THERE’S A MAN IN MY LIFE.
Blaise tried to make out the spidery scrawl in the orange light of the table lamp. His straggly eyebrows shot up high enough to turn his forehead into an accordion. He remained like that for some time, playing card in hand, unable to look away from it, putting Ophelia through torture.
Then he wrote a reply on the opposite edge.
IN MINE, TOO.
Ophelia had to read these three words several times to be sure she wasn’t mistaken. When she raised her glasses back at Blaise, he was kneading the rubbery skin of his face, seemingly awaiting her reaction with apprehension, as if the rest of his life depended on it. Ophelia wasn’t prone to great demonstrative outbursts, but she couldn’t stop her hand springing towards his. For the first time, Blaise’s tormented features relaxed. She found him handsome. Their fingers clasped clumsily, firmly. A friendship sealed.
“May the sauciness be with you, citizens!”
The dancers froze, the laughter died, and the musicians silenced their instruments. Everyone turned to the stage, from where the voice had erupted, like the roar of a lion. A voice that Ophelia had recognized without a second’s hesitation: that of Fearless-and-Almost-Blameless. It was the first time she was seeing him in the flesh, this elusive rebel, and she couldn’t believe her glasses. The individual standing behind the footlights was so puny, so balding, so ordinary, she could have passed him a hundred times without ever noticing him. One couldn’t but wonder where he got his thunderous voice from.
He pointed up at the high, vaulted ceiling. “Above our heads live the lambs!” he exclaimed. “A great docile herd that bleats whatever those hypocrites of LUX ask it to bleat. A herd whose freedom is curtailed with every new law, every new code, and yet still it bleats!”
Anarchic applause and whistling rose in the room, stopping as soon as Fearless-and-Almost-Blameless spoke again:
“Down here, citizens, we become free voices again. We say all that we think just as we think it. We are not the model little pupils, we’re the little brats of Babel!”
An eruption of joy set the room alight.
“Down with the Index!” Fearless concluded. “Death to the censors!”
Ophelia kept shrinking into her chair. This cabaret was the haunt of the public enemy of the city and all its supporters. What would they do if they discovered that two representatives of the institution they hated the most were seated at a table in their midst?
“Let’s go,” she mouthed in Blaise’s direction, rising discreetly from her chair.
At first, she didn’t understand why he insisted on remaining seated, stiff as a statue. It took her a moment to notice that the child who had opened the door to them had now joined their table. And that he was pointing a pistol at them.
“Grant us the honor of staying a little longer, Messieur-Dames,” he said, with extreme politeness. “My father will receive you in his dressing room, if you would care to follow me.”
THE WILD BEAST
Ophelia had already had the opportunity to visit a diva’s dressing room, at the Family Opera House in the Pole. The one to which she and Blaise were forcibly led bore no resemblance to it. There was no velvet, no carpet, no mirror, no wardrobe to be found here. There was, on the other hand, some impressive radio-communication equipment, and, pinned to the walls, detailed maps of each minor ark that made up the city of Babel.
With the pistol, the child calmly indicated a bench, on which Blaise and Ophelia were only too willing to sit. For a small boy with dirty feet, he had persuasive manners.
“My father will be with you when he’s finished his speech. That can take time—he finds it hard to stop once he gets warmed up. I’ll put the radio on for you, to fill in the time.” The child turned the knob on a radio set, and it immediately broadcast the solemn music of a symphonic march. He whistled along to it and waved his pistol like a conductor’s baton.
I’m vraiment désolé,” Blaise whispered, eyeing the firearm like someone seeing one for the first time. “My bad luck has struck again.”
“In fact,” said Ophelia, “I think we were more foolhardy than unlucky. It is I who apologize to you for dragging you into this business.”
She began to think hard. How could they get out of this trap unscathed? They were now somewhere within the maze-like cellars, and a child had a gun trained on them. An attempt to escape seemed problematic.
Ophelia looked more closely at the dressing room. The radio-communication equipment and the maps on the walls appeared to have been installed here in haste; it wasn’t a place that had been occupied for long. She noticed some sepia photographs leaning on the radio-communication instrument panel. On the oldest and palest of them all, a pair of young women clasped each other, cigar in mouth and glass in hand. Ophelia pushed away the scarf of her turban to be sure she was seeing clearly. One of them was wearing a polka-dot dress of totally inimitable bad taste.
Mother Hildegarde!
It was extraordinary to find her here, in Babel, in a spectacularly younger and lovelier version. And it confirmed the intuition that had struck Ophelia on seeing the cabaret’s sign in the form of an orange.
“Ah,” the child suddenly said, stopping his whistling. “Here’s my father and his bodyguard.”
The dressing-room door had indeed just opened on to Fearless-and-Almost-Blameless. He was wiping his streaming face, as if his stint onstage had exhausted him. The gigantic proportions of the saber-toothed tiger accompanying him were those of a Beast. One wondered by what miracle such a creature managed to fit through the door frame. With such a bodyguard, this man could indeed allow himself to be afraid of nothing and no one.
Fearless gave the sign to his wild beast to sit, and to his son to leave. Then he leaned over the radio that was still broadcasting its symphonic march. Ophelia thought he was going to turn it off so they could talk, but instead he increased the volume and parked himself up on the radio set as if it were a seat. He placed a forefinger on his mouth to indicate to everyone to keep quiet and concentrate on the music.
Ophelia had experienced some unusual situations in her life. Listening to the radio in the same room as a saber-toothed tiger would now be up there with them.
A long time went by in this eerie way when, suddenly, the radio malfunctioned, repeating the same musical passage twice. Fearless instantly turned the knob to cut the sound, as though that was what he’d been waiting for from the start.
“Echoes are a vrrraiment fascinating phenomenon,” he said, with a very strong Babelian accent. “Our scientists are capable of lighting up towns and sending men into the sky, and there’s not a single one—not a single one, do you hear me?—who’s ever been able to explain that particular quirk of nature. Since I’ve launched into the subtle art of radio-piracy, I’ve heard plenty of duplicating wavelengths like the one you just heard. At first, I found it vrrraiment tiresome, but then I ended up becoming fascinated by the subject.”