That night he went out and walked the streets, and he walked for hours, without feeling fatigue. He observed that there were Laundromats that never closed, and he registered the fact with a particular satisfaction.
30
He no longer saw her as fat, or beautiful, and whatever he had thought and learned about her, before entering that studio, had completely dissipated, or had never existed. As it seemed to him that time did not pass in there but that, rather, a single instant unrolled, always identical to itself. He began to recognize, sometimes, passages in David Barber’s loop, and their periodic returns, which were always the same, gave any lapse of time a poetic fixity compared to which what was happening in the world outside lost any enchantment. That everything took shape in a single unchanging, childish light was an infinite joy. The odors of the studio, the dust that was lying on things, the dirt that no one resisted—everything gave the impression of an animal in hibernation, breathing slowly, dead to the world. To the woman with the rain scarf, who wanted to know, Jasper Gwyn went so far as to explain that there was something hypnotic in all that, similar to the effects of a drug. I wouldn’t exaggerate, said the old woman. And she reminded him that it was, after all, only a job, the job of a copyist. Think rather of accomplishing something good, she added, otherwise you’ll be right back to meeting with students.
“How many days left?” asked Jasper Gwyn.
“Twenty, I think.”
“I have time.”
“Have you already written something?”
“Notes. Nothing it would make sense to read.”
“If I were you I wouldn’t be so calm.”
“I’m not calm. I said only that I have time. I was thinking of panicking in a few days.”
“Always putting things off, you young people.”
31
He often arrived late, when Rebecca was already in the studio. It might be ten minutes, or it might be an hour. He did it deliberately. He liked to find that she had already disappeared to herself in David Barber’s sound river and in that light—when he, instead, was still immersed in the crudeness and the rhythm of the world outside. Then he entered, making as little noise as possible, and on the threshold stopped, searching for her with his gaze as if in a giant birdcage: the instant he found her—that was the image that would remain most distinct in his memory. In time she got used to it, and didn’t move when the door opened, but just stayed where she was. For days now they had been omitting any useless liturgy of greeting or farewell, in meeting and parting.
One day he came in and Rebecca was sleeping. Lying on the bed, slightly turned onto one side. She was breathing slowly. Jasper Gwyn silently approached a chair at the foot of the bed. He sat down and watched her for a long time. As he had never done before, he scrutinized the details from close up, the folds of the body, the shadings of white in the skin, the small things. He didn’t care about fixing them in his memory, they wouldn’t be useful in his portrait, but by means of that looking he gained a secret closeness that in fact did help, and carried him far. He let the time pass without rushing the ideas he felt arriving, scattered and disorderly like people coming from a border. At some point Rebecca opened her eyes, saw him. Instinctively she closed her legs. But slowly she reopened them, returning to the position she had abandoned—she stared at him for a few seconds, and then closed her eyes again.
Jasper Gwyn didn’t move from the chair, that day, and he got so close to Rebecca that it was natural to end up where she was, first passing through a torpor full of images, then sliding into sleep, without resisting, slumped in the chair. The last thing he heard was the voice of the woman in the rain scarf. Fine way of working, she said.
On the other hand it seemed normal to Rebecca, when she opened her eyes—something that was bound to happen. The writer asleep. What a strange sweetness. Silently she got off the bed. It was past eight. Before getting dressed she approached Jasper Gwyn and stood looking at him. She walked around him, and since one elbow was resting on the arm of the chair, the hand hanging in space, she brought her hips close to that hand, almost touching it, and stood motionless for a moment—the fingers of that man and my sex, she thought. She got dressed without making any noise. He was still sleeping when she left.
As she did every evening, she took her first steps on the street with the tentativeness of a newborn animal.
32
When she got home there was a guy.
“Hi, Rebecca,” he said.
“I told you to let me know when you’re coming back here.”
But without even taking off her coat she kissed him.
Later, at night, Rebecca told him she had a new job. I’m posing for a painter, she said.
“You?”
“Yes, me.”
He laughed.
“Nude,” she said.
“Come on.”
“It’s not a bad job. Every day, four hours a day.”
“Shit, why’d you do it?”
“Money. He’s giving me five thousand pounds. We have to pay for the flat somehow. Are you going to do it?”
The guy was a photographer, but not many people seemed disposed to believe it. So Rebecca took care of everything, the rent, the bills, the stuff in the fridge. He every so often disappeared, then he returned. His things were there. Rebecca usually summed up the situation in very elementary terms. I’m in love with a shit, she said.
A couple of months earlier, he had said that a friend of his wanted to take some photographs of her. They arranged to meet one evening, there at her house. They drank a lot and eventually Rebecca found herself naked on the bed, with the friend taking snapshots. At some point her boyfriend the shit undressed and came over to her. They had begun to make love. The friend meanwhile took pictures. Then, for a few days, Rebecca hadn’t wanted to see the shit. But not even then had she stopped loving him.
