The God of Homosexuals, he said, would take shape first in dreams and then along deserted streets, the kind visited only by those who dream waking dreams. Its body, its face: a hybrid of the Hulk and the Terminator, a terrible and repulsive colossus. From this monster they (the homosexuals) expected endless bounty, not the republic on the pampa or in the Patagonia of the Argentinean archbishop, but a republic on another planet, a thousand light-years from earth.
The letter ended abruptly, as if his pen had run out of ink, but he sent kisses to Amalfitano and his daughter.
18
Padilla’s next letter talked about Elisa. It said that one night when he got home he found the girl outside his building waiting for him. She was sick, with bruises on her neck, a slight fever, and not much interest in sleeping. We got in bed together, he said, it was very late and we tried to make love, but her general lowness was matched by my own despondency, my fever, my shivers. At first they just masturbated on opposite sides of the bed, gazing into each other’s eyes, saying nothing for a long time. The result was that neither of them could come and sleep fled them both for good. Wide-awake, said Padilla, we talked until dawn, and only then were we finally able to fall asleep.
So Padilla began to talk about the first thing that came into his head, and all of a sudden he found himself telling the story of Leopoldo María Panero, his poems, his madness, what he imagined his life must be like at the Mondragón asylum. The next thing he realized, the girl was kneeling over him or curled around his legs or tying him to the bedposts or asking him to tie her up, said Padilla, or the two of them were sitting on the rug, naked, or they were talking for the first time about death in an innocent, idiotic, desperate, brave way, making plans and promising each other that they would carry them out. Of course, we didn’t end up making love, said Padilla, at least technically we didn’t.
The problem, said Padilla further on, is that the next day I was sober again (if you could say that what had happened the night before took place in a state of drunkenness), but not Elisa, who all through breakfast couldn’t stop going over the things they’d talked about, remembering bits of everything that Padilla had told her, sometimes priding herself on her incredible memory, since their late-night conversation hadn’t exactly been a model of coherence, and also, when he got like that, admitted Padilla, he talked in bursts, too fast, confusedly, it was a coprolalic kind of thing, so that whoever he was talking to (and Padilla himself) tended to miss more than half of what he was saying, but Elisa, apparently, remembered everything: names, book titles, the petty intrigues and small excesses of a (literary) life long gone.
So the breakfast in question had been very strange.
Suddenly I had a vision of myself. But as a woman. Which (as you know) is something I’ve never wished for. But there I was, on the other side of the table, a woman with very thin lips, sick, young, poor, unkempt. A woman with the look of someone near death. I’m surprised I didn’t kick her out of the house on the spot, said Padilla, clearly not quite persuaded, clearly a little scared. About his novel he said nothing.
Amalfitano’s response was brief and epigrammatically ambiguous: he began by saying that Padilla’s friendship with Elisa must have some meaning that they had yet to understand, and he ended with an ominous list of the daily problems he faced, both in the philosophy department and at home, in his father-daughter dealings with Rosa, who was distancing herself from him more and more.
As had become habitual, Padilla didn’t wait for Amalfitano’s response to send him another letter.
He talked again about Elisa.
For three days he had lost sight of her. On the fourth, when he was finally beginning to forget that strange mnemotechnical epiphany, he found her outside his building at a similar time of night and in similar circumstances. Again they slept together. Again they masturbated (this time they both came). Again they talked.
The girl, said Padilla, had come up with a plan to cure herself. The plan was to hitchhike from Barcelona to the Mondragón asylum. When she told him this, Padilla burst out laughing. But she kept talking. This time it was dark and the only light filtered in the window from the skylight in the inner courtyard. She spoke, said Padilla, in a monotone, but it wasn’t a monotone, it was full of inflection, but it lacked inflection, it was contaminated by the slang of Barcelona’s blue-collar neighborhoods, but at the same time it was the voice of a young lady from Sarriá. You, thought Amalfitano, have read too much Gombrowicz.
The rest of the letter continued at great length on the same subject. The dark room. Elisa’s voice describing an impossible trip. Padilla’s questions: why did she think she would be cured by traveling? what did she expect from Leopoldo María Panero and the Mondragón asylum? The urge to laugh, and Padilla’s laughter and teasing. Sleeping with a faggot is messing with your head. Elisa’s laughter, which for a fraction of a second seemed to light up the room and then shoot like backwards lightning through the window joints, upward, toward the courtyard skylight and the stars.
But the letter ended on a less than festive note. Elisa is here with me, said the last paragraph, when I went out this afternoon she stayed here, in bed, my father and I talked about taking her to the hospital but she refused, we made her some chicken broth, she drank it, and then she fell asleep.
19
Padilla’s next letter, the first that Amalfitano didn’t answer right away, talked about the pilgrimage to San Sebastián and the terms on which it would be conducted, terms dictated by the wavering voice of Elisa, who, he reported, was in the hospital now and with whom it was best not to argue, at least until she recovered. At the hospital, he said, I’ve gotten to see her family again, the junkie brother I tried to strangle, her mother, who’s a saint, assorted aunts and cousins. Once Raguenau had come with him, and another time Adrià, both of them worried about the interest Padilla had taken in the girl. His friends, he said, advised him to stop visiting her, stop taking care of her, start taking care of himself. But Padilla ignored them and spent a night or two at the foot of Elisa’s bed. She asked him to talk to her about Panero. When Raguenau and Adrià heard this they didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. But Padilla took it seriously and told Elisa everything he knew about Panero, which wasn’t much, actually; the rest he made up. And when he couldn’t think what else to make up he brought volumes of Panero’s poetry to the hospital and read them to Elisa.
At first she didn’t understand them.
I think, said Padilla, that she understands even less about these things than I realized at first.
But he was undaunted and he devised a method (or something resembling a method) of reading. It was simple. He decided to read Panero’s poems aloud in chronological order. He began with the first book and ended with the last and after each poem he offered a brief commentary that didn’t pretend to explain the whole poem, which was impossible, according to Padilla, but rather a single line, an image, a metaphor. This way, Elisa understood and retained at least a fragment of each poem. Soon, wrote Padilla, Elisa was reading Panero’s books on her own and her comprehension of them (but the word comprehension conveys none of the desperation and communion of her reading) was luminous.
When she was discharged, Padilla-in a rather crepuscular gesture, thought Amalfitano-presented her with all the books he had loaned her and left. He didn’t expect to see her again and for a few days he was happy about it. Raguenau and Adrià took him out to the movies and the theater. He went out on his own again. He got back to work, though unenthusiastically, on The God of Homosexuals. Very late one night, coming home drunk and high, he found her sitting outside his building, waiting for him.