...of consequence

Etienne was leaning against Oliveira. Ronald was sitting with his legs crossed and humming Big Lip Blues, thinking about Jelly Roll, who was his favourite dead man. Oliveira lit a Gauloise, and as in a painting by La Tour, for a second the flame coloured the faces of his friends, it brought Gregorovius out of the shadows and tied the murmur of his voice to a pair of moving lips, brutally set La Maga in the easy chair, with her face that always became avid at moments of ignorance and explanations, softly bathed placid Babs, and Ronald the musician, lost in his moaning improvisations. Then there was a thump on the ceiling just as the match went out.

"Il faut tenter de vivre," Oliveira quoted from his memory. "Pourquoi?"

The line had come out of his memory just like the faces in the light of the match, instantaneously and probably gratuitously. Etienne's shoulder was warming him, was transmitting a deceptive presence to him, a nearness that death, that match that went out, was going to erase just as now the faces, the shapes, just as the silence closed in again around the knock from upstairs.

[Hopscotch, Cortazar, J.]