CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Marcia, 2

MADAME MARCIA is in her bedroom. She is a woman of sixty or so, tough, broad, and bony. Half-undressed, wearing a white lace-edged nylon slip, a girdle, and stockings, and with her hair in curlers, she is sitting in a modern-made moulded wooden armchair upholstered in black leather. In her right hand she is holding a large barrel-shaped glass jar full of pickled gherkins and is trying to get hold of one between the index and medius fingers of her left hand. At her side there is a low table overloaded with papers, books, and miscellaneous objects: a prospectus printed in the style of a family announcement, advertising the marriage of Delmont and Co. (interior design, decor, objets d’art) and the House of Artifoni (flower arrangers, designers of decorative gardens, greenhouses, balconies, flowerbeds, and potted plants); an invitation from the Franco-Polish Cultural Association to an Andrzej Wajda Festival; an invitation to a private viewing of an exhibition of Silberselber’s paintings: the work reproduced on the card is a watercolour entitled Japanese Garden, IV, of which the lower third is taken up by a set of perfectly parallel dotted lines and the upper two-thirds by a realistic representation of a heavy, storm-laden sky; a novel, probably a detective story, called Clocks and Clouds, on the cover of which you can see, against a background of a backgammon board, a pair of handcuffs, a small alabaster figurine copying Watteau’s L’Indifférent, a pistol, a saucer full of a no doubt sugary liquid since several bees are buzzing over it, and a six-sided tin token in which the number 90 has been cut by stamping; a postcard bearing the legend Choza de Indios, Beni, Bolivia, exhibiting a group of savage women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning, sleeping, amid a swarm of infants, outside some primitive shanties of osier; a photograph, certainly depicting Madame Marcia herself, but at least forty years younger: the picture shows a frail young girl dressed in a spotted sleeveless jacket and a bonnet; she is driving a cardboard motor car – one of those painted panels with various cutouts for heads used by fairground photographers – and is accompanied by two young men in pin-striped white jackets and boaters.

The furnishing of the flat boldly combines the ultramodern – the armchair, the Japanese wallpaper, three floorlamps looking like large luminescent pebbles – with curios of different periods: two display cases full of Coptic cloth and papyri, above which two gloomy landscapes by a seventeenth-century artist from Alsace, with the outlines of towns and burning fires in the background, are placed on either side of and show off a plate covered in hieroglyphs; a rare set of so-called “footpads’ goblets”, widely used by nineteenth-century innkeepers in major ports with the aim of reducing brawls between sailors: on the outside they appear properly cylindrical, but they are tapered on the inside like sewing thimbles, the intended imperfection being skilfully masked by uneven bubbles blown into the glass; parallel rings engraved from top to bottom show how much can be drunk for such and such a price; and lastly a sumptuous bed, a Muscovite fantasy alleged to have been offered to Napoleon I for the night he spent at the Petrovsky Palace, but which he certainly declined in favour of his customary camp bed: it’s an imposing piece, all its surfaces inlaid with tiny lozenge-shaped marquetry of sixteen different woods and shells, creating a mythical picture: a world of roseate forms and entwined garlands from the midst of which arises, Botticelli-like, a nymph clad only in her own hair.