The Accident (12 page)
The same night. A Cervantes text.
Under the jet of hot water, Besfort tried to imagine what Rovena would make of the medieval Spanish city and the two inseparable friends, Lothario and Anselmo. And the sweet Camilla, the latter’s bride who unwittingly becomes the reason why Lothario cools slightly towards his bosom friend. The newlyweds notice this coldness and it worries them.
Besfort imagined Rovena’s tapered fingers turning the pages.
So the young couple are concerned. They encourage their friend to come to them as before, and to make their home his own. Lothario visits, but nervously. He is scared of rumours. But the couple are not worried about these at all. The shadow of anxiety that Lothario sometimes sees cross his friend’s brow has a quite different cause. One day Anselmo opens his heart. He is gnawed by an obsession, one that might drive him mad. Of course he is happy with his bride, but he cannot allay this pain. It involves a suspicion. Lothario should not stare like that. This suspicion is about nothing less than Camilla’s constancy.
Besfort knew that Rovena’s delicate fingers would turn the pages eagerly.
Wait, Anselmo says to his friend, not letting him speak. He knows what he’s going to say. He also knows that his Camilla is spotlessly pure. But . . . can a woman be called virtuous if she has never had the chance to be wicked?
Besfort imagined Rovena’s eyebrows and lashes, so carefully made up, trembling like a swallow’s wings at an approaching storm.
Lothario does all he can to reassure his friend. But there is no cure for his obsession. As if tormented by a fever, he reverts again and again to his dark suspicions. Finally, he makes a grotesque suggestion. Only Lothario, his faithful friend, can free him from this nightmare. There is only one way to prove Camilla’s constancy; he admits it is a dangerous game, but it is foolproof. Lothario must put Camilla to the test, in short, seduce her. Trap her.
Besfort imagined Rovena’s nervous fingers turning back the pages to reread them, the steady glow on her cheeks matching the ruby in her ring.
Lothario rejects the suggestion with contempt. He takes serious offence. He gets up to leave. For ever. But a single utterance from Anselmo stops him in his tracks. It is a threat. If Lothario will not do it, he will find a total stranger. Some ordinary lecher. Some low rat.
Lothario holds his head in his hands. This threat crushes his resistance. He takes on this appalling task, or rather pretends to. He decides to deceive his friend, as one might humour a lunatic. And so, when the hour of trial comes, sitting opposite Camilla, he does not make the slightest move. Anselmo can barely wait to hear the outcome. Lothario tells him: Camilla is as pure as crystal, as white as mountain snow. She called him a swine. She repulsed his advances. She threatened to tell her husband.
But Anselmo does not believe what he hears. His expression darkens. “Traitor!” he says. “Double-crosser! I watched you through the keyhole. You’re telling lies. You sat there like a poker. Scumbag! What kind of a seducer are you? Now you’ll see, I’ll bring in the real libertines. The real fornicators. At least they don’t lie.”
Lothario tries to calm him down. He begs forgiveness. He asks for another chance. A test of loyalty. One last time. Just don’t bring in any lowlife.
Finally, they reach an agreement. They will both set the trap. Anselmo will go away to the country. Lothario will stay in Anselmo’s home, for three days and three nights. This is Anselmo’s order. Camilla makes no objection. The first evening arrives.
Besfort turned off the shower, as if to listen out for Rovena’s faster breathing.
The two are alone, Lothario and Camilla. They eat dinner together, drink a little wine. They look at the fire in the hearth.
The text describes it in a few words. Lothario makes a declaration of love. Camilla desperately attempts to ward him off, but eventually her defences are exhausted. Camilla gives in. The text is pitiless, and uses the word “surrender” twice. Camilla surrenders. Camilla falls.
Besfort knew that Rovena would close her eyes at this point in the story. Of all the women he had known, not one shut her eyes during lovemaking in the same passionate way as Rovena. So she must have closed her eyes to imagine the scene and identify with it. Would she feel sorry that Camilla had given in? Probably the opposite, she would hardly be able to wait . . .
At the brightly lit entrance to the Loreley, Besfort put more or less the same question for the umpteenth time. Was she enjoying this? Rovena’s wan face gave no answer.
