The Casanova Embrace (12 page)

"I'm sorry," she said. Was she genuinely
compassionate?

"It is far from over," he whispered. He glanced
behind him furtively. "The game has not been fully played."

She felt the sense of danger, suddenly excited, waiting for
more.

"I don't understand." She did, of course, and
knew she was goading him.

"I am a voice. They will not be happy until all the
voices of opposition are stilled. I am their gadfly and that is the only way
they can stop me."

"I had no idea." She had not calculated her
reaction; she was genuinely startled by his outburst.

"They are beasts. They are there merely to protect the
status quo, the wealth of the few who own most of the land. And the investments
of American business, while they let them rape our land. Our copper. The
Chilean people are in chains."

"Jeez, I didn't expect a speech." She was
immediately sorry for the sarcasm.

"I apologize. I hadn't expected to give one."

"No. Don't apologize. It's me. Not you."

He talked quietly, calmly, even when he had made his little
speech. His words were not unlike words she had heard before. Once she had
responded to them by raising a clenched fist, marching in protest. There had
been causes then. Inspiration. It had all happened in the time when she was
alive. Once she had thrown a firebomb into the branch of the Bank of America in
San Luis Obispo. She had actually taken instruction in methods of violence and
had on occasion helped make bombs, later used in their combat when they were
"the army of the revolution." He remained silent. She wondered if her
flirtiness put him off.

"I'm not much into causes these days," she said.
"I've had it with them."

"It is necessary to believe in something," he
said.

"It is the same bullshit. Same types. Different faces.
All in it to manipulate other people." She paused. "Am I offending
you?"

"Of course," he said, showing a flash of
incredibly white teeth.

"I'm a burnt out case," she mocked, stretching.
She closed her eyes, remembering again the life of the other Frederika.
"You don't really believe your group will be back in power?"

"I not only believe it. It's all I live for."

"Well, that's something."

"What do you live for?"

"Omelets," she said, then explained the remark.

"Are you a Marxist?" she asked. It had been so
long since that label had any meaning for her, when the sound of the word was a
call to arms. She had been politicized once, had seen the world through the
telescope of the political lens, and although she had somehow resisted the uniformity
of thought, she had participated in all of the discipline, all of the feeling.

His voice drifted back into her consciousness. "I am a
Chilean and our party was under a Marxist oriented philosophy. But we were
unique to Chile. Our movement was for Chile."

She had seen that look before, a gaze turned inward, seeing
nothing up close, only the dream inside. A single-mindedness. She felt oddly
moved, faintly rekindled. Without realizing it, she gripped his forearm and
held it tightly. He made no move to disengage her.

The train had slid into Union Station and they stood up. He
removed a large leather foreign-looking valise from the baggage rack. Opening
it, to repack the book, she noted soiled clothing and piles of files among its
contents. He saw her watching and quickly shut the case.

"I meet in New York with friends from time to
time," he said, as if some explanation was required. They walked together
to the front of the station. It was cold and she found herself shivering in her
light clothes.

"Can I drop you somewhere?" he asked.

"I live on Wisconsin Avenue, above Georgetown."

The truth was that she didn't want him to leave her now, to
lose him. "Tell you what. You come to my place. I'll whip up a real
snack."

He stood facing her in the street. She had to look up to
see his eyes, the silver lost in the shadows. He was a well groomed man, she
noted, not like the men she had been with in those relevant days. Before he
consented she knew that he would. Perhaps he, too, had found something, she
wondered hopefully, feeling sensations in her body that she thought had
disappeared.

While she laid out the bacon strips on her frying pan, she
watched him sitting in the single overstuffed easy chair of her small
efficiency apartment. His feet were propped up on the ottoman and he had lit a
cigarette from which the smoke curled upward through the shade of the reading
lamp. The bacon crackled and curled, releasing its lovely aroma, and she called
to him.

"How do you like your eggs?"

"Scrambled."

She scrambled the eggs and put in some toast as the bacon
soaked out its grease on a brown paper bag. There was something odd about his
sitting there quietly in the easy chair, something foreign, a kind of
formality. An American might have stood over her as she worked, making small
talk. Again the idea of courtliness popped into her mind, an image gathered
somewhere about Latin men of the upper classes who put a high premium on
politeness and courtesy. Was that it? Or was she simply rationalizing? There
goes Frederika again, she thought joyously. The old Frederika. The one with the
analytical nose.

He still wore his jacket and tie, another oddity for her,
and when she came into the room with the steaming platters he seemed lost in
thought, his long fingers touching each other in the delicate attitude of
prayer.

"Coffee's coming," she said, placing the platters
on a cocktail table near the couch, then patting the seat pillows. "Come
here. You'll be more comfortable." She felt her aggressiveness and when he
stirred in obedience she felt again her old strength. "And, for crying out
loud, take your jacket off. Make yourself at home."

He took off his jacket.

"And the tie." He removed his tie and sat down
beside her, placing his napkin on his legs.

"In my next life I'm going to be a chicken," he
said. "My whole presence on earth revolves around eggs. My veins must be
choked with cholesterol."

She got up, poured the coffee and came back. She sensed
that he was loosening up, becoming less of a walking polemic, which pleased
her.

"Can I call you Eddie?" she said suddenly. She
had been watching him, noting how long and dark his lashes were, the strength
of his chin, his lips' sensuality. She was being stirred, she knew.

"Of course." She wondered if there was any
interest in her on his part.

Perhaps I am taking too much for granted, she told herself.
"You mean that?"

He turned toward her. "Do I sound insincere?"

Raw nerves, she thought. He is touchy. "You see my
friends always called me Freddie. I assume that friends make up names, or
shorten them. There's a kind of intimacy about that, don't you think?"

"Of course."

