I took it as a pretext for touching me and allowed her to do it. So sensitive was I to her touch that I nearly swooned. It did not seem to occur to her that other parts of my body might also have suffered blows—or at least she did not probe them.
Then she sat down, at a greater distance from me than the previous evening, and as we spoke of the Easterner and she prescribed aguardiente, she became the señora receiving a visitor once more, and called me “Señor de Zama,” “Doctor,” or “Don Diego.” I considered the possibility that someone might be spying on us and she was avoiding intimacies to throw this person off track, but I detected nothing of the kind.
For some while I sustained this tone of Luciana’s, but soon my need for her became acute. Wishing to hurry matters along, I spoke several phrases of utmost devotion and described an entire mental consecration to her person since the preceding night—a lie. The truth was that whenever I’d thought about her over the course of the day, I had felt no need to bother myself about her. In my mind she was submissive and surrendering, which dispensed me from further effort.
But that evening she was not the submissive, surrendering Luciana I had envisioned; she was a Luciana on the defensive.
Skillfully she eliminated anything from her responses that might engage my amorous declarations until at last she produced this disconcerting confession: “Every man is greedy for my body. Honorio, my own husband, lives in thrall to the flesh. I despise it and despise all men for their love of possession.”
The conditions had been laid down.
She fell silent a moment, as if extenuated by the force and courage required to speak with such clarity, and also as if giving me time to consider this statement and declare myself.
I was enamored of her body and toward her body I was reaching. Nothing else about this untutored woman whose face gave no pleasure mattered to me in the slightest. But she spurned those who aspired to the love of her body.
Had all my plans come to nothing? Yet if Luciana had accepted me so frankly and rapidly, something had suggested to her that I was unlike other men, those other men she despised. Of course: I was the virtuous man of Don Godofredo Alijo’s discourse!
And so I adapted to her fantasy, resigned to sustaining it as an elegant cover for my retreat, now imminent.
It was a simple task to hold forth upon her virtue and idealism and to conclude by alleging that my spirit yearned to meet such a woman, who would lavish her friendship upon me, and a tender affection free of all other implications.
I could see she was greatly flattered. She hinted that if I proved deserving, I might find myself enjoying that very affection of which I dreamed. So she conceded two points to me now, when the day before she’d accorded six and promised ten.
Night was falling as I departed. She accompanied me out to the arcade and called a servant to show me to the door.
A drowsy sacristan was stumbling along the street, swinging a bell.
“Who died?” the servant asked.
The sacristan intoned the prescribed reply: “A son of God: Don Félix Ordóñez. Pray for him.”
Don Félix Ordóñez was the Easterner. From her servant’s mouth, Luciana would soon learn of it.
•
With the demise of the Easterner, there was no pretext Luciana could give her husband to explain my visits. This contingency favored me; it freed me from interviews I now saw as pointless and from the obvious dangers they entailed. Moreover, we had made no plans for the following day, or for any other. I had no obligation to go back.
Was I glad to have emerged from the adventure unscathed?
•
The Easterner had departed too quickly to leave any indication of his wishes and I did not know which of the Orders he preferred. I assigned him to the one I favored, the Mercedarian friars.
I went directly from Luciana to the house of mourning, already very visibly that. The room was shrouded and the chanting of the religious brothers alternated with prayers in an oppressive atmosphere filled with more murmuring than I could readily explain, given how few people could possibly be interested in the posthumous destiny of this foreigner. The priest had organized everything with great care, no doubt suspecting that the Easterner had arrived at our port well provisioned.
So great was the priest’s zeal that he forbade any cooking fire in the house, as if the death truly affected the family who lived there. The tardy sacristan had divulged news of the decease quite sparsely, and as a result not a single dish of food, such as people of position generally send when a death is announced, arrived that whole night. The next morning, sleepy and fatigued from my vigil, I was tortured by hunger.
The first stew was sent over by the Piñares de Luenga family. I thanked fate for having inspired in Luciana some attachment.
The maidservant who brought it, a well-tutored and very self-assured mestiza, duly delivered the protocols of condolence, begged pardon for her mistress and master’s absence from the wake, and, with exemplary reserve, told me the señora would expect me after the interment.
At first this message irritated me. It would embroil me in a new round of visits, now strictly formal and unproductive.
•
And so, having delivered the Easterner’s coffin unto the earth in the shadow of the Templo de la Merced, I took two hours of necessary rest before responding to Luciana’s appeal.
Perhaps I sought to provoke her, to make her bristle at my tardiness, and so begin to relinquish her belief in my unfailing courtesy and rectitude.
15
On previous occasions I must have arrived with an anxious face. Not this time. My changed demeanor authorized Luciana to raise a question. If she hadn’t sent for me, would I have come?
The question was so astute that it flustered me. I claimed such need of her understanding and company that there was no length I would not have gone to in order to see her, even in the face of powerful opposition.
