THE VIOLINIST WAS LOCATED at the top of the building and next afternoon she set out for there. Along the quiet and empty corridor she walked, like a shadow, stealthily, and close to the wall. He had warned her not to be seen by guests. On the sixth landing she rested. He had warned her too about not taking the lift in case the lift operator might see her and watch where she went. By the time she got to his door she was out of breath. She tapped nervously and he opened it a little and drew her in. The first effect was of clutter and not much light. Musical instruments were strewn about and the feeling of constriction was terrible. It was an attic room, and compared with the majestic ballroom where he played each night, this was absurd.
His clothes were hung in an alcove and she saw the jacket that had first introduced her to him. Not sumptuous now but a best jacket carefully hung up so that it would be perfect for its evening’s outing.
She said ‘Bonjour,’ but said it badly. All the way up the stairs she had practised saying it casually. He scratched idly at the hair on his chest, smiling at her, stretching his other arm to show the difference in their colouring. They were like people from different orbits. There was a smell of ozone from under his armpits. Then in his shorts, he stood before her and kissed her and positioned his legs so that they coincided with hers exactly. When she made a small change of position he moved his limbs too and she thought, ‘He’s hurrying everything, he’s rushing it.’ Over his bare, bronze shoulder she saw a camera on a tripod, like an eye spying on her, and she drew back quickly and asked what it was. She really meant, ‘Why is it there spying on me?’
‘For photograph,’ he said, and then remembering his duties as a host he offered her apple juice.
‘Have you whisky?’ she said. She felt nervous. The small room was suffocating and insects came in hordes through the window space. He had taken the glass out completely. She breathed out through her parted lips to try and cool herself. The morning’s heat had murdered her. Sun got in the folds of her arms and legs, and she gasped when she went out and saw the cars cooking on the roadside and the brown bodies glistening with jelly and not even a twilight under the trees where she ran to escape.
‘Spirits no gud,’ he said handing her the half glass of apple juice.
‘Christ, I always pick the puritans,’ she said, hoping he would not know what she meant. He told her to sit on the bed and then he got behind the camera and asked if he could take a picture.
‘I’m not very pretty,’ she said, sitting all the same. She saw him stoop down and heard something click and knew that the picture when it was developed would show an apprehensive woman, with a glass midway between her chest and her open mouth. He crossed over and drew down one strap of her dress so that it fell on her arm. The white sagging top of one breast came into view. Above it was a line of raw pink where she had boiled in the sun that morning in an effort to get a tan for him. He photographed her like that and then with both straps down so that the sag of both breasts was in view and then he brought her dress down around her waist and photographed her naked top. It had been too hot to put on a brassière. From his position, stooped behind the camera, he indicated that she hold one breast, perkily, as if she enjoyed showing it off.
‘I’m not well formed,’ she said stupidly, and remembered, stupidly again, that breasts ought to be the shape of champagne glasses. Then she asked him to talk. Desire had snapped since the previous night, and she thought of elastic snapping and the ugly pimply look it got. She felt ugly like that.
‘Take your dress…’ and then he frowned. ‘Your name?’ he asked.
‘Ellen,’ she said, flatly.
‘Ellen,’ he said, and dwelt on it for a second, to please her. ‘Ellen, take your dress right off, show the body,’ he said. He pulled an imaginary dress down the length of his own body.
‘I can’t,’ she said, her voice strangled with embarrassment.
‘You are a holy woman,’ he said.
‘I am not a holy woman,’ she said, although it would have been simpler to say yes.
‘I want to talk,’ she said. ‘I want you to tell me about you and where you’re from and who taught you the violin and why you do this.’ She pointed to the camera and then looked for the other camera on the wash-stand. It was a small one with a treacherous little eye. Beside it a bundle of new towels in a Cellophane wrapping. On the Cellophane there was printed an English name. Her eye rested there, as if by looking at the English name she would escape the indignity happening to her.
‘A gift,’ he said, ‘from Englishwoman.’
‘Nice,’ she said.
‘They are nice,’ he said. ‘They are thought to be cold.’ He repeated the word cold as if to confirm its meaning.
‘You mean frigid,’ she said, but he didn’t seem to understand.
‘The unmarried girls they only want cuddle, no business,’ he said. ‘No juice.’
‘No juice,’ she said, and asked about the Englishwoman who had sent him the gift. He said a nice lady she had been, and handsome. Ellen thought of some woman – bound to be in her thirties – going home to her husband with a guarded look, and having to keep the violinist’s address in the toecap of her shoe and have the towels posted directly from the shop. Sadness began to wash over her, and thinking of lying in a sea of sadness she saw the waves as patient, painless and unceasing.
‘You are from where ‘she said, seriously trying to get on to another plane of friendship with him. He was from Vienna and had a flat separate from his parents. He had a sweetheart too, who sewed all her own dresses and looked smarter than any of the girls who spent fortunes in shops. He was engaged, and hoped to be married at the end of the summer, which was why he had to save and could not buy spirits for Englishwomen, not even nice Englishwomen.
‘And how would you feel if your sweetheart was unfaithful?’ she said trying to stir his conscience so that he would make no scene when she drew her dress up.
‘Sad,’ he said. ‘Très, très sad.’ And she wished that she had never come and the jacket had been something she saw and stroked without knowing its owner.
‘We not talk about such things, I think it a little beet un-natural,’ he said.
