrupt, and the boss was obviously preparing a little speech, look how he’s moving his thin, pale lips and swaying slightly, hands in his pockets. It was clear as daylight! He should get a word in first, but how can he tell them, how can I tell them, of the lion that’s been flying over the city the last few nights, or of the swords gleaming in the flowerpots? There was only one solution: to say I dreamed it — wasn’t I dreaming, in fact? — to say that it was a dream, a nightmare, that I wasn’t able to fall asleep all night, that I haven’t had a wink of sleep for so many nights. All this was perfectly true, look at the bags under his eyes, red from lack of sleep, look at how he falters and staggers along endless deserted passages, along those white corridors with equally white statues dotted here and there, corridors opening onto dozens of whitewashed rooms with white curtains and white marble floors, where the light comes from long tubes buried high and low in the wall, what’s the matter with you? the woman asked tenderly, leaning with her elbows on his desk, what’s the matter with you?
He sat there, eyes closed, perhaps asleep, perhaps dreaming, a warm voice whispering in his ear, tell me, are you ill? His leaden eyelids no longer obeyed his commands, fluttering open and shut, in order to see what? Petrache sitting puffed up by the window? Valentin writing diligently, poking out the tip of his tongue, glancing at the boss from time to time out of the corner of his eye? Next to him, Magda’s velvety voice pulled him from the endless white labyrinthine corridors, brought him back out into reality — into what everyone, himself included, calls reality. He looked through his eyelashes and saw Petrache half turned from the window, eyebrows frowning terribly, eyes trained on him, everyone was looking at him and waiting, I must tell them, he tried to find his voice, felt a lump forced down his throat, a whitish curtain pulled over his eyelids, so he again finds himself wandering deserted corridors and marble floors, and the neon light, though also white, is milky and wearying. Say, are you ill?