Solitaire of Love 9780822398110

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Solitaire ofLove

Solitaire ofLove Cristina Peri Rossi

Translated from the Spanish by Robert S. Rudder and Gloria Arjona

Duke University Press Durham and London 2000

© 2000 Cristina Peri Rossi

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 00 Originally published in Spanish with the title Solitario de allwr (Spain: Ediciones Grijalbo, S.A.), © 1988 Cristina Peri Rossi

© 2000 English translation by

Robert S. Rudder and Gloria Arjona Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

· .. the strangegestures that lovers invent in order to kill Love. Paul Valery

Love isgiving what one does not have to someone who does not exist. Jacques Lacan

Solitaire ofLove

Aida complains about anonymous telephone calls; a clandestine caller who does not dare give his name, or speak, or suggest a rendezvous, who accepts her angry "Hello" and then listens passively to a string of filthy words. "How do you know it's a man?" I ask with feigned indifference. "Women are braver;' says Aida. She doesn't know that I could be that anonymous caller; trembling, I too could dial her number, and anxiously await the sound of her voice. And to avoid the harsh "Hello" of an irritated Aida (to avoid her filthy words when confronted by a timid silence), I would call her at different hours; then, unguarded, Aida's "Hello" would not be harsh or furious, it would be a spontaneous "Hello;' with resonance, coins and a fish in water. "Sometimes he taps softly on the receiver, perhaps with his fingernails, as though drumming out a phrase that I have to decipher;' adds Aida. Aida doesn't know Morse code. The anonymous caller does not know that Aida has no knowledge of Morse, and that possibility may excite him: what he doesn't say with his voice, he expresses with small coded taps. Bold or unexpected encounters: "At five o'clock, in Havana: I'll be wearing a dark Slut and a white shirt, there will be a lilac handkerchief in my coat pocket, I'd like you to have on sandals:'

With the dawn, I pass the time thinking about all the frustrated trysts of the anonymous caller. "Surely, there's nothing lyrical about what he's suggesting to me;' says Aida, who cannot believe in anyone's lyricism. Not even mine. So, I anl condemned to bear it alone. Sometimes, unintentionally, I defend the anonymous caller. "Only lyricism is secret, it can't be confessed;' I tell Aida. Kiosks filled with magazines, pictures with large sex organs like the throats of bestial, primal, antediluvian animals. "Obscenity is public;' I add, "it doesn't create excitement or surprise these days." Only a madman, a solitary lyricist, would be capable of proposing a rendezvous with Aida at the conservatory of the Ciudadela, a walk along the seaside steps, a visit to the museum of zoology. On the other hand, Aida turns down several invitations to intimate parties where people exhibit themselves, nude, and where there are sexual exchanges. Proposals from men and women. "I don't think anything is so sinful that it can't be spoken aloud;' I declare. (And yet, Aida, some of my fantasies cannot be confessed. I would be ashamed, not that I have those thoughts, but to confess them to you. ) "I don't know what that man wants;' says Aida, and for an instant I blush: did she, unintentionally, mean those words for me? "You'd better leave, I don't want the child to find you here when he wakes." Dawn breaks, yellow-brown in color. Every day it dawns the same color, in this city of languishing, pasty skies that soften contours. I would like to remain in your house a while longer, to look at the metallic clarity of the sky through the windows. The roofs are made of dark tiles: the blue plumage of giant eagles. "I don't like eagles;' I tell Aida. "I have to put the clothes in the washing machine, make breakfast for the child, and do the shopping:' She comes away from love with an extraordinary vigor for common things. A~ if love were only a pause in her everyday affairs, a fugitive island in the dense sea of routine. An island where we, intermittent travelers, have scarcely rested. I, on the other hand, 2

drown in nebulous, distant waves: love carries me off, transports me, separates me from things. I wander, a lost traveler, in vague hollands, in foggy denmarks. I could not say when pleasure began nor how it ended. It might not have begun on the skin, or ended with a clitoris thrust into the mouth like a key fitting perfectly in a lock. And nothing would have changed. Enveloped in languid dreams like veils, like blue whorls, I see her stand, light a cigarette, drink some water. "If you look at me that way, I won't be able to get up:' she says, already on her feet. Like a photograph in sharp contrast, in black and white, her nude body is outlined against the back of tlle wall. The photograph, fixed, would hold this moment forever: Aida in the act of putting on a sandal, bending over slightly, her back to me, her twin thighs barely separated by a brief line (darker), the vertebral column arched softly, the nearly straight line of the shoulders, the hollow at either side of the neck where I scavenge, as at the bottom of an antediluvian lake. Aida has a slender waist, and this gives an extraordinary harmony to her body; there are no abrupt curves, no entrances or exits, only a bare slant to tlle belly (I put my ear against its surface and try to listen to the sOllnd of her viscera: the slow stirring of the liver, the imperceptible contractions of the pylorus, the vibrations of the colon, the invisible clepsydra, the slow purr of the bladder - a tortoise sunk in the cistern - the workings of the stomach and the yawn of the intestines). The legs, solemn - columns without arches - stretch upward. Aida does not move in parts like other women; she is a single entity, indivisible, with something of a giant on an empty beach, with something of a Roman matron on a stone patio. As I watch her I see that she is nothing like a rush, not at all like tl10se fragile porcelain pieces of our grandmothers, of romantic dreamers. The pubic hair, dark and abundant, protects her from obscene looks. My gaze is multiple: I look at you from the remote past of the sea and of the stone, of the Neolithic man and woman, of the ancient fish that we once were in some far distant time, of the volcano that spewed llS out, of carved wood, of fishing and hunting; I look at you with the eyes of others 3

who are not entirely myself and yet; I look at you with the cold clarity of your mother and the confused passion of your father, with the rancor of your brother and the disparaging envy of your women friends; I look at you from my ashamed "macho" animalself and from the part of me that is woman in love with another woman; I look at you from old age - "I'm tired;' you say - it sometimes shows in the circles under your eyes, in the wrinkles on your forehead. My gaze, hypnotized, follows her like a dog, hungry, passive, and patient; as some eyes follow the meandering movements of the fish in the aquarium; as the apostle follows the red parables of fire; as the puma follows the trace of blood; as the hair follows the undulating fluctuations of the wind; as the timid novice follows the power of the sorcerer. Aida does not notice my bewitchment, and so can do nothing to exorcise me; I am condemned to bear it in painful solitude. "It's late," says Aida. Is time passingr Installed in a fixed eternity like a crystal lake, I become immutable, perpetual: I have only one dimension, that of space. My pores look at you, my veins look at you, my arteries, my cavities. I have not heard the sound of the washing machine that you started: sounds have no time to cross over in my motionless contemplation.

* I read old newspapers. Time exists only in reverse: some Tuesday, some previous Friday when a man raped a little girl, a man killed his wife, there was a fire, a building burned down, the stock market went up, an actress commitred suicide. Only when I leave Aida's house am I able to break my fascination with the crystallized time in which I have been floating, a somnambulant fish. I go out to the street, ejected from my pond. Then, suddenly, the sounds arise, abrupt, brutal. Creaking orthoptera with wheels and horns cross madly over the long avenues. Trembling syringes spasmodically puncture the ground, they dig holes. Brakes scrape the grayish pavement. I am born violently into 4

sun and noise. I am born among waste and rasping. Life is bustling, filthy, foul-smelling, noisy. The instmments become jumbled, the musical score is confusing. I am born and immediately I am expelled to an island of gravel and cement, a roaring, barbaric anthill. Weaned too soon, I am Aida's orphan in a world unfamiliar to me, one that wounds me with its violent light, with its msh and its noise. I walk. aimlessly, a lost traveler in a land colonized by others. It is difficult for me to join the hive, I have lost my identity. "When someone is up against neurosis and delirium, it is best to subject himself to a routine, like a diet;' says Raul. "If a person can put his actions in order, day by day, he may be able to organize his inner structure." A routine: that is what Raul is recommending to me. ""hen she gets up, Aida turns on the shower. The water runs down, even though she is not there: I listen to the limpid tinkling - sometimes I confuse it with the sound of her urine - as she goes toward the bathroom she passes next to me with a dress over her shoulders, I hear the water, I look at the skirt, "Get up;' she says to me, "Have grapefmit with your breakfast;' advises Raul, every morning, a person must build a routine. Build a routine like an edifice with several floors: the bottom floor, the base, a good breakfast. I buy oysters for breakfast with Aida. She opens her mouth. "It's a mollusk-animal;' I tell her. ''And mosslikC;' she says. Mucus against mucus; oyster, mouth. The zeal of the oyster, her mouth. Her mouth zealously devours the oyster. On her tongue) the oyster is a muscle. Moist animals, in avid contact. And yet Aida's nudity has something ascetic, impermeable about it: like that of great Assyrian idols. It is a clean nakedness, without nocturnal secretions, without accretions. As though she were always just coming from a bath. Then the words, the old words of a lifetime, appear suddenly, and they are also naked, fresh, resplendent, cmde, with all tl1eir potency, with all their weight, unused, in all their purity, as though they had been bathed in a primal spring. As if Aida had spawned them between her teeth, and once the fabric of the lips had been broken- the prenatal bag - they would explode, red, pubescent, equal to themselves. Conventional lan5

guage explodes, a defoliated forest, I am born between Aida's sheets, and other words, other sounds are born with me, death and resurrection. I do not love her skin, but her epidermis: the white membrane covering her arms, her extremities, her neck, the nape, her feet, her arms, her elbows, her femurs, her armpits, and her phalanges. I suddenly recover my lucidity with language. As if the words surged from a hidden cavern, forced out with pick and hammer, separated from the others, hard gems whose beauty is to be discovered under the patina of binunen and gangue. I do not love her odors, I love her secretions: the slight, salty sweat that appears between her breasts; the thick spittle that gathers in the corners of her mouth, like a well of froth, the sinuous bile that she vomits out when she is tired; the rusty menstrual blood with which I trace out Cretan signs on her shoulders; the clear moisture from her nose; the splendid, sonorous horse urine that falls like a cascade from her long, ample, outspread legs. I am born and I strip myself of euphemisms; I do not love her body, I am loving her membranous liver and its imperceptible heaving, the white sclerotic of her eyes, the bleeding endometrium, the pierced ear, the lines of the fingernails, the small, turbulent intestinal appendix, the tonsils as red as cherries, the hidden mastoid prominence, the creaking jaw, the meninges that may become inflamed, the arched palate, the roots of the teeth, the hazel-colored mole on her shoulder, the carotid artery as taut as a string, the lungs poisoned by smoke, the tiny clitoris clasped to the vulva like a beacon. I do not touch it: I run my fingers over it with the lust of a blind man.

* Blind men don't see, they recognize. The darkened eyes of blind men are not turned toward things or beings - which they do not see - but to certain ideal, abstract models in the grotto. The eyes of blind men are not linlited to seeing earthly objects; instead, they perceive at a higher level: in the space of the dream. Only their hands are at the height of objects. Their operation is essential: the message from the hands - form, texture, heat, cold, moisture, 6

weight - is sent to the memory of the species, to some ideal models, the object is only one of their possible representations. On the other hand, we, the seeing, remain bound to the diversity of the apparent, to the multiplicity of the perceptible, to special deception. Seduced and trapped in inexhaustible diversity, we do not raise our eyes. I touch Aida like a blind man: slowly and meticulously, to recognize her. I need not raise my eyes because I look with two simultaneous views: the evident one that surveys the surface, and the look of the blind man that sends what is seen to the memory of the species. I run my hands over her like one who must have (re ) cognition before giving something a nan1e: Aida opens her white silk blouse, two concentric half worlds appear, parallel (the earth and its double), she takes them in the palms of her hands, holding them by the sides and pushing them together, the earth and its image slowly draw together, and the space that held them apart disappears, now the half worlds are umbilical twins, they swell and become inflamed, reddish, opulent: ubres. 1 The word surges forward, it bursts forth from the forgotten past of my infancy, it explodes with its primal force. I lick at your udders like a gluttonous calf and I listen to the rustle of the blood in your mammary glands, the crowding in your heart, and immediately, when you separate one breast from the other, palpitating like cities, the other word surges forth, dense, charged: urbes. 2 Now I see your breasts as two heavily populated cities at rest from the activity of the day. Two distant cities, separated by a river, unknown to one another. The one rising on the left bank of the river must be Bilbilis. The city of Martial. The city that has disappeared. "You only love cities that no longer exist;' murmurs Aida. Cities that no longer exist, towns that have disappeared. Those that the tide has dragged off and buried far away. Those that the tornado lifted and scattered, like ashes. Those that the fire devoured. Those that were burned to cinders by war, and are now wasteland. Cities that no longer exist, like extinct languages.

1.

udders

2.

large cities

7

The one that rises on the right bank of the river must be Viedma, from Patagonia. "One city that no longer exists, and another that is not yet;' grumbles Aida. "We have recovered the space of what is sacred," I tell Aida: we have the capacity to baptize once again. I begin giving names to the parts of Aida, I am the first man, astounded and dumbfounded, stammering, stuttering, spluttering, and in the midst of the confusion of my birth, immersed in the mystery, I murmur visceral sounds that need (re) cognition. I touch her body, the image of the world, and I baptize her organs; filled with emotion, I take out words like ancient stones and install them in the parts of Aida, as links of my ignorance. Language should be born like this, from passion, not from reason. I am the first man, astounded and dunlbfounded, who, before the majesty of the oceans, mad with terror, must name the water that lays siege to him, the waves that attack him, the fear of darkness, the pain of being bitten, the horror of death. I am the first man who, astounded and dumbfounded, must name his anguish, his happiness and his rage. The first man who, from the darkness of his viscera, impetuously extracts a deep, guttural cry, a cry full of tatters and branches, of blood and spittle, to name the passion that relentlessly pursues him. I am the first man and the last: what I do not name will die in silence, the worst punishment. And when your nipples swell under the black blouse that I moisten with spittle, they rise, erect, beneath the cloth, when your nipples, stuck to the fabric, protrude, firm and straight, the word sprouts from my apocalyptic desire: tuning pegs, I say; then, with the delicacy and knowledge of a handler of violins, my fingers, from a distance, begin the operation of approaching; my fingers, which I have previously washed and rubbed with cold cream, descend, and pressing your nipples, I turn them, I adjust them, I gird them to the trough of your breasts. I am the turner of breasts, the violinist who adjusts the pegs before I listen, yearning to hear the first sound from your half-opened mouth, from your mouth wet with ponds

8

of saliva, the note forced from your throat, the cry of the whale on the high sea, the inconceivable sound, the cosmic shout. The earth prepares for its birth while I touch you; from your red mouth, inflamed (a frothing crater), a sound, a scream begins to rise; I adjust the pegs one last time and your shout rushes out, it is uttered from deep within the bowels, from the throat, the womb, and the lungs: the shout names you and identifies you, it lays your foundation and establishes you, it baptizes and confirms you: Aida.

* "Women invented language so they could name their offspring;' says Aida, from the bed. Her back leaning against the coral-red wall, her large back, etched like the figure of an Assyrian idol, legs open, with knees lifted and thighs spread, languid arms resting at either side of her body, her right hand holding a cigarette, her black blouse half-open, revealing crimson, erect nipples. "Once;' I tell her, "I dreamed about two parallel moons. One faCing the other. Both shining in the sky together. It was night, and in the dream I felt a revelation looming. I didn't know (or I forgot) that the symbol of the Apocalypse is two parallel moons." But I still don't know what your two nipples, parallel suns, are proclaiming. I look at them and they look back at me. Sometimes, when I'm lying down, they lean downward a little too, so that they can observe me more closely. I have the sensation that you are looking at me with two pair of eyes: those of your face that wander over my naked body, and the eyes of your breasts, searching for my face, examining my mouth, my nose, my forehead, my checks. I say that your blouse is a balcony, and that your nipples, curious like women, peer forward so that they may see outside: they cannot endure the cloistered life too long. Your nipples, two confined women in search of light, the outside, the diverse. And when you dress, it is as though you were closing them in again. As if you were suddenly closing their eyes. Then you arc left only with the eyes of your face to look at me, and I yearn for the others. (Aida's eyes

9

have no lashes, they look out, cold, devoid of pity.) With only the eyes of her face, Aida is an indifferent woman: she is lacking something, like the women in Magritte's paintings. "You lose something when you close the eyes of your breasts;' I tell her. Aida covers her breasts the way one closes a book. Her dress, the book covers. Then it is as if she has been left blind. Her fleshy eyelids fall, the pupils cloud over, light flees. Dressed, Aida is a woman who does not see. Dressed, Aida is a woman alone. "There are people who are dressed by nudity;' I tell her, "and there are people who, when they dress, find themselves alone." Aida's full measure is her nudity. Surely, if she could walk naked through the streets, if she could go to work naked, if Aida always moved about her house, strolled along the avenues and went to the movies naked, no one would say that she is a woman alone. Her breasts, her nipples, her long pubic hair would accompany her wherever she went, and around her, like a forest, respect would grow. Her body, a shade less than opulent, would protect her. On the other hand, dressed, Aida is a vulnerable woman. As if her clothing were a second skin, uncomfortable, a slightly inimical disguise. The dress is the restriction.

* To speak in tongues. This expression, which I discover by chance

while talking with another woman, takes me back once again to Aida. We love each other in tongues, I think to myself, like two strangers, each understanding only a few phrases, certain signs, some symbols from the other.

* When Aida is suffering an attack of nerves, she walks, like an automaton, to the new train station, bright, illuminated like an airport, filled with travelers coming and going, with brilliantly

10

lighted kiosks that carry newspapers in every language, magazines, books, flowers, souvenirs, porcelain dolls, stuffed animals, pocket radios, foreign cigarettes. Loving her, I follow at a short distance, although I know that if I were to step in, if her gaze of a lost woman should accidentally find me, she would not recognize me. I see her moving, walking clwnsily, like a great Mesozoic animal, too heavy for water, too large for land, too blind to fly. With something of enormous sea turtles, lazy, slow, and ages-old; with something of a self-absorbed ruminant constantly chewing on a perfectly circular ball of anguish that it never finishes digesting or voiding. With something of a little girl who has grown up precociously and doesn't know her way around, lost in an adult world where she does not yet fit. She moves like this, a Roman matron passing through the patios of a house not her own, an inebriated priestess of Bacchus - a fugitive from the chorus singing in the desert. She walks, lost in thought, looking inward, an empty, inner place where solitude terrifies her, a house without windows, a garden laid waste by the southwesterly wind. "Last night I dreamed about a hotel again;' she says in despair. Aida dreams about empty hotels in a city she is unfamiliar witll, on a suddenly deserted street, in a foreign country. Alone, like a little girl who has not yet been given a nanle by her mother. Alone, like an amnesiac, anesthetized foreigner, the reason for her journey forgotten. Exiled to an unknown land whose language, customs, clothing, tradition she does not know. Night after night she becomes immersed in the dream as though on an unknown continent, with no houses, without a family's protection, without familiar faces. Every night there is a different hotel, and she looks at it with aversion; she, sedentary like a large baobab, she, who loves permanent houses, those that do not move even when the north wind blows, the northwest wind, the rancorous wind of the SOUtll, a blast of smoke from tlle dragon as it emerges from the desert. She, who loves the parental home, the uterus of brick and cement where she once chewed the lime of the walls, licked the dirt of the garden, drank water oozing from the drains.

