Kierkegaard, "A True Friendship" (part 1)

The first part of a selection from a work by this Danish man of letters.  You can find the original in this volume.

So we are friends, Edward and I; a true friendship, a beautiful relationship exists between us, one unlike any that has existed since the halcyon days of Ancient Greece.  We soon became confidants and, after having involved him in a plethora of observations regarding Cordelia, I almost succeeded in making him confess his secret.  It is said that as easily as secrets come together, so do they slip away.  Poor fellow, so often has he sighed already.  He decks himself out each time she comes by; from there he walks her home in the evening, his heart throbbing at the thought of her arm grazing his.  And they stroll home, gazing at the stars, he rings the outside doorbell, she disappears, he despairs – but he hopes and waits for next time.  He still has not had the courage to set foot across her threshold, he whose own apartment is so exquisite.  Although I cannot help but silently mock Edward in my mind there is indeed something cute about his childishness.  And although I imagine myself otherwise as rather skilled in all these erotic concepts, I have never observed that condition, a lover's fear or trembling, that is to say, to the degree that it robs me of my composure which I can usually maintain.  But this instance is such that it actually makes me stronger.  Perhaps one would say I have never really been in love – perhaps.  I have reprimanded Edward; I have encouraged him to rely on our friendship.  Tomorrow he shall take a decisive step, personally go over and invite her out.  I have made him keen on the desperate idea of asking me to go with him; this I have promised him.  He takes it as an extraordinary act of friendship.  The apartment is just how I want it, with the door opening into the living room.  Should she have the slightest doubt about the meaning of my appearance, my appearance shall yet again confound everything.

I have not been accustomed previously to preparing myself for conversation, and now I see the necessity of talking with her aunt.  Namely, I have taken upon myself the hateful task of conversing with her, therewith concealing Edward's love-struck movements towards Cordelia.  The aunt used to reside in the country, and from both my painstaking studies of agronomic documents and the aunt's wisdom grounded in experience, I continue to make significant progress in my insights and capabilities.

At her aunt's I do whatever I please; she regards me as a staid and respectable person whom one can always enjoy inviting along – not like one of those waggish Junkers.   With Cordelia I do not think of being particularly well-regarded.  Owing to her purely innocent femininity she is someone who demands that every man pay her courtship, and yet she senses all too greatly the rebelliousness of my existence.

So as I sit in that cozy salon and as she, like some good angel, spreads her charm and grace everywhere and over everyone,  I come into contiguity with her, beyond good and evil, where I sometimes become impatient within and am tempted to abandon my cover.  For even though I sit before everyone's eyes in the living room, I also sit and lurk.  I am tempted to grab her hand, to embrace the entire girl, to hide her within me out of fear that someone will rob me of her.  Or as Edward and I leave them in the evening, as she extends her hand to me to say goodbye, as I hold it in mine, sometimes I find it difficult to let the bird slip out from my fingers.  Patience – quod antea fuit impetus, nunc ratio est ***– may now be spun in a completely different way in my loom, and suddenly I let all of passion's might burst forth.  We do not debase this moment with sweets, with untimely anticipation – and you can thank me for that, my dear Cordelia.  I work on developing contradistinctions, opposites; I tense Cupid's bow to wound even more deeply.  And like an archer I release the string, tense it again, hear its song anew, which is my war anthem, but I still do not aim nor place an arrow on the string.

As a limited number of people often come in contact with one another in the same room, so there develops a tradition as to each person's place, his stage, that remains in one's mind like a picture which can be unrolled at will, a map of the terrain.  This is how we are now in the Wahlske house: a picture all together.  The general scene: seated on the sofa, the aunt moves the little sewing table towards her; Cordelia moves to accommodate her; she moves it up to the coffee table in front of the sofa; then Edward follows, and I follow Edward.  Edward wants secrecy, mysteriousness, he wants to whisper; and in general he whispers so well as to seem completely mute.  I, on the other hand, make no mystery of my effusions to the aunt, market square prices, a calculation as to how many pots of milk would make a pound of butter through the liquid medium and the butter's core dialectic.  These really are things to which every young girl cannot just listen without being harmed; even more rarely does it devolve into a solid, fundamental and constructive conversation that ennobles the head and heart.  I generally have my back to the coffee table and to Edward and Cordelia's chatter, and I chat away with the aunt.  And is it not of our great and undoubted nature in its creations; what is butter if not a delicious gift; what a magnificent result of nature and art.  Her aunt would certainly be in no condition to listen to what is being said between Edward and Cordelia, assuming something is actually being said.  That much I promised Edward and I am a man of my word.  I, however, can hear every word exchanged, every movement.  For me this is paramount because one doesn't know what a person in his despair might venture.  The most cautious and dispirited among us sometimes attempt the most desperate acts. Nevertheless, I have nothing of the kind to undertake with these two people, I can see that on Cordelia's face.  And I am the constant invisible presence between her and Edward.