‘Un-natural,’ she said, sitting there with the top of her dress bagging around her middle. She tried to hold her breasts up but the effort was extreme. Then she fanned herself with her silk purse and said,
‘You and I will be special friends and not make love.’
‘Oh yes, yes.’ He rushed over.
If she resisted and screamed, would she be heard? Did other rapists occupy the attic rooms around? He drew her up by the hand and opened her zip, at snail’s pace, and then looked at her in her half-slip. She stood there with the middle of her body death-white – a body that had never faced sunshine in its life – the ridiculous crescent of pink on her chest and two patches of pink on her thighs where the sun had hit them when she pulled her dress above her knees. He drew back the white cotton bedspread and the one worn blanket underneath, and the top sheet. He rolled them back together and left the roll like a bolster at the end of the bed. Over the bottom sheet he spread a large bath towel. He did it thoroughly so that no inch of sheet was uncovered; she thought of the Englishwoman and why she sent him towels and she knew she could never lie down with him and make love.
‘Come on,’ he said, waiting for her to take off the frilled pants that she’d bought along with all the other honeymoon clothes.
He tried to help her with this and she knew that she had to say something to stop him.
‘I think I’m going to bleed,’ she said. The only thing that came to her lips.
‘Bleed?’ he said, not understanding.
‘Blood,’ she said, very clearly, and he frowned and said he did not like that very much.
‘I do not like it very much either,’ she said. He looked at her now with alarm, in case she might do the room an injury. He began to take the towel off the bed and fold it very carefully, first in two, then in four, then he put it on the towel rack near the wash-basin.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Too bat,’ he said and suddenly he got very industrious and took up a small notebook and asked her to spell the ugly word she had used. She wrote it down for him and thought if her husband ever needed evidence of her infidelity there was a half-naked, shivering picture of her on film and a word in her handwriting in his home-made phrase book. She said it was a verb and the infinitive was ‘to bleed.’
‘You are educated,’ he said, surprised.
‘I know about words,’ she said, stepping into her dress, relieved, safe again.
‘And this,’ he asked, pointing to where her nipple lay, flat, under the flowered dress.
‘Nipple.’
‘Hot word,’ he said. It took her a minute to understand that he wanted not ordinary words, but erotic ones for wooing Englishwomen.
‘Just nipple,’ she said.
‘And you are a frigid woman,’ he said, flicking the pages to F, where he could enter this new, unwelcome word. He was not as slow as she’d thought him to be. Then he lowered his hand between his legs and asked the juice words for there. He did not touch her any more, but kept looking suspiciously as if she were about to sully the place. When she sat down again – she did not feel nervous now – he rushed over with a plastic beach cushion and had her stand up so that he could put it under her.
‘These region,’ he said, pointing to her but not actually touching.
‘Male or female?’ she said, a little injured now.
‘The both.’
‘Well there’s a vagina,’ she said.
‘Vagina no gud,’ he said. He already knew that word. He wanted love words and pet words that would send Englishwomen rearing to the skies of abandon.
‘Cunt, I suppose,’ she said. He flicked the pages back and wrote it under C. He wrote each word, carefully, in block letters.
‘Though it can also be derogatory,’ she said, ‘if applied to a man.’ He looked at her suspiciously as if she were making a fool of him.
‘Cunt is all right for a woman,’ she said.
‘A woman is a cunt?’ he said.
‘A woman is a cunt,’ she said. What did it matter if he ran into trouble. He deserved a few setbacks. She felt a fool, first for having come, then for having feigned bleeding, and now for not knowing a whole dictionary of love words so that he could stock up towels and other gifts for when he retired.
‘May I have another drink?’ she said, holding the glass out. He filled it quarter-ways and then began to busy himself about the room, picking up instruments, putting them down again, looking into his camera, looking through the window, frowning. She drank it down and left. He was putting on his shirt as she went out and he twiddled his fingers, but she could not see his face because it was lost in the vest. She would never forget the whites of his eyes.
Down in her bedroom she locked the door and sat straddled on the bidet, too fearful to wash herself. Because of the awful heat and what she’d told him she really felt that she might be bleeding. She could see nothing from her position on the bidet except one of the palms with the huge conical top. No matter where she went she saw one. They were beginning to be the only thing she noticed, the trees with the long trunks and their tops thrusting out from the sheath of whittled palms. She recalled everything they said, and thought if all the people in the world were as desperate as they then the world was a desperate place to be in. She sat for a long time but did not soap herself.
By dinner time she felt too despondent to go downstairs and ordered a meal to be sent up. The room-service boy wheeled the trolley in shortly after seven. He lifted the plate covers triumphantly as if he had been responsible for cooking the veal and dressing the salad and buttering the tiny little string beans.
‘Mademoiselle, I fear I have mislaid my bus ticket,’ he said, beaming at her.
‘I fear I have too,’ she said wryly. She sat quite still before the trolley and offered no resistance as he unfolded the cone of the napkin, shook it apart and then pressed it inside her shirt collar under her chin. She thought he petted her neck but could not be sure.
‘Bon,’ he said looking at the shirt. She had put on another stiff white shirt and a black silk skirt slit at one side. It seemed a waste to be eating in her room by herself, but she had dressed up simply to give herself some occupation.
‘Merci,’ she said, and waited with the knife and fork held in the air, above the plate, until such time as he went out.