II

But at night she inhabits the insidious floating hotels of a symbolic dream, a repetitive dream, like an obsessive cipher whose secret evades us. "Please, no more hotels, no more, no more;' she implores in the morning, a little baby, frightened of herself, of her own fantasies. I must construct a nocturnal house where she can live, in her dreams. A protective house like a mother's womb, tender as nannies of children, stationary -like the great roots of the walnut tree, filled with domesticated animals and velvet carpets. "I don't like animals that stay inside houses;' she says suddenly, rancorous. If they are not real animals, they must be stuffed ones. A raccoon with black circles under its eyes, lover of the water around her flowers. An elephant whose memory she envies, she who can never forget. A velveteen panda bear, lover of rain and of bamboo shoots that blossom once every hlUldred years. ("All of them at once?" asks Aida, incredulous. ) I must construct a nocturnal house for her where she can live in her dreams, with removable walls Aida can change every time that she, tired of space (and not of time), like architects brinm1ing with dreams, can shift as the spirit moves her. "I would never leave that house;' says Aida, suddenly agoraphobic. There would also be numerous crystal vases for your flowers. The flowers that you love above all things and that you place, serene and concentrating, in blue clay vases from Prussia, in silver vases as tall as shoots of plants, in transparent and delicate pitchers that vibrate at the high notes of your favorite sopranos. Murky belladonas that, in the course of time, inspire and arouse an intoxicating languor. Small jasmines of paradise, desirable as lichees, soft as the labia of little girls' pudenda. The shining, stimulating amaranth, exotic in your own country, common beyond the ocean. Poet's jasmines, humble and white, stained with Baudelarian wine. Disturbing lilacs, with their yellow filament. Like an ancient priestess of pagan temples, you place the offering of flowers in the corner- altar-of the living room that is suddenly filled 12

with a mixture of essences: the dry smell of hashish - identical to the smell of your skin - the noble odor of wood in your furniture, the acid fragrance of champagne from a secret vault, its name uttered as a key among the acolytes. And I - who dream of boats that move swiftly toward a destiny that I alone perceive, between fear and pain - could remain like this, suspended from the perverse contemplation - because it is timeless - of your soft hands arranging common flowers, rare flowers. "You like laboratory flowers more than natural ones;' you say to me in reproach. They are perverse flowers: born for something else. Cultivation - culture - deformed them, like a man who can only desire women with a slight lip defect, a glass eye, a breast with two nipples. That may be why I prefer the blue pine tree, growing in the center of a forest of green pine trees. I should slowly move that hotel, those hotels you wander through during the night like a lost stranger. I, who dream of mercurial ships on their way to some place, both loved and hated. Ships that glide among other ships, filled with passengers who do not know the way, who are unacquainted with their destiny. I have come to love those ships. Only because of their familiarity. Only because they appear in my dreams, still as stones, amid silvergray seas. "Are they fleeing?" asks Aida. "No;' I answer. They are not ghost ships; rather, I think they are carrying ghostly passengers who have lost all sense of time and of space. As I have. Hypnotized by my contemplation of Aida, I am a man from nowhere, from no particular time at all, a man enclosed in a museum, gazing at the prints that other men, anxious to set down thc transience of all things, have left on walls. My great desire, however, is to fix my vision. The vision that is extended and prolonged throughout the density of a timeless time, identical to eternity and death. Only from within myself does the vision see what it wants to see, witl10ut the betrayal of the lens, the pen, of sound. Useless to evoke you in photographs where I have caught you by surprise, clumsily; useless to attempt to evoke you in the

music of others, in classical or modern texts. It would be only a fragment of my vision, a small, diminished part of the scope of my own lens. "You don't love me, you love your own vision;' says Aida, unmoved. But my vision draws nourishment from your phobias and your fears, from your pain and your desires, from your previous lives, the names you had in times past, the little girls you were, from your painful menstruations, from your orgasms torn away like a shell stuck to the rock. Is there anyone who has ever loved anything that is not his own vision?

14

The construction of the port, on a small, old print tinged in pink and sky-blue, has the perfect pattern of a recurring dream, and for that reason is more real than sketches made during the day. The notion of time has been removed from the drawing; only space persists, perfectly distributed, in harmonious measures. Currents of water are represented by small parallel waves, some like others, sky-blue in color. The rise of the mountain at the foot of the bay has the perfect shape of a truncated cone, free of vegetation, tinged in pink. At the back of the small map is a distant island, entirely green, with 110 trees or houses, and from the edge of the bay, passing through very pure air (so pure that it seems unreal), a long framework of iron bars (identical to the roof of the new train station where Aida, the only aimless creahlre, strolls) crosses the space, designed to carry a hypothetical aerial tram, a square like a cage. The aerial tram was never built; the framework of iron bars lingers, like an abandoned bridge, like an escalator leading to nothing. "Berlin is like that;' says Aida, and it seems to me she's talking about the new city, designed by Dutch architects shortly before the construction of the Wall. At that time the stores' dimensions were too large for a divided city, and the giant, metal escalators, as they glide along in solitude from the first floor to an upper floor, rise and descend carrying no one, like a broken toy, its movement

impossible to stop. Like a deserted warehouse. Like a Ferris wheel at an amusement park, spirming in the void, moving through the air and holding no one. Aida loves small old sketches of cities that have lost their grace, of geometrically designed streets, torn up later by land speculation, by ever-increasing ambition. And yet, these small prints, seeming to step out of geometric dreams, in perfect balance, take her back to a lost space of serenity and beauty. I see her stop before each room in the old Association of Engineers building, as though before those old stylized jewels of artisans, who set precious stones artistically - as inscriptions of a holy text whose wisdom is now lost. One buys the jewel to display it, but no one knows if the rare combination of beveled emeralds and diaphanous diamonds contains a curse or a charm, and the haughty neck that wears it could well be an altar or a cross. "These are drawings of lost paradises;' I tell Aida, who is looking atrentively at the sketch of a plaza - which today no longer exists - perfectly circular, but adorned with diverse arches: one semicircular, one elliptical, one a lancet. Aida observes how the arches, sketched with ruling pen and compass, rise on the small ocher prints. And as she looks, I watch her, subdued by the space extending from her eyes with their large, heavy, cavernous eyelids to the small drawing of a plaza, dreamed by an architect who loves arches, as I love Aida. "We're closing now;' announces the usher, and yet Aida's feet, firmly planted on the waxed parquet, are reluctant to leave the small sketches behind, the framework of a city envisioned by architects who never reached the point of building it, by engineers who stored away blueprints of bridges and marketplaces in old chests, where they mouldered away. "These are drawings oflost paradises;' I tell Aida once more, as I take her arm sweetly, trying to disengage her from that hypnotic contemplation. I sense a dry resistance in her body, as when she does not want to be awakened. As when, in the street, Aida wants to be a free woman, a solitary woman, a separate woman. At the exit Aida buys a print in soft pastel colors-the drawing r6

of a bridge over the sea - along with a compass and ruler. It has begun to rain in this city of long, waterless summers, of dry winters, and the streets around the old Association of Engineers building are deserted. High walls prevent people from looking inside ("The wealthy protect themselves from the eyes of the poor;' I tell Aida, who is attempting to cover her head with a newspaper) where the tops of soft trees appear, bending in the rain: weeping willows, sweeping acacias that drag long manes, blue pines that seem to have stepped out of an old engraving. With the dampness, fragrances rising above the white wall, as long as a street, become humid, intense. The air seems to take on a crystal transparency. Reflections that did not exist before are uncovered, lancet mirrors, echoes of shapes in other shapes, lights that open outward like fans. The rainbow, another arch, is taking shape somewhere, being born from the light at our backs, from the sun that quickly - too quickly for my love of the water, for my love of Aida - will appear again, rather more pale, with the languishing strength of an infirm person. "The light of paradise must have been like this;' I tell Aida, who is walking silently, afraid of falling down, along the narrow strip of sidewalk near the wall. The light of paradise, a mother-of-pearl sky with patinas of copper, the intense green of wet leaves, the black earth oozing water, drenched moss, the sulfur of certain clouds that glide along as though over a waxed dance floor, the noise of water dripping from leaves, from walls, the solitude of Aida and me suddenly alone, the only inhabitants of a damp, silent paradise, lost after the flood, where petals fall slowly from flowers. The light of paradise: As we walk slowly along the narrow path, next to the wall, tlle green shades of plants are deepened to the point of turning black, tree trunks become waxen, the tips of leaves shine like crystal globes in which the entire world, created and uncreated, is reflected, and I sense, under the stepping-stones in gardens, hidden behind walls, the restless movement of insects, the creaking of tardy arachnids, the growing acti\'ity of spiders, the awakening of worms, the stretching of grimy beetles. 17

In the solitude of paradise before the Fall, Aida is a woman who still has no navel; born from no one, a woman with no mother, with no name, no ancestors, no offspring, no husband. I love her in the immensity of a dripping paradise, with reflections that glance off each other like echoes. I love her in the solitude of a paradise soon to be lost, soon to be destroyed, the instant Aida's sandals, wet, cross the narrow boundary of the Association of Engineers and step onto the opposite path waiting around the comer, a hell of noise and crowds, of metal doors and escalators, where she will once again become a woman endowed with a navel. "You are a woman without a navel:' I manage to shout at her, as we are about to tum the comer. Unhearing, Aida Ulrns. She raises her head in surprise. She looks at the opaque, brown sky. The deafening noise of automobiles can be heard, the relentless wail of a siren. Then she looks down at her feet, at tl1e dry pavement. "That's strange;' she says. "It hasn't rained here."

18

Aida's sex is a lock. I make my way into it like a stranger given the key to another person's house, so that he may explore. I am that foreigner, that explorer. The lost mariner. The expatriate of time and of space. I am that stranger. I speak a language no one knows, because my body is different from hers, and my sex is a key, not a house. I am the pilgrim in search of the temple where he may bow down and pray, the stranger who arrives at the farm, not knowing if he will be welcome, ignorant of the customs and ways of the woman of the house. And even \vhen my fleshy lips attach themselves like suckers to the fleshy part of her sex, sucking the sea juice from the conch, even then my tongue is separate, different from her tongue, different from her speech. "The tradition of keys is separate, the tradition of homes is separate;' says Aida, holding my head to her belly, like a woman with child, like a woman about to give birth. Keys, homes. "And yet;' I say to Aida who is in bed, half-naked, dressed only in an open black blouse, "we have all had many keys, but we have had only one real home." "There is only one home in every person's life;' says Raul, as he lays cards on the table to finish a game of solitaire. "And it's the home of our childhood. That is the one we remain in forever. The others are only semblances, substitutes."

I suck at her and she murmurs rumblings from her stomach. From her half-open mouth with drops of spittle at the sides, gutmral sounds rush forward, a stampede of buffalo, the heavy snort of whales in heat. The deep rumbling is forged inside her viscera; it is born there, in the palpitations of bleeding membranes, in the primal moisture of the mucosa, mLxed with residues of food and humors of fermentation. The rasping climbs with difficulty along cellular walls, through intertwined tissue -like vines that creep up garden walls, it scales the network of arteries and veins, it rises as far as the cavity of the stomach, and there it begins to resonate. Aida's abdomen flutters involuntarily, a deep dmm from the Amazon jungle; it rises and falls with dry, rhythmical shuddering: my head, held fast to the fat of the belly, ascends with round spheres of air, it descends to the depths of the liver and spleen. Ascent and descent accompanied by a deafening, deep, broken roar that hurls me into birth, that returns me to nativity, to the first days. The long, hidden moan of Aida casts us back to the origins, to the beginning. Like the rings of an old tree, every shudder of her abdomen is an epoch, an era that we cross in a boat, fleeing into the past, expelled involuntarily to the beginnings by the gravity of her abdomen. Soaking in sweat, stllck to her pelvis, T am the man transformed into a little boy, I am the contemporary of fish, the contemporary of giant trees of the Tertiary period, I am a contemporary of the first rocks, of the forming of lakes, of great oceanic shifting, of the separation of land masses, I am the contemporary of glaciers, of dinosaurs, of the archaeopteryx, of the unicorn, of mermaids. I do not ride Aida, I glide with her, in the small boat of her sex, toward remote origins, before the shout became a song, before the roar was an articulated sound, before hunger became appetite, before the marten's fur became a coat, before the plant was cultivated, before gesmre became rimal, before fear was transformed into prayer and clay into pottery. I am the contemporary of great baobabs and of the first plates above the boiling heat in the center of the earth. I anl pulled off course, with Aida, amid innumerable, giant waves; I am pulled off course, with Aida, toward

20

the only origin possible, the creaking of the elements as they explode. "Every return is a memory of the first pain;' I tell Aida as I make my way into her sex, and her face, verging on pleasure, has all the traces of this long, painful journey to the origins: her body inflamed and reddish, like a newborn; the slavering mouth of hungry animals; the deep wrinkles of ancient trees; the pained grimace of seeded land; the slightly acrid odor of metals uprooted from caverns; her eyes red with blood, her hair mussed. I make my way into her sex, finally, like a person who, once again in the origin, can rest; the beginnings were there, enveloped in lava, detriUls, veils, teguments, the rays of the sun warming the newborn. "Let's come;' murmurs Aida, breathlessly, and the plural envelops me like the bag of waters, like the wet placenta, a glass bubble in which the world is reflected, and I in it. "Let's come:' I say, and now the rhythmic movements of my delving and her gathering in bring us close together, beings adrift in the only boat passing through the ages. Now my sex (my sex of a foreigner, of an exile, of another being) is a cord. An umbilical cord that links Aida's sex (home) with the outer world. I am the outside, she the inside. I come from the dehors, she is the dedans. Condemned to this sole link, to this lone junction: to be any key whatsoever to the house, the umbilical cord that you will cut, implacably, to separate the son from his mother, the newborn from the placenta, the eternal orphan from the eternal female-with-child. "Men:' says Raul, "never cease to be children. And women are never anything but mothers." A man leaves one mother so that he may make a mother of another woman. One painfully abandons the original mother in order to commit, with the adoptive one, the longed for incest. One feeds us as children; the other nourishes us as adults. The moment we are born we drink from the primal breast, then, the rest of our lives, we drink from the vicarious breast. Weaned from the original paradise, our mouths, always open, round as lambs, attach them-

21

selves, fix themselves, sucking on white udders, on full udders, sucking the sacred juice, the vital breath, the warm liquid of the mammary glands. We are the eternal orphans, the nostalgic children, the nervous, neurotic, spoiled pups. "Being orphans doesn't allow us to grow up;' says Raul, "and we don't allow girls to grow up. When they are about to become women, we quickly make them into mothers; it is our way to continue being children, and to escape the permanently unsatisfied demand of a sex we are unfamiliar with." Breast, bay, boding. "I went to bed a virgin and woke up a mother;' says Aida, her black blouse open, revealing her symmetrical white breasts with their concentric axes, windmills for my pleasure. I sink my fingers into the neck of the bottle. The middle and the index finger. My fingertips become moist. "Men marry their mothers;' repeats Raul, about to win the delicate Queen's solitaire. Milk drips from my fingers. My fingers, soaking in milk, are two newborn infants in search of your breasts. "They raise them with their own children: they feed them, wash their clothes, cradle them when they're sick, rejoice in their antics, they shine their shoes, select their ties, they help them blow their snotty noses, they watch their bowel movements. 'Have you finished?' they ask the child, the husband. Great sewers for depositing what we rid ourselves of, what torments us, what weighs down on us, what makes us tense, what inflames us;' adds Raul. I moisten your nipples Witll my fingers dripping milk. The white liquid runs, hangs, like a drop of honey on the purple, ripe fig, on the two pink, large, haloed helices. I open my mouth like a fish out of water, gasping. My fingers make turns around your nipples and they become swollen, hard Paleolithic stones. I open my mouth like a condemned man about to die. You watch what I am doing with a puzzled look, the way one observes a child who is babbling incomprehensibly. You look at me with condescension, a poor madman who has never grown up, a poor orphan, a poor loveless man, weaned, a poor man with no nipple, without milk, without 22

motherliness. Finally, with infinite tenderness, you take my head in your hands (my hair is wct, my fingers wet, my cheeks damp, my lips full), you place it softly between your breasts, you put one hand on your tit, you lift it with your fingers, you hold your nipple to my mouth, I moan like a newborn babe, like a hungry pup, and you allow me to suckle.

23

Aida loves to contradict me. But to do it, she must first know my opinion. That is: I have to be the one who takes the initial risk, as I expound, I must be the one to expose myself. I must be the one who expresses a desire so that she will be able to decide whether or not to satisfy it. "Whoever speaks first assumes a risk;' says Raul. He is condemned to be the mirror in which the other is reflected, or in which the other is refracted. I feel like the musician sounding a note on the tuning fork, just to give Aida an opportunity to disagree. But for her to be able to contradict me, I must first make some sort of sound. I know from the outset that my opinion will be asked, not from any particular interest, not out of curiosity, but because when I give it, I will become vulnerable. When 1 make a judgment, or offer my opinion, that allows me to become the target of Aida's opposition. The game is played out the same way every time: Aida guesses what my opinion will be, she waits for me to express it, and then, as always, she contradicts it. If I refused to give it, she would have nothing on which to base her opposition. If she were the one who ran the risk by speaking first, the possibilities for contradicting me would diminish visibly. Like a well-fed fish, I keep to the familiar ritual. Every morning,

like a judge pemsing the pages of a monotonous list of charges, Aida examines the newspaper. I sit facing her, and I drink: a cup of coffee, outwardly calm, like a smdent about to take a test and attempting to hide his nervousness. I know that I will be condemned flatly. No matter what my opinion (and it's possible to suppose that Aida knows a good deal of what I might say beforehand), I am destined to having Aida always oppose me. And yet, I nearly always choose to give an honest opinion: Aware that I will have to defend my opinions before a tribunal disposed only to find me guilty of imaginary crimes and offenses, I prefer trying to defend what I believe, simply as an intellecmal exercise. Aida scans the newspaper so that she will be able to torment me. She's had access to it before I have (among the morning's rights, the newspaper belongs to her, like a tribute the world gives her so that she can exercise her power): like a blind man, I listen to the mstling of pages, not knowing what is in them. Not knowing what the subject of my examination will be today, to what tests I will be subjected. Aida pemses the pages of the newspaper, searching out my guilt, trying to discover which article -law - will allow me to fall into the trap. (The room is large and full of papers. I'm certain I've been here before, when I was very young. I recognize the gray walls, the sinks with full drains, and rising from them the odor of urine and of herbs clandestinely smoked. I don't know who brought me to this place - that I thought I had forgotten - or for what purpose. I am surrounded by functionaries in grav mnics who are poring over dispatches. Suddenly one of them smiles malignantly. In one hand he is holding a photograph of me, taken when I was an adolescent, and in tlle other a yellowing bundle of papers. He has uncovered my offense. If I now find myself there again unexpectedly, it is because of an old transgression that I believed had been forgotten. The omission leaps out, violent, irremediable: there is an examination I did not take, a test I did not pass, some paper that was misplaced during my university smdies, something I should have done but did not do, that has suddenly surfaced with all its force.

25

How could I have gone on in spite of that offense? Ignorance is no excuse: In vain I try to demonstrate my innocence. I didn't know about my omission, I wasn't conscious of it. I don't understand myself how it could have happened. Besides, the examination they're demanding of me is outside my field: it is knowledge I don't possess, a subject I have never studied. So I was at fault not only at that moment, but much later as well, because I have been living with an astonishing lack of awareness about my dereliction. Sometimes what I have missed is a chemistry test - a field I know absolutely nothing about; other times it's a cosmography exam; it is always something I am completely in the dark about, something I should have known, but did not, or, in any case, something I honestly thought I had done and did not do. Added to the terror of being found guilty of a crime that I unknowingly committed is tlle time factor: many years have gone by since my wrongdoing, since my involuntary transgression: I cannot go back and rectify the error I made, but still, that error keeps me from going on in the present. In a certain way, I am outside of time: I am conscious of an old, irreparable debt, and furthermore that same debt is an obstacle to my going on in the future. My earlier fault is a barrier. ) On page four of the newspaper's morning edition, Aida finally finds an article worthy of testing me on. But first, she has to determine my ignorance of the law, my ingenuousness as a reader. "Have you read this morning's paper?" "No;' I answer, as though it were simply an innocently put question. (I bought the newspaper for you when we went down for breakfast, I handed it to you like a convict who has bought the rope with which he'll be hanged. You accepted it with the haughty demeanor of a goddess accustomed to human sacrifices. ) Aida carefully chooses a paragraph from the article, from the law that will fall implacably on me. She reads it aloud and I listen, as though these were the preliminaries to a judicial decision that can never find me innocent. "Well then, what's your opinion?" she asks me after she finishes

26

reading. I take a moment before answering, like a condemned man who stands, looking at the shadow cast by the guillotine. I see low gray trees struggling to grow in the middle of the pavement, in sidewalks full of fumes and soot. Higher up, I discover a basrelief - on the facade of a very old building - nearly invisible under the patina of dust and mist. Perhaps it is of a woman, with long red hair and wearing a long tunic -like the ones Aida sometimes buys at the used-clothing store - who is harvesting wheat. I would like us to gaze, together, at the red-haired harvester of wheat on the frieze of a nearly collapsed house (like those pictured on old French postage stamps). I would like us to stroll along the footpath by the sea, hidden among wooden pyramids, among heads of cranes, among enormous blocks of cement. But, hypnotized, I accept Aida's customary challenge. The lazy ritual of each morning. I have to give my opinion so that the game of opposites can begin once more. "The one who speaks first both expounds and exposes himself;' says Raul as he places the chess pieces on the board once again. He is condemned to be the mirror that reflects, or the mirror that refracts. "Do you prefer the blacks or the whites?" "The blacks;' I say. "I feel more comfortable defending myself than when I have to attack." "It's all a matter of perspective;' says Raul. "The defender's moves actually depend on the aggressor. He should use no more strategy or imagination than is necessary for an adequate response." "I'll play one ganle with the whites and another with the blacks;' says Aida, uncertain about which selection will give her the advantage. "There is still one further pOSSibility;' maintains Raul, about to execute a delicate queen's gambit: the absence of a mirror. Without an image to be reflected or refracted, the "I" cannot become hypertrophied by a similarity or puffed up with pride by an opposition. Without mirrors, Aida would be blind to herself. In what vain form would she see herself? "The pleasure of seeking out an opponent does not lie in the

27

curiosity to discover truth or in the desire to investigate. The pleasure of opposition is that in our own eyes it gives us the prestige of our adversary. There is competition only between similar beings;' declares Raul. Aida and I: both different and the same, like a person looking at himself in the mirror.

