A Spy in the House of Love (7 page)

At dawn, the lie detector himself would see her
come out of the house, holding her cape tightly around her against the morning
sharpness, her hair not smoothly combed, and her eyes not fully opened.

Any other street but this one.

Once in the early summer, she had been awakened
by a painful tension of the nerves. All the windows were open. It was near
dawn. The little street was absolutely silent. She could hear the leaves
shivering on the trees. Then a cat wailing. Why had she awakened? Was there any
danger? Was Alan watching at the gate?

She heard a woman’s voice call out distinctly:
“Betty! Betty!” And a voice answered in the muffled tones of half-sleep: “What’s
the matter?”

“Betty! There’s a man hiding in one of the
doorways. I saw him sneak in.”

“Well…what do you want me to do about it? He’s
just a drunk getting home.”

“No, Betty. He was trying to hide when I leaned
out of the window. Ask Tom to go and see. I’m frightened.”

“Oh, don’t be childish. Go to sleep. Tom worked
late last night. I can’t wake him. The man can’t get in anyhow, unless you
press the button and let him in!”

“But he’ll be there when I go to work. He’ll
wait there. Call Tom.”

“Go to sleep.”

Sabina began to tremble. She was certain it was
Alan. Alan was waiting down below, to see her come out. For her this was the
end of the world. Alan was the core of her life. These other moments of fever
were moments in a dream: insubstantial and vanishing as quickly as they came.
But if Alan repudiated her, it was the death of Sabina. Her existence in Alan’s
eyes was her only true existence. To say to herself “Alan cast me off,” was
like saying: “Alan killed me.”

The caresses of the night before were acutely
marvelous, like all the multicolored flames from an artful fireworks, bursts of
exploded suns and
neons
within the body, flying
comets aimed at all the centers of delight, shooting stars of piercing joys,
and yet if she said: “I will stay here and live with Mambo forever,” it was
like the children she had seen trying to stand under the showers of sparks from
the fireworks lasting one instant and covering them with ashes.

She saw two scenes before her eyes: Alan
sobbing as he had sobbed at the death of his father, and this image caused her
an intolerable pain. And the second image was Alan angry, as he had never shown
himself to her but to others, and this was equally intolerable; both equally
annihilating.

It was not dawn yet. What could she do? Her
anxiety was so great she could not continue to lie there in silence. How would
she explain to Mambo her leaving so early in the morning? Nevertheless she rose
quietly after sliding gradually out of bed, and dressed. She was trembling and
her clothes slipped awkwardly between her fingers.

She must go and see who was the man hiding in
the doorway. She could not bear the suspense.

She left the apartment slowly, noiselessly. She
walked barefoot down the stairs, carrying her sandals. When one step creaked,
she stopped. Perspiration showed on her eyebrows. A feeling of utter weakness
kept her hands trembling. She finally o others,
ed
the door and saw a man’s outline behind the frosted glass of the door. He stood
there smoking a pipe as Alan smoked it. Sabina’s heart was paralyzed. She knew
why she had always hated this street without issue. She stood there fully ten
minutes, paralyzed by terror and guilt, by regrets for what she was losing.

“It’s the end of the world,” she whispered.

As if she were about to die, she summarized her
existence: the heightened moments of passion dissolved as unimportant in the
face of the loss of Alan as if this love were the core of her existence.

Formulating this, the anguish increased to the
point where she could no longer stand still. She pushed the door open
violently.

A stranger stood there, with red, blood-shot
eyes and unsteady legs. He was frightened by her sudden appearance and
muttered, leaning backwards: “Can’t find my name on the doorbell, lady, can you
help me?”

Sabina looked at him with a wild fury and ran
past him, the corner of her cape slapping his face.

Mambo reproached her constantly: “You don’t
love me.” He felt that she embraced in him, kissed on his lips the music, the
legends, the trees, the drums of the island he came from, that she sought to
possess ardently both his body and his island, that she offered her body to his
hands as much as to tropical winds, and that the undulations of pleasure
resembled those of swimmers in tropical seas. She savored on his lips his
island spices, and it was from his island too that he had learned his
particular way of caressing her, a silken voluptuousness without harshness or
violence, like the form of his island body on which no bone showed.

Sabina did not feel guilty for drinking of the
tropics through Mambo’s body: she felt a more subtle shame, that of bringing
him a fabricated Sabina, feigning a single love.

Tonight when the drug of caresses whirled them
into space, free—free for an instant of all the interferences to complete union
created by human beings themselves, she would give him an undisguised Sabina.

When their still throbbing bodies lay side by
side, there was always silence, and in this silence each one began to weave the
separating threads, to disunite what had been united, to return to each what
had been for a moment equally shared.

There were essences of caresses which could
penetrate the heaviest insulations, filtering through the heaviest defenses,
but these, so soon after the exchange of desires, could be destroyed like the
seeds of birth.

Mambo proceeded to this careful labor by
renewing his secret accusation against Sabina, that she sought only pleasure,
that she loved in him only the island man, the swimmer and the drummer
,
that
she never touched in him, or ardently desired, or took into her body, the
artist that he most valued in himself, the composer of music which was a
distillation of the barbaric themes of his origin.

He was a run-away from his own island, seeking
awareness, seeking
shadi
and delicate balances as in
the music
ofDebussy
, and at his side lay Sabina,
feverishly dispersing all the delicacies as she demanded: “Drum! Mambo, drum!
Drum for me.”

Sabina too was slipping out of the burning
moment which had almost welded their differences. Her secret self unveiled and
naked in his arms must be costumed once more for what she felt in the silence
were his withdrawal and silent accusations.

