After a purposely prolonged search, she held up the letter and began to examine it as if someone had offered to sell it to her and she had serious questions about wanting to buy it.
‘All it has are initials and an address,’ she said finally.
‘So?’
‘What documentation do you have to prove that you are the person who sent the letter?’
‘I have the draft,’ I said, showing it to her.
She took it, looked at it, and gave it back to me.
‘And how do we know that it is the draft of this letter?’
‘It’s very simple; let’s open the envelope and see.’
She hesitated, looked at the sealed envelope, and said:
‘And how can we open this letter if we don’t know it’s yours? I can’t do that.’
People began to complain again. I felt I was on the verge of violence.
‘This document is not sufficient,’ the harpy concluded.
‘Would an ID card be sufficient?’ I asked with sarcastic courtesy.
‘An ID card?’
She thought that over, again examined the envelope, and pronounced:
‘No, not by itself, because all there are here are initials. I will also need proof of domicile. Or, if you don’t have that, a draft card will do; your address will be on it.’
She thought better of that, however, and added:
‘Although I’d be surprised if you hadn’t moved in eighteen years. No, you will need proof of domicile.’
An uncontainable fury finally exploded in me that included María and, oddly enough, Mimí.
‘Go ahead and mail it, and you go to hell!’ I shouted.
I stalked out of the post office in a white-hot rage. I wondered whether if I went back to the window, I might somehow set fire to the letter sack. But how? Throw a match in it? The match might go out. If I sprinkled gasoline on it first, the outcome would be sure; but that complicated things. At least I could wait for the employees to leave, and insult the old harridan on her way out.
XXXI
After waiting an hour, I decided to leave. In the long run, what would I gain by insulting an imbecile? On the other hand, while I was waiting I had had time to think over a number of things, and was actually feeling quite calm: it was a good letter and it was good that María would receive it. (This has often happened to me: I struggle senselessly against some obstacle that prevents me from doing something I think necessary or worthwhile; I accept defeat angrily and, finally, some time later find out that fate had been right all along.) In fact, when I had begun the letter I had not given it much thought and, at the time, considered some of the insults a bit extreme. But now as I reconsidered everything that had led up to the letter, I recalled a dream I had one night during my bout of drinking: peering from a hiding place I saw myself sitting on a chair in the middle of a dark room bare of any furniture or decoration and, behind me, two persons looking at each other with expressions of diabolical irony: one was María; the other was Hunter.
Remembering this dream, I was inconsolably saddened. I left the post office with a heavy heart.
Some time later I found myself sitting in La Recoleta, on a bench beneath an enormous tree. The places, the trees, the paths of our happiest moments, began to alter my ideas. What, actually, did I have against María that was concrete? And as gently as we move a loved one who has been injured in an accident and cannot bear the slightest jolt or movement, the best moments of our love (her face, a tender glance, the touch of her hand on my hair) began subtly to blot out my doubts. Little by little, I sat up straighter; my sadness was turning into anxiety, hatred of María into hatred of myself, and my lethargy into an urgent need to rush home. The closer I came to my studio, the more I realized what it was I wanted: I wanted to talk to María, to telephone her at the estancia, right then, without letting another minute go by. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?
By the time my call went through I scarcely had strength to speak. A servant answered. I told him I had to speak to Señora María at once. After a brief interval the servant returned to tell me that the Señora would return my call in approximately one hour.
I thought the waiting would never end.
I cannot remember very well the words of that telephone conversation, but I do remember that instead of asking María’s forgiveness for the letter (the reason I had called), I ended up saying worse things than those in the letter. Naturally this did not come about illogically; the truth is that I began the conversation with humility and tenderness, but I was soon exasperated by the long-suffering tone of her voice and the fact that she would not, as she never did, answer any of my explicit questions. The dialogue – rather, my monologue – became increasingly violent, and the more violent it became, the more wounded she sounded and the more that incensed me, because I was convinced I was in the right, and that she had no reason to be sad. The conversation ended with my shouting that I would kill myself, that she was a total fraud, and that I had to see her immediately, in Buenos Aires.