28

Aida sits on the floor, half-naked, surrounded by papers and old photographs, like a little girl who has opened a hidden chest belonging to her mother. Half-naked, her legs spread, like a large, broken doll who is missing an arm, or the calf of a leg, or a shoulder bone. Something is dislocated in her, something very old: like those statues from the past that we admire - with all their nearly imperceptible deterioration, with all their lack of perfection. Unfinished, broken; we will never know whether we might have loved them more in their entirety (Venus without arms, Ceres with no head, Diomitylla with a harelip), or whether the small gap, the perverse blemish has given their heauty something that was lacking before, that hollow or groove along which our fantasies flow, fired by their imperfection. Around her are spread old letters, wrinkled papers, antique glass heads, yellowed photographs. Half-naked, she sits like a sacred cow in a temple. Halfnaked, surrounded by the past, sunk into self-contemplation like a great autistic idol. Surrounded by herself, wrapped in her own memory as though in prenatal liquid, as though in a fine, membranous sac that will neither let her grow nor leave. Surrounded by herself, by her emanations, by her fibrous memories fixed forever on the texture of paper. She has read parts of letters from former lovers, from faraway loves who loved her yesterday, three years ago, fifteen years; perhaps she was moved slightly by the curvi-

linear echoes of sentiments they aroused in blue ink, in green ink, in black ink. She sits, half-naked, enveloped in the old vapor of broken loves, as though in the intoxicating perfume of perverse belladonnas. "Aida!" I call to her, like someone trying to awaken a person who has been slumbering in a sleep of the ages. "Aida!" I call to her, like someone at sea who makes out familiar, uninhabited land. "Aida!" like someone trying to rescue a lost wanderer from a dark cave. ''Aida!'' I shout at her. "Come out of yourself! Leave yourself!" Aida does not hear me, she looks at me without seeing, immersed in the well of herself, in self-pitying contemplation of her own past. "Everyone has a history;' I tell her. "Everyone is a sewer of detritus. Everyone is a museum. Everyone harbors the beauty and hideousness of the world." Aida does not hear me. Aida, a witness unto herself, is immersed in her past, like an inverted conch. Like a snail in its shell. Deaf, mute, before the appearance of the word, of the sign; from her arms hang clusters of letters, sketches, and papers, like unfathomable palimpsests.

30

Sometimes, by chance, I hear echoes of catastrophes: last summer, for example, the city's air was poisoned by a high concentration of lead and aluminum particles that fused in the atmosphere like a nuclear mushroom cloud. Last summer? At some point, in the back of my mind, I must have realized it was summer. I no longer notice the passing of seasons. Obsessed, like a creature from another planet - distant, isolated, alienated - I'm unaware of the passage of time, of the progression of the seasons, of the change from hot to cold. I have become a nonthermal being: heat and cold do not depend on the earth's position relative to the sun, but rather on my relationship with Aida. She is the giver of cold and warmth. Of the infertility and aridity of great, frozen tundras, of the abandonment of the desert, of the chill of snowy summits, of the warmth of the land, of blazing heat given off by burned stones. Cut off from external reality, absent from her, I am a man who lives in no hemisphere, in no equinox: there are nights wet with passion, days frozen with indifference. All the empty ideas that people find to mouth about the weather roll off me, like phrases spoken in an unknown, foreign tongue. The verbal traffic - from which I am apart, cut off, isolated, because it is nearly always a loveless language - sounds flat, completely unintelligible. \Vhen someone says something to me in the elevator, on the bus, in the street, I feel a sort of irritation: phrases come to me

from a distance, as though they're separated by a dense barrier, and it takes an effort to remember their meaning. Then I find myself having to raise my head, to look at the sky and decide if it will rain, or I have to look at the appearance of the trees to know if autumn is on the way. These corroborations mean absolutely nothing to me, they exhaust me because they demand that I interrupt my inner dream, the subjectivity of my inner discourse, simply to get bogged down in an absolutely useless series of judgments and opinions. Like a deaf musici,m who listens only to the inner melody, like a mute vocalist who sings the lieder simply by mouthing the words. In the same way, the other incidents in the world: the beginning of classes, their end, national celebrations, Sundays, holidays. Apart from the passing of days, I live in a perpetual eternity that varies only by spells of insomnia, by the cruel vigil of my nights without Aida or by a weary sleep after love. I'm a person removed from time by subjectivity, and launched -like one of those swiftly moving satellites one sometimes follows in the evening sky - toward an unknown, circular limbo, toward the timeless realm of the infinite. "No one talks any more about those poor guys who, five months ago, were in a capsule, spinning around in space all by themselves:' Aida says in the morning. "Everyone to his own delirium;' says Raul, alluding to his patients. Like the argonauts in space, I spin after Aida, in my own capsule of isolation, in my ship of subjectivity, and the sun - it may not know that it's the sun, spinning alone around itself as it does. I am the man from limbo, gone astray, lost. I am the one outside of time, the one who has taken flight in an orbit that nobody else can comprehend. Subjectivity has left me without space, without time, without contemporaries, witnesses, marks of identification. I can't share my time, my eternally present obsession; I cannot share space, because my space is Aida, and all else has disappeared. I have nothing that could be useful to any other man: I can offer no favors (all my favors are devoted to Aida), no pleasant conversation: only 32

people who do not love can talk about the world. I can offer no social pleasures (love is not gregarious: man becomes social in order to stop loving - or to flee from love), no happy frivolities (love is as serious as death and similar only to agony: the same consciousness, the same intensity, the same pleasure-pain, the same living for the moment as unique, inimitable, ephemeral and deep). I am a man without possessions, without property, and yet filled with subjectivity. And this subjectivity, given over completely to Aida, cannot be shared: it begins and ends with her. "Love makes habits fall apart:' I tell Raul. I am, in effect, a man without customs, without schedules, without order, with no pillars of reality on which to lean. I don't remember what I did yesterday, nor do I know what I will do later: alienated from everyone and from everything, acts, reflections, certainties have flown away, have scattered, have disappeared toward a past that I cannot remember. 1 don't recall the person 1 was before Aida (if that person ever existed), and 1 feel incapable of imagining even the most minute routine that I would recognize myself in tomorrow. I'm a fellow without a memory, a man without roots, without habits, and worse: I am a child with no mother to teach him how to eat, how to dress, to speak, to get along with others. In order to love Aida, I have unlearned the world, I've forgotten culture. I am an uncivilized man, someone who does not know. I've lost my habits, they have exploded as though ignited by a destroying energy. 1 don't eat, or 1 eat too much. (Alimentary phobia: I cannot accept nourishment - I want only to nourish myself from Aida, from her juices, from her flesh, from her secretions, her voice, her emanations - I don't want to ingest or introduce any substance other than Aida into my body. Or rather, I suffer from oral anxiety: I devour great amounts of indiscriminate types of sustenance, 1 try to fill the interval when Aida is gone by devouring food as though it were enormous chunks of hours and minutes that 1 bolt down hurriedly to make the time until we are together again pass by quickly. ) Separated from other men by my irreconcilable difference (1 am 33

one who loves, who is in love; in other words, someone unproductive, unsociable, savage), I observe the habits of others as though they were small acts of apprenticeship that I must undertake, but whose execution I find extremely difficult. I would like to ask what time I should eat, what I should eat. My likes and tastes have changed too, all at once, consumed by the same force that made habits shatter. I suddenly detest meat, my favorite dish, and I favor fish. But soon afterward I become tired of fish and I prefer pasta. (Inside my mouth everything changes into one same pap that I can't swallow, or into a mixed mass of things that I ingest voraciously, indiscriminately. ) Aida, an implacable observer, says: "The way you eat is absolutely erratic. You'll get sick" - and this observation seems odd and out of place to me. "It's not the food:' I tell her. It's something else. I'm surprised that she can have a natural relationship - that is, a loveless relationship - with food. She eats at precise times, always at the same time, and she makes certain that her diet is sensible and balanced, with proteins, vitamins, mineral salts, lipids, and very little fat. She carefully selects the menu for each day, and she establishes regimens for purifying the blood, for avoiding cholesterol, for reSisting infections, for improving her skin. "I've begun a diet to eliminate toxins. Do you want to try it too?" she asks me. (The illness is love, I think; the toxin is the other person, and that sort of poison isn't gotten rid of by eating vegetables or cereals, by drinking large quantities of water, or by quitting smoking.) In the same way, I don't sleep or I sleep too much. (It seems to me that being constantly vigilant is a tribute, an homage that a person owes to love; I must remain watchful so that I won't lose even an instant of contemplating the woman I love, so that I won't lose even one second of this yearning, always unsatisfied state that is love, so tllat any request, any desire of the other will find me awake, alert, watchful. If J should fall asleep, it would be like effaCing myself from this duty of love, from tlle vigil of arms. It doesn't matter whether I'm alone or with her: sleeping would 34

always be a betrayal of service. Aida, on the other hand, sleeps peacefully: I am her barbiUlrate, her narcotic. 1 am the pill she swallows before going to sleep, lulled like a little baby. "1 sleep because I'm satisfied:' says Aida, and this assertion makes me feel both flattered and uneasy. Then, docs satisfied love really exist? 1 watch Q\'er Aida's sleep. (I watch you sleep and I know that you are not with me, 1 know that sleep separates you from me and takes you to your inner self, a forbidden zone while you sleep, a private territory where you once again become the Aida you were before my arri\'al, the one I didn't know, the one 1 have lost forever, the one who refuses to be a little girl again. I watch you sleep, and I know that I cannot gain entrance to that space; 1 don't sleep for this very reason: so there will always be a place where you can find me, so I won't have a space of my own. 1 watch you sleep and I know that I'm not behind your thick eyelids, a hea\)' curtain, a dosed door, a tl1eater where an event will take place to which 1 am not, nor shall I ever be, invited. 1 watch you sleep and 1 feel discriminated against: 1 am the black man in a land of whites, 1 am the Jew in Germany, the woman in a saloon, the woman in a fishing boat, 1 am the Indian, the dwarf, the old man, the foreigner. I watch you sleep and 1 know that you are withdrawn into yourself like the snail into its carapace, like the oyster into its shell: you are withdrawn into yourself the way you are when, apparently awake, you move distantly through the house, you open chests witl10ut rhyme or reason, you dean what you have alreadv cleaned. An automaton, a sleepwalker, bent into yourself, confined, closed, hidden, impenetrable, unpossessable, alien and foreign.) As Aida's mouth closes, it leaves an imperceptible gap between her lips. She falls asleep on my shoulder, and immediately a thin string of saliva runs down to my skin: in dreams, Aida spills out her vital essence upon my shoulder.

35

In the dream, Aida and I live in the same type of house, next to each other. (Aida's sex is a house.) The city is that of my childhood. As in the bordellos of Amsterdam, the windows reach to the fioor, and one can see inside. My mother lives in the house on the left, and Aida in the one on the right. I stand in the middle of the street, between the two windows, and suddenly, on the empty sidewalk:, a man appears whom I have never seen before, he walks toward me. He is an ugly man, common in appearance, with a pimply face and wearing thick glasses. He informs me that he is Aida's new lover, and that she has told him I must give him the key to her house. I feel completely confused by this revelation. From inside, Aida watches the scene impassively. So then, I am not Aida's only lover, or even the latest one. Pain and irritation cloud my senses. Furthermore, I don't have a key, nor have I ever had one. The man insists, even with a certain graciousness: it's nothing personal against me, just an order from Aida. "I don't have one, I've never had one;' I tell him, "and if I did, I wouldn't give it to you:' I answer. Then, determined, the little man goes in through the window. I am left alone in the middle of the street, abandoned,

rejected, filled with fear. Seeing what has happened, my mother says to me: "It's very strange that you have never had Aida's key." "It's only a dream," says Aida in the morning, indifferent. I am a man without a key, that is, a sexless man.

Aida feels bitter about her ex-lover, a professional photographer she lived with before we knew each other. Every morning as I gaze at her, seminude, she begins the day by launching a string of filthy words against the absent photographer (even though it was she who left him). I listen paSSively. On the face of it, I'm benefiting from her irritation against her former lover, but at the same time I feel a deep sense of uneasiness. On the one hand, I'm offended that her pleasure with me isn't enough to dispel her bad mood: even if it's through Aida's rancor, the photographer is there, between the two of us. (However, I feel like a man without a past, with no feelings of anger, without old wounds: I am born of Aida, I am the virgin son.) On the other hand, I identify with the abandoned lover: I could end up having the same fate as he (who loved her). I would prefer to listen in silence (hiding my fear as well), but Aida won't allow this: she wants my opinion, she insists on my becoming involved in the dispute she's still having with him. I see the danger in the situation at once: if! defend the photographer's love (in other words, if! defend my love so that I won't be abandoned the way he was), I will irritate Aida even more. However, if I take her side, she might grow less perturbed, but I will be condemned to be a victim in the fumre. I attempt an intermediate road, one less open to danger: "He must feel very hurt;' I say calmly.

"Now, look!" responds Aida, irritated. "He was the one who hurt me. I was the victim. That's all I needed - for you to defend him;' she says, turning her anger against me. Immediately afterward she adds: "1 was stupid. The fact is, I should have left him a long time before. Instead of keeping still, giving in, bending to his every wish, I should have left him without a second thought." (I don't understand, or 1 understand only too well, the reason she is complaining. Aida feels resentful because she punished her lover by leaving him; and instead of going mad, or begging for forgiveness, or dying, he's living with another woman. ) "But he loved you," 1 tell Aida, and I feel that by emphasizing the photographer's love l'm really pointing out my own. (One day you'll leave me too, Aida, and ifI am able to survive your abandoning me, ifI don't die, you will think it's proof that I didn't love you. You'll throw me out of your bed, drive me from your heart, you'll use any excuse to ban me from your home, and afterward you will also find me guilty of sleeping in another's bed, of having another love, of living in someone else's house. Insensitive to any pain you cause, blind to the wounds you inflict, beyond all law, like an autistic child, you respond to someone's love only as they bend absolutely to your will. And your abandoned children, your orphaned sons, learn to live without you, with an open wound that slowly stanches: yours, on the other hand, is a bleeding groove that does not close, a furrow along which you distill bitterness and resentment: when you condemn one of your lovers to exile, you and only you can forgive the imaginary offenses they have committed. ) "Ha;' laughs Aida, sardonically. "That's what he used to say. But he lied. In fact, he was the one who left me. And you're taking his side?' Once again I have lost ground. Once again 1 am the one under attack. "It would be very indelicate on my part;' I say, changing tactics, "if I didn't feel sorry for the man who lost you." "Well, he certainly recovered easily enough;' says Aida, aggressive.

"Maybe he hasn't recovered," I say sweetly. "Maybe he's merely surviving." (What I don't dare tell you, Aida, is my deep fear that tomorrow or next week I too could be like the photographer, abandoned the way he was; I could be tl1e one who is abandoned, the one shut out, your pariah. By feeling pity for the photographer I think I can magically assure myself of my successor's pity, his defense, that he will advocate for me and bear witness to my love to you after you've stopped believing in it. ) "You're only defending him because he's a man;' says Aida, irascibly. (No, Aida, I would like to tell her, the way we are alike is not in our sex, but in being in love and abandoned. ) "The same thing happened to me with Hugo;' says Aida, unwilling to forgive anyone. "I waited a long time before I left him." (Hugo is the father of her child.) "Then I realized that I should have made mat decision long before. But of coutse, I was too yOW1g and inexperienced. And besides, he was my husband." "At least;' I say, trying to be conciliatory, "you have his child?' "His child?" exclaims Aida, indignant. "It's mothers who have the children! What are you minking? A man can never be certain that a child is his. Only tl1e mother knows whose it is. You can fool a man into believing he's the father all his life; but a woman carries her child in her womb; that's a unique experience; it can't be imitated. A man's involvement in me birth of a child is only minimal: just a few drops of semen that he flings around entirely at random, even uselessly: every day he spills them out in the sheets or in his pants, he throws them down any hole at all. No man can know what it is to have a child. Only mothers know." (And yet, Aida, I have loved your maternity. I'm not the father of your child, nor will I ever be a father to any child of yours, but I love your retrospective maternity: your body becoming more plump each day, monm after month, your tits swollen, the nipples reddish, the rubbing of your blouse against your full breasts - "My clothes hurt me back then;' remembers Aida - I have loved your open legs, me rhythmic contractions of your vagina, the weight on your kidneys, the pain in your back, your bliss of spirit when 39

you've felt yourself brimming over, the sweet serenity on your face of a woman who is expecting, the gleam in both your eyes - "1 have known no other completeness, no other fulfillment, no other satisfaction" - I loved the doctor's incision in the vagina, I loved the brutal orgasm of birth -- a mixture of pleasure and pain - the languor of your legs, the weakness in your voice, the terrible puerperal emptiness, the sadness at having been full and now being empty, the womb that has fulfilled its role and now feels disenchanted, and then I have loved your breasts once more, the solemn, religious moment when, for the first time, alone in your room, you uncovered your tits - swollen, reddish, full, and painful- slowly you drew the anxious, blind mouth to your moist nipple and you felt the flow. 1 have loved that instant as no other, as only you could have loved it. 1 have loved you, alone and selfcentered, in the sort of pleasure you would share with no one: no matter who the father of your child might be - and there is no doubt that it's your husband - you were unwilling to let him participate in the most intimate of ceremonies: suckling the child of your loins. That mass of flesh you nourished for nine months with the secretions of your womb, that you enveloped in an oleaginous membrane, that pulsed to your rhythm, that belonged to you alone, because you were the house and he the inhabitant; because you were the wrapping and he the contents, because you were the proVider and he the recipient; because you were the cloister and he the cloistered, because you were the food and he the hunger, because you were the warm shelter and he the storm, because you were the fullness and he the emptiness; because he was the part of yourself that had slowly been formed by your pain and by your pleasure, by your will and by your constancy. ) "After all, he hasn't been such a bad father;' I say, trying to be fair. ''And he wasn't such a bad husband either;' Aida now corrects me: "five years were enough for me to see that marriage is the worst sort of humiliation a woman can bear:' Aida's wounds do not heal. They are like open furrows, distilling venom: their toxicity pervades me like the fragrance of flowers 40

in her room. I listen to her passively, and slowly I become contaminated. From you I drink the tears, the bile, the sweat, the menstrual blood, the urine, the rage, the pancreatic juice, the irritation, the spittle, the frustration, the wounded pride, your vomitings, rancor and loathing. The rancorous bile, the tears of loathing, the irritated menstruation, the aggressive urine, the toxic spittle, the venomous milk. At night, worn out from complaining, empty of her rancor, devoid of her anger, lethargic after baring her soul as in a fit of convulsive vomiting, Aida sleeps heavily at my side. Now Aida is a great marble stahle left at the seaside. A dead giantess. A great bulk of flesh without feelings or memory. Aida, empty of her anger, sleeps the way exhausted children do. She has fallen into the restoring limbo of sleep after an illness. When she awakens, she will remember nothing of the previous day. She will have erased the traces of her vomit, the spots of blood from old wounds, the disintegration of her feelings. At her side, I am unable to sleep. The toxins of her memory have poisoned me and, stretched out on the bed, my legs feel swollen, my limbs numbed, my tongue rough and yellow, my lungs blocked, my stomach full of undigestible lumps.

* In the dream, I am ill. Through my gorged mouth I begin to spew out my intestines in large circular spirals. The fecal scum accumulates in my throat, on my tongue, on the roof of my mouth, I feel it passing between my teeth, I see it coming out and soiling my body, the sheets, the floor. It is an endless vomit, but it brings no relief: it stops only when I awaken suddenly, frightened.

