Four Novels (28 page)

“One always overestimates one’s strength,” Maria said. “I think I’ll sleep very well.”

“You have always overestimated your strength,” Claire said. They smiled at each other.

“It’s the liquor,” Maria said, “that’s what it is. And afterwards, the distrust that one feels, but you wouldn’t know.”

“I don’t know. But we can go on talking like this until evening.”

“Oh no,” Maria said, “I’m going to sleep.”

She stretched out on the bench. Claire was opposite her.

Pierre turned around to look at Judith.

“She’s asleep,” he said.

“You’d think it feasible,” Maria said, “but she’s really too small for such long trips, and in this heat.”

She had taken Pierre’s place on the bench. There were many tourists stretched out like her. Some men were on the floor, lying on the rope carpets. The rooms were silent. All the children were asleep and people were whispering.

“I would have taken him traveling, a lot, again and again”—she was yawning—“and little by little, day by day, I would have seen him change, look at me, then listen to me, and then . . .”

She yawned again, stretched, and closed her eyes.

“No more drinking for you before Madrid,” Pierre said. “No more.”

“No more. I promise. I didn’t drink enough to . . .”

“To what?” Claire asked.

“To be still more talkative,” Maria said. “And to feel too desperate about Rodrigo Paestra’s desertion. You know how it is, I was planning on starting a big project with Rodrigo Paestra. And now, now it has all collapsed before we even started. That’s all. But I didn’t drink enough not to admit it. Am I sleepy! I’m sleeping, Claire.”

She closed her eyes. Where were they? She could hear Claire.

“Can we wake up Judith in another half hour?”

Pierre didn’t answer. Then just one more time, Maria spoke.

“If you like. As you like. I could easily sleep until evening.”

Pierre said he would call the National Hotel in Madrid to reserve three rooms. He was whispering. He went to call. Nothing happened. Claire must have been there. That sigh near Maria, that smell of sandalwood around her, that was Claire. Maria dreamed she was asleep.

Pierre came back. He had reserved three rooms for the night at the National Hotel in Madrid, he said. They were silent for a moment. Rooms in Madrid for the night. They knew that on reaching Madrid, Maria would want to drink and go from bar to bar. They would have to be very patient. Perfectly synchronized, they both closed their eyes. Shame prevented them from looking at each other in her presence, even if she was asleep. And yet they looked at each other, even though they couldn’t. Then closed their eyes again, unable to bear the urgency of their desire. Claire said:

“She’s asleep.”

What silence. Claire softly stroked the rough linen covering the couch. As she continued to stroke it, she started scratching it with her nails. Pierre looked on, following the progress of Claire’s caress, saw it stop abruptly, and painfully break loose from the couch and fall back on her blue dress. It was surely she who got up first and walked away from the table. That rustling of the air, hardly noticeable, that crackling of unfolding skirts, that slowness, that languid straightening out of a body, it could only be a woman. She would recognize among a thousand others those resinous whiffs, sweetened by perfume that had ripened on the skin and become adapted to its breathing, to its sweat, to its warmth in the shelter of her blue dress.

The smell of perfune around Maria subsided just as the wind does.
He had followed her. Maria opened her eyes, absolutely convinced. They were no longer there. At last.

Maria closed her eyes again. It was going to happen. In half an hour. In an hour. And then the coupling of their love would be reversed.

She wanted things to happen between them so that she too would be illuminated like them and enter the world she bequeathed them, since the day, in fact, when she herself invented it, in Verona, one night.

Was Maria asleep?

There were in this inn, in this residence shielded from the summer, a few openings onto the summer. There must have been a patio. Corridors that turn and die at deserted terraces where flowers, each day of that season, were dying too, while waiting for evening. During the day no one went through these corridors, or on the terraces.

Claire knew he was following her. She knew. He had already done so. He knew how to follow a woman he desired, from just the right distance so she would become a little more tense than necessary. He preferred them like that.

Here too, there was no one, because of the deadly heat of the countryside. Would it be there? Claire stopped, at the limit, as he wanted her, of the tenseness that came from his not having joined her yet, from his step, behind her, having remained calm and measured.

