Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [82]
Stella, who between stage contracts also earned a living as an astrologer, had studied his natal chart and found that, with Scorpio rising, a star called Agena had been in conjunction with Neptune and exerted a strong influence on his life. She taught him that it was the tenth-brightest star in the sky, which perfectly contented Gabriel’s unassuming modesty (he had already accepted living, after all, on an island that was only the tenth-biggest in the world). Its rays made him “sharp,” “headstrong,” and “original”—which he was only too eager to admit—but Stella did not hide from him that their influence could also result in “poor executive ability, loss through law and speculation, obstacles to success, many false friends and enemies, and liability to accidents or death by colds or fevers.” He’d sniggered and gone for it, mostly as a dare, drawing for the tattoo artist a sigil that he thought would look fine at the base of his neck. He was marked for life, but that was exactly what he felt like feeling anyway.
Then he’d had a row with Stella, when he reproached her for having let him shake the hand of one of her former beaus. Another nerve snapped (he wondered with curiosity when he would reach the last one, but there always seemed to be something more in him that could be severed, crumpled, trampled, or broken), and he remembered Brentford’s wedding as, if not a good idea, a good excuse to get out of the house. Surely, pneumatic dispatches from the worrying groom were accumulating in his apartment. He would go there and fetch a decent suit and then, instead of reading St Paul as he was supposed to, he would tell everyone from the pulpit what the bride was doing in her spare time at the Ingersarvik, or maybe not, and then the Gentlemen of the Night would do him in for having communicated with his friend, who wouldn’t be his friend anymore. That would be a great evening. Twinkle, twinkle, little fixed star.
The Orsini family had done things on a grand scale. They had rented the Splendide-Hôtel on the Icy Heights of Circeto, the crowning achievement of the d’Ussonville chain of hotels that had been so instrumental in the city’s foundation. Winding along a ravine, two majestic, immaculate avenues met in front of the monumental stairs that rose to the Casino, where guests were welcomed by the newlyweds, and to the Kursaal, where tables had been installed for the banquet. The weather conditions were both atrocious, because of a cold that made Celsius feel like Fahrenheit, and enchanted, because the frozen snowstorm had decorated the roofs, gutters, and balconies with a crystalline lavishness of icicles that money couldn’t have bought—though, to speak frankly, money hadn’t spared its efforts, either. Brentford doubted that the two hundred or so persons who had been invited could make it to the highest point of the city on roads that were like curling sheets, but then, he could not care less, for he knew precious few of them.
Caught between the outer darkness and the dazzling brightness of the lustre, between icy draughts from the revolving door and warm waves from the rooms behind, he stood in the lobby and smiled at perfect strangers so bejewelled that they, too, seemed to have been frosted. He did not feel quite at ease. First, because he had never been much of a socialite. Then, because these guests were, after all, the people A Blast on the Barren Land had been partly written against, though they had done nothing to him except, tonight, offer gifts and blessings. Brentford’s true loyalty, he reckoned, was with the Scavengers, and the Inuit, maybe. But they had not been invited, and so there he was, part outlaw, part son-in-law, a gentle Judas to all the classes he wished to reconcile.
He could