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*** More properly, "Quod nunc ratio est, impetus ante fuit," from Horace [What we justify today as reasonable, we deemed yesterday an act of violence]. 

The Dance of Death

It has been said that destiny steers us just enough for us to ride it, which is a gentler way of claiming that over time we embrace our fate as we recognize its inevitability.  In modern literature many fictional characters have developed the rather annoying habit of realizing that they are nothing more than constructs of some alien imagination and lamenting the prison in which they rot – but this is a boring subject for other pages.  What we can learn from these poor trapped shades is not that they are, in fact, captive and subject to their warden's every whim, but that there are certain moments in each life where we seem to be fulfilling a role unchosen yet scripted in detail.  You will notice such humbug when we tell a departing and disliked colleague that we will miss him, when a schmaltzy film tugs on our heartstrings because it thinks our hearts to be average and submissive, and when we find ourselves laughing at a cruel joke that could not possibly be funny.  Why do we do these things?  Because life shuffles its deck and recommends certain behavioral conformity that elevates minutia into events and obliges us to make the most of every second by filling up our time with overwrought emotions.  It has also been said that there is nothing sweeter than scandal, which brings us to this famous play.

Our setting is fin-de-siècle Sweden and our characters are primarily two.  Edgar, an army captain, and Alice, his wife and a former actress, have been married for twenty-five apparently miserable years and do not hesitate to remind each other of it.  Their barbs have the wicked slant so commonly incident to unhappy marriages whereby each knows every last weakness of the loathsome being who roams his house (in the play's rarely-staged second part, their remote island home is revealed to have once been a prison).  Yet it hardly takes an attentive reader to notice that their vocations are not haphazard: both of them operate exclusively under orders, be it those of a general or a playwright.   As such, everything they say to each other seems to be translated from some unspoken or even secret codex on moral conduct.  The Captain is alternatively portrayed as lazy, aggressive, sick, booming with health, protectively jealous, indifferent, ambitious and brilliant, hopelessly untalented, lascivious, sexless, ascetic, alcoholic, vampiric, passive, recalcitrant and a lockstep soldier.  How can one person be all those things?  The simple answer, of course, is that we all assume these personas – if only very briefly at times – in the course of our lives, which may be crudely equated with the title ("Death demands sacrifices.  Otherwise he comes at once"), but there are also expectations on the part of both spouses.  The Captain would love for his wife to be young because his youth meant being a soldier, active, polished and uniformed; Alice, on the other hand, would like to be an actress, which means, for her at least, that her husband would let her be whoever she wants.  An actress by definition must adapt to the given situation and lend it some modicum of plausibility, but she also may continue to act once the curtain falls just like an old soldier often forgets he will no longer be called to arms.  For that reason we might conclude that whatever the Captain says about Alice is perfectly true, and what Alice says about her husband is complete nonsense.

Why this dichotomy, so often criticized as misogynist?  It is not from any presumption that Alice is a typical female, but from the fact that Alice is a typical failed actress.  In every scene with her husband and her odd, religious but at the same time sinful cousin Kurt, she comes off as bitter (over her uncapitalized beauty) and vindicative (against an old soldier who no longer fancies her looks).  Kurt picks up on the venom in her tone quite rapidly:

But tell me, what do you do in this house?  What happens here?  The walls smell of poison – one feels ill the moment one enters.  I'd like to leave, if I hadn't promised Alice to stay.  There are corpses under the floorboards; there's such hatred here, it's difficult to breathe.

That being an actress allows you to circumvent the innumerable rules and regulations that a military upbringing requires is a simple point, yet one that colors the whole play from grumpy, tired beginning to the last pages of the second part in which one of the characters does not manage to evade his lot. Kurt and Alice's relationship is given the caption when we sinned, and there is an active effort on their part to pair off their respective children, Allan and Judith, as if to compensate for a missed opportunity.  This matchmaking despite Alice's repeated claims that Judith despises her and is at the Captain's beck and call.  Alice will spend almost entire scenes trying to convince Kurt, whom she wishes to seduce, as well as her daughter that the Captain has consecrated a large chunk of his off-duty hours to terrorizing her with his peremptory whims and "vampirism" (a term used several times).  Once these secondary characters exeunt, however, the Captain and Alice share a nasty laugh:

But do you remember Adolf's wedding – that fellow in the Hussars?  The bride had to wear her ring on her right hand because the bridegroom, in a fit of tender passion, had chopped off the third finger of her left hand with a jewelled penknife.

