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At the piano he plays with soul, undeniably; but the soul that rules him is Chopin’s, not his own. And if that soul strikes one as unusually dry and severe, it may point to a certain aridity in his own temperament.
She is an intelligent person but not reflective. A portion of her intelligence consists in an awareness that excess of reflection can paralyse the will.
If one can conceive of virtue as a quantity, then the greater part of the Pole’s virtue is spent on his music, leaving hardly any behind for his dealings with the world; whereas Beatriz’s virtue is expended evenly in all directions.
She inspects her hand. After its brief rest under that giant paw it seems smaller than usual. But unharmed.
What would it say about her if she were to respond? More to the point, what does it say about her that the man expects she will respond?
She has also with a cool eye observed how the men of her class behave. She has emerged from her explorations with no great respect for men and their appetites, no wish to have a wave of male passion splash over her.
They go for a walk on a tree-lined path along the riverside. It is a pleasant autumn day. The leaves are turning, et cetera.
Music that spends its time questing after a lost object (Mahler) makes her yawn.
Perhaps, if the truth be told, that is why he settled on her, Beatriz. Because in his line of work he comes across too many women like Margarita, energetic, brilliant, acquisitive; because, that evening at Boffini’s, she, Beatriz, seemed the epitome of the unobtrusive, undemanding yet entirely presentable woman who would attend to his needs without giving too much trouble. If so, what an insult!
I was not meant for you, as you seem to think. I was not “meant” for anyone. None of us is “meant,” whatever the word means.
Between a man and a woman, between the two poles, electricity either crackles or does not crackle.
Nothing about Loreto is surprising. That is to say, of what she knows about Loreto nothing surprises her, not even the moped. But of course Loreto has a life of her own, invisible to her employers, which may well be full of surprises. It may contain, for instance, Loreto’s equivalent of the Pole: a man who finds her, Loreto, to be full of grace and worth pursuing. It is only a matter of chance that the story being told is not about Loreto and her man but about her, Beatriz, and her Polish admirer. Another fall of the dice and the story would be about Loreto’s submerged life.
‘An ordinary life side by side—that is what I want. For always. The next life too, if there is another life. But if not, okay, I accept. If you say no, not for the rest of life, just for this week—okay, I accept that too. For just a day even. For just a minute. A minute is enough. What is time? Time is nothing. We have our memory. In memory there is no time. I will hold you in my memory. And you, maybe you will remember me too.’
‘Of course I will remember you, you strange man.’
What has she forgotten? She has no idea. It is gone, has vanished from the face of the earth as if it had never existed.
Orfeo. So now he is Orfeo.
‘No one regards me highly, nowhere in the world. It’s okay. I am the old generation. I am history. I should be in a museum, in a glass cabinet. But here I am. I am still alive.
‘You ought to be proud of yourself,’ she says. ‘Not everyone enters history. There are people who spend their whole lives trying to be part of history and fail. I will never be part of history, for example.’ ‘But you do not try,’ he says. ‘No, I don’t try. I am content to be who I am.’ What she does not say is: Why should I want to end up in history? What is history to me?
She brushes her teeth, washes her face, combs her hair, inspects herself in the bathroom mirror. Looking at oneself in a mirror is something that women do in books and films, but she is not in a book or a film and she is not looking at herself. No, it is the being on the other side of the glass who is looking at her, to whose inspection she is submitting herself. What does that other see?
Without a word he undresses; she averts her eyes. She feels his body stretch out beside hers, feels the barrel chest against her and the hair that covers it in a thick mat. Like a bear! she thinks. What am I letting myself in for? Too late: no going back now.
She is not going to spend the night with this huge lump of a man in her bed. ‘I must sleep now,’ she says, ‘and you must go. I will see you in the morning. Good-night, Witold. Sleep well.’
You have only yourself to blame, she chides herself. Two strangers thrown together in the dark, performing an act neither was ready for. Actors. Performers. You thought you would get away scot-free, you thought there would be no consequences, but you were wrong, wrong, wrong.
‘I have been your lover since the day I met you and no one knows. No one in the world can guard a secret better than I can.’ ‘If you really believe that then you are a fool. To me you are transparent. To Loreto you are transparent. To any woman you are transparent. What I am asking you to do has nothing to do with guarding secrets. I am asking you to maintain a fiction. Can you do that, in a respectful way?’
The Pole bows his head. ‘Dante the poet was the lover of Beatrice and no one knew.’ ‘That is nonsense. Beatrice knew. All her friends knew. They giggled about it, like all girls do. Do you really think you are Dante, Witold?’
All their conversations seem to be like that: coins passed back and forth in the dark, in ignorance of what they are worth.
Why is she with him? Why has she brought him here? What if anything does she find pleasing about him? There is an answer: that he so transparently takes pleasure in her. When she walks into the room, his face, usually so dour, lights up. In the gaze that bathes her there is a quantum of male desire, but finally it is a gaze of admiration, of dazzlement, as though he cannot believe his luck. It pleases her to offer herself to his gaze.
A comical spectacle, the two of them, making their love in English, a tongue whose erotic reaches are closed to them.
They will not see each other again, she and the Weiszes. A relief. They know too much about her. Yet what does it amount to, what they know? That she had an affair with a man? It happens every day. That the man was left heartbroken and wrote poems about her? That too happens, though not every day. No, the shame is that Clara Weisz, who is no one to her and no one to Witold, has had access to what was going on in Witold’s soul, clearer access than she, for whom the poems were written, will ever have, given that there must be tones, echoes, nuances, subtleties in the Polish that no translation
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Mourning is a natural process. All the peoples of the planet have rituals of mourning.
She, Beatriz, lost her mother early. The loss left a gaping hole in her life. She grieved, she mourned, she missed her. Then at a certain point the mourning came to an end and she moved on. But the Pole does not seem to have moved on. Having lost her, he mourned her and went on mourning, nursing his loss like a mother who refuses to give up a dead child.
She does not believe in life after death, except in the most metaphorical of senses. When she is dead her children will remember her and reminisce about her, fondly or not so fondly. They might also pick her to pieces with their psychoanalysts (Was she a good mother? Was she a bad mother?). As long as they go on doing so she will enjoy a flickering kind of life. But with the passing of their generation she will be tossed into a dusty archive, there to be shut out from the light of day for ever and ever. Such constitutes her belief, her mature, adult belief; and she does the Pole the credit of
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Will there be no jealousy in the afterlife? No boredom? No hunger? No bowel movements? What about clothes? Will we all have to wear shapeless smocks down to our ankles? And underwear—will a touch of lace be permitted or will everything have to be very plain, very puritan? Heaven: a vast ante-room full of souls milling about in their uniform smocks, searching anxiously for their other halves.
If you were Dante, I would go down in history as your inspiration, your Muse. But you are not Dante. The evidence is before us.
If the words belong in the poem and ‘Beatrice’ is the heavenly being you have adopted from your friend and mentor Dante, well and good, I say no more. But if Beatrice is me, and if when you wrote those words you were pleading with me to save you—to come and save you from death—I must tell you, first, that the message did not reach me, telepathically or otherwise, and, second, that even if it had reached me I would probably not have come.
You had the whole creaking philosophical edifice of romantic love behind you, into which you slotted me as your donna and saviour. I had no such resources, apart from what I regard as a saving scepticism about schemes of thought that crush and annihilate living beings.
P.S. I will write again.