A Heart So White Read Online Free PDF Page A

have to go on waiting, perhaps on the same spot she'd been before, not beneath the balconies, she'd have to return to her original place on the other side of the street beyond the esplanade, to perform that same swift, furious dragging of her sharp heel after every two or three steps, three blows with an axe followed by a stab, or a stab followed by three blows with an axe. She was suddenly disarmed, docile, drained of all her rage and energy, and I don't think she was worried so much about what I might think of her mistake and of her bad temper - in her green eyes, I was after all a stranger - as about the fact that she still ran the risk of her date not turning up. She was looking at me with her vague, grey gaze suddenly lost in thought, a little apologetic, a little indifferent, though only slightly apologetic, for what predominated was bitterness. Should she leave or go on waiting, having thought the waiting was over?
    "No problem," I said.
    "Who are you talking to?" asked Luisa, who, without my assistance, was emerging from her stupor, although not from the darkness (her voice was rather less hoarse now and her question more precise; perhaps she couldn't understand why it was so dark).
    But I still didn't reply or go over to the bed to calm her and smooth her sheets, because at that moment the doors of the balcony to my left were flung noisily open and I saw two male arms appear and lean on the iron balustrade, or rather grab hold of it as if it were not in fact fixed, and then call out:
    "Miriam!"
    Hesitant and confused, the mulatto woman looked up again, there was no doubt this time about the direction of her gaze, to my left, towards the balcony doors that had been flung open and the strong arms that were all I could see, a man's long arms, a man in shirtsleeves, the white sleeves rolled up, the arms hairy, as hairy or even hairier than mine. I'd ceased to exist, I'd disappeared, I too was in shirtsleeves, I'd rolled my sleeves up when, some time before, I'd gone out to lean on the balcony, but now I'd disappeared because I was myself again, that is, because for her I was once more no one. On the ring finger of his right hand the man was wearing a wedding ring like mine, except that I wore mine on my left hand, I'd done so for only two weeks now and was still not used to it. The man wore his large, black watch on the wrist of the same arm, whilst I wore mine on the other. He was probably left-handed. The mulatto woman wore neither watch nor rings. I realized that the figure of that man must have been half-visible to her all the time, unlike me, clearly visible as I stood with my elbows resting on the balustrade. Now the positions were reversed, I'd been wiped out at a stroke and was invisible and now it was the man I couldn't see, just as I couldn't see Luisa, to whom my back was still turned. Perhaps that man had been repeatedly going over to the windows then moving away again, though never opening the balcony doors, according to whether or not he could feel the grey-green eyes of the woman in the street - that myopic, inoffensive gaze - fixed on him. He'd been blithely playing hide-and-seek, or rather neither hide nor seek, and she was right in fact, her date had already gone up to the hotel room without telling her, to watch her waiting from a distance, to observe her anxious pacing up and down - three steps forward, three steps back — and then her stumbling advance and her fall, her putting on of her shoe again, just as I had done.
    The odd thing was that Miriam's response was nothing like her response to me had been when she thought I was someone else, that I was that man with the long, strong, hairy arms, who wore both watch and wedding ring on his right hand. When she saw him and knew for certain that it was he, when she saw the person she'd waited for so long and heard him call her name, she didn't gesture or shout at him. She didn't insult him or threaten him or say: "I'll get you" or "I kill you",