LITMIR.BIZ

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won’t you dance with me?”

      •

      Roger didn’t dance that day. He was standing by a window of the drawing room, talking to an elderly gentleman. He seemed uneasy as he watched someone she couldn’t see. Between the dancing couples she caught a glimpse of the gardenia he was wearing in his lapel.

      “Why won’t you dance with me?”

      Jaume Mas, her husband, had entered her life in that manner: timidly, as she gazed at Roger, remembering that afternoon. She was filled with the terrible wish to scream. Jaume had entered her life too late, but it was at the precise moment when she was losing her bearings. Are you tired? She was gazing at her fan, the mother-of-pearl ribs, the silk tassel. She had had a mauve dress with a lilac posy at the waist made for her. She had it made with Roger’s words in mind. We’ve begun to love each other beneath the sign of the lilacs. You could see clumps of lilacs in the park, and branches of them stood in vases around the room. On that afternoon. If Roger comes near, he’ll see the landscape on my fan, tender apple green with a peach-colored sky. But he didn’t approach. I don’t think he even saw me, and I wanted to scream.

      “You don’t want to dance?”

      I felt sorry for him, a sudden sadness, as if I had just been shown a condemned man. Had I chosen him as a victim while I watched Roger? Scarcely a month had passed. The man in charge of closing the park had scolded us because he had to wait. The streetlights were beginning to come on and a slight drizzle had started. In the sand near the bench where we sat, I had written “Roger” with the tip of my umbrella, and the drizzle had slowly erased the name.

      The waltz was sad. Sad as the light that afternoon when we left the park. She passed me. Agata dancing, her shoulders bare. Agata. Her dress was white as daisies, and she was wearing a ruby necklace, shiny as drops of fresh blood. Lovers. Agata and Roger, lovers. I had only been told a few days before. Long-time lovers. Roger and Agata. Roger. When I scribbled “Roger” in the sand that day. He and I were lovers that afternoon. The first and last afternoon. A few drops of blood on a white sheet. Red as Agata’s ruby necklace. I could still hear Roger’s voice when, with the last embrace, he asked: “Don’t you feel well?” All so far away. The kisses, the blood, the lilac perfume.

      I found myself dancing in the center of the drawing room. An expressionless face had drawn near mine, its cheeks too round. It belonged to the man who would become my husband.

      •

      “Get the watering can, little girl, and help me water the plants.”

      “The sunflowers, too?”

      Her daughter-in-law must have locked the gate and was probably watering the geraniums beneath the dining room window, as she did every afternoon. Then she would water the chrysanthemums that were beginning to grow tall. She sighed and turned the mirror sideways. She had small, pearly ears with pinkish lobes. One was slashed. When she was breastfeeding her son—she had wanted to call him Roger—she would often wear her long emerald and diamond earrings. The child, who was just beginning to walk, used to take hold of her lips with his tiny hand and squeeze them tightly. Sometimes the hand seemed to be grasping air. One day he pulled furiously at one of the earrings. With the earring in his hand, he continued to suck the blood-splattered breast.

      White lilacs adorned the altar the day she married, like lilacs from another world, a world of the dead. She was frightened. She suddenly wanted to flee.

      •

      I was sinking. Sinking into a dark well. Two invisible hands had grabbed hold of my head and were pulling me down, down, backwards. “Remember when we first met? I asked you: ‘Do you want to dance with me?’” That memory will haunt me all my life. When he embraced me, he said: “Say my name, say it.” In my mind I said, “Roger.” I didn’t say it, only thought it, but my husband moved aside. I didn’t understand what he said. I never knew what he said. I could sense him getting dressed; then I heard the outside door closing, his footsteps walking across the pavement. I wasn’t sad, nor did I feel like crying. It was as if I had turned to stone. I stroked my belly. Roger’s son would live, and I could give him a name. I woke when it was still dark. Someone beside me was weeping. The smell of night and wind reached me. He had returned. I felt the suffering, and it calmed me. He wept with his face close to my back; the smell of wind and night were in his hair. Against my skin I could feel his burning breath broken by sobs. Another breathing, within my belly, burned me. Every drop of blood gathered together to create flesh. I lay very still, observing the shadows in the corners of the room. Dawn would devour them. I held a monster within me, a footless, handless monster. I thought my belly moved, that hands were forming as I watched, determined to emerge. A bitter, sour taste coursed into my mouth. He wept, and I fell asleep.

      Beneath the lilac-filled vases lay purple stars; lots of tiny flowers had fallen. Roger was getting dressed. His initials, R.G., were embroidered on the left side of his shirt. I too needed to get dressed, but I lingered, afraid that the most insignificant gesture would shatter that mirror of sad, fragile happiness. As if my dismay could make the afternoon last for years and years. When we went down to the street, we stopped beneath a streetlight and shook hands, as if we were simply friends, and said good-bye. Yet coming down the stairs, we had stopped to kiss on each step. When I was alone again, I thought, “We’ll never see each other again as we have today.” I looked around for something to call my own: the light from the streetlamp, the purple sky, a window with a light. Then I started walking. And later? The dance, Agata, the child, my marriage.

      •

      I had only the instinct to say: “Don’t shout.” He walked up and down the bedroom, occasionally opening a drawer in the dresser, only to slam it shut furiously, with an abrupt, brutal gesture.

      “Why did you marry me? Why?”

      “Don’t shout. Everyone will hear. Don’t.”

      “Your past.”

      He had said “Your past.” We were different then, bookish.

      “If at least your past were dead! But it isn’t; it’s alive. Your past has lived with us, breathing day and night as if it were a real person. Always, always. I’ve reached the point where to continue living I have to feel that someone needs me.”

      Ill. I’m old now and ill and my youth . . . “For a diabetic, diet is more important than medicine.” Cookies don’t make me feel bad, the sun does. I was out in the sun too long. This mirror knows it all. My green eyes and black hair are still there, hidden inside it. The first thing they did was hold the mirror up to his lips. This same mirror. At the beginning it didn’t turn misty. “We’ll save him, I’m sure.” The doctor looked at me, as if to cheer me up, as if it were a tragedy that my husband had wished to hang himself. I too had suffered, but I didn’t hang myself. “We’ll save him.” He was left with a purple spot on his neck, a line that lingered for a long time. I watched over him that night. He had chosen our wedding anniversary, and I couldn’t forgive him for surviving.

      “I keep seeing you with that mauve dress of yours, and the lilac posy on the day I met you, at the dance. You’re looking at me as if I frightened you. How could I frighten you?”

      How indeed? Especially now that it’s like someone else’s story. My son, my husband, Roger. Nothing. No one. I’ve lived alone. I am alone. Alone with this bundle of dead memories, which could be mine or not. Useless, sordid. Sixty years old, ill, with a son I don’t love because he looks like Roger. My jewelry has been sold off, little by little, in order to get by; I was forced to leave my country. Stupid. Bald and stupid. I watched over him all night; in the morning he asked for a glass of water. He could hardly speak. He made a tired gesture with his hand. He took a swallow and wouldn’t let go of my hand. He asked me to kiss him. “Out of kindness, even if I frighten you.” I went over to him. We were alone, everybody was asleep. I leaned down to kiss him, and when his face was close to mine, I spat on him. I spat and ran out. He seemed to be dead already. When he died, a few years later, I didn’t cry. And he was probably the only person who had loved me. Not me, the other woman who lived inside me.

      •

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