But suddenly today it is Manur who touches her. He touches her thigh, naked, supple and firm (although her legs are no longer supernatural). She allows herself to be touched, although only in order to discover how, after all this time, she will receive this invitation or marital advance. Manur touches her with his right hand, which is both new and old, insistent and soft, a touch which is as recognizable as it is forgotten, which comes from a past in all other respects so similar to the present that it cannot even be viewed as the past. Manur slips his other hand beneath Natalia Manur's pajama jacket and strokes her back. Gradually, surreptitiously, like a novice, he makes each caress move gradually closer to the side of Natalia Manur's left breast, until, once it has reached and gone beyond lateral contact, the hand that pretends to be or actually has become inexperienced goes in search of full frontal contact (the hand emerging from the green sleeve). The whole room suddenly smells of him. Natalia Manur does not move, she does not know if she is excited, not even when it is her nipple that receives and acknowledges that touch (by growing hard). She would perhaps prefer not to know about it, she would like to fall asleep instantly and have Manur, her husband, use her as if she were a doll, according to his fancy, with no preamble, to enter her without her explicit consent, without her participation or her waking passivity, without her refusal or her acquiescence, without her knowledge, without her awareness, without her existence, in such a way that the following day they could behave as if that violation of the norm had never taken place. It is too late now for them to be able to talk about themselves the following day. Just as it is too late for them to feel embarrassed about not talking. Their life is such that it no longer allows for improvisation or change, everything was discussed and stipulated a long time ago. The only thing their life allows for is perpetuation or violent cancellation. But Natalia does not put up any opposition to the Flemish banker's resuscitated attempt at foreplay, because it is at once familiar and remote — a remnant, a trace — because it does not frighten her and it is so utterly improbable and because, since she has been in Madrid, no one has touched her at all. She waits. She waits. Manur, however, must want a response; he gets bored, he desists: he was always an impatient man. His caresses become lethargic and clumsy, even his hand, grown weary, lies dead on her side, abandoning any frontal approach, contenting itself instead with the degree of lateral contact achieved. Having someone's hand resting on your side is rather uncomfortable when you're trying to get to sleep. Natalia Manur slides a bit further over to her side of the bed, the hand moves away, drops limply onto the white sheet like an anaesthetised limb (the hand in the green sleeve). Manur is the owner of Natalia Manur, but today he gives no orders nor issues any demands. He too turns over, as I used to when I saw that sleep had overwhelmed Berta, and I would turn to the wall, bare apart from the Italian calendar (aprile, giugno, settembre), and he falls asleep almost immediately. Natalia does not sleep, but she does not want to move for fear of re-establishing contact with her husband's body. If she tries to turn out the light on his side of the bed, she will touch Manur, and he might wake up. And if he wakes up now, when he has only just fallen asleep, he will not get to sleep again. Natalia Manur's left breast aches. Her husband's smell is now dissipating, as if it were a smell he only gave off while awake, as if it were something exuded by his fierce eyes. His eyes are closed now. The lamp on the bedside table will remain on all night and will startle them awake in the early hours of the morning.
