Free The Secret of Evil by Roberto Bolaño

and what she sees, beneath the expedient mask
of bitterness, is a well of unbearable horror and fear.
    So the Central American, Z, is there in the café when the photo is
taken, and Carla and Marie-Thérèse have recognized him, they’ve remembered him;
perhaps he has just arrived, perhaps he walked past the table at which the group
is sitting and greeted them, but except for the two women, they had no idea who
he was; this happens quite often, of course, but it’s something that the Central
American still can’t accept with equanimity. There he is, to the left of the
group, with some Central American friends, or waiting for them, maybe, and deep
within him — nourished by affronts and grudges, fuelled by bitterness and the
chill of the City of Light — there’s a seething. His appearance, however, is
equivocal: it makes Carla Devade feel like a protective older sister or a
missionary nun in Africa, but it catches at Marie-Thérèse Réveillé like barbed
wire and triggers a vague erotic longing.
    And then night falls again and the photo empties out or disappears
under a scribble of lines entirely traced by the night’s mechanism, and Sollers
is writing in his study, and Kristeva is writing in the study next door,
soundproofed studies so they can’t hear each other typing, for example, or
getting up to consult a book, or coughing or talking to themselves, and Carla
and Marc Devade are leaving a cinema (they’ve been to a film by Rivette), not
talking to each other, although, a couple of times, Marc and then Carla, who’s
more distracted, greet people they know, and J.-J. Goux is preparing his dinner,
a frugal dinner consisting of bread, pâté, cheese and a glass of wine, and
Guyotat is undressing Marie-Thérèse Réveillé and throwing her onto the sofa with
a violent thrust that Marie-Thérèse intercepts in midair as if she were catching
a butterfly of lucidity in a net of lucidity, and Henric is leaving his
apartment, going down to the parking lot and he stops again as the lights go
out, first the ones near the metal roller gate that opens onto the street, and
then the others, till there is only the light down at the back, flickering
helplessly, illuminating his multicolored Honda, and then it fails as well. And
it occurs to Henric that his motorbike is like an Assyrian god, but for the
moment his legs refuse to walk on into the darkness, and Marie-Thérèse shuts her
eyes and opens her legs, one foot on the sofa, the other on the carpet, while
Guyotat pushes into her, the panties still around her thighs, and calls her his
little whore, his little bitch, and asks her what she did all day, what happened
to her, what streets she wandered down, and J.-J. Goux is sitting at the table
and spreading pâté on a piece of bread and lifting it to his mouth and chewing,
first on the right side, then on the left, unhurriedly, with a book by Robert
Pinget open beside him at page two and the television switched off but the
screen reflecting his image, a man on his own with his mouth closed and his
cheeks full, looking thoughtful and absent, and Carla Devade and Marc Devade are
making love, Carla on top, illuminated only by the light in the corridor, a
light they usually leave on, and Carla is groaning and trying not to look at her
husband’s face, his blond hair in a mess now, his light eyes, his broad and
placid face, his delicate, elegant hands, devoid of the fire she’s longing for,
ineffectually holding her hips, as if he were trying to keep her there with him,
but he has no real sense of what she might be fleeing from or what her flight
might mean, a flight that goes on and on like torture, and Kristeva and Sollers
are going to bed, first her, she has to lecture early the next day, then him,
and both of them take books that they will leave on their bedside tables when
sleep comes to close their eyes, and Philippe Sollers will dream that he is
walking along a beach in Brittany with a scientist who has discovered a way