Strangest of all the manifestations of her condition, eerier even than the seizures she was subject to, were those states of utter absence into which she would suddenly fall, without warning, and from which she was not to be roused or recalled until whatever other place it was she had been in was ready to release her. For it was absence. Although she may have seemed in those intervals like a catatonic, she would retain a quality of such vividness, such – what shall I say? – such immanence, that it was plain she was fully conscious, but, as it were, conscious somewhere else. I confess I found these lapses extremely unnerving. She would falter, and stop still as a breathing statue, and I would feel her leaving herself, as the ancients believed they could feel the soul abandoning the body of one who was dying. I too would halt, transfixed, as if I had felt the passing of a ghost, and wait for her to come back. We never spoke of any of this. I never asked where she had been, or even if she was aware of having been gone. In fact, I never mentioned any of the signs of her condition, and certainly not the condition itself, held in check as I was by a reserve that was as arbitrary and as rigid as any primitive taboo. Just as she was preserving the world, so I must preserve something in her, some last and vital shred of decorum, privacy, equilibrium. However, lest I present an image of myself bent low in hieratic submission at the feet of a capricious moon goddess – although they were lovely, in their way, those large, long, slender, pale feet of hers – I should say that my treatment of her in general was not pretty, no, not pretty at all. She was demented, and hardly more than a child, a lost poor damaged soul who trusted me, and I betrayed that trust. In defence of myself, although I do not deserve defending, I shall adduce only two articles of evidence, the first of which is a product of the second. I was embarrassed. Now, there is embarrassment, and there is embarrassment. That under which I sweated was of a kind usually experienced only in those dreams in which one finds oneself caught trouserless in a public place. Do not mistake me. My shame was not that I had taken advantage of a creature who was a fraction of my age and of unsound mind. I did not care how the hotel waiters might smirk, or Franco Bartoli frown, or Kristina Kovacs offer me her sadly smiling, patronising sympathy; where lust and its easements are concerned I am and always was beyond good and evil, or at least beyond delicacy and bad taste. No. The trouble lay elsewhere. This is the second line of evidence for my defence, and the source of my embarrassment: the fact, simply, that I loved her.
I have allowed I hope a decent interval for the laughter, the jeers and the catcalls to subside. Now I must qualify this startling declaration. It was a great surprise to me, a great shock, at this late, last stage of my life, to find myself host to such a sudden and unfamiliar, if not forgotten, emotion. Inside every old man, or inside this one, anyway, there lives on an unageing youth who never had enough of love, of the Keats and moonlight variety, and who at the least encouragement and in the most unsuitable circumstances will leap out, posy in paw and glans athrob, ready to scale the ivy to the rose-hung balcony and his beloved's bedchamber. He is of a serious, a solemn, bent, this flushed and swooning Romeo; he is after more than mere gratification of the flesh. Despite the pococurantish pose to which in the matter of love I am given like all my kind – men, I mean, old or young – I approach the female body on the knees of my soul. Never, since that April evening in my earliest springtime when bad little Lili Erstenheim lifted her skirts for me in the shadows under the staircase of our apartment building and laughing seized my rigid virginity and slipped it effortlessly, like a lollipop, into the hot hollow between her skinny thighs, never, I say, have I been able to breach that holy of holies, wherever I have encountered it, without a numinous shiver. To thrust a limb of one's living flesh into the living flesh of another, how can that be other than a sacred or a sacrilegious act?
