It is oval, or spherical, the room, although it is endless. Enlighted, wrapped in all the veils from all the distant lands. How strange, the social boundaries of this uncourteous dance: she alone amongst masked felines, all, including her, mercilessly magnetised by the unmasked king, this being that is a secret core for things she cannot name - from which she cannot help but expect, await, a blossoming of light. For now, only the glistening of unnamable eyes and the feeling of a trajectory more sinuous than all the poems she had never read, the dance through the unreadable poem, that does not speak of snakes and does not speak of honey. Closer and closer to the pure softness of the truth it teases, as if she was the one meant to be driven through the dawning gates of Art by a touch. She struggles, in her mind, to find the sinuous shard that started to grow with strange colours – is it in her skin, through the veil of her dress, on the unseen ceiling of the ovoidal room? How is it emanating from the motionless smile, from the sign-like features of his face? She struggles to understand, no longer conscious of her own breath, why in this stance, in this Tyrian purple cloth, in this harshly blossoming figure lies such deep triumph. She marvels at her own knowledge of all this. She can sense the poison in his blood.
She would perhaps remember the sultan of Baghdad who was dipped by his vizir in the water of his bathtub, to live for many years the life of someone else, nurtured by seven women, his wives, in a nameless house, on the shore of a sea. As one final veil leaves them she does not need to wonder to half-know this is a relapse of that sort, a movement out of time. A real oubliette.
She could have dined with him, for once, in that oriental room too rich for the mind. She cannot surmount the stain of contrast his nordic features make, too sharp for the surroundings, languid gold, endless vapours of amber. She muses out-loud, to try and hear her voice in this new medium.
"Where did all this come from?"
"A wandering storyteller offered it to me", comes the answer, equal, ironic.
A spring haze passes through the room.
Several gentle women with dark eyes and a page spread out a canopy, a towel made with something of a spiderweb's wealth. They undress him and he steps inside the bath. His eyes are calmer than any emerald secreted inside a jewel. He is a white flame and fresh from a white fire she will never know. For the second time in one night, she understands the beckoning he never gestured, but she cannot understand. Something like shock passes through her, seeming to bury itself in that ground of endless roots flourishing beneath her feet.
"You can't ask me that", she sais, it seems the obvious.
"Come here, child." he sais. "Don't you know why you are down here? Do I ever speak in vain? Something has to happen to you."
She can't grasp which of the words he has ironically emphasized, but, as with Swann's intonations, it doesn't matter. The pertinence is not lost. She obeys, she gets ready without breathing, she approaches and enters the water like one enters the eye of one's soulstorm.