To which Alice reacts by "holding a handkerchief to her mouth to stifle a laugh" – which may be the most revelatory reaction in the entire play; even more surprising is that her husband treats her laughter as natural and almost pleasant.   What could be more delightful than one failing marriage?  Apparently one that fails even before it officially begins.

Strindberg wrote a bevy of other works but The Dance of Death will remain among his most performed and a perfect reflection of the doubts and nightmares that plagued him at the time of composition.  The most fascinating character in the play is neither the Captain nor Alice, but Kurt.  Having abandoned his family, a point the Captain repeats, Kurt traveled to the U.S. where he bore witness to evils that made him appreciate his everyday life in Sweden.  He returns to Sweden to find the couple still married but ready to harangue each other about the slightest detail, and he alternates between believing Alice's exaggerated accusations and defending the Captain's integrity (which desperately needs defending).  Too bad integrity is one thing that didn't rub off on Kurt.          

En memoria de Paulina (part 2)

 The conclusion to a story ("In memory of Paulina") by this native of Buenos Aires. You can read the original here.

The evening I arrived from Europe, my thoughts returned to Paulina.  There lurked the fear that the memories of her might be too vivid once I was home.  When I entered my room I was beset by emotion, and I stopped respectfully to commemorate the past and the extremes of happiness and grief which I had known.  Then I had an embarrassing revelation: it was not the secret monuments to our love that moved me as they manifested themselves suddenly in the most intimate vales of my memory, but the emphatic light entering through the window, the light of Buenos Aires.

At around four o’clock I went to the corner shop and bought a kilo of coffee.  In the bakery I was recognized by the owner who greeted me with loud cordiality and told me that for a while now, for at least six months, I hadn’t been paying my tab.  After these niceties, I asked him meekly for half a kilo of bread.  He asked me, as he always had:

“Toasted or white?”

And I answered, as always:

“White.”

I returned home.  It was a day as clear as crystal and very cold.

While I prepared my coffee, I thought of Paulina.  We would always drink a cup of black coffee towards the end of the afternoon.

Just as in a dream, I soon abandoned my affable and even−tempered indifference in favor of the emotion and madness stirred up in me by her appearance.  Upon seeing her I fell to my knees, sank my face into my hands and, for the first time, sobbed out all the pain of having lost her.

Her arrival occurred thus: there were three knocks on the door; I asked myself who could be the intruder; I thought that this intruder would be to blame for my coffee getting cold; and, distracted by all these thoughts, I opened the door.

Then — I don’t know whether the time that passed was very long or very short — Paulina ordered me to follow her.  I understood that, having been persuaded by relentless facts, she was in the middle of correcting those age−old mistakes in our relationship to one another.  It seems to me (but, in addition to relapsing into those same mistakes, I am unfaithful to that evening) that she corrected them with excessive determination.  When she asked me to take her by the hand (“Give me your hand!” she said. “Now!”).  I abandoned myself to pure delight. We looked in each other’s eyes and, just like two confluent rivers, our souls united as well.  Outside, on the roof, against the walls, it was raining.  I interpreted this rain — which was the whole world surging forth anew — as the panicked expansion of our love.

Such emotion did not, however, prevent me from discovering that Montero had polluted Paulina’s speech.  Here and there when she spoke I had the unpleasant impression that I was listening to my rival.  I recognized the characteristic weightiness of his locution, the ingenuous and laborious attempts to find the precise word or turn of phrase, and, most embarrassingly, his incontrovertible vulgarity.

With effort I was able to superimpose myself. I gazed at her face, her smile, her eyes.  There was Paulina, whole and perfect.  There, for me, she had not changed.

Then, while I was considering her in the mercurial shadows of the mirror, surrounded by a frame of garlands, crowns, and black angels, she seemed different.  It was as if I had discovered another version of Paulina, as if I saw her now in another way.  I was thankful for this separation that interrupted my habit of seeing her, now more beautiful than ever.

Paulina said:

“I’m off.  Julio is waiting for me.”

There was a strange mix of scorn and anguish in her voice which troubled me.  Melancholy thoughts: Paulina, in other times, would not have betrayed anyone.  When I lifted my gaze, she was already gone.

After a moment’s hesitation, I called her.  I called her again, went down to the entrance, and ran through the street.  But I didn’t find her.  Coming back I felt cold.  I said to myself: “It’s cooled off.  It was just a simple shower.”  The street was dry.

When I returned home I saw that it was already nine o’clock.  Not having any desire to go out to eat, I was afraid of running into someone I knew.  I made a bit of coffee, drank two or three cups, and nibbled at the end of a piece of bread.

