Before they’d been married a year, J himself had already intimated to Mitsuko that he was a person who could not find satisfaction in perfectly ordinary sexual intercourse. Mitsuko had realized that there was a connection between his orgasm and his anus, which tapered like the end of a lemon, and had made it a regular habit to caress him there. She had also accepted it when J led the jazz singer into the sexual world of their marriage. She became another one of their habits. Mitsuko had tried to understand that J felt incomplete during intercourse. But the next step would be an extremely difficult one.
“Am I finally to reach the complete fulfillment of my sexual world?” J thought blankly. He was lost in a fog of insecurity and despair. Countless nights he’d passed the last minutes before the darkness of sleep drenched in this suffocating fog, permeated by a sense of exhaustion. Possibly it was a fog that would not completely clear until his difficult sexual world was complete. Bringing the young actor into their sexual world, to take the place of the jazz singer, would be the final step. His wife had shown no particular shock when the eighteen-year-old girl joined them, but was it really possible that she would show no more shock when a twenty-year-old boy slipped into their bed? J had gradually led his wife to the point where she was free of her prejudice against homosexuality. She no longer reacted when he invited homosexuals to their parties. But it would take a leap over a chasm of the greatest width and depth for her to enter a bed where her own husband was already conjoined in sex with another man. There was no question about that. “Will I be able to plant the delusion in my wife’s head that I am making her take that great leap for no other reason than to free her from her frigidity?” He would remain hopeful if, until the faraway day when that could be accomplished, she would do him the favor of devoting herself solely to film, with no interest in an easy orgasm.
His wife breathed with difficulty as she slept. J recalled the winter night, just before dawn, when his first wife had killed herself. She and J were sleeping in the same bed when suddenly he noticed that there was something wrong with her breathing. His wife had discovered that he was having a homosexual affair with his sister’s foreign teacher. J was living for the day when he could recover completely from the deep fear that he had felt in bed on that predawn winter night. He thought that he would for the first time be able to liberate himself from his dead first wife when his second wife accepted his sexual microcosm. Why? Now that he could no longer make amends to his dead wife, he would by an inverse process convert his feeling of sin into legimate self-defense. That would mean nothing more or less than the restoration of peace in his heart.
J was sleeping like a ghost in the heart of a pure blackness, a tar-like sleep. He knew, of course, that he was no different from a cornered criminal ready to fight. That was why, in the dark abyss of sleep, he couldn’t help but notice the glitter of the accusing pair of eyes that he had felt watching him earlier. He slept an anxious sleep, threatened from the bottom of his heart . . .
In the main room the cameraman was sleeping in front of the fireplace. He was curled up like a fetus, his body drawn in to the very limit. He gave a much older, sullenly friendless impression than when he was awake and mingling with the others. His sleep was a total rejection of the others. It wasn’t only in his company that he was an isolated being out of harmony with the world. As long as he lived in this world, there would probably never be an instant when he lived in harmony with it. Anyone who saw the forty-year-old man sleeping that night, like an animal, locked up inside his ego, would have wondered about the purpose of his being there, surrounded by these young men and women.
The jazz singer was still sitting on the floor beside the cameraman with her arms around her naked knees, about to gulp down the last of the gin-and-tonic. Unsatisfying sex with J had created a hard body of resistance inside her that was unpleasant. She was drinking strong liquor because she wanted to dissolve it and excrete it. She had already drunk too much. Drunkenness and drowsiness made a comical red nebula wheel around inside her small eighteen-year-old head. The glass slipped from her hands like sand. She gave a forced yawn and tried to stand, but there was no way that she was going to get up. She growled angrily at her legs and staggered as she made another unavailing effort to rise.
“Who was better, me or the foreigner?” the boy’s coquettish voice repeated, low and insistent, from the sofa by the wall. “Well, who was better, me or the foreigner?”
“When I was overseas, I didn’t know what to do if I got pregnant. I was scared to death at the thought of it. I was still a child then,” the sculptor finally answered, sounding sleepy.
