His thick lips parted, his eyelids flickered, his light brown complexion darkened slightly as if from repressed excitement, his black pupils contracted making the pale green irises seem dilated; but I don't think it was the shape of his face, the wide and easily knitted forehead, the lean cheeks, the dimpled chin and disproportionately small, almost pointed, perhaps still undeveloped nose, that made the most profound and most painfully beautiful impression on me; it was the coloring: in the green of his eyes, beaming out of the savagely sensual brown of his skin, there was something abstractly ethereal, clamoring for heights, while his chapped red lips and the unmanageably curly mass of his black hair were pulling me down into dark depths; the animal boldness of his glance made me recall our intimate moments together when, lost in each other's looks, which always suggested open hostility as well as hidden love, we could accurately sense that our mutual attraction was based simply on uncontrollable curiosity, which was only an illusion of something, though strong enough to draw us close, bind us together, deeper than any so-called dangerous inclination could ever be because it was undirected, insatiable; yet the synchronized narrowing of our pupils and harmoniously dilating irises surely disclosed something in our eyes that made palpably clear that our supposed intimacy had been a sham and that in reality we were irreconcilably different.
Looking into his eyes I seemed to see not another person but two terrifying magic balls.
This time, however, we couldn't hold each other's gaze for long; though neither of us tried to avoid the other or look away, I saw the change: his eyes lost their inherently brilliant openness, they filled with purpose and motive, and their surface became dimmer, glazed over; they took cover.
"I must ask you," he said quietly but sharply, and he stepped closer to keep me from interrupting him again and roughly gripped my arm, "I must ask you not to report me to the principal, or if you already have, go and try to take it back."
He kept biting his lips, pulling my arm, and blinking his eyes, and his voice lost its self-confident soft depth; he was thrusting out his words as if he wanted not even the air that carried them to touch his lips, wanted to expel these hated sounds, had to feel he had done all he could, although he must have had as little faith in the effectiveness of his own words as he did in my amenability, and for this reason alone I don't think he was very interested in my answer; besides, he didn't make it clear how he thought the report was to be taken back, so I think he knew all along he was treading on slippery ground; he was looking at me, but it may have been too much of an effort to make his voice sound so thin and humble, and it's very likely he didn't even see my face: in his eyes I must have been a mere blot, dissolving in its own vagueness.
But as far as I was concerned, a wonderful feeling of superiority made me more self-assured than ever.
A request had been put to me which I had the power to grant or refuse; the moment had arrived when I could prove my own importance, when at my own will and pleasure I could either reassure or destroy him, with a single word avenge all my secret injuries — injuries which ultimately were not even his doing, but which I had inflicted on myself because of him, the bitter pains of being ignored he induced in me, unwittingly and innocently, by simply being alive, by wearing nice clothes, by talking and playing with others, while with me he was unable or unwilling to establish the kind of contact I so yearned for and didn't even know what it should be like; he was almost a head taller than I, but at this moment, in the clearing, I was looking down at him; I found his forced smile distasteful, and as my body regained its normal dimensions, it assumed the lightness of that secure state in which our consciousness stops playing and struggling and, with a careless shrug, surrenders to all its contradictory emotions, rendering outward appearances and shows irrelevant; I didn't care anymore how I looked or whether he liked me or not, and while I felt the chill of cooling perspiration on my back, the dampness in my leaky shoes, the unpleasant prickles of my cheap trousers clinging to my thighs, as well as the burning in my ears, my smallness and my ugliness, there was nothing hurtful or humiliating in all this, because in spite of the unrelieved misery of bodily sensations, I was now free and powerful, felt free within and for myself; I knew I loved him, and no matter what he did I could not stop loving him; I was completely defenseless, and for that I could either take my revenge on him or forgive him, it was all the same; to be sure, he didn't seem just then as beautiful and attractive as he had been in my fantasies or when he'd overwhelm me with his sudden presence — his dark skin had turned sallow; he seemed to have eaten something with garlic in it and I didn't want to inhale the smell of his breath; to boot, the humility in his smile was so twisted, so exaggerated, that it betrayed his fear, which may have been genuine but which he was anxious not to show, preferring proudly to conceal it, to substitute mock humility; he was playing up to me and deceiving me at the same time.
I blushed and yanked away my arm.
But I did not, after all, have a choice; I couldn't simply tell him anything I felt like, since as far as my emotions were concerned every possible response led to a dead end: it hadn't occurred to me to report him, but if I were to, if now I really did, I might alienate him forever and they might even take him away; if, however, I pretended to be swayed by his plea, I'd be letting myself be misled by his clumsy show of humility, in which case his victory would be much too easy for him to love me for it; I wasn't ashamed of blushing — if anything, I wanted him to notice it, would have liked nothing more than for him to discover my feelings and then not mind them — but feeling myself blush made me realize all too clearly that nothing could help me now, that regardless of what I'd say or do, he'd slip through my fingers again and I'd be left with nothing but another unclarified moment, which he couldn't understand, and with my futile fantasies; but if that's the case, I suddenly thought, then I must be true to my convictions and act sensibly and cruelly, although this alternative would bring me close to my father and mother, even if I didn't actually think of them at the moment, because much as I would have liked to have my own convictions, I knew they weren't all mine; still, at the same time, the situation was much too unique and personal for my parents' faces or bodies to appear in my mind's eye and whisper in my ear specific words that I could then go on confidently repeating, like a parrot, but they were there all right, with the warm persistence of feeling at home, hiding out in my thoughts, ready to jump in; that's how I knew that there was a form of human behavior capable of eliminating emotional considerations and acting purely on the basis of principles known as convictions — except that I didn't have the strength to stifle my emotions.
"I'm not asking for myself!" he said even more sharply, and his hand, from which I'd just withdrawn my arm, was still in the air, hesitating; he had long fingers, a slender wrist, but I didn't let him finish, didn't want to, because I didn't want to see him like this, and I cut in: "First of all, it would be nice if you could tell the difference between denouncing and reporting."
But pretending not to have heard me, he continued the interrupted sentence: "I'd just like to spare my mother this latest unpleasantness."