What takes place behind the lips now—they hint at it with a kneading, pressing, and stretching—must be blissfully murderous. At this moment I am all salmon: there, in the darkness, I am will-lessly tossed to and fro by the nimble tongue-reptile, minced, slimed, crushed, releasing my juices and shooting down with them into an even deeper, more abysmal darkness. A small cluck, germ of a sob, in the brown column of her throat seals my fate. Thank goodness I can identify with the next and then the following piece; I am entirely flayed, entirely raw flesh (a true-blue masochist would plunge into paroxysms in my place), but only for the duration of the salmon; the cold grouse already has something cadaverous about it—if the Haut-Brion 1923 didn’t provide a flamboyant supply of blood for the pale meat, then the notion of necrophagia could spoil my appetite. A pear compote with a delicate touch of clove and a sharp shot of mango chutney restores purity, à l’indienne, as it were, then for coffee we move to the sofa, while in the two superimposed glass spheres of the Kona machine (freely adapted from Jakob Böhme) the mocha substance is gradually created from the first, incorporeal primal grounds. I quickly clear the table, Madame meanwhile inserts the afternoon’s tape into her portable deck, the newly discovered skiffle group is dynamite, I’ll soon hear how good these guys are, she pours the coffee into our cups (recently brought back from Tunisia, turban-shaped, with delightful apple-green and peach-red stripes), I fill two of our beautiful snifters with honey-hued calvados, we snuggle on the sofa. This is right, I participate physically in her professional experience, as she does (by disappointment) in mine. She presses the start button of the tape player, and the room fills with psychedelic emotion, fills with rhythmic washboard scraping and grooved drops of a vibraharp (first indolently, then alternating faster and faster and swallowed up, but then rain-showering down and drawn out by the beat into swinging wave stripes), in almost breathless syncopes the knitting needle of a flute stabs in and joins them in the ghost of an old, familiar tune—I know that, I’ve heard it some time or other . . . Under Madame’s dark jungle gaze (black moon in white sky) I mull it over, strenuously listening—just what is that? . . . The melody is as ensnarled as an Irish Bible initial—and then the surface splashing brings me the name: Bach, of course, the D-minor fugue from the Art of the same, yes indeed, that’s it; undulated with vibrations, rippled up and driven down by rhythms, Madame is proud of me, not everyone would hit on it so soon (“Bravo, mon ours! Mais tu es malin comme un singe! Ah, ce que j’ai froid aux pieds—prends-les dans tes mains, mon petit!”), her feet really are icy, I blow on them, warm them up, rub them between my palms, bed them on my chest (et tes pieds s’endormaient dans mes mains fraternelles), she still isn’t completely satisfied with the recording, one reason for her (professional as well as personal) success is her relentless perfectionism (mine is the reason for my failure), it is almost impossible to find a sound engineer with an ear, the good people are all under contract elsewhere, the ones left over push the buttons mechanically, they’re deaf, they’re stupid robots, and every minute costs a fortune . . . (that’s right, darling: chat away, unburden yourself in a heart-to-heart in my arms, it’s evening and the fire warms us) if you don’t do everything yourself you end up with nothing at all (nous avons dit souvent d’impérissables choses les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon) . . . incidentally the chieftain of the skiffle group is an attractive young Englishman who looks fabulous with his Viking beard and Bulgarian lambskin jacket . . .