VIIOn the side of the drunken madly revolving world hurtling at 1:20 p.m. toward Hercules’ Butterfly the house seemed a bad idea, the Consul thought—
There were two towers, Jacques’ zacualis, one at each end and joined by a catwalk over the roof, which was the glassed-in gable of the studio below. These towers were as if camouflaged (almost like the Samaritan, in fact): blue, grey, purple, vermilion, had once been slashed on in zebra stripes. But time and weather had combined to render the effect from a short distance of a uniform dull mauve. Their tops, reached from the catwalk by twin wooden ladders, and from inside by two spiral staircases, made two flimsy crenellated miradors, each scarcely larger than a bartizan, tiny roofless variants of the observation posts which everywhere comman