I didn’t even know when we would see each other again.  I wanted to talk to Paulina.  I wanted to ask her to explain … Suddenly, my ingratitude frightened me.  Destiny had provided me with all the joy in the world and I wasn’t content.  That evening was the culmination of our lives.  That’s how Paulina had understood it.  And that’s how I had taken it as well.  For that reason, we almost didn’t talk (in a way talking and asking questions would have been like differentiating one another).

It seemed impossible to me to have to wait until the following day to see Paulina.  As urgent relief to my pain, I determined that it would be, in fact, that very night in Montero’s house.  Very soon thereafter, I decided against it: I couldn’t visit them without speaking with Paulina beforehand.  I made up my mind to look for a friend — Luis Alberto Morgan seemed to be the best choice — and ask him to tell me what he knew about Paulina’s life in the time I was away.

Then I thought that the best thing would be to go to bed and sleep.  Rested, I would see everything with greater understanding.  On the other hand, I was not ready for frivolous talk about Paulina.  Getting into bed I had the impression of setting foot into a trap (perhaps I remembered sleepless nights in which one stayed in bed without realizing one was awake).  I turned off the lights.

I didn’t ponder Paulina’s conduct any longer.  I knew far too little to understand the situation.  Since I was no longer able to turn my mind off and stop thinking, I sought alee in the memories of that evening.

I would continue to love Paulina’s face even if it appeared so hostile and strange that I distanced myself from her.  Her face was the one she always had, that pure and marvelous jewel that had loved me before the abominable appearance of Montero.  I said to myself: “A face has a certain faithfulness which a soul might not be able to share.”

Or was everything a sham?  Was I in love with a blind projection of my desires and dislikes?  Had I never really known Paulina?

I selected an image from that evening, Paulina before the smooth dark profundity of the mirror, and I tried to summon it.  When I caught sight of it, I had an instantaneous revelation: I doubted why I forgot Paulina.  I wanted to devote myself to the contemplation of her image.  Memory and imagination are capricious faculties: I recalled disheveled hair, pleated clothes, the vague surrounding shadows.  But my beloved vanished.

Many images, inspired by unavoidable energy, passed between my closed eyes.  Then suddenly I made a discovery.  As if on the dark edge of an abyss, in an angle of the mirror, at the right of Paulina appeared the little horse of green stone.

At the time that it occurred, the vision did not seem strange.  Only minutes later did I remember that the horse was not in the house.  I had given it to Paulina two years ago as a gift.

This was from, I said to myself, the superimposition of anachronistic memories (the oldest being the little horse and the most recent being Paulina).  The matter was clarified, and I grew calm and fell asleep.  I then came up with an embarrassing thought, and, in light of what I would later confirm, a pathetic one.  “If I don’t go to sleep soon,” I thought, “tomorrow I will be haggard and Paulina will not be so pleased.”  Later I noticed that my memory of the statuette in the mirror of the bedroom was not justified.  I never put it in the bedroom.  At home, I had only seen it in the other room (either on the shelf, or in Paulina’s hands, or in my hands).

Terrified, I wanted to take another look at those memories.  The mirror reappeared, surrounded by angels and garlands of wood, with Paulina in the center and the little horse at the right.  I was not certain of what the room reflected.  Perhaps it reflected her, if in a brief and vague way.  Instead, the horse was clearly reared up on the library shelf.  The library took up all the background and the darkness on the side surrounded a new figure whom I initially didn’t recognize.  Then, with scant interest, I noticed that I was this figure.

I saw Paulina’s face, I saw it whole, not in parts, as if projected towards me by the extreme intensity of her beauty and sadness.  I woke up crying.

I don’t know how long I had been asleep.  All I know is that the dream was not invented.  Unconsciously I continued my imaginings and faithfully reproduced the scenes from that evening.

I looked at the clock: it was five.  I would be get up early and, even at the risk of annoying her, go to Paulina’s house.  This resolution did not mitigate my anguish.

I got up at half past seven, took a long bath and slowly got dressed.

I didn’t happen to know where Paulina lived.  The concierge lent me the phonebook and a Green Guide.  Montero’s address wasn’t registered anywhere.  I looked for Paulina’s number, but it too could not be found.  I also checked that someone else was living in Montero’s old house.  Then I thought of asking for the address from Paulina’s parents.

It had been ages since I’d seen them last (once I found out about Paulina’s love for Montero, I stopped interacting with them).  Now, to pardon my action, I would have to document my sufferings, for which I didn’t have the heart.

