the figure of Walter even today preserves its fascinating light.
When I met him, he was sitting in the shade of a locust tree, on a log, reading a Buffalo Bill comic. The clear light of morning filtered through the thick green leaves in a rustle of very cool shadows. His attire was not at all ordinary: he was wearing a cherry-coloured tunic with buttons carved from bone, deerskin trousers, and, on his bare feet, sandals plaited from straps of white leather. Sometimes, when I want to relive for an instant the extraordinary sensation of that encounter, I gaze for a long time at a Buffalo Bill comic. Nevertheless, the real presence of Walter, of his red tunic in the greenish air under the shade of the locust tree, was something else.
His first gesture was a kind of elastic leap onto his feet, like that of an animal. We made friends instantly. We spoke little and all of a sudden he made a stupefying proposal: to eat locust tree flowers. It was the first time I had met someone who ate flowers. In a few moments Walter was up in the tree gathering an enormous bunch. Then he climbed down and showed me how you ought delicately to detach the flower from the corolla in order to suck only its tip. I tried it for myself; the flower gave a little pop between my teeth, a very pleasant little clack, and in my mouth dispersed a delicate and cooling perfume such as I had never tasted before.
For a short while we remained silent, eating the locust tree flowers. All of a sudden he grasped me tightly by the arm: “Would you like to see our gang’s headquarters?”
In Walter’s eyes sparks had kindled. I hesitated for a second. “Yes, I would”, I answered with a voice that was no longer mine and with an impulse for danger which suddenly erupted in me and which I very well sensed did not belong to me.
Walter took me by the hand and through the little gate at the bottom of the yard he led me to a vacant lot. The grass and the weeds had sprung up there unchecked. The nettles stung my legs as I passed and with my hand I had to move aside the thick stems of hemlock and burdock. At the bottom of the vacant lot we came to a tumbledown wall. In front of the wall there was a ditch and a deep hole. Walter jumped inside and called me to follow; the hole led through the wall and thence we entered an abandoned cellar.
The steps were broken and overgrown with grass, the walls oozed dampness, and the darkness before us was consummate. Walter squeezed my hand tightly and pulled me after him. We slowly descended some ten steps. There we came to a stop.
“We have to stop here”, he told me, “we can’t go any further. At the back there are some iron men with iron hands and iron heads, growing from the ground. They stand there motionless and if they catch us in the dark they’ll throttle us”.
I turned my head and gazed desperately at the open mouth of the cellar above, whose light came from a simple and clear world where there were no iron men and where at a great distance plants, people and houses could be seen.
Walter produced a plank from somewhere and we sat down upon it. For a few minutes we were silent once more. It was good and cool in the cellar; the air had a heavy odour of dampness and I would have sat there for hours, isolated, far from the hot streets, far from the sad and tedious town. I felt good enclosed between cold walls, beneath the earth seething in the sun. The pointless hum of the afternoon came like a distant echo through the open mouth of the cellar.
“This is where we bring the girls we capture”, said Walter.
I vaguely understood what he must have been talking about. The cellar took on an unsuspected attraction.
“And what do you do with them?”
Walter laughed.
“Don’t you know? We do what all men do to women, we lie down with them and… with the feather…”
“With the feather? What kind of feather? What do you do to the girls?”
Walter laughed once more.
“How old are you? Don’t you know what men do to women? Don’t you have a feather? Look at mine”.
He took from the pocket of his tunic a small, black, bird’s feather.
In that moment I felt that I was being overwhelmed by one of my usual crises. Perhaps Walter would not have taken the feather out of his pocket had I continued to bear that cellar’s air of complete desolation to the very end. In an instant, however, the isolation took on a painful and profound meaning. I now realised how far the cellar was from the town and its dusty streets. It was as if I had grown distant from myself, in the solitude of the subterranean depths beneath an ordinary summer’s day. The black, glossy feather Walter showed me meant that nothing else existed in my familiar world. Everything entered a fainting fit where it gleamed strangely, in the middle of a strange room with damp grasses, in the darkness that inhaled the light like a cold, ravenous mouth.
“What’s up with you?” Walter asked. “Let me tell you what we do with the feather…”
The sky outside, through the mouth of the cellar, became whiter and whiter, more vaporous. The words tapped up against the walls, they softly slid down me like some fluid creature.
Walter went on talking to me. But it was as if he was so far away from me and so ethereal that he seemed a mere clear space in the dark, a patch of mist palpitating in the shadow.
“First you stroke the girl”, I heard him as though in a dream, “then, also with the feather, you stroke yourself… These are the things you have to know…”
All of a sudden Walter drew closer to me and began to shake me, as though to wake me from sleep. Slowly, slowly, I began to come round. When I had fully opened my eyes, Walter was bending over my pubis, with his mouth tightly stuck to my sex. It was impossible for me to understand what was going on.
Walter stood up.
“See, that made you better… In the war, the Indians wake their wounded like that and in our gang we know all the Indian spells and cures”.
I awoke groggy and exhausted. Walter ran off and vanished. I too climbed the steps, cautiously.
In the days that followed, I sought him everywhere, but in vain. It had been agreed that I should meet him in the cellar, but when I went there it seemed wholly altered. Everywhere there were heaps of garbage, with dead animals and putrefaction that reeked dreadfully in the sun. With Walter I had not seen anything of this. I gave up going to the cellar and thus I never met Walter again.
*
I procured a feather, which I kept in great secrecy, wrapped up in a piece of newspaper in my pocket. It sometimes seemed to me that I myself had invented the whole story with the feather and that Walter had never existed. From time to time I would unwrap the feather from its newspaper and gaze at it for a long while: its mystery was impenetrable. I would brush its silky soft gloss across my cheek and that caress would cause me to shudder a little, as though an invisible, albeit real, person were touching my face with his fingertips. The first time I made use of it was one beautiful evening, in circumstances that are quite extraordinary.
I liked to stay outside until late. That evening a heavy and oppressive storm had sprung up. All the heat of the day had condensed into an overpowering atmosphere, under a black sky slashed by streaks of lightning. I was sitting on the threshold of a house and watching the play of the electric light on the walls of the lane. The wind was shaking the light bulb that illuminated the street, and the concentric circles of the globe, casting shadows onto the walls, were rocking like water sloshing in a pot. Long streamers of dust were being whipped up in the road and
