“Don’t look at me that way.”
“How am I looking at you?”
“As if I were a ghost.”
“I’m looking at you because I never tire of looking at you. Because I’ve missed you so much I can’t believe you’re here.”
“I’m not sure you see me when you look at me. I’ve never been sure. You would stare at me but seem to be elsewhere, lost in your world, probably thinking about your work, or wondering whether your son or daughter had a fever, or your wife, or what lie you’d tell when you got home, or the remorse you felt deceiving her. You’d look at me and then look away, though only for a second. We were kissing in that room at Madame Mathilde’s, and I saw you in the mirror across from the bed looking at the clock on the night table. Just a glance, but I noticed it. I believe in the man you are, not the one I might have dreamed you were. And when I read your letters I felt like running out and getting into bed with you, felt as dizzy as when we had those cold beers in cafés. But then, reading them again, I felt the same doubt as when I just saw you looking at me. I wasn’t sure it was me you were writing to. The letters were so vague. You talked about what you felt for me and our love as if we were living in an abstract world in which there was nothing else and no one else but us. You filled two pages telling me about the house you wanted to build for us, and I asked myself where, when. Promise me you won’t get angry with me for what I’m saying.”
“I promise.”
“You’ll get angry. Sometimes I thought you wrote to me reluctantly, because you felt obliged to, because I was asking you to. You made fun of those wordy articles intellectuals published in El Sol, but there was something in your letters that reminded me of them. You told me what you felt about me but didn’t answer the question I’d asked. I thought of an expression you taught me: dar largas. You were putting me off so you’d never have to address our real lives, yours and mine. And the truth was that though we spoke so much and wrote to each other so much we never spoke about anything specific. Only about the two of us, floating in space, floating in time. Never about the future, and after a while almost never about the past. You said you were in love with me but became distracted whenever I brought up my life. And if I mentioned my ex-husband, you changed the subject.”
“It makes me jealous to think you’ve been with other men.”
“You’d be less jealous if you’d let me tell you that my husband and those others never mattered to me half as much as you.”
“There were more men.”
“Of course there were. Did you think I was in a convent waiting for you to appear?”
“I couldn’t stand the thought of you with someone else. I can’t now, either.”
“I had to stand not the thought but the reality that after being with me you could dissimulate with no difficulty and get into bed with your wife.”
“We hadn’t touched each other for a long time.”
“But you were with her, not me. In the same room and the same bed. While I went back alone to my room in the pensión and couldn’t sleep, and if I turned on the light I couldn’t read, and I sat in front of my typewriter and couldn’t write, not even a letter. And if I wrote to my mother, I couldn’t tell her that her sacrifice had allowed a married Spaniard to have a younger American lover.”
“Van Doren told me your mother died.”
“How strange for you to ask about her.”
“I always wanted to hear about your family.”
“But you became distracted the minute I started talking about them. You didn’t realize it, and you don’t remember, but you were an impatient man. You were always in a hurry for one reason or another. You were nervous. You were anxious. You’d throw yourself on me in bed sometimes, and it seemed you’d forgotten you were with me. You’d open your eyes after you came and look at me as if you just awoke.”
“Is that all you remember?”
“No. At other times you could be very sweet. Other men don’t even make the effort.”
“I was crazy about you.”
“Or about someone you imagined. I reread your letters and thought they could just as easily have been written to another woman. I was flattered at the time to be the one who inspired those words in you, but sometimes I didn’t believe them. You’d look at me and I didn’t know if it was me you were looking at.”
“Who else would it be?”
“A foreigner, an American. Like those women in the movies and the advertisements you said you’d always liked. You enjoyed looking at me. It always seemed you could have done without the talking. You were more expressive in letters.”
“Am I looking at you now the way I did then?”
“Now your eyes have changed. When you opened the door I didn’t recognize you. Now I’m recognizing you again, slowly, but not completely. I don’t see you sneaking a glance at your watch.”
“Why are you going to New York?”
“The Spanish man, asking his questions.”
“Are you going to see your lover?”
“Don’t talk to me that way.”
“You used to say you couldn’t imagine yourself going to bed with another man.”
“If I were to remind you of all the things you said to me.”
“I wasn’t the one who disappeared. I wasn’t the one who promised to keep an appointment and then didn’t show up.”
“Do you really want to talk about that now? I didn’t disappear. I left you a letter explaining how I felt, what I thought. Why I couldn’t see you again. I didn’t hide anything from you. I didn’t tell you any lies.”
“You left the letter knowing I was waiting for you in the room.”