Jonathan Littell - The Fata Morgana Books

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The rain streaked the train’s windows; beyond, everything was dark, opaque, unreachable. It was still raining when I got out, a firm, sustained shower now; I reached my apartment soaking wet, a little annoyed. The girl, wearing nothing but cotton panties, chartreuse green with thin red stripes, was leafing through a magazine, lying on her belly on the lilac rectangle of the bed. “What are you doing here?” I asked, surprised, shedding my wet clothes. She smiled at me as I was struggling with my pants: “Well, I was waiting for you.”—“You could have turned on the heat, at least,” I grumbled. “It’s freezing in here.” Although she was nearly naked, she didn’t seem to notice, whereas I was shivering; I hurried to pull on a dry pair of pants, then a shirt and a sweater. That didn’t help much and I sat down at the round table to pour myself a drink. The girl had sat up and, sitting cross-legged, was looking at me with an amused air: her smile, her thin waist, her pert little breasts, the bones of her knees, everything in her was like a rebuke addressed to me, friendly and indistinct. Glass in hand, I rose and went to sit down behind the desk. The girl fell back, her head in the pillows, her knees touching and forming, with her feet flat on the violet sheets, an unstable triangle that she swung quietly from side to side. “Come here, if you’re cold.”—“No, not now,” I answered distractedly as I fiddled with a pen and shifted some papers, running my gaze over the countless pictures adorning the walls without really seeing them. “Take a hot bath, then,” she suggested. I rubbed my shoulders: “No, not now.” A little glass egg, opaque and rather rough, had made its way into my fingers; I weighed it, slid it over my palm, then lifted it to the light: it glowed with a warm, red, dark, shifting light, as if it were filled with blood, or else incubating a mysterious creature intimately linked to fire. I finished my drink and looked around for the bottle, but the girl, I’m not sure how, had gotten hold of it and was rolling it between her legs, laughing: “You want it? Come and get it.”—“Oh, you’re annoying.” My shoulders were shuddering in spasms: I must have really caught cold. The rain was still falling heavily behind the window, darkening the space, almost masking the brick wall even though it was quite close. I got up and headed for the bathroom; the girl had taken up her magazine again and was turning the pages, toying with the bottle between her feet. I stood in front of the mirror and examined my face: it looked strangely vague to me, half erased, I couldn’t seem to grasp its workings; mystified, I rubbed it, but it was as if the skin were peeling away between my fingers, leaving me even more insubstantial. I preferred not to see this so I returned to the room; the girl was still reading, quite alive and absolutely real with her thin bones and delicate joints, her warm, golden skin, her hair with its reddish reflections, her dark, always slightly amused eyes. I was afraid of touching her, it seemed to me as if my fingers would pass through her skin, or else would crumble against her like wet sand. I returned to the desk after grabbing the bottle, poured myself another glass, and began reading the pages piled there. The handwriting was not at all unlike my own, I myself must have written these lines, these pages of text, but they said absolutely nothing to me, and I could barely grasp their meaning. It was a kind of story: the narrator, a lost shade, was wandering through a vast house whose rooms echoed with the laughter of small children. The setting seemed vaguely Russian, it could have been a story by Chekhov if it had had the slightest psychological substance; in any case, it had nothing to do with me. Perhaps it was a translation I had done and then forgotten? Or the copy of a text I had come across? I had no idea, and it didn’t matter. On the bed, the girl seemed to be sleeping, her breasts hidden under the overturned magazine, her head on its side, her face half masked by her hair. She is taking up more and more room, I said to myself, soon she’ll be treating this place like her own. I was still very cold, my whole body was trembling, but I didn’t want to lie down next to her, I was afraid of hurting myself on her sharp bones, her hard, piercing body; so I stacked the papers, went out into the hallway, and opened the second door, the one on the left. I crossed the room, walking on the plastic tarps, climbed the ladder to the loft, and slipped under the tarp that covered it, rolled into a ball, my eyes closed, my legs racked with long shivers. How long did this last? I couldn’t say, an eternity of sand and lava, my body had rid itself