Before he could speak and harm her with words
while she lay naked and exposed, while he prepared a judgment, she was
preparing her metamorphosis, so that whatever Sabina he struck down she could
abandon like a disguise, shedding the self he had seized upon and say: “That
was not me.”

Any devastating words addressed to the Sabina
he had possessed, the primitive one, could not reach her then; she was already
halfway out of the forest of their desire, the core already far away,
invulnerable, protected by flight. What remained was a costume: it was piled on
the floor of his room, and empty of her.

Once in an ancient city in South America,
Sabina had seen streets which had been ravaged by an earthquake. Nothing was
left but facades, as in Chirico paintings; the facades of granite had remained
with doors and windows half unhinged, opening unexpectedly, not upon a
household nestled around a hearth, but whole families camping under the sky,
protected from strangers only by one wall and door, but otherwise completely
free of walls or roofs from the other three sides.

She realized that it was this illimitable space
she had expected to find in every lover’s room, the sea, the mountains visible
all around, the world shut off on one side. A hearth without roof or walls,
growing between trees, a floor through which wild flowers pushed to show
smiling faces, a column housing stray birds, temples and pyramids and baroque
churches in the distance.

But when she saw four walls and a bed pushed
against the corner as if it had been flying and had collided against an
obstacle, she did not feel as other voyagers: “I have arrived at my destination
and can now remove my traveling costume,” but: “I have been captured and from
here, sooner or later, I must escape.”

No place, no human being could bear to be gazed
at with the critical eye of the absolute, as if they were obstacles to the
reaching of a place or person of greater value created by the imagination. This
was the blight she inflicted upon each room when she asked herself: “Am I to
live here forever?” This was the blight, the application of the irrevocable,
the endless fixation upon a place or relationship. It aged it prematurely, it
accelerated the process of decay by staleness. A chemical death ray, this
concentrate of time, inflicting the fear of stasis like a consuming ray,
deteriorating at the high speed of a hundred years per minute.

At this moment she was aware of her evil, of an
invisible crime equal to murder in life. It was her secret sickness, one she
believed incurable, unnamable.

Having touched the source of death, she turned
back to her source of life; it was only in Stravinsky’s
The Firebird
that
Sabina found her unerring musical autobiography. It was only here she could
find the lost Sabina, her self-revelation.

Even when the first sensual footsteps of the
orange bird first appeared, phosphorescent tracks along magnolia forests, she
recognized her first sensations, the adolescent stalking of emotion, of its
shadow first of all, the echo of its dazzling presence, not yet daring to enter
the circle of frenzy.

She recognized the first prologue waltzes, the
paintings on glass which might shatter at the touch of warm hands, the moon’s
haloes around featureless heads, the preparations for festivities and the wild
drums announcing feasts of the hearts and senses. She recognized the crimson
suspenses
, the elevations which heightened the pulse, the
wind which thrust its hieroglyphs through the swan necks of the trombones.

The fireworks were mounted on wire bodies
waving amorous arms, tiptoeing on the purple tongues of the Holy Ghost, leaping
out of captivity, Mercury’s wings of orange on pointed torches hurled like
javelins into space sparring through the clouds, the purple vulvas of the
night.

On many of the evenings Sabina spent with Mambo
they did not go anywhere.

On evenings when Sabina had agreed to return to
Alan at midnight, her going out with a friend would not have been fatal or too
difficult to explain; but there were evenings (when she wanted to spend a few
whole nights with her lover) when she had been obliged to say she was
traveling, and then when Mambo suggested: “Let’s go to a movie,” the conflict
was started. She did not like to answer: “I don’t want Alan to see me.” This
made her feel like a child being watched, or a woman in a state of subjection,
so much did her feelings about Alan seem not like those of a woman wanting to
be faithful or loyal but those of an adolescent escaping home for some
forbidden games. She could only see Alan as a kind father who might become
angry at her lies and punish her. She would also, if she mentioned Alan’s
rights, be forced to confess to Mambo the division in her affections. At times
her lies seemed to her like the most intricate act of protectiveness instead of
the greatest treachery. Other days she felt tempted to confess, but would be
blocked by the knowledge that even if she were forgiven, Alan would expect then
a change of life, and this she knew she was powerless to achieve.

At mention of the movies she would assent, but
as if it were a game of chance she were playing, each time that Mambo suggested
one movie, or another, or still another, she weighed them not so much for their
qualities as movies, but according to what quarter of the city they were shown
at, whether or not it was a movie Alan might care to see, whether it was near
at hand (knowing Alan was lazy about going uptown). If she were with Alan she
would have to try and remember the movies Mambo had seen, or the ones he wanted
to see, and knowing how fanatical he was about movies, to gauge even those he
might see twice.

Ultimately, like a gambler, she had to question
her instinct.

Once seated at the movies her anxiety
increased. Alan might have liked this movie enough to want to see it again, or
a friend might have persuaded him to make the
eft
to
go uptown. Could Mambo be sitting in the audience while she sat with Alan,
could he have seen her walking down the aisle?

Sometimes she discarded her anxiety as
nervousness. At other times she was compelled to go to the ladies’ room at the
very beginning in order to be able to walk slowly and carefully down the aisle
examining the crowd from behind before settling down beside Mambo or Alan. This
would relieve her anxiety for awhile, until some fragment of the movie story
itself would reawaken it, if a lie were pictured, a false situation, exposure.
Above all if it were a spy story.

It was when she saw the lives of spies that she
realized fully the tension with which she lived every moment, equal to theirs.
The fear of committing themselves, of sleeping too soundly, of talking in their
sleep, of carelessness of accent or behavior, the need for continuous
pretending, quick improvisations of motivations, quick justifications of their
presence here or there.