...And Dreams Are Dreams

Two lovers create their own behavioral code that, after a certain point, monitors them automatically, like a computer. All you have to do is hit the key and the equation appears on the screen. So the little hypocrite was letting me, without ever saying no — showing in fact that she was enjoying it, pretending she was participating — degrade myself by pressing all her keys according to the code and getting no result. At first, as I have said, I didn’t realize what was going on. I thought that her lack of total participation was the result of trauma. I didn’t know that it was her way of proving the old truth about it being the woman’s participation that makes a lover omnipotent. If she is not moved by him, he resembles an automatic washer-dryer that turns when you press the button, that washes the clothes and dries them. But this procedure is formalized, industrial, and the wash does not acquire the fragrance it does when a loving hand washes it in the stream, on the smooth rock, and dries it in the unhewn light of the sun. That was exactly how she had made me feel when she left: that we had made, five or six times, however many days she had been here, a plastic, sanitized love, superficially intense but without the exhilaration and exuberance that had brought us together and carried our relationship along.

In other words, she had made me feel indigent.

She had stripped me of the peacock feathers with which she herself had adorned me. She was tender with me, and joyful; she hadn’t changed at all. She never complained to me about our breakup, though at the time she had called it unjust and absurd. No, never.

Except once, when these words escaped her lips:

“What a shame, what a shame for us both.” When she said this, I didn’t understand right away, and it was only later when she was saying goodbye that her words took on their real significance. It was as if she were saying: “What a shame that you destroyed the love we knew; what a shame that whatever it was that elevated us no longer exists. What a shame that we were both denied the only possibility a human being has of joining the Gods: the possibility of absolute love.”

For me this was like a slap in the face, which I did not feel until later. During the days Rosa was here, something inside had been telling me that all was not well, but I had kept pulling the wool over my eyes. It’ll be better tomorrow, I kept telling myself. Her pomegranate will explode. Its grains will scatter to the four corners of the earth, like before. She will become the earth again, and I her sky. She will become the sea, and I the sun that warms her. But she became, alas, neither the earth nor the sea. And I became neither the sun nor the sky. We remained within our petty, carnal burdens: Rosa and Irineos, two well-defined human beings who did not overstep the boundaries of their bodies, who did not participate in the cosmic happenings, within whom the rhythm of the world was not overthrown. Two grey partridges, not proud rock partridges, rebels of the mountain; two quails flying one meter above the clover; two aphasic pheasants; family restaurants, not diners for vagabonds; two neighborhood churches, not two country chapels drunk on their ascetic solitude, with the smell of wax hanging from ossified candle stands. We had become the store-bought flowers in the cathedral, not the wild flowers of spring in the village church; we had become jukebox songs, not those old, rare seventy-eights that need special needles to be played.

I realized then how insignificant I was. How dependent on the other’s love in order to feel love.

How poor by nature in the face of self-sufficient forces. Rosa had taken her revenge in her own way, perhaps even unconsciously.

I had never considered her sly or petty. But the weight of an injury can only be thrown off, it seems, by injuring the one who caused it. In these voracious human relationships that become cannibalistic where love is concerned, Rosa, to survive, had to make me die a little, just as I had made her die in order to triumph.

Then, at last, the writing began. Every cloud has a silver lining, as the saying goes. That’s pretty much what happened with me. My creative self finally got going. I have two strings to my bow, you see: when the man is hurt, the writer comes alive. When the writer Don Pacifico wins, the man Irineos loses. When the writer dies, the man survives. Rosa became Doña Rosita and I became Don Pacifico who had received her heart in a transplant and is now living with it. I had her inside me, I loved her, because with her behavior she had managed to awaken me, to make me see our relationship more clearly. What had gone wrong, what I had done wrong, that we had reached this nadir? And so, happily, because I was Don Pacifico and Rosa was Doña Rosita, I started writing and finished quickly, in less than a fortnight. Rosa’s injured heart had become my own since her death. And yet, with the heart of another, how much longer would I live?

— 3-