She knew, besides, that she was destined by her body to ridiculous loves. No man thinks he desires a body like that. But experience had taught Rebecca that, in fact, many desire it, and it’s often the result of some wound they don’t want to admit. Often they are afraid of the female body, without knowing it. Sometimes they need to despise it to get excited, and then possessing that body makes them feel good. Almost always there was a sort of expectation of perversion in the air, as if to choose that anomalous beauty necessarily involved giving up the simpler and more straightforward modes of desire. So, at twenty-seven, Rebecca already had a pile of bad memories, where she would have had a hard time finding the simple sweetness of a clean, pure moment. It didn’t matter to her. There wasn’t much she could do, in that regard.
So she stayed with her shit boyfriend. So she wasn’t surprised when Jasper Gwyn had made her that offer. It was exactly the sort of thing she had learned to expect from life.
33
In the morning she left the shit boyfriend asleep in the bed and went out without even taking a shower. She had a night of sex on her, and she liked carrying it around with her, completely. Today you’ll get me like this, dear Jasper Gwyn, let’s see what effect it has on you.
For four hours, every morning, she still went to work for Tom. She revered that man. Three years earlier, a car accident had confined him to a wheelchair, and he had built up around himself an enormous office, a kind of country, where he was God. He was surrounded by workers of all kinds, some very old, some completely mad. He was always stuck to the telephone. He paid little and seldom, but that was a detail. He had such energy, and generated so much life, that people adored him. He was the sort of person who, if you happened to die, would take it as a personal insult.
About the matter of the portrait he had never said anything to her. Only once, when Rebecca had been going to Jasper Gwyn’s for several days, he had come by in his wheelchair and, stopping in front of her desk, had said:
“If I ask you something, tell me to fuck off.”
“Okay.”
“How is old Jasper behaving?”
“F
uck off.”
“Perfect.”
So at one o’clock she got up, took her stuff, and, on the way out, said goodbye to Tom. They both knew where she was going, but they pretended it was nothing. Every so often he glanced at how she was dressed. Maybe he thought he could deduce something from that, who knows.
She went to Jasper Gwyn’s studio on the Underground, but she always got out one stop earlier, to walk a little before going in. On the street, she turned the key over and over in her hand. And that was her way of starting work. Another thing she did was to think in what order she would take her clothes off. It was strange, but, being close to that man every single day, she had learned a sort of precision in her gestures that she had never imagined necessary. He led you to believe that everything wasn’t equivalent, and that someone, somewhere, was recording our every action—one day, likely, he would ask us to account for it.
She turned the key in the lock and entered.
She couldn’t tell right away if he was already there. She had learned that it wasn’t important. Yet she didn’t feel safe until she saw him—or tranquil until he was looking at her. She could never have imagined it before, but really the most ridiculous thing—that that man should stare at her—had become the thing she needed, and without which she could find nothing of herself. She realized, to her surprise, that she was aware of being naked only when she was alone, or he wasn’t looking at her. Whereas it seemed natural when he stared at her; she felt clothed, then, and complete, like a job well done. As the days passed, she was startled to find herself wishing that he would get closer, and often the way he stayed leaning against the wall frustrated her, his reluctance to take what she would have granted him without any trouble. Then it might happen that she approached him, but it wasn’t simple, you had to be capable of avoiding any position that might seem a seduction—the gesture ended up being brusque, and inexact. It was always he who regained a painless distance.
The day she arrived with her night of sex on her, Jasper Gwyn didn’t show up. Rebecca had time to calculate: eighteen days had passed since they began. She thought that the number of bulbs hanging from the ceiling was also eighteen. Mad as he was, it was even possible that Jasper Gwyn attributed some meaning to the circumstance—maybe that was why he hadn’t come. She got dressed, exactly at eight, and then she took a long time getting home—it was as if she expected that something should first be restored to her.
34
Jasper Gwyn didn’t arrive the next day, either. Rebecca felt the hours pass exasperatingly slowly. She was sure he would appear, but he didn’t, and when she got dressed, exactly at eight, she did it angrily. In the evening, walking along the street, she thought she was a fool, it was only a job, what did it matter to her—but she also tried to remember if she had read anything strange in him, the last time they had seen each other. She remembered him bent over his pages, nothing else.
The next day she arrived late, on purpose—just a few minutes, but for Jasper Gwyn, she knew, it was an enormity. She went in, and the studio was deserted. Rebecca got undressed but she couldn’t find the cynicism, or the simplicity, not to think of anything; she spent the time measuring her increasing anxiety. She couldn’t do what she was supposed to do—be herself, simply—although she recalled clearly how easy it had seemed, the first day, when he hadn’t shown up. Evidently something must have happened—like a journey. Now there was nowhere to go back to; besides, no path seemed possible without him.
You’re a fool, she thought.
He must be sick. He must be working at home. Maybe he’s finished. Maybe he’s dead.
But she knew it wasn’t true, because Jasper Gwyn was a precise man, even in error.
