José Saramago - Skylight

“Here’s your hot water.”

He didn’t thank her, he merely closed the bathroom door again. While he was shaving, he kept peering across at Lídia’s window. The sleeve had disappeared. In its place, Caetano found his wife’s eyes staring at him. He knew that the best way to avoid the imminent storm was to stop looking, which would be easy enough given that Lídia was no longer there. However, temptation won out over prudence. At one point, exasperated by his wife’s spying, he opened the door and said:

“Haven’t you got anything better to do?”

They never addressed each other by their first names. She looked at him without answering and, still without answering, turned her back on him. Caetano slammed the door and did not look out of the window again. When he emerged, washed and shaved, he noticed that his wife had taken from a suitcase that she kept in the kitchen the diminutive items of clothing that had once belonged to Matilde. Were it not for the adoring look she bestowed on the clothes, Caetano might have passed by without a word, but yet again, he felt she was criticizing him.

“When are you going to stop spying on me?”

Justina took her time before replying. She seemed to be returning very slowly from somewhere far away, from a distant land with only one inhabitant.

“I was admiring your persistence,” she said coldly.

“What do you mean ‘persistence’?” he asked, taking a step forward.

He looked utterly ridiculous in his underpants, his legs bare. Justina eyed him sarcastically. She knew that she was ugly and unattractive, but seeing her husband like that, she felt like laughing in his face:

“Do you really want me to tell you?”

“Yes.”

From that moment on, Caetano was lost. Before he said that word, there had still been time to avoid receiving the inevitable slap in the face, but he had said yes and was already regretting it. Too late.

“You still haven’t lost hope, then? You still think she’ll fall into your arms one day, do you? Aren’t you embarrassed by what happened?”

Caetano’s chin was trembling with rage. Saliva appeared at the corners of his thick lips.

“Do you want her lover to come and rip you to shreds again for overstepping the mark?”

And in a tone of ironic concern, as if she were giving him a piece of advice, she said:

“Have a little self-respect. She’s far too classy a piece for you to lay hands on. Make do with the other women, the ones whose photos you carry around in your wallet. I can’t say I care for your taste. I suppose when they have their mug shots taken they give you a copy, is that right? You’re a sort of branch office of the police, aren’t you?”

Caetano turned deathly pale. His wife had never gone so far before. He clenched his fists and took a step toward her:

“One day I’ll break every bone in your body! One day I’ll beat you to a pulp, do you hear? Just don’t push me!”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“You…” and a particularly filthy word emerged from his lips.

Justina said only:

“You’re not insulting me but yourself, because that’s how you see all women.”

Caetano’s heavy body swayed stiffly like that of a robot. Fury and impotent rage sent words up into his mouth, but there they stumbled and died. He raised his clenched fist as if to bring it down on his wife’s head. She didn’t flinch. His fist, defeated, slowly descended. Justina’s eyes resembled two burning coals. A humiliated Caetano vanished from the room, slamming the door.

The cat, who had been observing his owners with glaucous eyes, slipped away along the dark corridor and lay down on the doormat, silent and indifferent.

Isaura, unable to sleep, had been tossing and turning in bed for two hours now. The whole building was quiet. Occasionally, from outside in the street, she heard the footsteps of some night owl returning home late. The pale, distant light of the stars came in through the window. In the darkness of the bedroom she could just make out the still-darker shapes of the furniture. The wardrobe mirror vaguely reflected the light from the window. Every quarter of an hour, as inflexible as time itself, the clock in the downstairs apartment reminded her of her insomniac state. Everything was silent and asleep, except for Isaura. She did all she could to get to sleep. She counted to a thousand, then counted again, she relaxed her muscles one by one, she closed her eyes, tried to forget about her insomnia and slip past it into sleep. In vain. Every single one of her nerves was awake. Despite the effort required to make her brain concentrate on the need to sleep, her thoughts were leading her along vertiginous paths into deep valleys from which arose the dim murmur of voices calling to her. She was hovering high up on the powerful back of a bird with wide wings, which, after soaring above the clouds, where it was hard to catch her breath, fell like a stone into the misty valleys in which she could make out white figures so pale they appeared to be naked or covered only by transparent veils. She was tormented by an objectless desire, by a desire for desire and by an equal fear of it too.

At her side, her sister was sleeping peacefully. Isaura found her quiet breathing and her stillness exasperating. She twice got up and went over to the window. Random words, half-finished sentences, vague gestures were going round and round in her head. It was like a scratched record that repeats over and over the same lovely musical phrase, which becomes odious with endless repetition. Ten times, a hundred times, the notes recur and mesh and meld until all that remains is a single, obsessive sound, terrible and implacable. You feel that just one minute of that obsession will bring madness in its wake, but the minute passes and madness does not come. Instead you grow still more lucid. Your spirit embraces far horizons, travels here, there, everywhere, with no frontiers to contain it, and with each step you take you become more and more painfully lucid. To forget about it, to stop the sound, to crush it with silence would mean peace and sleep, but the words, the phrases, the gestures rise up from beneath the silence in a dumb, endless spiral.

Isaura told herself that she was mad. Her head was burning, her forehead too, and her brain seemed to have grown so large it was about to burst out of her skull. It was her insomnia that was to blame, and it would not leave her until those thoughts left her as well. And what thoughts, Isaura! What monstrous thoughts! What repellent aberrations! What subterranean furies were pushing at the trapdoors of her will!

What diabolical, malicious hand had guided her toward that book? And it was supposed to serve a moral purpose too! Of course, said cold reason, almost lost in the whirlwind of sensations. Why, then, this turmoil of unchained instincts erupting in her flesh? Why had she not read it coolly, dispassionately? Weakness, said reason. Desire, screamed her long-buried instincts, for years shunned and ignored as being shameful in the extreme. And now those instincts had risen to the surface, and her will was drowning in a pool darker than night and deeper than death.

Isaura gnawed at her wrists. Her face was drenched in sweat, her hair clung to her scalp, her mouth was twisted into a violent grimace. Close to madness, she sat on the edge of the bed, ran her hands through her hair and looked around her. Night and silence. The sound from that scratched record was rising from the abyss of silence. Exhausted, she fell back on the bed. Adriana shifted slightly, but continued to sleep. Her indifference felt like a recrimination. Despite the suffocating heat, Isaura pulled the sheet up over her head. She covered her eyes with her hands, as if the night were not dark enough to hide her shame, but the darkness behind her eyelids filled up with red and yellow lights, like the sparks from a bonfire. (If only dawn would break, if only the sun would miraculously leave the other side of the world and burst into the room!)