At this point in her story, Miss Margaret stopped for a while, until I became aware of having returned to the night in which I was listening to her under the branches. I wasn’t sure whether her last thoughts had come to her in the train or crossed her mind now, while she spoke. She was already motioning me to take her back to the foot of the stairs.
That night I didn’t turn on my lamp, and, feeling my way around the room, I was reminded of another night when I had gotten a bit high on a drink I was tasting for the first time. It took me a while to get undressed. Later, in bed, with my eyes on the mosquito net, the words shed by Miss Margaret’s body came back to me.
Even before she opened her mouth I had realized not only that she belonged to her husband but that I had been thinking about her too much, and sometimes in a guilty way — and for a moment I’d had the feeling I was the one hiding thoughts among the plants. But as soon as she started to speak, I had felt my body sag miserably under her weight, as if she were sinking into the water and dragging me with her. My guilty thoughts had still managed to surface once or twice, but too fleetingly to seem worth bothering with, and as her story unfolded I had begun to see the water as the spirit of a religion that revealed unexpected aspects of us in which sins had another meaning and mattered less. The sense of sharing in a religion born of the water had grown stronger every minute. Although Miss Margaret and I were the only flesh-and-blood members of that religion, the memories of my own life stirring in the water, in the pauses between the incidents of her story, had seemed to join the flock, one by one, slowly coming to life, as if traveling toward me from some distant time, after some great sin.
Suddenly I had realized a new soul was being born in me from my old one, and that I would follow Miss Margaret not only into the water but into the memory of her husband. And after she had interrupted her story, when I was on my way up the concrete staircase, I had imagined water raining from the sky and the faithful meeting under it.
But now in bed, under the mosquito net, I circled Miss Margaret’s story in a different way and, to my surprise, felt myself gradually being drawn down into my old self, tormented by my own ghosts, as if the net that held my wide-open eyes hung over a swamp where another flock, the one of my own faithful, rose and called out to me. I remembered my guilty thoughts — loaded with the intentions I knew all too well — in some detail. They had begun on one of the first afternoons, when I had suspected Miss Margaret would sweep me up like a great wave, and that I would be too lazy or weak to resist. My reaction had been to try to leave the house, but the impulse had lasted only a moment, as if I had woken up briefly and made what I thought was a move to get out of bed when all I had really done was roll over to go on sleeping. Another afternoon, I had tried to imagine — this had already happened to me with other women — what I would look like married to Miss Margaret. After thinking it over I had decided, losing heart, that if I pitied her loneliness enough to marry her, my friends would say it had been for her money and my old girlfriends would laugh at the picture of me on a narrow walk, trailing after an enormous woman who turned out to be my wife. (I had already had to follow her along the ledge that encircled the lake, on the nights when she felt like walking.)
Now I didn’t care what my friends would say or how hard my old girlfriends would laugh at me: I was like a planet orbiting Miss Margaret, attracted to her by the same force with which she held me at a distance, at once remote and strangely sublime. But my flock kept asking me for the first Miss Margaret, the uncomplicated one, without a husband, before I had gotten to know her, when I could still imagine anything I wanted about her. I can’t say what other thoughts were caught in the mosquito net, which vanished when I fell asleep.
The next morning Miss Margaret rang me on the phone to tell me, “Please go back to Buenos Aires for a few days. I’m having the house cleaned and I don’t want you to see me without my water.” She named the hotel she had reserved for me. She would let me know when I could return.
The invitation to leave set off a jealous reflex in me — first panic, then sadness. The sadness was like a heavy package that I took with me, knowing that as soon as I calmed down I would feel the stupid urge to unwrap it and examine it more closely. By the time I caught the train, I had as little hope that Miss Margaret would love me as she probably had that her husband might still be alive when she took the train to Italy. It was another time and another train, but my longing to have something in common with her made me think: “We’ve both suffered on the noisy wheels of trains.” But the coincidence was as tenuous as if I had guessed only one of the digits of a winning lottery number. I lacked Miss Margaret’s gift for finding miraculous waters, nor would I seek comfort in religion. Just the night before, I had been untrue to my own faithful, because even while they were trying to lead me back to the first Miss Margaret I had been summoning up out of the depths of the swamp other faithful that gaped at her spellbound, like bugs drunk on moonlight. The fact was that my sadness took a poet’s pride in itself and in the sense of easy well-being it got from feeling unloved and misunderstood. I was the temporary meeting place where my ancestors flowed lazily into my descendants. My two sets of grandparents had been very different, and avowed enemies, but they had sworn off fighting while they passed through my life, which they had chosen to spend in more restful ways, wandering idly without ever meeting, like sleepwalkers in different dreams, and I tried not to provoke them, although if they had met and quarreled I would have preferred the fight to be short and deadly.
In Buenos Aires I had a hard time finding quiet spots where Hector could not reach me. (He would have loved to have some juicy details to add to his spiteful portrait of Miss Margaret.) I was also in a quandary trying to sort out my two Miss Margarets, hesitating between them, as if unable to decide which of two sisters to prefer and which to betray, or how to fuse them so I could love them both at the same time. What bothered me above all was being allowed only the most innocent thoughts with regard to the later Miss Margaret. My idea was to indulge all her fantasies from now on so she would confuse me with her memories of her husband and I could end up supplanting him.