He was this close to hating her.
5
THIS MAN DIDN’T SEEM TO want anything. Valérie was not used to having a man look at her without looking; having his eyes remain so absent. The pianist continued to hammer out polkas. The air was heavy. A client was drooling on her shoulder.
“Hey, you—mademoiselle.”
“Me?”
“No, my little grandmother from Pétaouchnoc-sur-Oise!”
“What do you want?”
“What do you mean, what do I want? Shouldn’t you be asking me that?”
“I am asking you.”
“No, you know what I’m talking about.”
The floor is thick with sawdust, the air with polkas, and the walls with paintings by painters who couldn’t pay for their drinks or their lives. Valérie tries to remember what the world was like when it wasn’t like this, and she asks herself what she wouldn’t give to have her own little parcel of memories: a little girl in a pure white dress running through a meadow full of pretty yellow flowers, for example. Surrounded by a litter of golden puppies. A bright pitcher of orange juice waiting for her outside on an old iron table painted white. A strict but understanding father watching her from a distance while he absentmindedly swipes at his boots with his crop. Or at least a modest old peasant house set in a valley—the kind you see everywhere in France—that she has seen so often in paintings, with a mother who cooks in a big pot and a father who trudges home, weary from pruning the vines, and lights a long pipe and sits himself down in front of the fire. The smell of smoke. Many little brothers and sisters. A plaid skirt. Another dog with matted fur who growls. Or best of all, in another house, in a big bedroom filled with light, a bed with a big canopy and lavender sheets, and a mother kissing her forehead while she dozed, so sweetly dozed.
She would kill, she tells herself—though she has no idea whom—for a mother who kissed her forehead, or at least for an aunt who would wait up for her some nights, her hands on her hips, yelling at her that this is no time for a young lady to be getting home, any home, and who would drag her to the bathroom and wash her face to get rid of her makeup and who would shout at her that she was a lost cause for whom things would surely end badly.
But she doesn’t have this memory or any other worth remembering, and she is sure that this man knows who she is and what she is—he must see it, as she herself does. She thinks: there are men who would run from this, out of timidity, even while I spend my life taking advantage of the other kind. Escaping from the other kind or flirting with them. Teasing them with what they are never going to get, or perhaps someday, after a long campaign, a costly campaign, a stupid campaign, and so on through days, months, years until I find one who will fill me with memories of a girl singing in an old church choir with her hair tied up in a blue ribbon, her face washed, unclouded, glowing. The silly face of a girl who wouldn’t even need to be pretty—who wouldn’t care if she was pretty. How easy it would be not to have to think about being pretty, she thinks. Since she was first able to reason, beauty—her own supposed beauty—has been her great weapon for nearly everything. And she’s not even beautiful; she knows she’s not even that.
“Who will know how to fill my past with memories?” she asks herself, without any great hopes. She looks at the man who looks without looking.
Valérie Larbin was what the chroniclers of society—or their putative sons, the social novelists—would have called a demimondaine. The qualification is specious. The first half of the term, the demi, makes it ambiguous: these women were not worldly, they were only half worldly. These were not women with set rates, prostitutes who in exchange for their services received a specific amount of coin (or notes for that matter, depending on the quality of the product). But it was understood that they were—in an era in which women feigned a fundamental indisposition to any romantic encounter that had not been preceded by the necessary signatures—women disposed to exchange their favors for an indeterminate set of favors in turn. These might include money, but more often consisted of gifts, attentions, various invitations. All of which bestowed on the practice the more attractive air of indefinition, since it wasn’t an automatic or explicit exchange. The interested party would size up the quality of the offerings and thus avoid the strict rationalism and measurement through which the bourgeoisie typically saw the world. To have a demi was to have a demi-adventure.
“Do you know who that guy is?”
“Which one?”
“That one there.”
“Val, there are about ten different guys there.”
“Him, with the dark hair in his eyes.”
“No, I don’t. I’ve seen him around here a couple of times, but I don’t know him. Why?”
“No reason. Just wondering.”
Beauty is a weapon that you can never grab by the handle, someone once told Valérie, and she remembers this whenever she lets herself go.
The clientele at the Faux Chien is a mixture of would-be Montmartre artists, slumming bourgeois in search of emotion, con men on the make, the jumble of regulars, and the girls. It’s eleven thirty at night, and instead of a piano, an accordion plays, and a man with a raspy voice sings songs about women and animals. A few people dance in the middle of the room; many more drink.
Valérie is used to men who are too timid to approach her, but not to men who ignore her. The man with dark hair and the eyes too close together is sitting alone at a table in the corner, where two cracked mirrors meet. He drinks wine and seems far away, his eyelids drooping over eyes as black as his hair, a sharp, cruel nose, and an uneven mustache. Vincenzo Perugia wears an open white shirt and a blue kerchief tied around his neck. The look could almost be affected but instead contributes to the overall look of disrepair, of a lack of interest in trivial things.
