Red: A Love Story

by Nicole Collet

  “Later,” she retorted with a note of impatience. “First I want to know more details about the teacher.”

  “Well…” Marisa stared at the ceiling. “The whole class dreaded him. He was always in a sour mood. He would fill the whiteboard with those physics formulas no one understood—”

  The psychoanalyst interrupted Marisa with her usual assertiveness: “Physics formulas? I was under the impression he taught literature.”

  Marisa stirred and shifted position. In her reverie, the physics teacher with his gray moustache gave room to the vision of Marco before the whiteboard.

  “Oh, Marco… I’m still in love with him, doctor. It’s just beyond my control. I’ve made out with some guys from college but always end up finding them dull. Life with Marco had more color, you know what I mean?”

  Marisa couldn’t erase from her memory their last encounter. Marco’s gaze told her everything even before he spoke: it was best if they stopped seeing each other. And then her body turned into a dead weight plummeting from a cliff. I don’t want to cause you more family problems, Mari. Moreover, the age gap between us will create divergences. I’m very fond of you, but I’m not the right man for you. I’ve got scars…

  And he said that she was wonderful and he admired her greatly. That he felt sorry they couldn’t be together and was jealous of the man who would succeed in giving her everything she deserved and he was unable to give. He spoke with extreme tact. It did nothing to ease the pain. Marisa couldn’t understand how things changed that way. It was as if she had never existed in this life.

  Marco returned her belongings: clothes left in the apartment, a toothbrush, the strass collar. He put everything in a cardboard box and handed it to the porter in her building. Marisa got rid of the collar, along with Marco’s gifts: poetry collections, CDs, a white lacy top, a black lingerie set. She didn’t muster the courage to part with the filigree ring and put it away in her closet’s last drawer, where the sweaters were kept.

  The drawer remained untouched. It was finally opened when winter arrived. Sweaters left it, returned, some left again. The last garment from the pile, however, crystallized on the bottom of the drawer and never shifted. It was a shroud. Under it rested the ring.

  Inside Marisa the days were quiet. And outside, wherever she looked, she saw echoes of Marco—one day, upon seeing a street cart selling jabuticabas, Marisa broke into tears. She needed to reclaim life without his marks. Make it her own again. Her own. Not theirs.

  Except for the ring, nothing was left. She ripped off cards and notes, deleted emails and the smiley photo taken in his kitchen—she behind a bunch of herbs, he with a grater in his hand. She couldn’t stand the irony of the words and that smile now devoid of meaning. Marisa erased all physical traces of Marco’s presence. The only thing she couldn’t erase was the invisible trace that lingered within her.

  Marco never contacted her again. At first she couldn’t help but make up excuses to call him. Marco always acted solicitous. But he had changed. On those occasions, they would talk with a distant politeness that was much worse than no contact. Marisa stopped calling.

  “It was all too sudden. Since he decided to break up, I feel like a shadow… Valentina says he’s an idiot and I’m a bigger idiot because I keep thinking of him. She’s right. I can’t help it, though. I wonder if I did anything wrong, if he left me for another woman… I’m sure the situation with my mom was the last straw,” Marisa stuttered as her eyes blurred. “Oh, doctor, I’ve never been in love with anyone like this.”

  She couldn’t go on. Whimpering weakly, Marisa blinked and sniffled. Doctor Spitzer offered her a tissue.

  “Nonsense,” she retorted in a professional tone. “Let us steer away from the scope of traditional psychoanalysis for a moment. What people call passion is merely a cocktail of dopamine and pheromones. A biological strategy for the perpetuation of the species.” She closed the notepad, ignoring Marisa’s attempt to object. “You are suffering from withdrawal symptoms, that’s all. Stop filling your head with foolish ideas and harboring feelings of guilt and inferiority. It’s all going to pass. But Marco ignites your desire, right? You think you’re in love, when in reality it is the hormones dictating your reactions. Note that a dream is the fulfillment of an intrinsically sexual wish…”

  The therapist made a suggestive pause as she shifted in the armchair. For a moment, her glasses reflected the blue from the suit and sparkled with fury.

