“MARQUÉS, MAY I ASK YOU a question?”
“As long as you don’t ask me if I love you,” replies Valfierno, and knows right away that it was not necessary. Valérie allows him his life; she does not judge him. She takes a sip of her tea and retouches her lips with a rich vermilion. Then just for a moment, without intending to, Valfierno thinks of Mercedes, Don Simón’s daughter, and the thought surprises him.
“What is the strangest thing that you have faked?”
“Faked? Me?”
“Come, Marqués, I’m not a fool. It’s useful for me to seem that way, but don’t believe it, not you. Come—what is the most unusual thing that you’ve ever faked, apart from your title, your name, your history, and those pearls you gave me last month as a present? Sometimes I think even your nationality is false. I can’t say why, exactly, but I’d bet that you’re not even Argentine.”
“‘Fake’ is not part of my vocabulary,” replies Valfierno, but he knows that his lack of indignation says something, and he doesn’t mind telling her like this, through his silence.
“What would you call it, then?”
Valfierno plays his gaze over her like a tongue, that languid diva’s body draped across the fake velvet couch. The velvet of her skin against the fake velvet of the couch, he thinks, then tells himself not to be so trite.
“I’m sure you don’t call it anything—some things are better for not being named, wouldn’t you say, Marqués?”
For weeks now he’s been asking himself why he keeps calling her, seeking her out. For weeks he’s been telling himself that a pair of tits isn’t enough, that anyway they’re not up to his standards; that they’re so animal, so primitive—two dangling bags of fat that females use to feed their juices to their young. Tits are the most prehistoric feature of our species, he thinks, laughing to himself as he looks at them again.
Once again he asks himself why this woman—who could easily find herself more rewarding adventures—keeps on accepting his invitations, tolerating him. That’s the word, he thinks—“tolerate.” It must be that flaw—the one thing that prevents her from being truly beautiful. I must think more about that flaw, he says to himself, and what about it turns her into a kind of lie.
“Don’t try me, Valérie.”
Unless, he thinks, she needs this for some reason that he has yet to understand, and now he is alarmed. He recalls that in an errant moment he’d been tempted to think it was his charms that had seduced her, but that something had told him it wasn’t, or at least that there was something else as well. Something: a sense, the wreck in the mirror.
“Marqués, may I ask you another question?”
Valérie gets up from the couch, goes up to him, brushes the nonexistent dust from his shoulders, and lets the black silk robe with the red Chinese characters part slightly.
Valfierno wears a suit of raw linen with brown and white shoes, his shirt impeccable, a purple bow tie. His shoes have heels, to make him taller. He finishes his grooming and surveys his expensively cut salt-and-pepper hair, the thin mustache, the green eyes like slits. The straight, aristocratic nose. A modest mouth. The forehead smooth. He has the right face for his role, he thinks: pleasant, neat, nothing particularly memorable.
“Marqués, couldn’t we work together?”
“That’s just what I need!”
“You’ll want to, eventually.”
“No doubt, my angel. But now I have a lunch to go to, and if you don’t make yourself decent, I shall be late.”
“Marqués, don’t be an idiot. It’s not what you imagine.”
“And what is it I imagine? Do tell me.”
“I’d rather not guess. In any case we both know it’s pure fantasy. I simply want to tell you this: a friend of mine knows a fellow who until just recently worked at the Louvre. He’s an idiot, but he’s without scruples. That’s not that common in an idiot like him. You know what they say: morals are the substitute for intelligence. This fellow can go in and out of that museum the way you do at the Hippodrome d’Auteuil.”
“Why would that be of any interest to me?”
“I don’t know, Valfierno, but think it over. You’re the thinking type. You don’t always know how to do things, but you do know how to think. If we work hard, my love—even harder than last night—maybe something will come to you.”
He was this close to hating her.