My ladylove must have imagined a different fate for her messages. After such time as she deemed sufficient for me to have written a response, she sent the little girl, that mute and persuasive presence.
I wrote a few lines. “My head is cleft with pain. I shall write tomorrow at greater length, as is due, and with all the passion that possesses me.”
Very shortly thereafter the little messenger stood before the door again.
I did not answer, fearful of some home remedy.
•
To escape the little mulatta’s persistent knocking, I went out through the darkness to the kitchen to make a fire, though my stomach issued no urgent demand.
When the coals glowed evenly, I went back for the pavita.
It was on the table, next to the burning candle. I walked to it, with no thought but to heat water for maté. With neither premonition nor apprehension.
Not in the storeroom but on entering my room, I had a sudden certainty that I’d just walked past someone. Some bodily but indefinite presence was there behind me, only a few steps away, pressed against the lightless wall.
The secret sound of a stealthy flight, with myself in pursuit. Not to hunt her down. To see.
A final instant beneath the moon and then the dark corner took her in.
I glimpsed the comb atop the head, the tall comb.
To follow was to introduce myself into the private quarters of Ignacio Soledo. The impulse to burst in, full of reproach, fell away.
Soledo was back on his feet, according to Tora’s latest information. His wife, or false daughter, was spying, spying on me, perhaps at his command, perhaps with intent to steal.
This, not the damp, was the danger in that house. I had been warned and had failed to understand the warning. I stood at the edge of the storeroom where the courtyard began.
Entirely occupied with these fleeting thoughts, I saw only the image of the fugitive.
Until I observed that the figure of a woman had just slipped past me, curls tumbling past her shoulders.
She was moving toward the shadows, as if she were one of them.
Curls, not a comb: This was my docile, passive, distant friend from the roofless lookout next to the passageway.
Two of them, then. Two women.
My indignation at the spying, my fear of nocturnal assault, gave way, after the passage of the second woman, to something else.
To fascination. She had circled past, as if inviting me to follow. And I foresaw that at the end of her path lay neither love nor happiness nor prosperity.
32
I slept to excess, until the morning was far advanced.
I had to make haste to reach the office. Since Tora did not appear at the first sounding of the bell, I left without taking maté and without having had any opportunity to cast light on the previous night’s double presence. A demand to speak to Ignacio Soledo would have taken up even more time, of course. My quest for explanation would have to wait until evening.
•
So I resolved to proceed while dressing, but once out in the street and then later in the office, that second figure whose weightless transit through the gallery I had glimpsed began to circle around me. It was pleasant to think of her, though there was an element of deceit, emptiness, and absorption in the thought that gave me no peace. She was a beautiful perversion, a temptation I resisted. A silent fury rose up inside me like blood rushing to the head.
I told myself I would kill Soledo for that woman.
The horror.
The horror of being trapped in absurdity.
The horror of fascination.
A total consecration to her image, without sensuality, in sadness. The brutal urge to capture her, to see her for longer than an instant. Perhaps that alone and nothing more, and therefore the crime I contemplated was unnecessary.
The horrors within were stripping away the daily reality of the office, of Manuel Fernández, there before me, concrete, unaltered, along with the small and unending scrape of his pen, which only then reappeared, when I saw him there once more.
•
He took me to eat.
I was bewildered.
He spoke, but my thoughts were all projected toward the night, the coming night, which hinged upon the night before.
I neither ate nor was tempted by the food that lay there on the plate. It was clear that my stomach, without sustenance since yesterday’s lunch, hoped to be fed, but it had no support from my hands, my head, or my will.
Manuel Fernández was expressing himself with vehemence. I was weak, depleted. I watched and listened to him as if he were inside a tank of water.
“¡Por favor!” he said impatiently, and I listened more attentively. His words were a comfort and a relief.
He was declaring his aim and resolve to take Emilia in holy matrimony.
He grew animated. We both grew animated.
Then he told me that if I authorized it he would recognize my son as his own.
Yes, I told him again, and he seemed to have attained the happiness of self-denial. It was visible in his face.
I was glad for him, for Emilia, for my dirty little son. I was glad for myself. Now I would be less and less bound to other people.
I was laughing softly, a slight, continual laugh from between clenched teeth, as if for no reason: the laughter of an idiot child.
I beseeched Fernández to take me to the tavern.
•
Not the slave of aguardiente, but with aguardiente at my service, obedient to the commands of my appetite and my defiance, I waited for night to fall.
A candle in the window testified that someone had not resigned herself to my absence.
Brutal and petulant, I threw a fistful of earth against the glass.
She appeared at her transparent post, with her soft face and stiff hair. Was this provocation, aggression, or mournful serenade?
I gestured to her to open the door.
The light disappeared from the window.
The door creaked inward. She presented herself to guide me.
I swept the candle aside; it went out in midair and fell to the ground.
I took her with vehemence.
Not seeing her, I could kiss her. A great deal, as much as she needed.