41

Love draws things into the present: I am a man without a past, a man who loved no one before Aida, who knew no other body, who had lain with no one. I am severed from myself, from my yesterday, from my yesteryears, I am cut off, divided: my time is the present with Aida, and when I am far from Aida, my time is taken up with waiting: then I have no past, I have only a future: when I will be with her again. A strange fellow, this one, torn away, separated from the rest of the world, attached umbilically to time by nothing more than a narrow cord named Aida. At the same time I cannot imagine a future. I am immersed in the bewitched enchantment of the present: under hypnosis, time stops, it is fixed; only when one awakens - when one becomes lovelessdoes he regain the normal notion of time. If that should happen to me, if some day, both desired and feared, my fascination came to an end, 1 might suddenly turn into an old man. For the moment 1 am ageless: like people with phobias about clocks, I am suspended outside of time, released from having to calculate days and weeks. Equal to myself-unchanging in the perpetual enchanted present - 1 am without a past, without a future. The allusions to time that I chance to hear create a great sense of wonder in me; one difficulty immediately: I cannot understand which time they are talking about. For example, if 1 hear someone say: "1 have a doctor's appointment Tuesday;' 1 have to close my eyes, concentrate

intensely so that I can understand the meaning of the words. Tuesday? I vaguely recall that it has something to do with the name of a day. But I don't know which day, because I don't even know what day this present one is. Or to put it better: my days don't exist as transitions, they are not disttibuted along dle conventional frame of hours and minutes. My way of counting has become different: it doesn't depend on the light of the Silll, or the movement of the earth around it, but on the presence or absence of Aida. I don't live on a Tuesday, or a Wednesday or a Friday: my present is either being with Aida or the terrible anxiety of waiting. There are no clocks for this sort of time. The sea is blue in ilie small bay, awash with pebbles. A white village dut climbs over the mountain of dark, bare rock, so dry and impenetrable that ilie heart looks on it in awe. The roads are also made of stone, and the walls that separate it are of stacked flagstone. Olive trees are scattered here, like funereal specters. The old reconstructed casino rises, facing ilie sea. "Too white for me;' I tell Aida. "That's what I like about it;' she answers. A few hours from ilie city, along the busy highway, one reaches ilie coastal village after climbing roads that wind over the mOllltain, above the sleepy, still, motionless sea. The boats are positioned on its oily surface as though anchored (your ribs are anchors, Aida, the bones of your pelvis). There is a small marketplace, with artisans who display their wares for wealthy visitors. Worked leather, silver, crystal, objects fashioned of iron. For Aida, the great burner of time, I buy an uncommon sundial. It is a circle of fine, plated metal, wiili ilie names of the twel ve months of the year engraved by hand; another ring, concentric, also plated, marks the days. With a small movement of both - adjusted like ilie diaphragms of cameras, like your sex and mine-the solar light, penetrating through a tiny hole in ilie center, indicates ilie hour, the day. Aida, tall, majestic, receives the gift as a tribute due her. She raises it to the level of her eyes (the sun, this dying September sun, gray, motionless, opens a space between ilie clouds to insinuate itself into ilie hole of the improvised clock), and for a moment ilie two golden rings and the 43

two eyes of Aida coincide, as in a multiple lens. Then I see four women at once: Aida is the white goddess, haughty, an intriguer, born from the head of Zeus; Aida is the enigmatic Turandot who scorns her suitors; Aida is the beautiful and ambiguous Elizabeth Siddal, painted by Rossetti; Aida is a woman both old and modern, loquacious and taciturn, surrounded by objects the way children surround themselves with games. The world was created by lovelessness, not by love. "For one who does not live in the world, habits are decrees;' says Kafka. I am a man without a routine, without a daily agenda. I live among decrees that I don't understand, and when they concern me, they disgust me. I have no routine because I'm in love; my only routine is Aida. Obligations, duties, worldliness have exploded and scattered, like tired planets, like shooting stars. Only the man who doesn't love may be gregarious, only the loveless inhabit this world. And someone who has no relationship with his fellow men (but only with the divinity) someone who has broken his ties with humanity, is a savage, an uncivilized being. I live in a sealed capsule, like the astronaut traveling in empty space, without signposts, in a sphere without points of reference. But just like space travelers who have felt the irresistible seduction of floating in a different space, void and infinite, I care for my bubble like a jealous guardian: I don't allow the intrusion of present-day reality, I drive it off, I hurl it away. I buy newspapers that I don't read, with headlines that are completely foreign and that seem odd to me: I've forgotten geography, wars, the names of dictators and secretaries of state, I'm indifferent to the stock market, sports, any topic of conversation that docs not deal with love. In my house, letters pile up that I don't open, because Aida detests writing letters, and if I happen to read one, it's only in a superficial way: I am indifferent to all requests or flattery from the outside. If the water faucet or a window pane breaks, I don't have it repaired; being in a state of permanent anxiety, any distraction from waiting for my next meeting with Aida seems to me a betrayal. Buying a bottle of milk or a loaf of bread becomes an extremely difficult task. Any trivial conversation makes me weary, cyen those that seem morc serious hold no attrac44

tion: removed from my true and only interest, they are in another sphere, in another realm. So then, I am the alien in the world, the one who does not belong. I have no plans that concern anyone else, nor do I feel tied to any. And yet, I can't say that I'm an apathetic man. On the contrary: I have great energy, and it is entirely focused. But love is a socially sterile energy. Although my love for Aida consmnes me, literally (like a sort of monomania), it produces nothing, not even something so common and numerous as children. My love is socially unproductive: it doesn't build factories, it doesn't put up houses, it doesn't generate a rise in value or in benefits, it doesn't circulate like money, it brings no wealth, it doesn't make someone a part of an institution, it helps no one. Not even me: it won't make me into a more sane man, or a harderworking or more famous one. At most, I'll gain a more heightened awareness of language, but it will be a type of awareness that produces no speech: the pleasure of hypnosis is a passive, paralytic joy; it's not translated into gestures, into words or into actions. I anl not of this world: I am separate, alien from it, unconnected. A~ if! lived alone on the outskirts (unbearable, as well), in a sort of limbo or underground cave. So separate from the world that even when I occupy the usual space, the one everyone shares (a platform at the metro, the cafeteria, the restaurant, the living room of a house, the art gallery), I feel distant, divided: only part of me is there, the part that corresponds to social or cultural habits, to good manners, to laws, in other words: to the learning process; the other part, much more profound, intimate and secret, is my asocial, enamored part, that is: savage, outside the law, outside normal custom, beyond the world. I feel a sort of pleasure (perverse) when I occasionally perform one of those ritual acts that brings me back to the world of normal men. For example, I attend a social gathering, the presentation of a book (which I won't read; the act of reading belongs to the world; the enamored man has no time to read books, busy as he is deciphering symbols, the meaning of every word, every gesture, every sign of being loved. A prisoner and pawn of your face, I am one who seeks out - in an imperceptible line of the mouth, in the 45

direction of your gaze, in the vibration of your lips - the coveted message: I love you, the terrible and feared opposite message: I don)t love you and, driven to madness, seeks confirmation, tries to decipher - not in books, but in all things in the world - the security that he lacks, or the awful confirmation of what he fears). The large hall is filled with people. Cut off from the world, detached by the fact that I'm in love, that is to say, an abnormal man, I am in two spheres at once: that of social worldliness which I pretend to share with the rest, and another-intimate, solitary, reserved - that of my secret love for Aida. The people I see in the room seem extraordinarily flat to me: they have only one dimension, the social. Their entire existence is in their expressions, in their conversations, in their manner of drinking and eating. They aren't cut off, separated by love, they have no secret. I feel a certain satisfaction in being a dual man: in knowing that I can carry out the rituals of the world to perfection, and still be absent, apart, distant. This sort of enjoyment (Similar to self-sufficiency) makes me euphoric. I am one who knows something that everyone else is unaware of (my duplicity, my being present and not present, my secret), one who has something the others don't: another world, inside, solitary, filled with codes and signs to interpret and that correspond to my reading of love for Aida. (The enamored man seeks significance in the things society considers insubstantial, ephemeral; on the other hand, he loses interest in hallowed, wellestablished conversations.) I play at being intelligent, ingenious, brilliant. I pretend to exist precisely because I don't. It's like a dance of peacocks, and my tail-feathering (my sociability) is no less beautiful than any other, I even puff it up, in the sense that it's not my only possession. I can be generous: I write down telephone numbers of people I will never call, I accept invitations to events and social gatherings, knowing that when the day arrives I'll call and excuse myself or simply not show up. It exhilarates me to display, subtly, a sociability that's as ephemeral as it is superfiCial; I smile amiably, I reel off intelligent remarks, I'm well-dressed, to all appearances I am a perfectly urbane and civilized animal. (Very cleverly I conceal the savage, that is, the enamored man, tlle depen-

dent child, the one connected to the umbilical cord, the hungry one, the suckling child, the obsessive one, the vulnerable one, the pariah, the man who doesn't exist, who doesn't have, who doesn't know, the one who doesn't understand, the nervous one, the irrational, dependent, agonizing, suicidal one, the possessed.) Knowing that for a few hours I can become a civilized man once again (that is: a man not in love), self-sufficient, worldly, productive (I produce comments, speeches, jokes, I participate in the social traffic and discourse, I share in the exchange of opinions), is ephemeral, precarious; the intensity of this collision with the world is due, essentially, to its brevity; I no longer have space, I have no time; I live in exile from the world, from conventional life (work, friends, recreation, amusement, reading, relationships) and from discourse (my language is a different language, the guttural language of the savage, the stammering babel of the expatriate, the jargon of the prisoner, the street talk of the delinquent, the lingo of the tramp). To my surprise, 1 discover that I'm not irrevocably excluded from the world, the way I thought: if I renounce my love for Aida, I can become, once again, social, gregarious; I will be able to speak the common language, that of lovelessness. Someone approaches and greets me. 1 don't remember his name or profession. My memories, apart from Aida, before my love for Aida, are enveloped in a nebula, as though from another world. (In reality, I'm the one who lives on an island, alone and unknown; my love for Aida is an island outside of time and space. ) "You're here?" the stranger savs to me. "1 thought you'd left the city." (It is true: I live in another world, with no address, no map, no landmarks. ) "You're mistaken;' I tell him. "I still live in this city. But I'm very busy." (I am a very busy man \VllO docs nothing all day long. I have no time, but my use of time produces nothing, no money, no works; and so it is an imaginary time for the society we live in, an unloving society. All my energy is taken up with loving Aida, imagining Aida, waiting for Aida. ) 47

"When a man starts reading the newspaper;' I tell Raul, "it's because he's fallen out of love." Normal men who are not in love are offended by the life of a man in love. In effect, he does nothing. And yet, if his intellectual energy, the energy of his imagination and sensitivity, could be measured, he might possibly be the man who does most. "Love is an addiction;' says Raul. I allow myself to be intoxicated by Aida. Aida is my drug, and the dosages of Aida that I need increase constantly. Like the addict, being hooked on Aida creates an uncontrollable anxiety in me. I talk to myself, I drink too much, I smoke too much, but these other drugs don't take the place of the only drug that I desire. The "habit" makes me lose my reflexive actions, it sets me apart from all objects, it makes me a stranger to reality. Obsessed by Aida, I forget everything unrelated to her; the electric coffee pot turns suddenly into a complex, foreign mechanism that I don't know how to operate. Like a monstrous animal, it is composed of various parts whose relationship I cannot fathom, that I find incomprehensible. The pieces have a hostile stmcture, and I am ignorant as to both their order and the way they fit together. The same thing happens to me with clothing: I have waited all day long, doing nothing, for the burning moment when I will be with Aida, but now, when I should dress, I don't know which shirt to choose, I can't find my shoes, my pants look soiled. Finally, afraid of getting there late, I put on the first sports jacket I find, pants that belong to another suit of clothes. Quickly I go outside, but when I'm halfway there, I am struck by the suspicion that I have on socks that don't match, or that my pullover is on backward. Immediately afterward I suspect that I forgot to lock the door to my apartment or that I left on the gas. I want to go back, but at the same time I don't want to be late to Aida's house: being unpunctual exasperates her. So I keep going, with a sense of impending catastrophe: my apartment will surely burn down, or it will be burglarized, but I prefer that catastrophe to making Aida wait (besides, she would listen to my explanations suspiciously, always ready to find me guilty of failing her in some way). Not even Aida's presence is enough to make my

anxiety completely disappear. Mollified, only mollified a little by her presence, I transfer my obsession to her expressions, to her words: I observe her look, and if she draws away from me, I am in anguish, I feel a sense of betrayal. The same thing happens to me widl conversation: When Aida attempts to talk in generalities, or to ask my opinion about a political conflict, she finds a distant conversationalist, one who is Lminterested, barely responsive: I want to talk only about my love for her and her love of me. (But the fact that you don't talk about your love for me seems to me irrefutable proof of your lack of love. How is it possible to talk about anything except the loyed one? At the same time, I feel trapped in a dilemma that I'm unable to resolve: if I don't manage to talk with some enthusiasm, intelligence or interest about something besides my love for you, you become irritated, and dlat places your love in danger, but at the same time, if I talk to you about something other than my love for you, I feel I'm betraying it, that I am participating in the world, that I'm involving myself, somehow, in the time frame of unloving sane people. )

* Surely I could give up Aida. But it would be much more difficult to give up my love for Aida. If I did, I would change, once more, into a normal person, that is, someone who does not love. If! gave up my love for Aida, I would regain the world. If I am unable to become part of Aida - the way the believer is not simply a part of the divinity, but has to seduce it, conquer it, offer it tributes, prayers, vows - by renouncing my love I would finally be able to be a part of the world. I would be like others once again: with the removal of this idolatrous, solitary love for a severe, minor divinity (like a fanatic with peculiar tastes, a hunter of butterflies, a collector of fossils, someone who builds wooden miniatures), I would become a free man once again, exempt from any obligation to offer veneration and praise. Instead of being a hypnotized meditator, I would be a man unbound, separate, disconnected, lucid, and sane.

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I lick your clothing. First the thin, black strap that, stroked with my tongue, sways on your wide, white shoulder, a barbaric bacchanalian swing. The strap is silk, a fine black ribbon that I can slide with my tongue. After macerating it, I hold it prey between my teeth. I stretch it toward me and listen to the intimate mstling of silk. If I pull it upward, your breast moves gently, like a sand dune caught by a sudden breeze. I mg at it. Your breast moves. I know that witl1 the black strap in my mouth, I am guiding your breast, lifting it like a balloon that begins to rise. Then, suddenly, my mouth releases the black strap and the sands fall back, they settle into place once more. But if I lean to the left, the black strap held tightly in my teeth, like a mast, another part of your shoulder, hidden until now, is revealed; half-hidden, tl1e white moon of your breast begins to rise. And if my teeth guide the strap to the other side, pulling it down across your wide, ripe neck, your breast is squeezed like an orange, it is smothered under the cloth. The strap lightly stains my lips. It is a black dye, as though dark wounds of leprosy were appearing upon my mouth that never ceases to lick you. At times, numb with desire and engorgement, you tell me, "Be careful." I cannot take care of you, nor of myself. Love has a price.

When I grow tired of one strap, I attack the other, and I begin the operation all over again. I stretch the thin, black strap with my teeth, my spittle drips down upon the brassiere cup, I drivel, I am an anxious dog, licking, immersed in you as though in a spring. I sip, I suck, I drink, I kiss, I drivel, I stir, I squeeze, I savor, I absorb, I lick again, I relish, I sniff. The thin strap grows wet between my lips. Now and again I spit out small threads of silk, tiny black pellets that stick to my tongue, to my palate. My mouth fills with saliva and threatens to drown me; llet it fall in long lines down to your clothing; your nipple, wet, sticks to the cloth, it hardens, it grows, it takes on consistency, it becomes the crest of a mountain, it is a watch tower. "Lighthouse," I say. Beneath the cloth, your nipple rises, hard. I dribble like an infant. Long lines of saliva fall onto your skin, they follow the contour of your breasts. Then, with my fingertips, I write the signs of my moist love upon your body. The A of your name. From one nipple to the other, the horizontal line. From each nipple up to your neck, the straight lines. From nipple to nipple, the curve of a fish: my cretaceous love for you. Then, with the spittle that I have let fall on your wide and abundant belly, I trace the boat in which we rock: the large bones of your pelvis are anchors. I seize them like a man fallen overboard. I hold onto your sides, and I moan. I am the lost one, the newborn, the outcast. You move slowly back and forth and YOll rock me. Now I am the helmsman, drifting off course, driven by waves and breeze. Anchored to you, like coral. I am the barnacle to the rock. Like moss to stone. I have so much saliva in my mouth that I'm drowning and I drip a little into the well of your navel. The well holds it in place. I dip the tip of my index finger into it, my fingertip becomes wet, and with a drop of spittle hanging down, I lift my finger to the rosy orb of your nipple: I move it from side to side, I turn it, wheel of my love. The spittle, in the basin of your breast, looks gray, like a tiny sea on the moon, one of those with curious names like Sea of Melancholy or Sea of Thoughts. The soft lunar pit of the orb of your nipple will

51

be my reserve of drinking water when I am tired of navigating over your body. I will return to it, time and again, after each excursion. It will be my spring, my well, my place for repairs. I slide a moist finger along the line of your neck. I go up and down, I climb and slide back. You have covered yourself again, provocatively. On one of my returns, my tongue wanders to the edge of your brassiere. Black, transparent lace covers the upper portion of your breasts. I stroll along that line with a finger, like a sleepwalker on a cornice. At any moment I could hurl myself into space, I could fall into the abyss of your breasts. But no. I resist the vertigo, the anxiety, and I run along the edge delicately, from one end to the other. I am fond of that line. Through the fine structure of cloth, the rising of white breasts can be discerned, touched by a golden light, the light of paradise. If I sensitize the tips of my fingers, I can feel the tiny pores of your breast, warm and open through the delicate, fluted embroidery. Only after I have brushed the cloth against the skin lightly, as though by accident, do I lower my eyes, and immediately I confront the two concentric spheres of your breasts, covered by a black mesh. I gaze at them steadily so that I can measure their symmetry. There are two, on opposite sides, luxuriant, faCing each otller, apparently equal. Equal in form, in denSity, in weight:. I don't know if they are friends or enemies, but equidistant, parallel. Then I lift my hands, I raise them high above your body and, from this height, I try to cup them like two vessels made to fall upon them, gather them in, contain them. I attempt to perform this operation delicately and with perfection. First I move my fingers in the air, I rub them the way a person does before playing the piano; then I begin to shape them as if they were a mold. I must try to give my fingers the correct curvature and depth for your breasts. When I think I have designed the ideal receptacles for them, I swoop down through the air, suddenly, like a bird of prey, and I entrap them. One lies in my left hand, the other in my right: like someone enclosing two spheres. My five curved fingers have come to rest on each of your breasts, and they cover them, they hold them tight. The warmth of your bosom passes through the black cloth, like the roar of two 52

dormant volcanoes. It is a deep heat, like incandescence. Once they are trapped I move them gently, with a round, circular motion. My left hand revolves around your left breast, counterclockwise, my right hand moves around your other breast the opposite way. I try to give the two parallel movements the same rhythm. I tell you that in one of my hands I hold the world, and in the other its image. The sphere and the clock. The earth and its double. The wheel and the mirror. The moon and the other moon that, on the barbaric day of the Apocalypse, will shimmer like a lake. Love, slow and profound, begins to gain rhythm and speed. You pant softly. The two spheres, enclosed in my hands, turn warm, like fruit of the earth. Splendid pomegranates, reddish peaches. Summer suns, effervescent tumors. Hot cmdles, fiery cherries. Then, suddenly, I release your breasts, I abandon them and, free, they continue to heave, they complete two more revolutions from the thrust I have given them. They continue to quiver like sand dunes with a solid base and shifting surface. Again I raise my hands, distantly, I rub my fingertips as though about to play an instrument. My fingers arc sensitive, butterfly wings. I hold my thumbs and index fingers apart from the other fingers, I massage them and aim them, still rubbing them, toward your nipples. Your nipples show through the black cloth like two stone beacons. I take them softly between my thumbs and index fingers and I compress them, feeling them grow. At first your nipples harden. The skin rises, it becomes wrinkled. I don't see them, I only feel them. They push forward, trying to emerge, attempting to break through the black cloth of your mesh. Then, girding them well, I help them break out, as though they were the heads of survivors of a shipwreck on the waters. I pull them toward the outside so that they can emerge. And they protrude like two suns hidden inside two greater suns. Then, when they have grown large enough, I take one aside. First the left one. It sticks up beneath the cloth like a child with a hat. Your nipple, which I do not touch, swells and it grows under my gaze. Looking at it steadily, I moisten my fingers with large amounts of spittle. I carry the spittle to the black cloth. On the cloth, I move your nipple with my white saliva. I describe 53

