Villa Triste Read Online Free PDF Page A

poufs, side by side, and she laid her head on my shoulder. A young brunette whose low-cut bodice displayed her breasts (at every even slightly abrupt movement, they surged up out of her décolletage) handed us two glasses filled with pink liquid. She guffawed and kissed Yvonne and begged us to try the cocktail, which she’d prepared “especially” for us. If I remember right, her name was Daisy Marchi, and Yvonne told me she played the lead role in “the film.” She too was going to have a great career. She was well known in Rome. Soon she left us, laughing even harder and shaking her long hair, and went to join a fiftyish man with a slender figure and a pockmarked face who wasstanding, glass in hand, at an open French window. He was a Dutchman named Harry Dressel, one of the actors in “the film.” Other people were sitting in the wicker armchairs or leaning on the balustrade. Some women were gathered around Madeja’s wife, who continued to smile, vacant eyed. Through the French window came a murmur of conversations, along with slow, syrupy music, but this time the singer with the deep voice was repeating different words:
    Abat-jour
    Che soffondi la luce blu … 
    Madeja himself was pacing up and down the lawn in the company of a little bald man who came up to his waist, so that he had to bend down to talk to him. They passed and repassed the terrace, Madeja more and more ponderous and bowed down, his companion more and more stretched and straining upward, on the tips of his toes. He emitted a buzz like a hornet, and the only words he spoke in human language were, “Va bene Rolf … Va bene Rolf … Va bene Rolf … Vabenerolf …” Yvonne’s dog sat sphinxlike at the edge of the terrace and followed their comings and goings, turning his head from right to left, from left to right.
    Where were we? Deep in the heart of Haute-Savoie. But however much I repeat this reassuring phrase, “deep in the heart of Haute-Savoie,” I keep thinking of a colonial country, or one of the Caribbean islands. How else to explain that soft, corroding light, the midnight blue that turned eyes, skin, dresses, and alpaca suits phosphorescent? Those people were all surrounded by some mysterious electricity, and every time they made a move, you braced yourself for ashort circuit. Their names — some of them have remained in my memory, and I regret not having written them all down at the time; I could have recited them at night before falling asleep, not knowing who their owners were, the sound of them would have been enough — their names brought to mind the little cosmopolitan societies of free ports and foreign bars: Gay Orloff, Percy Lippitt, Osvaldo Valenti, Ilse Korber, Roland Witt von Nidda, Geneviève Bouchet, Geza Pellemont, François Brunhardt … What’s become of them? Having summoned them to this rendezvous, what can I say to them? Already in those days — soon to be thirteen years ago — they gave me the impression that they’d long since burned out their lives. I watched them, I listened to them talking under the Chinese lantern that dappled their faces and the women’s shoulders. I assigned each of them a past that dovetailed with those of the others, and I wished they’d tell me everything: when did Percy Lippitt and Gay Orloff meet for the first time? Did one of them know Osvaldo Valenti? Which of them had put Madeja together with Geneviève Bouchet and François Brunhardt? Which of the other six had introduced Roland Witt von Nidda into their circle? (And I’m mentioning only those whose names I remember.) So many enigmas presupposed an infinity of combinations, a spider’s web they’d been spinning for ten or twenty years.
    It was late, and we were looking for Meinthe. He was neither in the garden nor on the terrace nor in the salon. The Dodge had disappeared. We ran into Madeja, accompanied by a girl with very short blond hair, on the front steps, and he reported that “Menthe” had just left