She smiled, but vaguely and with a hint of incredulity, and prevented me from going on.
Instead, she plied me with questions about the Easterner’s death and the details of the funerary rites. I admonished myself severely for having set my sights on a woman who would dither away my time in a conversation so conducive to tedium.
In retrospect I see it must all have been a way for her to study me and learn my reactions. She cared for the Easterner and the nails in his coffin only as an excipient into which, when the time came, she could mingle the drug, the active ingredient, with a lengthy pause, underscored by the words “Ungrateful wretch. . . .”
The words were a spring that activated me. In a single bound I was at her feet, one knee to the ground, caressing the hand that rested upon her skirt, and, much later, kissing it.
The fingers of her free hand were buried in my hair. Then they strayed lower, to the beard, conveying all gentleness in their caress.
I raised my gaze to hers in questioning supplication.
She declared, as if yielding to a beautiful and fearsome fatality, “If it must be, then let it be.”
She flung her head back against the chair, offering herself to my kiss.
It was prolonged and succulent.
When we emerged and I waited for some sign to tell me how much farther I could advance, Luciana remained melted in a dream.
Then, returning to herself, she called me “Beloved. . . .”
And when I bent toward her for another kiss, her right hand intervened, with delicate but unopposable authority. I yielded, and she said, “Now go.”
I could accept this, for I felt myself already her master. These delays, plausibly intended to appease her virtue, cost me little.
•
The following afternoon in the salon she was at work on a complex piece of embroidery that incorporated many multicolored silken stuffs. Because the fabrics exceeded by far the size of the frame, someone had to hold them up to keep them from trailing on the floor. Next to Luciana stood a mestiza, doing precisely that.
&n
bsp; This additional presence alone was not reason enough for discouragement, but I grew to suspect a studied strategy when, after a time, another servant began bringing us maté with periodic punctuality, no doubt in obedience to orders given prior to my arrival.
At the fifth or sixth round of maté I declared myself replete in order to stave off at least one of our vigilant chaperones, but very soon she returned with a small jug of liqueur that she served out in tiny cups. The contents were very meager and I drained them quickly three times in succession before noting that this gave the servant a motive for presenting herself again, without being called. I left the last cupful intact, and after a few inspections, she had to accept that I had no further need of her services.
Luciana nodded, disarmed and delighted by the tenacity with which I strove to make our encounter more intimate, and arranged for my reward. She instructed the mestiza who was holding the goods to spread them over a sofa and fetch her a special pair of tiny scissors from some remote room. And to leave the door only slightly ajar when she went out and to knock before coming in when she returned.
With the door half closed, Luciana and I stood in a single impulse, moving into a union of lips, crushing each other in an unending embrace. For me, the sensation of contact extended across the body, as though we wore no clothes. Somewhat out of breath, I took my lips from hers and acquainted them with her cheeks, her neck, the spot behind her ear where her hair began. . . .
Two faint knocks, knuckles against wood, and hair and clothing had to be reordered.
The conversation grew impersonal for a few moments longer until Luciana told me, with an indifference either feigned or real, I could not tell, that her husband was to return the next day. I inquired as to the hour, in hopes that it would be very late in the night and an opportunity would still remain. But no. He had sent word with a courier that he would spend the night in a town half a day’s journey from the city and would be back under way at dawn.
I could not contain my disappointment, which was so overwhelming that Luciana adopted an inoffensive look of sly amusement. But she was learned in signals, communication, and the art of sustaining hope, if not in other things. Her lips arranged themselves in a slight and soothing smile. An inclination of the head, her eyes full of confidence, announced some piece of astute cunning that would keep us from having to suspend our encounters.
What was her system? Would it be possible for us to see each other only in the presence of third parties or from a prudent distance? My urgent need to know was impeded by the calm mestiza with the silken threads.
My last kiss was of leave-taking, upon the señora’s hand. We were in the gallery, in the presence of her maid and the slave who was to accompany me to the door. Other servants passed by, bearing vessels of food to the dining room. The embroidery assistant stood next to Luciana, attached to her mistress like a lapdog. Luciana gestured to her to bid me farewell, as if some special connection had been formed between this female and myself. The girl honored me with a ceremonious reverence, knee bent and torso inclined, then emitted an inexpressive yawp.
The duenna I’d perpetually feared might betray us if we spoke imprudently was a deaf-mute.
This new wile of Luciana’s, calculated to suppress my fears, only diminished my pride in the knowledge that she was prepared for intrigues, even with her husband in residence.
By taking the lead in this way—without so much as consulting my not wholly negligible ingenuity—she showed herself to be well versed in such machinations.
16
All the discipline I’d exercised to mitigate the rigor of my abstinence from women had collapsed. I was a horse at the starting line and the shot that would begin the race was slow in coming.
Yet I trusted my powers of self-control, well exercised by the year and a half of waiting.