I decided to talk to Luis Alberto Morgan, whom I couldn’t call on before eleven.  I wandered through the streets without seeing a thing, momentarily shifting my attention to the shape of the molding of a particular wall or to the sense of a word heard by chance.  I remember a woman in the Plaza Independencia with her shoes in one hand and a book in the other passing barefoot over the wet lawn.

Morgan received me in bed, his face in a giant bowl which he held with both hands.  I caught a glimpse of a whitish liquid, and, floating, a piece of bread.

“Where does Montero live?” I asked him.

Having already drunk all the milk, he now proceeded to scoop up the pieces of bread from the bottom of the bowl.

“Montero is in custody,” he replied.

I couldn’t conceal my astonishment.  Morgan continued:

“What? You don’t know?”

Doubtless he thought that my lack of knowledge only encompassed that one detail, but because he liked to talk, he told me everything that had occurred.  I thought I had lost consciousness and fallen into a sudden precipice.  But there I still heard his clear, ceremonious, and implacable voice relating incomprehensible facts with the monstrous and persuasive conviction that they were familiar to me.

Morgan told me the following: suspecting that Paulina might visit me, Montero had hidden in the garden of my house.  Seeing her leave, he followed her then questioned her in the street.  When curious onlookers began to gather, he threw her into a rental car and took off.  They drove the whole night through the Costanera and the lakes, and at dawn, at a certain Hotel del Tigre, he killed her with a bullet.  This had not happened the night before this morning, but on the night before my trip to Europe.  It had occurred two years ago.

At life’s most terrible moments our habitual recourse is that of defensive irresponsibility, and instead of thinking about what’s happening to us, we turn our attention to trivialities.  This was when I asked Morgan:

“Do you remember our last meeting, at my house, before my trip?”

Morgan did indeed.  I went on:

“When you noticed that I was concerned and you went into my bedroom to fetch Paulina, what was Montero doing?”

“Nothing,” replied Morgan, with a certain vivacity.  “Nothing.  Now, however, I remember: he was looking at himself in the mirror.”

I returned home.  At the entrance, I ran into the concierge.  Affecting indifference, I asked him:

“Do you know that Ms. Paulina is dead?”

“How could I not?” he replied.  “All the newspapers talked about her murder, and I ended up making a statement to the police.”

The man looked at me inquisitively.

“Is something up?” he said, coming much closer.  “Do you want me to come with you?”

I thanked him and fled upstairs.  I have a vague recollection of struggling with a key, of retrieving some letters, of the other side of the door, of having my eyes closed and of being face down in my bed.

Then I found myself in front of the mirror, thinking: “That Paulina visited me last night is certain.  She died knowing that her marriage to Montero had been a mistake — an atrocious mistake — and that we were the truth.  She returned from the dead to fulfill her destiny.  Our destiny.” I remembered a sentence that Paulina wrote, years ago, in a book: “Our souls have already been conjoined.”  I continued thinking: “Last night, finally, at that moment when I took her by the hand.”  Then I said to myself: “I am unworthy of her.  I have doubted.  I have been jealous.  She came back from the dead in order to love me.”

Paulina had forgiven me.  Never had we loved each other so much as now.  Never had we been so close.

This was when I, wallowing and wavering in this sad and victorious inebriation of love, asked myself — better said, when my brain, led by the simple habit of proposing alternatives, asked itself — whether there could not be any other explanation for last night’s visit.  Then, like lightning, I touched upon the truth.

Now I would like to find out again that I’m wrong.  Unfortunately, as always occurs when the truth surfaces, my horrible explanation clarifies the facts which seemed mysterious.  And these, in turn, confirm the truth.

Our poor love was not ripped from Paulina’s tomb, nor was it Paulina’s ghost.  I had embraced a monstrous ghost of the jealousy of my rival.

The key to what happened is hidden in the visit that Paulina paid me on the eve of my departure.  Montero followed her and waited for her in the garden.  He argued with her the whole night and, because he did believe her explanations (how could this man understand Paulina’s pureness?), at dawn he ended her life.

I saw him now in jail, pondering this visit, reimagining it with jealousy’s cruel stubbornness.

The image that entered the house, and that which later occurred there were a projection of the horrific imagination of Montero.  I didn’t find this out at the time because I was so moved and happy that my only wish was to obey Paulina.  Yet there is no lack of evidence.  For example, the rain.  During the visit of the real Paulina, on the eve of my departure, I didn’t hear the rain.  Montero, who was in the garden, felt it directly on his body.  In imagining us, he thought that we had heard it.  For that reason I heard rain last night.  Then I found myself on a dry street.