“But who was better, me or the foreigner?” the twenty-year-old actor went on saying in a sing-song voice.
The jazz singer slowly started to walk to the door. By the time she had passed the sofa, the sculptor and the young actor had already gone to sleep. The jazz singer opened the door and closed it again. Then, after having trouble telling which was the bathroom door and which was the kitchen’s, she went into the bathroom. She was singing a Negro song in a low voice, but it came back to her more like the buzzing of a bee’s wings. Half sleeping, she sat down on the toilet and took a languid piss. The smell of urine and alcohol rose up around her like the steam of a hot shower.
A smallish moving body darkened the jazz singer’s closed eyelids for an instant, like the shadow of a bird flickering past. Still in the act of urinating, the eighteen-year-old girl opened her enraptured eyes. The small presence stopped right in front of her, as though suspended, and looked at her with glittering eyes. Oh, it’s you! Those eyes! Without raising her voice, she screamed in the back of her throat. In an instant the eyes jumped nimbly behind her back. Because she was too drunk, and too sleepy, her gaze couldn’t follow them. The creature had seemed like a baby monkey, and it had seemed like a small god, like a traveler’s guardian. By the time she finished urinating and slowly got up from the toilet, she’d already forgotten about the intruder. She walked back to the main room like a somnambulist and gradually fell into a deep sleep. A milky light was already beginning to show through the glass door that opened onto the garden. The fire was completely dead. Nobody was awake. The ocean breeze carried the crowings of several cocks up from the bayside village. Without waking up, the sleepers shivered in the early-morning cold . . .
At 4 A.M. the cameraman discovered the tiny ten-year-old intruder sleeping like a bat as he stood against the wall in the dark shadow of the stairs. He tiptoed into the bathroom, squatted like a woman to pee so he wouldn’t make any noise, came back the way he’d come, and grabbed the child. It began to struggle frantically as soon as it opened its eyes. The cameraman was stunned and called out to rouse his friends. Grumbling but nonetheless curious, the others woke up—first the young poet, who was asleep in the bathtub; then the twenty-seven-year-old sculptor and the young actor, who were on top of each other on the sofa; and the jazz singer. Finally J and his wife came downstairs to join them in surrounding the captured child. The cameraman held the child’s arms, while the young actor kept it from biting the cameraman. Though the child kicked them both without mercy, they finally managed to carry it into the main room. The other five moved excitedly with them, not breaking the circle. The child was like a little devil. The young poet bent over to hold down its legs but straightaway was kneed in the face. His nose started to bleed. Even though the child was being held by three strong men, it writhed like an eel in stubborn silence. The actor screamed in anger and pain when the child bit his finger. Blood trickled down the cameraman’s cheek. The child seemed mad with anger and frozen with fear. It was like the capture of a small wild animal they’d seen in an animal film from Kenya. The fear that this small animal might drop dead of a heart attack if it continued to rage like this flitted around the heads of its seven captors. An irresistible irritation was gradually rising in the three who were actually holding the child. What should they do now that they had the child? Suddenly, as unnaturally as if a steel spring had snapped in its t
iny body, the child stopped all resistance. Then it screamed in a strange tinkling voice stained with the poison of hatred, “But I saw it!” It drenched its upturned little black face with tears, clucked its tongue—hard and sharp as a snake’s—against the roof of its mouth, and cried . . .
The seven captors were dumbfounded. In the next instant the child recaptured the appearance of the agile moving body which the jazz singer had seen the night before, not knowing if it was a monkey or a small god. He broke free of the three men’s arms, knocked the women down, and dashed toward the wide, still-closed glass door. A sound like the coming of the end of the world filled the room. The seven all closed their eyes. When they opened them again, they saw the boy’s small back run into the swirling fog in the still-dark garden beyond the shattered glass door. He was screaming and in tears and probably staining the dew-drenched lawn with blood, since his bare feet were full of glass shards. The night was nearly over, and it seemed that in a short while the fog would continue its retreat as well. . .