I threw her to the ground, with some gusto, I believe. She was lightly clad, as if in preparation.
•
I rose to my feet, brushing off the dust.
In the darkness, I could sense her scrambling. She dragged herself toward the wall and leaned back against it. She was panting.
“I need money,” I said.
She panted a moment longer, took in a long breath, and spoke one word, cuánto, without a question mark.
“Fifty pesos,” I said, and immediately knew that the sum was paltry and that it was too late to ask for more. I was no longer burning nor was she panting.
“You’ll have it,” she said. The declaration had the liberating power of a farewell.
I groped for the outer door, which had been left unbarred, and went into the street.
•
Once in my quarters, I stood with my back against the door. Before me, in the depths of the silent, sleeping house, was the image— evanescent, or so I foresaw—of the young woman in all her fearsome charm. Behind me, concrete in her ugliness and in the force of the bond acquired that night, was a woman I could not see by the light of day without recoiling.
I believed that the doorway of the storeroom was closed, that I was isolated and secure. But as I grew accustomed to the darkness, I distinguished the overgrown plants in the depths of the garden.
I rushed to shut the door.
Even so, if someone were already inside, that person was still there with me. I needed light so as to investigate, but nowhere could I put my hand on the tinderbox.
I heard a dull, rhythmic sound.
I tiptoed toward the spot where I thought it came from. Tiptoed into the void.
It was closer than
that . . . it was upon me!
I reached to touch. I almost thought it was my own heart.
But now it wasn’t there. It had become a blow upon wood, the wood of the door, a knocking. Diligent, precise, and soft.
I struggled not to open it, and the sound continued, like a piece of advice: A-bre, a-bre, a-bre.
Its command could not be resisted.
With a blow I separated the two leaves of the door, as if in surrender, as if baring my breast to bullets. There, at my door, was the one who had knocked: the blond lad, rawboned, barefoot, bedraggled. Beyond him, in the middle of the street, were three stampeding horses, one with a small body entangled in its legs, a body that gave itself over with wild movements of the hands and never a whimper.
With a bound I was in the midst of the beasts and the riders, already dismounting. The blond lad ran beside me.
The little mulatta had completed her fall. She was now a small, soft body given over to the earth. My attention fastened on two things: the lips, half open in the sad smile of one who will not laugh again, and, scattered on the ground around the hand whose open palm faced the cloud-swathed moon, a few lusterless coins, brittle but whole in their roundness, constant in their material nature, alien to the tragedy.
The coins, myself, the small dead girl: All of us were silent and serene. The three men cursed and swore and the blond boy joined in, gesticulating, saying who knows what. The murderous horse’s fore-legs were still skittish and the horse reared up in another fit of rage, perhaps disposed to trample others underfoot, there and farther along, on every roadway in the province.
I withdrew. My boots dragged in the dirt; I could not lift my feet. Had my arms been longer, my fingernails, too, would have been encrusted with red earth.
•
From my room, my head cast down upon the table, I heard loud voices, loud weeping, then softer voices, softer weeping, until it was over.
One, two horses departed. Others arrived. Then left.
I know nothing more. Night, my benefactress, came to my tired body.
I dreamed a woman’s cool hand was stroking my forehead; this coolness permeated my whole body, which may have been feverish until then. After that the cold was master to my flesh, before someone threw a thin woolen poncho over me.
33
I awoke in the early hours of dawn.
The courtyard was strewn with a rubble of sunlight that made the birds chatter with joy. I shook myself. A strange garment lay over me.
A poncho made of soft, thin wool.
I thought Tora might have put it there, but along with this unascertainable surmise came the cold to reclaim me. I shut the door to the courtyard, made a blanket of the poncho, and went to hide in my bed as if it were a cave.
I slept very late.
I did not leave the room until I sensed an absence of light outside.
I perceived the moon, like a woman seated on the horizon, naked and fat.
I went to the rear yards.
I searched for something to chew on in the kitchen garden but it was much neglected and had no fruit trees.
I drank maté in the kitchen.
I was not thinking of the dead girl. By now she was far away. I remembered the blond boy. He had reappeared now, with four years gone by, under incomprehensible circumstances. I did not devote much thought to him.
In that kitchen, I seemed to be separate from everything, alone and forgotten. I could die there and no one would notice. To cease to exist did not trouble me. But, I said to myself, it would be terrible to cry out in pain—or fear—in the throes of death, with no one there to hear.
I was isolated, besieged, defenseless. The wind’s sudden shifts had incapacitated me. As had these premonitions.
I returned to my quarters as if harvesting the darkness, and with a new faculty—or so it seemed—of perceiving myself from without. I could see myself gradually transformed into a figure of mourning, the shadows, soft as bat’s down, adhering to me as I passed.
When I stepped into the storeroom, I knew it could all disappear.
It could disappear with me.
I was going to confront something, someone, and I understood that I was to choose it or choose for it to die. But I was confusing that with death itself, and the choice to be made on this sad night would not turn out to be difficult, or so I believed.
