Rosa seemed sure of herself; she pretended to be happy to have apparently overcome her karma. She was a different person now, free of me and of my domination over her. My hallucinogenic domination, as she used to call it, since she was unable otherwise to explain the effect that I had on her. I would have been the last person, therefore, to bridge the painful rift, had it not been Rosa herself who had taken the first step, aggressive, sexual, with flowers, in my room that morning and now again in her room, where she started slowly to undress, inviting me tacitly to bed.
I wanted her. And how! Her body had been to me, at one time, worse than opium. As soon as I saw her naked, I would be seized by a sort of sexual frenzy; I wanted her unbearably, here and now. (There and then.) Her body had an impudence all its own, which was not always in accordance with her face. Her face might be talking about other things, but her body would say, “I want you. I want you to sweeten me, to soften me, to make me submit.” And I would take her in my arms and together we would turn into a single rocket shooting into a space full of galaxies. She had loved our space travels so much; it was precisely their loss that had made her suffer.
I wasn’t long (about an hour after the scene I have described) in understanding this strange move of Rosa’s. I must say it came to me a little late because I’m an idiot where the complex psychology of a woman is concerned: I fell victim to her sexual advances, thinking that we would reach once again the apogee of our travels. But I was wrong. I was lamentably wrong. Rosa had come to see me, Rosa had sought me out, Rosa had practically asked me to bed a moment ago for one reason, apparently a very important one to her: to prove to me that she was over me. That I did not give her the same pleasure as before, that our exhilaration and our space travel belonged to a past that was irrevocably lost. She knew I would be deeply hurt by that, because it would strip me of medals I had awarded myself for her conquest.
She knew (although she never told me so; we never discussed what I am now writing) that she too needed to be convinced it was indeed so, that she was over me, that we now had an ordinary relationship, as she had had before with other men and I with other women.
Nothing unique, nothing special, nothing earth-shattering like before. By proving this, she succeeded in hurting the most sensitive part of my manhood—
since all men deep down are flattered when a woman loves them — and in poisoning me with the slow-acting drug of ranking our relationship together with all others.
Of course I did not understand all this at the time.
When we found ourselves face to face again in bed, everything seemed to unfold according to the old scenario of our love. I wanted her and she wanted me; we gave ourselves to each other, we exchanged some of the words we used to say, as if we were taking old clothes out of a closet. But the explosion never happened, the rocket never took off, we remained on the surface of the earth, a few meters above it perhaps, but always under an inexorable terrestrial law. I had thought then that this might have been because it was the first time. Two bodies that had once loved each other shamelessly, fanatically, like neophytes of a mystical sect, could not help but suffer a slight shock when they met again. But the same thing happened the following time. During the six days that she stayed in town, every time we came together as lovers — and, if I’m not mistaken, there were as many times as days—
nothing happened reminiscent of that twin flame that had set the universe on fire, its sparks like fireworks that illuminated our darkened sky. Everything went along at an ordinary, normal pace, without the slightest surprise.
What I am writing now is the conclusion, the summary of all our meetings. And I am practically convinced that she did it all for one reason: to prove to me that in fact our relationship was over and thus to hurt me, since apparently I had hurt her so much. As for that romantic line, “Let’s stay friends,” Rosa had worded it differently: “Not only friends, but lovers too.
But you should know that love isn’t what you think it is. It cannot be ignited by the fire of the body. The body is a vessel, a tool, endowed with an inner power greater than ourselves, since, as you see, the very same bodies, our own, cannot reach their old records. We are no longer Olympic champions at love, but creatures like most others, with our feet on the ground, who carry out this function to satisfy a need.” Having apparently studied my psyche well, she knew that knowledge would hurt me. That it would kill me. And indeed it did hurt me, it did kill me. I tried many times to lift her up to the old heights we used to scale, like mountaineers, hanging from taut ropes, in danger of falling to our deaths at any moment, always to find, at the last moment, the magical flower of our love that would save us, a miracle on the steep slope of the most abysmal desire.
And that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that she was letting me use all the old tricks, the old passkeys with which I used to open her most secret doors, after which she would give herself to me as to a pirate pillaging her diamond coffers, whose treasures were at once replenished. It was as if my hands, by taking her diamonds, made her give birth to newer, brighter ones, through the magical power of love.
Two lovers create their own behavioral code that, after a certain point, monitors them automatically, like a computer. All you have to do is hit the key and the equation appears on the screen. So the little hypocrite was letting me, without ever saying no — showing in fact that she was enjoying it, pretending she was participating — degrade myself by pressing all her keys according to the code and getting no result. At first, as I have said, I didn’t realize what was going on. I thought that her lack of total participation was the result of trauma. I didn’t know that it was her way of proving the old truth about it being the woman’s participation that makes a lover omnipotent. If she is not moved by him, he resembles an automatic washer-dryer that turns when you press the button, that washes the clothes and dries them. But this procedure is formalized, industrial, and the wash does not acquire the fragrance it does when a loving hand washes it in the stream, on the smooth rock, and dries it in the unhewn light of the sun. That was exactly how she had made me feel when she left: that we had made, five or six times, however many days she had been here, a plastic, sanitized love, superficially intense but without the exhilaration and exuberance that had brought us together and carried our relationship along.
In other words, she had made me feel indigent.
She had stripped me of the peacock feathers with which she herself had adorned me. She was tender with me, and joyful; she hadn’t changed at all. She never complained to me about our breakup, though at the time she had called it unjust and absurd. No, never.
Except once, when these words escaped her lips:
“What a shame, what a shame for us both.” When she said this, I didn’t understand right away, and it was only later when she was saying goodbye that her words took on their real significance. It was as if she were saying: “What a shame that you destroyed the love we knew; what a shame that whatever it was that elevated us no longer exists. What a shame that we were both denied the only possibility a human being has of joining the Gods: the possibility of absolute love.”
For me this was like a slap in the face, which I did not feel until later. During the days Rosa was here, something inside had been telling me that all was not well, but I had kept pulling the wool over my eyes. It’ll be better tomorrow, I kept telling myself. Her pomegranate will explode. Its grains will scatter to the four corners of the earth, like before. She will become the earth again, and I her sky. She will become the sea, and I the sun that warms her. But she became, alas, neither the earth nor the sea. And I became neither the sun nor the sky. We remained within our petty, carnal burdens: Rosa and Irineos, two well-defined human beings who did not overstep the boundaries of their bodies, who did not participate in the cosmic happenings, within whom the rhythm of the world was not overthrown. Two grey partridges, not proud rock partridges, rebels of the mountain; two quails flying one meter above the clover; two aphasic pheasants; family restaurants, not diners for vagabonds; two neighborhood churches, not two country chapels drunk on their ascetic solitude, with the smell of wax hanging from ossified candle stands. We had become the store-bought flowers in the cathedral, not the wild flowers of spring in the village church; we had become jukebox songs, not those old, rare seventy-eights that need special needles to be played.