Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [73]
Modelled on igloo architecture, the Ingersarvik was actually a labyrinth of little dome-shaped rooms of different sizes connected by small tunnels. It was hot, probably around 100°F, and some steam that smelled of laundry made the place rather smoky. The walls were made of glazed ice, and the rooms were lit by a sparsity of wick lamps, so that most people one came across were little more than faceless silhouettes. The light grew less and less intense as the maze went on, and the last lamps could even be blown out to simulate the Eskimo ritual, more a game, actually, known as “snuffing the candles,” that preceded the Inuits’ too-famous orgies. (Gabriel recalled from his studies that these were less a permanent feature of Eskimo life than a diversion in times of hardship and food shortages.) Niches were carved inside some of the walls, allowing people to have a drink or to lounge on fur blankets. A block of ice, or iglerk, covered with furs and skins, was placed in the middle or inserted in the wall of each igloo. This was where people got busy, “laughing under the skins,” as the Inuit said, though as a matter of fact you hardly ever heard anyone laughing.
Gabriel scoured the rooms, in a curious predicament, afraid of finding what he could not help looking for. A woman with a stick and a masked man with a penis made of stuffed intestines fooled around the rooms chanting in a hypnotic tone, adding a touch of couleur locale that seemed rather tiresome to Gabriel, while meatbergs of indistinct people could be seen in a distant room, piling up like walruses on top of one another. He was rather indifferent to the spectacle—once he had made sure, as well as he could, that the participants were not known to him.
He had been there and done that, and not been impressed. Had he been inclined—God forbid—toward metaphysics, what he would have concluded from these experiments is that Sex is in Man an ancient, different, parasitic soul that can operate on its own and for motives obscure even to itself. What he had lived through here had been, in a way, happening to Sex more than it had been happening to him. Gabriel had watched himself doing things, or things being done to him, with a kind of detached curiosity that had perplexed more than enlightened him. He had been hoping for a trip to the terrae incognitae of life, for revelations that would flay the world alive, but instead had found scary savages huddling together in a cave around the feeble fire of a female body.
Tonight, as he passed among those silhouettes in the smoke, little locker keys dangling and jangling from their wrists or ankles as if they were lost sheep in the fog, he even felt he had descended to Hades, among fading shadows who loitered at loose ends between two stages of Death, barely realizing they were not alive anymore. But then, he had to admit he had seen better days himself.
Still, something was making him feel alive. It was less his beating heart—even though that was pounding fast and loud enough—than his constantly nagging, tugging, gnawing stomach, which, since the day he had met Stella, seemed to be the very location of his soul. It now acted as a compass, pointing him toward