Somehow, Haley’s comet, which reappears every seventy-six years, corresponded inside me with Pirandello and his short story, and I tried desperately to convince myself that between 1910 and 1986 the way we approach the same phenomenon changed. But it was no use. Perhaps it’s because man is not a comet but a fixed star that, though fixed, passes like a comet through life. Only life doesn’t change. Intellectual developments (psychoanalysis, sociology, and biophysics) do not help us in the least to understand the phenomenon of human existence. It is only the knowledge of the mechanics of the text, its translation so to speak, and the naïvefé of the narrator in describing and analyzing his hero’s reactions, that undermines our confidence. That is why the idea of a transplant excited me. It was something modern. Something that no Pirandello had ever touched because it simply did not exist in his day. Whereas the story of the Nordic goddess and the southern satyr, or, in his short story, the Nordic god and the southern siren, was outdated, and I was thankful to him for writing it so well as to rid me of my desire to write it.
Around half past one, not being able to hold out any longer, I called her. Rosa herself answered the phone. She had just gotten back from work, she said. Would she like to see me? Of course she would! Did she want me to come over? Right away. She was staying in the Parioli quarter. She gave me the address. I took a taxi and soon I was with her.
The Aldo Brandini residence was chic. As a rule, all people connected to fashion and clothes stayed here when visiting the city. In the foyer downstairs, I saw a crowd of models and photographers meeting for lunch. An atmosphere of wealth and freshness. An air of well being, merriment, and sanitized sex, that’s how it seemed to me. I went up to her apartment. It was small but comfortable, with a tiny kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom. It looked out on the courtyard palm trees. Rosa looked beautiful. I was enchanted.
She was a blend of youth and maturity, the Rosa of my love. It was the first time that this symbiosis of both ages in her had struck me so vividly. Now that it had been months since I had seen her, I had acquired the proper distance to see her thus. Her face had flashes of a youth not spent, or not well spent, which allowed her a reserve of wealth, while at the same time the weariness of a life she had not lived, or that had made her suffer, that had left its heavy seal on her. Like most of the women I had been involved with, she regarded me, since I was a writer, a bit as a confessor. I knew Rosa’s life, what she had been through before we met by chance at an art exhibition, and why she had attached herself to me with such a passion: she believed that she had finally met the man she had been looking for, the one who could understand as well as love her. And it had indeed been so in the beginning.
But, with time, other things count for more in a relationship: sexual habits suddenly become very important, and while two properly know that everything favors their splitting up, since their relationship is leading nowhere long-term (like living together, a necessary development after a certain point), still they are unable to split up, because meanwhile, their way of getting it on has become too powerful. If Rosa happens to read this passage, I know she will be indignant at the expression getting it on. Because for her, our sexual intercourse had come to signify something momentous and multifaceted, far above the mediocrity she had known in her life previously. And it was indeed so. She wasn’t exaggerating, and neither am I, when I say that we had reached a degree of sexual identification that was very rare. That is precisely what brought on the problem and caused the difficulties of our separation that had cost her dearly, me somewhat less.
So then what was the meaning of her reappearance in my life? What could she want from me, when I knew that in order to forget me she had gone as far as Tierra del Fuego? I knew from friends we had in common that she had suffered terribly after our split up, and everybody had urged me to help her by never appearing in her life again. As painful as it was, I had done it. However horribly I missed her presence, I never gave a sign of life. I only made sure I met with people who knew us both, so that I could keep up with her news and, through her news, relive the Sweet warmth of the good times we had had together. Of course, this happened less and less often as time went by, which was why, when I received my publisher’s order to disappear into a foreign land, into a foreign city, in order to write, I accepted with pleasure: the torment of forcing myself not to see her became more bearable. If I was far away, she would be more free to circulate and perhaps to find someone else, while I would isolate myself and recover more easily. So I was very surprised that morning, when she appeared like a comet in my room. I was so happy to see her again that I didn’t worry over the details of her motives. It was only now that we were together in this foreign room, both of us a little embarrassed, that these thoughts began to eat at me.
In the bedroom, the large double bed with a foam mattress and two pillows gently touching each other was an invitation and a provocation to our old love. Rosa seemed sure of herself; she pretended to be happy to have apparently overcome her karma. She was a different person now, free of me and of my domination over her. My hallucinogenic domination, as she used to call it, since she was unable otherwise to explain the effect that I had on her. I would have been the last person, therefore, to bridge the painful rift, had it not been Rosa herself who had taken the first step, aggressive, sexual, with flowers, in my room that morning and now again in her room, where she started slowly to undress, inviting me tacidy to bed.
I wanted her. And how! Her body had been to me, at one time, worse than opium. As soon as I saw her naked, I would be seized by a sort of sexual frenzy; I wanted her unbearably, here and now. (There and then.) Her body had an impudence all its own, which was not always in accordance with her face. Her face might be talking about other things, but her body would say, “I want you. I want you to sweeten me, to soften me, to make me submit.” And I would take her in my arms and together we would turn into a single rocket shooting into a space full of galaxies. She had loved our space travels so much; it was precisely their loss that had made her suffer.
