“YOU HAVEN’T TOLD ME YOUR name.”
“It’s Vincenzo. Vincenzo Perugia.”
Valérie takes a moment to try to pinpoint his accent but can’t quite place it. He does not return the question.
“My name is Valérie.”
“I thought so.”
He says it as if there really was some way he could have known it, as if knowing what couldn’t be known was something he did, or as if he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Why did you think so?” she asks, and regrets it. While she’s saying it she regrets it.
“Just because.”
“What are you drinking?” she asks, and again regrets it.
“Nothing. Wine.”
She despairs. She looks to the side—the mirrors. Silence reclaims them. And goes on. And on. She thinks that if she were just to grab his head in both hands and give him a furious kiss, hard, like that, perhaps that would get him out of his shell. She doesn’t do it. She asks herself if it’s because she doesn’t dare. Doesn’t dare? The very idea seems strange to her.
“And you?” Vincenzo Perugia now asks, though as someone who doesn’t really want to know. He is sitting with his back very straight and his hands on the table on either side of his glass of wine. She stands, close but not very. The rest isn’t happening.
“What about me?”
“Nothing, it’s an expression.”
She grabs his glass and drinks some. He watches, still not seeming interested. Her vermilion lipstick stains the glass. Now he grabs the glass and—wanting to? not wanting to?—places his lips on her lip marks and finishes it. She can’t tell if it was a drink or a gesture.
Valérie was not even thirteen—living with her Aunt Germaine in that room: the run-down building, the shabby working-class suburb, the sorry youths—when her neighbor told her he’d give her whatever she wanted if she’d let him kiss her.
It was nighttime. Her aunt was never there and the neighbor must have been at least twenty or thirty years old.
“A kiss, or anything you want?” Valérie replied, and the neighbor looked taken aback.
“So what do you want to give me, a kiss, or anything you want? It’s not the same thing—could be the opposite,” she said, with just the right smile, and the neighbor didn’t know how to respond. He left without saying a word, and Valérie could finally turn her attention to the trembling of her legs, which were jumping around now as if they were separate beings. This passed as she realized there was another side to the coin. That night, she began to see that she could get things from men in exchange for something that she believed wasn’t important to her. She felt very powerful, rich, like those rich girls she had seen that time in the Jardin des Plantes—even richer. She also assumed she would be able to manage them.
Some time ago, a poet had written:
Love orders, in extremities
That we but feel, and hold our peace
But what is surely more appealing
Is to give voice, and hold back feeling
Valfierno would recite this to her much later, during one of their talks. Valérie smiled.
Valérie Larbin had it all clear in her head: none of it had anything to do with love. Love—or whatever the novels meant by that silly word—was either a luxury or folly, she was not always sure which. Whereas this exchange was quite precise: to give so that she would get, to give without giving, to provide what they didn’t have and what she didn’t know. Valérie told herself that what she was giving was counterfeit, not the real thing, not what her friends—her clients?—expected or were paying for. Much later, she would tell this to Valfierno: “They want love and I give them a pretty good substitute, something very similar. So you and I are both fakers.”
Valfierno wasn’t having it. “No, my dear, not at all. Not me, and not you. First of all, we’re not even sure that they want love, but we do know that they want what your body has to offer. The real faking here is what everybody does for that: to promise love so they can get sex. Faking is what so many bourgeois call love: sex with flowers and chocolates,” said Valfierno, and the word “bourgeois” in his mouth sounded contemptuous—not aggressive or envious, just contemptuous. Valérie was surprised; she had not heard that note before in his voice. Not envious but contemptuous, she thought. And aristocratic, it occurred to her.
“Do you really think so, Marqués?”
“I don’t just think so. All the rest is a lie, I know that. While on the other hand you, my dear, deliver the real thing without any disguises. That glorious, creamy ass is the genuine article,” he concluded, and she could not decide if he was being serious, and in truth she couldn’t quite shake the thought that he was. In those cases she kept quiet.
“Isn’t that your Italian over there?”
“My Italian?”
“Come on, Val. I saw your face all those days that he didn’t show up.”
“Really, Gigi—you think I’d ever be interested in a guy like that?”
As she gets closer he seems different. The same, but changed somehow. She looks more closely, seeking out details: he has the same white shirt with the open collar and the blue kerchief tied around his neck and the glass of wine on the table between his hands, but this time—she makes a mental note, though she knows you can never really know in these cases—his eyes, which are not looking at her, are making an effort not to. As if now he didn’t know how not to look at her. Valérie takes this as a good sign and walks toward the table. As if there were nothing separating them, she walks toward the table. She knows that her footfalls make no sound, that she is a queen, that when she approaches someone in the Faux Chien she is a queen, that as long as she doesn’t open her mouth, she is a queen. She touches the ribbons that keep her deep neckline closed, that never keep her neckline closed.
