“Eve,” he said absentmindedly. “Yes, Eve, her hair smelled like that of a fine woman. And you couldn’t invent the scent that lingered on, someone left it…”
He tried to extract the smell from that of the fallen pine. But the tree had left a dirty cloud in the air: bugs, dry leaves, dust, bird shit. And the uproar continued beneath the earth, echoing through vegetable catacombs, rattling underground skeletons in a chaotic tangle of roots—mass love caught in a blind embrace. He knew the phenomenon better than anyone. A tree is never alone, as much as it may seem like it. Like men, they laze about, apparently on their own, but under the ground they wander who knows where in search of company. Then they emerge with their distinctive heads to fool those who only know how to count in single digits, like a child in their first years of school. He, for instance, had also thought he was alone. He thought that he had spent thirty years alone since his search for company had ended in what he had believed to be a genuine encounter. But his companion had evaporated right on the very steps where they had been joined during that fateful ceremony. And yet, perhaps at the very moment that his asinine coupling for life was occurring, the other woman was being born. The woman from two nights ago who had bewitched his nostrils with the scent of damp honeysuckle. As hard as he blew his nose, he couldn’t get rid of the aroma. But no more digressions; he was getting confused. The ground was still trembling from the felling of the pine, the shock galloped away under his feet. His wife was there, calling him over to see something happening in that damned village. If he didn’t want to torment himself to death with the memory of the perfume, he’d better take a look. Perhaps his nose would be distracted by the bells, or the smoke.
“Can you smell it, Nathaniel? A house must be on fire; they’re all made of wood and with the sun beating down hard like this… Poor souls.”
“Good riddance, I hope they all burn!” the man spat venomously. “So long as it doesn’t spread to the forest, so long as it’s not our forest, let it consume them all, worms living in rotten wood! They can never have enough trees, always wanting more. More and more wood, damn it!”
The Naked Woman knelt down next to her lover, who was now lying on his back. His soft chest, half-open mouth, and staring eyes have a twisted beauty of their own, she thought as she caressed him, wondering whether the minutes they had left together belonged to life or death.
“Juan, look at me, listen to me. They’ve left us alone, completely alone…”
In the powerful glow of the fire, they had both taken on the hue of blossoming apple trees, but in a remote spring from another world.
“Juan,” she pleaded in a despairingly tender voice, “I’m here, I love you, I exist.”
The words didn’t seem to get through to him; he appeared to have long since abandoned his post. But suddenly, from the depths of the abyss, something infinitely sad began its reply, something that didn’t feel connected to the man lying before her.
“You… I can’t remember your name… You, me, us…” The voice came from nowhere, suspended in the air, ephemeral as a feather or leaf.
“Tell me, tell me what you want to say. My ear is at your mouth, and they’re nowhere to be seen. Now, now,” the woman implored him.
“I just wanted… you to take it off…”
“What? What should I take off ?”
“That… ridiculous… thing I put on you… in a panic…” She understood. She removed the heavy cloak and threw it as far away as she could.
“Go on, keep talking, my love.”
“Now,” the man whispered. “Go… go…”
“No, never!” she cried. “How could I leave you now?”
Then, sensing that the entity that spells doom for us all was lurking nearby, she whispered again in his ear the way lovers do in bed at night even though they’re alone and the bedroom door is closed. Then she kissed him sweetly on the ear. She was trying to slip him words and love through the only entrance still available to her. She realized how little she knew him physically. On the inner lobe, she had just noticed a set of tiny freckles. They reminded her of grains of sand in an oyster.
“Juan,” she said again, hearing her words echo in the cavity. “You must live, to love me, so that I can love you. You never had any idea, not before we met at the haystack and not now, how much you can love me. My name isn’t what I told you, or perhaps it is, along with many others. You would bring back many women, night after night, under a simple, common name, just the way you wanted it, because you would truly love them. You can’t imagine how they suffer, all of them, how they have urged me to tell you this.”
“Where… are they?”
“They are inside of me, looking out through me like rain on the window, lapping at their solitude like dogs do a wounded foot. They’re in here too, suffering because they don’t know how to uncouple themselves from love. They’re like moths to the light. More and more of them will come out of me, each of them different, each with her own skin, smell, and voice. And if the woman I give you proves difficult to please, I would help you woo her. Between us we would turn her into a meek peasant girl, tamely offering up her little olive nipples.”
“No… not now…”
“Juan, let me in, let me do everything that can be done between two people until they are indivisible, until we become one, one and no more.”
“No… there’s no time… go now… I want to see… your legs… from behind… from the ground,” said the fallen man, his strength failing.
“No, no!” she gasped.
But she watched in horror as his face continued to fade away, drifting behind a film of sweat like a bird behind a cloud.
“Yes… I want to die knowing that you got away… Clean, brave you… They’re dirty, scorched, and cowardly… It took dying to make me understand… what you meant…” he said, now bathed in sweat.
The woman saw how close he was to death. His tongue had no more strength left; it was making its final effort. Then, as in the most ancient of rites, she stretched out next to him, put her arm under his damp head, and kissed him on the mouth. She felt him respond very faintly to her lips. There was the point of no return, the boundary was approaching. And yet, it was possible that blood was still flowing, the blood of love—a crushed, living rose.
Then, as if in answer, the only one his body was capable of giving, a thread of blood trickled from the side of his mouth. It happened suddenly, flowing faster than seemed possible for such a small stream. The woman was stunned by what was happening to him; it was a solitary, definitive shock. She wanted to scream, to shatter the sky with her voice, but what good would that do?
To one side was the fire, which was growing more and more ravenous, the murderers to the other. She looked back at the blood. Blood leaving the body brooks no argument, not now or ever.
“No, no!” she moaned with all her passion, for him, or herself, or perhaps for no one at all.
There was no more she could do against this grand denial, which is also the most terrible of certainties.
“No, Juan, no,” she said weakly, barely knowing why, her eyes fixed on his mouth and the convulsions that racked his body, running through him like electric eels.
She rested his head on the ground and tried to stand. She wanted to grant his wish, the sight of her legs leaving the village. His static eyes wouldn’t be able to see her back, but he’d know from her heels that she was walking away, naked, strong, and independent, the same woman she’d been when she arrived at the nameless village.
She walked away very slowly and deliberately to give her love full satisfaction. Love was dying behind her; perhaps he was dead by her fifth step, she couldn’t tell. Love has no future, she thought, merely a brief present, as fleeting as it is intense.