The Case of Lisandra P. (15 page)

“I felt her body beginning to relax, when Lisandra asked me a question that, in the end, convinced me I had not been mistaken.

“‘Doesn't she get jealous, your wife, when you dance with other women? Jealous that you spend all day long going from one woman to another?'

“‘What a strange question. It's my job, Lisandra.'

“‘“It's my job”—that doesn't mean a thing, “it's my job.” Our job is also who we are. Answer my question, Pepe.'

“‘No, my wife doesn't get jealous. Or anyway she's never mentioned it.'

“‘Maybe she just doesn't tell you. Do you think you know your wife well? Do you think she shares all her deepest thoughts with you? You know that's not possible, that it's never like that between two human beings. Be honest.'

“‘Then I'll “be honest”—I've never wondered whether she gets jealous.'

“‘You haven't? How selfish of you. Well then, I'm asking you. Does your wife have any reason to be jealous?'

“Lisandra would not let go of her question; I could feel it in her hand as it pressed against mine. I wanted to make light of it.

“‘Have you seen how old I am? My wife has nothing more to fear.'

“But there was no getting through to Lisandra, no reasoning with her; even an attempt at humor did not work. Her thoughts came rushing out.

“‘Age doesn't mean anything, either. And you've been giving classes for years, so there must have been a time when you could not have said that, an age where you couldn't say, “Have you seen how old I am?” So swear to me that you have never had wicked thoughts when dancing with another woman. Swear to me that it has never happened to you. I don't believe a man and a woman can be physically close without such thoughts pressing in on them. Even one floor in an elevator can be enough to initiate the thought. Go on, swear.'

“I thought about Mariana and I couldn't swear. But I went on dancing. I mustn't stop Lisandra. It would have been like slamming the lid down on a music box that was still playing, to force our bodies to bend just as they were spinning, gathering momentum. I had wanted to get her to speak; I had to hear her out. She went on, pressing her point.

“‘So you see, even you, Pepe, even you have thought about it.'

“Lisandra's voice was flowing like poison into my ear. It was as if she were some monster blocking my path and forcing me to think about the worst things in my life, or the best, but which have ended: so the worst. Mariana came back to me, and I had almost managed to forget her, when once I had thought I could never forget her. Mariana had been my student, and the minute she moved I desired her, and the minute she stopped moving I desired her; I could no longer do without her, without her body. But we never left this place. It was always in the studio, yes, always in the studio. That way my betrayal would seem less terrible, as if it were beyond reality. Mariana was
not competing with my wife, she was like my muse. That must be how I reasoned back then, although back then I didn't reason, I was simply fucking. I was fucking like a fifty-year-old man who is sheltered from remorse by his fear of regret. I deceived my wife with Mariana almost every day for close to a year. The last month Mariana took my hand and led me, unhesitating: she would stand with her back or her belly to the door of the studio and I took her there; that was the only place I was allowed to take her. I knew that was her way of asking me to take her somewhere else, anywhere else. The place of our lovemaking must have seemed too confined to her now. With one hand on me and the other on the door handle, it was her way of asking me to go out, or else she was hesitating between her freedom and me, or else it was just her way of saying good-bye; I never knew. I loved her all the more for it: for having known how to get away from me, to get away from this hateful system I had trapped her in, for having made the right choice.

“‘Vittorio is being unfaithful to me.'

“And then, suddenly, Lisandra began to talk. To rattle on and on, even. Her soul laid bare. All of a sudden. Without me asking her a thing. As abruptly as if she had suddenly taken her clothes off, without a single gaze begging her to.”

I'm sick.

It didn't start right away. But as soon as we met, I could tell that I was becoming unbalanced.