More proof can be derived from the statuette.  I kept it at home for one day and one day only: the day of the reception.  For Montero it remained a symbol of the place.  For that reason it appeared again last night.

I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror because Montero did not imagine me clearly.  Nor did he imagine the bedroom with any exactitude.  He didn’t even recognize Paulina.  The image projected by Montero was guided in a way not Paulina’s own.  In addition, she spoke the way he did.

Warping this fantasy remains Montero’s torment.  Mine is real.  Mine is the belief that Paulina did not return because she was disappointed with her love, the belief that I was never her love, the belief that Montero was privy to aspects of her life which I only knew indirectly, the belief that, in taking her by the hand in the supposed moment of the conjoining of our souls, I was obeying a request by Paulina that she never gave me and which my rival heard many times.

En memoria de Paulina (part 1)

Part one of a story ("In memory of Paulina") by this native of Buenos Aires. You can read the original here.

I had always loved Paulina.  In one of my first memories Paulina and I are hidden in a dark arbor of laurels, in a garden watched by two stone lions.  Paulina said to me: “I like blue, I like grapes, I like ice, I like roses, I like white horses.”  And I knew that my happiness had begun because these preferences of Paulina’s were also mine.  We resembled one another so miraculously that in a book on the final conjoining of souls into the soul of the world, my female friend wrote in the margin: “Ours have already been conjoined.”  Ours, at that time, meant Paulina’s and mine.

To explain this similarity, I will argue that I was a hasty and distant sketch of Paulina.  I recall having written in my notebook: “Every poem is a sketch of Poetry, and in every thing lies a prefiguration of God.”  I also thought: “I am safe as long as I resemble Paulina.”  I saw (and see even now) identification with Paulina as the best possibility for my own being, as the refuge in which I would be freed of my natural defects, of my obtuseness, my negligence, my vanity.

Life was a sweet habit which led us to await, just like something natural and sure, our future marriage.  Paulina’s parents, immune to the early literary success which I had soon squandered, promised their consent once I had completed my doctorate.  So often we imagined a tidy future with enough time to work, to travel, and to love one another.  This we imagined in such vividness that we became persuaded we were already living together.

But talk of our marriage did not induce us to treat each other as betrothed might.  All our childhood was spent together, and there persisted between us the chaste friendship so typical for our age.  Never did I dare assume the role of lover and say to her in solemn tones: “I love you.”  But I did as she wished, however, and gazed with astonished and scrupulous love upon her resplendent perfection.

Paulina liked it when I had friends over.  She would prepare everything in anticipation of my guests and secretly act like she were the lady of the house.  I must confess that these meetings were not to my liking.  The one we held for Julio Montero to meet some writers was no exception.

Montero visited me for the first time that evening.  On this occasion, he wielded a copious manuscript and the despotic demands that the unedited work made on the time of his fellow men.  Some time after the visit I had already forgotten his hairy, almost black face.  Referring to the story that he read me — Montero had beseeched me to tell him in all sincerity whether the impact of his bitterness had turned out too bold — it happened to be notable because it revealed a vague attempt at imitating a large number of different writers.  The probable sophism had given birth to the central idea: if a certain melody arises from the relationship between the violin and the movements of the violinist, the soul of every person arose from a certain relationship between movement and material.  The hero of the tale designed a machine to produce souls (a kind of stretcher, with wood and pylons).  Then the hero died.  A wake was held, then a burial; but in the stretcher the hero was secretly alive.  Towards the last paragraph, the stretcher appeared along with a stereoscope and a tripod with a galena stone within whose space a young woman had died.

Once I had managed to impart to him the problems of his argument, Montero exhibited a strange urge to meet some writers.

“Come back tomorrow afternoon,” I told him.  “I will introduce you to a few.”

Calling himself a savage, he accepted the invitation.  Moved perhaps by the pleasure of seeing him leave, I accompanied him down to the front door that gave onto the street.  When we got out of the elevator, Montero came upon the patio garden.  Sometimes, in the faint light of the evening, coming to it through the large glass door that separated it from the hall, this little garden suggested the mysterious image of a forest at the bottom of a lake.  At night, projectors of lilac and orange light converted it into a horrible caramel paradise.  Montero saw it at night.

“I’ll be frank,” he said, resigned to averting his eyes from the garden, “Of everything I’ve seen of the house, this is the most interesting.”

The next day Paulina arrived early, and it was five in the afternoon when I had everything ready for the reception.  I showed her a Chinese statuette made of green stone which I had bought in an antique shop that morning.  A savage horse with its legs and mane raised in the air.  The salesman assured me that it symbolized passion.