Excited and reproachful, the seven stared in silence at the garden where the fog swirled, as though they were looking hard at the surface of a sea where the ripples are subsiding after the fish have been hauled in. Pregnant with dew drops, the early-morning air came blowing in like a wave through the big hole in the shattered door, causing a powerful convection in the room. Their heads were too warm and their lower bodies too cold. The smell of the tide gradually permeated the room. All seven stood as they’d been when the boy escaped, with only their heads turned to the garden where day was breaking, following the after-image of the thing that had disappeared silently into the sea of fog. The film that was recording their movements had stopped there, and the mercury lamp was uselessly flashing a single still image. Only one of them, the jazz singer, broke from the still image and hurried to the back of the room. She’d gone to turn off the light. The room sank back into the depths of night, and they only saw each other’s faces, like the black faces of mummies. The glass door, both the broken part and the part still intact, immediately turned a brighter white, as if the door were a wall separating the night in the room from the foggy garden. The others thought the jazz singer would turn the light on again. She must have been too sure that day had broken. But she stood where she was, without moving, her head pressing the wall above the switch.
“Put on the lights. What’s the matter with you?” J shouted in a rancorous, frightened voice that was so loud the others all thought they were hearing him speak that way for the first time.
“No, I don’t want to. We have to keep it dark!” the eighteen-year-old said vehemently, still facing the other way. Her shoulders began to shake and she started to sob, tumbling down the incline toward hysteria. She was gasping uncontrollably, and her body was writhing. “Ah, ah!” she cried. “We’re going to be killed. Those people from the bay will kill us. As soon as they hear what that boy has to say, they’ll come to get us! Look what they did to that woman for nothing but adultery . . .”
The other six kept their distance from the hysteria, but none was now free from the ominous image of those fishing people who’d spilled onto the flagstone road at midnight to carry out a silent threat. . .
“Let’s get away in the Jaguar. Come on, let’s get in the Jaguar and get out of here before they come!” The jazz singer was still crying.
“That’s no good,” J said. “If, as you say, they are mad and want to do something to us, they’ll get together right away to block the road by the bay. We won’t have a way out.”
“Then what do we do?” the hysterical girl sobbed.
“First turn on the light, and we’ll worry about it over a leisurely breakfast,” J said. He walked over to where the jazz singer was standing. As he pressed the light switch with his left hand, he touched the girl’s neck with his right. She let out a short scream, as though she couldn’t conceal her revulsion. She brushed his hand away and fell into a crouch. Her forehead was pressed so hard against the wall that it seemed the skin might burst . . .
The six who were watching the singer by the light of the lamp felt uncomfortable and embarrassed. Not looking at one another, they searched for chairs where they could sit or walls to lean against. From his lips to his chin the young poet was covered with blood from his nose. The actor had put his bloody finger into his mouth. The cameraman groaned as he wiped the blood from his cheek. The women weren’t hurt as badly as the three bleeding men, but without their makeup, it was impossible to look at their faces in the bright light without a feeling of disgust. They all had slept badly, had hangovers, and were overcome by a feeling of self-abandonment. At the same time they all felt an accelerating mood of meanness and insecurity.
“Why did you have to treat him like that?” J said, blaming the cameraman. “He would’ve gone back happy if you’d just given him a fountain pen or something.”
“He went crazy in my arms before I realized it,” the cameraman said, defending himself. Hesitating, he added, “Anyway, it was bound to turn out the way it did. Didn’t he say he’d seen us?”
Once again an evil silence, filled with traps even more uncomfortable than before, hung over their heads like the shadow of a plane. That’s right, they all thought, he had seen absolutely everything. Then they realized that, until then, nobody in the group of seven had seen or been seen by another person; none of them had even seen themselves.
Standing by the shattered door, J’s sister noticed the blood that had been spilled there. The little boy had plunged through the glass like a diver into water. The trail continued to where the balcony met the lawn. Quite a lot of blood had been uselessly spent staining the overgrown summer grass. She wondered how much blood such a small child’s body could afford to waste.