A hint of womanliness had come into the room.
She was in the storeroom and this time she would not flee. I lit the candle. I needed to see her face.
The wick burned.
She, too, was expecting me, unmoved, impassive, even when I brought the flame close to her curls to see if it was she. And yes.
A fog seemed to have filled the room, but I managed to hold myself upright. I set the candle on the table as I went past, and sought my bed.
•
I awoke and it was night; the lamp cast its impure glitter against the wall.
Someone had covered me in blankets and I did not want to turn my head for I sensed a presence next to the bed. Not to keep from seeing her but because something, who knows what, had given me a premonition of disappointment.
She passed her hand—cool water—over my forehead and I deduced that this was the very caress of the night before.
She.
I turned my head.
Disappointment, yes. Disappointment.
The tall comb. A woman of unblooming middle age. Compassionate affection, an amorous and self-abnegating pity in her eyes. All very definite, without anything beyond that, without mystery.
“It isn’t you,” I said, shaking my head and speaking as if I were alone, as if she signified nothing.
“I am,” she said, with some bitterness.
I could not pretend, could not deceive myself, even if she had the clairvoyance to understand the disappointment in my words: “It isn’t you.” I could not lie to myself: Even her voice saying “I am” was that of a matron.
I rejected her affirmation. Obstinately I closed my eyes, as if to isolate myself in the full anguish of not finding her.
Then, betraying the pain of a thing lost and irrecoverable, she said, “Ah, I know it well. A man like you, a man sought after and attended to, who never has to ask anyone for anything, wants another kind of woman. You want the kind of woman who risks everything to help you, to place herself, driven mad by solitude, in your hands. She must be young, more beautiful than I am now, her voice bright, her curls as soft as the soft pink of her dress. . . .”
She seemed to be warning me that she knew just how subjugated I was to the enchantment of that other glimpsed figure—from my perspective quite possibly her daughter, but to her, a true rival.
Then suddenly the actual woman was attaining some power of fascination. This was because of her voice, its grave and sorrowing tone close at hand yet unfathomable, just as I wished it to be. I gave it all my attention, as if expecting some song of revelation to emerge from the forest. All that she said was simple and comprehensible. Or rather, I took her words to have a double sense, and to hold the explanation, all explanations.
She squeezed my hand on the blanket. Seeking to be more persuasive, she suggested, “Ah, if a man wants. . . . It’s possible to be one woman and the other. He can see a woman as she is and as he desires her to be.”
Was that what I had done over the past several days? I feared she would say so. I feared that, and something more. And she, still following her thought, said, “But only if he loves the woman. If he clings to the one who no longer is, and to her alone, then he loves a dangerous fantasy. It will lead to sickness and distress, perhaps horror.”
That was it, exactly. Horror—this night, only now revealed in its horror—had captured me.
I denied it, so as to deny power over me to this woman who had penetrated to my innermost thoughts so accurately. “How could I, how could anyone, voluntarily relinquish himself to horror?”
In response, she pierced me with these words: “If you desire, in terror, to
see my past, it’s only so you can transfer the terror of your own past to it.”
I seemed to be arguing with the dangerous fantasy she’d alluded to.
Her insinuation, strong as it was, did not scare me off. Bringing all my discernment to bear, I managed to situate her words within what is normal and possible. I thought she wanted to frighten me, to make me abhor the image of the younger woman and love her alone. I rejected the temptation to argue further about the nature of the youthful figure that made its appearances at twilight, but I did protest against the sullying of my early life. “My past isn’t shameful!” I exclaimed.
I gazed at her face to see if this outburst had affected her. It had not. She was serene, and her serenity cured me of the suspicions that had momentarily driven me to distraction.
She appeared to be waiting patiently for my thoughts to evolve. She contemplated me. Now that she knew I did not share or accept her opinion, I believed she would speak to me with the respect and deference her presence in my room gave me reason to hope for.
But no. “All of us, or almost all, are small matters. We devise some slight present for ourselves, and in consequence a hateful past,” she said.
She placed an open hand on my shoulder and added, “I’m afraid to draw up a tally of sins. I don’t want the past to be more powerful than the future.”
Such scruples were not new to me and could easily be mistaken for those of any woman who finds a final reason to vacillate before making her impassioned surrender. And yet. . . .Why was I immersed in such disturbing thoughts? When she spoke of herself, why did she seem to be speaking of me? Why were her words so strange and judgmental? Why did she express herself in these abstractions, so incongruous to the situation we were in?
Everything was far too ambiguous, but the ambiguity did not appear to be hers. It seemed, rather, to emanate from me, as if this feminine figure beside me were not real but only a projection of my afflicted consciousness, a projection made flesh by the magic power of creation that a fever possesses.
“I’m afraid,” she repeated in sorrow, and it struck me that the sorrow did not belong to her, that it was my own sorrow, of old vintage.
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