Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [81]
Not that Gabriel—his mind open like a ruin where draughts circulate through banging doors or unhinged windows—either cared for or condemned the lifestyle in itself. After all, as someone trustworthy had once said, “the whole business of man is the arts and all things common.” It was even, in a way, what he had been looking for. But, a bourgeois among bohemians, he would sooner have considered sharing his girlfriend (as long as she wasn’t Stella) than a bathroom with strangers. The promiscuity made him secretly unhappy and bothered him more than he admitted, for he did not want to criticize, let alone lose, Stella’s hospitality.
Among the Apostles, he was surprised to come across Mugrabin, lurking in the shadow and busy plotting with an Inuk who looked a lot like the one who had defended the Eskimos at the Inuit People’s Ice Palace. On seeing Gabriel, Mugrabin flashed a knowing false-toothed smile and winked a glass-eyed wink. “Ah!!! Did not I tell you that you would join us?” he sputtered in Gabriel’s face. Shaking his hands violently, he then informed him that “great things are on their way.” The idea of Mugrabin living a few yards away from him and probably fiddling about with homemade incendiary bombs had not quite helped Gabriel to relax. He later interrogated Stella about the man, but she had just tapped her forehead in an unambiguous estimation of the man’s sanity.
But what Gabriel could not forget about Mugrabin were the insinuations he had made about Stella and Free Love during his visit to Gabriel’s apartment. Another aspect of the local communism that did not sit very well with him was that every time he met a party of people somewhere within the Apostles, one of them turned out to be one of Stella’s former lovers. His efforts to forget everything about the Ingersarvik would be blown to smithereens, and sharp pangs of jealousy pierced him through and through, as if he were an unfortunate assistant in a failed sword-box illusion. Though Stella did her meagre best to reassure and soothe him, he often felt anguished and shameful, a laughingstock for people who probably could not care less.
He found he loved Stella too much, not in regard to what she deserved—for he wished everyone to be loved madly—but in regard to how much he could handle. Of course, she was cute, curious, quick-witted, deliciously debauched, and clownish as a kitten, but his obsession went far beyond her objective qualities. Every trifle from her was quatrefoil to him. Any word she said or move she made provoked instant salivation, like an electrode in a dog’s severed head. The way she danced with her fists clenched and biting her lips with her perfectly aligned little teeth, the way she put both of her small hands around a hot mug to drink the worst coffee he’d ever tasted, the way she, well … She was like the girl you fall in love with when you’re three years old and never quite recover from, the little child whose features you catch by surprise in the prettiest of your girlfriends. The sight of her receding buttocks as she got up from the bed in his St-Anthony-Pateyville Polars hockey top (which had, sewn on its back, a number that was, curiously, an exact count of the girls he had known before her), or, as she sat on her heels, the vision of her toes that were like little orphans huddling together, filled his heart with a curious blend of bliss and distress. When she fell asleep at his side, either he would prowl around her nude, half-covered body like an old hungry wolf, or he would simply bend over her and cry with what could equally be the tenderness of a father or the loneliness of an abandoned child.
He was, in a word, ridiculous.
It had even got to the point where he’d acquired a new tattoo from a nearby shop, as a token of commitment and complicity. He’d got the idea from a bizarre book that said that the scions of old families from the Bourbonnais (where the Alliers allegedly originated) used to