Part 2 (2/2)

”d.a.m.n it! I don't understand anything. I don't have anything. d.a.m.n it, d.a.m.n it,” moaned Kern, burying himself in the pillow. A leaden fatigue was compressing his temples. His legs ached and tingled unbearably. He groaned in the darkness for a long time, turning heavily from side to side. The rays on the ceiling were long since extinguished.

2.

The next day Isabel did not appear until lunchtime.

Since morning the sky had been blindingly white and the sun had been moonlike. Then snow began falling, slowly and vertically. The dense flakes, like ornamental spots on a white veil, curtained the view of the mountains, the heavily laden firs, the dulled turquoise of the rink. The plump, soft particles of snow rustled against the windowpanes, falling, falling without end. If one watched them for long, one had the impression the entire hotel was slowly drifting upward.

”I was so tired last night,” Isabel was saying to her neighbor, a young man with a high olive forehead and piercing eyes, ”so tired I decided to loll in bed.”

”You look stunning today,” drawled the young man with exotic courtesy.

She inflated her nostrils derisively.

Looking at her through the hyacinths, Kern said coldly, ”I didn't know, Miss Isabel, that you had a dog in your room, as well as a guitar.”

Her downy eyes seemed to narrow even more, against a breeze of embarra.s.sment. Then she beamed with a smile, all carmine and ivory.

”You overdid it on the dance floor last night, Mr. Kern,” she replied. The olive youth and the little fellow who recognized only Bible and billiards laughed, the first with a hearty ha-ha, the second very softly, with raised eyebrows.

Kern said with a frown, ”I'd like to ask you not to play at night. I don't have an easy time falling asleep.”

Isabel slashed his face with a rapid, radiant glance.

”You had better ask your dreams, not me, about that.”

And she began talking to her neighbor about the next day's ski compet.i.tion.

For some minutes already Kern had felt his lips stretching into a spasmodic, uncontrollable sneer. It twitched agonizingly in the corners of his mouth, and he suddenly felt like yanking the tablecloth off the table, hurling the pot with the hyacinths against the wall.

He rose, trying to conceal his unbearable tremor, and, seeing no one, went out of the room.

”What's happening to me,” he questioned his anguish. ”What's going on here?”

He kicked his suitcase open and started packing. He immediately felt dizzy. He stopped and again began pacing the room. Angrily he stuffed his short pipe. He sat down in the armchair by the window, beyond which the snow was falling with nauseating regularity.

He had come to this hotel, to this wintry, stylish nook called Zermatt, in order to fuse the sensation of white silence with the pleasure of lighthearted, motley encounters, for total solitude was what he feared most. But now he understood that human faces were also intolerable to him, that the snow made his head ring, and that he lacked the inspired vitality and tender perseverance without which pa.s.sion is powerless. While for Isabel, probably, life consisted of a splendid ski run, of impetuous laughter, of perfume and frosty air.

Who is she? A heliotype diva, broken free? Or the runaway daughter of a swaggering, bilious lord? Or just one of those women from Paris ... And where does her money come from? Slightly vulgar thought ...

She does have the dog, though, and it's pointless for her to deny it. Some sleek-haired Great Dane. With a cold nose and warm ears. Still snowing, too, Kern thought haphazardly. And, in my suitcase-a spring seemed to pop open, with a clink, in his brain-I have a Parabellum.

Until evening he again ambled about the hotel, or made dry rustling noises with the newspapers in the reading room. From the vestibule window he saw Isabel, the Swede, and several young men with jackets pulled on over fringed sweaters getting into a swanlike curved sleigh. The roan horses made their merry harnesses ring. The snow was falling silent and dense. Isabel, all spangled with small white stars, was shouting and laughing amid her companions. And when the sled started with a jerk and sped off, she rocked backward, clapping her fur-mittened hands in the air.

Kern turned away from the window.

Go ahead, enjoy your ride.... It makes no difference....

Then, during dinner, he tried not to look at her. She was filled with a merry, festive gaiety, and paid no attention to him. At nine the Negro music began moaning and clattering again. Kern, in a state of feverish languor, was standing by the doorjamb, gazing at the clinched couples and at Isabel's curly fan.

A soft voice said next to his ear, ”Would you care to go to the bar?”

He turned and saw the melancholy caprine eyes, the ears with their reddish fuzz.

Amid the crimson penumbra of the bar the gla.s.s tables reflected the flounces of the lampshades.

On high stools at the metal counter sat three men, all three wearing white gaiters, their legs retracted, sucking through straws on bright-colored drinks. On the other side of the bar, where varicolored bottles sparkled on the shelves like a collection of convex beetles, a fleshy, black-mustachioed man in a cherry-colored dinner jacket was mixing c.o.c.ktails with extraordinary dexterity. Kern and Monfiori selected a table in the bar's velvet depths. A waiter opened a long list of beverages, gingerly and reverently, like an antiquary exhibiting a precious book.

”We're going to have a gla.s.s of each in succession,” said Monfiori in his melancholy, slightly hollow voice, ”and when we get to the end we'll start over, choosing only the ones we found to our liking. Perhaps we'll stop at one and keep savoring it for a long time. Then we'll go back to the beginning again.”

He gave the waiter a pensive look. ”Is that clear?”

The part in the waiter's hair tipped forward.

”This is known as the roaming of Bacchus,” Monfiori told Kern with a doleful chuckle. ”Some people approach their daily life in the same way.”

Kern stifled a tremulous yawn. ”You know this ends by making you throw up.”

Monfiori sighed, swigged, smacked his lips, and marked the first item on the list with an X, using an automatic pencil. Two deep furrows ran from the wings of his nose to the corners of his thin mouth.

After his third gla.s.s Kern lit a cigarette in silence. After his sixth drink-an oversweet concoction of chocolate and champagne-he had the urge to talk.

He exhaled a megaphone of smoke. Narrowing his eyes, he tapped the ashes from his cigarette with a yellowed nail.

”Tell me, Monfiori, what do you think of this-what's her name-Isabel?”

”You'll get nowhere with her,” replied Monfiori. ”She belongs to the slippery species. All she seeks is fleeting contact.”

”But she plays the guitar at night, and fusses with her dog. That's not good, is it?” said Kern, goggling his eyes at his gla.s.s.

With another sigh, Monfiori said, ”Why don't you drop her. After all ...”

”Sounds to me like envy-” began Kern.

The other quietly interrupted him: ”She's a woman. And I, you see, have other tastes.” Clearing his throat modestly, he made another X.

The ruby drinks were replaced by golden ones. Kern had the feeling his blood was turning sweet. His head was growing foggy. The white spats left the bar. The drumming and crooning of the distant music ceased.

”You say one must be selective ...,” he spoke thickly and limply, ”while I have reached a point ... Listen to this, for instance-I once had a wife. She fell in love with someone else. He turned out to be a thief He stole cars, necklaces, furs.... And she poisoned herself. With strychnine.”

”And do you believe in G.o.d?” asked Monfiori with the air of a man getting on his hobby horse. ”There is G.o.d, after all.”

Kern gave an artificial laugh.

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