A Walk in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

under my eyes. Like a slight shadow, or a slight swelling. I rinsed the brush, put it away, and had a closer look. There were indeed two very slight swellings, between the eyes and the cheekbones.
    Bags under my eyes, I thought: those words exactly. Oh, shit.
    I stayed at the mirror and, a bit hesitantly, moved the index finger of my right hand closer to one of those . . . things. There it was. I could touch it, as well as see it.
    With my finger, I tried pulling down the skin. It didn’t seem like mine. It wasn’t elastic, but had the slack texture of a slightly worn fabric. At least that’s what I thought at that moment.
    Then I started to study my face closely in the mirror.
I noticed I had lines at the corners of my mouth, near the eyes, and especially on my forehead. Long, deep lines, like trenches. How long had I had them? How come I had never noticed them before?
    I pinched my skin, in different parts of my face, to see how long it took to fall back into place. As I did this experiment, I remembered when I was a child and my great-grandmother used to hold me on her knees and I’d pinch her cheeks. I’d pull them down and then watch as the skin fell back into place. Very slowly.
    That reminded me of my great-grandmother’s neck, all lines and creases. So I checked my own neck. Which of course was the kind of neck you’d expect to see on a forty-year-old man in good health and reasonable physical condition. My great-grandmother, as I didn’t stop to think at the time, had been at least eighty-five, if not older.
    I was about to start an anxious search for other marks of time – which had obviously passed without my realizing it – when the doorbell rang. I looked at my watch and realized, in this order (a) that Margherita was ready, was knocking at my door, and was probably thinking I was ready too, (b) that I wasn’t ready at all, and (c) that maybe I was starting to lose it.
    I went and opened the door, didn’t mention point (c) to Margherita (and to avoid her noticing it for herself, I also avoided asking her if she thought I had lines or bags under my eyes), finished getting ready in a hurry, and a quarter of an hour later we were in the street. For the rest of the evening, I stopped worrying about time passing and its dermatological ramifications.
     
     
    You could hear music even before you got inside
the villa. Wind and string instruments, remote, mystical sounds, a few strokes of the gong. The best of Vietnamese New Wave, someone explained to me some time later. The kind of music I love so much I can even listen to it for five minutes at a stretch.
    The house was full of incense smoke, and people. Some of them were almost normal.
    Margherita disappeared almost immediately into the crowd and the fog. Soon after, I glimpsed her chatting to a tall, thin, bearded guy, about fifty. He was dressed in an impeccable two-button Prince of Wales suit and looked quite surreal in the middle of this gathering. I knew hardly anybody and didn’t much feel like talking to the few people I did know. So, almost immediately, I applied myself to the food, which was copiously laid out on a long table.
    There was something like a kind of goulash, but it wasn’t Hungarian, it was Indonesian, and it was called beef rendang . Then there was something that looked like paella, but wasn’t Spanish but Indonesian too, called nasi goreng . And then there was something that looked like an innocuous Italian mixed salad. It wasn’t Italian – it too was Indonesian – and it certainly wasn’t innocuous. When I tasted it, I felt as if I’d put an oxyacetylene torch in my mouth. I don’t remember the exact name in Indonesian, but the translation was something like this: green salad with very spicy sauce.
    But I ate everything, including mango crepes in coconut sauce and a banana and cinnamon dessert. Both of these were Vietnamese, I think, but they were good.
    I went for a little walk around the house. I exchanged pointless