She would not answer any of my explicit questions but, finally, reacting to my threat to kill myself, she promised to come to Buenos Aires the next day, although she didn’t ‘know why.’
‘All that will be achieved,’ she added in a very faint voice, ‘is that once again we will hurt each other cruelly.’
‘If you don’t come, I will kill myself,’ I repeated for the last time. ‘Think about that before you decide not to come.’
I slammed down the receiver without another word, and at that moment I truly was determined to kill myself if she did not come to clear matters up. I was strangely satisfied with the decision. ‘She’ll see,’ I thought, as if that would be my revenge.
XXXII
That was an unbearable day.
I left my studio in a fury. Although I knew I would see María the following day, I was depressed and seething with stifled and ambiguous hatred. Now I think it was of myself, because in my heart I knew that my cruel insults were unfounded. But it made me furious that María would not defend herself and, far from placating me, her meek, long-suffering voice inflamed me all the more.
I despised myself. That evening I began to drink heavily, and I started a fight in a bar on Leandro Alem. I picked up the most depraved woman I saw and then challenged a sailor to a fight when he made some obscene joke about her. I do not remember anything after that, except beginning to fight, and then people separating us amid great hilarity. Afterward, I remember being outside with the woman. The cool air felt good. Toward dawn I took her to my studio. As soon as we stepped in the door she began laughing at a painting on one of my easels. (I do not know whether I have said that ever since the scene of the window, my painting had changed: it was as if the people and objects of my former style had undergone a cosmic cataclysm. I will say more about this later, but now I want to tell what happened during those decisive days.) The woman, laughing, looked at the painting and then at me, as if demanding an explanation. As you may imagine, I did not give a damn what opinion the bitch might have had about my art. I told her not to waste time.
We were in bed when I was struck by a dreadful discovery: the Rumanian’s expression was identical to one I had once observed on María.
‘Whore!’ I yelled, pulling away in revulsion. ‘God, yes, a whore!’
The Rumanian rose up like a viper and bit my arm hard enough to draw blood. She thought I was referring to her. Overcome with disgust and loathing for the whole human race, I kicked her out of my studio and told her I would kill her like a dog if she did not get out of my sight. She left screaming insults, in spite of the money I threw after her.
For a long time I stood transfixed in the middle of my studio, not knowing what to do, and unable to order either my emotions or my thoughts. Finally I came to a decision. I went into the bathroom, filled the tub with cold water, undressed, and got in. I wanted to be able to think, and would stay in the tub until my mind was clear. Gradually my brain began to function. I ne
eded to think with absolute precision, because I knew intuitively that I had reached a decisive moment. What was the crucial point? Several words came to mind in answer to the question I had asked myself. Those words were: Rumanian, María, prostitute, pleasure, pretense. I reasoned that those words must represent the essential fact, the profound truth, from which I must begin. I made repeated efforts to place them in the proper order, until I had arranged them in this terrible but irrefutable syllogism: María and the prostitute had the same expression; the prostitute was feigning pleasure; María, then, was also feigning pleasure: María was a prostitute.
‘Whore! Whore! Whore!’ I shouted, leaping from the tub.
My brain was working now with the lucid fervor of my best days: I saw with crystal clarity that I must bring things to an end, and that I must not allow myself to be misled again by María’s hurt voice, or her pretense. I must be guided solely by logic, and I must argue through to their ultimate conclusion María’s every suspicious word, gesture, and equivocal silence.