small, concentric, twirling circles. The cloth over your nipple becomes increasingly tinged with white. I pull back a little and from above I appraise my work. The white liquid on black cloth creates an area of snow, of deep reflections. You bend your head down and you also look. With slight curiosity, you look at the white circle that encompasses your nipple, the print of my saliva, as though what has happened to your breasts were happening to someone else. "Aida!" I name you, so that you will recognize yourself. "Aida;' you repeat, your head up now, your eyes closed. '~da:' you say again, lost in yourself, like an oyster in its shell, like a sphere eating away at its own periphery. Then I part your legs. Your large legs of a Roman statue, of a matron in a patio in Carthage. They are solid legs, of one shape, wide, full, majestic. I open them like a folding screen, and you awaken from your concentration, you slowly return from the voyage into the depths of yourself and you open your eyes. I draw them apart with a soft, delicate motion: just enough to open them slightly. The black mesh covers your body from your breasts to your groin. There, in the sweet line of their joining, it stops. Your sex is small and narrow. A sex disproportionately small for such a large woman. As if, instead of being tl1e sex of a Roman matron, it were the sex of a tender little girl, still without hair growing between her legs. Hidden among your muscles, your sex is small in contrast to the rest of your body. As though it had scarcely developed, as though it wanted to be only the trace of a sex. I open your legs slightly and you look down, toward the small triangle of black silk that is revealed, hidden between your legs. I love your thighs. They are white and delicate; my hands glide over them as tl10ugh over a waxed dance floor, as though over the snow-filled valley of a mountain. And I look at the black triangle as if it were an island. An island with clustered forests of vegetation. Then, impatient, with a precise, rapid motion, you open the mesh and reveal your sex. There it is, tiny, hidden in the grove. Concealed among dark leaves and soft mosses. So deep tl1at in order to reach it, it is necessary to open a path with both hands, like the machete-wielder 54

in the jungle. I use both hands to divide your downy hair, like the part one makes in a child's hair to comb it. The smail, pink sex rests like a newborn in its cradle. I breathe hard near it so that my breath, laden with desire, will make it tremble from the warmth. The newborn lies in its cradle, with membranous markings on its sides, barely damp from the amniotic fluid. I blow to awaken it. It moves. Then, brusquely and without looking at me, you take my head in your hands, holding me by the hair, and with precision you place my mouth on the small cradle, the capsule where you jealously guard your clitoris. Now your pubic hair is my mustache. I mumble amid the hair of my face, of your sex. I stammer guttural sounds. With my tongue, I barely brush against the newborn, lying in its cradle. Gently, I assault it. I tickle it under the arms. I push it with my tongue, full of saliva. I rock it from left to right, from right to left. Slowly, the newborn awakens. It yawns between the sheets and pillows. It shows itself suddenly sensitive to a movement that I make with my tongue and I repeat it rhythmically. Then your left leg, as though connected by an invisible cord to the hidden depths of your sex, shudders involuntarily, the mechanical reflex of a sensitive nerve. I increase the pressure of the movement and this time your leg, wild, hits my head softly, it butts against me like a blind goat. The newborn has just woken and it begins to move about. It turns its head, it grows, it becomes inflamed, swollen. I lick it, and it becomes moist. At the tip of the clitoris, like a fig, there is a torpid drop, transparent, a sphere of honey that I try to catch with my lips; I drink it, but it emerges again. Now your sex is a spring of thermal waters. If I touch it with my finger, my fingertip grows warm, like a forge. But you will not let my mouth leave it. There I drink, there I live, there I am born and I die, there I breathe, suffer, cry out, howl, there I give battle. Until the tension becomes unbearable. Then I, also with a single movement, precise and quick, sink the tip of my sex into your vagina. It is not always easy to penetrate: you are the mistress of your rooms, the one who opens the door or closes it. I am the parvenu, the transient. You speak with your clitoris, I speak with my voice. My language and 55

yours are different, wayward tongues. My sex is not the word, my sex is the ear. If 1 have heard you well, perhaps 1 will be able to enter as far as the patio, perhaps as far as the bedroom. The access, the code to get in, is possessed by you alone, you give it or you take it away, you grant it or you deny it. I can only go in; 1 am the key, not a house. You, the lady of the house, the mistress, may remain alone, you can open or close your rooms, you can permit this traveler or another to come inside. It is true that I could attempt to inhabit other houses, climb other walis, transgress other boundaries, but my destiny always is to visit: you, on the other hand, are the inn. I am the outside, you are the inside. And outside is abandonment, misery, cold, the night, the necessity to find shelter. Outside is the terror of loneliness. I live on the outside: seeking always to enter. You live on the inside, protected by your pubic hair, your mesh, your laces; you inhabit yourself, for you are the interior. I, on the other hand, can only dwell in another, for I am the outer. It is true that I can leave or go inside, yet 1 can shelter no one. "1 gave my child lodging in my womb for nine months and when he left I never recovered from that emptiness:' cries Aida, the mother. I am the outer, you the inner. Even if you wished (and at times you do), you couldn't take me with you everywhere, linked by the cord of my sex, like mother and child. I am condemned to solitude because I am a key, not a house. I am condemned to solitude except in this holy instant, in this sacred instant, in this instant, uterine, at the entry, complete, while penetrating inside you, having access to your interior, licked by your juices, rocked by your mucous secretions, sheltered by your moist tissues, warmed by your fire, embraced by the: walis of your sex, received into your chamber, held close to your sides, cradled by your vaginal muscles, attached to your tegument, absorbed by the strength of your womb, trapped in vines and mosses, 1 am the trwlk immersed in the womb, 1 am the tertiary tree born in the cave, 1 am the plow that opens the earth, I am the mast on the boat as it rocks back and forth, carrying us, dragging us upriver, downtiver, until death. 56

I buy dictionaries, both old and new, for Aida. The old ones are for reading, the new ones only to be consulted. Here we look up archaic words and modem words, words that already exist and newly coined words. "Some days I wake up feeling very m;' I tell Aida. I wake up membranous and mammary, masturbatory, meditating. I become a mystic. I love her enormously; she is like an ancient idol. "Today I feel very b;' says Aida, continuing the game. Babel, bacchant, barbarous, beautiful and brutal, brawling, burlesque, bold, bovine, bilious, boring, sometimes bibulous, belching, bestial. "Bullet, baby, benzine, bubble, benjamine, bistoury, bay, buccal, blank, bolus, blond;' says Aida, associating freely. "Bewitch, Belgian, barge, Barcelona, Bremen, bellow, branchiae, belladonnas, bore, below, bow;' I immediately add. At night the dictionaries stand upright, under the bed. Asleep under the opalescent 0, under the damask D, and there, in my dreams, are words I do not know, like bastinade and bontebok.

*

Awake at three o'clock in the morning, alone, without Aida. An evanescent rose-colored hue spreads across the deep black sky. I dress. Far away, next to her son, Aida must be asleep. No possibility of awaking her, of going to her house and climbing into her bed. In the street, a few lights are aglow. A single line of cars takes up every parking space. Like large, coriaceous insects that have invaded the city, they are asleep now, resting after their victory. Among them appear frail trees, like pikes of a retreating army. In the street, no one. GlOWing bulbs illuminate a phantom curtain, an empty theater. Vips, the restaurant and store, is open, bursting with trumpery, like the night lobby of an airport, on a transoceanic flight. A few shoppers stroll among posters of old actresses, idle now, their beauty appearing somewhat fabricated, rather like cardboard. Marlene Dietrich and her long cigarette holder, her dissipated look of a bored wom;m, a woman who, although she has no illusions, arouses dreams in others. Rita Hayworth with her long, red hair, wearing a black dress and a brassiere that may be padded to emphasize her mammary glands. I move among foreign magazines, their covers nearly always the same: princes, tennis players, government officials. Aida is on none of them, although hers is the only likeness I want to see. Aida, her face always pale - a woman who doesn't like the sun - with her morbose psyche. Aida, hair over her eyes, like a spaniel. Aida and the mystery of her wide, thinlipped mouth with a slight declivity at its center. I wander among books of photographs, pictures of engines, of nostalgia: movies, furniture, perfume. Indifferent, distracted shoppers select elegant boxes of chocolate, they thumb through record covers, postcards. For Aida, who is not present, I buy a collection of prints, reproductions of works by Tamara de Lempicka. I know she loves those muscular, cold bodies, those black dresses with their fascist cut, that slightly sadistic (becau~e it is unpossessable) beauty. Tamara de Lempicka always paints the same things: the marble beauty of bodies without souls, of nearly opulent but autistic bone structures. The Lempicka book (wrapped in black paper with a red floral design) under my arm, I go to the Vips bar. Solitary, aban-

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doned patrons (do they all have an Aida somewhere, far away, sleeping alone or with a son?), extravagant in appearance, are drinking cognac or coffee, while they look down with brilliant or languid eyes at the black formica counter that shines like a mirror. A young man is here, wearing a leather jacket adorned with metallic jewelry, a mastiff on a chain lying at his feet. To one side, seated next to a redhead with a pink velvet skirt cut above the knee, 1 see a short, fat man with sagging flesh and small, dark eyes, drinking whiskey. I recognize Aida's husband. He is drinking, head down, lost in thought. 1 go over to him, and I place the book of Tamara de Lcmpicka reproductions next to his glass. "May I?" I say to him. Aida's husband nods. I offer him a cigarette. He accepts. 1 know he's a drinking man, unsociable, cynical, cold. But suddenly I'm filled with a rush of sympathy for him. He loved Aida too, and she left him, and this gives me a strange feeling of solidarity with him. Do 1, somehow, identifY with his misfortune? "What did you and your husband used to do together?" 1 ask Aida. "Nothing;' replies Aida, still irritated at him. "Sometimes 1 drank so he wouldn't feel lonely. Other times, we played cards. Hugo's a quiet man. He doesn't like to talk. I think he's afraid of people. I'm that way too." He doesn't know that I'm Aida's new lover, and this offers me the sort of perspective that he lacks. And yet, the fact that he was once her husband gives him an odd advantage over me: one provided by a paper that's no longer in effect, a lapsed certificate, a canceled contract. But I am under no bond. I can present no document that would prove Aida's love, that would give us rights and obligations, no paper that unites us; no one has seen us, there have been no witnesses, we've received no gifts, no words of congratulation. We are oddly alone, Aida and 1, separate from the world and its blessings. "1 \NOn't ever marry again;' murmurs Aida resentfully.

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Still, I would be your husband. An attentive, caring, amorous husband who adores you, a considerate, tender, thoughtful husband. ''Us, marry?" says Aida sardonically. "Don't make me laugh. Married people don't make love?' My love for Aida has turned me into a conventional man: I would like to marry her. Anything that would assure me of seeing her, of her presence, of her touch, she and I, together. If we were to marry, maybe I could think about something else. A man wants to spend all his time at the side of the one he loves, so that he can think about other things. "I'm a bachelor:' I tell Aida's husband, still immersed in his whiskey glass but smoking the cigarette I gave him. The redhead at his side is drifting into a deep sleep. Sometimes Aida sleeps that way too: like a large ocean creature. "I'm divorced:' answers Aida's husband. "More or less the same thing:' I tell Hugo. "I like women:' he murmurs, looking sideways at his companion. "Her?" I ask, attempting to hide my skepticism. ''And others:' answers Hugo. "What about your wife?" I ask boldly. I feel that it's something I can talk to Aida's husband about - if he's drunk. He laughs darkly, as though it were a private joke. "I'd rather not talk about that:' he mutters. "She and I had a child. If you can say that any man has a child. If you can even say she used to be my wife?' Now I offer to buy him another drink. I have a feeling he's not looking at me, that he doesn't see me. ''Were you happy?" I ask stupidly. ''Neither of us was:' he answers melancholically, in spite of everything. Considering, as Aida says, that he's a man who doesn't talk, I'm having an extraordinary amount of success. Or it's the whiskey. "In theory:' continues Aida's husband, "it should have worked. But there's something about her ... , I mean, about me ... , about her:' the man fumbles again, and he doesn't finish his thought. 60

"Mutual likes: the same tastes, similar obsessions. And yet ... who knows? Why do you ask?" he says, as though noticing me for the first time. "That was a long time ago. And yet, there are days when it seems like time hasn't passed at all. I've gotten a little older, but then I wasn't very young when we married. She's probably grown a bit older too, but in a different way." "Don't you ever see her?" I ask, even though I already know the answer. "Yes, once in a while. Awkward conversations; just like when we were married. I'm not much of a conversationalist, no matter what you think. I only talk when I've been drinking. She's like that too. But she doesn't drink. And the boy belongs to her. A child always belongs to its mother. I probably can't be a father either, I can only be my mother's son. I think the only ones we love are the mothers." "That one doesn't look much like a mother;' I say, pointing to the redhead in the velvet skirt, who's half-asleep, oblivious to our conversation. "No, not her;' says Aida's husband, remembering that someone is sitting next to him. "That's because she hasn't had a baby yet. What's your line of work?" the man asks me, suddenly cautious now. "I'm a professor;' I say, not being very specific. "I know a little about that;' replies Aida's husband. "I'm a historian. A bookworm, you might say. But I spend all my free time drinking." A real paragon of virtue. I've known hundreds of guys like him. I wonder how Aida was able to go to bed with a fellow this ugly. "I don't care about beauty at all;' says Aida, and her words hit me like a bullet in the neck: I'm a handsome man, and that, at least, could give me some advantage over the men who've come before me, over the ones who will come later on. And yet, I find Aida's beauty unbearable, like a pain I can't endure alone: I want to share her beauty with her too. "Please stop talking about how beautiful I am;' says Aida, suspiciously. But there's a gash in Aida's beauty, an old pain. As though, to 61

create it, something had to be broken, she had to suffer deeply. I know nothing about that pain; I have only a profound intuition. Pain that drags on, day after day, year after year. Pain that doesn't run dry, doesn't stop, pain that seeps out with menstruation, with the irritated endometrium, with the inflamed vulva. Dark pain, old remorse, sorrows that won't go away. "Pain makes a person bitter;' says Aida, and I discover to my horror - in the grimace that appears on her forehead, on her lipstraces of suffering that have nothing to do with me. Aida is a woman who doesn't forget. Aida is a woman who watches over her wounds like ancient texts, inscriptions that have to be read many times over, reviewed, in order to be reinterpreted, in order to link the past with the future. Her beauty has something of those old, endless pains, as if each day her face were repeating the pain of birth, the pain of first menstruation, the pain of discovering that you are different, the pain of knowing you are unique (that is, alone), the pain of first disillusionment, the pain of loving, the pain of not loving, the pain of giving birth, the pain of maternity, the pain of every separation, the pain of being alive. Infected by her old pains, debilitated by the pain that I sense in her face, I voice a healing wish: "Aida;' I tell her: "you and I will never part. No more separations for you, no more separations for me. Together. For all the time we have left." Aida looks at me as though I were an idiotic child lost in a garden. "Dummy;' she says to me, smiling. I pay the bill and walk out of Vips. The next day I talk to Aida. "Last night;' I say, "I met your husband in a bar?' "Your good fortune is nothing to brag about;' Aida says bitterly. "And besides, quit saying he's my husband?'

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We are alone for the first time, the two of us, in the same room. The dining room of Aida's house. A blue clay vase in the comer holds violet flowers, a lusterless abstract painting hangs on the wall. The window is open, and from the street, usually empty at this hour of the afternoon, we can hear noise. Aida has gone out and left us alone, but not without a few words of warning. The child bears a certain resemblance to Aida: the same long legs, her pale hands, her wide forehead. He also resembles Aida's husband. I look him over carefully, a strange, embryonic animal, sitting on the carpet, surrounded by his tovs. He doesn't look at me, but I know that he's aware of my presence; his feigned indifference is a subtle way of making me feel uncomfortable. I page through a newspaper and pretend not to notice. He makes a noise with one of his electric toys. I cough. I light a cigarette. The smoke bothers him, and without turning his head he makes a motion to fan it away. But Aida smokes too, even though she's not here right now. Realizing that this strange little runt has been inside Aida for nine months, nourishing himself from her juices, licking at her innermost recesses, stanching her membranes, sipping her blood, swimming in amniotic liquid, caressing her tissues, pressing against her stomach, I feel a violent stab of jealousy. I can never be inside Aida the way he has. I'll never be a part of her the way he has been. Impossible for me to be born between her legs, I won't emerge

from her womb, she won't push me out with vaginal contractions, she won't listen to my heartbeat, impossible for her to caress my head when she touches her waist, I won't drink her milk, I won't press against her womb. She won't strain to hold me in, to force me out. It will all be infinitely more external and separate. More superficial, less profound th:m her relationship with this little runt to whom she has given her blood, her skin, her cells, her screams of labor, the final orgasm of birth, the puerperal depression. "Twerp;' I say in a voice loud enough for him to hear, even if he can't understand the meaning of my words. He must have heard me, but still he sits there, indifferent, his back to me, playing with his building blocks and electric toys. I blow smoke at him, deliberately. I know it annoys him. He says he won't smoke when he's big because a television program showed him how tobacco can harm the lungs. He's a little runt who wants to have a long life; he wants to grow up, wants to be healthy, wants to prosper. None of his mother's vices, none of his father's vices, none of the vices of his mother's lovers. A healthy fellow, this one. Sitting there on the carpet, all embroiled with nuts and bolts, building miniature cities, like a dwarf God in deep concentration. He must think he's master of the world, and in a sense the world does belong to him: the house, Aida, the toys, his room. The telephone rings. He and I both turn at the same time and look at it; we size each other up. I don't answer the phone in·Aida's house: our relationship is something of a secret, and if I answered, the sound of my voice might arouse unwanted curiosity. Hugo's, for instance. The telephone continues to ring as the child and I look at it, neither of us knowing who has the right to answer it. Finally, victorious, the child picks up the receiver and answers. It's Aida. She wants to know how her son is. Aware of his victory, he answers that he's fine, that he's playing. Aida apparently doesn't ask about me. I'm not here. I don't exist. I am not. The conversation between the two of them runs on, completely oblivious to my presence. When he hangs up, the little runt has a slight smile on his lips: he knows that Aida is his, that he possesses her, that Aida loves him, that together they form an inseparable pair. He sits on the carpet

once more, the architect of miniature cities - his own private kingdom. "Twerp;' I say again, to his back. He doesn't hear, or he pretends not to hear me. We are separate, far apart, and yet the tension around us is so intense that I could even say the air, for being a combination of nothing but molecules and particles, is heavy. Nervous, I try to break. this aggressive silence: "How much longer will your mother be gone~" I ask him, my voice choking. "I don't know;' the child answers indifferently. "She didn't tell me;' he adds generously. And she hasn't told him who I am either. Aida thinks she should give her son no explanation, and he accepts me as indifferently as he's accepted Aida's other lovers: no hostility, no sympathy. I fed temporary, vulnerable, hypersensitive. A traveler passing by, held to Aida by a weak. twine - my sex - not by an umbilical cord. I want to leave (suddenly the atmosphere in the room feels stifling, I hate the clay vase with its flowers, the rose tint of the wall, the leather furniture, the shag carpet), but I can't leave the child alone: I promised Aida I'd look after him until she came back, and even though the little runt can take care of himself, she would never forgive me if I abandoned him. Abandoned? I'm the one who feels abandoned. The little runt never feels abandoned; he knows that lovers come and go, but that he always stays. I'd like to know how many of Aida's lovers he can remember. One of them took him to soccer games, and since Aida detests sports, that one ended up disgusting her. Another bought him all sorts of gifts: bicycles, puzzles, clowns, and Aida, jealous, left him. There was another one who made the mistake of wanting to be a father to Aida's son, to adopt him, and she threw him out of the house. "My son doesn't need a father:' shouted Aida. "Not a real one, and not a symbolic one either." Another made the opposite mistake: he didn't like children, he was jealous of him, and the conflict irritated Aida. On the carpet, tl1e runt has built a miniature city. With its

garages, its plazas, an amusement park, several cafes, a movie theater, and tall skyscrapers. Now he turns toward me proudly; the architect needs the public's approval. "My house is right here:' he says, pointing to a building among the trees, near a gasoline station. I flatter him: I tell him it's a very pretty city. Satisfied with my praise, he turns his back to me once again, and with his construction kit he begins to build a bridge. It takes up almost the entire carpet, and he lays down the colored pieces symmetrically, like the neurotic runt that he is. From Aida he's inherited, or imitated, her sense of order. The little runt detests dirt, dust, clothing thrown across chairs, nicotine and alcohol stains. I think about Hugo, and how hard it is for him to get drunk when he has his son with him. He probably hides his drinking and pretends his whiskey is a bottle of medicine, the same way Aida hides from her son so she can smoke hashish. "Twerp:' I insult him again while I pretend to page through the newspaper. Suddenly a solid coin, shiny and heavy, rolls out of my pocket (doubtless, riddled with holes, I'm a careless guy, the sort of fellow the twerp never will be). The coin falls onto the carpet, halfway between the runt and me. I close the newspaper as the money rolls along the floor. The runt turns with a block in his hand that he holds suspended in midair, and looks at it too. The money comes to a stop. It lies there, between the two of us. The runt fastens his eyes on it. So do I. Obviously, he wants to throw himself on it, but he doesn't, yet. I don't move either. We study each other seriously, not moving. On the carpet, the gold coin gleams with apparent innocence. "Go on, twerp;' I urge him, even though I don't know if he's listening to me, if he can understand my words. As though he'd heard me, the little runt hunches down, he flattens his body against the floor, ready to slither along. Immediately, I move my right foot forward in its black, pointed shoe. I take a step toward the coin, but without getting up from the sofa. The runt stretches out, he arches his body and moves a few centimeters forward. I take another step. Slowly, I get to my feet. Now we're 66

both looking at the coin coyetously, greedily. So then, runt, you want the money that belongs to me, just like I want Aida who belongs to you. Maybe you'll sell cheap. Maybe you'll sell out for a gold coin to buy another puzzle with. But I'm not sure: you probably want Aida and the money too. The runt inches his way along, furtively he begins to slither forward. I let him. We look at each other with hatred in our eyes. Why do you think it belongs to you? Just because it's in your house, so close to your miniature city? I take a step forward, but not far enough to cover the advantage of distance he has over me. His body hugging the floor, he slowly continues to advance. His fingers, short and tiny, stretch out to grasp the coin. Then, with a long, definitive step, I smash it against the floor. My black, pointed shoe covers it. I grind it down, as if it were a cockroach. The runt, whose movement to reach it was left hanging in midair, raises his eyes in astonishment. I smile maliciously. "Take it, twerp;' I say to him triumphantly, and I draw back my foot; I push tl1e coin forward with the tip of my shoe. He picks it up and puts it in his pocket. When Aida finally comes back, I tell her: "I gave the little boy a large coin." "Why?" asks Aida, in wonder. I don't tell her it's the price I thought I had to pay her master. "Don't spoil him;' Aida adds, as she goes past.

