‘It’s great this, eh?’
‘Mmmmmh.’
‘Can’t you say anything else?’
‘Mmmmmh.’
Why when a single sound was enough? With both of us feeling the same, there was nothing left to say. Our words had fallen away like our clothes and in this terrible, fearless nakedness the voice was nothing but breathing sounds, the words poured into my ears nothing but prolongations of the lips that were kissing them. How wrong I’d always been: it wasn’t things that were distanced from words, it was us. In the same way that, for the first time, I was touching what my greedy baby’s hands were reaching for, for the first time I was saying the words I’d only repeated until now, saying them with my whole body. Before today, I understood, I’d only lied.
‘You’re really tripping; I envy you. How long’s it been since you had something to eat?’
‘Day. Night,’ I mumbled.
‘No wonder. And no sleep. It’s like you’ve taken three at once. Come with me; let’s put some music on.’
In our bare feet on the surf-cold sand that had burst through the scales of the parquet floor, we ran to the living room to put on some Prince. Blindly lying on the sofa I discovered that my whole body responded to the slightest vibration, tibia-femur-hip as tremulous and sensitive as hammer-anvil-stirrup, the diaphragm turned eardrum trembling in wave after wave of pleasure transmitted to the throbbing folds of the intestines. I opened my eyes to Gloria, who was parading her nakedness around the room while tracing arabesques with her arms, placing the soles of her feet with deliberate care — a transported, ecstatic Bacchante.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked her, fascinated.
‘I’m dancing,’ she remarked, without looking at me, bewitched by her own movements. ‘Dancing barefoot on the broken glass of the past.’
‘How long do the effects last?’
‘Six hours more or less. Adam and Eve’s time in paradise. The guy who invented it thought of everything.’
Six hours! But what did I care if in these six hours I was going to feel everything I hadn’t felt in my thirty-year existence? I found myself repeating a phrase I’d once read in a book I never finished, and immediately forgot, remembered now that I could finally understand it: ‘There is another country where one is at home, where everything one does is innocent.’
‘Why did nobody ever tell me this existed?’ I stammered. ‘Is there a planet-wide conspiracy to stop us experiencing it?’
‘Maybe you’re right. It brings out everything good that’s been repressed, it takes the fear out of love. Don’t you sometimes get the feeling we’re more afraid of showing the good than the bad we carry around inside us? Who knows if the unconscious isn’t full of precisely this love? We think it’s nothing but a sewer because we’ve been fed Freud’s whole psychic trip.’
‘Can you imagine if we all took it at the same time? The concentrated energy would be so great that the whole world would change, and that change would be irreversible.’
‘You are a sweetie,’ Gloria said to me, reaching out one hand, between whose caress and my cheek an infinitely fine dust had settled, as on a piece of furniture after a couple of days without dusting. ‘You remind me of my first time. I also thought that giving my ex an e would turn him into John Lennon. If only. It doesn’t work on pricks like him, you know. They drool all over you at best. I’ve been there.’
A few minutes ago, I thought, I wouldn’t have believed it, but now what she was saying sounded perfectly reasonable. With dawning astonishment I realised we’d started talking in order to communicate again, that a conversation like this one would have been inconceivable until almost a minute ago, and at that precise instant I felt in the pit of my stomach the certainty that Tuesday existed and, in the mere conception that another state unlike this one was possible, I sensed with the most childish pain that the effects of the drug were beginning to fade. Gloria was looking at me with the most intimate love, but over her soft smile the first quiver of still invisible sadness had begun to play.
‘You too?’ she asked without needing to specify.
‘So soon?’ I implored and went quiet as I heard the first muffled thud, feeling it directly over my heart from the effects of the pill. The dinosaur from the end of the world, wakening from its brief nap in the sun, was on the march again.
It receded in waves just as it had come. The moments of overwhelming fullness came back at regular intervals, but now there was always the awareness, an awareness that they weren’t invincible, that little by little they were losing ground and that at some point they’d be gone completely. I still didn’t feel fear, anguish, guilt, impotence. But they were now becoming thinkable … The clocks had regained their authority over time, minutely slicing it up with their precise knives, objects were again clothing themselves in their surfaces and fingers no longer sank in when they touched them. Knowing, always knowing, the ignorance of anything distinct from pleasure ebbing from the incandescent cells that went out one by one like stars in the light of day, I tried to delay the inevitable by closing my eyes and launching myself in one last assault on the still ductile body yawning and stretching to loosen its joints beneath mine, but my caresses were those of a shipwrecked sailor on the chest that keeps him afloat as the current leads him inexorably away from the promised land.
‘It’s going, it’s going, like grains of sand in your hand,’ Gloria kept repeating as it crept hopelessly through her fingers.
‘Why won’t it go on?’ I implored. ‘I don’t want it to stop! I want to live here for ever!’
‘I do too, my love. I dunno.’ She stretched out, curved and sinuous, to the upturned alarm clock. ‘Ha! Know what time it is?’
‘No.’
‘Twelve. Noon, but anyway. Cinderella has to make a quick phone call.’
She dialled while I stroked her, closing my eyes to delay for a few more instants the moment at which they’d re-establish their tyranny over the other senses.
‘Hi, Mum. I’m fine, don’t worry. Reeeeally fine. Are the girls back from school yet? Put them on … Sole, my love, my little chickadee. How’s Mummy’s little darling? Is Malvina with you? Oh, you were listening. You little snoop! Mummy loves you so, so much, you can’t imagine how much. Bet you don’t know who I’m with?’ She covered the receiver with her hand for a second to talk to me: ‘You’ll see, they’ll guess straightaway.’ She went back to them: ‘Yes! Got it in one! We’re going to take you to the cinema this afternoon as a treat.’ To me again: ‘Doing anything this afternoon?’ ‘Going out running on the clouds for a bit,’ I murmured, ‘but I can leave it till tomorrow.’ She gave me a long, liquid kiss on the mouth and went back to the receiver. ‘I’ll come and pick you up at … Put Granny on. Mummy adores you, eh. Muah. Muah. Muah again.’
‘They say hi,’ she said when she finally hung up.
She began ruthlessly to get dressed.
‘Tomorrow’s Tuesday, isn’t it? I have to find some work as soon as possible, I’m …’ She checked her handbag. ‘I can’t even afford the cinema; I’ll have to ask my old lady for some. You and I just took the last of what you gave me. Mmmh I can still feel it, can you?’
I was smoking, contemplating in the dead corner of the ceiling the life I had before me, my lungs flooded with smoke, which the residual effects of the ecstasy made silky, caressing. Luckily the comedown was gradual, like a slow low tide of the blood, quite unlike the suicidal precipice of cocaine. Now that would have been too much. I felt prey to a strange lucidity, a blank, empty lucidity, with no other object than itself, a dispassionately contemplated nothingness. Nothing here, nothing there …