He suddenly withdrew his hands with what was doubtless an exaggerated shudder, holding them up like a surgeon and then shaking them as if they were dripping wet and urgently in need of drying. He withdrew them like someone who has just completed an unpleasant task, like someone who has touched something sticky, like someone removing a sword from a body after plunging it in up to the hilt, much to his regret, because he had been challenged, because he had become drawn into a duel and had no alternative but to fight. And after making these gestures, he put his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown, puffed out his chest and drew himself up. He resembled a high priest or a Dracula or a Fu Manchu, in his tunic or his dark cape reaching almost down to his feet, with the eye covered by the black patch seeming to look even more sternly and with even more distaste than the one that was the colour of the sea at evening or at night and which was capable of seeing, as if both eyes were piercing Beatriz with a mixture of ferocity and embarrassment. And when he released her, she went limp and I suddenly saw her — just for a moment — as he saw her or claimed to see her: a plain, cowed, charmless woman, ashamed now perhaps of her skimpy attire, as though all her voluptuous curves had collapsed and flattened out, had suddenly deflated, and all her firmness grown slack; a poor wretch brought low by disappointment and undermined by humiliation, almost a piece of debris, a crumpled, defeated woman who could not even cover herself with her arms — that would have been too pathetic, too much of a surrender, after she had managed to dredge up from somewhere her one remaining scrap of defiance, only a scrap, and display herself to him — but who probably now longed to retreat and run back to her room, to escape and disappear.
‘How changed we are by someone’s adverse reaction,’ I thought, or I think I thought, remembering it now from another age, although probably not in those precise words. ‘How cast down we are by rejection, and how much power accrues to the person to whom we gave that power, for no one can take power unless it is first given or conferred, unless you’re prepared to adore and fear that person, unless you aspire to being loved by him or to enjoy his unswerving approval, any such ambition is a sign of conceit and that conceit is what weakens and leaves us defenceless: once that ambition remains unsatisfied or unfulfilled, it marks the beginning of our downfall and we apply ourselves to it day after day, hour after hour, and it’s perfectly natural then that dissatisfaction should predominate and prevail from the start, from the very first steps we take, either sooner or later … Why should we be loved by the person we have chosen with our tremulous finger? Why that one person, as if he were obliged to obey us? Why should the person who troubles or arouses us and for whose flesh and bones we yearn, why should he desire us? Why should we believe in such coincidences? And when they do happen, why should they last? Yes, why should it last, this rarest of conjunctions, something so fragile, so held together with pins? Reciprocal love, reciprocal lust, mutual fever, eyes and mouths in simultaneous pursuit and necks that crane to see the chosen one among the multitude, bodies that seek to join together time and time again, taking a strange delight in that repetition, returning and returning to the same body, then coming back for more … Normally, almost no one coincides, and the existence of so many supposedly loving couples is, in part, a matter of imitation, but largely a matter of convention, or else because the one who first pointed a finger, a man let’s say, has imposed his will, has persuaded, led, propelled, obliged the other to do what she isn’t even sure she wants to do and to follow a path she would never have taken without the urgency or insistence or guidance of the other, and the flattered and courted one — the one who stepped on to the other person’s cloud — has simply allowed herself to be dragged along. That’s why the seducer doesn’t need to persist, the charm and the misty penumbra vanish, the seduced party grows weary or wakes up, and then it’s the turn of the seducer to despair and panic and live on tenterhooks, to resume his labours if he still has the strength, to mount guard on the door and to beg and implore night after night and to be at the mercy of the other. Nothing is so exposing or so enslaving as trying to hold on to the person we chose or who, extraordinarily, came when summoned by our tremulous, beckoning finger, as if by a miracle or as though our word were law, something that would never normally happen.’
Beatriz soon recovered, it did not take long; she again took on her proper size and shape, having apparently, for a few seconds, inexplicably lost or been deserted by both. She straightened up, lifted her head, regained her striking corporeality, and looked straight at Muriel. I couldn’t see her face clearly, but I thought it would have been very hard for her not to shed tears when she heard her husband’s words — ‘I hope to be the one to bury you, the one to see your lifeless body, your deathly pallor’ — but if she had, she neither sobbed nor groaned, perhaps she had a better memory than Muriel thought and nothing could now hurt her very much, perhaps her nocturnal prowlings were due not to her instantly forgetting what had happened yesterday or the day before, but to her unshakable belief that she could demolish all resistance, wear down all reluctance, as long as she kept trying, and did not retreat or abandon the field, did not faint away. However, those were not the words that haunted her, the words she had retained, the words to which she responded and that had, I assume, wounded her most deeply:
‘No, it wasn’t stupid of you. On the contrary, you were quite right to love me during all those years, all those past years … You’ve probably never done anything better.’
Then I felt sure that her eyes must have filled with tears, because we men are easily moved by a woman’s silent weeping, even if it’s false, feigned, forced, even if provoked by some thought to which we have no access and which may have nothing whatever to do with us, but with another man, a rival, someone she lost some time before or who, unbeknown to us, she has only just lost. Even if we sense that we’re not the direct cause of her tears, her weeping melts our heart and fills us with pity and we feel obliged to make it stop. That is the only explanation I can find for Muriel’s reaction.
‘I’ll grant you that,’ he said. ‘All the more reason for me to feel I’ve thrown away my life. A part of my life. That’s why I can’t forgive you.’ He said this in a gentle, almost regretful voice, nothing like the bitter, insulting tone he had used up until then, as if this were the first time he was giving her these sorrowful explanations. ‘If only you’d never told me,’ he went on, ‘if only you’d kept me in the dark. When you embark on a deception, you should maintain it right until the end. What is the point of setting the record straight, of suddenly telling the truth? That’s even worse, because it invalidates or gives the lie to everything that went before, it obliges the deceived person to look at their whole life in a new light, or else deny it. And yet that was your life, and you can’t unlive what you’ve lived. So, as the now undeceived person, what do you do? Strike out your whole existence, retrospectively cancel everything you felt or believed? That’s impossible, but neither can you preserve it intact, as if it had all been true, when you know it wasn’t. You can’t ignore it, but neither can you simply discard all those years, which were what they were and can be no other way, and of which there will always be a remnant, a memory, even if it smacks of the phantasmagorical, something that both happened and didn’t happen. And what do you do with something that both happened and didn’t happen? Ah, what a fool you were, Beatriz. Not just once, but twice.’