I used to go there in the afternoon, as I neared the door of the shop I would extrude long quivering antennae, which would explore the air to pick up the sound of the violin. If I heard Eugene playing, a great calm would come over me. I would enter as softly as possible and say my name aloud on the very threshold, so that he would not think it was a customer and interrupt his playing even for an instant. In that instant, it would have been possible for the inertia and the mirage of the melody abruptly to cease and for Eugene to lay aside his violin and play no more that afternoon. For all that, the possibility of unfavourable occurrences did not cease. There were so many things happening in the cabin… During all the time that Clara was doing her toilette, I would listen for the tiniest sounds and follow the tiniest movements in fear that from them the afternoon might develop into a disaster. It was possible, for example, for Eugene to cough lightly, to swallow a little saliva and suddenly say that he was thirsty or going to the confectioners to buy a cake. From infinitesimally small events, such as that cough, a lost afternoon would emerge monstrous, enormous. The entire day would then lose its importance and in bed at night, instead of thinking at leisure (and lingering for a few minutes on each detail in order to “see” and remember it the better) about the moment when my knees touched Clara’s stockings – let me carve, sculpt, caress this thought – I would toss feverishly between the sheets, unable to sleep and impatiently waiting for the next day.
One day, something wholly unusual happened. The occurrence commenced with the allure of a disaster and culminated with an unhoped-for surprise, but in such a sudden way and with a gesture so petty that my entire subsequent joy at it was like a stack of heteroclite objects that a conjurer holds in equilibrium at a single point.
Clara, with a single step, changed the content of my visits in its entirety, giving them a different meaning and new frissons, the same as in that chemistry experiment in which I saw how a single piece of crystal immersed in a test-tube of red liquid instantaneously transformed it into an astonishing green.
I was on the couch, in the same place, waiting with the same impatience as ever, when the door opened and someone entered the shop. Eugene immediately left the cabin. All seemed lost. Clara, indifferent, continued to do her toilette, while the conversation in the shop went on endlessly. Nonetheless, it was still possible for Eugene to return before his sister finished dressing.
I painfully followed the thread of the two events, Clara’s toilette and the conversation in the shop, thinking that they might unwind parallel to one another until Clara left the shop, or on the contrary they might meet at the fixed point of the cabin, as in those cinematographic films where two locomotives hurtle towards each other and either meet or pass alongside depending on whether a mysterious hand shifts the points at the last moment. In those moments of waiting I categorically felt that the conversation was taking its course and, on a parallel path, Clara was continuing to apply her powder…
I tried to rectify the inevitable by stretching my knees further towards the table. In order to encounter Clara’s legs, I would have had to sit right on the edge of the couch, in a posture if not bizarre then at least comical.
It seemed that through the mirror Clara was looking at me and smiling.
She soon finished rounding off the contour of her lips with carmine and powdering her cheek with the puff one last time. The perfume that diffused through the cabin had dizzied me with lust and desperation. At the moment when she passed by me, the thing I was least expecting occurred: she rubbed her thighs against my knees the same as every other day (or perhaps harder? but this was an illusion of course) with the indifferent air that nothing was going on between us.
There is a complicity of vice deeper and quicker than any verbal understanding. It instantaneously pierces the body like an inner melody and entirely transforms thoughts, flesh and blood.
In that fraction of a second, when Clara’s legs touched mine, immense new expectations and new hopes had come to birth in me.
*
With Clara, I understood everything from the very first day, from the very first moment; it was my first complete and normal sexual adventure. An adventure full of torments and expectations, full of disquietudes and gnashing of teeth, something that would have resembled love had it not been a mere continuation of aching impatience. To the same extent that I was impulsive and daring, Clara was calm and capricious; she had a violent way of arousing me and a bitchy joy in seeing me suffer – a joy that always preceded the sexual act and formed part of it.
The first time when the thing for which I had been waiting so long happened between us, her provocation was of such an elementary (and almost brutal) simplicity that that meagre phrase she then uttered and that anonymous verb she employed still preserve in me even today something of their former virulence. It is enough for me to think about them a while longer in order for my present indifference to be bitten away as though by an acid and for the phrase to become as violent as it was then.
*
Eugene had gone into town. We were both sitting silently in the shop. Clara in her afternoon dress, cross-legged behind the window, was absorbed in her knitting. A few weeks had passed since the occurrence in the cabin and between us a severe coldness had suddenly arisen, a secret tension that translated as extreme indifference on her part. We would sit in front of each other for whole hours without uttering a word, but nonetheless in that silence there floated a perfectly secret understanding like the threat of an explosion. I lacked merely the mysterious word that would puncture the membrane of conventionality; I would make dozens of plans each evening but the next day they would strike up against the most elementary obstacles: the knitting that could not be interrupted, the lack of a more favourable light, the silence in the shop, or the three rows of sewing machines, too neatly lined up to allow any significant exchange in the shop, be it even one of a sentimental order. All the while I would be clenching my jaws; it was a terrible silence, a silence that in me had the definiteness and the outline of a scream.
It was Clara who interrupted it. She spoke almost in a whisper, without raising her eyes from her knitting: “If you’d come earlier today, we could have done it. Eugene went into town straight after lunch”.
Up until then, not even the shadow of a sexual allusion had filtered into our silence, and lo and behold now, from these few words, a new reality gushes up between us, as miraculous and extraordinary as though a marble statue had risen in the midst of the sewing machines, sprouting from the floor.
In an instant I was beside Clara, I clasped her hand and violently caressed it. I kissed her hand. She snatched it away. “Hey, leave me be”, she said, annoyed. “Please come, Clara…” “It’s too late now, Eugene is coming back, leave me be, leave me be”. I was feverishly touching her shoulders, her breasts, her legs. “Leave me be”, protested Clara. “Come now, we still have time”, I implored. “Where?” “Into the cabin… come on… it’s good there”.
And when I said “good” my chest swelled with a warm hope. I kissed her hand once more and forcibly tugged her off the chair. She reluctantly allowed herself to be led, dragging her feet across the floor.
From that day on, the afternoons changed their “customs”: it was still a case of Eugene, still a case of Clara and of those same sonatas, but now the playing of the violin became intolerable to me and my impatience lay in wait for the moment when Eugene would have to leave. In the same cabin, my disquietudes became different, as though I was playing a new game on a board with lines traced for an already familiar game.
When Eugene left, the true wait would begin. It was a harder, more intolerable wait than hitherto; the silence of the shop would turn into a block of ice.
Clara would seat herself at the window and knit: every day this was the “beginning”,
