Spring: -I- -II- -III-
The Stamp Album: -IV- -V- -VI- -VII- -VIII- -IX- -X- -XI- -XII-
In the Municipal Park: -XIII- -XIV- -XV- -XVI-
Springtime Twilight: -XVII-
The Villa: -XVIII- -XIX- -XX- -XXI- -XXII- (XXIII) -XXIV- -XXV- -XXVI- -XXVII-
Bianka’s Lineage: -XXVIII- -XXIX- -XXX- -XXXI- -XXXII- -XXXIII-
Hiatus: -XXXIV- -XXXV- -XXXVI- -XXXVII-
Finale: -XXXVIII- -XXXIX- -XL-
XXIII
IS IT POSSIBLE? Bianka’s villa, extraterritorial terrain? Her house under the protection of international treaties? My study of the stamp album leads me to such stupendous discoveries! Am I the only one in possession of this astounding truth? And yet one must not make light of all the arguments and circumstantial evidence that the stamp album amasses around this point.
I have investigated the whole villa at close quarters today, after circling for weeks its great, wrought-iron gate adorned with a coat of arms. I took advantage of the moment when two great empty equipages drove out of the villa garden. The gate stood wide open. No one closed it. I stepped nonchalantly inside, and took my sketching pad from my pocket. Leaning against one of the pillars, I pretended to draw some architectural detail. I was standing on the very same gravelled footpath that Bianka’s nimble feet must have passed along so many times. My heart froze in joyful terror at the thought of her slender figure, in a light white dress, emerging from one of the balcony doors. But all the windows and doors were drawn with green blinds. Not the least rustle betrayed the life that lay latent in that house. The sky was growing overcast on the horizon; lightning flashed in the distance. There was not the slightest breeze in the warm, thin air. In the stillness of that grey day, only the chalk-white walls of the villa spoke out, with the silent but revealing eloquence of its richly segmented architecture. Its ethereal enunciations were diffused in pleonasms—a single motif in a thousand versions. Bas-relief garlands ran to the left and the right in rhythmical cadences along a bright, white frieze, and lingered undecidedly at the corners. A marble stairway, pompous and ceremonial, ran down from the heights of the central terrace, between balustrades and architectural vases that stepped quickly to the side, and, spilling widely onto the ground, it seemed to gather and draw up its billowing gown in a deep curtsy.
I have an unusually sensitive notion of style. That style pricked me, disturbed me in some unaccountable way. Behind the resolute classicism, held firmly in check, behind that outwardly cool elegance, elusive frissons lay concealed. That style was too torrid, too sharply pointed, too full of unexpected beauty marks. A drop of some unknown poison released into the veins of that style had darkened its blood, had rendered it explosive and dangerous.
Internally disoriented, trembling with contradictory impulses, I inspected the front of the villa on tiptoe, startling awake lizards that were dozing on its steps.
Around a dried up circular pool, the earth was cracked by the sun, and still bare. Only here and there was a little eager and fantastic greenery poking out from a chink in the ground. I pulled up a small tuft of that weed, and hid it away between the pages of my sketching pad. I was trembling with inner disquiet. Above that pool, the air stood grey, extraordinarily transparent and shimmering, undulating in the heat. On a nearby pillar, a barometer indicated a catastrophic drop. Silence hung all around. Not a twig was stirred by any breeze. The villa slept, shining with chalky whiteness in the boundless torpor of its grey aura, its Venetian blinds drawn. Suddenly, as if that stagnation had reached some critical point, the air precipitated with colourful agitation, broke up into florid patches, into flickering flutters.
They were enormous, ponderous butterflies, occupied with amorous frolicking in pairs. Their listless, tremulous fluttering hung for a moment in the lifeless atmosphere. They flew by turns some distance past one another, and then rejoined the throng, shuffling a whole pack of colourful flares in the darkening air. Was this merely a rapid decomposition of the rank atmosphere? A fata Morgana of the air, full of hashish and caprice? I struck out with my cap, and a plush, ponderous butterfly dropped to the ground, fluttering its wings. I picked it up and hid it away. One more proof.
> -XXIV- >