Herve Le Tellier - Electrico W

Every move Aurora made opened a slit in her dress, her leg was revealed up to the top of her thigh, and Antonio stared irresistibly at her dark skin exposed for a moment and almost immediately hidden. Aurora danced like the jubilant waters of a spring. She was alive, carnal, sensuality itself.

Disconcerted, Antonio stepped backward, apparently wanting to melt into the crowd.

Aurora was dancing, alone, a few paces from him but not with him. She smiled at everyone and no one, and he felt a rush of bitterness, an icy wind that made him back away. The whole world toppled and Antonio understood. She was offering herself to anyone who watched her and wanted her. She didn’t belong to him, and he was just realizing that he could lose her at any moment.

Antonio turned to me. He affected indifference, but his unspoken fear had suddenly aged him.

“Do you want to go back to the hotel, Vincent?”

“Didn’t you want to dance?”

He shook his head and I remembered that night, in Verona, the night when Irene was drunk.

She too danced, stumbling, abandoned, laughing a drunken laugh, flaunting herself on that dance floor, her dress riding up, revealing her tanned thighs, attracting stares, fanning flames. Two men behind me were laughing and talking loudly, one of them used the word puttana , whore. I didn’t have the courage to hit him, neither did I find the strength to leave, to tear myself away from that spectacle that was nothing but treachery, betrayal. I was drained of all energy, and I stood there, crushed by powerless anger, and watched Irene dance. Of course I could have gotten up, taken her hand, and dragged her off the dance floor, but she would have pushed me away, driven me off, slinging sarcastic comments at me. That night I should have turned my rage to contempt, my defeat to derision, my blindness to strength. I should have left that woman who didn’t want to be mine.

Antonio was now also having his doubts that Aurora had ever wanted to be his, he was finally realizing there was too little in life to connect them, that she would leave one day, was already moving away now, he would suffer, and was suffering already.

Perhaps a man would come and take Aurora by the waist, twirl her around and pull her to him, making her laugh in his arms. Their bodies would touch, their faces would be so close he would have to look away. It would feel as if the other man were possessing her right there in front of him, as if she were abandoning herself to pleasure. This other man would lead her away, taking her arm, and she would hold his hand. She wouldn’t even acknowledge Antonio, poor idiotic Antonio, she would have forgotten him already, and he would feel dirtied and then, over time, just dirty. He would want to be left alone to imagine those endlessly repeated moves of fingers and mouths over bodies.

The blues song had finished and the music continued with a slower jazz rhythm, perhaps a Negro spiritual. Possibly Neil Oven’s “God Is Sitting on My Knee”? Now that’s something Harry would have known.

Aurora was sweating, her skin shimmering like mica, she was radiant with life, a man came up to her and asked her to dance but she shook her head, rejected him with a little bow. She came back toward Antonio and smiled at him, and Antonio’s nightmare evaporated. Not entirely, though. Never entirely again.

ANTONIO DIDN’T LEAVE Aurora’s side for the rest of the evening. She had coupled herself to his arm, and dragged him behind her from one group to another. She introduced him every time, saying, “Antonio, my friend,” or occasionally to some people, “my husband.”

When people looked astonished she asked indignantly, “What? Didn’t you know? Well, it is very recent. Really very recent.”

Antonio tilted his head politely in silence, discomfited, intoxicated. One time Aurora said “my fiancé,” and I smiled.

It was not a well-meaning smile. Talk of fiancés and engagement reminded me of Stéphanie Poterin du Motel, Pescheux d’Herbinville’s fiancée whose favor Galois had obtained. If Pescheux and Stéphanie had been married, perhaps her deceit would have been less hurtful. Cuckolding a fiancé is proof of impatience.

My brother was engaged once. His young intended was called Virginie, she was twenty to his twenty-two, and this ritual annunciation of a forthcoming marriage was almost obscene, in fact between a Paul and a Virginie — like the book — it was pretty close to ridiculous. But I said nothing and, at Paul’s insistence, even wrote a speech for the engagement, it was the fashion then.

I reminded them that this promise did not, either in canonical law or contemporary French law, entail any legal obligation to marry. That the engaged couple could indulge in copula carnalis , carnal union, but should not forget that if consummated, it was then a case of matrimonium praesumptum , a presumption of marriage, and hence de facto marriage.

While I outlined the rules for an engagement, I reminded them that this very expression, rules of engagement, was more usually associated with warfare.

Referring also to Søren Kierkegaard, whose first name I love with that crossed-out ø , Kierkegaard who was engaged to Regina Olsen when he was twenty-six and she barely fifteen, and whose engagement ring he returned three years later. She threatened to commit suicide but eventually found consolation in one Fritz Schlegel. I concluded by saying that this was one of the rare textbook examples where an engagement had ended well, but alas, we did have to face the fact that in most cases the two parties ended up married.

The speech was an unequivocal success. Virginie burst into tears, probably the tension. Paul led me to understand that it had not been what he had meant by amusing. Our father, on the other hand, laughed.

Speech or not, Virginie broke up with Paul a year later as the wedding drew near, apologizing and saying she wasn’t “capable of such a formal commitment,” was “terrified,” and would rather “get things in perspective.” She had actually been getting things in perspective for several weeks with one Maxime, a pharmaceuticals student like herself. Paul had never been engaged since, and Virginie, who now ran a drugstore in Asnières, had also got Maxime in perspective and married an Aurélien, whom she was probably also cheating on with some other Roman emperor’s name.

The hothouse was gradually emptying. I had sat myself on a bench near the water lilies, to make notes. Aurora walked toward me, smiling. Behind her the tiny lights on the vaulted roof shone like newly polished upholstery tacks.

“Are you still translating that Jaime Montestrela? I asked my father and he said the name rang a bell. He took exile in Brazil when Salazar was in power, is that right? Did he write poetry too?”

“Yes.”

“My father couldn’t find his old copy of Prisão . Apparently it’s not bad. Hard to translate.”

I had no way of knowing. But the obituary in O Século ended with these two lines from Prisão , which was cited as his founding work:

Num raio de sol, a poeira faz palhaçadas

Mas que idiota pintou o azul entre as minhas barras?

In a ray of sunshine, dust plays the fool

But what idiot painted blue between my bars?

I had been more interested in Montestrela’s life than his writing, as if his existence were an interrogation of my own. If a dictatorship took over, would I go into exile like him, like Zweig, rather than bowing my head completely in the face of barbarity? There was a certain honesty in not being ashamed of one’s own lack of courage, in knowing oneself well enough to opt for fleeing anticipated submission, which would be as abject as the violence of the tyrant it empowers.