I wasn’t long (about an hour after the scene I have described) in understanding this strange move of Rosa’s. I must say it came to me a little late because I’m an idiot where the complex psychology of a woman is concerned: I fell victim to her sexual advances, thinking that we would reach once again the apogee of our travels. But I was wrong. I was lamentably wrong. Rosa had come to see me, Rosa had sought me out, Rosa had practically asked me to bed a moment ago for one reason, apparently a very important one to her: to prove to me that she was over me. That I did not give her the same pleasure as before, that our exhilaration and our space travel belonged to a past that was irrevocably lost. She knew I would be deeply.hurt by that, because it would strip me of medals I had awarded myself for her conquest. She knew (although she never told me so; we never discussed what I am now writing) that she too needed to be convinced that it was indeed so, that she was over me, that we now had an ordinary relationship, as she had had before with other men and I with other women. Nothing unique, nothing special, nothing earth-shattering like before. By proving this, she succeeded in hurting the most sensitive part of my manhood—since all men deep down are flattered when a woman loves them—and in poisoning me with the slow-acting drug of ranking our relationship together with all others.
Of course I did not understand all this at the time. When we found ourselves face to face again in bed, everything seemed to unfold according to the old scenario of our love. I wanted her and she wanted me; we gave ourselves to each other, we exchanged some of the words we used to say, as if we were taking old clothes out of a closet. But the explosion never happened, the rocket never took off, we remained on the surface of the earth, a few meters above it perhaps, but always under an inexorable terrestrial law. I had thought then that this might have been because it was the first time. Two bodies that had once loved each other shamelessly, fanatically, like neophytes of a mystical sect, could not help but suffer a slight shock when they met again. But the s
ame thing happened the following time. During the six days that she stayed in town, every time we came together as lovers—and, if I’m not mistaken, there were as many times as days—nothing happened reminiscent of that twin flame that had set the universe on fire, its sparks like fireworks that illuminated our darkened sky. Everything went along at an ordinary, normal pace, without the slightest surprise.
What I am writing now is the conclusion, the summary of all our meetings. And I am practically convinced that she did it all for one reason: to prove to me that in fact our relationship was over and thus to hurt me, since apparently I had hurt her so much. As for that romantic line, “Let’s stay friends,” Rosa had worded it differently: “Not only friends, but lovers too. But you should know that love isn’t what you think it is. It cannot be ignited by the fire of the body. The body is a vessel, a tool, endowed with an inner power greater than ourselves, since, as you see, the very same bodies, our own, cannot reach their old records. We are no longer Olympic champions at love, but creatures like most others, with our feet on the ground, who carry out this function to satisfy a need.” Having apparently studied my psyche well, she knew that knowledge would hurt me. That it would kill me. And indeed it did hurt me, it did kill me. I tried many times to lift her up to the old heights we used to scale, like mountaineers, hanging from taut ropes, in danger of falling to our deaths at any moment, always to find, at the last moment, the magical flower of our love that would save us, a miracle on the steep slope of the most abysmal desire.
And that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that she was letting me use all the old tricks, the old passkeys with which I used to open her most secret doors, after which she would give herself to me as to a pirate pillaging her diamond coffers, whose treasures were at once replenished. It was as if my hands, by taking her diamonds, made her give birth to newer, brighter ones, through the magical power of love.
Two lovers create their own behavioral code that, after a certain point, monitors them automatically, like a computer. All you have to do is hit the key and the equation appears on the screen. So the little hypocrite was letting me, without ever saying no— showing in fact that she was enjoying it, pretending she was participating—degrade myself by pressing all her keys according to the code and getting no result. At first, as I have said, I didn’t realize what was going on. I thought that her lack of total participation was the result of trauma. I didn’t know that it was her way of proving the old truth about it being the woman’s participation that makes a lover omnipotent. If she is not moved by him, he resembles an automatic washer-dryer that turns when you press the button, that washes the clothes and dries them. But this procedure is formalized, industrial, and the wash does not acquire the fragrance it does when a loving hand washes it in the stream, on the smooth rock, and dries it in the unhewn light of the sun. That was exactly how she had made me feel when she left: that we had made, five or six times, however many days she had been here, a plastic, sanitized love, superficially intense but without the exhilaration and exuberance that had brought us together and carried our relationship along.
In other words, she had made me feel indigent. She had stripped me of the peacock feathers with which she herself had adorned me. She was tender with me, and joyful; she hadn’t changed at all. She never complained to me about our breakup, though at the time she had called it unjust and absurd. No, never. Except once, when these words escaped her lips: “What a shame, what a shame for us both.” When she said this, I didn’t understand right away, and it was only later when she was saying goodbye that her words took on their real significance. It was as if she were saying: “What a shame that you destroyed the love we knew; what a shame that whatever it was that elevated us no longer exists. What a shame that we were both denied the only possibility a human being has of joining the Gods: the possibility of absolute love.”
