Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [38]
Did you look at the stars last night
because I was up there
and was looking at you
I kept blinking with all my might
But you had a lover
By the time I got to you.
Music knows more about you than any humbug hypnotizer, thought Gabriel.
He had gone to the toilets for that “very last” sniff of Letheon, and as he came back he could see that some sort of huge black-coated, Viking-looking hunk was pestering Miss Stella Black. He walked up, his uncertain legs pedalling over the evasive ground toward the cask that served as a table, and as soon as he sat down, Stella sprang to her feet and glued her mouth to his. It was as fresh a draught as if someone had opened a door in the back of his skull. The Viking, who seemed more than a bit inebriated, frowned and tried to accommodate the scene to his disobedient eyeballs, and finally retired with slurred apologies.
Stella stepped back.
“Whoa,” she said. “One could get high on your breath.”
“That’s the best definition of love I have ever heard,” Gabriel said to the girl, who receded, wavering like Northern lights. He thought he might have preferred a different first kiss, but then he decided that no, everything was good, and would be from now on. Just because it had happened, it was good. That was his second-best definition of love.
They had ordered two Wormwood Star absinthes, and had just a few sips to go. Absinthe and Letheon were a daring blend that reduced everything to bi-dimensional pictures, which floated here and there to the point where it became uncomfortable.
“I think I’d like to get some fresh air,” Gabriel said.
“We could go skyskating,” Stella suggested casually.
The part of Gabriel that could discuss the pertinence of this idea had long been dead, buried, and forgotten. He did not miss it at all.
“And then we’ll test your Hollow Earth theory,” she added, dimpling like the devil.
“I promise we’ll use that little pot of butter,” said Gabriel, always a gentleman.
They walked for a long time along a deeply embanked small canal that often disappeared under smelly bridges, and during these eclipses, they kissed slobberingly and caressed each other, as far as their thick clothes allowed. And after another clumsy stunt from Gabriel climbing over a fence, they eventually looked down on the Ringnes Speed Skating Rink.
The moon that hung overhead looked strange, as if a quarter of it had been neatly cut and thrown away. The ice spread below, dark grey and scratched with entangled traces no angel could unravel. It was like life itself, thought Gabriel, a born allegorician: bodies had come and gone, met or avoided each other, retraced their steps or someone else’s, been found by and lost one another.
Stella took a pillbox from her pocket and gave him some purple heart-shaped “boilers,” before taking some herself. The glycine-and-ephedrine blend made one feel warm, caused one’s heart to beat faster, and pumped blood to the body’s extremities, three things Gabriel did not feel he needed more of. His good education, however, forbade him to refuse a drug.
Then Stella went down the slope and started to take her clothes off over her head, quickly, keeping on only her boots, whose skates she liberated with a little gesture that was a bit of a ballet, or bullet, to Gabriel’s heart. Coming closer, he watched her ecstatically, as if he had never seen a young woman before. He had more or less the same reaction every time (he believed that nude girls came from the same realm or region as dreams, from the same eternal inexhaustible fountain at the spring of time and yet out of time), but a girl like this one—no, he had never seen and never would see again. It was not only, as some bad poem put it, the “dimpled fullness of her form,” nor “the midnight blackness of her plentiful hair,” and neither was it—he could be as bad a poet as anyone else—the opal teardrops of her breasts. What held him mesmerized was the circular starmap tattoo that ran all around her shoulders and which, as she started gliding