Then she joined her hands over her breasts and felt them frozen. She saw the reflection of her hands, pecked by time, and remembered her young woman’s body, so desired, so well exhibited or hidden according to the decision of that great prompter of vanity which is pleasure, beauty, and seduction.
She went on loving herself.
“Rembrandt painted himself at every stage, from adolescence to old age,” said Orlando Ximénez when he invited her, for the umpteenth time, to the Scotch Bar at the Hotel Presidente in the Zona Rosa, and she, “for old times’ sake,” as Orlando himself insisted, agreed just once to see him for a bit at six o’clock, when the bar was empty. “There is no pictorial document more moving than that of a great artist who can see himself without any idealism as he was all through his life, culminating in a self-portrait in old age that has in the eyes all the earlier stages, all of them without exception, as if only old age can reveal not just the totality of a life but each one of the multiple lives we have lived.”
“You’re still nothing but an aesthete.” Laura laughed.
“No, listen to me. Rembrandt’s eyes are almost closed under his old eyelids. His eyes are tearing, not out of emotion but because age liquefies them. Look at my eyes, Laura, I have to wipe them all the time! I look as if I have a perpetual cold!” Orlando laughed in turn, as he picked up his scotch and soda with a tremulous hand.
“You look very well, very snappy,” offered Laura in genuine admiration of the dry trimness of her old beau, stiff and dressed with outmoded elegance, as if one could still buy clothes in the Duke of Windsor style-glen plaid jackets, ties with wide knots, wide cuffed trousers, Church shoes with thick soles.
Orlando had turned into a well-dressed broom crowned with a bare skull; a fringe of thin gray hair, well oiled at the temples, was scrupulously combed to the nape of his neck.
“No, let me tell you, the prodigious thing about that last portrait of the old Rembrandt is that the artist doesn’t blink at the sight of the ravages of time, but lets us remember not only all his earlier years but our own, so we keep the most profound image those little eyes possess. He was resigned-but astute.”
“What image?”
“The image of eternal youth, Laura, because it’s the image of the artistic power that created all his work, that of his youth, his maturity, and his old age. That’s the true image Rembrandt’s last self-portrait gives us: I’m eternally young because I’m eternally creative.”
“How little everything costs you.” Laura laughed again, this time defensively. “Being frivolous, cruel, charming, innocent, perverse. And sometimes even intelligent.”
“Laura, I’m a firefly, I light up and go dark without wanting to.” Orlando returned her laugh. “It’s my nature. You don’t approve?”
“I know you’re like that,” Laura answered quickly.
“Do you remember the first time I asked you, Does your body approve of me, do I get an A?”
“I’m astonished by your question.”
“Why?”
“You talk about the past as if it could be repeated. You talk about the past so that you can proposition me now, in the present.” Laura stretched out her hand and patted Orlando’s; she noted that his old gold ring with the engraved OX was now too big on his thin finger.
“For me,” said the eternal suitor, “you and I are always on the terrace of the San Cayetano hacienda in 1915…”
Laura drank her favorite dry martini more quickly than she should have. “No, we’re in a bar in the Zona Rosa in 1970, and it seems ridiculous for you to evoke-what shall I call it?-the romantic lyricism of our first meeting, my poor Orlando.”
“Don’t you understand?” The old man furrowed his brow. “I didn’t want our relationship to cool off out of habit.”
“My poor Orlando, age cools everything off.”
Orlando peered into the bottom of his glass of whiskey. “I didn’t want poetry to turn into prose.”
Laura fell silent for a few moments. She wanted to tell the truth without hurting her old friend. She didn’t want to take advantage of her age to judge others from an unjust height. That was a temptation of age, to make judgments with impunity. But Orlando spoke first.
“Laura, would you like to be my wife?”
Rather than answer, Laura told herself three truths in a row, repeated them several times: absence simplifies things, prolongation corrupts them, profundity kills them. With Orlando, the temptation was to simplify: just to leave. But Laura felt that to walk out on a man and a situation that were already close to absurd was a kind of betrayal, which she wanted to avoid at all costs, I’m not betraying myself or my past if I don’t run off, I’m not simplifying, not laughing, if I prolong this instant even if it ends in disaster, and deepen it even if it ends in death.
“Orlando.” Laura leaned closer. “We met in San Cayetano. We became lovers in Mexico City. You abandoned me, leaving a note in which you said that you weren’t what you said you were or what you seemed to be. You’re getting too close to my mystery. You reproached me.”
“Not reproached, warned.”
“You threw it in my face, Orlando. I’d rather keep my secret, you wrote me then. And without mystery, you added, our love would be uninteresting.”
“I also said, I’ll always love you.”
“Orlando, Orlando, my poor Orlando. Now you’re telling me the time has come for us to unite. Does this mean there’s no more mystery?”
She caressed his cold, emaciated hand with genuine tenderness.
“Orlando, be faithful to yourself to the end. Be Orlando Ximénez, leave everything in the air, everything open, everything unfinished. That’s your nature, don’t you realize? Actually, that’s what I most admire in you, my poor Orlando.”
Orlando’s glass of whiskey turned into a crystal ball for a while. The old man wanted to see into the future.
“I should have asked you to marry me, Laura.”
“When?” She felt she was wearing out.
“Do you mean I’m the victim of my own perversity? Have I lost you forever?”
He had no idea that “forever” had happened half a century before, at the ball in the tropical hacienda, he didn’t realize that then and there, when they met, Orlando had said “never” to Laura Díaz when he meant “forever,” confusing postponement with what he’d just said: I didn’t want our relationship to cool off out of habit, I didn’t want you to get too close to my mystery.
Laura shivered with cold. Orlando was proposing a marriage for death. An acceptance that now there were no more games to be played, no more ironies to show off, no more paradoxes to explore. Did Orlando realize that when he talked like that he was negating his own life, the mysterious and unfinished vocation of his entire existence?
“Do you know”-Laura Díaz smiled-“I remember our entire relationship as a fiction? Do you want to write a happy ending for it now?”
“No,” muttered Orlando. “I don’t want it to end. I want to start over.” He raised the glass to his mouth until she couldn’t see his eyes. “I don’t want to die alone.”
“Careful. You don’t want to die without knowing what might have been.”
“That’s right. What might have been.”
Laura found it very hard to get the register of her voice right. Did she hammer at him, pronounce, summarize, or start over? Whatever she chose she did it with all the tenderness she could muster. “What might have been already was, Orlando. Everything happened exactly as it should have happened.”
“Should we resign ourselves, then?”
“No, maybe not. We should carry some mysteries to the grave.”
“Of course. But where do you bury your demons?” Orlando automatically bit his emaciated finger where the heavy gold ring was slip ping around. “We all carry a little devil around inside us who won’t abandon us even in the hour of our death. We will never be satisfied.”