* * *
Δ “All right, Javier, if you’re there, turn the lights on. I’m tired and I want to lie down. Don’t you hear me? I think that maybe you aren’t there, or you don’t want to hear me. You never want to hear the truth, do you? What really happened, instead of your pretty dream. Well, let’s see, when was it? A year ago … eighteen months? I had already dressed and you were shaving and you told me to go on, you would join me later, and you told me the address and I still remember it: 1270 Sierra Paracaíma, the party would begin at ten. Who was giving it? Oh, that didn’t matter. We wouldn’t know anyone. But because of your work, it was important for us to be there. I left you. At ten exactly I was there, and as you had predicted, they were all strangers. All except Vasco. You remember him, Javier. Vasco Montero, who came back from Spain. At the party he wasn’t the same Vasco. Fifteen years had passed and he had aged. I hardly recognized him.”
And you see, more real now through the wall of flabby flesh and wrinkled skin, the form of the man who was, the man who has forgotten his own geometry. His jawline, once so sharp and lean, always brown from the sun, the foundation for the angularity of his nose and mouth, had come apart, swollen up, degenerated into carefully shaven floury bags. Vasco Montero, grown old.
“Vasco didn’t greet me. I don’t know whether or not he recognized me. But yes, he must have, for I’ve hardly changed. Have I, Javier? I’ve been careful to stay trim. Pictures don’t lie. The fashions have changed, clothes and hair, but I haven’t, not an inch or a pound, I look exactly as I did twenty years ago. But maybe he didn’t recognize me. Maybe he saw me and saw that I hadn’t come apart, as he had, and couldn’t believe it, thought I had to be someone else, not myself. Javier, how do people see us? As we see them? It would be ridiculous to live fifteen years and then be recognized. For time passes, I’ve lived with myself and I know I am different, even though I don’t look different. Why did Vasco stare at me?
“We went in for dinner and you still hadn’t arrived. I went in alone, holding my bag in my hands. Vasco had disappeared and I didn’t dare go look for him. The buffet was served on a long table in front of a window that looked out on the lighted garden. I took a plate and filled it, the usual things … you know, chicken cooked with almonds, ravioli, baked ham and pineapple. No one said a word to me. No one knew me. I went back to the living room and sat on a taboret. I recognized a few faces. The faces that one sees on the society pages, the people who give teas, receive showers, go sailing at Acapulco. Jaime Ceballos and his wife, the daughter of the banker … Régules, I think; they picked out the records for the changer and turned the lights down. Pedro Caseaux, the polo player, was there with an absolutely silent girl on his arm. Charlotte García, the famous party giver of the international set. And with her, her eternal Bobó. Both as aged as mummies, withered and yellow, like Lotte Lenya with Peter Lorre. Our host turned out to be Reynaldo Padilla, who inherited the empire of old Artemio Cruz. You remember Artemio Cruz, I know. He died six or seven years ago and the newspapers wrote about him for a month afterward. We read those eulogies and died laughing. He was simply an old millionaire, but you would have thought he was a great national hero. I sat alone on the taboret and ate my chicken and understood that you had sent me alone simply because you knew I would know no one at that party and could talk with no one and would have nothing to do except think about you, tell myself that however I might feel about you sometimes, to have you was good, at least it kept away the loneliness of this country, this city where even after so many years I was still a foreigner, an outsider isolated from these silly people who all knew each other and talked about the same silly things, their servants, their children, their priests. I was annoyed by their damned rudeness, leaving me alone, no one walking over to talk with me, to ask me who I was and where I was from, why they had never seen me in their clubs or at their beach houses. I tried to laugh at them. At their stupid serene confidence that they were the incarnate belly buttons of the entire world, the center of everything. I told myself that maybe I had changed more than I knew and that was why Vasco hadn’t spoken. And then, just as I was beginning to feel really out of it, you arrived. I noticed suddenly that I was sitting in darkness and that people were dancing and Judy Garland was singing Alone. You stretched your hand to me in the darkness and led me out to dance too, touching me as if we were meeting for the first time, as if this were our first evening together and I was once again the unknown to you, the unrevealed, a girl to be discovered and conquered. I let you pretend whatever you wanted to pretend, let myself be caressed and returned the caresses because they came from you, from Javier, the man I had loved and lived with so long. I declined to pretend too, my love. I could tell that you were touching me as if it were for the first time and that disgusted me and made me shiver. Yet I gave in and played along because it was you and you were mine and I had given up everything for you, had left my home and my country to follow you, Javier, and I returned your caresses precisely because you were familiar, known, not a stranger, and now in your arms I was feeling as I had used to feel, that everything had worked out all right, that though I had given up much, I had gained just the same because I had gained you and you were worth everything. That was what I was feeling and it was all I wanted to feel, that confidence and happiness again. The party was horrible, but I had you. And for you it was just as horrible, but you had a new woman in your arms, a new woman to discover as we danced together in the darkness. Oh, I understood. I knew that you were touching me because you had made me cease to be Elizabeth Jonas, born in New York forty-two years ago, and had transformed me into an adventure. And how you touched me, Javier! Your hands were on my thighs, your cheek rubbed against mine, you nibbled at my hair, felt my breasts beneath the sleeveless dress; oh, you were great, the cock of the roost in action, the seducer of virgins, the answer to every woman’s dream, out with a new lay while Ligeia sat at home in the apartment with a best-seller in her lap. Shit, Javier. Just shit. And you were telling yourself that you were risking everything, while I, at home alone, played it always safe, always secure. As if any woman is ever safe. I’d rather go into battle a thousand times than give birth once, that’s how safe it is. And when will it be possible to be a woman and yet not feel that fear? No, I don’t mean that. I take it back. I have to hang on to you. Yes. I put my arms around you and hold to you, for you’re all I have, I have no home, no country, no parents, no brother, just you. That’s why I let myself play your game. Sure, I’ll drink with you, dance with you, let you dream I’m anyone you please, it’s all right. I’ll try to guess each move fast enough to keep up with you, try to remember the scene, the lines, the business, a scene that after all we have played a hundred times before. That’s been our whole life together, hasn’t it? And I chose it, didn’t I, freely, voluntarily? Ha, ha, ha. It’s our very life, Javier. That’s why we read so much, you and I.”
You read as actors reading scripts, Elizabeth, to find, written by others, words and actions you can build your days of. And on that night at the party, you made up the answers as you went along, followed the path he hinted at: a path that led to a love that without pride would be lost because pride, impeding it, forced it into being. That led to a man who could be the accomplice of your passion but not your intelligence, a man Javier would never know. The real stranger in this game he forced upon you was that unknown lover, not you. He himself, in the role he was acting, was the stranger, and you played your responding part because you wanted the promised reward: that he would take you afterward and fuck you as he hadn’t for a long time, as if you were indeed a new woman and he a new man, and it wouldn’t matter by whose name he called you as you made love, all that would matter would be the passion you had found together again after so long, had found through different names and different faces but the same pulsing flesh …