Finally she emerged. Oh heaven, a total stranger, as pale as plaster, just like a real bride under traditional law. With head bowed, she approached the bed and lay down stiffly beside him. It seemed to him that they had forgotten entirely how to move. He bent down over her face. Her lips, like her eyes, looked alien, and he did not kiss them but whispered, “Has anybody else touched these?”
She said yes with a motion of her eyes.
The open bathrobe revealed her breasts, which were perhaps even more complicit in the conspiracy than her lips. He asked his question again, and her reply was the same.
He was not sure his body could withstand the swoon, in which misery was mixed inextricably with desire. And who was the lucky man, he thought.
He caressed her belly, and then below. When he asked his question again, she made the same motion of her eyes. So you’ve gone all the way, he thought, but what he said was, “Which means…?
Rovena did not answer. She stifled a groan, in a way she had never done before, as if sucking it inside, and he said to himself: of course.
Instead of music, a distant police siren accompanied their last moments of lovemaking.
A siren from nearby suddenly interrupted Besfort’s thoughts. It was almost the same sound as on that night in Luxembourg. He smiled, remembering that the Albanian police had been supplied with new cars from the West: their sirens had brought the first hint of Europe to Tirana. He turned to the window to look. Skirmishes had broken out on the main boulevard. They’re throwing tear gas, said someone who had been close by. People could be seen lifting their hands to their eyes, as if scared of shadows. The bi-diplomat’s curly hair looked as if it had caught fire. He remembered that redheads were sexually insatiable. My poor darling, he said to himself, who knows what you put up with from him.
That was more or less what had passed through his mind when, after their lovemaking, he collapsed exhausted alongside her.
Her words on the phone, mixed with others that were the product of his imagination, came back confusedly to his mind, with altered syntax, like a ritual formula. My sex life has been ruined by you.
Other men have abused you and you blame me, he thought. After their lovemaking, he had repeated his unanswered question. Had she gone the whole way? She hesitated again, before saying, “It depends what you mean.”
In a soft voice, so as not to disturb their stillness, he had said that this made no sense. The other man, if he had kissed and caressed her everywhere, had certainly gone the whole way… as they say.
She gave the same answer. “It depends what you mean.”
“How?” he asked. “Was he impotent?”
“No,” Rovena replied after a long silence. “It was a woman.”
He poured his entire being into a long release of breath. So this was the truth. He experienced a few moments of total perplexity, and then he thought he had found the answer that explained everything. Questions rushed pell-mell to his mind.
If it had been a woman that had tempted her, why had this infatuation, this new-found desire engendered such fury against himself? And why all this suffering and shouting, that visit to the psychiatrist?
She listened in astonishment. “What do you mean, why? It was only natural that this should happen. I wanted to break away from you and you wouldn’t let me. I wasn’t double-crossing you, do you understand? That’s all.”
It all became clear to him. As if her confession had been some opiate, his head fell back onto the pillow. She too wanted to sleep. They were both exhausted, and two hours later they woke up as if in a different era. It was as if he was discovering her again. But still he was not sure. It was like an image on the surface of water, which the slightest ripple could destroy.
Cautiously he took up the conversation where they had left off. He heard Liza’s name for the first time, and about the circumstances of their meeting. The nightclub where she played the piano on Saturdays. Their interlocked stares. The phone call. Their first kiss in the car.
Then? Then we know the rest.
“I don’t know anything,” he had said with childish curiosity.
“Tell me everything… Tell me how you did it.”
“How we did it?… In fact I didn’t do anything. She was the one who… I just let her…”
Rovena went on talking. Her description was earthier than anything he had ever heard. Did she get these words from the gypsy woman?
“Tell me again,” he had said, almost pleading. “Tell me everything.”
She told him about how as a schoolgirl she would get excited in gym class when the girls undressed. Apparently she had the instinct at that time, but not in any special way, only like many girls. She wasn’t lesbian, as he might think. It was more an escape from her fear of men, caused by anxiety over her breasts, which she thought were smaller than they should be. With Liza, she had become even more of a woman.
More of a woman, he thought. How much further could she go?
For the first time, she kissed him on the neck, but coldly. “After all, everything I have done, everything so far has been for you.”
He went back to what he had said just after their lovemaking. Still panting fast, he had said that she blamed him for everything that had happened to her. If she was attracted by a woman, discovered a new experience or melted in a rapture of desire, it was his fault. In the middle of this upheaval she had gone to a psychiatrist, for reasons that remained obscure, and this too was supposed to be on his conscience. She expected him to repent and ask forgiveness.
He had expressed to her only a part of all this, vaguely and incompletely. She had listened in silence, and then with the same gentleness had said: “That is the truth. It was for you.”
Besfort could not get angry. But his voice was still cold.
“Tell me something. But clearly and accurately. When you told the psychiatrist why you were upset, and that you had quarrelled with your lover, what form did you use, masculine or feminine? I think they are different in German.”
She sighed. She didn’t deny that there had been friction with Liza. But it was always over him. He had captured her like a songbird and would not let her go. She was trying to escape from his cage, but couldn’t. So she quarrelled with her girlfriend… Flailed. Injured her wings. Screamed.
All their conversations about Liza were disjointed like this. It wasn’t just Rovena. He too was in no hurry, almost as if he was scared of the fog clearing. It took a long time for him to reclaim Rovena, and he was not sure which he preferred, the first Rovena, so lucid, or this second one, so awkward, with her plaster mask and a double life.
Whenever she came close to him again, within reach and laughing as before, he felt, alongside the delight of rediscovery, a regret as the mask melted away. How could he bring back that otherworldly taste that came from alien, infinite regions?
One evening, as he stared at a sex doll in the window of a sex shop in Luxembourg, she had taunted him: “Go on, buy it, if you fancy it so much.”
“I will buy it,” he had answered earnestly. “But on one condition, that it’s just like you.”
Rovena had scowled, not knowing how to take this.
He could not totally explain it either. He did not want to disturb that veil of mystery that had fallen over her since the episode with Liza. Yet he knew that it was impossible not to do so. The weeks passed and they grew as close as before. It was a miracle, he repeated to himself, but deep down he felt that it was not so much a miracle as a kind of calm.
“You’re fed up with me,” she said, “so you want the company of a mask. Why don’t you find one of those Japanese actresses caked with plaster of Paris, a mystery within a mystery, like sleeping with a bride who has risen from her coffin. Isn’t that what you’re looking for?”