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— Would you like a coffee? She asked as a pretext to get him to come in.
He stayed on the threshold. She was standing, in a short and transparent nightdress. He was going to say: “you can sleep easy now, I found a way to get him to go.” But before he said that he stopped short, his lips pursed, and looked her up and down. Finally he said:
— I’ll call in the morning.
With the despair of a woman scorned, she heard his car pull away.
Ulisses’s gaze robbed her of sleep. She looked herself all over in the mirror in order to figure out what Ulisses had seen. And she found herself attractive. Yet he hadn’t wanted to come in.
And so you didn’t want any more of that. And you stopped the possibility of pain, which no one gets away with. You just stopped and found nothing beyond it. I’m not saying I have much, but I still have intense searching and violent hope. Not that quiet and sweet voice of yours. And I don’t cry, if I need to one day I’ll scream, Lóri. I’m in the middle of a struggle and much closer to whatever people call a poor human victory than you, but it is a victory. I could already have you with my body and soul. I’ll wait for years if I must for you too to have a soul-body in order to love. We’re still young, we can waste some time without wasting our whole lives. But look at everyone around you and see what we’ve made of ourselves and considered our daily victory. We haven’t loved, that most of all. We haven’t accepted what we don’t understand because we don’t want to look stupid. We’ve hoarded things and reassurances because we don’t have each other. We don’t have any joy that hasn’t already been catalogued. We’ve built cathedrals, and stayed outside because the cathedrals we ourselves built, we’re afraid they’re traps. We haven’t surrendered to ourselves, because that would be the start of a long life and we’re afraid of that. We’ve avoided falling to our knees in front of the first one of us who says, out of love: you’re afraid. We’ve organized smiley clubs and associations where you are served with or without soda. We’ve tried to save ourselves but without using the word salvation in order to avoid the embarrassment of being innocents. We haven’t used the word love so as not to have to recognize its contexture of hate, love, jealousy and so many other contradictories. We’ve kept our death a secret in order to make our life possible. Many of us make art because we don’t know what the other thing is like. We’ve disguised our indifference with false love, knowing that our indifference is disguised anguish. We’ve disguised with a small fear the greatest fear of all and that’s why we never speak of what really matters. Speaking about what really matters is considered a blunder. We haven’t worshipped because we have the sensible pettiness to remember on time the false gods. We haven’t been pure and naive in order not to laugh at ourselves and so that at each day’s close we can say “at least I didn’t do something stupid” and that way we don’t feel confused before putting out the light. We’ve smiled in public about things we wouldn’t smile about alone. We’ve called our candor weakness. We have feared each other, most of all. And all this we consider our daily victory. But I escaped that, Lóri, I escaped with the ferocity of someone escaping the plague, Lóri, and I’ll wait until you too are more ready.
ulisses monologue
— Yes, said Ulisses. But you’re wrong. I don’t give you advice. I just — I—I think that what I’m really doing is waiting. Waiting perhaps for you to give yourself advice, I don’t know, Lóri, I swear I don’t know, sometimes it seems like I’m wasting my time, sometimes it seems that on the contrary, there’s no more perfect, though worrisome, way to use time: the time of waiting for you. Do you know how to pray?
— What? she asked with a start.
— Not pray the Lord’s Prayer, but ask something of yourself, ask the maximum of yourself?
— I don’t know if I know, I’ve never tried. Is that a piece of advice? she asked with irony.
He looked flustered:
— I think it was. Forget what I said.
— My mystery is simple: I don’t know how to be alive.
— Because you only know, or only knew, how to be alive through pain.
— That’s right.
— And don’t you know how to be alive through pleasure?
— I almost do. That’s what I was trying to tell you.
[...] She knew the world of people who anxiously hunt down pleasures and don’t know how to wait for them to arrive on their own. And it was so tragic: you only had to look around a nightclub, in the half light: it was the search for pleasure that doesn’t come by and of itself. She’d only gone with some of her men from the past, maybe two or three times, and hadn’t wanted to go back. Because the search for pleasure, when she’d tried it, had been bad water: she’d put her mouth on the tap, which tasted like rust and only gave two or three drops of lukewarm water: it was dry water. No, she’d thought, better real suffering than forced pleasure. She wanted Ulisses’s left hand and knew she wanted it, but she did nothing, since she was enjoying the very thing she was needing: being able to have that hand if she stretched out her own.
And now she was the one who was feeling the desire to be apart from Ulisses, for a while, to learn on her own how to be. Two weeks had already passed and Lóri would sometimes feel a longing so enormous that it was like a hunger. It would only pass when she could eat Ulisses’s presence. But sometimes the longing was so deep that his presence, she figured, would seem paltry; she would want to absorb Ulisses completely. This desire of hers to be Ulisses’s and for Ulisses to be hers for a complete unification was one of the most urgent feelings she’d ever had. She got a grip, didn’t call, happy she could feel.
But the nascent pleasure would ache so much in her chest that sometimes Lóri would have preferred to feel her usual pain instead of this unwanted pleasure. True joy had no possible explanation, not even the possibility of being understood — and seemed like the start of an irreparable perdition. That merging with Ulisses that had been and still was her desire, had become unbearably good. But she was aware that she still wasn’t up to enjoying a man. It was as if death were our great and final good, except it wasn’t death, it was unfathomable life that was taking on the grandeur of death. Lóri thought: I can’t have a petty life because it wouldn’t match the absoluteness of death.
During the first days Lóri was bothered because she was sure Ulisses was waiting. It pained her for the roses to wilt and for him pathetically to replace them with others that would wilt too. It consoled her to think that his wait wouldn’t be too painful for him, since he was an extremely patient man who was capable of suffering. So she calmed down. She thought now that the ability to bear suffering was the measure of a person’s greatness and saved that person’s inner life.
So, no. What she ought to do was wrap them up and send them off, without any enjoyment now; wrap them up and, disappointed, send them off; and in astonishment be rid of them. Also because a person must have some consistency, her thinking ought to have some continuity: if she’d spontaneously decided to hand them over to Carlota, she should stick to her decision and give them away. Because no one changed their mind from one moment to the next.
But no one could have guessed what she was thinking. And for those who looked at her once more from the doorway, the birthday girl was only what she appeared to be: seated at the head of the filthy table, her hand clenched on the tablecloth as though grasping a scepter, and with that muteness that was her last word. Fist clenched on the table, never again would she be only what she was thinking. Her appearance had finally surpassed her and, going beyond her, was serenely becoming gigantic. Cordélia stared at her in alarm. The mute and severe fist on the table was telling the unhappy daughter-in-law she irremediably loved perhaps for the last time: You must know. You must know. That life is short. That life is short.
Pale, kicked out of a Church, she looked at the stationary earth from which she’d departed and back to which she’d been delivered. She straightened out her skirts primly. She didn’t look at anyone. Contrite as on that day when in the middle of everyone the entire contents of her purse had spilled onto the ground and everything that was valuable while lying secretly in her purse, once exposed in the dust of the street, revealed the pettiness of a private life of precautions: face powder, receipt, fountain pen, her retrieving from the curb the scaffolding of her life. She rose from her seat stunned as if shaking off a collision. Though no one was paying attention, she smoothed her skirt again, did what she could so no one would notice how weak and disgraced she was, haughtily protecting her broken bones. But the sky was spinning in her empty stomach; the earth, rising and falling before her eyes, remained distant for a few moments, the earth that is always so troublesome. For a moment the woman wanted, in mutely sobbing fatigue, to reach out her hand to the troublesome earth: her hand reached out like that of a crippled beggar. But as if she had swallowed the void, her heart stunned.