For me this was like a slap in the face, which I did not feel until later. During the days Rosa was here, something inside had been telling me that all was not well, but I had kept pulling the wool over my eyes. It’ll be better tomorrow, I kept telling myself. Her pomegranate will explode. Its grains will scatter to the four corners of the earth, like before. She will become the earth again, and I her sky. She will become the sea, and I the sun that warms her. But she became, alas, neither the earth nor the sea. And I became neither the sun nor the sky. We remained within our petty, carnal burdens: Rosa and Irineos, two well-defined human beings who did not overstep the boundaries of their bodies, who did not participate in the cosmic happenings, within whom the rhythm of the world was not overthrown. Two grey partridges, not proud rock partridges, rebels of the mountain; two quails flying one meter above the clover; two aphasic pheasants; family restaurants, not diners for vagabonds; two neighborhood churches, not two country chapels drunk on their ascetic solitude, with the smell of wax hanging from ossified candle stands. We had become the store-bought flowers in the cathedral, not the wild flowers of spring in the village church; we had become jukebox songs, not those old, rare seventy-eights that need special needles to be played.
I realized then how insignificant I was. How dependent on the other’s love in order to feel love. How poor by nature in the face of self-sufficient forces. Rosa had taken her revenge in her own way, perhaps even unconsciously.
I had never considered her sly or petty. But the weight of an injury can only be thrown off, it seems, by injuring the one who caused it. In these voracious human relationships that become cannibalistic where love is concerned, Rosa, to survive, had to make me die a little, just as I had made her die in order to triumph.
Then, at last, the writing began. Every cloud has a silver lining, as the saying goes. That’s pretty much what happened with me. My creative self finally got going. I have two strings to my bow, you see: when the man is hurt, the writer comes alive. When the writer Don Pacifico wins, the man Irineos loses. When the writer dies, the man survives. Rosa became Doña Rosita and I became Don Pacifico who had received her heart in a transplant and is now living with it. I had her inside me, I loved her, because with her behavior she had managed to awaken me, to make me see our relationship more clearly. What had gone wrong, what I had done wrong, that we had reached this nadir? And so, happily, because I was Don Pacifico and Rosa was Doña Rosita, I started writing and finished quickly, in less than a fortnight. Rosa’s injured heart had become my own since her death. And yet, with the heart of another, how much longer would I live?
-3-
This question—how much longer would I live?— occurred to me the day I finished the first draft. I was a wreck. I had been working fourteen hours a day, without stopping, without rereading what I wrote, advancing blindly, for I was being swept away by my passion for Rosa. I was Don Pacifico. But as soon as I finished, out of breath, I began to fear that with an artificial heart I would not be able to live much longer. After all, most transplant recipients don’t live long. Six month to two years, maximum. And for the first time in my life, I was worried. How much longer do I have left then? And what does it mean to live with somebody else’s heart?
I called her up, intending to tell her how happy I had been, deep down, to see her, but how a sadness deeper than the joy darkened the sun inside me. Something indistinct, something vague that I did not understand yet. I would ask her if this was perhaps the beginning of real love, and if she was experiencing the same feeling. Liberated after having written my book in one stretch, I would even invite her to come and join me for a while if she could. A man’s voice spoke:
“Who’s calling?”
“Have I got the right number?” I asked.
“Yes,” he snapped, when I told him the number. “What do you want?”
“I’d like to speak to Rosa.”
“Who’s calling?”
“A friend.”
“She isn’t here.”
“Oh, all right. Please tell her I called.”
“Your name?”
“Irineos.”
“No. Just tell her Irineos. She’ll know.”
“Hang on a minute....”
There was a silence. Rosa was there; he must have covered the mouthpiece with his hand while he told her my name. I waited, feeling confused, until I heard the happy, well-meaning sound of Rosa’s voice on the line.
“Hello, my dear Reno. Are you back?”
“No, I’m still here in Rome.”
“How’s the writing going?”
“Fine. It’s going fine. I’m not doing too well, though.”
“But why, what’s wrong?”
“Rosa... but what’s the point of telling you? What do you care?”
“I always care about you, my dear.”
But the way she said it sounded so distant, so indifferent, that I hastened to end the conversation.
“The one who answered the phone,” Rosa said, “was Elias. A friend of mine. You don’t know him. I just met him a few days ago. He knows you.”
“But he thought I was the bishop....”
“He didn’t make the connection.... Yes, I’m doing fine. I’ve found my balance again.”
I understood. I had to hang up.
“I only called,” I said, “to ask if you were planning to come again. That is, I’m inviting you to come again if..
... and Dreams Are Dreams Page 19