And her kiss was like that of the spy—an absorbing kiss throughout his entire person, making him awake…. Upon opening his eyes he saw Freya with her mouth close to his.
"Arise, my sea-wolf!… It is already night. We are going to dine."
Outside the house, Ulysses would breathe in the twilight breeze and look at the first stars that were beginning to sparkle above the roofs. He felt the fresh delight and trembling limbs of the odalisque coming out of retreat.
The dinner finished, they would stroll through the darkest street or the promenades along the shore, avoiding the people. One night they stopped in the gardens of the Villa Nazionale, near the bench that had witnessed their struggle when returning from Posilipo.
"You wished to kill me, you little rascal!… You threatened me with your revolver, my bandit!…"
Ulysses protested. What a way to remember things! But she refuted his correction with a bold and lying authority.
"It was you!… It way you! I say so, and that is enough. You must become accustomed to accepting whatever I may affirm."
In the beer garden, where they used to dine almost every night—an imitation medieval saloon, with paneled beams made by machinery, plaster walls imitating oak, and neo-Gothic crystals—the proprietor used to exhibit as a great curiosity a jar of grotesque little figures among the porcelain steins that adorned the brackets of the pedestals.
Ferragut recognized it immediately; it was an ancient Peruvian jar.
"Yes, it is a huaca," she said. "I have been in that, too…. We were engaged in manufacturing antiques."