And of course she came back.
I grew effusive. I took her arm and talked, bending my face close to hers. I said many things but again I felt real and of course eloquence failed me. For once I regretted having stepped out of my character. As such I could always speak brilliantly and in a convincing way. My speech was fluent and well chosen. But now I was speaking in a flat manner like a vulgar man. I wanted to appeal to her imagination and arouse her interest, but instead I said that I specialized in girls who spoke in a coarse, low voice and went out late at night looking for men to give or pay them money. I asked her name, what she did and where she lived and then, to feel the ground, I said that I was broke. Was she beginning to prove the stronger, would I definitely be dragged into her world of reality?
Her name was Maria Luisa Baez, but they called her Lunarito. She lived far from there and did nothing. She had no money either. But everything she said seemed to lack life. It condensed in the mist and rain and fell to the wet ground. Indeed, she was reality.
Then came the realization of the rain. I felt her damp clothes. It was necessary to get out of it. However, the weather, the hour and the place did not seem to affect her in the least. But I was human for the first time and I was drenched. It was imperative to get better acquainted because there was also another latent desire in me. I suggested a doorway.
“All right,” she said and we went in.
Until that moment I had been but a description and now I felt real. Beyond the door of that sordid hallway, beyond the clouded sky, I could sense the stars, life pushing me to her. I never thought that reality could be so intense and plastic, and when she looked at me, I kissed her.
What happened then is beyond me. It was so unexpected that I doubted if that reality was anything but a dream. Her dense cloak of indifference collapsed. She responded immensely. Indeed, she was a human being and human beings are sometimes wonderful. And then such a strong contrast, for what she said did not fall dead but flourished on her lips.
Yet what she said was in keeping with her style of talking. The word she said was silly and I drew it from her and it penetrated me, shaking the innermost fibers of the male. It passed from her tongue to mine, through our blended lips.
If there is such a thing as a long kiss, that kiss was long.
“Have you a cigarette?”
Again she was indifferent. We smoked in silence and then she said she was going.
I said:
“I want to see you again, I must be always with you. Give me your address.”
“It is no use. You will never find it.”
And even now I do not understand what kept me from insisting. I gave her my address and said:
“Will I see you again soon? Write to me, come to me, very soon.”
“All right.”
“Take good care of yourself. Your clothes are all wet. Take good care of yourself, you belong to me now.”
“I will always belong to you.”
“Good-by, Lunarito.”
“Good-by.”
When I arrived home I was thinking that this was the second woman I had loved without an interest. The other woman was there in my home, perhaps oblivious of the fact that for the first time I had really been untrue to her, that our future relations would be now more of a grotesque pantomime, intensifying our mutual absurdity.
And even so I felt that the tragedy of our life had somehow been robbed of its strength. Yes, that woman who awaited me, that woman who was my lover, was like me, nothing but a character. Had I not ceased to be a character? I entertained strong doubts as I entered my former house of unreality. Yes, that woman and I more than belonged to the world of puppets. Did I really belong? Had I sunk back into my world since I bade good-by to Lunarito?
But Carmen, my mistress, was awaiting me. How could I find anything in common with her after having had a test of reality? How could I cross the abyss which separated us now, unless I trusted to sheer romanticism? And after my fleeting escape into the human world I had no taste for that.
Had I truly been unfaithful to her? She could not deem my fault so great with a being that belonged to another plane, to another world and different standards. An actor on the stage cannot feel jealousy because his stage lover steps out between the acts and falls in love with a spectator. But was I coming back to go on with the next act of our eternal comedy? And a mere puppet does not allow himself to step out and live and love like a human being between the acts. No, he must sink back into nonentity.
Carmen was sleeping that profound sleep I knew so well. I remembered that stupor into which a character falls when he is not called upon to act, when his strings have been released. But I had been perhaps walking in my sleep and my actions thus committed, no matter how transcendental to my future life, did not concern her.
I thought all this and even more, but when I entered the chamber where Carmen lay asleep, I felt remorse.
And this is the end. I have not heard from Lunarito since that night and now I think that everything was but a vision. All that happened that night tends to prove that. Her supreme indifference, the fact that she did not mind the rain, the swift manner in which she walked over the puddles. Yes, the whole thing did not exist. It was a hallucination, and perhaps that is why there was no man waiting for her at the corner of Velazquez Street, for there could be no human being waiting on such a night for something that does not exist. Undoubtedly it was a vision. For that which is reality for humans is a hallucination for a character. Characters have visions of true life — they dream reality and then they are lost.
And this is my predicament. Here I am: a character who has stepped past the edge of the paper and plunged into the abyss of reality, who now cannot go back to his own world. My comedy has expanded beyond the footlights, I have fallen in love with a woman in the audience. Can she be brought onto the stage, or shall we the puppets invade the house and mix with the humans in a general drama?
What can I do? To go back into my world when my main interest is in reality seems hardly possible. To enter reality which I scarcely know is a tremendous ordeal, because I have no real past. What can I do? I appeal to the author to destroy me completely or make me all over. To make a character out of Lunarito in order that she shall be within my reach. But no, I want her real. It was reality that I loved in her. Then to give me a past and let me be human. But can an author give a past to a real being?
I appeal to the author to solve a problem which is beyond me.
II
This Gaston Bejarano, my character, is in quite a difficult situation. Of course, he is the only one to blame. I interrupted my story and he took advantage of my absence in order to develop it on his own hook, with the result that he has made a mess of it. The whole thing has not come to a proper ending; it has been dissolved rather than solved for lack of adequate interference.
However, what has happened to Gaston is a good lesson to my characters. Now he is coming in a submissive way to ask me to help him.