The first crisis was over three years ago. At the hotel. We had gone to spend a few days in Pinamar. It was around the middle of our stay. We had had dinner just the two of us. I don't remember what we talked about, but it was a good conversation. I've always been afraid I would bore him. And then we went up to the room. Vittorio switched on the television. I picked up a book. And I think I was still all right at that point. And then behind us, behind the head of the bed, there were sudden moans, faint at first. Then more precise, urgent cries, spontaneous. Cries of lovemaking. I no longer dared turn the page. For fear of making a ridiculous sound by touching the paper. It was terrible, horrible. The reflection of our own selves. Of our nothingness. Our absence from each other. To hear others getting their pleasure so nearby merely emphasized how lethargic we had become, sexually, by then. We didn't joke about it. Perhaps we should have. Well, if we had been able to. The silence became unbearable. Our silence. Because it wasn't silent around us at all. Their bed was creaking against our wall, banging against it. I could sense Vittorio's desire growing for that unknown woman. I was sure
he would rather have been on the other side of the wall. With her rather than me. A useful night, a night he could remember. I looked at the sheets. I was sure he had a hard-on. I thought of going to draw a bath but I was afraid such an unusual idea might merely emphasize the noise even more, the moans, when all I wanted was to hide them. I told myself if I went out he'd masturbate. As if to a porn film without the picture. What sort of extraordinary woman would his imagination dream up? A brunette? A blonde, surely. Yes, a blonde, he, too, prefers blondes. That's his taste. The way you might prefer savory to sweet. The way you can't force your tongue to feel differently, such tastes are independent of our will, it's physical. So why did he choose me? A brunette. An accidental slip-up. What sort of woman would his imagination come up with? Would she be thin? Plump? She would have big breasts. Or maybe small breasts, but with pointed, twitchy nipples. But maybe she wouldn't even be an imaginary woman. Maybe she would be a flesh and blood woman. Quite simply. A woman he'd crossed paths with earlier that day. Recently. The latest one to kindle his desire. I thought about the girl at the reception desk and suddenly I couldn't get her out of my mind; I saw them, their terrible shapes, intertwined.

When Vittorio switched off the light all I could think of was how to get out of that room. I prayed it would stop. Darkness made the sounds even louder. You could hear something like words between their moans, but they weren't audible. An impression that the wall reduced. I told myself the wall would vanish and we would find ourselves there with our two beds back to back. The bed for fucking and the bed for boredom. She was moaning so much, moaning so magnificently. I figured that this woman surely made love better than I did, and I began to think about all the women who made love better than I did, and I felt guilty. Toward him. I, too, wanted to give him nothing else, nights he would remember; otherwise,
what are nights for? But I couldn't. It was no longer possible. The weight of habit. Our skins touched. That calm skin of his. I wanted nothing to do with such motionless contact. But there was nothing else I wanted, either. I could not stand our dead, inert bodies, but I couldn't have stood it if our bodies were excited, either. The initiative came from him. Rage entered me at the same time he did. Who was he making love to? Who did he see behind his closed eyes? Maybe if he had looked at me, I might have calmed down; it was as if I was there but I no longer existed; I was sure that he wasn't making love to me but to her, the stranger behind the wall; I felt sure he was adjusting the rhythm of his thrusts to the sighs we could hear, not to my sighs, as if through me he was trying to go through the wall to penetrate the body of that Other Woman. I was the stimulant for lovemaking that did not exist, that would never exist; I was a means, an instrument, to enable him to take his pleasure through me but not with me, a lovemaking that was imagined and therefore more marvelous than reality. More marvelous than me. Because I was his reality. And I had always wanted to be his fantasy. Not his
reality
, I hate that word.
Reality
. My moans were not on par with the ones I could hear, they were not as genuine, not as voracious, not as expressive, inferior in every way. While I felt his cock moving about inside me, I remembered that during dinner he had recoiled when I took a bite from his plate. Before, he always used to let me taste his food. I think that jealousy really got to me that night because he didn't like it when I took a bite from his plate. That's when I became aware that there was a before. Because now we were in the after. That was when I knew he had grown tired of me. Without even knowing why, he was weary. Time had ridden over us, through us. When love begins, there is an hourglass somewhere that is turned and we head irrevocably toward the end. Before, we, too, would have made love, and perhaps we wouldn't even have heard them. Or we would have
laughed about them. The hourglass of love had been turned. I told him I wanted to leave the hotel the very next morning.