Valérie looks at him and decides that he’s a man who knows what’s important, and even more, what is not. Perugia takes a swig of his wine as if he were sitting in his own kitchen. Valérie understands that this gesture owes nothing to what’s going on around him, to the Chien, to her.
Usually the men in the Cabaret du Faux Chien are afraid to come up to her. Valérie knows this—her secret is to appear just slightly inaccessible. She knows how to project being out of place, how to appear to be above where she finds herself, to find herself in places that are beneath her. In a salon at the Ritz she would be an interloper; here at the Faux Chien she is a young woman who has just mistaken her way home. Here at the Faux Chien she stands out among the fifteen or twenty other girls who haven’t thought to make themselves stand out in any way, who thought that to belong one only needed to be like all the others.
Valérie stands with her back to the bar, her ass against the bar, her left foot in its kidskin boot hooked on the brass foot rail, her left knee moving back and forth under her silk skirt, her finger between her bright red lips, and she looks at him. To her, nothing stands between the two of them—the waiters in their leather waistcoats, the regulars who are singing and toasting and spinning promises of wispy futures, the smoky air, the song—everything disappears. All that is left is her on one side, leaning against the bar with her left boot tapping and her finger between her lips, and him, there in the corner between the two mirrors, not looking at her. Not seeming not to look at her so as to attract her with the difference of his indifference—just not looking at her at all.
Or a man who will give me a man’s memories, she thinks—the memories of a man who doesn’t have to wait for things to come to him.
His lips are thin, finely drawn. That fineness is one of the first things you notice about him, the manifestation of an overall fineness that at first glance he seems to embody. His lips are so thin that it looks like he doesn’t have lips at all, just a slight downward curve to his mouth, the corners pulled down in an expression that could seem contemptuous, if you believed those lips would ever take the trouble to disparage anyone. Above the thin lips is a thin nose, slightly turned up, the oval nostrils ending in an almost
sharp point; a nose seemingly not made for smell, too delicate to come in contact with the smells of this world.
He has a distinct, rounded jaw, and his high cheekbones have a slight flush to them, as if the air had finally managed to reach skin so white that it looks as if it had never been touched by anything before.
His long, lank hair is a perfect black—perhaps dyed—and he wears it pulled back, which elongates the shape of his head and face. His face has the aspect of a bust, a frozen version of Madame de Pompadour or Maintenon or some such character, though his eyes are opened wide, as if in surprise.
Valérie’s eyes are also big and dark, open and round, as if surprised, though there is something in her look that says nothing can surprise her, and then something else that says perhaps. She can open her eyes very wide, as if they were out of her control, her way of showing that there’s something within her that can open and close. Her way of saying, sometimes without wanting to, that she is not what she seems.
Then, when she can’t avoid it, she opens her lips and we can see her teeth.
Beauty comes in many forms—who could have known.
He must know that I am what I am. He must see it; it’s obvious. He knows but doesn’t know. There are men who are frightened off.
This time, Valérie doesn’t worry about his seeing her teeth. She thinks that the man with black hair must know what she is. He sees, and that is why he doesn’t look—there are men whom it disgusts, who condemn those kinds of women. As if they themselves hadn’t sold themselves out to some crook who makes them do whatever he wants. He must be one of those imbeciles who thinks he’s all clean and proper because he works for the owner of a factory, a man I could make crazy if I wanted to, ruin if I wanted to, just as I could ruin him if I wanted, though I have no reason to waste my time on some sanctimonious ass with a dead brain full of stupid ideas about decency and cleanliness and honesty and order and country and how superior he feels even though he doesn’t realize he sells himself out much more cheaply. She thinks he must be one of those poor, sad men who hide themselves in other people’s ideas so they won’t have to think for themselves; terrified of thinking for himself.
Vincenzo Perugia sees that alluring, strange, distant, almost-beautiful woman, and for a moment it seems as if she is looking at him. Valérie Larbin approaches him and hopes she can get her voice to come out like a whisper, even in all this noise: I don’t want anything from you, I want to give you everything.
She readies her throat. Don’t let him look at me.
Vincenzo Perugia looks at her with something she takes to be contempt—an excessive contempt, almost incomprehensible, as if it would be even greater if it could but didn’t know how.
For their part, those women did not consider themselves to be altogether outside of the world. Their name reflected this duality: they were by definition half in and half out, with the constant chance that they would fall completely out and the constant hope of returning to be completely in. They were, in any case, women who had forsaken the path of fiancée-wife-mother, and if they did live by their sex, they did not do so according to the new worker-boss relations that their society now dictated almost everywhere. They were loose women, people said, living bitter lives, though they themselves thought that, compared to many others like them, their lives were better. Loose women, who did in their job what other women wanted to do for fun, and who, in that professionalization, lost any possibility of enjoying play as play, pleasure as pleasure, sex as love. Loose women whom you could simply leave, the way Tholomyes and his three friends left those four demis in Les Misèrables, with the grandiose letter that ends by advising the four abandoned demis:
Mourn for us in haste and replace us with speed. If this letter rends you, then do the same to it. For almost two years we made you happy. We bear you no grudge for that.