She lay down on the bed, and for the first time she seemed to have an inkling of fear, being there by herself. She tried to remember if she had locked the door. She wondered if she was sure that three days had passed since she had seen him last. She went through in her memory those three afternoons full of nothing. It seemed to her even worse. Relax, she thought. He’ll arrive, she said to herself. She closed her eyes. She began to caress herself, first her body, slowly, then between her legs. She wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, and that did her good. She turned slightly onto one side, because that was how she liked to do it. She opened her eyes again, in front of her was the door. He’ll open it and I won’t stop, she thought. He doesn’t exist, I exist, and this is what I feel like doing now, dear Jasper Gwyn. I feel like caressing myself. Just come in that door, and then we’ll see what you feel like writing. I’ll keep going, until the end, I don’t care if you look. She closed her eyes again.
At eight she got up, dressed, and went home. She thought that there were ten days left, maybe a few more. She couldn’t understand if it was a little or a lot. It was a tiny eternity.
35
The next day when she entered the room Jasper Gwyn was sitting on a chair, in a corner. He seemed like the guard in a museum gallery, watching over a work of contemporary art.
Instinctively Rebecca stiffened. She looked questioningly at Jasper Gwyn. He merely stared at her. Then, for the first time since they’d started, she spoke.
“You haven’t been here for three days,” she said.
Then she became aware of the other man. He was standing in a corner, leaning against the wall.
Two men, there was another, sitting on the first step of the stairs that led to the bathroom.
Rebecca raised her voice and said it wasn’t in the agreement, but without clarifying what she was referring to. She said also that she considered herself free to stop when she liked, and that if he thought that for five thousand pounds he could dare to do anything he wanted he was grossly mistaken. Then she stayed there, motionless, because Jasper Gwyn did not look like he wanted to answer.
“What a shit,” she said, but to herself more than anything.
She sat on the bed, dressed, and stayed there, for quite a while.
There was that music by David Barber.
She decided not to be afraid.
If anything, they should be afraid of her.
She undressed brusquely, and began to walk around the room. She stayed far away from Jasper Gwyn, but passed close to the other two men, without looking at them. Where the hell did he get them, she thought. And with her footsteps she trampled Jasper Gwyn’s pieces of paper, first by walking over them, then tearing them with the soles of her feet; she felt the hardness of the thumbtacks scratching her skin—she didn’t care. She chose some and destroyed them—others she allowed to survive. She thought that she was like a servant who extinguishes the candles at night, throughout the palace, and leaves some lighted, because of some house rule. She liked the idea and gradually stopped doing it angrily, and began to do it with the meekness that would be expected from that servant. She slowed down, and her gaze lost its harshness. She continued to extinguish those pieces of paper, but with a different, gentle care. When it seemed to her that she had finished—whatever it was she had begun—she lay down on the bed again, and let her head sink into the pillow, closing her eyes. She was no longer angry, and in fact was amazed to feel a sort of peace coming over her that, she understood, she had been expecting for days. Nothing moved around her, but at some point there was some movement, footsteps, and then the sharp sound of a chair, maybe several chairs, being dragged next to the bed. She didn’t open her eyes, she had no need to know. She let herself subside into a mute darkness, and that darkness was herself. She could do it, and without fear, and easily, because someone was looking at her—she immediately realized it. For some reason that she didn’t understand, she was finally alone, in a perfect way, as one never is—or rarely, she thought, in a loving embrace. She was far away, having lost any notion of time, perhaps almost sleeping, sometimes wondering if those two men would touch her—and the third man, the only one for whom she was really there.
She opened her eyes, afraid that it was late. In the room there was no one. Next to the bed was a chair, only
one. Leaving, she touched it. Slowly, with the back of her hand.
36
When she entered the studio, at precisely four the next day, the first thing she saw was Jasper Gwyn’s pages, back in their places, not even a crease, restored again, with the thumbtacks and all. There were hundreds by now. It didn’t seem that anyone had ever walked on them. Rebecca looked up and Jasper Gwyn was there, sitting on the floor, in what seemed to have become his den, his back leaning against the wall. Everything was in its place, the light, the music, the bed. The chairs lined up on one side of the room, in order, except the one that he used every so often, placed in a corner, the notebook on the floor. That sensation of safety, she thought—which I never knew before.
She undressed, took a chair, moved it to a point she liked, not too close to Jasper Gwyn, not too far, and sat down. They stayed like that for a long time. Jasper Gwyn every so often looked at her, but more often stared at something in the room, making small gestures in the air, as if he were following some music. He seemed to miss his notebook, his eyes searched for it a couple of times, but in reality he didn’t get up to find it, he felt like staying there, leaning against the wall. Until, unexpectedly, Rebecca started talking.
“Tonight I thought of something,” she said.
Jasper Gwyn turned to look at her, caught by surprise.
“Yes, I know, I shouldn’t talk, I’ll stop right away.”
Her voice was calm, serene.
“But there’s a stupid thing I’ve decided to do. I don’t even know if I’m doing it for me or for you, I mean only that it seems right, the way here the light is right, the music, everything is right, except one thing. So I’ve decided to do it.”
She got up, went over to Jasper Gwyn, and knelt in front of him.
“I know, it’s stupid, I’m sorry. But let me do it.”
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