of all solidity and all presence, it was floating very high up on the fever as if on a funeral barge, traveling over the years all the seas of the world, unable to find its way, neither toward life, nor toward death. When at the end of this centuries-long journey I opened my eyes, the tarp had disappeared; I was lying beneath a thick comforter wrapped in a beige cover, completely soaked with my sweat. I turned over and examined the room: all the tarps had been removed, the floor was covered in a thick sky-blue carpet spotted with dark blue patterns, everything looked crisp and clean, the colorful toy was still resting on the stool. Against the wall stood a tall rectangular mirror, set in a thin orange frame: I looked for my reflection in it, but could only see that of the toy, which looked bigger and more elaborate than the one I remembered, as if it had grown during the long night. I heard a door open under the loft, I had never noticed there was one, and the girl appeared on the blue carpet. This time, she wore a lightweight pair of dark-brown pants and a red tank top with a large black circle across the chest. “That’s better, isn’t it?” she said, raising her head toward me and smiling widely. “You should knock down the wall, or at least put in a double door, that would give you more space.” I didn’t have the strength to tell her to keep her advice to herself and I closed my eyes, rolling onto my back and stretching my aching legs. My clothes, I noticed only then, had disappeared along with the tarps, I was lying naked under the comforter, and I felt a sudden shame at this, as if I had been turned into a plucked bird, bristling and scared. “Where are my clothes?” I asked in a murmur, but if she heard me, she didn’t reply, she had disappeared again. A vague sound of water reached me, she was probably running a bath, on the other side; all of a sudden, the sound became clearer, and even before she reappeared I understood that the mysterious door must communicate with the bathroom, allowing passage between the two contiguous rooms. This time, she was holding a green apple, which she brought to her nose before biting into it. She held out to me another one which she had kept hidden behind her back: “Here, take it.” Since I didn’t react, she insisted, shaking the apple almost in front of my face: “Go on, it’ll do you good.” I didn’t move and she bit again into her own apple, chewing slowly and carefully as she slipped the other one into her pants pocket. “The bath will be ready. Are you coming?” I couldn’t take my eyes away from the round ball on her hip; finally, I raised my eyes to the mirror, which reflected in its orange frame the long supple line of her body. “Where are my clothes?”—“Oh, what a pain you can be!” she laughed. “They’re here, on a chair. I added some clean underwear, you hadn’t put any on.” She went back under the loft and closed the door. I listened to her busying herself behind the wall, she had turned off the water and must have been undressing, then I heard her body slide into the bath. She kept eating her apple; the water made little lapping sounds. Then I squirmed out from under the comforter and managed with difficulty to reach the ladder, which creaked beneath my weight as I somehow descended, holding on with all my strength so as not to fall. My clothes were indeed where she had said; but my hat was still in the other room, along with my jacket, wallet, and cigarettes. Yet passing through this bathroom, which I imagined completely overflowing with this girl’s excess of life, was beyond me, and the key to the hallway door was precisely still in my jacket pocket. I tried to consider my situation, but my thoughts, foggy, kept shredding apart and contradicting one another in turn; the rain, still drumming in the air shaft, complicated things even more, since going out in the downpour in just a shirt was unthinkable, but as for confronting this impossible girl once again, I was incapable of it, and no other options presented themselves to me for the moment. I could have stayed there for a long time pointlessly turning over these thoughts, but every time I moved, the large mirror set against the wall sent back a reflection, too fragmented and aggressive to be my own, which put me ill at ease. Undecided, I opened the hallway door: a large tan canvas umbrella stood there, open and overturned,soaking the old red carpet with water. That solves everything! I exclaimed joyfully, grasping the black leather handle. Leaning against the railing, I shook it, sprinkling the carpet and the lavender floor with a rainfall of droplets, then closed it and started down the steps, leaning with all my weight on the handle in a vain attempt to control my legs which, lost, were each trying to move in a different direction.