“And you love and respect him. My God, what a lucky man he is!”
“He is indeed! And you can shove your cynicism. Ours is a happy marriage.”
“A love match.”
“It’s too much for your piggy little mind to grasp, isn’t it? I wouldn’t give up this happiness for anything in the world! His happiness! And his contentment, his peace of mind. If for no other reason than because — and I know you’ll give another of your ape grins at this — because I like people and you despise them. One twitch of his hand could mean the end of someone’s life. And what harm could your scribbling do? Getting a beating, like the one that … that actor was going to give you. Everyone respects him. I’m honored to be his wife.”
Hell and damnation, she means it! She does believe it all, this Iagoan Desdemona! Now what do you make of it? Come on, psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, endocrinologists, criminologists, sophists, sadists, casuists, Jesuits, diplomats, gnostics, mystics, dialecticians, occultists, moralists, veterinarians, dustmen, firemen … what do you make of it? Oh great ATMAN, you know what to make of it. You … and Shakespeare! Of that mental ileus, that Luciferian theology, that whorish moral science, that garbage salad, that sweetmeat made from one’s own intestinal content. “Her honor is an essence that’s not seen; they have it very oft that have it not.”
He repeated the quotation aloud.
“What was that?” she said suspiciously.
“Shakespeare. Iago talking to Othello about Desdemona.”
“I get it,” she said angrily. “It means I have no honor. You could have been a bit more decent about it.”
He laughed from deep inside his lungs, a forced, nervous laugh. This was the moment to slap her face and put an end to the whole affair. But he knew he would regret it the very next day. Not on her account; on his own. He needed her just as she was, paradoxical, mendacious, gifted for corruption of any kind. She provided him with an excuse for his lost state, with a kind of dirty bath for his leprous feeling. The leper. Pile on the filth all around! Oh, to get lost in dirt like a revolting insect living in dung. Maestro: the Crazy Bug.
And yet he was disgusted with Maestro the Bug.
He knew he was lying. It was all an exercise in mimicry performed by a mind horrified at the quicksands into which it was about to be pushed. And the mind was unable to flee, still believing this was a dream, a bad, terrible, infantile dream involving monsters with two pincerlike fingers for hands approaching to embrace you—“I’m your Daddy, my boy.” And when his mind awoke to a new day it found it simply unbelievable that people might not walk the streets so privately, that the crippled weighing-machine man might not slurp soup from his lunch bucket in the doorway at noon, that news vendors might not shout “War’s Worst Raid On London.” That someone down in the street might say in dead earnest, “This is no exercise, this is the real thing. I heard it with my own ears over the wireless.” And what of that mountain whiteness of the sanitarium for innocent diseases then, what of the dreams under the shelter of the melancholy white flag with the magic red cross on it, above which, high up among the clouds, pilots smiled like angels? Milk brothers and sisters, reclining on the terrace under the glaciers, thermometer under tongue, leafing through breviaries of love in postprandial contemplations. She is now Viviana. Not Francesca, not Beatrice or Laura or Isolde or Héloïse or Virginie; she is Viviana, a name which …
“What have you gone all quiet for?” called Enka in a conciliatory voice.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Abélard. A castrated man in the Middle Ages.”
“Did he do it out of piety?”
“No, they did it to him. The Church. For being in love with young Héloïse.”
“Would you go through that for me? Like hell you would!” She was actually seriously offended at the conclusion.
“I don’t love you,” he said, blowing away a strand of her hair that was tickling his nose.
“No?”
“No.”
She shooed his hand from her breast and got up irresolutely. She put her housecoat back on and went wordlessly to the bathroom.
That was how their encounters usually ended, to his satisfaction. He actually stage-managed such endings, closing the door behind him with no wish ever to return. And walking downstairs happy to be leaving. As if he were redeeming himself for some piece of perfidy.
He felt the wish to flee. To profit from her absence and go.
He dressed hastily. Prowling about on tiptoe, he tried to walk soundlessly, burglar style. But the parquet creaked. Suddenly she opened the door and gave him a frightened stare, as if about to shout for help. He stopped in his tracks, taken aback. He bent down like someone looking for something he’d mislaid.
“What is it you lost — your honor?” she collected her wits. Rage poured from her eyes.
“Yes. But I expect it must be somewhere in your marital bed,” he leered cynically. “Never mind, I’ll take yours. It’ll come in handy — I’m seeing some scoundrels later on today.”
“Kior!” she screamed and flew at him, but her arms threw themselves around his neck instead of pelting him. “Kio, why will you insult me?” She was being cuddly Enka again.
“It’s not my fault that all the facts around you are insulting.”
“All right. Fine. What would you have me do then? Do you want me to ring him up now, ‘Darling, Melkior Tresić is my lover’? Is that what you want?”
He produced a contemptuous smile.
“I may be, well … a whore, as you like to say, but I would never wish to hurt that man. That’s my morality. Now laugh all you want.”
He was not laughing. All of a sudden he said, so dejected that he wondered at the overtone himself: “It hurts me that you should be like that.”
He was lying. He liked her being like that, her, Enka’s, being like that. But he was thinking about the other one, about Viviana … and the thought hurt him. Ugo looking up her skirt while she, the Samaritan, bent over him … She knew he was looking … Oh Lord, must they all be like that?
And the Lord inside him replied cruelly: Every single one!
His face contorted at the Lord’s truth.
Enka started to make a commiserating gesture to him but gave up. She had remembered her own case.
“Yes, well, that’s the way I am. There’s nothing to be done,” and she shrugged.
Do they all shrug like that? Every single one, repeated the Lord inside him. He turned to leave. Enka blocked his way with a sheepish smile.
“Shall we listen to Bolero? It has been a long time.”
She was being small, humble. Ravel’s Bolero had worked in the past …
“No,” he said resolutely. “It’s past twelve. I’ve got to stop by the office …”
“When are you coming next?”
“Probably never.”
He caught a glimpse of fear flitting through her eyes. There, that was what he had wanted: to run a snap check. She never learns anything from experience. How many times did I tell her “never” only to come back again, and every time there was that flicker in her eyes! Yes, true, but I really believed I wasn’t coming back anymore. Could it be that she’s tuned in to that very thought on some wavelength of hers? This time, too, I think this “never” to be the last. Perhaps it really is? He now wished with all his heart it would be.
“Kio, please, can’t you stay for just a little while?” She was begging.