Finally, they entered and began to explore the club’s premises. Rovena was totally naked apart from the scanty underwear that the rules demanded. He wore even less. And so they wandered though the dim rooms, until they came to a huge bed. Here they sat down to collect themselves. As their eyes grew used to the gloom, they recovered from their shock enough to discern what was happening around them. There were beds here and there, some occupied. On one, a couple was making love. Other people roamed about. There were women wearing only lingerie, sometimes nothing at all. Men in briefs. Single men wandering like ghosts. Someone was carrying a drink to his girlfriend. Everything was calm and harmonious.
“You have the most beautiful breasts of anybody here,” he whispered. There was a gleam in Rovena’s eye that discouraged speech. He said it a second time. “Not just breasts either,” he added.
Her thigh was bent at an angle, and part of the dark region between her legs was visible. At this very spot, at the narrow opening in her underwear, one of the men stared with longing.
“Everybody fancies you,” Besfort whispered.
“Really?”
“And that little part that doesn’t seem special to you is driving that guy crazy.”
“I can see that,” she said. But still she did not make the slightest move to cover it.
“In ancient times, I forget where, people used to have sex in public places,” Besfort said.
“Really?”
“There was nothing cheap about it, it was a serious thing, in fact almost a sacred ritual, like celebrations nowadays.” She grasped his hand. “What about us? Here?” he asked.
She nodded. “Wait a bit. I haven’t got used to the place yet.” Suddenly, she shivered and drew in her leg. A man with gentle eyes had bent down to touch her ankle.
“Don’t be frightened,” said Besfort. The man eyed her tenderly with a guilty, long-suffering look. “I think that’s a sign,” Besfort said. “He wants permission to make love to you.”
She bit her fingers.
Everywhere around them was the same cult-like atmosphere. “Shall we look around?” she said. They stood up, and she took him by the hand. It seemed natural to him that she should lead him, like Virgil, he thought. As they walked, a door marked “Massage” caught their eyes . . .
Besfort finished his shower. Rovena must almost have finished the story.
Anselmo comes back from the country to learn the outcome. Lothario of course tells him the opposite of what really happened. Anselmo seems content. The test of constancy is over. Lothario now comes and goes, treating Anselmo’s house as his own. Deception has triumphed. Everything is topsy-turvy. The more Camilla’s honour is praised to the skies, the deeper she sinks into the mire, as Lothario does too. Then events rush pell-mell to catastrophe. One night, just before dawn, Lothario, blinded by jealousy, sees a strange man coming out of Anselmo’s house. He instantly thinks it is Camilla’s new lover. Lecher, scumbag, fornicator! These words of Anselmo’s now come to his own mind, but with a new meaning.
Besfort always thought the story ended here. He had never paid much attention to its coda, Lothario’s rage against Camilla, his desire for revenge, the confusion with the servant girl, the escape of the guilty pair, the scandal and finally the death of all three, one driven mad, one speared in a battle and one pining in a convent.
As he dried his hair, he thought that Rovena must have raced through the last pages as he had done.
He slowly opened the bathroom door and saw her stretched on her back, staring abstractedly at the ceiling. The book lay open beside her.
Their eyes finally met. Her own were vacant, as if any anger she might have felt had already ebbed away. Besfort expected a vigorous reaction, but their conversation was awkward. Finally she asked him why he had given her this little book.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Why? For no particular reason.”
“Besfort, you don’t often do things without a reason.”
“OK, let’s say I have a reason. What harm was there in it? What do you think was at the back of my mind?” Rovena did not answer. Besfort said he was sure she had read it before.
Don Quixote
? Of course. At high school, it was a set text. Fighting the windmills. Dulcinea del Toboso. But she scarcely remembered this part at all.
“Besfort, tell me the truth. You gave me this to read because you think it somehow relates to ourselves, I mean to both of us.”
“Somehow relates to us?” Besfort laughed. “Not somehow, but totally. And not just to us, but to everybody.” He stroked her hair as she lay down beside him. In words that came to him with difficulty, he explained that this story was in a way archetypal. It described a sort of infernal machine through which millions of couples passed, consciously or otherwise.
