Only after some time did he tear his eyes away from the Mongolian mark and consider her naked body in its entirety. Her composure was impressive considering that she wasn’t a professional model, and taking into account the kind of relationship she’d had with her now ex-husband. Suddenly he remembered being told how she’d been found stripped to the waist in front of the hospital fountain, that day when she slit her wrist; that that was what had led to her being put in a closed ward; that her discharge had been delayed because even in the hospital she kept trying to take her clothes off and expose herself to the sunlight.

“Should I sit down?” she asked.

“No, lie on your stomach,” he told her, his voice so low it was barely intelligible. She did as he said. He stood there completely motionless, frowning as he struggled to identify the source of the roiling confusion inside him, which the sight of her prone body had stirred up. “Stay just like that. Give me a minute to set up.”

He fixed the camcorder to the tripod and adjusted the height. Once he’d arranged it so that her prone body filled the frame exactly, he got out his paints, his palette and brushes. He’d decided to film himself painting her.

First he swept up the hair that was falling over her shoulders, and then, starting from the nape of her neck, he began to paint. Half-open buds, red and orange, bloomed splendidly on her shoulders and back, and slender stems twined down her side. When he reached the hump of her right buttock he painted an orange flower in full bloom, with a thick, vivid yellow pistil protruding from its center. He left the left buttock, the one with the Mongolian mark, undecorated. Instead, he just used a large brush to cover the area around the bluish mark with a wash of light green, fainter than the mark itself, so that the latter stood out like the pale shadow of a flower.

Every time the brush swept over her skin he felt her flesh quiver delicately as if being tickled, and he shuddered. But it wasn’t arousal; rather, it was a feeling that stimulated something deep in his very core, passing through him like a continuous electric shock.

By the time he eventually completed the leaves and long stems, which continued over her right thigh all the way down to her slender ankle, he was completely drenched with sweat.

“All done,” he said. “Just stay like that for a minute more.”

He took the camera off the tripod and began to film her close up. He zoomed in on the details of each flower, and made a long collage of the curve of her neck, her disheveled hair, her two hands resting on the sheet, seeming tense, and the buttock with the Mongolian mark. Once he’d finally captured her whole body on the tape, he switched off the camcorder.