I look attentively at the Bordeaux in my glass. Giuseppe, who’s returned, asks me what I see in there. I shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know,” I say. “I like it,” I say. His smile makes me hide my gaze in the depths of the wine.
Suddenly, I’m the only one at the dining room table. I look around in alarm. Dorel and Clarisse are leaving, I say to myself. Yes. Did I say good-bye to them? Yes. Giuseppe and Pauline are seeing them to the doorway. I hear Giuseppe’s full, confident laughter. Pauline makes a silly face at me and goes into the kitchen. “Voilà la plus belle!” Giuseppe says and he sits down next to me. He leans in very close. Pauline is in the next room, I think to myself. Giuseppe’s hand on my face, his hand on my hip. I tremble like a child. Pauline will appear any second, I tell myself, and she’ll catch us. But with two fingers I follow his calf upward until his pants stop me. His hand grabs my head and we kiss.
“Why did you take so long?” I murmur in his ear. His smile enters through my eyes and reaches down into my stomach. It’s a vertigo I can’t resist. We kiss again. I jerk away from him roughly.
Pauline comes over to clear the table. Did she see us? I go help her. “Call me a taxi,” I tell him.
“Yes,” he says, “it’s raining and windy.” It comes right away. I pick up my umbrella. Giuseppe, behind me, is saying to Pauline that no, better not, he has things to do early tomorrow, it’s very late, and he’ll share the taxi with me. They’re in the doorway now and I see them kiss tenderly on the mouth. She closes the door, and he kisses me. We run down the stairs holding hands. We get into the taxi laughing like naughty children. The white hairs of his chest peek from under his shirt and he looks at me with smiling eyes. His happiness, I don’t know why, it moves me. Madam Bovary’s stagecoach, I think to myself, as we kiss and kiss again, borne along by a quick passion.
The light from outside the fogged window of his apartment was enough. The streetlight among the chestnut trees that were losing their leaves in the rain. I left my shoes on the rug. We kissed standing up, we bit each other gently on the ears, we looked into each other’s eyes for a long time. He was almost my height.
“Sei come una pantera,” he said to me, caressing my hair. “What makes you so attractive,” he told me, “is that you don’t realize how attractive you are.” He kissed me. He held me and kissed me lovingly, and I felt his lips playing with my nipples, and I fell backward with him holding my waist and I lost my balance, which was, I suppose, what he wanted, since the bed was right there, and I fell onto it and he fell hungrily on top of me, and I struggled beneath him to take off my pants and also his shirt, and I rolled over and once on top I managed to do it and I felt his muscles that were still firm and I felt his hands on my thighs and more and I felt him and I felt him slide a hand under my elastic and I practically felt a splash, and I was ashamed and I held his hand in mine and still I pushed him in and I was above him and I moved pressing myself tightly to him so I could feel him more, more, and then I came, like an idiot, I came suddenly, I couldn’t stand it anymore, I came, I swear, and I couldn’t hide it, because I came with everything I had.
Then we drank some water, and I took off all his clothes and kissed him from head to foot and he kissed me, and I stopped to kiss him where I thought he would like it most, but I kept changing my mind where that was; he sighed and at times he maybe groaned, or maybe I imagined that. And I got on top of him and I wanted him to come, and I started to feel again and I thought he had come and I got off but he hadn’t, and we went on loving like that until, sticky with sweat, he finally came and we fell asleep and it was already starting to dawn by then.
I got back to my hotel room a little after seven in the morning. Cuyano was waiting up for me and was very worried about me, he said. He asked for an explanation. I started to laugh and he understood. A couple of hours later I flew to Marseille, birthplace of Antonin Artaud. In the doorway of a café I met with an ETA contact. I brought a box with five cigarettes that carried a message. Of course, I never found out what they said. I only knew that there were always Mapuche comrades among us — like Kid of the Day. Many of them also participated in organizations of their people. The contact was close. That was what interested the ETA. And the ETA interested our Mapuches.
I went back to Paris that same day and went straight to Giuseppe’s apartment. “Voilà la plus belle!” He exclaimed when he opened the door. He uncorked a bottle of Moët et Chandon and in his miniscule kitchen he made an omelet with mushrooms that was delicious. “Je n’ai jamais aimé que vous,” he told me.
“You liar!” I shouted.
“It’s a line from that old guy Brassens you liked so much,” he protested, laughing. And as proof he put on the song “Il suffit de passer le pont.”
Let me tell you, that night was the best of my life. We parted at eight in the morning. It hurt my skin to pull my body away from his. And his eyes were full of tears.
Pelao and I flew back to Buenos Aires and traveled by land to Chile. It was safer that way. I never found out what Pelao did during those five days in France. Pauline never wrote her report and contact with her was cut off. I knew nothing more of Giuseppe until many years later.
1. “The ape, leaving his cage / says: “Today I will lose it!” / He meant his virginity / you will have guessed, I hope! / Beware the goril. . la!”
2. “Bah, sighed the ancient lady, / no one could still want me, / that would really be extraordinary, / and to be honest, unexpected! / The judge thought impassibly: / to be taken for a floozy, me! / it’s entirely impossible. . / Later, he was proven wrong! / Beware the gorilla!”
3. “To die for ideas, the idea is excellent. .”
4. “We shall die for ideas, all right, but let it be a slow death. .”
SEVENTEEN
Our organization functioned as a body fed by “ties” or “meet points.” If the “meet” was with our cell, the Spartan would arrive last of all, and he would always sit with his back to the wall in the spot with the greatest visibility in case of attack. He took orders from Max, his immediate superior, by means of a liaison. Who were they, these intermediaries? Where did they come from? Who recruited them? I never knew. The ones I saw were fragile women between sixty and seventy years old, who wore clothes that were neither luxurious nor poor, and who moved through the streets of Santiago with a dignified slowness. They almost always carried a purse on one arm and a bag with some vegetables, a wedge of cheese, a bottle of oil, a couple of apples, whatever. Many times I had to take from that bag a book or notebook that held an envelope with a coded message from the Spartan. The public telephone was used only in extreme cases. The old women gave the sign of recognition and then they would give the password. Of course, they never gave a name. They were the circulatory system. Most of them had belonged to the old forbidden party, they were retired, widows. . One might want to avenge her husband, another her brother, or a daughter who had been raped or murdered, another her own defeated dreams.