30. Exaltation

What more intense satisfaction could he expect than her absence when nothing had been said? White china felt smooth to the touch and sparkled for the eyes in the dining room lights during the moment when young Gangulf tried to convince himself that he had triumphed; eyes on the bright china, the white voice of the cups against saucers, the creamer next to the bottle of milk, the faint silver cry of the cutlery that burned his skin as if he had lain naked in the sun for the ages since the beginning of time under the gaze of visionaries, pushing him toward the clarity of bonfires, sparks, the reverberation of genius; everything left him blind, groping, trembling, becoming his own prophet in search of the conquerors’ pride. He took another step toward the stairway thinking he would manage to climb to the second floor and stalk to the door of the room at the end, a hidden and well-known door, his steps as light as a fox whose reddish color blends in with fallen leaves, light as someone walking suspiciously in a strange city, like the goshawk, like a sloop, light as the vole and the sun-dew, like venal sin, he who sought destiny in sacrifice; but in the end he paused at the foot of the stairway, turned, and entered the salon, crossed it, and came to the dining room whose doors were always open at that hour, dressed in metal and brilliant silvery lights that he almost never looked at. If nothing had been said, what did absence mean? He allowed himself to greet everyone, to sit at the table with its ivory tablecloth white china white flowers that he could not identify with yellow spots in their center, to ponder an apprenticeship that would raise him up to what he called exaltation even when that word very rarely appeared in his ruminations: it lived in truth rather than in hushed pronunciation, or no, like the sensation of acid fire, like illness or the inferno and possibly even the flight of angels to the foot of a throne of an indifferent god, cruel at times and incapable of meting out punishment in a show of deformed justice; a feeling of safety inside that became heavy and ignorant, too clumsy to know what was truly happening to him but alert to an urgent desire. Although he answered Mr. Pallud, he quickly looked at the General: here we have, he said to himself, a miserable man, and he knew unhappiness at that moment, avid for a pain that would authorize him to go up to the second floor, to knock on the door of Miss Esther’s room and enter smiling, to wish her a good trip, to surprise her, disturb her, finally to leave forgetting that absence can offer itself as the pretext of satisfaction, to go to his room where he would suffer this unnamed pain that was not his, as distant from him as a far-off land where he mistakenly went time and again. This woman, sharp and soft and smooth and keen as a dagger, dangerous to herself in her beautiful absolute determination, daughter of the Nibelheim Cave gods, would dream about him, speak to him, follow him, embark with him in the ship that would fight in all the rivers of the world for his fortune against the current flowing to the sea: he would make that happen without the disguise of terror, without a cry, without confession, without having said anything. Young, fatuous, miserly, far from his home and parents, the student thought that if treachery killed his determination he would wind up like that, like that pale watery-eyed old man who spent his time visiting second-hand shops in search of the dolls he adored and perhaps revered, worshiping ridiculously, naked or on his knees or flagellating himself or talking to them as if they were his children or dreaming that they grew and grew until they devoured him, always gray, quietly saying you have to see this treasure, just imagine, it is described there in the third volume of Heindesberg in a footnote in the chapter which studies national figurines what a find is it possible that these people did not know what they had this happens from a lack of information and most of all from a lack of interest. Under the spell of the growing fire that burned in the ashen man’s eyes, he told himself perhaps no or perhaps yes he would call it a destiny like the General’s and toward which little by little his mouth had been twisting the way the openings of his jacket pockets yawned at him and his gaze lowered until it was dragging on the floor unable to move his lids or pupils, his two eyes turned into hard agates left unpolished on the banks of a solitary and sluggish river. He finished his tea and said yes, of course he would be delighted to see the figurine and indeed it seemed very strange that Mr. Pallud had found it, so exquisite, exactly six months after Madame Nashiru had left the house on Scheller Street.