Except with a different partenaire.
Does that excite you, you cynic?
We’d be lovers and not create problems for anybody.
We wouldn’t gain anything.
We wouldn’t lose anything, either.
Then tell me what we gain if we don’t lose.
Being apart so we want each other more. Distance increases desire. It’s almost a Church dogma. Abelard and Heloise. Tristan and Isolde. You know.
I say we already have that. Explain what we would gain if I change husbands but continue as your lover.
I’ll tell you later.
You’re pushing me, Leo.
Toward what?
I’m just letting you know. Don’t push me too much, my love.
3. Leo looks intently at the painting by Hokusai. That Oriental sea — the rougher it becomes, the more cold it gives off. A white sail rises from the waves, which are so intense, and the sail so fragile, that one would doubt the existence of anything else: the undiscovered country, said the Bard, from whose bourn no traveler returns. Is that sail tossed on the agitation of the elements an act of mercy? Does it keep us from seeing the imaginary land hidden by the fog? Not to mention landing on it? Is the mist a friendly invitation to remain where we are, not to go beyond, to that làbas of the imagination where temptation and danger, satisfaction and disappointment, the life of death tremble like flames? Beyond. Taking the next step. Not settling for the crooning hush of the sea and its white sirens. Hush: crush. Crush the song of the sirens with drowned resonances and hostile foam. Hush the streams that come down from the sierra looking for the way to the sea. Crush the sirens so they don’t daze us. Daze and detain. Leo would have liked to set foot on the coast. Would he dare? Had he lived his life so far as a delicious conjuring trick, not daring to take the next step, the step from game to life, from shadow to wall, from appearance to touch, from touch to true absence? From observation of the sea to the certainties of terra firma, where all imaginary dangers are transformed into the greatest danger: no longer sensing any danger at all?
4. It’s all true, Leo. Álvaro insults me, abuses me, doesn’t appreciate me, mistreats me, but at the same time he complains violently that the world insults him, people abuse him, injustice victimizes him, and destiny mistreats him. That’s his posture. He’s simply giving me what the world, destiny, and people have given him. The worst thing is that deep inside, he believes this identifies us and, in a way, makes us partners in misfortune, so to speak. He makes us depend on each other in unhappiness. He and I. He creates an effect filled with blame.
Except that he can make you miserable, and you don’t know how to harm him, Cordelia.
Are you insisting I abandon him completely?
I said no such thing. I’m not asking you to leave him. I’m asking you to do him harm.
Isn’t it enough that he knows about us?
No. And I’ll tell you why. Forgive me, Cordelia. Yesterday I went to visit your husband.
You saw Álvaro? Why? What happened?
First of all let me clarify: He called me. He reached out to me.
I don’t understand. What did he want?
To require my presence.
Why?
To clarify my relationship with you.
And what did you tell him?
That it is reflection in absence that makes a husband undesirable, not his proximity.
Did he understand you? Because I don’t really understand you.
Let both of you understand me, then. The great romantic rule is that distance stimulates desire. Tristan and Isolde. Abelard and Heloise.
I know. You always refer to those couples.
It’s the great romantic rule. Unacceptable to modern promiscuity. We want immediate satisfaction. And we get it. Except that what is gotten right away is consumed quickly and then thrown in the trash. I don’t know how a society can be called conservative when it doesn’t conserve anything. We are engaged in an imperfect duel with the world.
Don’t leave for the hills of Úbeda.
I mean that if the consumer society is the way it is, Abelard and Heloise are impossible. The rule takes a leap to tell us that absence separates us and makes us undesirable. We want to consume each other. If we can’t, we don’t hate each other, we simply ignore each other. Whoever isn’t immediately available becomes old and decayed forever. Love has an expiration date, too, just like a bottle of milk. Everything conspires to disenchant us.
You forget that one can love somebody without that somebody knowing it.
Ah. That’s the case with your husband.
It may be, if you insist.
Naturally. I insist. Of course I do.
Nothing you’ve told me includes my case.
Tell me.
Being the object of love that is ignorant of the fact.
I don’t follow.
Álvaro doesn’t know that even if I leave him for you, I’ll go on loving him. And even though he hates me because of you, I don’t know if Álvaro will go on loving me.
You know and he doesn’t?
He doesn’t know that I know.
Why?
Because he doesn’t have an imagination for the good. He thinks and feels only in darkness.
Why does he bring me into it, Cordelia?
Because Álvaro doesn’t love or hate. He fears vulnerability. He wants to know he’s protected.
I repeat: Why me? I believe I’m the least qualified to give your husband protection.
You’re thinking sentimentally. Remember who gave him a job at the Department of the Interior.
The secretary.
Who recommended him?
I did, because you asked me to.
Who are you?
Adviser to the secretary.
Who dismissed my husband?
The secretary, because Álvaro was insubordinate.
Did you approve the dismissal?
There was nothing else I could do. It was a bureaucratic decision. Don‘t think it was on account of you. Besides, it isn’t that he was insubordinate. He simply didn’t measure up. I’m sorry.
It doesn’t matter. For my husband, you’re the factotum. You hire. You fire. You seduce the wives of your employees. And just as you seduce them, you can abandon them. And then, Leo, then he would be there, ready to receive me with feigned anger, with disguised tenderness, he, Álvaro Meneses, who is who he is only because of favors received, becomes the giver, do you understand? The Good Samaritan, the sentimental Midas, oh, I don’t know! He receives. He gives to me. That’s his well-being.
You’re the object of love who ought to be unaware of it.
Do you know something? I’m tired of the comedy of pain, devotion, and fidelity. Passion exhausts me. The problem with my husband is that things weren’t as satisfactory as I hoped or as indifferent as he expected.
What did you want, Cordelia? Being a couple is an illness. It’s a sickness. It isn’t true that the couple is the perfect egotism between two people. The couple is shared hell.
You and I?
The exception that proves the rule.
Aren’t there three of us, if we include Álvaro?
Tell me something, Cordelia: At some point in your marriage, did you ever have the feeling that you and your husband were a single person?
Yes. How horrible. As soon as I felt that, I began to step back.
Was I the way to distance yourself from the similarity to your husband?
In part. Not completely. Not always. It doesn’t matter. The more you resemble yourself, the less you resemble your spouse. That’s what I thought then. With you, there are no physical antipathies. Very strange. With you, there are no doubts about the amorous relationship.
Inevitable doubts?
Maybe.
Are you sure? You didn’t break with Álvaro. Not completely, I mean.