Behind the door the darkness was all the more dense as you’d stayed too long under the light in the room below. You grabbed the rail firmly and then in two strides entered without taking the time to master your fear. The sexual urge that had mixed with your agitation before that had entirely fizzled out. All your nerves were taut to breaking point. In the dead of that night the weather was icy cold but your body streamed with sweat. Sweat, sweat, sweat. And what about your lips, then – brittle dry. Brittle dry too your throat, your tongue, your teeth. To do evil isn’t easy, contrary to what you’d always thought. The way to abomination is strewn with obstacles. You took another three or four steps into the darkness of the room and stumbled on something soft and very light. You bent over to pick it up and smell it. It was but a cloth slipper as one wears at home and whose pair she refused to part with. Its smell wasn’t particularly appetising and you mentally cursed yourself to have smelled it. You stood up. But even at the moment you bent over the nearest bed you weren’t sure whether the body lying on the side under a thick, light-coloured blanket which you had seen Nartaya air out in the sun was hers or San’s. Your eyes had difficulty adjusting to the darkness. It might be San, you fearfully thought, or maybe he’s even awake and merely pretending to sleep and gloating at your taking all these precautions. You bent over, blinked in quick succession. You didn’t dare touch the body in question, not even the tip of its feet.
You didn’t dare take the risk of whispering Nartaya! Nartaya! You even feared your heart, which beat so loud, would be unable to hush its racket. Finally you took the stupid decision to open the window by the foot of the bed to let the neon light from the lower floor in. And it’s only when you went back to the bed and bent over to have a look that you were certain the body lying there really was Nartaya’s. Yes, it really was Nartaya. She lay snuggled against the bolster and was sleeping tight. Her lips were slightly opened so that you could see the tips of her hazy-white teeth. Her black hair was spread over the white pillow. She breathed lightly and her chest heaved slowly and steadily. Her arm stretched over the blanket followed the swell of her waist and haunch. As for the other, underneath, it supported her head. The blanket with its pattern of flowers and ivy of one kind or another covered her up to her armpits. What could she be dreaming of? Or maybe she wasn’t? You told yourself you were going to kiss her. You told yourself that if you’d wrestled with all sorts of obstacles to come to her, it was only to kiss her and then leave. The stark raving madness which in your confusion you’d mistaken for audacity had vanished, leaving behind but nauseous odours. You limited your desire to merely want to kiss her on her cheek, her lips, her eyelids or even her feet, and softly to boot. As far as you were concerned, Nartaya asleep seemed even more formidable than Nartaya awake. You sat down on the bed. The thick, springy mattress received your weight without any noise and you bent over again, not to kiss her but to observe her more closely. A discreet perfume struck your face as a salvo from her first-line defence. It didn’t originate from any particular point of her but seemed to arise from her entire body, which was naked beneath her skin-tight slip of fine white serge, and it enhanced the mysterious fragrance of the night flowers in front of her place, increasingly insidious and heady as the hour slowly went by. The smell of a woman… Oh, that’s what the smell of a woman is like! you exclaimed in your heart, almost stuttering in your stupor. With the shock of such a discovery, that smell was powerful enough to stop you short and make you leave. It was at that very instant that you told yourself you didn’t dare. You didn’t know what more you could do to her, she who, from then on, was a splendid flower deep in the heart of an impenetrable thorn bush. One aspect of the problem which in your excitement you’d forgotten was clearly presenting itself now: it was to know if tonight San had or hadn’t come back to sleep at home. What was hiding behind the night-blue curtain adorned with a flight of teals in the setting sun that was now all black? For a moment, teething with anger, you saw yourself springing up, rushing to the curtain, pulling at it with all your might and tearing it to shreds. But enough’s enough, you told yourself, you’ve gone as far as you could. You’d reached the sacred place, the forbidden place full of perils and you were ready to go away from it without taking back the least souvenir, the merest token. You’d violated no moral interdict. You hadn’t touched even the tip of her nails or a strand of her hair and you were happy not to have done so. You looked at her from top to toe; you looked around the room as if to take your leave and, that done, you got up. But that was when she stretched out and changed posture to lie on her back. Her lips now shut tight, she seemed ready to sink anew into sleep unaware of what was going on. But that wasn’t what she did. Her eyes opened in full, she blinked a couple of times and, the next moment, ejaculated your name in a voice so low you hardly heard her. It’s you, isn’t it? she asked in a gravelly voice as she stretched out her hand and caught your arm and squeezed it. I was having a nightmare. Look: my hands are still sticky with sweat. You