‘You hadn’t seen my bed, had you?’
‘What do we do?’
The light filtered through the half-closed blinds. Tiny motes of dust danced in the beams.
‘Well, we lie down. Side by side, right?’
‘Shall we leave a note?’
‘What do we say?’
She was right. I started to lie back.
‘Shall we get undressed? It’s more romantic.’
‘You’ve got it all worked out.’
‘I’ve been through it a thousand times in my head. I know every step by heart.’
It must have been true, because she was one step ahead of me at every turn. I hadn’t finished peeling the shirt off my back before she, leaning on my shoulder to balance, had slipped her knickers over her feet — ‘A leopard can’t change its spots,’ she said as the soft projectile left her fingers and landed on the shade of the night-light. Standing at the foot of the bed, she smiled at me. The constellations shone on her naked body, as if the wind had blow away the clouds of an overcast sky.
‘Something’s missing,’ she said pensively.
‘Cigarettes?’
‘That’s for the firing squad. Oh, I know: water. In case they get stuck in our throats.’
She came back with a disposable litre-and-a-half bottle of Villavicencio and two glasses. What a shame to leave her. When the two of us aren’t around, whose dreams will we be able to meet again in? Soledad and Malvina’s I suppose. Not such a bad option.
‘What’ll happen to the girls?’
‘My old lady’s looked after them more than I have. I, there were times … better not to tell you. And if something happens to her, they’ve always got an aunt and uncle in Rosario. I always thought a father wouldn’t hurt them.’
‘What if we go to Europe, or the States?’
‘What for? We’re fine here.’
Lying side by side, not touching, with just a narrow gap of blue quilt between our bodies, we fell silent for a few seconds, staring at the ceiling.
‘Shall we make love first?’ I asked for the sake of asking.
‘In this funereal mood?’ She stretched out a hand, took hold of the flexible dwarf between two fingers and jogged it at the base. ‘You don’t look very willing to me. Anyone would think you’re trying to get out of it.’
‘All right, go on,’ I said sitting up on the bed. Perhaps the only way was to swallow them without thinking. I’d believe in them when it happened. I grabbed my pill with two fingers, delicately, like a contact lens. It hardly seemed possible that something so small … Freedom. This easy? My hands were so damp that a yellowish paste formed on the fingers that were holding it. I licked them.
‘It’s bitter.’
‘Yes. We were going to bring out a fruit-flavoured line, but the lab fell. Try not to taste it. Swallow it whole. But let’s have a toast first.’
We clinked pills and, with a sip from the same glass, we both swallowed them. I closed my eyes. Quick, quick. But I opened them and everything was still the same. Gloria looked at me for a second like she’d never looked at me before and gave me a wan smile. Then she became preoccupied with picking at an ingrowing hair in her bikini-line that had escaped the wax.
‘It’s not working.’
‘No, it isn’t, is it?’ she replied absorbed in her business.
‘Isn’t it supposed to be instantaneous?’
‘They must be coated. Coated ones take longer to act, you know.’
‘They didn’t look coated,’ I said with so little conviction that she didn’t bother to answer. ‘Where did you get them?’
‘My guerrilla days.’
‘Won’t they have expired by now?’
‘Cyanide never expires.’
There was nothing to read on the ceiling; it was impeccably painted, not a trace of damp, like a blank screen on which, miraculously, in those last few moments, the film of my life was mercifully not being projected. A bit of luck: I don’t think I could have taken it. Just a few brief flashes on my retinas after diverting my eyes from the filament of the light bulb. The room dissolved around them and, when I tried to get back to it, I found myself staring instead at the light undulations of the Malihuel lagoon, the sunlight ricocheting off its surface and dazzling my eyes. I dipped a hand in the warm water and could feel it holding me, its fingers flowing and interlacing, playing with and between my own.
‘Feel it? Feel it?’ Gloria’s voice asked me.
I felt it. The first time just something moving, expanding, at regular one-minute intervals. My ribs began to bow outwards, to give it space, and my heart began to pulse, rather than beat. Then I was breathing differently, as if I had a hot-air balloon inside my chest and the atmosphere was giving me the kiss of life, forcing more — and more — into my lungs with every breath until, fit to burst, it let me go and all the contained air escaped in gust after gust of unspeakable sweetness. In my surprise I remembered that these novel and varied sensations were those of death; I wouldn’t have waited so long if I’d know it was going to feel so good. Gloria’s hand was still moving inside mine, as if it had a life of its own, and mine did too. They touched and recognised each other like people. It was as if I’d always been wearing gloves and now, for the first time, had been allowed to take them off. I turned to look at her. Her eyes had become liquid, brimming, like water overflowing a glass, and her smile was the same as the time I ran after her with the squeezy bottle at the carnival in Malihuel. Her chin trembled uncontrollably as she spoke.
‘Looks like it’s working, doesn’t it?’
‘What is it?’ I asked, enraptured.
‘Ecstasy. Never tried it?’
‘No.’
‘Mmmh. Congratulations. Your new life begins today.’
‘Aren’t we going to die?’
‘Someday, I guess.’
I didn’t feel disappointed. It wasn’t that I’d suddenly been filled with the will to live, just that, in this state of absolute plenitude, it didn’t matter whether I was alive or dead, as long as I could go on feeling like this. ‘This is what we were made for,’ I found myself repeating without surprise as I slid my hand along the curve of her backwaistbuttocks, recapturing the mystery of the first time — no, realising that the first time I’d done nothing more than brush it. So this was touching? This conviction that my fingers weren’t discovering but creating what flowed between them, my hands running over Gloria’s skin, dissolving the old scars with the ease of the potter’s hand smoothing his clay on the turning wheel?
‘Hey, I think these things are the real deal.’
‘Where did you get them?’
‘Manna from heaven. A friend from Spain.’
‘Christopher Columbus?’
A fresh gust of warm air blowing from the new world extinguished the words in our mouths before we could speak them and a drowsy sweetness gripped my limbs, holding them fast, delivering me defenceless into her irreverent hands, which began to knead the clay of my old body. A new identity was being born, trembling as her fingers gradually drew out the forms of the new; the hands of Rodin couldn’t have breathed more life into my limbs. Possessed by an ambition for greater plenitude, I leaped on top of her and slid inside her open body but, after the first few assaults, I realised I could barely feel anything. Not that I regretted it too much, because my willie swam slackly between her legs the way as a boy I went skinny-dipping one summer in the warm water of Malihuel’s lagoon.
‘It’s not for fucking, is it,’ she murmured without disappointment. ‘Everything wants to go out and play. Nothing wants to stay inside.’
I couldn’t even if I wanted to; my body was turning inside out like a glove so that the hand of the world, which had taken the form of Gloria, could approach to touch me.