After that afternoon, and for quite a few days, I was in a singular state of absence, severely arid, though without fits or anxieties. Distanced from The One and absent from myself, I was but a double solitude. I felt like someone living in another heart, a heart in exile; and that someone knew not how to revoke his exile along with that of the absent heart. I was looking for the woman of Saavedra, unaware I was seeking for her, because in my being there was no glimmer of understanding. And that search was but an unconscious will to be; for to find The One meant to find myself, and finding her and finding myself would be resolved in a single act. My aimless wandering would sometimes bring me, as though in a dream state, to the house in Saavedra, on whose threshold I would suddenly stir up some inchoate emotion. There, beside the wrought-iron gate, oblivious to the mildness of the season and the evening bliss, I would nevertheless enter a state of unease, which, resembling life, reanimated my being for a few short minutes. Then, clinging to the sweet thought of her closeness, I meditated on The One, mentally associating her with the things of her daily world, with the sidewalk to her house, the little paths through her garden, the threshold of her door, the worn-out brass door-knocker, with everything that still retained, no doubt, the trace of her footstep, the warmth of her hand. In gathering up at least the vestiges of the presence so thoroughly denied me, my heart revived, if only for a moment, until it came time to go back home, when each step I took away from The One was, irremediably, another step away from myself.
XI
But at last came a red-letter afternoon I shall never forget. I still do not know if that friend who inititated me into the Saavedra tertulias had read the secret of my soul. I only know that by his side, one early afternoon, I crossed the threshold of the house, quivering, and stopped short as though stepping into a land both desired and feared. True, the grace of the garden had already been revealed to my eyes on their first encounter with The One; but then so great had been the work of my solitude and so deceitful the labour of my fantasy, that now my eyes, turned toward the garden, comtemplated it afresh as if for the first time. Moreover, glimpsed through the fence over the course of many nights, the garden had to my furtive eyes assumed the dimensions of an inaccessible province or the profile of a forbidden coast viewed by a mariner from afar: no wonder, then, my knees wobbled on crossing the threshold and my steps came to a halt before the world newly on display. But the voice of the friend waiting at my side infused me with courage, and we entered the garden on a path passing among new flowers. I walked as in a dream, with no fear or anxiety at all, weak and jubilant like someone recently brought back to life who marvels at all the things of the earth. When a turn in the path took us behind the house, I stopped, holding my friend back with my hand: there lay the garden in its full amplitude; and, mistress of that luminous domain, a Woman was coming to meet us.
She moved slowly forward, beneath a sun perpendicular to the earth: her body, without shadow, had the firm fragility of a branch, a sort of combative force in her lightness, a terrible audacity in her decorum. She wore a sky-blue dress wrapped round her like a whisp of mist; but the garden, the light, the air, all heaven and earth joined forces and worked to clothe her, so much to be feared was her nakedness. With her face turned to the sun, she showed the two violets of her eyes and the slight arc of her smile; a bee buzzed in circles around her hair. As she walked, her small feet crushed golden sand, seashells, and the carapaces of blue beetles. Her arrival seemed to last an eternity, as if The One came from very far off, across a hundred days and a hundred nights.
Ah, well did I recognize her power in the faintness suffered by my heart at every step she took! And I recognized too the admirable virtue with which she remedied that effect on me, when she finally came up to us and extended the double bridge of her voice and her hand. I was hearing her for the first time, and to my ears her words took on a resonance that was new and nonetheless ancient: hers was a morning voice, of the same family as other morning voices that once upon a time, back in Maipú, had spirited me out of childish frights and nightmares. And, certainly, it was a joyous awakening after the phantasmagoria of dreams possessing me, thanks to the charm of her voice and the brush of her hand — warm, dry and golden as a spike of wheat: a rekindled strength, boldness trying its wings, allowed me to face without flinching the Woman so long contemplated in my mind.
Then, beginning to walk, The One led us into her resplendent vegetal domain. In the time of my childhood, when I came upon a colour print or read some novelistic episode, I would long for the miracle of inhabiting those luminous realms invented by art. I recall having approached that ideal on a few memorable days, later, during my youth. But never, as on that afternoon, had I so felt the strange beatitude of living in poetry. And never had reality been so exalted before my eyes, to the point of becoming a set of pure forms and graceful, singing numbers. The three of us chatted in the garden, the glowing noonday sun burnishing our skin like a strong ointment, and made our way through the dense legions of flowers, bathed in an ecstatic light flecked now and then by a bird’s wing or the volatile gold of a butterfly. We walked next to the wall clothed in honeysuckle, where iridescent-throated doves cooed with no trace of fear: theirs was the music of the garden, and along with the elytron beetles hidden amid the herbs and the bumblebees, their chant filled our ears. The realm of The One was a world in lasting harmony: the death of a single insect would have upset its delicate balance. The One, pausing frequently, spoke to us of her garden, without looking at us, as though in an intimate soliloquy. It was like learning everything anew, but with no effort at all and with the living certainty of music. For the Woman guiding us through the garden had her own way of naming things: she would say “bird” and the essence of the bird appeared in the mind of her listener in a hitherto unknown light, as if The One somehow had the virtue of recreating the bird merely by saying its name.
Who, then, spoke of love? It was Friend.10 We were sitting, the three of us, on a rustic bench, in the shade of a willow whose verdant fronds grazed our hair: the strong aroma of heliotropes beneath the sun induced in us an inchoate inebriation more of the mind than of the body; and ever since that afternoon I occasionally tell myself that if the mind had a scent it would be comparable to the dry, ardent, chaste perfume of heliotropes. But who, then, spoke of love? It was Friend. The first thing he pointed out was the loving virtue thanks to which the Lover, with eyes turned toward the Beloved, forgets himself, exchanges his form for the form of what is loved, dies by degrees to his own life, and comes to life again in the life of the Other; until finally the Lover transforms into the Beloved. As the Friend spoke, my eyes looked into The One’s eyes, with an easy boldness I cannot explain. Then it was my turn to speak, but rather than talk about my own feelings, I related the drama of the Lover converted to the Beloved who hides or flees or ignores the Lover. With a vehemence that must have seemed strange in that garden setting, I depicted the anguish of the Lover who, dying within himself, finds no resurrection in the life of the Other. The One remained silent, although her eyes, looking into mine, emitted the clearest light, indefinable for me then, but whose true value I understood later.