But the man went on, deaf to the world, trapped in his own net, governed entirely by the imperative to keep thrusting. He was oblivious to everything else, even the inert, pale, suffering body he was assaulting. There was no room for pity, only this blind act of annihilation and the final embers of a torch that had slowly been going out without his realizing. All this was happening independently of him, as though it were beyond his control, with the fatality of a landslide. He let himself ooze out, drop by drop, in brief shudders of desperation and triumph expressed in the anachronistic language of another time relived through his present sacrifice. Then, after delivering himself entirely, he fell back, unconscious, damp, and lost. Only after a few minutes was he able to say anything intelligible.
“Antonia, was that really you talking to me in the middle of the night?”
His voice sounded distant, as if from a more humble creature, far more restrained than the man of a few minutes ago.
“I’m going to make a cup of chamomile tea” was all she said in reply, smothering her hatred in an ancient, bestial servitude.
She dragged herself along on bare feet, turned on the light, and started to rummage through the pots and pans. The man, meanwhile, lay back in his usual position, staring up at the ceiling. Suddenly, sick of the beams he’d been counting for thirty years without ever finding one out of place, he rolled onto his stomach. And then, like a stone thrown through a window, he let out a primitive, feral roar, shaking the cabin to its very foundations. By the simple means of his nasal passages, he had discovered how a being chained to reality for many years could break free of its shackles. The amazing thing was that it had left its mark without him or anyone else noticing. It had lain next to his body unseen, like a funeral rose sinking its roots into the body of the deceased. And he had raised himself from the dead to smell the flowers that were still very much alive above him.
“No, woman, I don’t want any more of your concoctions!” he shouted, sitting up in bed. “She, I don’t know who she was, but she was real, she was right here next to me. Come over here, if you don’t believe me. Don’t just stand there like a scarecrow, come and sniff these sheets. Is it your dirty, smoky hair? Are you so afraid of bending over? Smell, you wretched thing, smell and then crumble away once and for all. Leave me alone with these sheets!”
He plunged his nose back into the indentation, trying to inhale as much of the absent woman as he could. At times, he lost the trail of her essence in the fury of his lungs. Then he began to breathe in more gently, as he never had in his boorish life. But his wife made no effort to find out what he was talking about. She stood there stupidly, staring at him with the mug in her hand. Then, overwhelmed by the crazed scene taking place in their cabin, her fingers went limp and it fell to the ground. It was the sight of something so real being smashed to pieces that convinced the man once and for all. Something had broken. He’d heard it. Clay fragments lay on the ground, the evidence stuck in his brain like shrapnel. Meanwhile, the smell of the woman from his dream taunted him; it was so close and yet he couldn’t satisfy his desires in his pillow or escape from the temptation lurking in the folds of the sheets. He leaped away from the source of his torment, opened the door to a night slowly fading into dawn, and began to scream into the forest, “Eve! Eve! Eve!”
Back on the soft path that separated the trees from the river, the woman left the cabin behind without ever turning back, not even to check if it had been real. She wasn’t about to wallow in her failure. She had been a guest there and had wanted, demanded even, something they didn’t know how to give her. But the accounts she would later offer of her adventure would focus not on the man’s frustration but the ruthlessness with which she had exposed his impotence. This was how she would debunk certain myths. The man hadn’t laid a finger on her and yet she had been far from chaste. It was a question of full- or half-blooded desire: that was the key. But even this discovery had no effect on her new perspective. Ever since she had lost her conventional consciousness, she had moved freely, without hindrance. What a useless invention consciousness is, she thought. She would have preferred a different approach to such an awful concept, something more firmly based in tangible fact. But that would require abstract theory, the reduction of one’s personal experience to generalized norms that, whether they were shared or rejected, would nonetheless eventually come to apply. And thence the falsities, the need to be trusted, and all those wretched domestic games would begin all over again.
Her attention was drawn to the noise of the river, now close by. She was in no hurry to get anywhere, so she flopped down onto the sand. Her breasts felt heavy and painful, scratched by the branches that had blocked her way. But, physically, she was still fine. Her persistence was like that of certain memories that linger uselessly in the widowed soul. In her languid position, she thought back over the episode with the woodsman, the mature beauty to which he was oblivious and the jail cell in which he lived, unaware he was a prisoner. Then there was the clumsy confusion of bodies into which she had stumbled, how he had pawed the worn reality of a remembered name while she whispered a procession of infamous women in his ear. She laughed out loud at the contrast. But fortunately the chapters in which she reconstructed the story were already more confused than even a minute ago. Their outlines blurred, faded, and were superimposed over each other as they drifted further and further away from their point of origin. Then her attention was diverted to a new character slithering a few steps away, and she was able to rid herself of the last remnants.
The river’s sudden appearance promised far more than its current alone. It was a long, living creature lying on its back with something solitary and incomprehensible dissolved in its marrow. She stood up and walked across the pebbly shore, fully aware of the commotion she was causing: she was an alien element in a strange land. Intrepid creatures leaped out from the undergrowth in front of her. One soared in a perfect parabola before falling into the water, filling the surface with circular ripples. But she knew that the apparent inoffensiveness of the scene wasn’t the whole story. Something out there was coming to an end. As she continued, guided by a nameless compass, the river flowed on, progressively less oblivious, chaste, and innocent than it had been at its source. It betrayed a kind of animal anxiety, a painful bewilderment mixed with denial. She wanted to find out why but was unable to establish a dialogue with the creature, nor it with her. Perhaps it wanted her to go away, to be left alone with a secret invisible to her or anyone with mobile eyes. It was then she realized that dawn was breaking over the water, and felt a shiver of fear. Her nudity and commitment to freedom had begun at night, when morning had been unimaginable. But a sunny morning was settling over the land, and she was entirely unprepared to deal with the light. Not even memories from her former existence helped. She had no name, origin, or explanation—an oppressive triumvirate that always led back to the same place.
Behind her, she thought as she walked, the established order must go on repeating itself until it’s worn out, with never a new idea to replace it. A fuzzy memory of the man from the cabin came to her. She had seen him for the last time as a ghostly form in the fog. Maybe now he was awake. She had knocked something over as she left and hadn’t closed the door. This evidence meant he wouldn’t be able to dismiss her as a dream. But there was nothing left to say except What do I care? Like a boy trying to get over being punished by his father, she shrugged her shoulders at the episode in the woods: the universal sign of indifference. She walked on, the milky air descending around her.