“Why do you want to change hotels? This one is fine.”

“I don't want to change hotels.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“To go home.”

It begins with a sort of paralysis. My throat tightens. My chest seems squeezed from within. And my heartbeat accelerates. At times like this, the heart is never on the side of the body, but in the middle. If there hadn't been this first time, there would have been another time. Vittorio had to induce me to feel jealous; it was part of our story. I knew that jealousy had just asserted its power over me, subjecting me to its madness. I couldn't breathe. I think that I have never gone back to breathing the way I used to. My heart was plugged in somewhere else. To the wrong rhythm. The wrong tempo. Except, perhaps, when I dance. Only then can my breathing relax.

Make them stop, make them stop. Oh, no, not louder. Be quiet.

“Are you asleep?”

He was asleep. The others went on fucking, but we had already finished. I told myself he wasn't sleeping, he wanted me to leave him alone, so he could listen to them in peace; I told myself I hadn't satisfied him, he would gladly have started all over. But next door. On the other side of the wall. Jealousy did not evaporate with his ejaculation. No, it settled in for good. It's a reflex now. Jealousy doesn't choose the person it will inhabit, it's more devious than that, more collective. Jealousy doesn't want to destroy just one person, it wants to destroy a couple. And everything that goes with it. And nocturnal jealousy became diurnal. He didn't want to have breakfast in the room.

“Let's go have it downstairs instead.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“But why? We always have it in our room.”

“And the coffee is always cold. At least downstairs we will have hot coffee.”

A hot pussy, that's what he wanted. He wanted to see her. The girl from next door. He wanted to get her firmly printed upon his mind, that girl who was so good in bed. In the mental storeroom where he kept his fantasies, he wanted to see what she looked like, what kind of body she had.

“Let's sit here.”

“But we're right in the middle.”

“We're nearer the buffet like this.”

You don't want to miss her, is that it? I got the impression he was looking at every woman who was busy at the buffet. Which one was she? The unknown woman with whom he had spent the night. One of them would be more beautiful than the others. I decided it was that one. My gaze went from him to the woman, constructing a couple that was more real than the one he made with me. I felt like hitting him.

“What are you looking at like that?” I asked.

“To see if they put any more salmon on the table.”

Liar. Obsessed. You're looking at her. You'd love to go and give it to her, wouldn't you? Take her right away, there on the buffet: while she stuffs a slice of salmon down your throat, you'd stuff your cock up her cunt. Go on, then! Since that's all you can think about, go on!

“How many more times are you going to help yourself?”

“What's wrong with you this morning? Don't I have the right to eat?”

“You should have told me that we'd only come here to eat.”

“Okay, okay, we'll go; let's go get some fresh air, it'll calm you down. I'm going back up to the room to get a sweater; you can wait for me here if you want.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want me to wait for you here?”

“I don't know . . . so you don't have to go back upstairs.”

“Of course . . .”

“What, ‘of course'?”

“I'm going up. I want to get a sweater, too.”

“You want me to get it for you?”

“You really don't want me to come upstairs, do you?”

“No, that's not it at all . . . come up if you want, but stop attacking me.”

If you think I don't know what you're up to. You want to run into her. Have a good slow look at her. They came out just as we were going into our room. The couple. Of course they hadn't had any breakfast, not those two, they'd been fucking.

“Did you see the way you were looking at her?”

“Who?”

“The girl leaving her room.”

“But I wasn't looking at her.”

“You wish you were in her room, right? You would rather be with her.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don't act all innocent.”

It was the first time I slapped him. My hand shot out all by itself. My body flared with an intense heat. Hatred. After insulting him, screaming at him. Now the door was open.

 • • • 

Occasionally the jealousy left me alone, but it was only to seize hold of me all the better afterward, to crush me. Destructive. Definitively destructive. I knew I would lose Vittorio. Another woman would take my place. Would bring him the novelty that I
could never bring him ever again. Like water spreading, implacably, the jealousy spread everywhere, to fill the tiniest cracks in my life, in my reasoning, in my emotions. In my identity.

