"Did all that happen in church? Did you spit in the holy-water font?"
"Yes! I spat in the holy-water font!"
"Onno, you're not going to tell me that you've been to bed with another woman?"
"I'm not going to tell you anything at all, you shit. When an exceptionally refined spirit reproaches itself, all you can think of is that. My real problem is of a completely different spiritual kind. I've allowed myself to be devoured — as a victim of my own goodness. My noble spirit will be my downfall one day. And now I'm going to hang my… I mean, now I'm going to hang up, because I'm exhausted. Tell Ada that I'll come straight to her tomorrow to throw myself at her feet. No, don't say that last bit. You're coming back this evening, aren't you?"
"We'll be home at about twelve."
"See you tomorrow."
" 'Good night, sweet prince.' "
Max hung up and stood there lost in thought. What did it mean? Had Onno really been unfaithful to Ada, in broad daylight? Surely that was inconceivable, but even if he had, then what he said was incomprehensible, even making allowances for all the exaggeration. What did he mean by "necrophiliac"? Had he been seduced into taking the host, perhaps? Hoc est enim corpus meum? Had he slunk toward the altar, with head bowed and hands folded, and stuck his tongue out? Perhaps to please someone? The priest? Perhaps because he was the only person in the church? In any case Max knew that Onno always exaggerated in the direction of truth, never in the opposite direction, and that something was really tormenting him, and that he would do better not to return to the subject if Onno did not raise it himself.
He went to the veranda, where the housekeeper, the cook, and Jesús had now joined them and sat talking softly in the dark. Ada had disappeared. Marilyn said that she had gone into the sea for a last time "to say goodbye."
"What's stopping you?" said Guerra, gesturing toward the crashing of the surf in the darkness.
Yes, why not? He had never swum in the Gulf of Mexico at night, and in a few days' time he would be shaking his English umbrella with its bamboo handle in and out in the doorway, as though fighting a gigantic bat. In the bungalow he put on his clammy swimming trunks again and went down the steps to the beach.
'When he emerged from under the trees, his bare feet sinking into the sand, still warm from the sun, the moonless starry sky spread out with a gesture that he thought he could almost hear: like a marvelous chord played by the whole orchestra. Compared to this, the sight of the heavens from his hotel room on the twenty-fifth floor, pale because of the city lights and the exhaust fumes, was a record on an old portable gramophone. He stood still. Feeling as though his head were the dome of an observatory, he let his eyes wander.
Mars shone red and unwavering among the twinkling stars, and in the Cross of Orion, Messier 42 glimmered like a dried sperm stain on the fly of a pair of evening trousers. For him the stars to the south below Betelgeuse and Rigel, sometimes invisible even in summer at higher latitudes, did not merge into the geometrical mythical "pictures" of ancient astronomy; but even with those of the Northern Hemisphere he got no further than the few configurations that he had learned as a boy, in the war — just as doctors no longer knew the Hippocratic theory of temperaments. The capricious, faintly glowing band of the Milky Way wound across the heavens like a torn bridal veil, and for the first time in years he again realized why he had devoted his life to that magnificent dome.
The sea, which seemed even warmer than in the afternoon, received him like someone coming home. The tide was in. As he swayed and let the waves break against his chest, he tried to find Ada, but it was impossible in all that dark movement. He cupped his hands round his mouth and shouted:
"Ada!"
She hesitated. She saw his silhouette outlined against the lighter beach. Each wave lifted her up a little and set her back on her toes. But she was absorbed by the fairy-tale fact that she was here now because she could play the cello: music had carried her auf Flügeln des Gesanges to this spot in the sea — if only her mother could see her!
"Max!" She waved. "Over here!"
He waved back and dived.
She would have preferred to remain alone, but then of course he would have worried that she had been engulfed by the sea. Only when she was alone did she have the sense that she really existed; other people might be frightened precisely because of that sense, but she was frightened of other people because they stole it from her.
Max surfaced near her.
"What do we owe this to?" she cried.
"Our lucky stars!"
He put his hands around her waist and together they bobbed up and down in the almost black water. It had been a long time since she had seen him so close; his dripping face was lit only by the stars. She put her hands on his shoulders and laughed.
"It's as though we're dancing."
He put his right arm around her waist, took her right hand in his left, and pulled her to him. "La valse…"
She saw a mischievous twinkle in his eyes and could feel him getting an erection, but because it was under water, invisible down in the depths, it was as though she had nothing to do with it: there were so many secrets in the sea that had not yet been unveiled. He put his cheek against hers, and while he hummed the macabre theme of Ravel's orchestral piece through the roar of the surf, she saw a bright light shooting across the sky.
"Look, a falling star! We can make a wish."
He turned his head, but he did not entirely trust the grainy, slowly fading dust traiclass="underline" it must be a block of one or two kilos, and meteorites were rarely that big.
"And if it doesn't come true," he said, "it was a fragment of a satellite; the sky's full of them at this latitude. What did you wish?"
"You must never say that." She looked at him in confusion.
A child is what she had instantly thought, without hesitation, as though the wish had plunged into her mind like that thing into the atmosphere— I want a child. She felt as disconcerted as a good husband and father who, on seeing a meteor, suddenly desires a beautiful nymph of seventeen. As far as she was aware, she did not want a child at all, nor did Onno. So was she suppressing her deepest wish every time she swallowed that little white pill?
Suddenly there was a syncopation in the rhythm of the waves: a faster, higher one arrived, which lifted them up and tumbled them over. Coughing, spewing saltwater, they surfaced again and grabbed each other again. Max gave her a kiss on the cheek and immediately afterward sought her mouth. Had he seen what she was thinking? She let herself be kissed and felt his hand disappearing down the back of her bikini bottom.
"What are you doing?"
"We need to finish something…" he panted.
Bring yourself off. His excitement of course also derived from the state he had gotten himself into with Marilyn; he had been given the cold shoulder and now Ada was the erotic substitute — but at the same time he harked back to that morning over three months ago, and that rendered her helpless. He had not forgotten, either; he too knew that it was wrong. At the moment that a wave lifted them up, he pulled down her bikini bottom and already had it around his arm. Almost weightlessly, she wrapped her legs around his hips and said, "Max… this is impossible… if Onno.."
But he could no longer hear. I made sure that a completely different force flowed through him, which cared nothing about him. She felt him penetrate her — and over his shoulder she saw that a blood-red, monstrous crescent moon had risen; in its first quarter, it lay back almost horizontally on the horizon. .