Herve Le Tellier - Electrico W

Someone put a hand on my shoulder. I was startled to hear Antonio’s voice and dropped my pen like a little boy caught red-handed.

“What are you doing here?”

Antonio was amused to have caught me. He was chewing a sandwich. I leaned down, picked up my pen, and stuffed my notebook in my pocket. He wasn’t inquisitive about what I was hiding, but I couldn’t help answering.

“I’m looking for an address, I’m trying to call someone. Like everyone else.”

“From here? Do it in the hotel.”

“In the hotel … yes. Are you here to post your letter? Or rather our letter?”

Now I was smiling too. Antonio shook his head: “No. It turns out I won’t need to post it. Irene just called. She’s coming to Lisbon. In a couple of days. Monday or Tuesday. She’ll call. I told her you were here …”

He took a bite of his sandwich, seemed to want to gauge the effect he had made.

“Really? And … what did she say?”

He stayed silent, an impish crease at the corners of his mouth, and I realized that my speedy response had betrayed my anxiety. He took another bite of his sandwich.

“She told me not to trust you …”

He swallowed a mouthful with gusto and looked around.

“I really like post offices, big post offices. The bustle, the echoing voices. It’s like the anteroom to the whole world.”

He smiled, pleased with his phrase.

“But you see, not like an airport, or a station. There are no departures here, no stopovers. Just addresses, languages, alphabets, letters and parcels. Absolutely anybody writing to absolutely anybody else. A huge great phonebook of the planet …”

Antonio was pontificating. He threw the last bit of bread in the trash.

“Shall we go change?”

“Excuse me?”

“For the concert this evening, with Aurora … the Estufa Fria. You are coming with me, aren’t you? Don’t leave me alone with the sorceress.”

He laughed and showed me his palm. There, still shimmering in the light, was the ghost of a blue bird.

AURORA WAS RIGHT, penguins visiting the Amazon was an accurate image. With advancing years and an accumulation of good port, many of the guests had even achieved the embonpoint of emperor penguins. I tried to tell Antonio the joke about never competing with Emperor Peng (because Emperor Peng wins), but he was too busy looking for Aurora to get it, or even listen to me.

“Hey, Vincent, look, there she is. Look how beautiful she is …”

I didn’t recognize Aurora in the young woman he was already walking toward. Perhaps because of the long cobalt-blue dress, or her hair, which was now not held in check by any ribbons so it spilled over her shoulders. Beside her was a very tall, very dark, fairly good-looking boy of about twenty wearing a dated gray suit. He was doing his utmost to generate some of the tragic darkness of a Russian soul in his expression. If this were a game of Happy Families, then he could have been the youngest of the Karamazov brothers. This Alyosha spoke very little and smiled very little but never took his eyes off Aurora. She meanwhile seemed distant, a stranger.

When she saw Antonio her face came to life, blossomed. She put a lock of hair behind her ear and abandoned her suddenly powerless companion. She cut through the crowd to reach us, stood on tiptoe and planted a kiss on Antonio’s left cheek. Then, in a move that was both intimate and incredibly brazen, she tilted her head for him to return the kiss, in the crook of her neck. He looked helplessly at that shoulder line offered up to him and, as if drawn in by the smell of it, furtively kissed the base of her neck.

“I was worried you wouldn’t come, Antonio.”

“Well, you can see I have.”

I greeted her with a nod, and she skimmed my cheek with her lips.

“Thank you for coming to see me again.”

She looked up at the glass roof, where all the ultraviolet lights had been lit.

“Have you seen? Little blue suns … I wasn’t lying …”

She had lost her childish voice and adopted a woman’s, but not quite a lady’s: “Would you like some champagne? Follow me.”

She took Antonio’s hand with energy and determination and guided us to the buffet, walking quickly through the dense crowd. Antonio was Aurora’s prisoner, leaning forward as he ran after his own hand. Beside the trays of canapés, she finally released him and chose a small pink éclair with sparrowlike voracity, nibbled one creamy end, then put it back down on the tablecloth with a smirk of distaste.

“It’s gelatinous and too sweet. Too bad, I really like the color, like a chubby child’s finger. Yummy. The concert’s going to start soon, I saved you two places, near me.”

“Who organizes all this, the concert, the reception?” Antonio asked.

“Well … the Philarmonica, isn’t it? Why does it matter?”

“Why are you invited? You said your father worked in the hothouse?”

“Have you quite finished with the questions? I’ve already said, this is my home. Shall we go?”

She took Antonio’s hand again and led us to the concert hall. The seats were theater red, the décor rococo. Aurora sat us in our places, 31 and 33, in the middle of the third row of the stalls.

“The best seats, these are. You don’t know how lucky you are to know me.”

She slipped a program into my pocket with a conspiratorial expression and narrowed her eyes mischievously. She knelt before us, crucifying the fabric of her dress with all the aplomb of a little countess in a silk gown playing in a dusty alleyway.

“Are you comfortable here? I won’t be far away, and I’ll be watching you the whole time.”

She snatched Antonio’s hand and opened it like a rose.

“But … where’s the bird? Did you frighten it? Did it fly away?”

And before Antonio could reply, she was kissing him on the lips and running off toward the wings. After a moment of stupefaction, he looked rather bemused and turned toward me. In the lamplight, his black eyes had gone the harsh green of a hornbeam leaf.

“That girl is …”

“Yes, isn’t she.”

I was smiling, amused by the helplessness on Antonio’s face. I was amazed to feel no jealousy at all. Aurora was very pretty, beautiful even, but I wasn’t attracted to her. I’m not attracted to women who are too beautiful, because they wear their refusal to seduce like a badge, because a cold hostility seeps out of them, helping them avoid being pestered too often.

And yet Aurora was not a sensual desert. She was well aware of her charms, but tried to please with daring and gentleness. She was sincere and naive, like a girl who doesn’t know she has a woman’s face and who hasn’t yet learned to see herself in men’s expressions. To crown it all she had a natural candor that forgave everything else. I would never have dared envy Antonio the tenderness she showed him, because she held the secret to ultimate propriety, she knew how to be desirable to him alone.

The hall was filling up and I opened the simple program printed on a lightweight card. The ensemble was called Quatuor Papageno, they were going to play some Purcell, some Dubois, and some Moulinié. I pointed out a line in the program to Antonio.

“Look, that’s where your Aurora’s going.”

Antonio snatched it from my hand. Among the musicians was Aurora Oliveira, tenor viola. Antonio read and reread those few words, shook his head, and turned to me: “Have you ever heard of a tenor viola?”

“No. Do you think it’s like a viola da gamba?”

“I …”

Antonio bit his lower lip as if to repress a laugh.

The bell, darkness, one last creak of the seats. As the hubbub died, the curtain rose. A narrow beam of moonlight came through the glass roof. It caressed the smooth face of a young woman standing onstage. Once again I failed to recognize Aurora. I was disarmed to discover how pure her features were, how perfect the oval of her face. Her cheeks glowed with a touch of pink, her lips with a hint of vermilion. Behind her, in the half light, the silhouettes of three musicians were just visible.