Rovena struggled to follow his meaning. So it was an occult text that needed a key to unlock it.
“Don’t look at me like that, as if I were sick,” he said.
Gently she touched his hand.
He said he had always liked it when she looked like a sympathetic nurse. It was no accident that nurses made such tender lovers. But he wasn’t crazy, as she might think.
Rovena stroked his hand. Of course he didn’t seem crazy to her. If anybody was crazy, then they both were. Or had been at one time.
“You mean at the Loreley,” he butted in.
They recalled their visit there, without pretending they hadn’t been thinking of the tale of the foolish test of virtue. The two stories were essentially so close that they almost coincided, and the phrase “infernal machine” was not accidental either. Both stories brought to mind the afterworld, not the familiar hell with its tortures and fiery cauldrons, but another gentler, muted, pre-Christian kind.
How bewildered they had been at first as they wandered through the dim spaces, until the huge bed loomed in front of them like some rock of salvation. Their second expedition took them to the bar in search of drinks, and then further afield. She grew more relaxed as she walked, her silk-sheathed hips swayed more freely, until they came to the door marked “Massage”.
Would you like that? he asked her, with his eyes rather than in words. She barely hesitated. If he didn’t mind.
The door closed behind her and he turned back to find a place to wait for her. From a distance, he saw the bed where they had lain, still vacant. He sat down on it and lay back on one elbow, a solitary Ulysses cast up by the waves, surrounded by the booming of the sea. Around him, the ebb and flow continued. A couple paused beside him and started talking to each other. The woman stepped forward, bent down, touched his ankle. Besfort produced a guilty smile. He wanted to explain that this lady was very attractive and classy, but he had something else on his mind. He whispered, “I’m sorry,” but the two lowered their heads to say goodbye so politely that he was sincerely touched to the heart. He watched them move away arm-in-arm, but could not muster the willpower to stand up and follow them. He wanted to tell them how much he would have liked to stay with them, with this noble lady and this gentleman, sharing their sophisticated ennui on this bed where destiny had landed them. He felt genuinely sad, but for a different reason. Sometimes he thought of Rovena, and sometimes he put her behind him. She seemed to him light years away, sucked away by a whirling universe resembling one of the dormant galaxies captured in the latest space photos. The fear that she would never return came so naturally to him that he reflected he should not complain, because they had spent so many wonderful years together. He would do better to find out where this debilitating numbness came from. It was as if he had been smoking hashish. Perhaps it was the stress of this exhausting day, or was it time to take that Doppler test, as his doctor was insisting?
The languid crowd still circulated. A woman with tearful eyes and a tulip in her hand appeared to be looking for someone. He would not have been surprised to see, among the milling swarm, people he knew from the Council of Europe – those who had first given him the club’s address. Rovena was taking a long time. The tear-stained woman passed by again. Instead of the tulip she held a document of some kind in her hand. She was looking for somebody. Besfort thought that if she came a little closer he would surely distinguish on the document the initials and seal of the ICTY. The International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague.
A court summons! Rubbish, he thought. Go and wave that scrap of paper in front of someone else! Yet he averted his head in order not to meet her eyes.
He dozed off two or three times, until Rovena finally reappeared, as if emerging out of a fog, or arriving from dozens or thousands of light years away. Of course she would be changed. The whites of her eyes had a devastating gleam. There were vacant spaces in them. Her words were also sparse.
“When I came back you were in a trance,” said Rovena. “I expected you to ask me what it was like.”
“I don’t know what was stopping me,” he said. “Maybe I thought you wouldn’t be able to tell the truth even if you wanted to.”
“Perhaps,” she replied. “Sometimes that really does happen.”
He took a deep breath.
“It’s what usually happens. And it is a really peculiar thing that love, the most beautiful emotion on earth, is the one least able to bear the truth.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said.
“It’s different now. You’re free now. We’re both different now. Do you see what I mean? We’re both entirely different, so now you can say it.”
She remained silent, but she took his hand that was stroking her stomach into her own, and guided it where she wanted.
