Muriel did not speak again for a while. I wondered if he was perhaps considering opening the door. As a spectator, I would have preferred him to appear and thus add to the spectacle, because once you begin to look and listen, you always want the performance to continue. It’s an instantaneous addiction if your curiosity is aroused, a stronger and more irresistible poison than acting and taking part. If you do take part, you have to make decisions and invent, which is hard work and depends on you ending a conversation or a scene, it brings with it responsibilities; if you merely look, everything is done for you, as in a novel or a film, you simply wait to be shown or told about events that haven’t actually happened, and sometimes you get so caught up in them that no one can shift you from your sofa or armchair and you would curse the first person to try. Except that the events were happening that night, and despite the unreality of the dark corridor, a little light was coming in from the street, the pale, indirect light from the street lamps or from the sentinel moon was slipping into the rooms and was reflected more palely still on the waxed floorboards, on which stood the apparently bare feet of a tall, anxious, well-built woman of about forty or perhaps a little more by then, who, having knocked on her husband’s door, was humbly waiting, begging him for a little sex or a little affection, I couldn’t be sure, or perhaps she wanted both things, or to her they were indistinguishable, I couldn’t be sure of that either; at any moment, I thought, she might lose her initial fearlessness and feel ashamed, ugly, pathetic and fat, if he did open the door, it was, I thought, possible that Beatriz would suddenly feel too skimpily dressed, too exposed, with her voluptuous figure covered only by the brief nightdress she had chosen after trying on all her other night attire, that she might see herself as a shameless beggar and cover herself with her arms in a sudden fit of modesty, when she was at last given her opportunity, when she was at last seen as she had wanted to be seen. She would certainly have done so had she noticed my presence and my admiring eyes drinking in every detail — they did not, I think, dare to be covetous, insofar as one can control such things. What I had seen and heard was enough for me to hope the scene would not end, not yet, I at least wanted to find out if Muriel would soften or would keep his door as blank and shut as a wall, as if there were no door, only a wall, however flimsy, because I had been able to hear his voice through the door’s constraining thickness. I saw Beatriz lean forward again to study the crack under the door — a clearer view of buttocks and thighs, my gaze sharper — and heard her utter an expectant or triumphant or relieved ‘Ah’. I deduced from this that the light in Muriel’s room had been turned on and then I thought I heard his footsteps, or perhaps I was merely anticipating, as one does in the cinema. Or perhaps he had got up and was going over to the door, to look at his wife as she had asked, and then go back in or not, if he could.
This did not happen as quickly as I expected. He must have made some minimal preparations, or perhaps more than that, put on his long, dark navy-blue dressing gown and rinsed out his mouth or, who knows, had a pee — both he and Beatriz had small private bathrooms in their respective bedrooms. Perhaps he had already removed his patch in order to go to sleep and had to put it on again and adjust it in front of a mirror, because when he did finally emerge, he was wearing it as usual, which slightly disappointed me, because I was hoping to see what was hidden underneath, even though I could only do so in very dim lighting and from a distance, after all, there was no reason why he should cover his eye in his wife’s presence, she must often have seen it or what remained of his eye, at least before he suddenly broke off their relationship, before he had begun to find her presence boring and before their relationship had languished, according to what Beatriz had said, and there was no reason why this should not be true, there had been no witnesses and, normally, where there are no witnesses, the two interlocutors are unlikely to lie about the facts, not in principle, unless one of them does so without really knowing what they’re doing, because they’ve told themselves the only version of events they find bearable, for example: ‘I can’t believe you’ve stopped wanting to have sex with me. It must have been a decision taken against your own instincts, self-imposed, and now you’re sticking to it blindly because you feel a hostage to your own words. One day or one night of frustration and yearning, you’ll forget them, you’ll rebel and believe you never spoke them. Perhaps tonight or else tomorrow or the day after, and I’ll be here to help you erase them.’
Muriel flung open the door, although without making any noise, you might say he did so with mute, measured violence so that everything continued to happen soundlessly and nothing shattered the silence of the house, the city, the universe, as if he didn’t want the scene he was making, or that domestic quarrel, to trouble them in the least, house, city or universe. Perhaps it was true what he had said and what she had called exaggerated, that she came to his door every night from her woeful bed, and thus both were skilled at holding their conversations almost in a whisper and tempering their anger so as not to disturb or wake anyone else. Perhaps, too, so that their story would remain a tenuous, never-told tale, as tends to be the case with such deeply personal matters, and would be seen only by the moon’s somnolent, half-open eye. On that night, however, the moon’s eye had been joined by my eyes, somnolent certainly, but wide open and far from cold.