She wanted him to return. Every night she looked for him at the Faux Chien without telling herself what she was doing. Every night her eyes scanned the faces that filled the place but she didn’t see him and she didn’t admit to herself that yes, she sought him. She did not dare to ask after him—that would have been a confession she wasn’t yet prepared to make to herself. Then the next week she saw him again—he was wearing the same shirt or one identical to it, sitting at the same table, drinking the same thing. There was the threat again—identical.
Her white lace blouse has thin ribbons attached to its deep neckline, which she now ties closed, though this does little. Usually she leaves it open, showing her white breasts and the dark beauty mark at exactly the point where her tits begin, where the skin begins to curve out to form them. She ties the ribbons and walks over to the table in the corner between the two mirrors, seeing herself in those mirrors, advancing.
“You haven’t told me your name.”
“It’s Vincenzo. Vincenzo Perugia.”
Valérie takes a moment to try to pinpoint his accent but can’t quite place it. He does not return the question.
“My name is Valérie.”
“I thought so.”
Juan María
1
SUDDENLY, I NO LONGER HAD a place. Overnight, I was taken out of what had always been my house, my life. Diego and Marianita hadn’t wanted to say good-bye—either that or Don Manuel hadn’t let them. And my mother didn’t want to tell me why we were leaving. I suspected it was my fault, but I wasn’t sure. Some years later she told me. Even then, when she told me, she didn’t know, and I didn’t tell her anything.
And so we moved to a tiny house in another barrio, to that little shack of Antonio’s—Antonio, who was so good to my mother. I began to like staying at school more and more. And my mother no longer called me Bollino—I was now Juan María.
“Mamá, I’m going to look after you.”
“Oh, yes? What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet, Mamá, but don’t you worry.”
“One day, GianMaria, when you’re grown up. Right now I have to sew all these shirts.”
Best of all was Saturday. I liked Sunday less because it was only a part day, a day that began full of possibility but turned quickly to waiting for sundown, when my mother would take me back to the monks, and school. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go, as I’ve said—more likely I even missed it. What really bothered me is that a day that began by promising such extraordinary things could end in such a routine and predictable way. But Saturdays did not suffer from this. Saturdays everything was still possible.
Usually on Saturday nights my mother and Antonio would go to the seamstresses’ dance. My mother would wear her shawl and Antonio his broad-brimmed hat—every Saturday from the time we went to live with Antonio. I stayed behind, alone in the house—we can be kind and call it that: a house. That was my house then, though it also wasn’t.
The boy learned that he lived in a city—or town, or place—which might have been any other, and learned that the fact he lived in the city was pure chance, and most of all, that that city was not the only place in the world, or rather, the city they called Rosario was not the world. It’s a shock; it comes as a shock to a boy when he learns that the place where he lives is one among many, that he might have lived in any number of other places. Not that he could choose to live in other places, for that comes later—at first, the shock is learning that things could be as they are or a thousand different ways. When it dawns on you that, as a result, everything might be different. Or, said in words that a boy would not use: that nothing is necessarily so.
For most of a boy’s life, he thinks—though he doesn’t really think, for this suggests too much, better to say that he lives under the belief—that everything around him is decreed, necessary: parents and places and teachers, his abilities, his toys. Later, bit by bit—and then finally, one day, all at once—a boy understands that these are single possibilities among infinite others. The unease that this discovery can produce is epic—and only survivable thanks to the short attention span and lack of imagination of so m
any boys. Only they survive it.
So it is not the new beard or the voice that now skips, or the pimples—it is this: the discovery of the intolerable caprice of their situation that, when it comes, causes a boy to stop being a boy. Though for the lucky ones, not even that.
“You said that you learned many things in that school.”
“Yes, though I don’t think they were the things they meant to teach me.”
“For example?”
“Don’t you know, Newspaperman? Am I really going to have to spell every single thing out?”
He gripped my hand to guide it on its path around the paper that had once been white and that was now being marred by my markings. First I marveled at how easy it was to spoil that whiteness, the purity of the paper, or of anything else. Later, I marveled at how once it was spoilt, it could not be recovered. I marveled a lot during that time, when each marvel took an effort of imagination. I was a happy boy then, though who can say if I was still a boy.
The priest would grip my hand and guide it. This was drawing class: fifteen more or less filthy boys wearing grey smocks in a high-ceilinged schoolroom, cold in the way of a big room, with walls that had once been white and low desks of dark wood, their foreheads furrowed with effort as they copied the features of a Jesus embedded in his cross. One day, Little Stanislaus asked the Father if we could draw apples and pears and live people, by which I suppose he meant live women, though he said people. The Father replied that we could once we had learned how, but that for now, as ignorant as we were, all we could do was to try with the Lord’s help to draw His images. All that year we drew Virgins in cloaks, Christs in loincloths; I suspect we could have gone on drawing them forever.
The Vanishing of the Mona Lisa Page 3