We had sealed within ourselves all the dissatisfaction, resentment, and suffering our surroundings had generated. Side by side, we were incubating our grievances. Our relationship suffered profoundly for it: we gave free reign to our mood swings without any creative effort to break through the distance establishing itself between us. A terrible wound opened from all that was eating away at us.
Crisis erupted upon our return from a week spent in New York for the New Year, when we fell once again into the hell we had unknowingly emerged from for a moment. Its abrupt, stifling horror filled us with distress, the same distress walling us in through the dissolution of our love, through a distance that was making us practically strangers to each other. All that the outside inflicted on us resulted in a growing tension, which we never let dissolve in a moribund agreement.
One evening, we turned on each other in the dressing room of the Eden where A*** was getting ready to go on stage. I haphazardly reproached A*** for being cold and uncaring, for being shamefully narcissistic, too. I was reproached in turn for never having asked myself what I really wanted our relationship to be, for never allowing it to run smoothly by fault of never having considered, or taken into account, anything other than an image, other than my singular, and therefore false, vision of A***, with which I had been complacent.
We reached a point of extreme irritation, throwing in each other’s face absolutely anything that came to mind. I demanded to know what was wanted of me, what need I had to satisfy. We only cut ourselves off when a stagehand entered with A***’s costume. Leaving the dressing room, A***, from the door, turned back and hurled this question at me without waiting for a response: “How do you see me, anyway?”
After A*** left, I lingered in the dressing room’s usual disorder. My gaze fell upon a large mirror opposite the door, which had slammed shut after the question. I stared at the door’s reflection. A response came to my lips, which I murmured pensively in the silence: “I see you in a mirror.”
I was waiting for the show to finish so I could deliver that reply — a reply that gave me an odd satisfaction. It was not quite a reply, in fact: it was an enigma, an obscure sentence, a fragment of an aphorism in the tone of an apocalyptic prophesy. I turned it over and over in my mind, on my lips, and before my eyes without diminishing its charm or unveiling its meaning.
An unexpected uproar pulled me from my lethargic, mesmerized meditation. The show must have been coming to a close, but the rumble that usually accompanied the finale had never taken on such proportions. I got up from the couch and started toward the hallway. On the threshold, I paused for a moment and glanced over my shoulder to glimpse my reflection in the mirror.
I tried to see from the wings what was causing all this commotion. On the stage, at the bottom of the large staircase at the back, was a confused cluster of bodies, some of them almost naked, others in work overalls or in evening wear. Arms, heads, and ostrich feathers were sprouting out of the crowd. Rumbles and indistinct murmurs traveled through the chaotic hall. A firefighter, jostling me, raced onto the stage; the rest of the troupe rushed from the dressing rooms, carrying me in its throng, packing me into the mass. In order to reassure the audience, a stage manager grabbed a microphone to announce that the show had been momentarily interrupted, and to beseech all those who had no business being on the stage please to clear away. Ebbing, the circle moved aside and, in the interstice between a heap of feathers and the imposing stature of a stagehand, with heartrending terror I saw A***’s body, which I recognized even before having truly discerned it, sprawled and immobile on the ground, with two men trying to place it on a stretcher.
While everyone else evacuated the stage, I approached and followed the stretcher into the wings. They brought the body to the dressing room where a doctor, summoned for the emergency, came bursting in shortly after. I stood next to the lifeless body that in my terror I didn’t dare touch — I knew already, obscurely, that a gruesome misfortune I was afraid to name had taken place. Next entered a small group of dancers who came upon hearing the news. The doctor, leaning over the body, straightened up. Seeing that I was watching him, he pronounced his conclusion volubly. Apparently, a break in the cervical spine had provoked an instant and probably painless death.
A murmur rose from the back of the room; the doctor was already on his way out. Some of the dancers, still half-naked, approached the body. They had seen A*** trip, fall headfirst, and violently hurtle down the entire flight of stairs, helpless to resist or direct the fall. At the foot of the stairs, the dislocated body, following a scream that had sprung forth from every mouth, had remained still in the silence of death that preceded the general tumult.
The show was suspended only briefly. They replaced A*** off the cuff with another member of the troupe. The presenter reassured the spectators of the fate of the victim of this regrettable accident, and they redid the finale (which A***’s fall had interrupted) in its entirety. Mourning isn’t much suited to venal celebrations. The show was performed two times each night for successive batches of clients, and the second performance of that night went on as usual, quite naturally and without mishap.
I remained in the dressing room with A***’s body, and the director came to convey his condolences to me and to assure me that he would take care of all the formalities and cover the costs until the insurance money came through. He left, and I found myself again head to head with the cadaver still spread upon the stretcher that had served to transport it, which the two stagehands had set up on a trestle in the middle of the room.
For three hours I stood before this vision of a beloved body I knew to be dead, without the fact resounding in me sufficiently to shift my sentiment or my gaze. To my right, in the mirror on top of the vanity table, was the body’s reflection. From my view, due to a frightening effect of perspective, the body’s image was foreshortened, from the soles of the feet in the foreground up to the head, which was lost in the distance in a virtual space that swallowed up my gaze, stumbling up against the base of the chin, boring into the gaps of the nostrils, and fading along the line of the eyebrows beyond which the forehead faded away. It was as if this sprawled body in the mirror was looming over my gaze.
A halo of lamps, the sole source of light, framed the mirror and bathed the painting taking shape there in a pale shadow; the reflection was melting A***’s body and my face at its side into one single lividity.
III
From then on I didn’t get out of bed until dusk; in the night, my infernal refuge, I indulged in roving fantasies.
A***’s presence was stolen from me by images. While we were together, I was jealous of all that had engrossed A***. I hated the television, detested those frivolous parties and their cortèges of ostentatious, superficial people. All the time stolen from me by those hours spent shopping, at the jeweler’s, the hairdresser’s, all of that dissipated time. Although, to be fair: some moments of pure pomp had fascinated me as well, the times I watched A***’s body mutate into an image. What price did I pay for them, in suffering? When we lived together, I always interrupted my eternal, languishing reverie to spy on the slow ceremony of applying makeup in the bathroom — the brushstrokes that highlighted the cheekbones, the sharp line of the pencil, the superimposition of different colors on the eyelids to intensify the socket. But I would lose myself in the distance of the gaze, closing myself off in mere vision. Little by little, my gaze, isolated in the mirror — a living enclave — became petrified in the glass facade formed around that face.