“Somehow relates to us?” Besfort laughed. “Not somehow, but totally. And not just to us, but to everybody.” He stroked her hair as she lay down beside him. In words that came to him with difficulty, he explained that this story was in a way archetypal. It described a sort of infernal machine through which millions of couples passed, consciously or otherwise.
Rovena struggled to follow his meaning. So it was an occult text that needed a key to unlock it.
“Don’t look at me like that, as if I were sick,” he said.
Gently she touched his hand.
He said he had always liked it when she looked like a sympathetic nurse. It was no accident that nurses made such tender lovers. But he wasn’t crazy, as she might think.
Rovena stroked his hand. Of course he didn’t seem crazy to her. If anybody was crazy, then they both were. Or had been at one time.
“You mean at the Loreley,” he butted in.
They recalled their visit there, without pretending they hadn’t been thinking of the tale of the foolish test of virtue. The two stories were essentially so close that they almost coincided, and the phrase “infernal machine” was not accidental either. Both stories brought to mind the afterworld, not the familiar hell with its tortures and fiery cauldrons, but another gentler, muted, pre-Christian kind.
How bewildered they had been at first as they wandered through the dim spaces, until the huge bed loomed in front of them like some rock of salvation. Their second expedition took them to the bar in search of drinks, and then further afield. She grew more relaxed as she walked, her silk-sheathed hips swayed more freely, until they came to the door marked “Massage”.
Would you like that? he asked her, with his eyes rather than in words. She barely hesitated. If he didn’t mind.
The door closed behind her and he turned back to find a place to wait for her. From a distance, he saw the bed where they had lain, still vacant. He sat down on it and lay back on one elbow, a solitary Ulysses cast up by the waves, surrounded by the booming of the sea. Around him, the ebb and flow continued. A couple paused beside him and started talking to each other. The woman stepped forward, bent down, touched his ankle. Besfort produced a guilty smile. He wanted to explain that this lady was very attractive and classy, but he had something else on his mind. He whispered, “I’m sorry,” but the two lowered their heads to say goodbye so politely that he was sincerely touched to the heart. He watched them move away arm-in-arm, but could not muster the willpower to stand up and follow them. He wanted to tell them how much he would have liked to stay with them, with this noble lady and this gentleman, sharing their sophisticated ennui on this bed where destiny had landed them. He felt genuinely sad, but for a different reason. Sometimes he thought of Rovena, and sometimes he put her behind him. She seemed to him light years away, sucked away by a whirling universe resembling one of the dormant galaxies captured in the latest space photos. The fear that she would never return came so naturally to him that he reflected he should not complain, because they had spent so many wonderful years together. He would do better to find out where this debilitating numbness came from. It was as if he had been smoking hashish. Perhaps it was the stress of this exhausting day, or was it time to take that Doppler test, as his doctor was insisting?
The languid crowd still circulated. A woman with tearful eyes and a tulip in her hand appeared to be looking for someone. He would not have been surprised to see, among the milling swarm, people he knew from the Council of Europe – those who had first given him the club’s address. Rovena was taking a long time. The tear-stained woman passed by again. Instead of the tulip she held a document of some kind in her hand. She was looking for somebody. Besfort thought that if she came a little closer he would surely distinguish on the document the initials and seal of the ICTY. The International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague.
A court summons! Rubbish, he thought. Go and wave that scrap of paper in front of someone else! Yet he averted his head in order not to meet her eyes.
He dozed off two or three times, until Rovena finally reappeared, as if emerging out of a fog, or arriving from dozens or thousands of light years away. Of course she would be changed. The whites of her eyes had a devastating gleam. There were vacant spaces in them. Her words were also sparse.
“When I came back you were in a trance,” said Rovena. “I expected you to ask me what it was like.”
“I don’t know what was stopping me,” he said. “Maybe I thought you wouldn’t be able to tell the truth even if you wanted to.”
“Perhaps,” she replied. “Sometimes that really does happen.”
He took a deep breath.
“It’s what usually happens. And it is a really peculiar thing that love, the most beautiful emotion on earth, is the one least able to bear the truth.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said.
“It’s different now. You’re free now. We’re both different now. Do you see what I mean? We’re both entirely different, so now you can say it.”
She remained silent, but she took his hand that was stroking her stomach into her own, and guided it where she wanted.
“Do you really want to know?” she said in a lifeless voice. Did he really want to know, after so long? The words of both of them, broken by their laboured breathing, died out into silence.
“Now I understand why you gave me the Cervantes text,” said Rovena when they were calm again.
He had not worked it out so precisely, he said. He had been drawn to the text first out of curiosity and its resemblance to the Loreley. The other things came later.
“You told me the text contained a mystery, and that you had found the key to its meaning.”
“I don’t think I’m the only one. Would you like to hear about it? Aren’t you tired?”
“Don’t back out,” she said. “You told me that the hour after midnight would be the same as it has always been.”
“That’s true. I promised.”
She took a deep breath.
“The hour when a prostitute tells her interested client about her orphaned childhood, drunken father, insane mother.”
“That’s enough,” he interrupted, clapping his hand over her mouth. He felt her lips under his palm, gently squeezed into a kiss, and his heart leaped.
Chapter Ten
That same night. The occult text.
Slowly he began to explain his interpretation of the text. Rarely had such a great deception been portrayed in such a covert manner. Treachery triumphed. All the characters were waiting their turn to deceive or be deceived. Camilla, the young bride, is first deceived by Anselmo, her own husband who puts her to the test, and then by Lothario, their house guest, who agrees to play the game. Then Lothario, now Camilla’s lover, deceives her again by failing to confess to her how the story started.
Anselmo, with his mania for putting his wife to the test, is deceived by both Camilla and Lothario, who become lovers behind his back.
Truth is violated to such an extent that when Lothario acts honestly he is vilified for treachery, and when he becomes a deceiver he is revered as a saint. The same goes for Camilla. First she is suspected of being inconstant when she is not, and then she is praised for her sanctity when she yields.
“The only character in the story who deceives without being deceived is Lothario. Do you agree with that?”
Rovena did not know what to say.
“Or so it seems,” continued Besfort. “But probably the opposite is true. In all likelihood, he is the only one who is a victim of deceit.”
He went on to explain that the most mysterious passage in the tale describes the morning before dawn when Lothario sees a stranger coming out of Anselmo’s house. Lothario jumps to the conclusion that Camilla has a lover. Did she find him herself? Or did Anselmo plant him there, to repeat his test? Curiously, Cervantes suggests only the first possibility. He does not raise the second at all, although it is just as likely, if not more so.