Sylva

For Dorothy was not an inert body at the end of a rope, too dazed to help in her own rescue. On the contrary, she tugged with all her strength, in the wild hope of making me lose my grip, of pulling me down into the chasm with her. Did jealousy, Sylva’s existence, play some part in this ruthless passion, this frenzied and perverse attempt? I am not able to answer with certainty. But I no longer doubt that Dorothy loved me after her fashion, with honesty at first when she ran away, and then, when contrary to expectations I seemed to give myself up to her, with that fierce blaze in which she tried to consume me.

She almost succeeded. First, there was the shock of the drug: the intoxication with an oceanic unconscious, in which a riot of the senses alone subsists, stuns like a flash of lightning, and it takes all one’s will power to resist its dazzle. And then, this vertiginous absence meant total oblivion, and oblivion of Sylva first of all. I never thought nor dreamed of her a single time during that long illumination. And finally, the vacuum thus created cried out to be filled, and I imagined myself gorged with one love only-for Dorothy; for in my rapt state I confused the passing infatuation in which she engulfed me in her wake with a genuine passion.

Fortunately, this period during which we abandoned ourselves to our self-destructive fury-a period which, in my muddled memory, seems without beginning or end- did not actually last very long. A few days at most. We woke up from it for some quite earthly but forceful reasons; namely, that one cannot live without food or drink. As if in a half-sleep I recall Dorothy opening tins of sardines or pineapple-but such stopgaps cannot suffice in the long run. So if only to buy food or to cook it, we necessarily had to resume, now and then, a less overwrought, less radiantly befuddled life, and emerge into normal consciousness. For Dorothy, undermined by long intoxication, these periods of even very brief abstinence were a painful ordeal through which she hurried blindly until she could take the plunge into the drug and nepenthe. As for me who was still intact, those awakenings meant a coldly recording clear-sightedness: the stained divan, the dirty carpet, a foul-smelling disorder, not only in the room but about Dorothy herself, slouching wearily about in trodden-down slippers, unwashed, uncombed, heavy-lidded, and with flaccid, swollen lips.

At the same time I gradually became aware of the key fact of her life. I had wondered, at rare moments, what she was living on, since she no longer worked (and it seemed improbable to me that Dr. Sullivan could or would encourage her situation with financial support). The answer could be found upstairs, in the room with the blue and green striped wallpaper. I realized the part the dark-haired woman must have been playing in Dorothy’s life for a long time. She was the one who had found her the flat below her own, and she too had since been supplying her, perhaps with money, but certainly with drugs.

The first time I saw this woman clearly, I mean without being dazed with drugs myself, I was struck by her rather hideous beauty. She could not have been much older than Dorothy and I had firsthand knowledge of the slender youthfulness of her body; but her face was a field of ruins. I have never again seen such a face and I trembled at the idea that it prefigured what Dorothy would look like in a few years’ time. Not that the wrinkles that lined it were particularly deep, but they were flabby and shifting. As if a colony of worms had settled under the mortified skin. She was called Viola. I presume, from her Southern accent, that she came from Malta, Cyprus or Egypt. Perhaps she was a Copt. She worked in a film studio and came home around teatime, when Dorothy would make tea between two doses of the drug.

When we met again in a more or less normal state, she gave me a look of connivance above her full cup, a salacious wink which would have been enough to make me understand, had I not guessed it already, that I was a mere extra, an instrument of pleasure, that she tolerated my presence near Dorothy for this reason only, just as she must have tolerated a good many other lovers before me. The overheavy teapot having almost slipped out of Dorothy’s hands, I caught it by its long, banana-shaped spout.

“Fie, fie,” said Viola, with a ribald smirk, “what manners!” And stroking my cheek, she added: “But if that’s what you fancy, we’ll get you suited-the more, the merrier.” Whereupon Dorothy gave a nervous burst of laughter and tousled my hair.