He seemed to be slipping away. She decided to be silent and
they sipped their coffee quietly. She could hear the faulty faucet dripping
water rhythmically into the sink. Watching him, she saw his eyelids droop
momentarily.

"Tired?"

"Tired. Yes." He straightened. It had been an
unguarded comment, she realized.

"No. Lean back," she said. "I know what
tired means."

"I think I had better be going," he said, but
without conviction.

"Where do you live?"

"Not far."

"Alone?"

"Yes."

There seemed a secret comfort in that. Alone! She certainly
knew what that meant. She wanted to touch him, but she held back.

"Just stretch out," she said, getting up,
clearing the plates from the cocktail table and clicking off the reading lamp.
Without looking back, she went into the kitchen and began to wash the dishes.
After a while she stole a glance into the room, noting that he had, indeed,
stretched out the length of the couch. Shutting the water tap, she went into
the room, tiptoeing to the closet, removing a blanket from the top shelf. She
covered him gently, hoping that the weight of the cover would not wake him. He
didn't stir.

Dumb Freddie, she told herself. You've given a strange man
the only bed in the joint. But she was happy. She had been afraid that the
suggestion of opening the couch to its studio bed would put him off. From the
closet, she brought out her coat, wrapped it around her and slumped in the easy
chair, her legs on the ottoman, cuddling her chin into the wool collar.

She didn't sleep, waiting instead for her eyes to become
accustomed to the dark. She wanted to see him, to watch the movement of his
breathing. To imagine things about him. He was an "exile," he had
told her. She could understand what that meant. Wasn't she, too, an exile? Only
he was still in the battle, while she was a fallen soldier. Dear brave Eduardo,
Eddie. Perhaps she simply hadn't had the courage to continue. But now. Now she
could continue the fight through him, with him. She remembered what it was like
to fling that firebomb into the plate glass window of that bank in San Luis
Obispo.

"Let me do it," she had insisted. They had met in
a wooded area of a state campground and had talked for hours about symbolic
acts, the necessity to keep alive the battle with little symbolic acts. There
were about ten of them and on the table of the camper which they could see
through the open door was the carefully constructed Molotov cocktail,
incongruous. They had used an empty bottle of Pouilly Fuissé wine
which they had fished out of a garbage can with the label still intact. They
were sitting around Indian style, legs crossed beneath them, passing around a
joint which barely lasted one time around the group and, even now, she could
remember how happy she felt, the kind of high that seemed never to come again.

She had been perched on the back of Lenny's bike, her
thighs wrapped around his tight hips, her crotch jammed up against his
buttocks, stirring her, for her hand clutched his penis, feeling its hardness
as Lenny gunned the bike in the direction of the bank. Nothing before or since
had ever come up to that moment, when the bike sped toward its destination and
the high wind created by its speed whipped against her cheeks and hair.

He had decelerated when they moved up the quiet street, and
turned onto the sidewalk, idling in front of the plate glass window. Calmly
Lenny had taken a pickaxe and broken the glass while she lit the firebomb and
threw it through the opening, watching it explode as it hit the floor. Then she
jumped onto the back of the bike again and they moved into the night, winding
along the quiet streets, into the woods, following the trail they had mapped
out in advance, to the place where he had parked the pickup truck.

She had helped him put the bike in the back of the truck,
covering it with tarpaulin. Lenny had driven the truck to high ground and they
could see the fire that they had created lighting up the sky. It was beautiful,
she remembered, even now, without a shred of remorse. Lights off, Lenny drove
the truck through the hills, heading west along secondary roads to the
prearranged rendezvous with others in an abandoned barn about one hundred miles
away. They stopped only once along a dark stretch after about an hour's drive
and made love along the side of the road. The ground was soft under her bare
skin and she imagined that she was tuned into the natural rhythm of life as she
felt him inside her, another symbolic act, she had decided, which embellished
the meaning of what they had done.

Was that the high point of it all, she wondered. Now, as
she sat in the chair watching Eddie, the memory came back, bringing with it all
the old wonder. Even the later image of Lenny tending bar in the St. Francis
Hotel couldn't dull what she now felt.

But then the scream crowded into her thoughts, which must
have become dreams, as she quickly found her sense of place. Awake, now, she
saw him screaming on her couch. He was apparently still asleep, although he
moved restlessly, as if writhing in pain. It was genuine pain, she knew,
despite its happening only in his mind. She watched him suffer until it became
unbearable to her and slipped beside him, holding him in her arms. He stirred,
mumbled something, then breathed a long deep sigh and was still. She continued
to hold him, feeling in him the sense of her comfort.

She observed time passing by the growing whiteness behind
the slats of the blinds. In the gray light she watched his face, the breathing
quiet, and she felt an overwhelming urge to kiss his lips, slightly puffed and
open to expel his breath, which seemed sweet and clear. Resisting, she
continued to watch, and finally he was responding to her gaze through gradually
opening eyes.

"You were having a nightmare," she whispered.

"I don't remember."

"You seemed to be suffering and you screamed as if you
were being tortured."

He was silent a long time, but his eyes were open.

"It stays in your soul." he said.

"What?"

"The pain of it. Actually, they did it to me only once
in the first days, but it was enough to make me fear it forever."

"What?"

"You don't want to hear about it."

"Yes. You must."

"They put these wires and pinched them on to my
genitals. I told myself that I would have courage through it all. And I did. I
had planned to tell them something, to give them raw meat. But until I had been
through the pain, they would not have believed me, so I told them a tiny bit of
what they wanted to know. It was that ... or--" He coughed to cover his
inability to continue. "It wasn't much really," he said after a
while.

"It's inhuman," she said with disgust.

"On the contrary. Very human."

"You're crazy."

"There is a relationship between the torturer and the
tortured."

"And that's human?"

"Yes."