Villa Triste Read Online Free PDF

with“Fritzi Trenker,” and that he was most certainly not coming back. He burst into loud laughter, surprising me, and placed his hand on the girl’s shoulder.
    “The staff of my old age,” he declared. “You understand me, Chmara?”
    Then, abruptly, he turned his back on us and went down the hall, leaning on the girl’s shoulder more heavily than before. He looked like a blind ex-boxer.
    That was the moment when things took a new direction. The lamps in the salon were switched off. The only light left was the night-light on the mantelpiece, whose pink glow was absorbed by great swaths of shadow. The Italian singer’s deep tones had been replaced by a woman’s voice, which broke and hoarsened so much you couldn’t tell anymore whether you were listening to dying moans or grunts of pleasure. Then all at once the voice became pure. It intoned the same words, sweetly repeating them.
    Madeja’s wife is lying across the sofa, and one of the young people from the group that surrounded her on the terrace bends over her and slowly begins to unbutton her blouse. She stares at the ceiling, her lips parted. Some couples are dancing, a little too close, their movements a little too precise. In passing, I notice that the strange Harry Dressel is stroking Daisy Marchi’s thighs with a heavy hand. A little group near the French window turn their attention to a spectacle: a woman doing a solo dance. She takes off her dress, her slip, her brassiere. Out of sheer idleness, Yvonne and I have joined the group. Roland Witt von Nidda, his features distorted, devours the dancer with his eyes. She’s down to her stockings and her garter belt, nothing else,and she keeps on dancing. On his knees, he tries to tear off her garters with his teeth, but she dodges him every time. Finally she decides to remove her remaining accessories herself and then continues to dance, stark naked, whirling around Witt von Nidda, brushing against him, while he remains motionless, impassive, his chin thrust out, his torso arched, a grotesque matador. His twisted shadow spreads over the wall, and the woman’s shadow — immeasurably enlarged — sweeps across the floor. Soon, throughout the entire house, there’s nothing but a ballet of shadows pursuing one another, climbing and descending stairs, bursting into laughter, uttering furtive cries.
    A corner office adjoining the salon. Its furniture included a massive desk with numerous drawers, the sort of thing I imagine could be found in the old Ministry of the Colonies, and a big dark green leather armchair. We took refuge in that office. I glanced back at the salon, and I can still see Madame Madeja’s thrown-back head (her neck was resting on the arm of the sofa). Her long blond hair hung down to the floor, and you would have thought that head of hers had just been lopped off. She started moaning. There was another face, very close, whose features I could barely make out. Her groans grew louder and louder, her cries more and more unhinged: “Kill me … Kill me … Kill me … Kill me …” Yes, I remember all that.
    The floor of the office was covered with a very thick wool rug, and we lay down on it. A ray of light beside us painted a grayish-blue bar that ran from one end of the room to the other. One of the windows was partly open, and I could hear the rustling of a tree whose branches rubbed againstthe glass. The shadow of those branches covered the bookcase with a netting of night and moon. The shelves held all the volumes in the crime fiction collection
Le Masque
.
    The dog fell asleep in front of the door. No more sounds, no more voices reached our ears from the salon. Had everyone else left the villa, and were we the only ones still there? A scent of old leather hung in the air of the office, and I wondered who had arranged the books on those shelves. Whose were they? Who came in here of an evening to smoke a pipe, or work, or read one of the novels, or listen to the murmuring of the