Paulina put the little horse on one of the bookshelves and exclaimed: “For life’s first passion, it’s beautiful.”  When I told her I was giving to her as a gift she immediately threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

We took our tea in the breakfast room.  I told her I had been offered a two−year scholarship to study in London. Suddenly it was like we were married, on a trip, in our life in England (it seemed to us as immediate as our marriage).  We considered the details of a domestic budget; the privations, almost sweet, to which we would subject ourselves; the division of study time, of walking, of relaxing, and perhaps even of work; what Paulina would be doing while I attended class; the clothes and books we would take with us.  After some time mulling over projects, we admitted that I had to turn down the scholarship.  My exams were a week away, but it was already evident that Paulina’s parents wanted to delay our nuptials.

Our guests began to arrive.  I wasn’t feeling happy.  Whenever I talked to anyone, I was only thinking of excuses to move on.  It seemed impossible to propose a topic that might interest the person to whom I was speaking.  Whenever I wanted to remember something I couldn’t, or my recollections came back far too slowly.  Anxious, futile, dejected, I moved from one group to another, all the time just wanting everyone to leave for us to be alone and for the moment to come, however brief, when I would walk Paulina back to her house.

Near the window, my fiancée was talking to Montero.  When I saw her she raised her eyes and inclined her perfect face towards me.  In Paulina’s tenderness I sensed an inviolable refuge where we were alone.  How I yearned to tell her that I loved her!  That very night I made the firm decision to abandon my puerile and absurd embarrassment about speaking of love.  “If I could now,” I sighed, “communicate my thoughts to her.”  In her look there palpitated a generous, happy and surprising gratitude.

Paulina asked me which poem was it where a man distanced himself so much from a woman that he did not greet her when he saw her in heaven.  I knew that the poem was by Browning and had a vague recollection of the lines.  I spent the rest of the afternoon looking them up in the Oxford edition.  If they weren’t going to leave me alone with Paulina, looking for something for her was preferable to chatting with other people.  But I was singularly dumbfounded and asked myself whether the impossibility of finding the poem wasn’t an omen.  I looked towards the window.  Luis Alberto Morgan, the pianist, must have noticed my anxiety because he told me:

“Paulina is showing Montero the house.”

Hardly concealing my annoyance, I shrugged my shoulders and pretended to turn back towards my book by Browning.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Morgan enter my room.  “He’s going to call her,” I thought.  He immediately returned with Paulina and Montero.

Finally, someone left.  In indifference and slowness, others then began leaving.  The moment arrived when only Paulina, Montero, and I were alone.  Then, as I feared, Paulina said:

“It’s very late.  I’m off.”

Montero quickly intervened:

“If you so desire, I can escort you back to your house.”

“I can also escort you,” I countered.

I spoke to Paulina but looked at Montero.  I pretended that my eyes conveyed to him my contempt and hate.

Arriving downstairs, I informed Paulina that she didn’t have her little Chinese horse.  I said to her:

“You’ve forgotten my gift.”

I went up to the apartment and returned with the statuette.  I found them leaning against the glass door looking at the garden.  I took Paulina by the hand and did not let Montero approach her from the other side.  In conversation, I openly disregarded Montero.

He did not get offended.  When we had taken our leave from Paulina, he insisted on accompanying me back to my house.  On the way he talked about literature, probably with sincerity and fervor.  I said to myself: “He is one of the literati, I am a tired man frivolously preoccupied with a woman.”  I considered the incongruence which existed between his physical vigor and his literary feebleness.  I thought: “He is protected by a shell.  What his interlocutor says doesn’t reach him.”  I looked with hate at his lively eyes, his hairy mustache, his hefty neck.

That week I almost didn’t get to see Paulina.  I was studying a lot.  After the last of my exams, I gave her a call.  She pleased me with her insistence that it didn’t seem natural and said that at the end of the afternoon she would come home.

I took a nap, bathed with great slowness, and, leafing through a book on the Fausts of Müller and Lessing, waited for Paulina.

Seeing her, I exclaimed:

“You’ve changed.”

“Yes,” she responded.  “How we know one another!  I don’t need to talk for you to know what I feel.”

We looked into each other’s eyes in an ecstasy of beatitude.

“Thank you,” I replied.

Nothing had ever moved me as much as the admission, on the part of Paulina, that our souls were conjoined in profound compatibility.  I confidently abandoned myself to this blandishment.  I don’t know when I asked myself (incredulously) if Paulina’s words concealed another meaning.  Before I was able to consider this possibility, Paulina embarked on a confused explanation.  Suddenly I heard:

“That first evening we were already so hopelessly in love.”

I asked myself whom she might mean.  Paulina continued:

“He’s very jealous.  He is not opposed to our friendship, but I promised him that I wouldn’t see you for a while.”