He had reached Claire. He had reached Claire’s lips. But she didn’t want to give them to him.

“We have an hour,” she said, “before she wakes up. We can rent a room. I can do it, rent it, if it bothers you. I can’t wait any more.”

He didn’t answer.

“I know her,” she continued, “I knew she would fall asleep. Did you notice? After four manzanillas, she has reached that stage, she falls asleep.”

He didn’t answer.

“But did you notice it? Please. Did you notice it? Pierre?”

“Yes. Today she isn’t sleeping.”

She went up to him and pressed herself against him, from head to toe, from her hair to her thighs, entrusting her whole body to him. They did not kiss.

Liquor makes your heart beat more than usual. Such a long time before evening. Maria slightly opened her thighs where her heart, a dagger, was beating.

“Is it that I’ve already lost you?”

“My love. How can you? . . .”

She pulled away from him, moved away, farther away. He was alone. When she came back he was still in the same place, nailed to it. She was holding a key in her hand.

“It’s done,” she said.

Pierre didn’t answer. She had gone by him without stopping. He had heard her say that it was done. She was moving away. He followed far behind her. Then she walked up a dark stairway. Even the maids were still sleeping. Hardly ten minutes had gone by since they had left Maria. She turned around on the stairs.

“I said it was for the siesta.”

They reached the room they had to unlock. He did that. It was a very big room looking out on the olive grove. She was the one who slowed down suddenly, opened the window and spoke.

“What luck. Look.”—and she added, loudly, “I couldn’t wait any more.” He looked, and while they both looked, he dared to start touching her. He kissed her mouth so she wouldn’t shout any more.

The heat was still dazzling in the deserted countryside.

Was her heart beating in such an unreasonable way for the very last time? She half opened her eyes. They were no longer there. She closed them again. She moved her legs and put them back on the bench. Then she got up and, through the opened blinds, looked at the same olive grove, petrified by the heat. Then she lay down again, again closed her eyes. She thought she was sleeping. Her heart had become calm. She drank too much. Everybody said so, mainly Pierre. You drink too much, Maria.

The window was exactly in the middle of the wall. The grove was there. The olive trees were very old. No grass around the trees. They were not looking at the grove.

Pierre, stretched out on the bed, watched her take off her blue dress and walk toward him, naked. He would remember later that he had seen her come up to him framed by the open window, against the olive trees. Would he remember later? She had taken off her dress very fast and had stepped over it and here she was.

“You’re beautiful. God, how beautiful you are.”

Or perhaps they would not say anything.

Rodrigo Paestra’s suicide in the wheat field, early in the morning, was foreseeable. He was uncomfortable, disturbed by the noise of the carts, and by the increasing heat of the sun; the presence, in his pocket,
of a weapon that prevented him from stretching out, from falling asleep, made him remember a godsend he had absent-mindedly forgotten up to then: death. Maria was sleeping. She was sure of it. If she tried harder, she would dream. But she didn’t try. She didn’t dream. She was surprised by the sudden calmness that followed her discovery that she was awake. So she wasn’t sleeping.

Pierre got up from the bed first. Claire was crying. Claire was still crying from pleasure when Pierre got up.

“She knows everything,” he said. “Come.”

Then Claire’s crying subsided.

“You think so?”

He did think so. He was standing next to her, completely dressed, while she was still naked. Then he turned toward the window and repeated that they had to leave.

“You don’t love me?” she asked.

Her voice sounded gloomy. He told her.

“I love you. I’ve loved Maria. And you.”

Outside, the landscape had softened. He didn’t want to know that she was getting up from the bed. The sun was less vertical. The shade from the olive trees had begun to grow longer, imperceptibly, while they were making love. The heat had weakened a little. Where was Maria? Had Maria been drinking herself to death? Had Maria’s regal gift for drinking and dying led her into the wheat fields, far away, laughing, just like Rodrigo Paestra? Where was this other woman, Maria?

“Quick,” Pierre said. “Come on.”

She was ready. She was crying.

“You no longer love Maria,” she shouted. “Remember, you no longer love Maria.”

“I don’t know,” Pierre said. “Don’t cry, don’t cry, Claire. Already an hour since we left her.”

