“Rest now, Javier.”
“But I don’t believe I’m sleepy.”
“Take one of your sleeping pills.”
You embraced his waist, rested your chin on his shoulder.
“I haven’t unpacked my medicines yet.” He was motionless in your arms. “Elizabeth?”
“What, old man?”
“Why are we here?”
“Because we’re on our way to the sea. Because once in a while we have to get away from the city. And you feel better for it, don’t you? Isn’t the lower altitude better? Come on now, lie down and rest. Get your sleeping pill.”
“I forget its name. It’s yellow, I think. A capsule. Good Lord, Ligeia. How well I used to know my medicines! What’s coming over me?”
“Don’t worry about it. Look for the pill and rest.”
Javier stood in the bathroom door and stared down at the woman who had not had time or inclination to change the wrinkled skirt and blouse in which she had traveled from Mexico City to Cholula. At you, Elizabeth. Liz, Lizzie, Lisbeth. At you, Beth, Bette. He blew his nose on a Kleenex and drew up the zipper of his fly.
“Ligeia, do you know something?”
Oh boy, you thought. Here it comes.
“Do I know what?”
“The snail is androgynous. What was the point of those two snails coming out of their shells on the wall? I mean, if both are bisexual, what was the point of it? Can you tell me, Ligeia?”
* * *
Δ And this morning, Dragoness, I also traveled from Mexico City to Cholula. I rode turning the pages of the Sunday paper and marking certain interesting items with a red pencil. For example: Linda Darnell and La Belle Otero died yesterday. Carolina Otero, of pure old age, ninety-seven. Ninety-seven long years with her fat clitoris always fighting the stout good fight. She died in a room beside the tracks, not a cent to her name, several years behind in the rent, nothing except some yellowed bonds from the time of the Tsar that a Russian noble once gave her, face value, one million rubles, but then came the revolution. The revolution always comes and goodbye bonds. And that was back when it was easy enough to predict your revolutions. Just the same, nowadays no one gives away bonds worth a million rubles, before the revolution or after it. La Belle Otero. And think of it, Dragoness, she left us just as we are moving into our own Belle Époque: she saw the age whooping back to art noveau, to Gaudí, to Oscar Wilde and Beardsley and Firbank and Radiguet and Baron Corvo, and out she bowed. It says that she was born in Cádiz. The daughter of a gypsy girl who was seduced by a Greek officer vacationing in Andalusia. Knowing gypsies and the Greeks, I suspect it may have been the other way around. At the age of thirteen she ran away from school with a lover and went to Portugal and danced in a cabaret. Resolved: the profession of lover. She granted D’Annunzio her favors. Yes, her favors. Look at the picture of the old girclass="underline" some favors, eh? So D’Annunzio discovered that to write well a man must screw hard, and there he was, hooked and wriggling inside the sour cave of La Belle Otero, baffled by shadows, confounding observant asceticism with the hot balls of the stud. Well, for all that, something worked. Pure sexotherapy. No. The best was the night she dined with five crowned heads: Edward VII of England, Nicholas II of Russia, Alfonso XIII of Spain, Wilhelm II of Germany, and Leopold II of Belgium. At the Café de Paris. Oh, the royal cocks! Now I understand it. Imagine the coolness, the disengagement and intelligence it took for her to give herself to them and yet preserve her essential virginity, that virginity born of absolute indifference and absolute sexual virtuosity. You must be very optimistic to make love in that way, neither hurried nor hopeless. Just as we do, La Belle Otero believed that her age would never end. Except that we disguise our conviction by putting on a pessimism that is really no more than an attempt to preserve psychological health: we tell ourselves that the world will die not with a cry but with a whimper, that Doctor Strangeloves are on the loose, that Big Brother is watching. The future is cloudy, we insist, we accept, we even enjoy. Mere psychotherapy. Our pessimism is hygiene for our invincible optimism. We use the condom provided by Thomas Stearns Orwell. In contrast, La Belle Otero and the Belle Époque knew very well that they could not last. Their cheerfulness actually expressed a profound despair, as sinister as the gingerbread castles of Barcelona, the flabby breasts of Beardsley’s Salome. And then she went on the dole. She died yesterday, in the morning; they found her body. So I read my newspaper, Elizabeth, while you rode in the front seat of the Volkswagen beside your blond, sunburned German and Isabel and your husband rode side by side in the back seat and you turned the knob and the radio faded with the voices of the Beatles floating on for an instant, and then you looked ahead and saw the curve and said sharply, “Watch it!” and in one movement grabbed Franz’s arm and pushed your foot down hard on an imaginary brake. In the seat behind Franz, Javier touched his handkerchief to his lips and smiled and said that the drawback to winding roads is that they make conversation difficult and Franz said that soon the worst of it would be behind and you were aware that Isabel had not grabbed Javier as you had Franz and that she was looking at you fixedly as you moved your hand from Franz’s arm and said: “Ten years ago this was all unbroken forest. But Mexicans don’t know how to preserve their riches.”
You turned your head and looked out at the stumps that had been the forest, at the deep gullies worn by the swift muddy water that carries Mexico’s mountains down and levels her hills and presents us with a land of excrement, dry, suffocated, hostile. You closed your eyes and let yourself be lulled by the steady drone of the engine and the sway of the highway. Presently you heard Javier ask Franz to turn on the radio again, but Franz shook his head and said that you had gone to sleep. And then again presently you had opened your eyes with a start and interrupted Franz, who was saying something about the tightness of the curves, by asking: “Didn’t they once have a big race all the way from one border to the other?”
Yes, Isabel replied, it was called the Pan-American Race, and no one who drove it survived. You paid no attention to Javier’s nasal laugh, for now you were intent upon your purse, looking in it for your mirror and comb. You combed your ash-dyed hair with quick strokes, making a face of disapproval as you saw your reflection. You took out your lipstick and puckered your mouth and applied red to those lips which are indeed, sweet Dragoness, wide and full. You moved the mirror around in front of your face and allowed your gray eyes to study themselves. Now you noticed that Javier was talking again and that from time to time Franz was nodding without looking away from the road ahead. Javier was saying that perhaps simply to know it was enough for the woman, but it forced him, the man, to create something that might correspond. You turned and faced Javier and stared at him while Franz said dryly that after all there was the matter of the pleasure involved and that for his part he did not insist that any woman be this or that or the other, simply what she was. Franz pointed toward the valley and said that from here on the road was easier. That would be absurd, certainly, said your husband. Yes, that was what he said. You looked at him and spoke again: “How many hours before we’ll get to the sea?”
“To the sea?” smiled Javier. “When, Franz?”
“Not until tomorrow.”
You turned and closed your eyes again. For several minutes you were all silent. You sensed Franz feeling in his shirt pocket for his cigarettes and opened your eyes and reached across his chest and got the pack. You lit a cigarette and passed it to him stained with the red circle of your lips. Then you lit one for yourself. Only when you had finished the cigarette did you say, as if the conversation had not been interrupted for a moment: “I can accept everything except the same old thing forever repeated. Nothing is so marvelous that it can’t eventually become boring.”