No one said anything for a few moments, a fitting silence, full of the most intense dignity. Lía stubbed out her cigarette, said excuse me, and went to the bathroom. Milan walked over to the bar and asked the dark-skinned girl for a glass of red wine. And stayed there, flirting with her. A theater director came over to say hello, but I acted uninterested and he soon went off again. Anything for you? said Milan, and I was struck once again by the very Argentinian way he spoke Spanish. A beer, please. He asked me about Lía and I told him her full name was Lía Gandini, that we’d met during the intermission of a performance of some comic monologues after putting up with one very bad-tempered Italian actor and another quite charming one, and that we’d been introduced by a mutual friend, whom we went on to ignore as we drank red wine for the rest of the intermission, too dry (the wine) and too short (the intermission), and I rambled on about one of Dario Fo’s tigers that I liked and she smiled at me with those endless eyelashes of hers. Milan didn’t appear to pick up on the reference. I like her long neck, he said. Like a swan, he said. Like one of Modigliani’s women. I guess, I said, and took a sip of beer. I asked him if there had been any difference between studying classical music in the States and in Europe. God, he said, huge. And he sat down on Lía’s stool. The thing is, he said, the Americans like classical compositions to be played as if one were a machine or a robot. Devoid of all emotion. As if you weren’t there. The music always exactly the same. What they want, he said, is to eliminate the interpreter’s personality altogether. He lit a cigarette and, smiling at the dark-skinned girl, thought for a moment. Do you know who Lazar Berman was? No idea. A great pianist, he told me. A Liszt expert. A Russian Jew who fought against the music of Chopin the Pole, he said, and immediately jumbling up his words, I had thoughts of the Polish boxer fighting every night, followed by thoughts of my grandfather fighting with Polish words. I studied under Berman as a child, Milan said, in Italy. Want one? he asked, and I accepted a cigarette. I remember that on the first day, in his studio, I played Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor, a very complex piece, and the old Jew, sitting on his enormous red velvet sofa, didn’t say a word. Nothing. The second day, I went back to his studio, began playing the same piece and, straight off, Berman got up and began tapping the window with his cane, like this, very softly. Milan, after a long sip of wine, dried his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. The old man shouted at me in Russian: You’re playing the piece the same way you did yesterday, child. I kept my mouth shut as Berman carried on tapping the window with his cane. I thought he’d lost it. But then he walked over to me, very slowly, put a hand on my shoulder and, with a devilish smile, whispered: Haven’t you noticed, my boy, that it’s raining today? A big difference, Milan said, moving aside so that Lía could sit down. Tomorrow, Eduardito, I’ll play a little Liszt, he concluded, as if this confirmed the truth of his anecdote, and off he went to chat with the dark-skinned girl.
The restaurant seemed to be emptying out. Lía had a sip of my beer. I stroked her forearm, and she, pouting semierotically — reminding me of a very young Marilyn Monroe, or at least of a very young Natalie Portman doing a poor but sweet impression of Marilyn Monroe — said she wanted to go. Then, exaggerating the pout still further, she said she was itching to draw in her almond-colored notebook. I downed my beer in two gulps.
Standing up, I said to Milan we’d be coming to listen to him the next day. Definitely. He hugged us both at the same time. A three-way hug, my dears, he said with a fake, forced laugh, the laugh of someone who didn’t really want to laugh.
Before we got to the room, Lía had already taken her bra off. She liked to take it off while we were driving in the car or walking along, because she knew I liked to imagine her suddenly braless. We began stopping every now and then in the middle of the street to kiss, and she’d take my hand and place it on her cold, bare breasts, shuddering as though no one had ever touched her there. It was hard to tell, tight in each other’s arms, which one of us was trembling. Maybe neither. Then we’d carry on walking, impatient, a little giddy. The bra in her handbag or maybe forgotten on the ground or maybe dangling like some enormous black pod from the branch of a tree.
Then the uproar of beer and tequila sex. A naked thing that trembled with a thousand legs and a thousand hands and a thousand guava-flavored tongues that could never be enough to make love with. Not saying a word or at least not saying words that made any sense, which always mean more. We ended up half-asleep, connected, inseparable, never finishing (sex is always better in gerunds), until at daybreak I heard the far-off cry of a child or a rooster and felt a breeze across my chest and saw her warm and sitting up in bed. She glowed amber. The almond-colored notebook was open on her lap.
Lía used to draw her orgasms.
Since our first time, whenever we finished, she’d get up, make her way across the room completely naked, and come back to bed with a small almond-colored notebook. Then, leaning on one elbow or sitting or sometimes kneeling, she’d begin to sketch the orgasm or orgasms that she’d experienced and that were still fresh in her vaginal memory; to make graphs of them for me, like a scientist would, with everything from convulsions to climaxes, spasms, changes in temperature, and liquid overflows. In general she’d sketch a line that would resemble a mountain or a series of mountains of different heights and widths. Sometimes the plateau was short; often it was round; sometimes it extended horizontally for what appeared to be several kilometers. From somewhere, almost always (but not always) out of a crater, fluvial jets would burst up. Bristling, zigzagging lines would spring out very sporadically on the slopes, like miniature lightning bolts, but I’ve no idea what they meant: that was her one secret, she used to say, and it was of the utmost importance. So, whenever one of these zigzags sprouted up, I’d feel ludicrously satisfied without knowing why. Other times, though, it wouldn’t be mountains she’d draw, but clouds or cotton spirals or something of the kind: throbbing, dense, closed ellipses. She explained to me that she didn’t know how else to represent it, that this was how she perceived her whole body: as a light, palpating mass. I envied her. Other times, the drawing would resemble a grapevine without any grapes. Other times: a knot of electric cables set on top of a post. Other times: a prickly fossil. Other times: the map of some African country, perhaps Angola or Namibia. Only once, on a night in that same room in Antigua, had Lía told me it couldn’t be drawn, her head buried in my shoulder, possibly crying, trembling meekly, her warm vagina dampening my thigh as the last little drops of some ineffable pleasure drained away. And again I envied her or maybe I envied the whole female sex. But usually she’d carry out her studied scribbles with the dedication of a Flemish painter, revealing to me the details, the signs, the keys to interpret her most unfathomable mysteries.
With my eyes closed, I caressed her bare back and began to dream of an archipelago of freckles. I could hear the rustling sound of the pen as it glided over the paper, followed by a brief silence, and then the rustle of the pen again. I felt a kiss on my belly. Ready, Lía said, and curling up beside me, passed me the notebook.
A raging sea viewed from a small boat.
That was what the sketch looked like. I wanted to ask her what it meant, but I felt her rhythmic breathing on the back of my neck and almost immediately fell into a deep sleep as well.