It was as if images from a vertiginous nightmare were parading before me beneath the glare of a blinding spotlight. As I threw on my clothes, all my doubts passed before me: the first telephone conversation, with María’s surprising flair for deceit and the long practice revealed by her change of voice; the dark shadows around her revealed in enigmatic phrases; her fear that she would hurt me – which could only mean, ‘I will harm you with my lies, with my inconsistencies, with my secret actions, with my feigned emotions and sensations,’ since she could never hurt me by truly loving me; the distressing scene of the matches; how at the beginning she had avoided even my kisses, and how she had given herself physically only when faced with the extreme of confessing her aversion or, in the best of cases, a motherly or sisterly affection – all of which, of course, prevented me from trusting her raptures of pleasure, her words and expressions of ecstasy; the fact that she would scarcely have acquired her considerable sexual experience with a stoic and philosopher like Allende; her answers that she loved her husband, which only led once again to the inference that she was able to deceive by feigning emotions and sensations; her family circle, formed of a collection of hypocrites and liars; the aplomb and skill shown in deceiving her cousins with the story of the nonexistent sketches of the port; the scene at the dinner table at the estancia, the overheard argument, Hunter’s jealousy; the phrase that had slipped out when we were sitting on the cliff: ‘as once before I had been mistaken’; with whom: when: how?; the ‘stormy and cruel episodes’ with that other cousin, which also slipped out unconsciously, as proved by her not answering when I had asked ‘what stormy and cruel episodes?’ – she had been so immersed in her childhood that she had not heard me, she simply had not heard me, during what may have been her only truthful confession ever; and, finally, that horrible scene with the Rumanian, or Russian, or whatever she was. The filthy bitch who had laughed at my paintings and the fragile creature who had inspired me to paint them, both, at a certain moment in their lives, had worn the same expression. Dear God, how can you have faith in human nature when you think that a sewer and certain moments of Schumann or Brahms are connected by secret, shadowy, subterranean passageways.
XXXIII
Many of the conclusions I drew from that lucid but phantasmagoric review were hypothetical; I could not prove them, although I was certain I was not in error. I realized, however, that until that very moment I had overlooked one important avenue of investigation: the opinion of other people. With grim satisfaction and an intensity I had never known, I hit upon that course – and the appropriate person: Lartigue. He was Hunter’s friend, an intimate friend. True, he was as despicable as Hunter. He had written a book of poems about human vanity, then complained because he had not received the National Prize. But scruples were not going to stand in my way. With loathing, but with decision, I telephoned him. I told him I needed urgently to see him; I went to his house; I praised his book of verses and (much to his displeasure, for he wanted to talk about that), I asked him point-blank the question I had prepared:
‘How long has María Iribarne been Hunter’s lover?’
My mother never asked whether we had eaten an apple, because we would have denied it. She asked how many, cleverly presenting as fact the question she wanted answered: whether we had eaten the fruit. We, subtly decoyed by the mention of numbers, would say that we had eaten only one apple.
Lartigue is vain but he is not stupid: he suspected there was something more to my question, and he tried to evade answering:
‘I don’t know anything about that.’
And he started talking again about his book and the prize. With true disgust, I shouted:
‘What a crime they committed with your book!’
With that I ran from his house. Lartigue is not stupid, but he was unaware that he had said enough.
It was three o’clock. By then María must already have been in Buenos Aires. I called her from a café; I was too impatient to wait till I got home. As soon as she answered, I said:
‘I must see you immediately.’
I tried to disguise my hatred, because I was afraid that if she was suspicious, she would not come. We agreed to meet at five in La Recoleta, in the usual place.
‘Although I don’t know what we will gain,’ she said sadly.
‘A lot,’ I replied. ‘A lot.’
‘Do you believe that?’ she asked in a hopeless voice.
‘Of course.’
‘Well, I believe we will only hurt each other a little more, destroy a little more the fragile bridge that connects us, hurt each other more cruelly … I came because you were so insistent, but I should have stayed at the estancia. Hunter is ill.’
‘Another lie,’ I thought to myself.
‘Thanks,’ I replied dryly. ‘Let’s plan, then, to meet promptly at five.’
With a sigh, María agreed.
