there would lie only the coquetry finally, and maybe vulgarity and certainly greed. He felt so tired suddenly. So weary. And this room was so close. He saw himself slipping into his own bed; he felt the weight of Marianna next to him. He thought slowly and bitterly, she is in the grave.
And he was too drunk for this, he was on the verge of sickness, and he should never have come.
“But why are you so sad?” she asked him in that purring voice. It was as if she truly wanted an answer, and there was about her something so powerful…what was it…her beauty had a fierceness. She might truly make him…but then this was what he always believed in the beginning, and what was it in the end? The struggle between the sheets, some little cruelty slipping out of him, and that haggling afterwards, threats maybe. And he was too drunk for this, much too drunk.
“I must leave…” he said, his mouth working reluctantly. He would take out his purse—that is, if he still had it. His tabarro, what had he done with it? It lay at his feet. But then she would be a perfect fool to try robbing him. She knew better than that.
It seemed her face was…too large. Impossibly large. Yet those wide-set black eyes were astonishing him. He stared at her hands as she played with the white hair at her temples, such an exquisite forehead, rising without the slightest slope to that expensive French hair. But such large hands for a beautiful woman, large hands for any woman, and those eyes. He had a sudden sense of drifting, of disorientation that he remembered now from the gondola, and it had nothing to do with the water, or did it?
He felt the room moving just as if they were still in the narrow boat.
“I must…go. I must lie down.”
He watched her rise.
She seemed to rise and rise and rise.
“But that isn’t possible…” he murmured.
“What isn’t possible?” she whispered. She stood over him and he breathed her perfume, which wasn’t so much the French scent as it was her freshness, her sweetness, her youth. She was holding something in her hands. It looked like a great black loop of something, of leather, a belt with a buckle.
“That you…that you could be so tall…” he answered. She had raised the loop over his head.
“You’ve only just noticed it?” she asked, smiling. Exquisite!
It was almost as if he could fall in love with her, imagine it, love her, it was as if there were some substance to her, not the predictable mystery and its inevitable vulgar core, but something infinitely more fierce. “But what are you doing?” he asked her. “What’s this…in your hands?”
They didn’t look human, these hands.
She had dropped this loop of leather belt down over him. What an extraordinary thing to do. He stared down and saw it binding his chest and his arms.
“What did you do with it?” he asked her.
And then when he tried to move, he knew.
She had dropped it over the back of the chair as well, and it was so tight he couldn’t move forward, nor lift more than his forearms. This was most strange.
“No,” he said smiling. He could raise his forearms and he brought them up almost spilling the brandy from the flask. Suddenly he jerked forward.
It was impossible. The chair, immense and heavy, did not move.
“No,” he said again smiling coldly at her. “I don’t like this.” And as if correcting a little child, he gently shook his head.
But she had passed in back of him where he couldn’t see her, and as he tried to lift the belt with his right hand, he realized it was too tight.
He grasped it in both hands now, crossing his arms, the brandy fallen over on the table, his fingers wet and slipping on the leather. Something was holding the belt in its place from behind.
She appeared then at his right shoulder.
“You don’t like it?” she asked.
Again, he gave her that cold smile. He would when this inanity had reached its conclusion make her pay for this when he had her stripped and helpless and his hand over her mouth. Nothing too cruel, only a lesson of sorts, and he saw himself slipping his fingers inside that flat band of embroidery and pulling it loose.
“Take this off, my dearest,” he said coldly, in a voice that was low and full of command. “Take it off me now.”