THE JOURNEY
79
And everyone in the house was asleep too. In the decanted blue
light I crept past the men sleeping on the floor. The place was littered
like an army billet from one of the old wars. Clothes flung over
chairs, bottles, rifles stacked on marble-topped tables, ammunition
belts hanging from the wall. And the smell of tobacco and stale food.
For I do after all support a small army here (I think we are eighteen) :
its only function to defend the house, to defend Delphine, Odile and
me, and to do the shopping or scouring for food, with always at least
one man to guard the car. (Yes, Delphine: who did at last leave
Louis Guilloux in an act of complex loyalty, hoping he would be
helpless without her and would give up the broadcasting-"the rebel–
lion"-after she was gone.) I support them? To be precise: my
American employer supports them unknowingly, who would doubtless
be outraged by so much disorder. But what for that matter would
he think of the
Agracorinth
herself, its arrangements a paradigm of
anarchy?
I am tired; then suddenly much more tired, having taken off my
shoes. All this time to go five miles! In the blue half-darkness I
hesitate between looking for Delphine and looking for the girl Odile.
It seems wrong to come "home" and speak to no one. The one forty,
the other fifteen; I am fond of both. I trust Delphine (who preceded
me by a week) has found a room to herself, perhaps even a room
that can be locked. But if not? Could I go to her and lower myself
onto her so quietly she would experience my body entering her as a
dream? But no. Moments later she would be alert and full of ques–
tions, and her nervous hands digging at my back.
And Odile? We would share a cigarette in the dark. It is for her,
always, a child prostitute's game: the struck match in the dark and
her cretin soft eyes turned inward to the flaring light. And now I
do want her, and search for her through one room after another. I
find her in one of the bedrooms upstairs. The man she is with is
truly anonymous, since he has turned to the wall with the blanket over
his
head. Her soft untroubled face, the small nose and mouth, her
shoulders two bulbs of bone, and under the blanket her small breasts
that do not stir-she is half in the moonlight, half in shadow. The
shadow hides her arm and hand with the terrible burn.
I rub her forehead gently; her eyes stir, she is dreaming. And then
I hear, pure as a bird's call, the sound of a flute. I think it must be
from one of the bodyguards at the Villa Lou Macart next door, lonely