XXXIV
I was in La Recoleta before five, at the bench where we always met. When I saw the trees and paths and benches that had witnessed our love, my mood, already gloomy, became one of absolute despondency. I remembered with melancholy the moments we had spent in the gardens of La Recoleta and the Plaza Francia, and how, in those days that now seemed so far away, we had believed that our love would endure. Everything then had been miraculous, dazzling, but now the world was somber, cold, devoid of meaning. For an instant, the fear of destroying what little remained of our love and finding myself utterly alone made me hesitate. I wondered whether it was possible to cast aside all the doubts tormenting me. What did I care who María was outside our relationship? Looking at those benches and trees, I knew that I could never do without her, even if all I had were those moments of communication, and the mysterious love that united us. The more I thought about it, the more receptive I became to the idea of accepting her love without condition, and the more terrified I became of being left with nothing, absolutely nothing. From that terror was germinating and flowering the kind of humility possessed only by persons who have no choice. I felt an overflowing happiness as I realized that nothing had been lost and that from this moment of lucidity a new life might begin.
Unfortunately, once again María failed me. At five-thirty, alarmed, half-crazed, I telephoned her. They told me that she had unexpectedly returned to the estancia. Totally unaware of what I was saying, I shouted at the maid:
‘But we had agreed to meet at five!’
‘I don’t know anything about that, Señor,’ she replied, somewhat frightened. ‘The Señora left by car a short while ago and said she would be gone at least a week.’
At least a week! The world seemed to crumble; nothing was believable, nothing had a purpose. Like a sleepwalker, I left the bar. I saw absurd things: lampposts, people walking back and forth, as if there were some point to it. How I had pleaded to see her that afternoon! How desperately I needed her! I had been prepared to ask for so little … to beg! But – I thought with savage bitterness – when it came to a choice between co
nsoling me in a park and going to bed with Hunter at the estancia, there really was no choice. And as soon as that thought occurred to me, I had a suspicion. No, I would say I was certain of something. I ran the few blocks to my studio and from there once again telephoned the Allende house. I asked whether before she left the Señora had received a telephone call from the estancia.
‘Yes,’ the maid replied, after a brief hesitation.
‘A call from Señor Hunter, wasn’t it?’
Again she hesitated. I took note of the two hesitations.
‘Yes,’ she replied finally.
My bitterness was now diabolically triumphant. Just as I had thought! I was overwhelmed by a sense of infinite loneliness and, at the same time, insane pride – pride in my infallibility.
I must see Mapelli.
I was almost out the door when I had an idea. I ran to the kitchen, snatched up a large knife, and returned to my studio. How little remained of Juan Pablo Castel’s early painting! Now those imbeciles who had compared me to an architect would have something to marvel at. As if a man could ever change. How many of those morons had perceived beneath my ‘architecture’ and my ‘cerebral je ne sais quoi’ a seething volcano about to erupt? Not one. Now they would have more than enough time to view these toppled columns, these mutilated statues, these smoking ruins, these infernal stairs. There they were, like a museum of petrified dreams, a Museum of Shame and Despair. But there was one thing I wanted to destroy without leaving a trace. I looked at it for the last time; I felt my throat constrict painfully, but I did not hesitate. Through the blur of my tears I saw the shreds of that beach, that remote, anxious woman, that waiting. I trampled the strips of canvas, and ground them beneath my feet until they were nothing but filthy rags. Now that senseless waiting would never be answered. Now more than ever I knew how futile that waiting had been!
I ran to Mapelli’s house, but he was not in. I was told that I could probably find him in the Viau bookstore. I went to the bookstore, I found him, I led him aside. I told him I wanted to borrow his car. He seemed very surprised, and asked if something was wrong. I had not thought that far, but told him some story about my father’s being very ill and not being able to get a train until the next day. He offered to drive me himself, but I refused, saying I preferred to go alone. Again he showed surprise, but finally gave me the keys.