THE MARQUÉS EDUARDO DE VALFIERNO fusses with the knot of his bow tie to a degree many would consider excessive. Valérie Larbin thinks it is entirely too much, though he is in all likelihood exaggerating his usual meticulousness just to irritate her.
“Aren’t you going to get dressed, my angel?”
“What for? Are you taking me out somewhere?”
The music is silent. Valérie reclines on a chaise longue of grey velvet, her long, raven-black hair falling in torrents across her white breasts. Her black silk robe with the red Chinese characters lies slightly open, as if to show that she is very much a woman. Valérie Larbin smokes, her mother-of-pearl cigarette holder held between lilac-painted nails—the vampire queen of some movie she has seen recently.
The Marqués looks at her and smiles to himself. Everything about her is a poor imitation of some bad film. If she knew, he thinks, that he used to do the very same thing long ago—or perhaps not so long ago. If she knew that what appeals to him about her is something else entirely. If he knew, he thinks, exactly what that was.
“So now you’re going to ask me to parade you around like a wife?”
“No, like an expensive mistress.”
“Which you are not.”
“Do me the courtesy, Marqués. If I were, you couldn’t allow yourself.”
Valérie is a vulgar wonder, with her big tits and her fake refinement. He can’t stand to be attracted by such commonness.
“I can allow myself what I please.”
“Not me, Valfierno, please. You might be able to fool the lovelies in the Bois de Boulogne with your act, but not me. How long since you’ve paid the bill for this suite? How much longer is the hotel going to be patient?”
“I can also allow myself to be quite without funds.”
“Marqués…”
Valfierno hates it when she speaks like a character in some cheap melodrama, which is almost always. In fact he hates her most of the time, yet he keeps seeking her out and buying her silly baubles with cheap paste glitter and despairing when she disappears, which is often. He imagines her with her hands on some pig, older than he is and richer, wheedling real jewels from him, and he can’t stand it and he despises her and nothing excites him quite as much as that and back he goes, seeking her, sending her bunches of gladioli. She must not know who he really is, he thinks, or she wouldn’t do these things to him. No one really knows, he thinks. If they did!
“You don’t understand anything.”
“No, I don’t.”
A little past one in the afternoon, humid heat, Paris, the end of summer. Valérie and Valfierno have been in the suite since about three or four in the morning, when they returned from a ball at the Opera-Comique. Valfierno was too tired and drunk then to give her what she wanted, and he asked her to caress him awake later, that this would revive him. But in the morning he fared little better, and now he just wants her to go, soon. Not having the temerity to ask her to leave, he begins to dress on the flimsy pretext of a lunch engagement. He knows, in any case, that as soon as she is gone that he will again begin to need her, their next encounter.
“Marqués, may I ask you a question?”