Villa Triste Read Online Free Page B

complicated shadows, making patterns like lace or tracery, and it was as though Yvonne’s and Meinthe’s faces were suddenly covered with veils.
    In the garden below us, several people were crowding around a buffet table laden with things to eat. A very tall, very blond man waved and came toward us, supporting himself on a cane. His linen shirt — natural-colored, mostly open — looked like a safari jacket, and I thought about certain characters one used to meet in the colonies in the old days, the ones who had a “past.” Meinthe introduced the tall man: Rolf Madeja, “the director.” He leaned down to kiss Yvonne and put his hand on Meinthe’s shoulder. He called him “Menthe,” mint, with an accent that sounded more English than German. He led us toward the buffet, and the blond woman as tall as he was, the vague-eyed Valkyrie (she stared at us without seeing us, or maybe she was contemplating something she saw through us), turned out to be his wife.
    Yvonne and I left Meinthe in the company of a young man with a mountain climber’s physique and moved from group to group. She kissed everybody, and if anyone asked who I was, she said, “A friend.” If I understood correctly, most of the people present had played some part in “the film.” They wandered off across the garden. The bright moonlight lit up everything. We followed the grass-covered paths and came upon a cedar tree of terrifying size. When we reached the garden wall, we could hear the lapping ofthe lake on the other side, and we stayed there for a long moment. From where we were, you could see the house standing in the midst of the neglected grounds, and its presence surprised us as much as if we’d just arrived in the old South American city where a rococo opera house, a cathedral, and some mansions of Carrara marble are said to exist to this day, entombed by the virgin forest.
    The other guests haven’t ventured as far as we have, except for two or three barely distinguishable couples who are taking advantage of the dense coppices and the night. Everyone else has stayed near the house or on the terrace. We rejoin them. Where’s Meinthe? Inside, maybe, in the salon. Madeja comes up to us and reveals, in his half-English, half-German accent, that he would happily stay here another two weeks, but he must go to Rome. He’ll rent the villa again in September, he says, “When the film’s final cut is ready.” He takes Yvonne by the waist — I don’t know whether he’s groping her or displaying fatherly affection — and declares, “She’s a very fine actress.”
    He stares at me, and I notice his eyes look misted, and the mist is growing denser.
    “Your name is Chmara, isn’t it?”
    The mist has suddenly vanished; his blue-gray eyes glint. “Chmara,” he says. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
    I answer him with a tight-lipped “yes,” and then his eyes grow soft again, mist over, practically liquefy. I don’t doubt he has the power to regulate their intensity at will, the way you adjust binoculars. When he wants to withdraw into himself, his eyes mist over, and then the outside world isnothing but a blurred mass. I know this method well, as I often practice it myself.
    “There was a Chmara in Berlin, in the old days …” he said to me. “Wasn’t there, Ilse?”
    His wife, lying on a deck chair at the other end of the veranda and chatting with two young people, swiveled her head toward us with a smile on her lips.
    “Wasn’t there, Ilse? Wasn’t there a Chmara in the old days in Berlin?”
    She looked at him and kept smiling. Then she turned her head and resumed her conversation. Madeja shrugged and gripped his cane tightly with both hands.
    “Yes … yes … This Chmara lived on the Kaiserallee … You don’t believe me, do you?”
    He stood up, caressed Yvonne’s face, and walked over to the green wooden balustrade. He remained there, looming, massive, contemplating the moonlit garden.
    Yvonne and I sat on two