He had come to the conclusion that he could not experience this dream-like sensation except with a person who had once been close to him but was now distant. He would make Rovena a stranger again, like two years before. He would lose her in order to win her again.
He was aware that these were crazy ideas, contradictory notions.
Perhaps he should take tranquillisers to keep this kind of excitement under control. And not drink so much coffee.
The temptation to play a game with Rovena, like Russian roulette, perhaps really came from another dimension. But her obsession with freedom, where did that come from? These things were somehow connected to each other, and so was his question: does love exist?
He thought with a smile that there were cases in which freedom could also be granted by force. He ordered a third coffee, but dared not touch it.
On the boulevard, the street sweepers were clearing away rubbish and placards that had been trampled underfoot in the fray. This short eruption of anger had subsided and its traces were being removed, leaving behind the old, familiar rancour of court cases and disputes over ancient wills, some of them in dead languages and with Ottoman seals.
Chapter Six
The end of the same week. Rovena.
All week she had been worrying and trying to ease her mind by phoning regularly. But these frequent calls only increased her distress. The opposite tactic of not phoning at all only made things worse.
We shouldn’t have talked so much about Liza, she thought. Neither of them had given her a thought for almost two years, and suddenly, like a baleful ghost, she had come back to haunt them when they met in Vienna.
Sometimes I think that you purposely never wanted to hear all about her. You wanted to torture me with unasked questions, with suspicions that I might think you still harboured secretly.
I have started so many letters about this and torn them up. I have worn myself out brooding over it in solitude. I tried to explain when we were together, but you were always impatient to reach the climax, the only part that interested you. You tried to look as if you were listening but you were not. Your eyes were always glazed when I described the nightclub where I met Liza, and how she kept her beer glass beside the piano.
My inner confusion, her look, my answering stare, then the kiss in the car, her hand on my thigh, the memory of the school lavatory, and my hand taking hers to lead it between my legs, then her groan and my opening the zip so she could find what she was looking for…
Feverishly, you kept asking the same questions, and only those: “When you opened the zip, did you know what she wanted?” Then you would keep talking without listening to my reply. “Tell me, when she had you in her hands, I don’t know if you would put it that way, I mean when she had taken you completely, as you might say…”
After I finished describing our lovemaking, you lost interest, so I could never explain that I went with Liza not because of that instinct of so long ago, but because I wanted to loosen myself a little from you. Subconsciously I wanted a woman more than a man. I did it for my own sake, perhaps because it was an easier way out. It was easier that way, perhaps because there couldn’t be any comparison between you. But, believe me, it was more for your sake than mine. So as not to injure you with a rival. But the devil got into you and you started phoning more often at the very time when I needed a little rest and distance from you. You called every day, which you had never done before. These were the first weeks with Liza, and we had our first quarrel over you. She became jealous of you, and spent hours spinning her theory that you were not merely an obstacle in my life but had distorted my real sexuality. I argued back as hard as I could and told her that you had made me twice, three times the woman I was. She ridiculed what she called my naivety and ignorance of the world. She would caress me and murmur in my ear that I was one of the few women with the natural gift to reach the heights of ecstasy that only the gods can imagine, if only I could get rid of that hindrance in my path, meaning you. You, meanwhile, instead of helping me resist this, did the opposite. The more irritated you were on the phone, the sweeter she murmured in my ear, until the day when something incredible happened, the only thing that I have never told you and I’m not sure I should: she proposed marriage.
It happened after an ordinary quarrel in a café, a jealous tiff, initiated by me when I thought she was angling after someone else. To get my own back I pretended to be attracted to someone else too. Both angry at each other, we ended up at her place, and then in bed, where she used all her skill to excite me as never before. We were born for each other, she whispered as she stroked me. I am the pianist, you are the instrument under my fingers, and that’s how we will always be. We’ll ascend to the divine. We’ll climb to that seventh heaven that so many talk about but only a handful of the chosen ever reach. Expert as she was, she uttered the word “marriage” or rather exhaled it at the instant of climax, to associate it with this moment, just as they say sadomasochists do.
Later that afternoon, in the drained and febrile state that you like to call “rainbowed”, I went home. I had indeed almost crossed the rainbow and realised my vague adolescent dream, but this time in a different, tangible, purposeful way: I was marrying a woman.
My emotion was mixed with a similarly vague anger towards you, as well as grief and bitterness, because you had never made that proposal to me.
The bridal veil, the wedding guests, everything appeared to me in surreal fantasy, as if from another world. I told myself that this was nothing less than the truth: I would be married on another planet.
Liza and I were going to go to Greece, where, for the last few years, on an island with an abandoned chapel, women had been marrying in semi-secrecy. This would all change soon. The Council of Europe was drafting new legislation and we would no longer have to conceal our relationship on the street, in cafés and at concerts where we could not keep our eyes off each other, she on the stage and me in the audience.
This is what I thought, but meanwhile my pangs of conscience over you gave me no rest. I consoled myself with the idea that I was sacrificing myself for you. Like a bride who marries in another city to prevent her wedding causing pain to her jilted lover, I was marrying into another world, that of women. Or so I liked to think. It was less a joy in itself than a way of sidestepping you, while at the same time avoiding any insult to that other wedding ring, yours, which did not exist.
How I had longed for your proposal during that unforgettable winter trip to Vienna. All the street lights, neon signs and billboards advertised it, shrieked for it. The church bells clamoured for it. You alone were deaf.
I was still in the street, caught between my morbid intoxication, pain at parting from something, fear of what was to come, anger at you and a peculiar hollowness in whose depths lay that illegal chapel, when all of a sudden you phoned.
From the first moment, that phone call struck me as strange and ill-timed. Your voice too. No doubt I replied frostily, which made you say, “What does this tone of voice mean?” Then everything spiralled downwards. The harshness in your voice was only half of it. There was a note of mockery. You ridiculed everything, my emotional state, the bridal veil, the marriage vows, the surreal chapel. Pitiless, destructive, as you are at your worst, you tore all these things apart like rags. Of course I lost control. In the heat of that rage I said those words that wounded you so much, about ruining my sex life. Of course they came from Liza. She insisted that when the memory of men’s brutal penetration faded from my violated body I would be ready for a higher plane of love.
To cap it all, two hours later, while I was sitting in despair after my quarrel with you, Liza phoned. She spoke more lovingly than ever and she expected me to reply in kind. My confusion first astonished and then offended her. So you’re having second thoughts? You’ve changed your mind? I couldn’t think clearly. She grew angrier. My vacillation disappointed her. She had thought her proposal had made me happy. She had never in her life made such an offer, and now I was being coquettish. “Wait, let me explain,” I said, but she was no longer listening. Then she called me unfaithful. I said she didn’t know what she was saying, and then she started reviling you. “Go on, go back to that terrorist,” she said. “That warmonger will end up on trial at The Hague. And you’ll be there with him.”