I love each one in his own way. You and he.
Would you take the next step?
It depends. I don’t know. What are you talking about?
About egotism disguised as generosity. I’m talking about giving. About giving oneself. About giving oneself completely. About going beyond the couple. .
5. Leo could concentrate on the painting by Hokusai. On the other hand, it was difficult for him to concentrate on the two women, Lavinia and Cordelia. In the painting, he could see what he wanted to. It was a transparent painting, pure glass open to the whim of one’s eyes and the strength of one’s imagination. For example: In the picture, it is raining on the landscape. To Leo’s eyes, the rain is smoke. In the painting, the world floats past. To Leo’s eyes, the world tends to be fixed, immobile, in the most immediate reality. Leo’s daily reality? Or the reality of the imaginary painting? Aren’t they, both of them — everyday reality, the virtual reality of art — permanent flux, everything flows? Leo understands it this way even though he doesn’t feel it. Leo is the victim of a parceling of hours into immobile minutes that, no matter how they follow in succession, are identical among themselves or, at least, to themselves. But Hokusai’s sea, though immobile in the painting (or within the painting), is like the gigantic spirit of the world. That surf along the Japanese coast, enclosed within the four sides of the painting, over-flows them, the sea ascends to the sky, invades the beaches, sinks to the bottom of itself, devours itself in each singular, repeated wave.
The sea, like the figures in Piero della Francesca, looks elsewhere, ailleurs, làbas. Leo knows there are no geographical làbas to flee to, as Gauguin and Stevenson did. Gauguin’s grandchildren receive the Paris papers by plane every day. Stevenson’s grandchildren watch a serialized Treasure Island on television. The làbas, the other place, the great undiscovered country, exists only in each person’s soul, but there are beings with no soul, that is, with no imagination. And even those who have more than enough, which is what Leo thinks about himself, who use it up rapidly, soon become sated with their own fantasy and then feel the need to go beyond, farther than where they have already gone.
An enormous lassitude invades the entire being of Leo Casares when he thinks this, and then he returns to his bedroom and continues to look at the painting. The world is floating by. Grab it!
6. First he spoke with each woman and later with both of them together in the penthouse on Calle de Schiller. He had spoken to each about the other without revealing the nature of their relationships to him. They were friends, barely acquaintances. To each — it was the most difficult point — he explained the particular beauty of the other. He admired each for her beauty — one so different from the other — and when he told this to the other, he did not add what the one listening — Lavinia, Cordelia — wanted to know, each more beautiful than the other. And since they could not say that about themselves, they waited for him to say: “She is very beautiful, but you’re more beautiful.” Or “not as beautiful as you.” Or at least “there’s no comparison to you.” He kept this back. At the most, he told each one: “A woman is interesting not because she’s beautiful but because she’s another beauty.”
He knew, looking at each one in turn, that he was looking for a woman who would have a little of Lavinia and a little of Cordelia. Since that woman did not exist, Leo preferred having both. The problem that was becoming acute, distressing, exciting, and filled with expectation was knowing how to bring them together, put them face-to-face, and observe what would happen when the two women who were his lovers met without knowing that each was a sexual partner of Leo’s. Would they intuit it? Say it? When two are one, each experiences what Mallarmé calls “the evil of being two.” What does the poet mean? That the amorous couple would like to be a perfect, indissoluble unity, and when they achieve it, they experience evil, the absolute evil of knowing yourself a lover and knowing, fatally, that you are separated from what you desire most in spite of having it?
Leo debates this question with himself, the lover of two women who do not know each other and whom he now invites to have a drink at the same time — seven in the evening — in the apartment that each one — Cordelia, Lavinia — knows and considers hers because each one has moved from the living room to the bedroom and from the bedroom to the bathroom and each one has used the same soap, the same shower, the same towel, the same bidet, and sometimes the same toothbrush (Cordelia never forgets to bring hers, Lavinia does: “What would my husband, Cristóbal, think if he found a toothbrush in my Louis Vuitton bag?”).
Until now Leo has kept them apart thanks to a fortunate though hazardous act of juggling. Two balls in the air. One ball in each hand. Leo becomes irritated. In his life as a great dilettante, a great enthusiast, each step ahead has been transformed over time into a step backward if the next step forward is not taken in time. It is what he is experiencing now. Lassitude. Abulia. Lack of surprise. Wonder exhausted. The sea dries up. There is only a cliff that sinks to the bottom of a great cemetery of sand. A ravine whose crown is the great bare desert. The sea basin has to be filled again. Where is the surf, where are the sweet laments of the sea, where is the new, unheard-of, voracious foam that his existence demands in order to move forward? In order not to commit suicide in the name of unknown novelty?
Leo replaces on the mantelpiece the photograph hidden during Cordelia’s and Lavinia’s visits. It was the portrait of a man in his forties, handsome, with a thin face, his chin resting on two hands with long, very slim fingers. The dedication read: “To my adored son Leo, your father, Manuel.”
7. Leo told them the good thing about absence when a couple falls in love but lives apart is that it keeps desire alive.
Lavinia did not agree. She said that absence does not stimulate desire, it kills it. And she added picturesquely: “If you’re smart, don’t stay apart.”
Cordelia intervened with the opinion that absence is like the sweet but unbearable reserve of the next encounter.
“I’ve wanted to be at a distance without desiring,” Leo claimed, leaving unstated the conclusion that neither woman would or could reach.
“I’d rather say stupid things than feel sorrow,” Lavinia said in an eccentric way.
“Do you mean that’s why you say them?” Leo said with a nasty smile.
“I don’t dare oppose older people like the two of you,” Lavinia said, returning his smile.
Leo guffawed in irritation. “I like women who, in spite of being women, are different.”
Cordelia shrugged and made a disapproving face. Did Leo think that being a woman was a uniform? Weren’t men, in any case, more similar to one another than any two women? Lavinia laughed. “We wear feathers like savages, we raise and lower our skirts following the dictates of fashion, whatever that means, we don’t become bald, we don’t have to shave (our faces), and our underwear isn’t predictable, we’re divine!”
Leo and Lavinia wanted to break the ice emanating from Cordelia’s labored breathing. Suddenly, this simple conversation (this complicated presence of the three of them in the home of a shared lover) had placed Cordelia at an age disadvantage, something she was not accustomed to accepting, especially because it was the repeated insult her husband, Álvaro, threw up to her.
It was obvious that Álvaro’s wife was twice the age of Cristóbal’s. Except with Leo, Cordelia had never felt the contrast that the youthful presence of Lavinia imposed on her now. The two women were aware of the difference. They also confirmed that age did not matter to Leo.