The Kindly Ones

It was almost warm out. I had taken a chair out onto the terrace, I stayed there for hours, reading or listening to the snow melting in the sloping garden, watching the topiary reappear, reimposing their presence. I read Flaubert and also, when I tired momentarily of the great moving walkway of his prose, verses translated from Occitan that sometimes made me laugh out loud in surprise: I have a lady, don’t know who she is, / Never saw her, by my faith. I had the joyous feeling of being on a deserted island, cut off from the world; if, as in fairy tales, I could have surrounded the estate with a barrier of invisibility, I would have stayed there forever, waiting for my sister’s return, almost happy, as Bolsheviks and trolls overran the surrounding lands. For like the poet-princes of the Lower Middle Ages, the thought of the love of a woman cloistered in a distant castle (or a Helvetian sanatorium) fully contented me. With a serene gaiety, I pictured her sitting like me on a terrace, facing high mountains instead of a forest, also alone (let her husband deal with his treatment), and reading books like the ones I was reading, taken from her library. The keen mountain air must have bitten at her mouth, perhaps she had wrapped herself in a blanket to read, but beneath it her body remained, with its heaviness and its presence. As children, our spindly bodies rushed at each other, clashed together furiously, but they were like two cages of skin and bone, which prevented our naked feelings from touching each other. We hadn’t yet grasped the extent to which love lives in bodies, nests in their most secret folds, in their wearinesses and their weight too. I imagined with precision Una’s body reading, adjusting itself to the chair, I guessed the curve of her backbone, of the back of her neck, the weight of one leg crossed over the other, the almost inaudible sound of her breathing, and the very idea of her sweat, under her armpits, delighted me, lifted me into a transport that abolished my own flesh and turned me into pure perception, strained to the breaking point. But such moments couldn’t last: water was slowly dripping from the trees and there, in Switzerland, she got up, pushing off her blanket, and went back into the common rooms, leaving me with my chimeras, my dark chimeras that, as I in turn went back into the house, blended into its architecture, spread out according to the layout of the rooms I lived in, avoided, or, like her bedroom, wanted to avoid but couldn’t. I had finally pushed open the door to her bathroom. It was a large woman’s room, with a long porcelain bathtub, a bidet, a toilet in the back. I fingered the perfume flasks, contemplating myself bitterly in the mirror over the sink. As in her bedroom, there was almost no odor in this bathroom; no matter how deeply I breathed in, it was in vain, she had left too long ago, and Käthe had cleaned well. If I put my nose over the perfumed soaps, or else opened the flasks of eau de toilette, then I smelled magnificent, profoundly feminine scents, but they weren’t hers, even her sheets had no smell, I had gone out of the bathroom and returned to the bed to sniff it in vain, Käthe had put on clean, white, stiff, cool sheets, even her underwear had no smell, the few black lace panties left in her drawers, carefully washed, and it was only with my head buried in the dresses in the closet that I noticed something, a distant, indefinable odor, which made my temples pulsate and the blood beat dully in my ears. At night, in the light from a candle (the electricity had been cut off for some days), I heated two large buckets of water on the stove and went up to pour them into my sister’s bathtub. The water was boiling, I had to wear gloves to hold the burning handles; I added a few buckets of cold water, dipping my hand in to check the temperature, and added some flakes of scented bubbles. I was now drinking a local plum brandy, a large demijohn of which I had found in the kitchen, and I had also brought up a flask of it, with a glass and an ashtray, which I placed on a little silver tray across the bidet. Before entering the water I lowered my eyes to my body, my pale skin that took on a softly golden tint in the light of the candles stuck in a candelabrum at the foot of the bath. I didn’t like this body very much, and yet, how could I not adore it? I got into the water thinking about the creaminess of my sister’s skin, alone and naked in a tiled bathroom in Switzerland, with the thick blue veins snaking beneath that skin. I hadn’t seen her body naked since we were children; in Zurich, overcome with fear, I had turned off the lights, but I could picture it down to the smallest details, the heavy, ripe, firm breasts, the solid hips, the beautiful round belly that was lost in a dense black triangle of curls, creased possibly now by a thick vertical scar, from the navel to the pubis. I drank a little brandy and relaxed into the embrace of the hot water, my head resting on the shelf near the candlestick, my chin scarcely rising above the thick layer of soap bubbles, as the serene face of my sister must have floated, her long hair put up in a heavy bun stabbed by a silver needle. The thought of that body stretched in the water, its legs slightly apart, reminded me of the conception of Rhesos. His mother, one of the Muses, I forget which, Calliope perhaps, was still a virgin and she was going to a musical contest to answer the challenge of Thamyris; to get there, she had to cross the River Strymon, which slipped its cool ripples into her, between her thighs, and that’s how she conceived. Was that how my sister conceived her twins, I said to myself sourly, in the soapy water of her bath? She must have known men, after me, many men; and since she had betrayed me in this way, I hoped it was with many men, an army, and that she deceived her impotent husband every day with anything that came her way. I imagined her having a man come up to this bathroom, a farm boy, the gardener, a milkman, one of the Frenchmen from the STO. Everyone in the neighborhood must have known, but no one said anything, out of respect for von Üxküll. And von Üxküll couldn’t care less, he stayed hunched like a spider in his apartments, dreaming about his abstract music, which carried him far from his broken body. And my sister too couldn’t care less about what her neighbors thought or said, as long as they kept coming up. She asked them to carry the water, to help her unfasten her dress; and they were clumsy, they blushed, their stubby fingers, hardened by work, got tangled up, she had to help them. Most of them were already hard when they came in, that was obvious through their pants; they didn’t know what to do, she had to tell them everything. They rubbed her back, her breasts, and afterward, she fucked them in her bedroom. They smelled of earth, of filth, of sweat, of cheap tobacco, she must have liked that, madly. Their cocks, when she pulled back the foreskin to suck them, stank of urine. And when it was over she dismissed them, amicably but without smiling. She didn’t wash, she slept in their smell, like a child. Thus her life, when I wasn’t there, was no better than mine, both of us, without the other, knew only how to wallow in our bodies, their infinite, yet at the same time so limited possibilities. The bath was slowly growing colder, but I didn’t get out, I warmed myself in the evil fire of these thoughts, I found an insane comfort in these daydreams, even the most sordid ones, I sought a refuge in my dreams like a kid under his blanket, for however cruel and corrupt they might have been, it was always better than the unbearable bitterness of the outside. Finally I got out of the bath. Without even drying myself I swallowed a glass of brandy, then rolled myself up in one of the large bath towels hanging there. I lit a cigarette and, without troubling to get dressed, went to smoke at one of the windows looking out onto the courtyard: in the farthest distance, a pale line rimmed the sky, shifting slowly from pink to white to gray then to a dark blue that melted into the nighttime sky. The cigarette finished, I went to drink another glass and then lay down on the large four-poster bed, pulling the starched sheets and heavy blankets over me. I stretched out my limbs, turned onto my stomach, my head buried in the soft pillow, lying as she had lain there, after her bath, for so many years. I saw it clearly, all these agitated and contradictory things were rising up in me like a black water, or like a loud noise that threatened to drown out all other sounds, reason, prudence, even conscious desire. I slipped my hand between my thighs, and said to myself: If I slipped my hand there, on her, she wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore, but at the same time this thought revolted me, I didn’t want her to take me as she would have taken a farm boy, just to satisfy herself, I wanted her to desire me, freely as I desired her, I wanted her to love me as I loved her. Finally I sank into sleep and into ferocious, dislocated dreams, of which only the dark trace of this phrase, uttered by Una’s serene voice, remains in my mind: “You are a very heavy man for women to bear.”