She is almost there. Without looking, she sees herself in the mirrors. Now he does look up at her. He gets up. She stands still while he gets up, pushes back from the table, walks around it to her, takes her hand, and tells her that they’re leaving. “We’re leaving,” he says, a murmured instruction, a slight tremble, and they start walking. Valérie lets herself be led by the hand, and for a moment she has the suspicion that this is something he’s rehearsed many times over. She doesn’t ask herself why his grasping her hand and leading her out gives her that chill, that feeling of suffocating. Why now, this man? Together, they walk toward the door. There’s a door. It’s raining.
The purpose of a cabaret like the Faux Chien—like all the others—is to create a world separate from the world outside. Outside, it might be raining, snowing, icy; inside, the heaters maintain a constant, different temperature. Outside it can be day; inside, the tightly closed velvet curtains create a perpetual nighttime. Outside there are rules, and norms; inside also, but they are very different. Outside, there is class; inside, there is sex—these are similar, if not the same. Outside, money can buy just about anything; inside, money can buy the kind of things that can’t be bought in other places, and again, not everything. Outside, the world appears to have limits; inside, it does not, because the limits are different. Inside—truly inside—some come to believe that the world is an illusion from which you can wake up.
This is why it’s so harsh to come out of a cabaret. This is why some never leave, even when they leave. This is why the rain that greets them at the door of the Faux Chien feels so exaggerated.
What if that was just how it was? At what point does one thing become another?
Neither one speaks. They walk.
Until they get to Perugia’s room and go in, and he says, “This is it, come in,” playing down the trace of embarrassment she hears in his voice. He does not say, “This is it—I’m sorry,” though that’s what she hears.
Perugia’s room in that cheap pension is a ten-foot square with a chair, a table, a trunk, and a narrow bed. A kerosene lamp sits in a corner of the room on the edge of the trunk. The wallpaper had flowers once. Perugia’s room smells of sweat, of a man enclosed. To Valérie it smells of the world of a man who doesn’t know—or has forgotten—that the world has smells. The room of a man who has forgotten himself—and once again that chill and the feeling of suffocation. Not the room of one of the others who want me to make them a man. He lets go of her hand.
He remains silent and so does she. There is a bottle of pastis on the table. He fills two glasses without a word. They raise them and toast in silence. She braves a smile, opening that big mouth. The flame of the kerosene lamp flickers. They are standing in the only free space in the middle of the room, and for a long moment they do not look at one another. Valérie thinks that she must make a move but hates to think that she has to—she’s there because she didn’t think she’d have to—and she remains standing. She remembers that she knows how to make a man jump with pleasure, arch with pleasure, ache with pleasure. She aches but stays quiet, savoring the wait, standing there. He will do what’s required, she thinks, and shudders. He will do what’s required. Now, the silence does not threaten.
He grabs her face in his hands and kisses her mouth and runs his tongue across her teeth—one by one, her teeth with his tongue, either he knows or he has no idea. Her broken teeth with his tongue, someone who knows, accepts, buys. Someone who says “everything, everything.” Even the teeth.
There are moments when time gets confused. These muddled moments are time at its best, when it can no longer be used as a measure.
You think that if you hear that question you’ll give this answer, and you’re surprised when the answer appears ready, on the tip of the tongue. You think that nothing would be better than to close your eyes and let yourself be enfolded sweetly by dreams, to feel the sleep creeping over you and the muscles’ release, falling further and further, but then, suddenly, you’re waking up. You think that if you stretch out your hand to brush that cheek, and catch that curious or inviting look with your own, and bring your eyes closer to those eyes, lips to those lips, all the rest to all the rest, that the bodies will all finally come together, but then you discover, not knowing how, that all that has passed and that you’re just remembering it. And you begin to think of time as a friend.
Much later, she would hear:
Love orders, in extremities…
Valérie is strewn across the narrow bed, disheveled, flung there, her body still, arms by her sides, tits spilling down her sides, legs stretched out, slightly open. Sitting next to her, naked as well, hair matted, his cock dangling between his thighs, Perugia looks at her—not as you’d look at a live person but rather a portrait or a statue. He looks at her as if he owed her no explanation. He smokes, says nothing, looks at her, smokes. Now he really looks at her. As if, she thinks, she existed only to be looked at. It’s a peaceful tableau, outside of time, or trying to be. It lasts—because of this, surely, it goes on and on.
If only we could stay quiet, like this, for hours upon hours, for days, she thinks. Then he speaks.
“I could stay like this forever.”
“Do you think it should take hours to say words like ‘forever’?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Valérie gets up and starts to dress. It makes her shy—shy?—to have him watch her dressing, and when she’s finished she leaves without a word. It’s what he intended, and she goes. Outside, in the street, it is still raining. She can’t believe it; it’s still raining.