I'd like to be your husband: buy cabbage for you at the market, come home with a large paper bag filled with lettuce, figs, radishes, carrots, and cucumbers. I go to the market with Aida. Our first stop is a flower stand. There are long-stemmed gladiolas, daffodils, lilacs, and lilies. "You see?" says Aida. "You don't need to be my husband to come to the market." But what I want is to be your husband: to come home with my hands full of gifts for you. Aida chooses the meat very carefully. She doesn't let me help; she doesn't trust me with food. ''You don't care what you eat;' she says. I would sleep beside you every night. I would like to wait for you at home, listen for your footsteps on the porch, hear the jangle of your keys before you open the door. I'd like to hide behind the door and surprise you when you come in. The way you surprised me that day you put on a Ulxedo. You were making a lot of noise in the bedroom and wouldn't let me in. Finally you appeared, looking very white in the black tuxedo. The shirt underneath had starched cloth stripes, and your ambiguity stood out in the clothing, even with your long hair. "I detest marriage;' says Aida. And yet, I would like to be your husband.

"You'd grow tired of it too;' she murmurs skeptically. I can't imagine growing tired of you, although I can imagine you becoming tired of me.

Love is dissipation, it is excess. A person can't be in love, and at the same time hold back, save anything, produce, make a profit, invest, "become wealthy." I wear myself out, I indulge myself, I'm excessive. I don't feel tired even when I am tired: love is antieconomical, it's inflationary. Any consideration that arises from a nonspending economy belongs to the system of "unlove;' not of love. I often hear people say, "This relationship isn't good for you;' and the remark genuinely annoys me. It's because I feel wealthy (that is: because I feel that I can throwaway my energy, myattention, my spirit, my sleep, my will, my pain, my happiness), it's because I'm involved in the dissipation that I love, not the reverse. I don't want to save anything for myself, and at the same time this frame of mind terrifies me: I give what I don't have, and so, like the Nazarene, I can say that I'm giving up all my worldly goods. "This relationship isn't an appropriate one for you;' but what proprieties are they talking about? I become tolerant and considerate with Aida's friends, who could never be - will not be - my friends. For them, I hIm into a dissembler. I pay close attention to their mundane conversations, I dine with them and Aida in fine restaurants, but I'll never be able to appreciate the food they serve (a man in love is a man without an appetite, without taste), and I hide my boredom under a cloak of amiable gentility and good manners. But if I deceive everyone

perfectly (I'm a subtle dissembler), I still can't hide my discomfort from myself. I think to myself: this is the price I'm paying for the time I'll be able to spend alone with Aida, her friends far away, the house in silence. There are very few times when I really manage to take part in the conversation (a man in love only knows how to talk about his love). And if! don't mix in enough, Aida gets annoyed: she thinks I'm shunning her friends somehow, that I seem to be indifferent to them. She doesn't underst~Uld how hard it is for me to concentrate on the conversation, even if it isn't very complex. Besides, everything Aida and her friends talk about makes me uneasy: when 1 listen to them, 1 realize how isolated I am from the world, how far apart 1 am from the others, how different from tile rest - because of my love for Aida - and different from her too, as she talks with such apparent glibness about everyday things, movies, books, politics. But what 1 can say is that I'm completely focused on Aida, watching her every expression, examining her gestures and her movements. For example, under the handruffie of her blouse I glimpse a delicate leather and bronze bracelet that reminds me of an autumn leaf. I'm especially sensitive to tile silver-lined ornament hanging from the lapel of her jacket, and although 1 don't bend down to look at them, 1 sense her sandals on the floor, the ocher-colored sandals 1 love so much, with their green trim. A laugh from Aida, brusque and almost emphatic, rings overly loud in my ears (1 make an involuntary, recoiling motion, as if Aida had struck a wrong note on the piano). And yet, as she reaches for a glass of wine, her delicate hand has the airy quality of a ballet step. I know every article of clothing Aida wears, every inflection of her voice. "1 like you better in black;' I tell her, and as the days go by, Aida buys black skirts, dark jerseys, black shoes. "Were you in love with a nun when you were little?" she inquires bitingly. No, Aida: it's you I want to see dressed in black, it's your smooth, white skin 1 want to see under the dark wool, beneath the black silk, under the lace of your brassiere. (Out in the street, a 71

terrible shock: an advertisement in a store window shows a model covered in black nylon mesh, and I'm astonished that it isn't Aida. I go into the shop and buy the mesh immediately: my present for Aida. "You ought to see a doctor about this;' Aida mocks me as she tries on the mesh in front of the mirror. She has undressed quickly - I feel a stab of pain: so then, Aida can disrobe freely before the mirror, without ceremony, she can take her clothes off and put on others while I stand in front of her, without her nudity being directed toward me in particular, without the opulence of her white breasts spilling Out toward my hungry mouth, without the majesty of her legs demanding the ministry of my caressesand she has put on the black mesh that girds her, that molds itself to her figure, that covers her body from feet to breast the way I would like to gird her, mold myself to her figure, cover her. The black mesh represents me, symbolizes me, does for me what I cannot do: even if I wished, I can't be anything but an embroidered nylon web, thin as a thread, stuck to her skin. But I have no other desire: I would like to be the mesh, I would like to be the cloth covering her body, I would like to have no other life or essence than that. If I were the black mesh, I could always be on her skin, girding her from feet to decolletage. I love your decolletage, and the word decolletage. Your decolletage is a balcony from which I peer out in wonder, looking down. I become rapt in the precipice. Aida takes my head in her hands and places me on the only level place, between her breasts. Swallowed up there, I find it difficult to breathe. From your skin I inhale the pungent odor of hashish. Between the black threads of the mesh, I observe white, open pores. Your left breast strikes my head, then your right one. They rock me, they arouse me, they perturb me. Rocked, pounded, I am a boat in the middle of the ocean. ) "Cover me;' says Aida, deeply, solemnly. And, both shaken and restrained by emotion, I slowly cover her. I approach her, and from her small feet (how can such a tall woman have such tiny feet? ), I glide over her. I am the cloak of ice, blanketing the seas as it moves. I am burning lava, sliding over the

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earth. She is below, I am above. And yet, I feel no sense of power. I cover her with my body, as a cloak of magma covers stone. I respond to her request, to her brief demand; consequently there is no power. She withdraws into herself. She closes her eyes, she knits her brow. Her eyebrows draw together. I strain, and then I release my weight upon her. My sex, large, tries to enter her sex, small. I penetrate her, and she shudders. The bed creaks. Like the tide, I cover her. My breath warms her neck. Her breatll warms my forehead. She moans. I moan. She cries out. I cry out. She pants. I pant. She howls. I howl. She rubs against me. I rub against her. The hair of her armpits sinks into my mouth. I stammer. She stammers. I roar. She roars. I dribble. She dribbles. I simmer. She simmers. Now our movements coincide. I press down on her, and she follows my movement. I release her, and she releases me. I go in and out, as though from a barn. "Let's come:' she says, and tllen, in a perfectly synchronized effort, the two of us come together, we both gush, we both cry out, we two are one, overlapping, intertwined, drunk, insane, thrust violently into one another, like the key in the perfect lock.

* "The first time I heard the phrase 'making love'" - remembers Aida, half-naked, smoking a cigarette, in one corner of the bed, at an angle with the coral-red wall- "it made me shudder. I was still just a child, and for me the words were jarring: love isn't made, it's felt. The expression sounded long and deliberate: like building a house, for example, or putting up a wall. There was planning behind it, a project, as if the will could control the act. All the words I learned afterward seemed just as unsuitable. Some, like screw and fuck, sounded unbearably vulgar to me: as though they were scatological, referring to a disagreeable body function. Everyone thinks people screw or fuck in the dark, the way you do ugly things in life. In secret, shamefully. Mter a long time I began to reevaluate 'making love.' Now I agree: you and I make love the way

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a building is constructed, the: way a house is built, the way a sail is raised. It's a job for two, shared, delicate work, whose reward is at the end, in the beautiful fulfillment of the work." (We love each other with four hands, Aida, like two people playing the piano, I think. We love each other like twins, like inseparable Siamese twins, joined at the side, at the hip.) to cover: to fill the surface of an object. I don't cover Aida the way male animals do the female, but rather like clouds to sky: sliding slowly over her body, to cover her, to drive away the harshness of her being a woman alone. to lie: I lie with Aida, the two of us together, facing the ceiling, like an incestuous brother and sister, like a biblical brother and sister. to make love: before we go to bed, Aida and I store up provisions. Like Noal1 and his wife: going onto the ark. American cigarettes, two packs. A cigarette lighter. A bottle of water. A small lump of hashish. Cigarette papers. A dictionary. (To answer your questions of a little girl discovering language, Aida.) The telephone, mute, under a pillow. Then we take off our clothes joyfully, like two children who are finally alone in the large, deserted house.

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At night, without Aida, 1 feel like losing. (But I also want to lose when I'm with Aida.) 1 go into a small private casino, I gamble as though I'm sleepwalking, the four, the month we met, the three, the number of years I've loved her, the thirty-five, Aida's age, but none of them come up. Another spin of the roulette wheel. Now I entertain myself by adding: four (the month we met) plus three (the number of years I've loved her) equals seven, a cabalistic number; but it falls on the number twenty-eight instead. "1 never win at anything;' says Aida. "You never gamble;' I tell her. "It doesn't make any difference, I wouldn't win anyway;' maintains Aida, incapable of letting anyone get the better of her. "Nobody gambles to win;' I say. "Then, what do you gamble for?" she asks. "To lose;' I answer. "That sounds dumb to me." "It is;' I agree. Aida knows nothing about my clandestine nocturnal life as a gambler. I don't tell her anything about that. It wouldn't interesther. "It's your money;' she'd say. No, Aida; money doesn't belong to anyone. That's why it can

be lost and won, because it really isn't owned. Money is flow, forfeiture, apathy. Outside of what we need for eating and shelter, money is disgust. "You always buy the same things;' says Aida. Two identical pairs of shoes, two shirts exactly the same, the same kind of pants, over and over again. T always buy the same things, perhaps to avoid having to make a decision. At night, in the casino, I gamble in a maniacal, obsessive way: twenty chips on number thirty-seven, the fascinating speed of the wheel, of the platinum ball that spins around, jumping over the small black-and-white sections. Sometimes, holding the dark chips in my hand, I don't even know what numbers I've bet on. It's just a matter of making the time pass more quickly that separates me from the next day, when there's a chance I may see Aida again, when I can listen to her complain about the boy's health, the prices at the market, the incompetence of the servant. Her complaints cradle me, like a child's nanny. Aida's way of treating reality is so free and so strict at the same time that it astonishes me. She copies recipes (I will taste the dish with that indifference that irritates you), changes the sheets, sends her dresses to the dry cleaners, she jots down her expenses in a little memorandum book. Yet I find reality evading me like a fish in water. I spread my fingers, and it slips through the gaps, it vanishes, fugitive and fragile. "You don't have time or space;' Aida criticizes. (My time is named Aida, my space is nanled Aida. ) When I leave her house, I go automatically to the old casino that rises among the trees in the park. It's an old, dilapidated building, filled with ancient lamps, torn curtains, furniture stained with nicotine and whiskey. There's another, more modern one, at the edge of the beach, but it's far away, and, besides, it holds no appeal for me. I prefer this one with its air of the last century and its stony gamblers who are fleeing from solitude and silence to immerse themselves in green tabletops as though at the bottom of the sea. There, at the bottom, the dreams of each of them are caught up in the wide shape of the red five, or in the comical pairing of the twenty-two, black. I win, by chance, with a bet squarely on the 76

thirteen, I pick up the chips, and immediately place a very large bet on the numbers around it: winning bothers me, it makes me think. Losing doesn't require any thought. But winning breaks the bewitching fascination of loss, where one has only to place chips at random on the tabletop while imagination and fantasy are off somewhere else. An old woman who is watching me, suddenly says: "Young man, would you mind betting those chips for me? I can't reach the table." Politely, I put the chips down where she tells me. I look at her and feel a rush of tenderness toward her. Her hair is silver with a few strands of gray, and she is wearing a simple white dress made of very fine cloth. Underneath, she has on a heavy petticoat. She has put on makeup like a woman who can't see very well: a few spots of badly placed rouge give her face the appearance of a china doll. Suddenly I think of my mother. I haven't thought about her for a long time. My love for Aida has eradicated all other affection in me. Passion is egotistical: it effaces us from the world, and the feelings we once had for other people disappear, along with our own image. My mother emerges from the black darkness of my love for Aida like a lusterless figure, rescued from exile, from a shipwreck, by an inept memory. But the tenderness I feel is so vivid that I unconsciously spill it over onto the old woman who is fingering chips at my side. As though responding to the exaggerated wave of tenderness that washes over me (and I'm not stealing this tenderness from Aida: I find it within myself, sleeping, sprawled out, like an animal in winter), the old woman offers: "Young man, bet on the twenty-six if you want to win;' she says to me, politely. I place bets on the fourteen, the twenty, the seventeen and the twenty-six. My chip and the two of hers are next to each other. The ball spins, rolls, jumps over one nwnber, then another, it seems about to stop on the zero, but it makes another leap and comes to rest softly on the twenty-six. The old woman lets out a happy, contagious little laugh. Suddenly I realize that I haven't heard 77

anyone laugh for a long time. Passion is solemn, tragic, elegiac: since falling in love with Aida, I've lost my sense of humor, and for her part, she's a sad woman, a woman who seldom laughs, and when she does, it's strong, booming laughter that makes me suspicious: if she has to demonstrate so openly that she's happy, there's a good chance she really isn't. I seldom laugh any more, and Aida laughs even less. We're a pair of sad lovers, too aware of our bond, too frightened of madness and death. This sudden insight into our relationship makes me uneasy. Although the old lady picks up the chips, and the croupier hands me mine, I'm suddenly overcome by a terrible fear: someone has to save Aida. Save her from herself, save her from me. But who could possibly do that? "If you've lost your sense of humor;' Raul will say the next morning when I talk to him, ''you should start to be seriously concerned about your mental health. Once we've lost the ability to laugh at ourselves, we're on the verge of falling into a deep depression." ''Now bet on the eight and the fifteen, young man;' the old woman advises me. I don't have time to think about the old woman's strange generosity. (I've never seen real roulette players give advice about numbers: the gambler is an ever-solitary man or woman facing the challenge of fate, absolutely aware of his own uniqueness: good or bad luck is an entirely private matter that has to be decided, discovered in complete solitude, without anyone interfering or making suggestions.) I suddenly lose all interest in nwnbers, and I have an odd sensation of fear: somebody has to save Aida. If I've lost my sense of humor, it's because I'm sick, and someone has to save her from me, from herself, from us. Why doesn't somebody do something? But who could? "Aren't you going to play any more?" the old woman asks me, astonished. I say no. When I pick up my chips, one of them slips from my hand, and I bend down to find it. Then, while I'm on the floor, I notice the old woman's white ankles, and I get the urge to start barking like a small dog. It's thoroughly improper to laugh in a casino, but the old woman, hearing my imitation bark, utters a soft

laugh. It's a much more spontaneous, natural laugh than Aida's, a real laugh, flung into the air with a certain exhilaration and pleasure. I stand up, and I smile too. "You're very witty;' the old lady says to me in a slightly reproachful tone. A wave of tenderness and gratitude sweeps over me. I invite her to have a whiskey with me at the casino bar. "I shouldn't;' she says, coquettishly. "My heart, you know. But then, 1 shouldn't gamble either. Now, what 1 think is this: if I can't drink a glass of whiskey, or playa little roulette, what sense is there in keeping my heart healthy?" "Everything that gives us pleasure is fattening or expensive or immoral;' 1 tell her, smiling. ''What's worse;' the old woman adds, "these things are addictive. Did you know that in the United States they have psychiatric treatment for the obsession of playing slot machines?" The idea is like a revelation to me: I would have to undergo treatment to break myself of the habit of Aida. Love is an unmerciful dmg. Being hooked on Aida leads me to other habits, to otl1er addictions: When I'm not with her, 1 gaD1ble, or smoke, or drink too much. If I've been able to make the old woman laugh, then I'm not so sick after all. Then, perhaps someday I'll be able to make Aida smile. If Aida would only smile, she'd be out of danger. She wouldn't have to be saved from herself, from me, from us. Spontaneously, I tell the old woman, "There's a lady I miss very much?' When I'm not with Aida, I tl1ink only of her, or I talk only about her. Among strangers I turn into an uncontrollable magpie: I'm ready to talk about my love at the drop of a hat. "Lucky you;' the old woman replies. "A day will come when you won't miss her and the world will seem as uninhabitable to you then as it does now, but for other reasons. It's good to think you know what you miss. I never fell in love with anyone, I must confess (I think I'm a pragmatic woman), and yet I've always suffered from nostalgia. A vague, general feeling of nostalgia. I come here to get rid of it by gambling: it's a good tranquilizer; tl1en 1 go to sleep like a baby. I would ratl1er have red and black 79

nwnbers whirling around in my mind, than see faces spinning that I don't know." And yet, I don't want to talk about Aida. I drink the whiskey quickly and ask for another: at the bottom of the glass I can see the outline of Aida's face, and suddenly I feel sad again. "The world is full of madmen who want to fall in love, even if it's only once in their lifetime, and it's full of madmen who want to fall out of love. I only want the number four to win. I've made five bets on a single number."