I do not say that this heightened state of reverence survives intact into the afterwards of sweat and tangled sheets and that peculiarly melancholy smell of sea-wrack and ammonia that lingers when the tide of love has ebbed. After the first time, the first two times, in the hotel room, when, half-drunk and obscurely terrified, I had thrown myself upon Cass Cleave in her bed, my mind naturally turned at once to the question of how to get rid of her. Bitter experience in my early academic life had taught me a simple but peremptory lesson, namely, that one might take a student to bed once and get away with it, but to repeat the performance is as good as giving a pledge of life-long passionate devotion, involving marriage and children, a nice big house, and dinner parties, foreign travel, a place in the country, companionship throughout a long and vigorous retirement, then tears at the graveside and a comfortable inheritance to follow. As I lay there through that long afternoon I considered carefully my little predicament. True, Cass Cleave was not the vengeful rival bent on destroying me and my reputation that I had expected; she was, I estimated, just a bright though unstable young woman who had stumbled on a great man's youthful follies, and was eager to see what profit might be made of her discovery. Perhaps merely these hours of passion in the peccant professor's arms would be enough to buy her silence? After all, I told myself, that rascal Schaudeine might not have revealed to her the real secret, that is, the secret of my, or, should I say, Axel Vander's, true identity. Yes, a kiss, a rough cuddle, a few well-fashioned endearments – never before, my darling child, never have I known such, such…! – and then I could get up from this bed and put on my hat and be gone. But I could not do it. At first, it was easy to find excuses not to have done with her just yet. I must have time, must I not, in which to worm out of her the full extent of what she knew about me? And she was disturbed in her head, remember: if I let her go now, who could say what things she might not invent to incriminate me? Even if she were only to bruit it abroad that I had taken her to bed I would be a laughingstock – is there anything more horribly funny than a lustful and infatuate old man? – and besides, I would not have been surprised if under some antique but still flourishing law of this paternalist and fervidly Catholic country the monstrous disparity in age between us were to make me guilty, in a technical sense, of rape. No, no, I must keep her le strategy to adopt.
Try as I might, though, I could not hide from myself the fact, intolerably shamibeside me, under surveillance, that was the only safe and sensibng to me now, that I was as gone on her as any gonadolescent on his girl. She was, I suppose, the last fire in the winter of my life. This is the part I wish I could skip. How I squirm, thinking of it. I wanted to please her. I wanted her to admire me. I wanted her to deliquesce in my arms, helpless with astonished desire and adoration. I did all the foolish things an old man does when he falls in love with a girl. I tried to seem young, naturally. I made light of my physical afflictions. Why, I even bought a bright new neck-tie. I used to entertain the happy daydream – I am blushing, blushing – of taking her to some exclusive and fabulously expensive clinic where she would be cured of her malady, where together we would banish the interloper Mr. Mandelbaum and mend her mind. In my reveries I conjured the place, a sparkling white complex cunningly designed to look like a ski lodge, clinging to an Alpine crag, with hushed corridors and an ever-smiling staff, and an open verandah where my love in her spotless smock would lie drowsing in the crystalline, pine-scented air, I on one side of her, holding her hand in mine as gently as if it were a sleeping bird, and on the other the good Herr Doktor Jungfreud, with beard and specs and tobacco pipe, smiling down upon us both benignly, working the cure already just by the kindliness of his eye. Then we would set out gloriously on our travels together. We would go everywhere, to Paris, to New York, to Zacatecoluca, to Hy Brasail the Isle of the Blest! And I would teach her things, I would teach her everything that I had learned in a long life. For I knew, of course, that the way to her heart was through my mind. I would write at last the masterpiece that all these years, I would tell her, had been locked inside me, waiting for her to come with the key. She would be my Beatrice, my Laura, my Trilby. What times we should have – what time: for her, I would live forever. It was a splendid fantasy. However, had I harboured any real, honest, human feelings for her I would have protected her and not let her drop from my safe-keeping like a drunk man dropping a brimming glass. Even that is not quite right, I did not even have drunkenness to blame for my lack of care. It was plain inattention. The object of my true regard was not her, the so-called loved one, but myself, the one who loved, so-called. Is it not always thus? Is not love the mirror of burnished gold in which we contemplate our shining selves? Ah, see how I seek to wriggle out of my culpability: since all lovers really love themselves, I am only one among the multitude. It will not do; no, it will not do.