‘Are you sad?’
‘No, what makes you think that? It’s the song that’s sad.’
There was a comedy on television. Simón said maybe if they took their minds off things, focused on something else, they might get back to the way they felt before they were married. Might even forget that they were alone. He turned off the music and turned on the television. On the screen, a pale comedian was sitting on the floor of a cage on a pile of straw, wearing a black leotard through which his pitifully thin chest and his protruding ribs were clearly visible. From nearby cages came wild shrieks and roars. The comedian was obviously the only visible exhibit in a zoo — and clearly the least interesting, since people sneered, walked past his cage not even stopping to look at him, eager to see the lions or the monkeys. As the cage grew dark and light again, the sign outside changed to indicate the number of days the man had been fasting: 35 days, 40 days, and so on.
Simón explained to Emilia that this was a comic version of Kafka’s short story ‘A Hunger Artist’. Every time the lights came up, fewer and fewer people stopped to look at the hunger artist. Visitors walked straight past his enclosure to look at the animals on either side. ‘Let me out of here!’ the actor screamed. ‘Stop torturing me!’ The screen faded to black and the words ‘62 days later’ appeared to the sound of canned laughter. Simón, who remembered the story, told Emilia that in Kafka’s version, the artist is proud of his record-breaking fasts and his main reason for staying in the cage is that he does not really like eating. Curiously, this version was even more Kafkaesque. On day 73, a guard came over and peered into the cage, poking the damp pile of straw with a stick looking for the comedian. Unable to see him, the attendant pressed his ear to the cage. A childlike, almost inaudible voice from the straw screamed, ‘Get me out of here! I’m disappearing!’ There was another burst of canned laughter. Eventually, a truck pulled up towing a wagon in which a restless panther was prowling. ‘There’s an empty cage here,’ the driver says. ‘Get it cleaned out, we’ve got a panther we need to house.’ Some people in the audience started shouting, ‘You can’t put a panther in that cage! There’s a starving man in there!’ while others yelled, ‘Go on, put him in the cage! Let him eat the bastard!’ Hands on his hips, the truck driver said, ‘Where is this hunger artist then? I want to see him!’ He threw open the cage, took a pitchfork and began sifting through the straw on the dirty floor. The camera zoomed in on a tiny heap of straw and the actor appeared, no bigger than an ant, screaming, ‘Don’t stamp on me!’ his voice so shrill, so faint, that only the microphone could pick it up. ‘Don’t trample me! I’m one of the disappeared!’ The sketch ended with a close-up of the sole of a shoe hovering menacingly over the actor as the audience applauded, roaring with laughter.
The sketch left them feeling even more depressed. They decided to sleep in separate rooms and kissed each other goodnight without passion. In the morning they were due to take the 10 a.m. flight to Recife for a two-week cruise down the Brazilian coast — a wedding present from Emilia’s father.
They had been on the cruise for several days when, over breakfast, they heard that the actor in the sketch had issued an unqualified apology to the viewers and the authorities. ‘Sometimes my jokes are in bad taste,’ he said, ‘and this time I have stupidly contributed to the campaign of vilification against our country. I am unworthy to live among you. The people of Argentina are a peaceful people, and I failed to respect that peace. To joke about the disappeared is to play into the hands of the subversives.’ One of the ship’s officers, who had seen the apology on television, mentioned it over breakfast. ‘The poor bastard had circles under his eyes so black that they looked like they were painted on,’ he said. ‘Hijo de puta,’ commented a deeply tanned older woman sitting next to Emilia. ‘People like that don’t deserve to live. If I were a man, I’d kill every last one of them.’ Everyone went on eating breakfast in silence.
The inchoate love Emilia had felt on her wedding night cured itself the following day in the narrow uncomfortable berth of the cruise ship put out of Recife. When Simón’s hand brushed her belly as he stowed the luggage, she felt a smouldering desire she had kept buried deep inside her ever since she had her first period. Now, finally, she could satisfy it without virginal coyness or Catholic guilt. She fell back on the berth and begged Simón to rid her once and for all of her cursed hymen. But Simón did not feel the same urgency. He wanted to prolong the moment, to separate it into languid fragments of desire, to enter Emilia’s body with his every sense. ‘Let’s take it gently, amor,’ he said. ‘It’s your first time.’ She was impatient and couldn’t understand why her husband wanted to delay the moment of penetration. ‘No, not gently, do it now,’ she urged him. Was this Christian? She wanted nothing in that moment as much as she wanted to be hurt, defiled, broken. When she had been a little girl of seven or eight, the family cook had explained to her that losing her virginity would be like dying. That the pain she felt would be the same pain she would feel when she died, but that with it would come all of God’s pleasures.
She allowed Simón to undress her; to discover for the first time the pinkish birthmark, round as a ten centavo coin, on her right buttock; to linger over the small folds of cellulite that had appeared on one of her thighs — while still she was a virgin, she had thought to herself, a twenty-nine-year-old virgin with cellulite — to trace with his tongue the almost invisible line of hair that ran from her navel to the centre of her being. Her eyes were closed when he, now naked, parted her lips with his tongue and mingled his saliva with hers. Feeling his gentleness, smelling his scent, Emilia’s heart began to race, she had never felt it pound so hard, she didn’t think it could take much more, but it was beating harder still when Simón slipped his tongue between her thighs.
‘Don’t. ’ she said. ‘It’s salty.’ He looked up from between her legs and smiled. ‘How do you know it’s salty?’ Then, without waiting for an answer, he buried himself in her depths until her inner labia gripped him. ‘Now, please. ’ Emilia whimpered. ‘Give it to me now, please.’ Simón penetrated her gently, moving towards her hymen, more gently than she had imagined. She heard a brief moan and then the surge of his ejaculation overcame him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wanted it to last a lifetime.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she reassured him. ‘We can do it again in a little while.’
‘I’ve hurt you. You’re bleeding.’
‘Good. I’m supposed to bleed. I won’t even feel it tomorrow. And besides, like you said, we’ve got our whole lives together.’
After a while, Emilia shifted towards him, kissed his throat, behind his ear. Without saying a word, she took his penis and stroked it delicately.
‘I can’t,’ Simón said. ‘It’s got a life of its own, this thing. Sometimes it stays limp like that for hours.’
‘It’s OK, it’s OK, don’t think about it. You can do it.’
Simón rummaged in a suitcase, took out a cassette deck and pressed Play. From the machine, in spite of the poor quality of the recording, came a sequence of simple piano chords of extraordinary purity, music that sounded like nothing else in the world.
‘When I’m alone, Keith Jarrett’s improvisations get me excited. With you, they’ll get me even more excited.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Emilia smiled. ‘You’re saying he’s improvising this?’
‘From beginning to end.’
‘It’s so perfect. He must have the whole melody memorised.’
‘No. This is Jarrett’s great discovery. He turned up at the Köln Opera House without the faintest idea of what he was going to play. He was tired, he’d spent a whole week playing concerts and he was surprised to find that the music came to him in waves. Before that night, he was a great jazz pianist, but that night he created a genre all his own. His music is a constant, an absolute. The coughing from the audience, the creak of the piano, nothing is prepared. Maybe Bach or Mozart created galaxies like this, improvised harmonies that drift now through the darkness of time, but none of them have survived. That night at the Köln Opera House can never be repeated. Jarrett himself couldn’t do it. It’s an evanescent concerto, born to live and die in that very moment. It will become a commonplace, a cliché, to be listened to by lovers like us, but the human race will go on needing it.’