The Casanova Embrace (25 page)

"I suppose," she said. He could feel her
indifference. Then she added quickly, "But I will do my duty." He
wanted to block out the sense of the words. He squeezed her breasts, his tongue
rolling over her nipples. Still, there was no reaction. He reached down and
caressed her clitoris. She did not stir.

"Are you frightened?" he whispered.

"No," she said. She lay there without emotion,
her eyes open, her lips pursed. "It would have been all right last
night," she said.

"I suppose you would have preferred it that way."

She looked at him and nodded.

"But I am a man!" he said, the anger rising
again, the humiliation palpable.

"Do it then!" It seemed a taunt. Then she threw
the covers off and spread her legs. His eyes washed over her womanhood, the
beauty of it. He had dreamed about it, seen it in his mind, desired it. Now he
was intimidated by it.

"Do it!" she hissed. "For God's sake, let's
get it over with."

He wanted to protest, but she reached out for him and
pulled him over her.

"Do it!" she said, guiding him roughly. He felt
her physical irritation, her dryness.

"Not like this." He tried holding back, but she
urged him forward. He felt her body's pain, although he could not confirm it in
her face. She strained forward, plunging his penis into her. He felt her
tightness close over him, vise-like.

"There!" she said, her breath gasping. "I
have done my duty."

He felt his helplessness as his body again quickly gave way
to its own pleasure, and although he was consciously ashamed of it, he let it
sweep over him again in a delicious fury. His body shuddered. She lay there,
still a lump of flesh, accepting her duty.

"I love you," he whispered. She said nothing,
waiting. Finally, he fell backward on the bed, his own exhaustion reaching
through his humiliation. He closed his eyes and heard her go into the bathroom
and slam the door. Before he fell asleep, he wondered why he could not bring
himself to hate her.

To the outside world, their parents, her friends, they
could pass as a reasonably loving but reticent couple. To themselves, they were
an arrangement and their life together an exercise in politeness. It was his
cross to bear, he decided, since he was the loving one. She was true to the
bargain, obedient and dutiful. And he kept his end of the bargain. His father
had bought for them a large house in Santiago, giving them additional property
and shares in a variety of companies. From a business point of view, the merger
was a spectacular deal. But the financial aspects held little interest for him
and it was she who took command of the records and finances when he entered law
school.

He was older than the rest of the students and he kept
mostly to himself, especially avoiding his old political friends, who soon grew
tired of his aloofness. Naturally, they did not take his defection lightly. A
scion of one of the first families of the oligarchy was always a visible prize
for the left, but even an attempt by Allende to bring him back to the fold
failed. It was, he knew, against the grain, and glimpsing ahead, he could see
his life spread out like a lush carpet--money and the power it gave, and the
endless manipulations to preserve it, a life of ease, servants, and, in the
end, a perpetuation of the privilege in his children. The prospect disgusted
him, although he knew it was the kind of life that Miranda had been bred for.
So had he. What had gone wrong?

Beneath the surface of what seemed like a truce or, worse,
a suspension of life, he was in a perpetual state of mental torture. Its root
was Miranda. The more she became indifferent, if that was possible, the more he
became inflamed. He began to watch her, study her, observing every movement and
expression as if he were studying a complex cell under a microscope.

"What is it, Eduardo?" she would ask when his
inspection became an irritation.

"Nothing."

"Why are you staring?"

It became, on her part, a litany. He was not conscious of
it, as if she were a magnet and his eyes a metallic substance. Perhaps he was
subconsciously trying to will her to love him and this fixation was an attempt
at hypnotism. Why doesn't she love me? he would cry within himself, never
daring to confront her with the question.

In his arms, at the beginning, she would lay motionless, accepting
his ministrations mutely, doing her duty. Her indifference gnawed at him. The
contrast to himself, his own sense of ecstasy when he touched her, when he felt
her, when his body merged with hers, seemed bizarre, somehow inhuman. He was
alternately gentle and insistent. She refused him nothing and gave him nothing.
And yet, in terms of pure physical pleasure, the wonder of her exasperated him.
She was his gift and curse. He had, he knew, bargained with the devil. Nothing
could move her.

"What do you think about when I do that?" he
asked once, when the pain had become unbearable. Her eyes were closed and he
lay over her, supported by his elbow, watching her closed eyelids flutter.

"Nothing," she responded.

"Just your duty?"

"I am your wife."

"Surely there is some feeling?" The way the
question was posed frightened him and he was grateful for her silence.

"How long do you think I can endure this?"

She opened her eyes and looked at him, as he searched her
face.

"A lifetime," she said. "There is no
question about that." She paused. "We have obligations."

"To whom?" He was being sarcastic. The question
needed no answer. But it was the key to her life and she persisted.

"To our blood." She had paused. "And our
children."

"Children?"

"Of course. It is our duty to conceive children."

"Like this?"

"It is the way it is done." She was mocking now.
But she had inadvertently given him a weapon.

If she was to continue her indifference, he determined to
hold off, to whip his desire. He no longer submitted himself to his own
passion, and although it steamed and churned within him, he would not go near
her. If she noticed, she said nothing, certainly relieved and, perhaps, hopeful
that a conception might already have taken place. It hadn't.

Miranda's life changed little since their marriage. She had
her friends, her tennis, her parties. She was still the center of interest
everywhere she went, and if she had little joy to give him, her smile warmed
everyone else she touched. He followed her obediently for the first six months,
hoping that his father's admonition of "in time" might suddenly
become operative. It didn't. They drifted, speaking little, always polite. He
imagined he was trying to wipe away, destroy his love for her somehow, but it
was impossible. Its intensity continued to burn, fueled, it seemed, by the
depth of her indifference.