  “Observe, in your last dream, the abundance of libidinous references. The night associated with the primordial instinct. The curvaceous lake and the phallic pine trees. The full moon, a symbol of femininity at its prime. The corridor representing the female organ. The closed doors of forbidden desire. The room with a cat, the icon of sensuality. The tank as a receptacle (female organ) that breaks into pieces under the feline’s influence (desire), releasing the water (body fluids). And what have we got inside the tank? The formula for calculating the fall (surrender to pleasure) that causes death, i.e., total abandonment (climax). Everything is quite simple and logical. Clear as day.”

  Doctor Spitzer didn’t hide her satisfaction and added: “The conscious mind has barred your sexual drive as a way of blocking the emotions associated with it: fear of vulnerability and loss, and even fear of happiness, for happiness is also disturbing: you cannot blame it for failures as you do with depression.” She sighed. “Don’t forget your whole life has changed in less than a year. And that can be very frightening. You lost your father and your boyfriend, besides losing stability at home and at school with the end of the term. As a result, you shut everything off to protect yourself, and the repressed wishes provoked panic attacks. But the important thing is you overcame your fear and entered the symbolic elevator. Even better: you picked up the red flower bouquet. Do you know what that means?”

  “I have no idea, doctor. I will be frank, though, this color of blood makes me uneasy.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know. It makes me think of things like… accidents.”

  “It all depends on the context. Blood, just like the red color, can have various meanings.” Doctor Spitzer gazed at an inexistent dot on the wall. She seemed to speak to herself, oblivious to the patient: “It’s a vast subject. Really instigating…”

  “What’s so instigating?” interjected Marisa, unable to stand the suspense.

  “The red color, you see, possesses diurnal and nocturnal qualities. In the diurnal polarity, it incorporates yellow and refers to the radiant energy of the sun. In the nocturnal polarity, it incorporates blue and is spectral. Blood itself holds such duality. Outside the body, it means death. Inside it, blood is life. Note the paradox here: what’s without suggests the occult, and what’s within evokes the explosion of life itself.”

  “I’ve never thought about that. But the boundaries between what’s within and what’s without aren’t always clear, right? Funnily enough, red is one of my favorite colors.”

  It was the favorite color of children, Doctor Spitzer stated with a benevolent expression. Then she focused back on Marisa’s dream. It brought three primordial shades. Black and white, the first two colors named by men’s ancestors because they translated the basic perception of day and night, of the conscious mind and the unconscious. Parallel to that, another crucial color stood out in the dream: red.

  Doctor Spitzer silenced in meditation. She had her legs crossed, one foot waving up and down to the tempo of her thoughts. Marisa glanced at her out of the corner of one eye and waited. She imagined Doctor Spitzer’s analytical brain processing data like a state-of-the-art computer. Her RAM memory must be huge.

  “The matter at hand is simple and logical,” she affirmed at last. “Red is the first color to appear in the spectrum of visible light, that is to say, it’s the first color we discern amongst all the others. The tint of life and death. Cave men used it in their rupestral paintings to p
ortray the hunt (the death of the prey that supports life), as well as to worship the gods. The red color had a sacred quality associated with the enigma of existence. Today it represents love and passion. It equally represents hate and suffering.”

  As she spoke, Doctor Spitzer raised one hand and described an arch in the air. Red encompassed a palette of many hues. It was the color of extremes and dressed the Pope just like it painted the Devil. It attracted by symbolizing desire. And repelled as it warned to prohibition. It was visceral: it signaled pleasure as well as pain, the two basic human drives which coincidentally shared the same neural circuits to reach the brain. That’s why they walked hand in hand and sometimes got mixed up. It was no wonder the reddest emotion of all, passion, reflected the full richness of the human experience. A quick look in the dictionary attested that passion simultaneously meant a strong feeling, love, and pain—because it was impossible to set the three apart.

