The Disaster

Mrs. De la Fontaine arrived at dinner an hour late. The guests’ wives proposed the dinner
should start without the “countess”, just like the men expressed through their unanimous and yet
respectfully resigned impatience.

-Let’s wait ten minutes more, said one gentleman. She must be on her way. She might

have been held up by some guest. No one likes to leave Mrs. De la Fontaine that easily…

-E, indeed, charming, said a colonel. – The ladies are kindly asked to have a little more

patience. A couple minutes more or less don’t matter (all) that much.

-We can’t say we’re starving, either, an engineer added.

The ladies exchanged some looks instinctively, and then looked at each and every man
respectively. When one of the wives, who was familiar with literary ornaments/who was very
diplomatic, said what needed to be said, she boosted the aggression from every party and made
every woman content.

-Anyway, she said, timeliness/punctuality is a thing of the princes, the French invented it.

-Mrs. De la Fontaine is French, I specified to the Japanese literary figure, who didn’t
understand the link/connection

One moment, like it happens in dancing, every lady was sitting next to her man. A slow
molecular alignment happened naturally between the participants, it was a moral and chemical
need which pushed every atom towards its electron, and surely between each pair judging from
the difficult to hide nervousness, the conversation with my wife happened.

-Next time, try and don’t invite the Frenchwoman. She is always late and that thing costs.

-Would you look at that! I replied my wife as politely as this gathering allowed. I don’t
understand how waiting could be humiliating. You suffer from a special/uncommon kind of
vanity.

-Men don’t notice anything, my beloved wife replied very sad, parting human nature into
two sensibilities, one masculine and one feminine.
 I got close to my wife’s ear and I saw in the many mirrors of the salon that every man
was doing the same thing with his pair.

-If we were home, I would tell you something else, I shouted discretely and insulting

-Didn’t you understand yet that I can’t stand this woman? My wife concluded, like every
wife in the salon probably did. Now I think you would understand.

The next moment, the guests’ table, moved away again instinctively, gathered again, men
and ladies, out of necessity to express through physical contact, concordant and silent
impressions. Only the Japanese literary man was alone within the men and ladies, and with his
round and concave glasses resting on his nose, he looked like a delicate animal, zoologically
situated between the bee and its bottom.

Truth is, none of the ladies present liked Madame de la Fontaine and tonight we were
thirty ladies along with their husbands. We must admit that, honoring variety, our wives were
financially active and authentic but also, I would say, individually and collectively among the
ugliest. Monstrous exaggerated and voluminous details laid next to reduced monstrosities, as if
nature felt responsible to pull the beauty out of a wealthy fiancé’s dowry and share it for free
with the poor girls. Wrongly placed bumps, fat lumps, unforgiving slouch, trails and grimaces
that were aesthetically painful, they were all pacing elegantly/stylishly and arrogantly through
the drawing room. A splendid string of pearls was resting on oily, bat-like skin. Through subtle
perfumes, one could sense a hint of mouse smell. A boney chin, that would suit the hairy jawline
of a byzantine saint better, was decorating the neckline/cleavage of a great banker’s wife. A
throat like a steam engine surrounded by a lacey collar let out a hoarse voice of a janitor.
Madame de la Fontaine, on the other hand, was opposing/standing against the walking museum
of figures invited to the feast, the slow beauty of a ruling figure, the nobleness of the lines, the
gentle and agile pacing was warming up the atmosphere with an addictive subtlety and she was
decomposing the feelings and principles, analyzing the complicated conventions and giving color
and shape to everything around her, like a lamp proceeding through the dark.

Of course, we didn’t sit at the table before Madame de la Fontaine came. She entered the
room dressed in a lead blue dress, she smiled without apologizing, and the ladies, overwhelmed
by her magnificent influence, gathered around her generosity. Her smile looked as if she were
saying: “it’s all right if you are unattractive, it was God’s will.” Despite all the sworn and sincere
love, the men had for their wives, they were watching her, charmed by the countess’s beauty,
concentrated on her as if she were a scenery, spread with water and built with mountains, and
they felt offended that they weren’t given as many commands as they had wanted. Their soul
was spinning like the wave of a lake in the most dangerous area of a waterhole, and every one of
them would gladly drown in the prestige and beauty of this woman.

As she got closer to me, my wife said:

-Since the moment she entered you all have got puzzled. Every mirror reflects your
ridiculous stupidity, although among you were a few intelligent men…

We were following her with our heads turned, mesmerized, her every move turned into a
painting, a statue, a Tanagra. The Frenchwoman’s beauty was one with the clarity of the sky and
of the water, it was universal, various and unique at the same time, and the more attractive the
more she enjoyed the dinner with simplicity and ease in her every action. The men remained
hungry as they watched her eat, they were satisfied only with contemplating her as she ate with
the dexterity of a jeweler. Feeding herself with the fork, she looked as if she sang soft songs with
her soul only, using the silver instrument.

But when the Dutch sauce was served, a great tragedy happened. As a valet was serving
her a golden bowl through the left, she continued an extremely interesting story which made
about sixty men focus on her. The countess was reproducing an untrue story, which she had
heard in Arabia when she and her husband, the governor, had been traveling in the land of 1001
nights. Scheherazade showed her master the craft of a carpetmaker: the craft of braiding and
combining threads of dusk with strands of sunrise, dashed with knots and weaves like stars that
pricked the weaver’s fingers. The countess laughed a little more than usual. And it was then that
we saw her splendid, pearlescent teeth making a shimmery arch in the air as they fell out of her
mouth and steeped in the Dutch sauce. The countess’s lips suddenly got the look of a loose
pocket and flattened as a bag.

She looked around, frightened: the ladies were laughing out loud, one was laughing at her
humpback, another was laughing at her thick neck. She would have wanted to say something, but
her mouth opened loosely like a broken overshoe and her confidence has disappeared. The men
started eating, in order to find a reason for their silence.

The countess stood up shy, unaccompanied and lonely she hunched in embarrassment as
if she were wearing a shawl/scarf with a dead infant/baby underneath, by her bosom. She crossed
the entire room like that. The ladies were roaring in laughter. The countess was scared and lost
her attitude and started running and disappeared in the vestibule and the female guests and the
host were roaring of revenge and pleasure, all together:

-Huideo!