Chapter 42: 42- Magic exist into your kisses
“Serena!” shouted the man from the bar, leaning towards her perilously but not losing his grip on the back of his chair for fear of toppling. Someone nearer to her gallantly repeated the name for her, which she finally acknowledged as her own. At this moment, the lie detector threw off the iridescence which the night, the voice, the drug of sleep and her presence had created in him, and determined that she behaved like someone who had all the symptoms of guilt: her way of looking at the door of the bar, as if expecting the proper moment to make her escape; her unpremeditated talk, without continuity; her erratic and sudden gestures, unrelated to her talk; the chaos of her phrases; her sudden, sulky silences. As friends drifted towards her, sat with her, and then drifted away to other tables, she was forced to raise her voice, usually low, to be heard above the cajoling blues.
She was talking about a party at which indistinct incidents had taken place, hazy scenes from which the lie detector could not distinguish the heroine or the victim; talking a broken dream, with spaces, reversals, retractions, and galloping fantasies. She was now in Morocco visiting the baths with the native women, sharing their pumice stone, and learning from the prostitutes how to paint her eyes with kohl from the market place.
“It’s coal dust, and you place it right inside the eyes. It smarts at first, and you want to cry; but that spreads it out on the eyelids, and that is how they get that shiny, coal black rim around the eyes.”
“Didn’t you get an infection?” asked someone at her right whom the lie detector could not see clearly, an indistinct personage she disregarded even as she answered, “Oh, no, the prostitutes have the kohl blessed at the mosque.” And then, when everyone laughed at this which she did not consider humorous, she laughed with them; and now it was as if all she had said had been written on a huge blackboard, and she took a sponge and effaced it all by a phrase which left in suspense who had been at the baths; or, perhaps, this was a story she had read, or heard at a bar; and, as soon as it was erased in the mind of her listeners, she began another…
The faces and the figures of her personages appeared only half drawn; and, when the lie detector had just begun to perceive them, another face and figure were interposed as in a dream. And when he believed she had been talking about a woman, it turned out that it was not a woman, but a man; and when the image of the man began to form, it turned out the lie detector had not heard aright:ies. She was a young man who resembled a woman who had once taken care of Serena; and this young man was instantly metamorphosed into a group of people who had humiliated her one night. He could not retain a sequence of the people she had loved, hated, escaped from, any more than he could keep track of the changes in her personal appearance by phrases such as “at that time my hair was blond,” “at that time I was married,” and who it was that had been forgotten or betrayed; and when in desperation he clung to the recurrences of certain words, they formed no design by their repetition, but rather an absolute contradiction. The word “actress” recurred most persistently; and yet the lie detector could not, after hours of detection, tell whether she was an actress, or wanted to be one, or was pretending.
She was compelled by a confessional fever which forced her into lifting a corner of the veil, and then frightened when anyone listened too attentively. She repeatedly took a giant sponge and erased all she had said by absolute denial, as if this confusion were in itself a mantle of protection.
At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection. The dawn appearing at the door silenced her. She tightened her cape around her shoulders as if it were the final threat, the greatest enemy of all. To the dawn she would not even address a feverish speech.
She stared at it angrily, and left the bar. The lie detector followed her. Before she awakened, Serena’s dark eyes showed the hard light of precious stones through a slit in the eyelids, pure dark green beryl shining, not yet warmed by her feverishness. Then instantly she was awake, on guard. She did not awaken gradually, in abandon and trust to the new day. As soon as light or sound registered on her consciousness, danger was in the air and she sat up to meet its thrusts. Her first expression was one of tension, which was not beauty. Just as anxiety dispersed the strength of the body, it also gave to the face a wavering, tremulous vagueness, which was not beauty, like that of a drawing out of focus. Slowly what she composed with the new day was her own focus, to bring together body and mind.
This was made with an effort, as if all the dissolutions and dispersions of herself the night before were difficult to reassemble. She must redesign the face, smooth the anxious brows, separate the crushed eyelashes, wash off the traces of secret interior tears, accentuate the mouth as upon a canvas, so it will hold its luxuriant smile. Inner chaos, like those secret volcanoes which suddenly lift the neat furrows of a peacefully ploughed field, awaited behind all disorders of face, hair and costume for a fissure through which to explode. What she saw in the mirror now was a flushed, clear-eyed face, smiling, smooth, beautiful.
The multiple acts of composure and artifice had merely dissolved her anxieties; now that she felt prepared to meet the day, her true beauty, which had been frayed and marred by anxiety, emerged. She considered her clothes with the same weighing of possible external dangers as she had the new day which had entered through her closed windows and doors.
Believing in the danger which sprang from objects as well as people, which dress, which shoes, which coat demanded less of her panicked heart and body? For a costume was a challenge too, a discipline, a trap which once adopted could influence the actor. She ended by choosing a dress with a hole in its sleeve.
The last time she had worn it she had stood before a restaurant which was too luxurious, too ostentatious, which she was frightened to enter, but instead of saying: “I am afraid to enter here,” she had been able to say:
“I can’t enter here with a hole in my sleeve.” She selected her cape which seemed more protective, more enveloping. Also the cape held within its folds something of what she imagined was a quality possessed exclusively by man: some dash, some audacity, some swagger of freedom denied to woman.
The toreador’s provocative flings, the medieval horsemen’s floating flag of attack, a sail unfurled in full collision with the wind, the warrior’s shield for his face in battle, all these she experienced when she placed a cape around her shoulder. A spread-out cape was the bed of nomads, a cape unfurled was the flag of adventure. Now she was dressed in a costume most appropriate to flights, battles, tournaments. The curtain of the night’s defenselessness was rising to expose a personage prepared.