Any careful reader must ask a serious question. What is Lothario doing outside Anselmo’s house before dawn? Why is he on the lookout? What does he suspect?
This question turns the entire text inside out, and here is the new interpretation.
Anselmo and Camilla, after they are engaged or married, discover the miracle of sex. Their passion for each other is such that they turn the marital bed, so often derided as a desert of tedium, into an altar to the boundlessness of desire. With the passage of time their lusts become ever more refined, pushing them towards an ultimate liberation. They try every kind of sex they have ever heard of or imagined. They talk dirty, they perform the most shameful acts. They know no limits. As they eat dinner with friends and go to market or Sunday mass, they think of nothing but the hour after dinner, when she comes with a candle in her hand to the bed where he is waiting for her, his desire hotter than the melting wax. In sombre, mighty Spain, bristling with cathedrals, with its protocols of the Inquisition and its spies, these two are set apart. They discover a kind of passion that few have ever known, which transports them every night to unknown regions. The barriers of shame fall one after another, and the couple break through inhibitions and taboos, until one day they stand before the gateway of decision. “Would you like to try it with someone else?” A long silence. Then the answer, “Why not?” And then the question, “What about you?” and silence again. And then the reply, “To tell the truth, yes.”
And so, trembling with terror and lust, they embark on the great trial. Everything about it is unnerving. Especially the selection of their partner and victim. First they suggest Lothario, but they both reject this choice as too reckless. He is too close a friend. They think of others, but they are no good either. The first is bald, the second has some other flaw, the third isn’t serious and the fourth not man enough. Camilla notices with delight that her husband is not deviously choosing someone lesser than himself. This makes it easier for them to come back to Lothario. Camilla says candidly that he fits the bill. Anselmo makes no objection. He suits them both. In short, he excites them both.
And so events take their course. But the difference is that Anselmo never leaves the house. Excitedly, he watches Camilla making herself ready for another man. He senses her impatience, which matches his own. Then, from the place where he hides, with Camilla’s knowledge, he observes everything: Lothario’s declaration of love, Camilla’s bowed head. He watches them draw close and kiss for the first time. Then from another vantage point he watches them go to the bed and undress. He hears Camilla’s familiar cry, and sees her pale legs carelessly splayed after their lovemaking. He can hardly wait for the other man to leave, so that he can make love to his wife.
And so it goes on for several weeks, or perhaps months, until the day of the catastrophe. There is no doubt that a disaster occurs, and it is entirely credible that Lothario, now in the role of eavesdropper, should see someone leaving the house in secret. What is not credible in the story as Cervantes tells it is the introduction of the servant girl’s love affair, and so on. In fact, it is not the servant girl’s lover leaving the house, but Camilla’s.
And this is what the new reading tells us really happened:
Camilla and Anselmo quickly tire of Lothario, and want to stretch their limits again. As is usual in such cases, they want fresh stimulus. And so they need a new partner, as Anselmo had predicted they would from the start.
Lothario has noticed something odd. His suspicions have been aroused. That is why he spies on his friend’s house every night until he discovers the truth.
Here the curtain falls on the drama and we are left in darkness. Something serious happens, something that brings death to all three, but for some reason this is not revealed.
Besfort was tired, and he fell silent. As so often when he spoke again after an interval, his eyelids moved first.
“A strange story,” said Rovena, with averted eyes. “Do you want to know what happened in the Loreley?” she added.
He paused before replying.
“I didn’t tell you the story with that in mind, believe me.”
“I do believe you. But I want you to know.”
He felt the familiar stab in his heart.
She spoke with her eyes lifted, as if telling her story to the ceiling.
“I wasn’t unfaithful to you in the Loreley,” she said calmly.
Each avoided the other’s eyes. In a steady voice, as if talking about someone else, Rovena described what had happened. Besfort listened with the same detachment, reflecting with sorrow that there is a proper time to ask every question, and he was no longer curious about the Loreley. She had walked to the massage couch, and the masseur was “suitable”, as she and Besfort would have described him, like Camilla and Anselmo long ago… She described the uncertain borderline between massage and fondling, her temptation, her hesitation. With astonishing precision, she described how she cast aside all shame, but finally and unaccountably demurred on the very brink…
“That is all,” she said. “Are you upset?”
He did not reply immediately. He cleared his throat, coughed.
“Upset? Why?”
The silence became awkward.
“Upset at what happened… although in fact nothing happened…”
“Then why should I be upset?”
She felt an emptiness in the pit of her stomach.
“I could ask it differently. Are you upset because nothing happened?”
“No,” he said curtly. “Not for that reason either.”
Suddenly, Rovena felt traduced. The old question of where she had made a mistake surfaced again, accompanied by all the anxieties she thought she had left behind. As people so often do, in trying to repair her blunder she merely made it worse.
“Don’t you even care?” she cried despairingly.
She was on the verge of breaking down in tears.
“Listen, Rovena,” he said calmly. “I don’t know how to talk to you. Until yesterday you were complaining that it was my fault that you aren’t free. And now you say you have too much freedom. But somehow it’s always my fault.”
“I’m sorry,” she butted in. “I know, I know. Please forgive me. We’re different now. We have a pact. You’re the client, I’m the prost… The call girl. I don’t have the right… I…”
“That’s enough,” he said. “There’s no need for a drama. There’s enough of that around.”
Years ago he had shouted “That’s enough” in just the same way. Ashen-faced and with a trembling hand, he had grabbed her by the hair, just by the window, and the appalling thought flashed through her mind, oh my God, here I am being treated like a whore in the middle of Europe.
He did not hit her. With a pale stare, as if he himself had been struck, he sank onto the sofa.
It was all over. The thought came to her, that of the two “enoughs” she would have chosen the first, and she burst into a torrent of tears. Tyrant, she said to herself. You pretend you’ve lost your power, but you’re still the same.
She heard his voice. “It’s three in the morning. Shall we go to sleep?”
“Yes,” she replied faintly.
They said goodnight, and a few moments later Rovena was astonished to hear his breathing deepen.
He had never before been the first to fall asleep. The emptiness of the room became somehow suspicious. This is no use, she thought. You can’t win against him – ever. She had lost her last chance long ago, and now it was too late. She had never resorted to her only superior weapon, her youth, because forbidden arms can never be used.
Now he was out of danger. He had persuaded her that they would come out of it together, leaving behind all their hesitations, their doubts over separating or not separating, and the question of where she had gone wrong or not gone wrong, as if these belonged to another world, like the Cervantes story, or old movies, or Greek tragedy.