Multiple fears, permanent fears.

A woman walking ahead of me, or toward me, a woman sitting down, a waitress, saleswoman, nurse, pharmacist, blonde, brunette, young, mature, wearing heels, wearing flats, a woman at a party, a primal scene where one evening I was sitting on his lap, his best friend nudged him on the knee when a beautiful woman walked in the room, except that he nudged the wrong knee and the knee he alerted was mine; how humiliating—how many codes do men have among themselves to signal a potential good lay to each other? A woman with long hair, a gamine, eyes of blue brown yellow black, a woman on a train, an air hostess, a virgin, the shopgirl where he goes to buy me flowers when he'd really rather give them to her, any woman, a woman on television, at the movies, a primal scene where I had my head on his shoulder and I felt his heart beating faster when a certain actress came on the screen—I can't even watch a movie with him anymore, I can't sit through a play at the theater, I imagine his fantasies about these actresses, I can't stand to see his gaze land on these women and follow them, undressing, assessing, even a woman in a book, the way he imagines her; what does she look like? What flesh and blood woman inspires him? Even a dead woman, a woman with freckles, the neighbor's daughter, any of them, they all convey a new perfume, a new charm, a new language, another culture, a Swede, an Italian, an Asian, the promise of new conversations, a girl in the next car at the traffic light, a girl he sees every morning at the bakery, the girl who brought a spare part to repair the fridge.

Another cunt to penetrate, simply, for a change.

These women are like wolves; I can't count them anymore. Like wolves, they place their paws in the prints of those who went before.

I would like to have the powers of a beautiful apparition yet remain the everyday woman in his life, his routine. I would like to transform myself to the rhythm of those who charm him. To have that power of metamorphosis. To become her when he is attracted to her, to become the other when he is attracted to the other. Not to always be me, inflicting myself on him. But to transform myself to the rhythm of his desires. To bring every single woman to him while remaining the Unique one. Life inflicts our uniqueness and individuality upon us, in a reduced and limited whole, and we have to endure it, put up with it all our lives. The same smile. The same laughter. The same eyes focusing into a gaze. The same hands in the same hair. The same shoulders, shrugging. The same legs, crossing. The same arms, stretching. The same yawns. The same voice. The same back. The same teeth. The same skin. The same breasts. How many times do we ourselves become weary in order not to weary others? How could he fail to find me repetitive? You can no longer light the fire when you are always there.

I am like a lookout. Absorbed by the coming disaster. A lookout who knows the storm will break, ineluctably. The warning signs fill my head. Danger reigns continuously.

I can enjoy dinner at a restaurant only if he sits facing the wall. The slightest footsteps in the street are torture; I lie in wait for his every gaze; wherever I go I am wary—which side will my enemy suddenly appear from? I freeze the images in my head. I scan them. I hunt for the detail, the proof that Vittorio has been attracted to another woman. A gleam in his eyes. I know that gleam, that quiver of hesitation in his eyes, which tells me desire has him in its grip. But then what thoughts arise? I am sure he uses those thoughts when he makes love to me, to lessen his boredom. I wish I could see into his head when he is making love to me; I wish I could invent a machine to see into another person's head when he is making love. Then no
one could hide. No one could pretend. There would be plenty of surprises. Even when I go out for a walk on my own I cannot find serenity; I become his gaze and I look, I look all around me at the women he might fancy; I cannot remain detached, there are no more elegiac thoughts. I go hunting to find who might charm him. Even the sight of a little girl is cause for despair. So pretty. Her child's beauty, so promising. Could she be the one who, someday, ten years from now, fifteen years from now, will take Vittorio from me? Will bring him something new, when all he and I can do is repeat ourselves? When I wake up in the middle of the night, my brain immediately fills with thoughts of him. And when he sighs in the night, I hear his fantasies. And I imagine all the creatures haunting him. It is not their beauty that torments me, it is knowing that I am never there among them. You don't go searching in your dreams for what you have to put up with in your life.