He knew there would be a limit to his endurance. Despite
his love for her and his pain, his intelligence had long ago rejected all of
her values--perpetuation of wealth for its own sake, a clear contempt for the
have-nots. She had an absolute belief in the aristocracy of power through
family and heritage. The rights of privilege were everything. It was his own
family's dictum as well. He began to look upon his life as an exercise in futility.

It was when the idea of killing himself popped into his
mind that he realized how far afield he had gone. He was surprised, too, at the
seriousness with which he entertained the idea, contemplating in detail the
method he would use. He had rejected the grand gesture, a bullet in the brain,
a knife in the heart, throwing himself in front of a train or truck, hanging
himself. Such a dramatic gesture might have meaning if he had sought martyrdom,
a permanent impression for political motives, for example. His was to be the
death of failure, a simple exit of a wayward soul.

He began to dwell on the method of the overdose as an
appropriate poetic gesture. Only Miranda would understand the irony and, after
all, that was just, since it was only Miranda's reaction that would matter.
Would it make the slightest impression on her, he wondered. He would stare at
the little vial of her pills on the ledge of the medicine chest, wondering when
he would find the courage to use their contents. It would be so simple. A handful
of pills down the gullet, a passage into slumber and then a swift painless
demise.

He might have done it, too, if the matter of his death had
not become an object of concern. It was as if the idea had permeated the air,
seeped into her brain, a supernatural transference.

"I have prepared our wills," she said one evening
on the rare occasion of their dining together. She moved an envelope across the
polished granite table.

"That's ridiculous," he said. Had she actually
read his mind?

"Actually, it was your father's suggestion. His firm
drew it up."

"But who will benefit?"

"If you die, I will. If I die, you will. Then when
there are children.... "She shrugged and slid the envelope further across
the table in his direction.

"There will be no children," he said
emphatically, watching her face.

"That's absurd," she said.

"Is it?" He continued to explore her face. It
betrayed nothing of what he was thinking. God, how he loved her, he thought. At
least, she will need me for that. The idea of it made his loins churn.

"Never," he whispered.

"Just look it over. Then sign them. It is quite
necessary."

"The hell with it!"

"Don't be a fool!" she admonished, her eyes
narrowing in anger. So she is human, after all, he thought happily, knowing
that the idea of his suicide was losing its allure.

The next day he quit law school and presented himself at
party headquarters, where his return was compared with that of the prodigal
son. He asked for an assignment outside of Santiago and was quickly assigned to
Valdivia, a northern city, where he was to supervise the editing of the party
newspaper and participate in expanding the party base. It would not be an easy
task. The city was dominated by citizens of German origin who were extremely
conservative.

"How will you explain it to your father?" Miranda
asked. It was her only reaction. There was no question of her going with him.

"I'm going without you," he told her.

"Of course."

He tried to write a long letter to his father, justifying
his action, but the words kept congealing on the paper. Could he explain his
own sense of warped maturity, his hopeless one-sided love for a frigid wife,
his flirting seriously with suicide? How could such information be conveyed to
someone outside yourself? Especially to someone who, he knew, loved him.

Although his political instincts seemed crystal clear at
times, he wondered about the sincerity of his commitment. It occurred to him
that perhaps he was merely acting to destroy a system of life that had made him
unhappy. Sometimes he could feel passionately what he espoused. But distrust of
emotion was conditioning him. Emotion was the enemy, he decided. Surely, there
was some way to overcome it, perhaps to use it, but never to allow it to
dominate or control.

Above all, he envied Miranda, her coldness, even though it
tortured him. Every nuance of indifference was a dagger in his heart. Yet he
admired her uninvolvement. His intelligence could be in revolt, but
nothing--logic, objective reasoning, ridicule--could erase what he felt for
her. He had seen her on the tennis courts, a perfectly innocent pastime, and it
had become an obsession, a monster. He had betrayed his political instincts. He
had betrayed his father. He had betrayed himself.

In the end, he could explain nothing to his father. As for
Miranda, she would endure the temporary embarrassment, providing, she insisted,
that appearances were kept up. It was becoming trendy now to have a radical
husband. The party of Allende was, as a matter of fact, taking on an air of
respectability in some circles. Conditions in Chile were in decline even for
the wealthy. Ominous signs were on the horizon. She might live with that.
Divorce, of course, was out of the question. There was the religious issue but,
more important, there was the financial problem. She was not going to deprive
her unborn children of the fruits of the Ferrara-Palmero merger.

He was quite proud of the fact that he had prepared his
mind for his departure. That was why he had been so baffled by what occurred.
He was fully packed. His bags were actually piled in the foyer ready for the
morning journey. It was near midnight. He had poured himself a cognac and stood
by the windows watching the flickering lights of Santiago which lay like a
luminescent carpet at his feet. It was his habit now to take a cognac before he
got into bed. It made him drowsy. Sometimes he would take two or three or more,
depending on his mood and the state of his agitation. Miranda, he knew, would
induce her sleep with sleeping pills. It was a fact of their lives together.
She anesthetized herself to endure him. He anesthetized himself to hold himself
back. There was, he knew, spite in both their motives.

"May I join you?" He was startled by her voice.
Turning, she appeared in a soft yellow dressing gown that he had never seen
before. Over it, her brushed hair seemed to glow as it fell in sharp contrast.
Beneath the dressing gown, he could see her full, lush body.

He poured out a drink and, handing her a snifter, watched
her tapered, ringed fingers delicately caress the glass. If only it were me, he
thought. She stood beside him, watching the lights outside, sipping the cognac.
He felt her magnetism, heard the softness of her steady breathing. His heart
began to beat wildly.

"I know it's my fault," she said. The words came
in a velvet whisper. Distrust it, his mind told him. He said nothing in
response.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"You can't bake bread without flour," he said
stupidly, censoring the original crudity.