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else was there to do in this rotten weather. She dragged one foot and it was painful to see her climb the stairs, stopping at each step to drag up her sick leg, which was thicker than the other, and go through the same maneuver all the way to the fourth floor. There was a smell of toilet soap, of soup, on the rug in the hallway someone had spilled a blue liquid which had taken the shape of a pair of wings. The room had two windows with red curtains, full of patches. A damp light spread out like an angel over to the bed with a yellow spread.
    La Maga had thought to play it innocent, staying by the window, pretending to look at the street while Oliveira checked the bolt on the door. She must have had a system all worked out for this sort of thing, or maybe it just always happened the same way. First she put her purse on the table and looked for her cigarettes, she looked at the street, taking deep drags, she commented on the wallpaper, she waited, obviously she waited, all effort was being made so that the man could best play his role and would have all the time necessary to take the initiative. At one point they had burst out laughing, it was all too silly. Flung into a corner, the yellow bedspread looked like a shapeless doll against the wall.
    They had got into the habit of comparing spreads, doors, lamps, curtains. They preferred the hotel rooms of the
cinquième arrondissement
to those of the
sixième.
In the
septième
theyhad no luck at all, something was always happening: pounding in the room next door or the plumbing made a lugubrious sound, and it was then that Oliveira had told La Maga the story of Troppmann. La Maga listened as she held him tight, and she would have to read the story by Turgenev. It was incredible what she would have to read in those two years (she didn’t know why they were two years). Another time it was Petiot, another time Weidmann, another time Christie. It ended up with the hotel always giving them the urge to talk about crimes, but La Maga would also be engulfed by a wave of seriousness and she would ask with her eyes fixed on the flat ceiling whether Sienese painting was really as fantastic as Étienne claimed, whether they shouldn’t try to save up to buy a phonograph and the works of Hugo Wolf, which she would sometimes hum, breaking off in the middle, forgetful and furious. Oliveira liked to make love to La Maga because there was nothing more important to her and at the same time, in a way hard to understand, she was in a sense dependent on his pleasure, she would reach him for a moment and would therefore cling desperately and prolong it. It was as if she had awakened and recognized her real name, and then she would fall back into that always somewhat twilight zone which enchanted Oliveira, fearful of perfection, but La Maga really did suffer when she returned to her memories and to everything that in some obscure way she had to think about but could not. Then he would have to kiss her deeply, incite her to new play, and the other woman, the reconciled one, would grow beneath him and pull him down, and she would surrender then like a frantic animal, her eyes lost, her hands twisted inward, mythical and terrible, like a statue rolling down a mountainside, clutching time with her nails, with a gurgling sound and a moaning growl that lasted interminably. One night she sank her teeth into him, bit him in the shoulder until the blood came, because he had fallen to one side, a little forgetful already, and there was a confused and wordless pact. Oliveira felt that La Maga wanted death from him, something in her which was not her awakened self, a dark form demanding annihilation, the slow wound which on its back breaks the stars at night and gives space back to questions and terrors. Only that time, off center like a mythical matador for whom killing is returning the bull to the sea and the sea to the heavens, he bothered La Maga in a longnight which they did not speak much about later. He