There remained the fear of dreams, which are incontrollable. But my accumulated fatigue demanded a bed.
As it happened, my only intelligible dream was a soothing one: Once more the solitary, smiling young woman arrived to entrust herself to my protection, and again I was unable to identify her with Marta, Luciana, Rita, or any other woman of my acquaintance.
This was a most pleasant prophecy that, repeated twice in the span of only a few days, might credibly become a reality: one I desired fervently as a consolation and a brake.
As on the previous occasion, I allowed myself to begin the morning in a calm and hopeful state.
It was a day of rest, in honor of some saint of small renown. I began the morning by riding my horse inland. The journey out was joyous and contemplative. On the return I was bent on speed and the pure pleasure of moving swiftly, tightening my body to keep from falling and to guide the horse, feeling my own internal rhythms conjugated with the beat of the gallop. But I was also in great haste to be back, as if I craved company.
I passed the harbor. There was no news of a ship from the Río de la Plata. And I had a great need to receive something, some business that was distinctly my own and had a direct bearing upon me, anything that came from another human being yet was remote from my habitual interactions with my neighbors or as an administrator.
I guided the animal to its stable.
The city, early to rise that day and rather festive, had its windows propped open. Pedestrians exchanged greetings with passengers in carriages, on their way from district to district and from church to home.
In the streets, I greeted several señoras and señoritas with whom I had dealings as a result of my friendships with their husbands or fathers.
And suddenly I was catapulted into adventure.
An unknown woman in a mantilla, escorted by two half-breed girls, fastened her gaze on me as we approached each other. Believing that I interested her, I stepped to one side and made a low bow. She did not respond. A hunger for her came over me—hunger for a woman—and I stood there a moment expecting her to turn back or order one of her maids to do so. That did not happen; she seemed prepared simply to leave me behind. I could not resign myself to this without further inquiry into the reason for her insistent gaze. I set off in resolute pursuit. One of the servant girls must have alerted her, and the lady, forewarned, quickened her pace, but my strides covered more ground. She was almost running now, as was I, though neither of us had lost our composure. It was a violent pursuit, destined to fail, I could see that clearly, for any number of reasons, foremost among them my appalling lack of urbanity. I did not relent until I had come within a few varas of her. Then, indolent and unavoidable, a large family with whom I had frequent contact emerged from their home, directly in my path. I had no choice but to stop and greet them.
Later I walked down streets in all directions without encountering the fugitive.
•
But the adventure was launched.
I returned to the places where devout women and those out paying calls tend to gather. I greeted all who were unaccompanied by any male guardian. If they were acquaintances, I probed their faces for any sign of a disposition toward me that was more than merely courteous. If they were strangers, I looked for some reaction to my mildly gallant demeanor that would betray a woman who might be persuaded to stray.
I was excited and alert to the subtlest sign, disposed to seize any opportunity I might glimpse and carry my daring forward into victory. I walked, I sweated: I came and went for an hour or more. Then the ambulatory population thinned out and vanished. It was time for lunch; my stomach, too, clamored for its due.
When the plate of cheese and pitcher of wine had been set before me, I speculated on how many tables there must be where, at that moment, a woman was describing to her husband her astonishment over the Asesor de Gobierno’s reckless conduct. I had sown pointless suspicions whose consequences I could not foresee.
Even as I cursed the havoc within me, I felt its power. My blood’s yearning defied any bridle. I had to contain myself, punish myself.
My only recourse was to return to my room and shut the door. But I ha
d no wish to sleep. I thought of Luciana’s kisses and though I knew them to be the cause of my present state, I imagined them minutely, reproducing the sensations they shot through me.
•
I did not go back out again until nightfall. There had been a market that day in and around the plaza, and the free women and slaves, sent by their masters to pitch their wares, were now putting away the baskets of manioc, peppers, sweets, tobacco, coffee, and other merchandise that remained suspended above them or lay strewn about on the ground without having found a buyer.
I halted a few moments, entertained by the sight of them packing up their day’s business, counting out small change, gossiping, and briskly taking leave of each other, no doubt in sorrow that so enjoyable a day was coming to an end. They left in small bands that would gradually unravel along the way.
As they went past, one girl who was walking with three others gazed at me with the look that means: I would desire this man but I know it’s impossible.
No. It wasn’t impossible.
I followed them at a distance. They observed my maneuver and grew anxious.
Two of them stopped at a house that belonged to a rich family. The other two continued on toward the rancherías. It was one of those two that I desired.
The night watch were making their rounds along the pineapple fields. If I were to hide, which I had no easy way of doing, I would give the women a reason to denounce me.
The soldiers did not harass them. It was obvious from their clothing and baskets that the women were on their way home from the market.
As they came toward me, the soldiers slowed their pace. The commanding officer recognized me and required no further clarification; on the contrary, without seeking to detain me he paid me several quite unnecessary compliments that under different circumstances would have flattered me.
One woman went into a rancho.
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