* I leave the casino with mixed feelings, in a state of confusion. In my mind, the image of the old gambling woman and my mother fuse together. I look for a phone booth to call my mother. And yet, I feel guilty about gambling. I've lost a good deal of money lately. Why haven't I used that money to help Aida? I could have bought her books, stockings, shoes, a coat. Still, we've always been extremely discreet when it comes to money: mine, hers. Only a few gifts sometimes, simply for the joy of it, but the accounts, separate. Is this her way of saying she doesn't want me getting too involved in her life? Is it her way of keeping me apart from what she considers her things? "Money is a symbol;' says Raul. "It always means something else:' I could have used it for myself too: to buy myself a suit, a couple of shirts, a jersey, a raincoat. But when I gamble, aren't I spending it on myself? Surely I've bought intervals of release from anxiety, times of distraction, when I'm not with Aida. "When you're with her, do you feel the need to gamble?" Raul will ask me tomorrow. "Yes;' I'll tell him, "but only when I'm tmder a great deal of tension, or when we've been together for several days:' I dial Aida's nunlber. Drowsy, she answers in a voice shrouded with sleep. "What time is it?" she asks me. 80

"Two o'clock;" I answer. "What are you doing at this hour?" she asks, blearily. "I feel like talking to my mother;' I say. "Then, why don't you cali her?" she suggests. No, Aida. It's really you I want to talk to.

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Raul has a patient who collects women's shoes. Only black patent leather shoes, and only the left ones. But he doesn't buy them at the store or in the market; he follows women down the street (preferably at night: the patent leather is shinier then), and when he catches up to them, he takes their left shoe. I, on the other hand, love Aida's sandals. "I can't go around wearing sandals all the time:' says Aida, aware of my fascination. "The women he follows must be very frightened:' I tell Raul. "He keeps the shoes under lock and key in a closet," says Raul, "and he never shows them to anyone. He lays them in a row, one beside the other, all left shoes, all patent leather." The night is dark. No one in the street. A woman appears on the comer, tall and slender. She's wearing a light blue cotton jacket; a leather purse hangs from her shoulder. She walks quickly, leaning slightly to the side where her purse is hanging. The street is badly lighted, facades of buildings slip into darkness like ships at anchor. Not one sailor on board. All is silence: sea, night, street. Suddenly she hears footsteps behind her. Quick, decisive steps, approaching rapidly. She can't suppress a shudder of fear. For a fleeting instant, the street, the black buildings, and the yellow circles of light beneath the street lamps are like a macabre scene from some horror

movie. In a moment of terrible intensity, alert, with great precision, she fixes every element of the scene in her mind: before her, dark, empty streets. To the side, where corners open up like dark throats, more streets, uninviting, hostile. Up above, the gallery of antennas, like sacrificial crosses. Empty automobiles, sleeping orthoptera, are lined up beside the sidewalk. The footsteps behind her are softer now, as though the walker were using pillows to silence his anxiety. She thinks she should drive away her fear, take control of the situation, put the phantoms of old movies and newspaper clippings to flight. Quickly, she calculates the distance to the doorway of her house at two hundred meters, and she opens her purse noisily to take out the keys. The steps behind her approach more rapidly, louder now, as if there were no reason to conceal them. With the keys in her hand she feels more confident. And yet she hopes fervently for anv sort of salvation: an automobile with a man and woman inside, a transient appearing unexpectedly on the deserted street, a door that would swing open and take her inside. But nothing of the sort happens, and she continues to walk, more and more quickly, with the strange sensation that she is being drawn toward her own self-immolation. She hears the footsteps behind her, and she can feel her heart pounding like a swollen internal organ, inflamed by fear. But the automobile doesn't appear, and when she reaches the last tree on the street, a violent blow knocks her against the wall. She is struck on the mouth, and she closes her eyes. It doesn't occur to her to scream: she opens her arms in the shape of a cross, and her purse falls to the ground. She doesn't see the face of her assailant, but she listens to his rapid panting. She is against the altar, her arms open, like a sacrificial victim. At this moment she hears her pursuer, short of breath, mutter: "Give me your shoe." Surprise arrests her fear for an instant: the man is staring down at the ground, at her shoes, and she has dropped her arms, bringing the ritual to a halt. "I only want your left shoe;' says the man, suddenly submissive

now. He cares nothing about her purse, her earrings, her bracelet, he scorns her breasts, her hips like ancient vases, her shapely legs. She looks at him, as though in a trance. "Your shoe;' repeats the man, "the left one:' The patent leather tip gleams in the night like a moon on the wane. Obediently, she removes her shoe and hands it to him, like alms given a beggar at the portal of a church. "Thank you;' says the man, turning away. Her hair mussed, her clothing in disarray, the woman stands in the street, against the wall, lame from the theft of her shoe. She looks at her stockings, and discovers that, in the struggle, a long, slender mn has opened down her left leg.

At a marketplace where humble artisans sell their wares, r buy sandals for Aida. They're handmade sandals, says the bearded young man who is selling them. And they have a raw quality that excites me at once: r can imagine Aida's delicate foot, white, small for her stature, slipping slowly into the rustic sandal with its leather cords that she will have to tie at the slight twist of her ankle. r gaze at the sandals, r picture Aida the moment she inserts her fingers softly into the leather casing, the way I insert my sex into hers. Aroused by the image, I buy three different pairs: some are drab, with delicate metallic ornaments, others are green, the color of grass; in them Aida will appear like a goddess of the forests, an autumn nymph. "Why shoes for the left foot?" asks Aida, when I tell her Raul's tale.

Aida's whiteness belongs to the moon. An ancient, mythical town, encased in her skin, nothing of it remaining except this white, intensely pale woman who smokes hashish and drinks Cointreau in laminated glass goblets. "My mother;' says Aida, "always thought I was sick because I was so pale, and she would send me outside in the sun, but I'd run off, and instead of going to the beach, I would go to the greenhouse. There, among the plants resistant to moisture, I learned the names of rare trees, poisonous vegetables, dusky resins, of twining vines." Mesmerized, I look at Aida's white skin, and my limbs grow slowly motionless. Lying beside you on the bed, my eyes sink into the spheres of your breasts, they fall into an inner, lunar lake, where they slide, cradled, rocked, fascinated by drowsiness. At your side I am a very quiet man, a space voyager who has inadvertendy lost his hold on gravity, on all sense of time, manners, and customs. I navigate in a zone that as yet has no name, in an unknown panorama, one that overwhelms and subdues me. "If you'd like;' says Aida, suddenly attentive, "I'll get a suntan this summer." No, Aida. I don't want to see you tanned. I don't want to change the fascination of your milky whiteness for a different color. I anl a child, hanging onto his mother, dreaming of a paradise where

nothing ever changes: this instant - as I lie beside YOLl, immersed inside your uncommonly white skin, bewitched by your bodydoes not change, I am the mirror that reflects you, I am an unblemished sheet of quicksilver, I am your husband, your father, your son, your lover, I am your admirer, your contemplator, your fetus, your bowels, your masturbation, I am your bloody menstruation, your pain of giving birth, your shiver of pleasure, your joy, your anxiety, and your image. I am Melibean. 3 "Something is wearing me down;' says Aida, suddenly tired. You wear yourself out. You are your own main work. Immersed in yourself, as though inside a well you cannot leave, the uterine walls of the well reflect you, the depths reflect you, the light on the surface reflects you. "It must be tiresome;' I tell Aida, in reply, "to look at yourself so much?' "But I let you look at me too;' says Aida, unaware that my look is also her own. "Those women that we let ourselves love, the way they love themselves;' says Raul: "are narcissistic, they're a great wet dream. They don't love us, they love themselves through us. We are their elegant compact, their satiny mirror, their self-fascination. They can't tolerate difference, the other who isn't themselves, and we play along with the game: we reflect the image they want to see of themselves:' "But I'm in love with that image;' I tell him. "She appears, and you look at her, but while you're looking at her, she sees herself in you;' says Raul. Sometimes, Aida grows tired of herself "If you would accept the other;' I suggest, "you might not feel so drained." The only one who doesn't tire her is her son - the little runt, and he's exactly like her.

3. In the great Spanish Renaissance work La Celestina, by Fernando de Rojas, the young Calista is so in love with Melibea that, in answer to his servant's question: "Aren't you a Christian?" he can only respond, "Melibeo soy" (I am Melibean).

"I'll never give in to being the other's dream;' declares Aida, independent. So, in order to love you, I can only be your drean1. I am Melibean. "I refused to be my father's dream;' says Aida, flatly. "What was your father's dream?" I ask. "He wanted an obedient, gentle daughter, an architect if possible, a good wife who would love her home and let her husband dominate her." Aida was not an architect, she was not docile, she was not gentle, she did not let herself be dominated by her husband. "I refused to be my first lover's dream;' adds Aida. "What did your first lover want?" ''A happy marriage with lots of children, outings to the mountains and scuba diving. I was fifteen years old. I tltink he loved me. But I didn't want children then, I didn't want to take trips to the country or to the mountains, I didn't want to go scuba diving. I wouldn't even let him teach me how to swim;' So then, Aida, I must never confess my dream to you; it will always be my secret. If I dared tell you, if I made the mistake of saying it aloud, you would recoil from it as though from the law, as if my dream about you were an ill-fitting suit, a dress you were made to wear, a blouse that was forced upon you. "I wouldn't be Victor's dream either;' "What did Victor want?" I ask her gently. ''Victor wanted me to be an actress. He said I had a real flair for the theater. He gave me fancy dresses, long gloves, frilly hats. Whenever we were alone, he'd ask me to recite from classical works. I wouldn't do it. To undermine him, I'd put on suit pants and a jacket, English shoes, I wouldn't wear sandals, and I'd smoke so my voice would sow1d scratchy;' Aida did not fulfill Victor's dream. Or her husband's. "Hugo didn't have many pretensions. He was a very calm man, really, but his silence bothered me. The only time Hugo talks is when he's drunk. He wanted me to be the perfect wife: pure, a good cook, caring about friends and family. I wasn't anything like that. I had several lovers, there were nights I didn't go home to 88

sleep, I joined an underground political party. We fought a lot. Finally, I left him. I never wanted to be any man's dream: I'm my own dream:' says Aida, slightly irritated. So, in order for you to love me, I can't have a dream. I can only love you the way you are, smooth and hairless like a cetacean, white, ltillar, capricious, selfish, mistress of yourself, proud, haughty, demanding, weak, vulnerable, hotheaded, tendentious, fanatical, irritable, in love with yourself. For you to love me, I can't have a dream, I have to be a man who is a mirror, a man who loves you because you can see yourself in him, and the image pleases you. I am Melibean. "What was the photographer's dream?" I ask. "Ah!" she remembers, "he liked to show me off in public. He was very pleased to have me as his lover, he thought I excited the jealousy and envy of the other men and of some women. We went out a lot. We went to the theater, to concerts, to receptions. He liked putting his arm around me, keeping his hand on my waist, to show that I was his. He gave parties. He took care of everything: all I had to do was pose. But then he got jealous. I told him that he was being contradictory: he wanted to show me off, and then he'd get jealous. But still, I was faithful to him. It was only when I met you that I stopped being faithful." She doesn't keep any of the photographs her former lover took. "He liked to photograph me;' says Aida, "but I didn't want him to. To tell you the truth, photographs disgust me." If I had been the photographer, I would have taken hundreds of photos of you. Aida, nude, getting up, with her long white legs and her nearly shapeless, flat buttocks. Aida, with her radiant, silvery jacket. Aida, smoking a cigarette, her elbow propped on the corner of the table, her eyes down. Aida, caught by surprise as she puts on a sandal. Aida, turning her leg to put on her black silk stocking with its fluted designs. Aida, the instant she closes her heavy eyelids, Aida, standing, like a Roman statue, looking out. "She doesn't need photographs;' says Raul. "Maybe your look is enough for her." I am Melibean.

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"The most fascinating story I can remember:' says Raul, "is about an Indian woman and an English doctor?' Aida is wrapped in a sheet that winds snugly around her body, like a tight-fitting dress. It's a white sheet, with stripes the color of soft watermelon. As though she were a mummy, as if she were a relic from an Asian civilization. I love the sheet that shrouds her like a tunic, the touch of thread against skin. "She was a young Indian girl from a very powerful family;' says Raul. "She became dangerously ill, and the native doctors couldn't cure her. Then her father, who loved her dearly, sent for an English doctor, with the stipulation that he must not look at his patient, her face covered with a veil and her body with a clinging tunic. It was a large, white tunic, like a sudary. It covered her completely. Preparing to use his stethoscope on her, the doctor made a tiny slit in the sheet with his scalpel, at the height of her navel. Through the hole he had cut, he fancied her beauty. He saw her smooth belly, the color of olives, her long, firm, smooth thighs, her lithe waist, and he fell in love?' So then, I am your doctor (and at the same time, your illness) . I bend over you and I begin to caress your body. I caress you slowly, through the striped sheet. You don't move: you lie in the white bed like an enormous Roman statue, while I touch you. The somewhat

rough texture of the sheet assists me as I run my hands along the lines of your body. I move along your left flank, I set anchor in your thighs, I feel the bones, under the cloth, I feel your belly, the dark beginnings of your sex, inside the groin. Then I pass over to the right side, and I climb the contours symmetrically. You don't move, you are agrm.md, like a ship in the sands of a deep sea. I suddenly heave myself upon you, I cover you with my body, still dressed, and my clothing grazes the sheet. I settle upon you, I search out my place, I gather your hair in my hands and kiss you on the mouth. My lips crush you, they knead your own. lIet my spittle drip onto the corners of your mouth, and when a small white island has formed, I spread it over your face with my fingers, over your cheeks, over your eyebrows and eyelids. I sink my index finger into your nostril, and I scratch it. Then I take it out, and I make the same incursion into the other orifice. Your nostrils rise like a butterfly'S wings. I kiss you again, and plunge my tongue into your mouth. I touch your teeth, and slowly, one by one, from top to bottom, from bottom to top, I nm my tongue over them. Your spittle has no flavor, it is as clean and odorless as your body. Through the sheet, I hold down the wide bones of your pelviS. With my teeth, I tear the sheet at the height of your navel. The cloth, torn, reveals some hairs. I suck at them. I penetrate through the hoIe in the sheet, searching for your depths. I ply apart your thighs, and they open like an arch. I cry aloud, I sink into your cavity, and your right leg shudders as though struck by electricity. I have entered just far enough to feel the moisture of the walls of your sex. "Open up;' I shout, and then from the depths of your uterus, a dull sound escapes, that of walls opening, separating, creating a void. In the depths of your womb the void has been created, a snorting that calls out to be filled, that calls out to be covered. A "plop" resounds from your womb. I long to lick your endometrium. I long for your menstrual blood, bright and red. I slip inside you as though on a waxed runway. The tip of my member touches the head of your uterus.

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"Let's come!" I say to you, panting. "Let's come!" you say to me, and the order is carried out in unison. We shout in unison, we shudder in unison, we snort in unison, mucus against mucus.

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I keep one of Aida's pubic hairs, a hair from her armpits, and a hair from her head. The pubic hair is long, dark, and curly. One end is somewhat thicker, marking the root. The hair is soft but thick, and I like to put it in my mouth, hold it between my teeth, bite it, chew on it, pull it outward while I keep it pressed tightly between my lips. Sometimes, while I'm holding it in that position, I play music on it: I pull it taut like a violin string, and I scrape it softly with the tip of my fingernail so that it makes a sound. I bite, I chew, I savor Aida's pubic hair the way a dog would who had caught a bird and now had its mouth full of feathers. ''What are you eating?" asks Aida, from far away. "I'm eating you:' I should answer. The hair from her armpit is redder, it shines with rays of bronze and iron. Long, limp, it barely turns upon the white page of the book where I keep it. I like to open the book and find the hair from Aida's armpit, slightly bent. It is a book of poems by Saint-John Perse. The white, porous page is a large cubbyhole for the hair from Aida's armpit. I smell it, trying in vain to find traces of Aida's body odor. Aida smells of wood and hashish, of antique furniture. I hold it down on the white page with one finger, and trace around it with a pencil: I draw a long, sinuous, winding river. I lick at the drops from that river, I suck at it. The hair from Aida's head is the color of old copper with reflec-

tions of gold. From base to tip, it curls a couple of times, twisting like the shell of a snail. I look at it through a magnifying glass, and it grows large, a thread of Ariadne, an umbilical cord. I think this hair comes from Aida's navel, like a cord, and is tied to my neck with several turns around the nape. In that way, Aida drags me around, she takes me wherever she goes. I move with her, I turn with her, I go from place to place with her, I rest with her. The strand of hair comes out of her navel and stretches toward me, wrapping around me like a silken thread. It is a strand of hair full of static electricity, and sometimes it raises itself up, it moves by itself, with its own energy. More than once, when we kiss on the mouth, the hair on our heads, charged with electricity, carries a current to our lips that shocks us. In this way, the kisses have been both pleasant and dangerous, as if my body and Aida's suffered from an irresistible, mortal attraction, two poles charged with energy that, when they come in contact, unleash their force. Aida's coppery hair is a magnet. "Francisco de Miranda kept a pubic hair from each of his lovers;' I tell Aida. "It was a very interesting collection: he sent it from Europe to America in a trunk, but a less than astute bureaucrat, like all bureaucrats, burned the tmnk~' I think about the strange memory of Francisco de Miranda, with the ability to classify the collection of pubic hairs of his lovers as though they were leaves of a botanist. Perhaps he would know that the darkest belonged to Catherine of Russia, that the curliest was from an Indian woman he made love to during nights of debauchery, that the blondest was from a princess. I, on the other hand, have only memories of Aida's downy hair, electrified by desire, languid after a bath, lusty when the moisture of the vulva makes them shine like filaments of a lightbulb.

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Aida's house is a den. "I've lived here for twenty years:' cries out Aida, proud of her only fidelity. And I, the passerby, the traveler, the visitor, the pariah (because my sex is a key and not a house), ask myself, mystified, how is it possible to live in the same place for so long if she is not a viscus. If she is not a viscus, an internal organ, long, the way life is; Aida lives in her house as if it were her own uterus. She doesn't leave it, because she doesn't leave her vital viscera. She lures lovers to her den the way active, seductive animals do. Twenty years ago: Aida must have been a proud, haughty adolescent then, sure of herself, both feared and desired, harsh, domineering, but deep inside timid, solitary, fearful, exasperated. "The house is always the same," says Aida, as she places a lilac branch along with some belladonnas in the blue clay vase, and the sweet, noxious perfume bears something of Aida: a hard drug that I inject into my bloodstream, a soft drug that makes me dream. Aida only leaves her house to take care of the essential things: then she returns, closes herself in, protects herself, curls into a ball, and contemplates herself from within, uterus over uterus. Aida's house surrounds her, contains her, circumscribes her, nourishes itself from her, and nourishes her with the prey that it traps outside. Aida will not accept the unfolding of love in any territory that is not her own, her house, that is, her cave, her uterus, her den.

