Читать книгу The Temptress (La tierra de todos) онлайн

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Well on the way toward fifty, the Countess still possessed the dregs, albeit somewhat muddy, of a remote but once heady beauty. Her overflowing obesity, her white and flaccid flesh, now served as the support for a head and face much like those of a sentimental doll; and as the Countess was given to writing amorous verses and reciting them to anyone within hearing, she was frequently referred to in the circles in which she moved, as “the five-hundred-weight of poetry.”

Already generously decolleté by mid-afternoon, her gigantic and barbarous jewels adorned the hollows and rotundities of her quivering flesh, or set off the high lights of a red gold wig for which the Countess was perpetually purchasing additional curls.

For the most part her jewels were quite shamelessly false. Most worthy of respect among their number was a pearl necklace, which, whenever the Countess deposited her bulk in a chair, dangled grotesquely over the protruding spheres of her opulent form. The pearls, irregular, triangular-shaped, and with root marks, resembled the shark’s teeth with which the members of certain savage tribes like to adorn themselves. Gossip asserted that they were souvenirs of those lovers of her youth of whom she had been able finally to extract nothing else.... It was undeniable that the Countess was given to speaking, with no perceptible restraint, of her innumerable tender experiences.