NATALIA MANUR TOLD ME NOTHING during those few days, while I, on the other hand, less reserved than she was or with fewer resources for maintaining a dialogue day after day without resorting to the tale of my own biography (with less strength of mind to endure the silences), did tell her about myself — under the disinterested or slightly incredulous gaze of Dato, who, perhaps out of discretion or diplomacy, pretended to be thinking his own inscrutable thoughts whenever I talked about myself — the bare facts of my story or past or life until approximately a year before, that is, up to the moment when I had decided to live in Barcelona with Berta, whose existence I still had not even mentioned. I talked to Natalia Manur (and therefore to Dato) about my sad, solitary childhood; about my then unhealthy plumpness, which had brought me so much mockery and heartache (another view of the world); about my wretched and always abject relationship with my godfather, Señor Casaldáliga, who took me in on the death of my mother — his cousin — and of whom I have always suspected that he might be, as well as my godfather and second cousin, my ashamed and unconfessed father. I talked to Natalia Manur about the painful experience of being a poor relation, with no rights and no aspirations, with not even the possibility of complaining, obliged to live in a state of uncertainty that goes far beyond what might be deemed reasonable, never feeling that one had a home of one's own. I explained to her how, as a child, I was permanently and painfully aware that I could be expelled at any moment from my room — which, purely by extension, I assumed to be also my home — by Señor Casaldáliga, a truly strange and terrifying man: wealthy (I found out afterwards that he was enormously rich), tortured, mean, devious, somber, sarcastic and authoritarian, a judge by profession and the owner of a bank (but this, like so many other things, I only found out when I was older and through third parties: I knew nothing about his activities when we lived under the same roof). I sensed that my being there — as with my schooling, my food and my clothes — depended entirely on his fancy, not on his affection or sense of responsibility or on his clemency, and nevertheless I felt obliged, not so much to gain his respect and to try to please him, as not to gain his disrespect and not be too much of a disappointment. (I haven't seen him for a long time now: four years ago he was still living in Madrid, but it never occurred to me — not once — to go and visit him, although I did send him tickets to the opening night of Verdi's Otello at the Teatro de la Zarzuela, to which he did not, as far as I know, come, at least he didn't drop by my dressing room to congratulate me. He's still alive now, having retired to the countryside, where he lives in a vast mansion in the province of Huelva, and we write to each other occasionally, a strange, belated father-son correspondence.) I explained to Natalia Manur how I had to ask permission to do anything: to move from one part of the house to another, from my room to the bathroom, from the dining room to the living room, from the kitchen to the bedroom, to say nothing of going outside and coming back in again. I never had my own keys. He always wanted to know exactly where I was, as if he were afraid I might come across him in a corner committing infamies that no one else should witness. Every move I made required his consent, and if my godfather wasn't at home, then I simply had to (this was what he prescribed and what I did not do) wait for his return before I came out of my room: put up with my bursting bladder, put up with my thirst, put up with my hunger; or be farsighted in a way no child, however sensible, unhappy and reliable, could ever be. Anyway, for years I had to avoid the servants (who, distinctly lacking in charity — and not at all enamoured of this fat little boy — promptly informed him whenever I overstepped the mark) and had to be very careful not to leave clues behind of any unauthorized movement: the sponge used to refresh my face had to be left as dry as it was before and in exactly the same position; whenever I gave in to the irresistible temptation to use the telephone in order to discuss the day's homework with my best friend, I had to remember to leave the handset exactly as he had left it, he being left-handed; I often had to walk around in my stockinged feet, like ne'er-do-wells in cartoons or silent films, in order to avoid leaving any telltale muddy stains on the carpet or the floor; any furtive sips of milk — my favorite drink — had to be minimal enough for any change in the level in the bottle to go unnoticed, as would any incursion into the kitchen in his absence; if I listened to the radio — my great passion as a child — I had to return the dial and the volume to the precise position in which they had been before my excited manipulations. I explained to Natalia Manur how, even when I was an adolescent and he could not keep quite such firm control over me, I had to beg Señor Casaldáliga to give me money for really essential things, and how sometimes he would refuse me for days: money to buy soap when mine ran out (mine was cheap Lagarto, not Lux like his) or toothpaste (mine was cheap Licor, not Colgate like his), money to buy replacements for my almost threadbare undershirts or underpants, to go and get my hair cut, to pay for the bus or the tram to and from school. During my childhood and adolescence, Madrid was a hateful place, and the expression on my face was one of permanent abstraction and amazement, like those little children painted by Chardin, elegantly dressed and absorbed in their games — the shuttlecock, the penknife, the spinning top — with the difference that my clothes were tragically ill-made and, although my gaze was as absent as theirs, I had no absorbing toy to hold or to look at. Then one day, I learned how to read a score and began to acquire my own, and singing came to my rescue. But that isn't what I want to talk about now.