She too looked at the landscape and immediately turned away from it. She put on her make-up, looking in the mirror next to the window. She was holding back her tears.

Maria, dead in the wheat fields? On her face a grin that had been stopped, laughter in full bloom? Maria’s lonely laughter in the wheat fields. This was her landscape. Everything was leading back to Maria: the sudden softness of the shade from the olive trees, the heat which suddenly made room for the oncoming evening, the various signs which announced everywhere that the day had passed its prime.

Pierre was at the door, his hand on the knob. She was in the middle of the room. He said he would go down first. His hand was shaking on the knob. Then she cried out.

“But what’s the matter? Pierre, Pierre, tell me.”

“I love you,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

The tourists had waked her. They all seemed in high spirits when they left. Judith was there, delighted, her hair still flat from the sweat of her siesta, in front of the main entrance, happily holding pebbles from the courtyard. Maria got up and Judith ran up to her.

“I’m hot,” Judith said. And she went away.

They weren’t there yet. You could still imagine the weight of the heat. There was a different kind of light in the inn. The blinds had been raised after their lovemaking.

“I’m going to give you a bath,” Maria told Judith. “You’ll see. In five minutes.”

The head waiter went by. Maria ordered coffee. She waited, sitting on the bench. That’s when Pierre arrived.

He came through the dining room. He was standing in front of her.

“I slept so well,” Maria said.

The head waiter brought the coffee and Marie drank it greedily. Pierre sat down next to her, smoked a cigarette and didn’t speak. He didn’t look at Maria but kept looking at Judith, sometimes Judith, and sometimes the door. When Claire arrived, he moved back a little to make room for her.

“Did you sleep?”

“Yes,” Maria said, “for a long time?”

“I don’t know,” Claire said. “Everybody has gone. I suppose it was for a long time. Yes.” She added, “I’m glad you slept.”

“You should have some coffee,” Maria said. “For once it’s good.”

Claire ordered some. She turned toward Maria.

“While you were sleeping we took a walk in the woods behind the hotel,” she said.

“And the heat was terrible?”

“Terrible. But you have to accept it. You know.”

“I’ve reserved rooms in Madrid,” Pierre said. “So we can leave whenever you want, Maria.”

“I’ll give Judith her shower. And we’ll leave for Madrid after that?”

They agreed. Maria took Judith to the shower on the ground floor. Judith went along without objecting. Maria put her under the shower.
Judith laughed. Then Maria joined her under the shower. And they both laughed.

“How cool you look,” Claire said when they came back. And she pounced on Judith and embraced her.

Outside it seemed at first that the heat had remained unchanged. But the mood wasn’t the same. It was very different from the morning and its anguish. And now the approaching evening brought hope. The workers were back in the fields, harvesting the same wheat, and the pale red mountains on the horizon recalled the spent youth of the morning.

Claire drove. Next to her Pierre was silent. Maria had wanted to stay in the back with Judith. They moved toward Madrid. Claire was driving safely, just a little faster than usual. It was only in that respect that, outwardly, their trip seemed to have changed. There was no point in talking about it, since each one of them had accepted and understood this change.

They drove through Castile until the late hours of the afternoon.

“In an hour and a half at the latest,” Pierre said, “we’ll be in Madrid.”

As they drove through a village, Maria said she wanted to stop. Pierre saw no reason why not. Claire stopped. Pierre lit a cigarette for her. Their hands met and touched. They now had precise memories.

The village was quite large. They stopped near its entrance, at the first café they passed. All the workers were still in the fields. They were the only customers. The café was very large and empty. You had to call to get served. A radio, in the back room, didn’t manage to drown out the tireless lisping of the flies on the windows. Pierre called several times. The radio stopped. A man, still young, came out. Maria wanted wine that evening. So did Pierre. Claire wasn’t going to have anything. Nor was Judith.

“It feels so good here,” Maria said.

They didn’t answer. Judith ran around the room and looked at the paintings on the walls. Harvesting scenes. Under a cart, children playing with dogs. A family, naively solemn, eating a meal in a wheat field, on and on, on all the walls, as far as you could see.