The Enchanter Read Free

ball high in the air, or brushing against him with a bare elbow as she seated herself on the bench—all of it (while he appeared engrossed in pleasant conversation) evoked an intolerable sensation of sanguine, dermal, multivascular communion with her, as if the monstrous bisector pumping all the juices from the depths of his being extended into her like a pulsating dotted line, as if this girl were growing out of him, as if, with every carefree movement,she tugged and shook her vital roots implanted in the bowels of his being, so that, when she abruptly changed position or rushed off, he felt a yank, a barbarous pluck, a momentary loss of equilibrium: suddenly you are traveling through the dust on your back, banging the back of your head, on your way to being strung up by your insides. And all the while he calmly sat listening, smiling, nodding his head, pulling at a pant leg to free his knee, scrabbling lightly in the gravel with his walking stick, and saying, “Is that so?” or “Yes, it happens sometimes, you know …,” but comprehending his neighbor’s words only when the girl was nowhere nearby. He learned from this circumstantiating chatterbox that between her and the girl’s mother, a forty-two-year-old widow, there existed a five-year friendship (her own husband’s honor had been saved by the widow’s late spouse); that last spring this widow had, after a long illness, undergone a serious operation of the intestine; that, having long since lost all her family, she had promptly and tenaciously clutched at the kind couple’s suggestion that the girl move in with them in their provincial town; and that now she had been brought for a visit with her mother, as the garrulous lady’s husband had a bit of bothersome business to attend to in the capital, but that soon it would be time to head home—the sooner the better, for the girl’s presence only irritated the widow, who was exceptionally decent but had grown somewhat self-indulgent.
    “Say, didn’t you mention that she was selling off some sort of furniture?”
    This question (with its continuation) he had prepared during the night and tried out sotto voce on the ticking silence; having convinced himself that it sounded natural, he repeated it the next day to his newfound acquaintance. She replied affirmatively and explained in no uncertain terms that it wouldn’t be a bad idea if the widow made a little money—her medical care was costing and would continue to cost a lot, her resources were very limited, she insisted on paying for her daughter’s upkeep but did so rather sporadically—and we’re not rich either—in a word, the debt of honor, apparently, was considered already extinguished.
    “Actually,” he continued without missing a beat, “I could use certain pieces of furniture myself. Do you suppose it might be convenient as well as proper if I …” He had forgotten the rest of his sentence, but improvised most adroitly, as he was beginning to feel at home with the artificial style of the still not fully comprehensible, many-ringed dream with which he was already so indistinctly but so firmly entwined that, for instance, he no longer knew what this thing was, and whose: part of his own leg or part of an octopus.
    She was obviously delighted, and offered to take him there that very moment if he wished—the widow’s apartment, where she and her husband were also staying, wasnot far, right on the other side of the electric-railway bridge.
    They set off. The girl walked in front, energetically swinging a canvas bag on a string, and already everything about her was, to his eyes, terrifyingly and insatiably familiar—the curve of her narrow back, the resilience of the two round little muscles farther down, the exact way the checks of her dress (the other, brown, one) tightened when she raised an arm, the delicate ankles, the rather high heels. She might be a little introverted, livelier of movement than of conversation, neither bashful nor