She turned and looked hard at J. Then, as if passing judgment on him for raising his head in that embarrassed smile, she said, “He was just an innocent kid, J. He hadn’t done anything wrong. If it turns out that he threw himself over the cliff and died, you’ll have your second victim.”
“Why do you say that?” Mitsuko said in a plaintive voice. She was so shaken that for an instant she’d forgotten the runaway child.
“Because J has already made one innocent, unsuspecting person kill herself.”
“You mean his first wife?” Mitsuko said. “Wasn’t she a neurotic who committed suicide?” She turned to J. “How was that your responsibility, J?”
“It was my fault,” J said. They were all silent. Only the jazz singer continued to sob, squatting by herself and turned away from the others. She was like a mentally retarded student who is always by herself in the classroom. Her ugly, pathetic sobbing annoyed and angered the others.
“Why?” Mitsuko asked.
“It’s a complicated story.”
“But it was because of her?” Mitsuko said, finding some small, twinkling sign of hope.
“No, there’s more to it than that.”
Mitsuko’s feeling of despair returned, becoming even deeper than before. “How did she do it?” she asked her husband again and again.
“Didn’t you marry me knowing that my first wife had committed suicide? It doesn’t concern you.” J scrambled into his shell like an egotistical hermit crab, while at the same time falling deeper into despair.
“It does concern her, because you’re about to do the same thing again,” J’s sister said bluntly. “In fact, you’ve already done the same thing if, at this very minute, that child has gone over the cliff into the ocean like a cut-up bag.”
“So it was just me? What that child saw was only me in an act of dirty sex? Didn’t he also see plenty of you? Or isn’t your sex as dirty as mine?”
“You shameless pig!” the twenty-seven-year-old sculptor said. Her voice was like the hard, trembling cry of a bird, and altogether dark. A wave of tears welled up in her gummy, bloodshot eyes, which were beginning to appear ruined. Still glaring at her brother, she began to cry without a sound.
“What did you do? How did you make your fi
rst wife kill herself?” Mitsuko demanded, ignoring her sister-in-law, who continued to sob, her shoulders trembling.
“Someday I’ll tell you.”
“I want to hear it now,” Mitsuko said.
“You’ll hear it, and then what will you do? After all, what difference does it make to you? Didn’t you marry me just because you wanted to make movies? Now that you’re making this avant-garde movie with your silly images of hell, what more do you want from me?”
J tried to defend himself, but his voice wasn’t very convincing. He himself felt disgusted with his own voice.
“J, it won’t do any good to evade the question.” J was surprised when the pale middle-aged cameraman suddenly intervened. J and the cameraman had been friends for nearly ten years, but in all that time J had always been the master of the relationship. Not once had the cameraman risen up against him. J felt terribly threatened at this discovery of a new stranger, in the form of the cameraman.
“I just. . .” J’s face turned an unsightly red as he groped for some point of compromise. He had to make the cameraman offer fresh acknowledgment of his decade-long subservience. J had already become as incoherent as a fainthearted, egotistical child.
“J’s first wife killed herself because, even after he’d married the poor girl, he kept jumping into bed with that filthy foreign faggot, in broad daylight. She was a genuine innocent. He didn’t actually confess to her, but on the other hand, he didn’t do very much to make sure she wouldn’t find out. J, from the day you married her, you were hoping your wife would kill herself. You knew she’d taken something like a hundred sleeping pills, but you lay there pretending to sleep, just waiting for her to die. J, are you going to keep quiet and try to fool us forever?”
J jumped from his chair and went for the cameraman. The cameraman offered no resistance to J’s fist as it hit his cheek. He simply endured, as he became more and more pale and the blood trickled from his lips. Now he was a middle-aged man, totally exhausted. He didn’t even raise his voice in pain. In the end, J kept beating him only out of some sense of duty.