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 bee
n 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.
“Do you really want to know?” she said in a lifeless voice. Did he really want to know, after so long? The words of both of them, broken by their laboured breathing, died out into silence.
“Now I understand why you gave me the Cervantes text,” said Rovena when they were calm again.
He had not worked it out so precisely, he said. He had been drawn to the text first out of curiosity and its resemblance to the Loreley. The other things came later.
“You told me the text contained a mystery, and that you had found the key to its meaning.”
“I don’t think I’m the only one. Would you like to hear about it? Aren’t you tired?”
“Don’t back out,” she said. “You told me that the hour after midnight would be the same as it has always been.”
“That’s true. I promised.”
She took a deep breath.
“The hour when a prostitute tells her interested client about her orphaned childhood, drunken father, insane mother.”
“That’s enough,” he interrupted, clapping his hand over her mouth. He felt her lips under his palm, gently squeezed into a kiss, and his heart leaped.
Chapter Ten
That same night. The occult text.
Slowly he began to explain his interpretation of the text. Rarely had such a great deception been portrayed in such a covert manner. Treachery triumphed. All the characters were waiting their turn to deceive or be deceived. Camilla, the young bride, is first deceived by Anselmo, her own husband who puts her to the test, and then by Lothario, their house guest, who agrees to play the game. Then Lothario, now Camilla’s lover, deceives her again by failing to confess to her how the story started.
Anselmo, with his mania for putting his wife to the test, is deceived by both Camilla and Lothario, who become lovers behind his back.
Truth is violated to such an extent that when Lothario acts honestly he is vilified for treachery, and when he becomes a deceiver he is revered as a saint. The same goes for Camilla. First she is suspected of being inconstant when she is not, and then she is praised for her sanctity when she yields.
“The only character in the story who deceives without being deceived is Lothario. Do you agree with that?”
Rovena did not know what to say.
“Or so it seems,” continued Besfort. “But probably the opposite is true. In all likelihood, he is the only one who is a victim of deceit.”
He went on to explain that the most mysterious passage in the tale describes the morning before dawn when Lothario sees a stranger coming out of Anselmo’s house. Lothario jumps to the conclusion that Camilla has a lover. Did she find him herself? Or did Anselmo plant him there, to repeat his test? Curiously, Cervantes suggests only the first possibility. He does not raise the second at all, although it is just as likely, if not more so.
Any careful reader must ask a serious question. What is Lothario doing outside Anselmo’s house before dawn? Why is he on the lookout? What does he suspect?
This question turns the entire text inside out, and here is the new interpretation.
Anselmo and Camilla, after they are engaged or married, discover the miracle of sex. Their passion for each other is such that they turn the marital bed, so often derided as a desert of tedium, into an altar to the boundlessness of desire. With the passage of time their lusts become ever more refined, pushing them towards an ultimate liberation. They try every kind of sex they have ever heard of or imagined. They talk dirty, they perform the most shameful acts. They know no limits. As they eat dinner with friends and go to market or Sunday mass, they think of nothing but the hour after dinner, when she comes with a candle in her hand to the bed where he is waiting for her, his desire hotter than the melting wax. In sombre, mighty Spain, bristling with cathedrals, with its protocols of the Inquisition and its spies, these two are set apart. They discover a ki
nd of passion that few have ever known, which transports them every night to unknown regions. The barriers of shame fall one after another, and the couple break through inhibitions and taboos, until one day they stand before the gateway of decision. “Would you like to try it with someone else?” A long silence. Then the answer, “Why not?” And then the question, “What about you?” and silence again. And then the reply, “To tell the truth, yes.”
And so, trembling with terror and lust, they embark on the great trial. Everything about it is unnerving. Especially the selection of their partner and victim. First they suggest Lothario, but they both reject this choice as too reckless. He is too close a friend. They think of others, but they are no good either. The first is bald, the second has some other flaw, the third isn’t serious and the fourth not man enough. Camilla notices with delight that her husband is not deviously choosing someone lesser than himself. This makes it easier for them to come back to Lothario. Camilla says candidly that he fits the bill. Anselmo makes no objection. He suits them both. In short, he excites them both.
And so events take their course. But the difference is that Anselmo never leaves the house. Excitedly, he watches Camilla making herself ready for another man. He senses her impatience, which matches his own. Then, from the place where he hides, with Camilla’s knowledge, he observes everything: Lothario’s declaration of love, Camilla’s bowed head. He watches them draw close and kiss for the first time. Then from another vantage point he watches them go to the bed and undress. He hears Camilla’s familiar cry, and sees her pale legs carelessly splayed after their lovemaking. He can hardly wait for the other man to leave, so that he can make love to his wife.