She tried moving her feet away, but the professor’s hands were gripping her ankles. The voices of the bishop and mayor could be heard in the living room. Chivo, on his knees, raised his intoxicated, inflamed face; it was as if he was catching a glimpse of Primavera in Heaven and he was much further away, in Hell.
“You are to be adored,” he said, as if crying.
“Get up from there,” Primavera urged, in an anxious whisper that sounded like a warning but also a celebration. In response, the professor simply crouched down again and redoubled his kisses, this time around her ankles, and then he moved lower down and started to plant kisses between Primavera’s toes, while she opened her mouth, incredulous, bowled over by a wave of heat. And he’s still kissing my feet, she cried inwardly, paralysed: now she could not even attempt to move her feet backwards. My feet? — she asked herself — not just my feet, because the kneeling professor was kissing her calves and had suddenly lifted a burning hand and was sliding it over her knee towards Primavera’s thighs, underneath her skirt.
“My dear Don Arcaín,” Primavera managed to blurt in surprise — with pleasure or annoyance? — and she thought that having said “My dear Don” to him, which she never said to anyone, and saying it in such a tone, she was calling him to order, “I could scream, they could hear me.”
And yet, in spite of everything, an immeasurable delight took hold of her, against her will; the presentiment that they could be discovered at any moment: that was what worried her most, that her husband and the bishop and the mayor might come into the kitchen at any time — above all the bishop, she thought — but she felt the professor’s hands moving even higher up her thighs, like dizzying, burning wings, pushing her legs apart; will I faint? — she wondered, leaning over the professor, who trembled on his knees as if praying — I will faint; and she opened her mouth to gulp down air because she could not breathe and it looked as though she were going to scream so the professor stopped his marauding: he lowered his scalding hands to encircle just one calf and left them there, as though shackling her.
“You,” he said at once, not giving her time to react, “you are the remote Virgin of my childhood, surely it was for a kiss from your lips that my great-grandfather killed himself, or that he was killed, or that there was that war between two peoples, each of their kings wanting to abduct you and throw you on the marriage bed and gulp you down thirstily, Primavera, like a drop of water in the desert,” and meanwhile he was looking fleetingly at her knees, and raised his gaze, fleetingly, to the place where her sex must be underneath her skirt, and from there he moved up fleetingly to her eyes, nothing daunted, and held her shocked, liquid blue gaze, held it without wavering while she stretched her mouth wide and exposed her teeth as though laughing silently, and yet it seemed she did it out loud, he thought, a torrent of feminine mirth cascading over him, encouraging him to keep talking, to provoke another silent, obliging laugh, she was challenging him to make her laugh more, or lose the game and see the laughter turn to contempt.
“I live in the hope of your love, the hope that one day you will open up for me like a flower, mistress of my pain,” he said and recited “sweet and sacred little light within my heart,” and chided her: “You’ll never imagine what you’re missing out on, not letting me adore you.”
“God, what are you saying? Do you know what you’re saying to me?”
Astonishment made her voice crack; another wave of heat washed over her; Arcaín Chivo renewed his wandering, his hand high inside her skirt.
“Don’t do that,” Primavera seemed to beg with a groan, mute laughter playing across her flushed face the whole time, and she lifted her free leg slightly and rested her foot on the kneeling professor’s shoulder (so that for a blazing moment Arcaín Chivo could see she was entirely naked beneath her skirt); oh unattainable sex, he thought, and was able to stammer “unattainable Primavera,” incredulous at such joy, and as Primavera moved he believed he managed to detect, on the air that wafted from inside her skirt, her most intimate scent, a sort of bitter sweetness, he thought, and now in a trance he was straining his neck head face mouth much further in to her when she pushed her foot against him with all her might and the professor collapsed backwards against a cabinet amid a clatter of saucepans and spoons, which simultaneously crashed down on his head.
“Arcaín’s just fallen over,” came Primavera’s nervous announcement. “Something happened. He’s hurt himself.”
The others arrived: three long, grey shadows leaned in through the doorway. The professor had hit the base of his skull, hard.
“I think I’ve had too much to drink,” he said, half getting up. The doctor himself held out his hand and helped him.
“I think I’d better go, señores,” Arcaín Chivo continued, and it was impossible to tell whether he felt angry or overwhelmed with delight — he did not know himself.
“Us too,” responded the bishop. “I’ll drop you home, Arcaín. It’s all been quite enough, if not too much. There are holidays on the horizon, but that doesn’t make the days any easier to get through, eh, Justo Pastor? Promise me we’ll meet again before carnival.”
“I promise,” the doctor replied. He could not take his eyes from his wife’s flushed face, the face that was looking right back at him, happy.
But the joy on Primavera’s face drained away as soon as they were alone, as the guests’ voices on the other side of the front door grew fainter; she crossed the living room at once and started to go up the stairs, with the doctor behind her, neither of them hurrying, but escaping and in pursuit.
When they got to the first-floor landing the doctor took her by the arm and made her stop. “We need to talk,” he said. “I’m going to see if the girls are asleep,” she responded. With a brisk jerk she shook off her husband’s hand, and carried on going upstairs. He hesitated over following her: in the end he headed for the study on the first floor, still hoping to find the recordings, or at least the paper transcriptions. He spent a long time there, in the office, rummaging through files, all to no avaiclass="underline" he had already lost the urge to ask Primavera about the tapes and start another row. He went up to the second floor with the intention of going to bed and putting the world out of his mind, but saw Primavera in Luz de Luna’s bedroom, leaning over her sleeping daughter, and to see Primavera so calm, in peaceful silence, reawakened his impotent rage and the misery of depending on — or not depending on, more like it — a woman like her. Would he ask her about the tapes, without worrying about the row? He remembered his daughters were sleeping. My God, he said to himself, was it possible Primavera had stolen the tapes?
He chose to go back down to the first floor: he turned on all the lights, went in to the guest room, the laundry room, the room with the ping-pong table in it — all lined with further bookshelves — and in each room he continued his search, for endless minutes. Absolutely nothing. How long ago did he lose track of the recordings? He could not remember. Didn’t he keep the tapes in a Cuban cigar box? Where did he hide that box? Why was his work — the only thing he had going for him — in such a muddle? The final room on the first floor was the toy room, and that was where he headed. He switched on the light: wooden Pinocchios, cuddly bears, lizards and whales, giant mice, penguins, plastic dolls and wind-up ones, puppets, wooden horses, electric trains, rubber ducks, tin soldiers, ballerinas, fairies and elves on strings all seemed to greet him at once with the most monstrous guffaw — that’s what he heard — a freakish laugh issuing from deep within the toys as they lay piled in heaps against the walls, like multiplied versions of his own daughters.