I was still waiting, however, for the impossible clarification which would calm me.  I didn’t know whether Paulina was joking or serious.  I didn’t know what expression my face now wore.  And I didn’t know what was tearing it apart was my anguish.  Paulina added:

“I’m going.  Julio is waiting for me.  He didn’t come upstairs so as not to bother us.”

“Who?” I asked.

Immediately I feared, as if nothing at all had occurred, that Paulina had discovered that I was an impostor and that our souls were not joined.

Paulina answered in all naturalness:

“Julio Montero.”

The response did not manage to surprise me; nevertheless, on that horrible night, nothing moved me more than those two words.  For the first time I felt far away from Paulina.  Almost contemptuously, I then asked:

“Are you going to get married?”

I don’t recall what her response was.  I think that she invited me to her wedding.

Then I found myself alone.  Everything was absurd.  There could not have been a person less compatible with Paulina (or with me) than Montero.  Or was I mistaken?  If Paulina loved this man, perhaps then she had never resembled me.  An abjuration was not enough for me; I discovered that many times I had caught a glimpse of the terrifying truth.

I was very sad, but I don’t think I felt any jealousy.  I went to bed, face down.  Stretching out my hand, I found the book which had just been reading for a while before.  I cast it far from me in disgust.

I went out for a walk.  On one of the corners I took a look at a merry−go−round.  That night it seemed impossible to go on living.

Over the years I remembered her.  And as I preferred the painful moments of our split (because they had taken place with Paulina) to the subsequent solitude, I ran through them again and again, examining them in minutest detail and reliving each one.  In such distressed deliberation, I thought I was discovering new interpretations of the facts.  Hence, for example, in the voice of Paulina telling me the name of her lover I was surprised to find a tenderness that, in principle, did not fail to thrill me.  I thought that the girl felt sorry for me, and her goodness moved me just as her love had before.  Later, reconsidering the matter, I deduced that this tenderness was not for me but for the name she had uttered.

I accepted the scholarship and silently busied myself with preparations for my trip.  Word, however, got out, and on my last evening I was visited by Paulina.

I felt far from her, but once I saw her I fell in love again.  Without her saying it, I understood that her appearance was a furtive one.  Trembling in gratitude, I took her hands in mine.  Paulina said:

“I will always love you.  Whatever may be, I will always love you more than anyone else.”

Perhaps she thought she had committed a betrayal.  She knew that I did not doubt her faithfulness to Montero, but as if disgusted by having pronounced words that involved her (if not for me than for an imaginary witness) in an unfaithful intention, she added rapidly:

“Obviously, I’m sorry for you is not important.  I’m in love with Julio.”

Everything else, she said, was not important.  The past was a desert region in which she had been waiting for Montero.  To our love, or friendship, she could not agree.

Then we spoke a bit more.  I was very resentful and pretended to be in a hurry.  I walked her to the elevator.  Once we got to front door it immediately began to pour.

“I’ll find you a taxi,” I said.

With sudden emotion in her voice, Paulina yelled at me:

"Goodbye, darling.”

She ran across the street and disappeared from sight.  Sad, I turned around.  Upon raising my eyes I saw a man crouching in the garden.  He sat up and pressed his hands and face against the glass door.  It was Montero.

Rays of lilac and orange light crossed above a green background with dark thickets.  Pressed against the glass, Montero’s face seemed deformed and ghastly pale.

I thought of aquariums, of fish in aquariums.  Then, with frivolous bitterness, I said to myself that Montero’s face suggested other monsters: those fish deformed by the pressure of the water living at the bottom of the sea.

The next day, in the morning, I departed.  I hardly left my cabin for the duration of my journey, and instead wrote and read intensely.

I wanted to forget Paulina.  In my two years in England I avoided thinking about her whenever I could: from meeting with other Argentines to the few telegrams from Buenos Aires where the daily newspapers are published.  It’s true that I seemed to be in a dream, a dream so real and of such persuasive vividness that I asked myself whether my soul was counteracting at night the privations I imposed upon myself during the day.  Obstinately I eluded her memories.  By the end of my first year, I managed to ban her from my nights, and, almost, to forget her.

Fet, "Вечер"

A work ("Evening") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

Above the river clear it roved  
And rang upon the meadow dark,
And danced aloft the silent grove
The other shore now all aspark.

The dusk and distance cloak each turn, 
Its course upon the western strand;
As golden cloud hems twist and burn,  
The parting smoke of sunswept land.

A hill both hot and damp I see,     
The day's exhale in night's deep gasp,  
The summer lightning, blue and green, 
The brightest fire of our sweet past.