felt nailed to the spot as she went on, Brr! How horrid! I was spooked. You know, like in those ghost stories you keep tellin’ me. She sat up, pulling on the blanket to cover herself and, after remaining still for a moment, asked as if the thought had just crossed her mind, But hey! Why did you come? Why-did-you-come? And how did you manage to get in, huh? By now she was beginning to have a vague idea of how things stood. Answer me! Her voice, severe, was rising, increasingly imperious. I’d never have thought you’d have the cheek to do this. And she threatened to denounce you to Daen for him to punish you one way or another. With a superior air, she told you you were behaving like a child without ever thinking about the consequences of what you did and if she started to shout, her brother who slept at the other end of the room was going to punish you harshly one way or another. Go away! she urged. Go back to your place. She didn’t want trouble. San was actually sleeping on the other side of the night-blue curtain, except that he’d had a drop to drink. If you didn’t leave right now, she was really going to shout. So if you were bright enough, you were going to go back. Actually, she’d see you out, on the condition we walk without making noise, okay? Her whispered remonstrations were those of an elder sister helping her errant little brother out. And all you did was panic, and panic even more, now that you knew San was also in the room. And Nartaya’s voice was getting louder beyond prudence. As you sat shaking all over, you found it hard to breathe because of the heady smell of her body and the heady smell of the flowers of the night. Go away! she urged, almost shouting. You motioned for her to pipe down. She quieted down the time it took her to take a breath, flung the blanket off her with an angry gesture, fell back hard on the mattress and said she didn’t understand why you had dirty thoughts about her. Had she ever said or done anything to make you think she was leading you on? Well then, get it into your nob once and for all that you got it all wrong; you’re the one thinkin’ evil, nothin’ to do with me. From now on she wouldn’t talk to you. She loathed whoever had such base instincts. And something else too: she’d never thought of you as anything but a friend. She was going to count to three and if, at three, you hadn’t left, she was going to yell for good. And she started counting at once without waiting for the least objection. Her tone was firm and determined. One, she counted firmly. Two. Not only firmly, but in a loud, threatening voice. Three. You crushed her into your arms so fast even you were surprised. Don’t shout! Calm down, you said between your teeth. Her heart beat hard, as hard as yours. The sweet smell coming out of her body became so heady it almost got you drunk. Within the tension, a softness began to spread as of a drop of ink impregnating blotting paper. Oddly enough, she wasn’t warding you off, wasn’t even putting up a struggle. Your breath fluttering at the level of her neck seemed to subjugate her totally and in your arms her body trembled like a fistful of flowers in the rain. Be quiet, don’t shout, you were saying, your voice quavering as if you were unable to control yourself. In the quiet that followed, you saw the couple of sky-blue Indian rollers that had nestl
ed in the hollow of a rain tree by the brook where you liked to fish, their blue as intense as the sky in winter; you saw orange-red cacti flowers bloom fiercely in the scorching heat and dryness of Phraek Narm Daeng; and you heard once again the forktail utter its somnambular trills in the stillness of a night long gone. You went past that couple of Indian rollers, past those cacti, past that forktail night song, mind adrift. And when you kissed her, everything became luminous. Luminous but soft like a photograph taken with a soft lens. You hardly dared open your eyes to look at her after you realised she too had her eyes closed. But she opened them again out of shock and bewilderment. You forced your way through the feeble resistance of flower petals, the rebuffs of butterfly wings, the opposition of foam on crested waves, the rage of cloud rags at the far end of the sky and the supplications of the fledgling hypnotised by an evil snake. It was a sexual joust without words, at once rattled and fluid, rough and smooth, hideous and beautiful, painful and sublime. There was but the clapping of mouths shutting on emptiness and the gurgling of swallowed saliva in San’s sleep and drunkenness, his meaningless throaty noises and gnashing of teeth and burps you almost could smell the acidic smell of, of the alcohol and cocktail snacks macerating in his stomach – the normal performance of a man sleeping it off. But once the deed was done, she cursed you with foul words. She sobbed bitterly. She pummelled you with all her might. She scraped your chest and tore your skin in long gashes. She bit your shoulder through the skin. She refused to listen to your words of comfort. You left her in tears at the break of day. Idiotic pride dwelt in your eyes. You’d managed to be the worm in the forbidden fruit; you’d managed to be the bug that wrecks the sacred flower. You weren’t quite aware that as of that night she’d fallen irrevocably under your power and, when you later became aware of the fact, you couldn’t quite believe that from a secretive young girl as proud as a peacock she’d become an oh so devoted bitch.
The White Shadow Page 6
