...And Dreams Are Dreams

An atmosphere of wealth and freshness. An air of well being, merriment, and sanitized sex, that’s how it seemed to me. I went up to her apartment. It was small but comfortable, with a tiny kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom. It looked out on the courtyard palm trees.

Rosa looked beautiful. I was enchanted.

She was a blend of youth and maturity, the Rosa of my love. It was the first time that this symbiosis of both ages in her had struck me so vividly. Now that it had been months since I had seen her, I had acquired the proper distance to see her thus. Her face had flashes of a youth not spent, or not well spent, which allowed her a reserve of wealth, while at the same time the weariness of a life she had not lived, or that had made her suffer, that had left its heavy seal on her.

Like most of the women I had been involved with, she regarded me, since I was a writer, a bit as a confessor.

I knew Rosa’s life, what she had been through before we met by chance at an art exhibition, and why she had attached herself to me with such a passion: she believed that she had finally met the man she had been looking for, the one who could understand as well as love her. And it had indeed been so in the beginning.

But, with time, other things count for more in a relationship: sexual habits suddenly become very important, and while two properly know that everything favors their splitting up, since their relationship is leading nowhere long-term (like living together, a necessary development after a certain point), still they are unable to split up, because meanwhile, their way of getting it on has become too powerful. If Rosa happens to read this passage, I know she will be indignant at the expression getting it on.

Because for her, our sexual intercourse had come to signify something momentous and multifaceted, far above the mediocrity she had known in her life previously. And it was indeed so. She wasn’t exaggerating, and neither am I, when I say that we had reached a degree of sexual identification that was very rare. That is precisely what brought on the problem and caused the difficulties of our separation that had cost her dearly, me somewhat less.

So then what was the meaning of her

reappearance in my life? What could she want from me, when I knew that in order to forget me she had gone as far as Tierra del Fuego? I knew from friends we had in common that she had suffered terribly after our split up, and everybody had urged me to help her by never appearing in her life again. As painful as it was, I had done it. However horribly I missed her presence, I never gave a sign of life. I only made sure I met with people who knew us both, so that I could keep up with her news and, through her news, relive the sweet warmth of the good times we had had together. Of course, this happened less and less often as time went by, which was why, when I received my publisher’s order to disappear into a foreign land, into a foreign city, in order to write, I accepted with pleasure: the torment of forcing myself not to see her became more bearable. If I was far away, she would be more free to circulate and perhaps to find someone else, while I would isolate myself and recover more easily. So I was very surprised that morning, when she appeared like a comet in my room. I was so happy to see her again that I didn’t worry over the details of her motives. It was only now that we were together in this foreign room, both of us a little embarrassed, that these thoughts began to eat at me.

In the bedroom, the large double bed with a foam mattress and two pillows gently touching each other was an invitation and a provocation to our old love.

Rosa seemed sure of herself; she pretended to be happy to have apparently overcome her karma. She was a different person now, free of me and of my domination over her. My hallucinogenic domination, as she used to call it, since she was unable otherwise to explain the effect that I had on her. I would have been the last person, therefore, to bridge the painful rift, had it not been Rosa herself who had taken the first step, aggressive, sexual, with flowers, in my room that morning and now again in her room, where she started slowly to undress, inviting me tacitly to bed.

I wanted her. And how! Her body had been to me, at one time, worse than opium. As soon as I saw her naked, I would be seized by a sort of sexual frenzy; I wanted her unbearably, here and now. (There and then.) Her body had an impudence all its own, which was not always in accordance with her face. Her face might be talking about other things, but her body would say, “I want you. I want you to sweeten me, to soften me, to make me submit.” And I would take her in my arms and together we would turn into a single rocket shooting into a space full of galaxies. She had loved our space travels so much; it was precisely their loss that had made her suffer.