  “In fact, love and hate, pleasure and pain all converge at one point. Red is the color of emotion boiling up to the surface of the skin… be it positive or negative, or a bit of each,” reflected Marisa. As she dissected it that way, the red color she saw with the eyes of imagination became less intimidating. “What is the bouquet in my dream about? Does it symbolize my repressed emotions?”

  Doctor Spitzer rewarded her with a smile.

  “Exactly. Observe that the repression mechanism is not selective. It’s not feasible to suppress one single emotion. It’s all or nothing. If you repress pain, you automatically repress pleasure too. Now just think of what happens when all emotions are shut off. They get exacerbated and, sooner or later, need to surface. Actually, when avoiding an unpleasant feeling (that is to say, pain), you avoid facing reality and fantasize about it instead. But fantasy can be much scarier than reality because the imagination has no limits.”

  She leaned forward and assumed a professorial tone: “In the first volume of his Letters, Jung wrote that your vision only becomes clear when you look into your heart: Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakes. You have gone through all those phases, Marisa. You have plunged into phobia, faced repressed wishes and returned to the starting point.”

  “So… if I’m back to the starting point, what happens now?”

  “A new beginning.”

  Doctor Spitzer beamed, her face sank into the background and her mouth levitated, teeth shining like glow-in-the-dark tape. And thus the cigar box opened with a whiff that made the bright-blue suit dance a rumba with a pair of white scarpino shoes.

  Before the scene became too surreal, Doctor Spitzer announced: “You have completed a cycle. You are cured, Marisa.”

  Hearing those words, Marisa sat up abruptly. She felt in her mouth the taste of her own astonishment. And what it was like? It tasted like miracle fruit, an African berry that is a red circle and tastes of nothing. The miracle fruit, however, dazes the palate, converting the sour into sweet, the lemon into honey. Dialectic lemon, relative flesh, red skin. That was the taste of Marisa’s astonishment.

  Cured. For a few seconds, she remained speechless. It was good news, right? Yet Marisa felt lost. How could she be dismissed from therapy just like that, how would she cope without psychological support? Her mind spiraled in a thousand and one interrogation marks.

  “But… tell me something, doctor… what are those repressed wishes after all?”

  Resting the pen on the notepad, the therapist fixed her enigmatic eyes on Marisa.

  “Only you can answer that.”

  Marisa admired for the last time the watercolor above the divan, now with a strange commotion: so that was it. Squares, circles. From black to gray to white and back to the start. Red. She had survived.

  Doctor Spitzer wished her good luck and walked her to the door. They said goodbye without effusion.

  At the exit, Marisa halted.

  “There’s one thing I’ve always wanted to ask, doctor. I’ve noticed the two paintings in your office are the same, only with inverted colors. What’s the meaning of that? Is it a metaphor about the alternation between the conscious mind and the unconscious? A Freudian interpretation of the yin-yang principle?”

  Marisa stared at her with high expectations. She knew the therapist, with the aid of her powerful psychoanalytic magnifying glass, would have some astounding revelation in store.

  Doctor Spitzer narrowed her eyes and lingered them on Marisa for a moment. Then, as she closed the door, she finally replied: “I don’t know. My interior decorator chose those paintings. Have a good evening.”

  And that concluded Marisa’s psychological treatment.

  Coincidentally, the next day that same interior decorator would replace the office’s watercolors with cubist paintings—which, besides suggesting the human being’s fragmentation, matched perfectly the new geranium arrangement on the sideboard.

  9. In the Bedroom

  The orchids on the coffee table were replaced with a silver candle holder and a lone flame. Around it, glass platters offered a variety of Arabic specialties Marco had prepared. The menu included dumplings in yogurt sauce, raw salmon kibbeh and fattoush salad, as well as sweets from a traditional deli. The aroma of honey and herbs lingered in the air.

