I wanted to go home, and he knew it; I didn't explain or give reasons, and he didn't ask for any; with the immeasurable superiority of his pain, he let me go, but as if to beat me to my departure, he also wanted to leave, to return to his barely abandoned despair, to escape; I wanted to get back to the safety of my homeland, he to the uncertainties of his desires; and this was as if with a parallel change of locales — which, being parallel, would not allow us to tear ourselves away from one another— we had wanted to take revenge on each other for our own personal stories, and to besmirch each other with the considerable amount of grimy history that met and clashed in us, except that this was no longer a game, a harmless lovers' quarrel; escaping from this place could have dangerous, life-threatening consequences, a prison term at the very least, in those years only a very small percentage of escape attempts ended in success; we didn't talk about this either, Melchior being very mysterious about it, also tense and irritable; he must have been waiting for a sign or message from the other side, and certain indications led me to believe that it was Melchior's French friend, that self-proclaimed Communist, who was making the arrangements for his escape.
Trusting in Melchior and Thea's mutual attraction, especially in Thea's subtle forcefulness, I figured that if I wanted to hasten the disintegration of their relationship that would enable Melchior to forget his senseless escape plan, which for me was rather unpleasant, since I could not morally support it, then I ought to stay as neutral as a catalyst involved in a chemical process that, having no valence of its own, can never be part of the new compound and falls away.
Needless to say, my scheme violated their privacy, in a sense was a sort of emotional crime, but since it seemed workable — its feasibility was clear to all of us at our very first meeting — I went on with my schemes and plots, assuaging my guilty conscience by telling myself that it was they who wanted it, I was only helping them; success would prove that I wanted only what was good for them; this was my way of saying to myself that I wanted not only to remain honest but to win.
Of course I couldn't be sure the plan would work, and I had to keep going back, all too frequently, to our first meeting, and review every moment, every tiny detail of that evening; and the more often I replayed it in my mind, the more it seemed that in the cold, distant space of the stage, in the bodies of singers moved by the music streaming from the orchestra pit, a wild, emotional chaos arose that was closely analogous to the one overwhelming us as we sat in the plush box.
Without formulating a single thought, then, the events sensed with my shoulders, seen with my eyes, and heard with my ears, occurred in duplicate, becoming their own metaphors, and they affected me in a way I can describe as nothing less than an emotional earthquake; later I could not escape the memory of this profound effect, even if I hadn't intended to exploit it for my own purposes; today I'd say that the smooth, hard ground of my emotions, packed firm in the thirty years of my life, moved under my feet, the magma of instincts was jolted, edifices erected with the stones of mastery and knowledge and self-protecting morality began to crumble during the heartbreaking overture; entire streets of allegedly omnipotent experience suddenly shifted, and almost as if to prove that emotions also had material substance, in the throes of struggling with contradictory emotions arising from a familiar unfamiliarity, I began to sweat so profusely I might as well have been chopping wood, yet I was sitting motionless; as often happens, I pretended I was being carried away by the music, but that did not help either, for like any obvious lie, it made my body, used to self-discipline and self-denial, swim in sweat.
It would seem that by the age of thirty one achieves a certain deceptive security; it was this security that began to fall apart that evening; but the moment before the collapse, all my edifices held their original forms, although not at their usual places; nothing remained at its original location, and therefore these forms, symbolizing their own emptiness, were unaware of the tectonic forces they were now exposed to; my feelings and thoughts were in their old, cracked forms, squeezed between old borders, wandering on worn paths, and simultaneously were the empty symbols of these very forms; in this landslide I was given a moment of grace: in a single bright flash before the moment of collapse I caught a glimpse of life's, or my own life's, most elementary principles.
No, I did not take leave of my senses, not then and not now as I grope for a string of metaphors to help me approach my feelings at that moment; I sensed quite clearly that what for me was a real prison, the prison of my senses and ideas, for the Frenchman on my left was merely a stage set smelling of greasepaint; after all, the only thing that was going on was that in that stage prison uncouth Jacquino was pursuing charming Marcellina, who had no use for his bumbling masculine charms because she pined for Fidelio, and this apparently kind and gentle young man — who was really a woman in disguise, working hard to free her beloved husband, Florestan, languishing in an underground dungeon — without too much thought, though with rueful sadness, Fidelio put up with Marcellina's misplaced affection so as to attain her politically and personally commendable goal, thus perpetrating the most outrageous or hilarious fraud of alclass="underline" pretending to be a boy while she was a girl, which of course proves nothing except that the end justifies the means, since everybody loved or would love to love somebody else, but somehow managed to find their true loves, so we could suspend our moral considerations; in the meantime, my shoulder could not and did not want to break free of feeling the shoulder of the man on my right, whose indecent proximity surprised, humiliated, and frightened me no less than his turning away did, offending my vanity; and though I knew that this turning away was temporary, a transparent love ploy, and that he was using Thea as shamelessly as Fidelio in her male disguise was using charming Marcellina's not altogether pristine sentiments, for she should have noticed that that was no man in those clothes! Melchior, with his convenient bisexual approach, exploited and turned to his own advantage what in all this ambiguity was quite real, Thea's real feelings; by withdrawing attention from me, he was actually calling attention to our closeness, which he could do convincingly only by really turning away, by displaying real or potentially real feelings for Thea, giving her what he took from me; and this was just what was happening onstage, where Fidelio had to become a real man, a perfect prison guard, and pretend to seduce Marcellina, in order to be able to free her true love from captivity.
I felt, then, that Melchior was showing Thea something surprising and genuine in himself that had been hidden even from himself, and because I sensed his emotional turmoil, his boyish helplessness, I felt what Thea must have felt, and as she responded to his advances the only way one could in such circumstances, with sighs, altered breathing, glances, I felt that what was going on between them was something of complete mutuality.
In my intricate jealousy I didn't want Melchior, feared him, found his closeness intrusive, or, I should say, I didn't want only him, for I felt that my own desire, mediated by his body, was taking me toward Thea; it would be fair to say that I yielded to Melchior's approach to the extent that it allowed me to approach Thea.