Enormous weasel hidden in her room, when she leaves it's to trap a prey that she will drag to her chamber and will raise, dress, seduce, will battle and avidly devour, surrounded by her earlier trophies, by her old weapons, by her favorite objects, as long as her desire lasts. She will lead the victim to her bed, and envelop it with her body, moisten it with her spittle, feed it from her breast, suck at it with her mouth, bite it with her teeth, cut it to pieces with her fingernails, have it mount upon her large haunches, examine it with her hands, flatten it with the force of her arms. There, apart from the world, far away from competitors and rivals, this avid weasel will enjoy the pleasure of slicking, bleeding, lacerating, cajoling, absorbing, enclosing, suckling, biting, chewing. The prey, isolated and seduced, will lose its strength bit by bit, until it withers away. When, tired of licking, eating, plundering, absorbing, devouring, Aida grows weary of her prey, like an enormous sated weasel, she sprawls out on the bed, to sleep. Satiety puts her in a bad mood, it sours her temperament. She broods on old grievances, hoarding them in her room like evil trophies. From her marsupial pouch she takes out an insult that has nestled like a tumor in her bowels. Then her body curls into a ball around her navel, the well of bitterness, and cultivates perverse flowers of rancor and reproach. The weasel, sated, vomits out detritus from the act of sucking and devouring. Aida is glutted with her prey, nauseated from her own pleasure, she wants to rid herself of the bloody remnants of her hunt. She wants to clean her room, eliminate the remains, rearrange the furniture, erase all traces of her gluttony. She wants to wash out the spots of blood, of semen, of white discharges, of bile, of nicotine and macerated flowers. She wants to forget her crime, her rush, her gluttony. She places the remainders of her prey in a bag, the little gnawed bones, the squeezed liver, the sucked-out marrow, the broken clavicles, the decimated kidneys, and without a backward glance she leaves the spoils at the doorway of her house, or in a dark corner. She secures the door with a triple lock and, exhausted, she encloses herself in her bedroom to rest. Then the enormous weasel deans the rooms. First, she rearranges the furniture. She feels that shifting the bed, the chairs, the pil-

lows, the table and lamps is an act of purification that will absolve her of any guilt. At times, she even removes a wall, or puts up a partition. She buys new sofas, changes the light in her office, tears up photographs, she paints the walls. Immediately afterward, the enormous weasel changes her appearance. She dyes her hair, she destroys all her old clothing, she goes on a purifying diet. The seductive animal is going to rest for a while. She must find repose, regain her strength, her lost appetite. In the den, I am the trapped bear, the bewitched, seduced, lethargic prey. (Like the fly in the spider's delicate web, like a bee's wings in pollen, like the koala in the marsupial pouch. )

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I often think about the first time we met. It was all written down there, as though in ancient stone, and I had to decipher it in confusion and fear. "The man in love:' says Raul, "is a fearful man. He's afraid for himself, afraid of losing the integrity of his 'self: afraid of the yoke that dominates him. He wants to stop loving, and at the same time he fears the lack oflove." At times, Aida, my desire to stop loving you is so strong that I wage actual battles against my need for you, against my desire to lose myself inside your body, against the nervous tension that is pushing me toward you with the force of electricity. Then, if I'm able to conquer the temptation of sleeping with you for one night, of waking at your side, of rocking on your body like a ship at sea, I believe that I'm a free man, and I celebrate my independence. I go to a bar full of strangers and get drunk, because for one night I've been able to not long for your legs, to not miss your breasts, to not bellow like a newborn before your naked body. But shortly after my lone celebration, a dark sadness comes over me. Something is missing from my side, something is missing from within me, with the alcohol I've lost something. I'm a free man who detests his liberty, because he only wants it so he can lose his way, again, in the depths of your body. Then I go back to my house, alone, at three in

the morning; I can't awaken you at this hour, and your son sleeps in the room in darkness, while you, powerful, brutal, sleep in your bed. The bed that I miss and desire now that, a little drunk and feeling terribly remorseful about my impulse for freedom, I go back to my disheveled house, to my house of a male in love with a woman who is gone. I open the door, I recognize the odor of tobacco seeping from the walls, the odor of rooms full of books and papers that have been closed up, through the large window I see the dark, lonely night, I long for our mornings amid vapors of love and hashish, I'm a lone man who loves his chains. The night we first met I burned myself twice while lighting a cigarette, and the sear lasted for days. You were wearing a long black skirt with a fringe of orange Grecian figures, and you wore one triangular earring in your left ear. It was the first time I had ever fallen in love with a woman with only one earring. Since that time I've always wanted you to wear one earring. Clumsily, I lit a cigarette (the beauty of your Pre-Raphaelite face made me nervous) , and the match exploded, like a petard, and burned the tip of my thumb. "I adore fireworks displays;' you told me. But I was the one who was burned. I thought about the fireworks in Venice, the nights of Mardi Gras, the fireworks in Sitges during the High Festival, and I could imagine you, slightly tipsy, confused by the lights, drunk with the noise, wandering among blue and red lights, under the incandescent sky sown with flashing sparks, smelling like gunpowder (your favorite perfume) and sulfur, like the witches of pagan ceremonies. I could imagine you in the midst of the bonfires, scarcely protected by a blanket from the fury of the fire, celebrating the burning of the great cardboard monuments, wandering (naked under the blanket) among crackling flames, through smoke, the odor of incense, the noise of stacks of wood as they caved in. "I would like to burn pleasure like a fireworks display;' Aida confesses at night, excited by the odor of gunpowder from the fires of Midswnmer's Eve.

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It was all inscribed at that first meeting as though in a holy book. My fingers, burned by the matches, your face of a Pre-Raphaelite model, my love of your figure, your desire for seduction, your yearning for pleasure, the fire and gunpowder rumbling in your womb of a matron - public and private.

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I wake up, oppressed by a nightmare. I dreamt that Aida had thrown me out of her house, out of her uterus, out of her bedroom, out of her body, convulsed by a paroxysm of uncontrollable fury. Aida's rages are as strong as her desires. Powerful, like the charge of a wounded bull throwing itself against a wire fence, sweeping along everything in its path. I fear her outbursts the same way I desire her body. Angry, Aida is a drunken follower of Bacchus, sacrificing her most beloved objects at the altar of a bloodthirsty god. The pyre flames up with Aida's tributes: my tics, one of my shoestrings, the sheets we make love on, my cuff links in the shape of golden anchors, the wristwatch that I often leave forgotten on the nightstand, next to Aida's bed. A furious follower of Bacchus, searching painstakingly through the house for all those objects that once belonged to us, she throws them on the pyre, with a consuming passion, like fire. Her sequined belt that I would put around her waist and use to pull her toward me in the act of love, the blouse of pale-blue silk with two holes at the height of her breasts, so that I could see them better; the leather armlet you wore as your only garment in bed; the black brassiere with the broach in front that I loved to open so that your breasts, spilling out, would suddenly break free, at last, from their prison. The kerchief of white silk with which I covered your eyes, tying it at the nape of your neck before I began, slowly, to love you, so that in

the darkness of cloth against your eyes, my caresses "vould be your only sensation, so that, deprived of sight, you would have to wonder about the direction of my fingers, you would have to guess where they were going as they touched you. "You dream about what you desire or what you fear;' says Raul. Then I have dreamed about what I fear most. I run anxiously toward Aida's house. It is a clear morning, I seem to notice, and the sky holds a celestial light. I don't know if it's winter or autumn: since falling in love with Aida, I've become unmindful of the passing of seasons. An automobile is about to run me over, and - in this small accident that I've avoided - I see a sign of impending disaster. If I saved myself from the automobile, surely I won't save myself from another form of death. Filled with a deep sense of danger, I nm the distance that separates me from Aida's house. It could be that Aida has gone mad, that she's sick, that her child has disappeared, that she no longer loves me. When I arrive in the clear morning, exhausted, at the door of her house, I press the doorbell hard. Aida doesn't answer. I walk back and forth, in front of the entryway, like a dog waiting for its master. And yet, one of the windows is open. I press the doorbell again. Aida does not answer. Overcome with fcar, I ring again. To me, the silence of Aida's house is like a dark signal, a sign of tragedy. As though I had received a hard blow to the head, I feel disconcerted, perplexed, fearful. I step back and decide to sit at a table in a cafe, to wait for a little time to pass. As I drink my tea, I think that, actually, nothing has happened. Aida must simply be too busy at the moment to open the door for me. My visit is untimely. Aida isn't waiting for me this dear aUhllTIn or winter morning (since I've fallen in love, I'm indifferent to seasons, to cold, to heat, to rain, the sun, to hunger, loathing, thirst, illnesses, to viruses, to newspapers, to advertisements, television, movies, the conversations of others), and I'm sure she must be very preoccupied with her own concerns: preparing the child's meal, washing clothes, dusting the furniture. This thought calms me down, and I drink a second cup of tea, certain that when I go back to Aida's house and press the doorbell, 102

she will be there to let me in - perhaps not smiling, because she's very busy - and my dark fear will disappear, my terrible premonition. I pay and 1 leave, feeling much more optimistic.

* 1 press the doorbell as though for the first time, as though that dark moment, when 1 called and no one answered, had never happened. The ringing is long, like the lament of a rustic flute. (Suddenly I remember that our favorite melody is the "Indian Lament of Love": we've made love to the accompaniment of this music in Autumn, Spring, Winter, Summer, in the morning, in the afternoon, at night, during red dawns aflame with light.) 1 stand waiting at the door, a bit nervous. No one answers. Finally, weary, I shout: ''Aida, open the door, it's me!" Aida doesn't answer. Desperate, I beat my fists against the door. Then 1 hear Aida's voice from the other side: "1 don't want to see you:' she says. I hear the words, but 1 find it difficult to understand their meaning. Finally, slowly, the meaning, hard, metallic, brutal, filters into my brain. She said she doesn't want to see me. Like a robot, 1 repeat the horrifying phrase. I-don't-want-to-see-you. I have to wait a moment for it to sink in, for it to grow, like a cancer spreading its malignant cells through an organism. 1 stand there, in suspense, like an inflated balloon in the air, bobbing slowly in unfamiliar space. I stagger, a giant bear wounded by a shot from the distant bushes, a shot that has found its vital parts. I go to the nearest phone booth. I dial Aida's number. When she hears my voice, Aida answers: "1 don't want to listen to you;' and quickly hangs up. I go back to Aida's house. The door is closed, and I feel displaced, out in the cold, a child lost at the fairground. Suddenly 1 remember a time when my mother left: me outside to punish me for something I did wrong, and in the terror of nightfall 1 was cold, 103

hungry, in need of tenderness, in need of being taken back inside the house. "Aida!" I implore. ''Aida!'' I beg. ''Aida!'' I demand. ''Aida! Aida! Aida! Aida!" Aida doesn't answer. She has locked the door, buttressing it against me. Now I am exiled from Aida, abandoned. Her house, like forbidden land, is denied to me, cloistered, like her uterus. I have no country, no floor, no roof, no womb to take shelter in. 1 am a man thrown overboard who, in the great vastness, is making signs of desperation. I am an exile, a man without a country, an orphan. Aida's absence, her anger, dislocates me, like a clap of thunder that has uprooted me. I stammer, and I fall apart. In the street I burst into tears like a lost child. If I had a bazooka, I would attack the locked door and destroy it, so that I could be with Aida. With Aida who, furious, turns me away with the grim resolution of an incensed bull. "1 don't want to listen to you;' Aida has shouted. Now, Aida is a sated woman. She turns her head, she turns me away, suffering from indigestion like someone who has gorged herself on too many sweets, the thought of sugar now nauseating her. I close myself up in my house, waiting by the telephone for the call that never comes. My hope is that in a moment of sanity and lucidity, calmer, Aida will think better of what she has done and will call me. That Aida will change her mind, and in her normal tone of voice, will invite me over to see her. But dawn breaks (I've spent the night awake) and the call does not come.

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Pain is selfish. Wounded, hurt, lacerated, turned into an open, pus-filled wound by Aida's absence, I'm an unfeeling man who only knows how to cry about his pain, what he's lost, who only knows how to pity himself, to complain, to roar with pain, to howl, dominated by his wound, anorexic, sleepless, drunk, complaining. A man torn apart, cut off from his center, divided, lost from himself, longing for death, eager for forgetfulness. I am a selfish man who looks at his hematoma, who contemplates his stump, who caresses his absent member, who observes the proliferation of malignant cells that are destroying his body and his imagination. A man who talks to no one, who thinks only of his own pain, who docs not offer a smile, doesn't joke, seduces no one. Dismembered by Aida's absence, I am also separated from the rest of the world. I'm not unaware of other catastrophes. But pain is selfish, and I feel only pity, commiseration and grief for my own. There is hunger in some countries, women are abused, some sick people are suffering from cancer, some people die, others can't find work; but I, attentive only to my own grief, am a man who is insensitive to the grief of others. And also to their happiness. If no one can share my grief - not even Aida - I refuse to share the happiness of others. Besides: to me they're poor pleasures, infantile, lacking in any real joy. Someone buys a shirt and to me it seems frivolous: how

can anyone take pleasure in an article of clothing while I'm suffering and falling apart because Aida is gone? When I want to console myself a little, I think about all the men who once loved her or were loved by her, and who have survived the separation. Now they have other loves, they enjoy themselves, sometimes they're even happy. But I don't want another love, I don't want to enjoy life or be happy. Being faithful to d1e pain I feel for Aida is a way of still loving her. "There are brusque passions;' says Raul. "They end as violendy and quickly as they began. Then, a person feels a sort of rejection: simply seeing the one who caused it can bring anguish." Aida doesn't want to see me, she doesn't want to hear me. Abandoned, I shuffle through the streets, I have crying spells in the most unexpected places. I take pills that Raul prescribes. They put me into a state of half-sleep, and I dream about Aida. I can't bear any conversation unless it's about Aida. "Rejection increases desire;' confirms Raul. I can't read or listen to music. Humiliated, I'm a person who has lost the center, the axis, the melody, cause, effect, reason, consistency. I write long letters that I send by messenger to Aida. I don't expect a reply: I trust only that she will read them. I know Aida's inflexibility, and I'm afraid the letters may wind up in the incinerator. And yet, my pain won't soften her. She's a weary woman who only wants solitude and rest, far from what yesterday was her pleasure. I buy flowers, and I send them to Aida with a brief note: "1 love you." At least, she will still have her love of flowers, she will touch them with her hands, she will arrange them in a vase (the blue Pruss ian one that I like so much), she will look at them. If she was unable to be faithful to her love, she can still be faithful to the beautiful lilies. Desperate, I keep calling her. Aida sometimes answers the telephone. But only to tell me: "I forbid you to call me:' I am banished, I am shut out. She is the forbidden land, the land I06

I cannot step onto, the country that does not accept me, the soil that I lack. I wander through the streets in anguish, looking without seeing, floating without roots, for she was my tmnk, my center, my axis. I vomit out the food I haven't been able to chew: Aida's absence is the mass of sustenance that I haven't been able to swallow, stuck in my throat. I've become acutely aware of every second, every minute. Without Aida, time has become a slow succession of moments that fall heavily to the bottom of my anguish, as though into a well. I feel them passing slowly, heavy beasts of burden in pain. I lose weight. Hungry only for Aida, I become thinner each day that she's gone. I don't sleep. Sleepless, like someone waiting for his lover, I think back over our life together, moment by moment, our nights of love, our idle afternoons. Memory, unleashed, evokes instead of erasing: I am a bleeding viscus, I'm wounded flesh, a torn out enrrail that vibrates and moves to the rhythm of images flowing from my unsatisfied desire. "It will pass;' Raul says to console me. But I don't want it to pass. I don't want to stop loving her. I prefer this sharp pain, this crushing anguish, to the tedium of lovelessness, of being normal. I don't want to go back to being a man who talks about banalities, an informed man, one who knows what's going on in the world, one who never misses work, who carries out his duties. This pain is my final way of being with Aida, of being faithful to her, of prolonging my passion. I am not separate from her: in her absence, her memory accompanies me, it follows me, it gives her to me everywhere that she is not. I've never been apart from her for a single moment, although no one knows it. Although she has cut the umbilical cord that united us, I still hold tightly to her nayel. I am one with the cord falling through the air, a cord that now has no place to hold onto, that hangs down like a limp member. "I've finally given birth to you!" shouts Aida over the telephone. I am newborn and abandoned. I am one who has just been born and is thrown out into the world without a mother's protection. I am Aida's orphan. "I'm a man without a name;' I tell Raul. 107

If she doesn't name me, then I'm an anonymous being, depersonalized, with no personality, no identity. I'm a castrated child. Who could I be, since my mother has abandoned me? Who can tell me who I am? Who is going to tell me: "You are Peter" or "You are John"? Who am I, if she won't tell me? "I don't know who I am;' I tell Raul. I look at myself in the mirror, and I become confused. It was not in the mirror that I used to see myself; but rather, I was the mirror in which Aida saw herself This mirror no longer reflects anyone. I've been left without a body to give back, without a face to illuminate, no fantasies to project. "I have no body;' I tell Raul.

If I have no body, I have no self. For the body is the sustenance of the self. By loving me, she granted me a body. Now I am only a shadow, weightless and ethereal. Flaccid sex, a face with no features. I lack a mother, I have been thrown out, without protection, without support, into a hostile world. At night I open and close my moutll against the pillow, searching for her breasts. I open my mouth, I draw in air, I suck at the white cloth of the pillow, I do not find her breast. "I've been weaned before it was time;' I tell Raul. "There is no breast-feeding that lasts a lifetime;' he answers. By depriving me of her breast, she has thrown me - alone and defenseless - out into lie tedium of everyday life. She has closed me out of her house, the same way she's closed me out of her utems. Her house, impenetrable, her body, impenetrable. House and body attached, like the vulva and the conch, like the shell and its spiral, like the tortoise and its carapace. House and utems, forbidden to me. And yet, Aida, I loved your house. I loved your house the way I loved your body, I between the two of them, the newborn endowed with a mother, endowed wili a hearth. Without Aida, I'm a castrated man, deprived, slipshod. Without Aida, I'm a melancholy man, apathetic, bland, clumsy, ugly, weak. I'm ashamed of myself. If she doesn't love me, lien I don't deserve to love myself either. Some female friends try in vain to console 108

me. I look at them wearily. I find them ugly, mediocre, uninteresting. I don't listen to what they say, I'm not able to hold a conversation with them. "Detoxification is slow:' says Raul. Loving Aida is a hard drug. "I'm hooked on Aida:' I tell Raul. Deep in painful lassitude, in drunken forgetfulness of myself, in the drowsy fascination of remembering, in long hypnosis, I abandon all tasks, all thought, all action: like a somnambulist, I perform only automatic, unconscious gestures that I can carry out without concentrating, without effort. I discover, for example, that I've gone three days without shaving, that I haven't slept for two nights, that I talk to no onc.

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When passion blinds you) dress in black and go where no one will knowyou. (Hebrew proverb)

The train is about to leave. In this same station, two years ago, Aida and I boarded a car. We made love all night long in the narrow compartment. Now I'm going to travel by myself. This time I haven't reserved a compartment. I'll travel sitting up, like someone who has made a promise. The promise of keeping vigil. I am the vigil-keeper of Aida. I'm her guardian. I am the soldier, alert to her memory. I must write down all our memories. Condemned to being forgotten by her harsh heart, condemned to being forgotten by her body - closed to me like a crypt - I shall be the scribe of this love. I can't imagine any other task that I could perform, any other occupation I could concentrate on. I know that she's locked herself inside her house. I know that she has rearranged the furniture, perhaps torn down a wall. I know that she doesn't answer the phone, or let her friends visit or answer my letters. She is sprawled out on her bed, alone. The train is about to depart. I've bought a black notebook to begin my writing. Aida is dressed in a short, black mesh; underneath, nothing. A few of her pubic hairs appear along the triangle of her groin. The train has turned on its lights. She unfastens the broach from the mesh over her sex, and the cloth opens, bursts, like a flower. (Before I left I sent you a dozen blue lilies with a note: "1 want you.") The train begins to move, slowly at first. Aida caresses her white thighs. A leisurely, slow, insinuating caress. She caresses her thighs with her

fingers alone: the index and the middle. She passes them over her groin, over the beginnings of pubic hair, over the inner, silky face of her pearly thigh. Now the train moves faster. She begins to rub her sex with intense, swift caresses. The clitoris, a newborn child, shows its head. Now the train moves faster. She touches it with the tip of her fingers and stretches it out, like someone opening a flower. The blast of a whistle sowlds from the locomotive. The clitoris peers out, ingenuous, infantile, an unbaptized child. She rubs the vulva, the two red, anxious lips. The train is picking up speed. The clitoris becomes inflamed, a shiny, transparent drop clings to its tip. When passion blinds you. I see her sex, red, moist, palpitating. Dress in black. I have bought a dark suit for the trip. ((We know you;') said the flowers ofthe field) nonetheless. "We know you/) said the horses in the meadow. And the orgasm bursts with a moan, like the ripe fruit of Aida, like a woman in labor when the water breaks. "We know you;' said the lilies of the field. Where shall I go, that no one will know me? "To your mother's house;' I seem to hear Aida murmur, in her orgasm.

III

Cristina Peri Rossi is the author of many works of fiction, including

Ship ofFools, Dostoevsky's Last Night, andA Forbidden Passion: Stories. Robert S. Rudder is an instructor of Spanish at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Literature ofSpain

in English Translation: A Bibliography (1975), editor of The Orgy: Modern One-Act Plays from LatinAmerica (1974), and translator (with Gloria Arjona) ofCityofIGngs (I993),Nazarin (1997), and Medicine Man (2000).

Gloria Arjona is a basic and intermediate Spanish instructor at the University of Southern California. She collaborated with Robert Rudder on the translation of City ofIGngs, Nazarin, and Medicine Man.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peri Rossi, Cristina, 1941[Solitario de amor. English 1 Solitaire of love / by Cristina Peri Rossi; translated by Robert S. Rudder and Gloria Arjona. ISBN 0-8223-2503-9 (cloth: acid-free paper) -

ISBN 0-8223-2540-3 (paperback: acid-free paper)

I. Rudder, Robert S.

II. Chacon de Arjona, Gloria. III. Title.

PQ8520.26.E74 s66I 3 2000 863 - dC2I

99-050789