  When the clock turned nine, she arrived preceded by a floral fragrance. She wore a satiny strap top and black skirt, her high-heeled sandals matching a pair of pearl earrings and a golden necklace. Marco couldn’t help but gaze at her in awe.

  When she was absent, her beauty seemed to pale. He contemplated her young body, returned to her oval face, stared into the irises that sparkled igniting his own desire. Marco oscillated in the frontier of lust and disquiet. It was such an odd sensation that he savored it for an instant while attempting to define it.

  “Why are you staring at me? It’s like you’ve never seen me before,” she said, smiling.

  “It’s nothing.”

  She approached Marco with an insinuating gait.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” She leaned toward him. “How about my kiss?”

  Her lips greeted Marco’s as her hands slid up his white shirt and rested lightly on his shoulders. Then she sat on the sofa and crossed her legs as she studied the surroundings with curiosity. She frowned at the sight of the food and sought an indication of what was to come. This time, however, nothing there hinted at Marco’s intentions, so the center stage would probably be the bedroom.

  “What are we doing tonight?” she inquired. Her pupils dilated.

  Marco remained silent. This was his last chance to back down. He could always get the valise and improvise a game. It held all sorts of toys—she wouldn’t even notice the change of plans.

  He hesitated, glancing at the bedroom door. His pause dragged.

  “Let’s have dinner first,” he said.

  The two sat cross-legged on the floor around the coffee table, drinking arak to world music by Pakistani Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook. The melody of My Heart, My Life brought to the living room a summer night—harp lute and stars, guitar and crickets, percussion and breeze in the foliage. The Pakistani artist sang about life in the form of a woman, wishing her to sit before him so he could gaze at her always and always. Mera dil, meri jaan…

  In the meantime she sat there, tasting the food and throwing furtive glances at Marco. Until she was unable to refrain herself any longer: “What did you plan, after all?”

  “Just wait and see. Didn’t you say you like surprises? Be patient.”

  Marco emptied his glass and poured more arak for both of them. He was about to raise the drink to his lips when he changed his mind and returned it to the table. She took a long draft and pushed the plate, her hands on the edge of the table, fingers tapping with a reflection of golden nail polisher.

  “I’ve had enough, thank you.”

  A smile.

  Now what? was what her eyes asked and hi
s didn’t reply.

  The air closed upon them. Marco reached out for the glass of arak but gave up once more. He rose to his feet, reached out and helped her stand up. He drew her near, leading her in the music cadence.

  She nestled up against his chest, and they danced cheek to cheek in place. Marco shut his eyes and tried to capture the womanly scent masked by jasmine. He skimmed his lips on the exposed nape of her neck, kissing the shoulder slope, pushing aside the top strap with his teeth to nibble the flesh.

  Little by little she started to reciprocate each caress with fluid symmetry. Her hands roamed over his wide back while he traced the line of her spine. Their mouths met simultaneously in the same route, at first lightly and slowly, then with impetuousness. A famished kiss that went on and on while hands clutched, squeezed, scratched…

  They tumbled on the couch, and he removed her top with impatient hands, then stripped off his own shirt. Bare skin against bare skin, they tightened their embrace. Her pulsating warmth. His moan. In an impulse, Marco took her breast in the mouth as his hand glided toward the curve of her hips.

  The hand lingered there to tantalize the hollow of the navel, tracing circles with the fingertips, in and out, around and about, making her sigh. It kept sliding down, sneaked under the skirt, explored the recess at the junction of her thighs. His fingers then hooked in a tiny cotton garment and removed the last obstacle between them and the naked flesh.

  She tossed back her head and buried her nails on his back. Then she groped for the waistband of his pants, the button, the zipper. She held him as if weighing the erection and smiled satisfied with herself, for she was the one responsible for that. She began stimulating him with her hands and mouth. Marco closed his eyes, caressing her hair, bringing her closer. Successive waves of delicious tension concentrated in one single spot to reach an almost unbearable crescendo…