Chapter IVIt was still the middle of winter when we were forced to think seriously of a solution – me, in a panicky, inefficient sort of way – Arabela with her usual cool pragmatism.
“It’s possible that I might be late home tonight,” she told me one day. “Wait for me in the square, in front of the post office, between 7 and 8. We’ll see…”
She returned in the evening with a tawdry and dubious engagement: a job as an acrobat, in a cabaret, somewhere on the outskirts of the city. Twenty-two francs per evening.
“Come on, Arabela, do you really want to go back to all that?”
“I’m not going back to anything. Least of all ‘that’. I just want us to pay the rent.”
She was going back to “all that”, without any disgust or revolt, with the simple understanding that she must work and earn money. Th
