Bonsai

II. TANTALIA

From then on, they kept follando, shagging in borrowed houses and in motels with sheets that smelled of pisco sour. They shagged for a year and this year seemed brief to them, although it was extremely long, and after that Emilia went to live with Anita, her childhood friend.

Anita didn’t like Julio, as she considered him spoiled and depressive, but nevertheless she had to allow him in at breakfast time and even, once, perhaps to demonstrate to herself and her friend that at the core Julio did not displease her, she made him boiled eggs, which were the favorite breakfast of Julio’s, that permanent guest of the narrow and rather inhospitable apartment that Emilia and Anita shared. What bothered Anita about Julio was that he had changed her friend.

You changed my friend. She wasn’t like that.

And have you always been like that?

Like what?

Like that, the way you are.

Emilia intervened, conciliatory and understanding. What’s the purpose of being with someone if they don’t change your life? She said that, and Julio was present when she said it: that life only had purpose if you found someone who changed it, who destroyed your life. It seemed a dubious theory to Anita, but she didn’t argue. She knew that when Emilia spoke in that tone it was absurd to contradict her.

Julio and Emilia’s peculiarities weren’t only sexual (they did have them), nor emotional (these abounded), but also, so to speak, literary. On a particularly joyful night, Julio read, in a joking tone, a Rubén Darío poem that Emilia dramatized and turned banal until it became a genuinely sexual poem, a poem of explicit sex, with screams, with orgasms included. It became a habit, this reading aloud — in a low voice — every night, before shagging. They read Marcel Schwob’s Monelle’s Book, and Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which turned out to be reasonable sources of erotic inspiration. However, very soon the readings diversified significantly: they read Perec’s A Man Asleep and Things, various stories by Onetti and Raymond Carver, poems by Ted Hughes, by Tomas Tranströmer, by Armando Uribe and by Kurt Folch. They even read fragments of Nietzsche and Émile Cioran.

One fine or dark day, chance led them to the pages of the Anthology of Fantastic Literature by Borges, Bioy Casares, and Silvina Ocampo. After imagining vaults or houses without doors, after taking inventory of the traces of unnameable ghosts, they arrived at “Tantalia,” a short story by Macedonio Fernández that affected them profoundly.

“Tantalia” is the story of a couple that decides to buy a small plant and keep it as a symbol of the love that unites them. They realize too late that if the plant dies, the love that unites them will die with it. And as the love that unites them is immense and they are not willing to sacrifice it for any reason, they decide to lose the little plant in a multitude of identical little plants. Later comes the despair, the misfortune of knowing they will never be able to find it.

She and he, Macedonio’s characters, had and lost a little plant of love. Emilia and Julio — who are not exactly characters, though maybe it’s convenient to think of them as characters — have been reading before shagging for months, it is very pleasant, they think, and sometimes they think it at the same time: it is very pleasant, it is beautiful to read and talk about the reading just before tangling legs. It’s like doing exercise.

It isn’t always easy to find, in the texts, some impetus, however small, to shag, but in the end they manage to locate a paragraph or verse that, when whimsically stretched or perverted, works for them, gets them hot. (They liked that expression, to get hot, that’s why I use it. They liked it almost enough to get hot from it.)

But this time it was different:

I don’t like Macedonio Fernández anymore, Emilia said, shaping her sentences with inexplicable timidity, as she caressed Julio’s chin and mouth.

And Julio: Me neither. I enjoyed it, I liked him a lot, but not anymore. Not Macedonio.

They had read Macedonio’s story in a very low voice and talked on in a very low voice:

It’s absurd, like a dream.

Because it is a dream.

It’s stupid.

I don’t understand.

Nothing, just that it’s absurd.

That should have been the last time Emilia and Julio shagged. But they kept going, despite Anita’s ongoing complaints and the unusual disturbance Macedonio’s story had caused them. Perhaps to burnish their disappointment, or simply to change the subject, they turned exclusively to classics. They argued, as all dilettantes the world over have at some time argued, over the first chapters of Madame Bovary. They classified their friends and acquaintances as to whether they were like Charles or Emma, and they also argued over whether they themselves were comparable to the tragic Bovary family. In bed there was no problem, as they both made great efforts to seem like Emma, to be like Emma, follar like Emma, as doubtlessly, they believed, Emma shagged exceptionally well, and would have shagged even better in current conditions; in Santiago de Chile, at the end of the twentieth century, Emma would have shagged even better than in the book. The bedroom, on those nights, turned into a shielded carriage that steered itself, feeling its way through a beautiful and unreal city. The others, the people, jealously murmured details of the scandalous and fascinating romance that was taking place behind closed doors.

But they could not reach agreement on other aspects. They were not able to decide whether she acted like Emma and he like Charles, or whether it was both of them who, without meaning to, played Charles’ role. Neither of them wanted to be Charles, nobody ever wants to play Charles’ role even for a brief while.

When there were only fifty pages left, they abandoned the book, trusting, perhaps, that they could find refuge, now, in the stories of Anton Chekhov.

They did terribly with Chekhov, a little better, curiously, with Kafka, but, as they say, the damage was already done. Since their reading of “Tantalia,” the end was imminent and of course they imagined and even starred in scenes in which their ending became sadder, more beautiful, and more unexpected.

It happened with Proust. They had postponed reading Proust, due to the unmentionable secret that linked them, separately, to the reading — or to the lack of reading — of In Search of Lost Time. They both had to pretend that their mutual read was, strictly speaking, a reread they had yearned for, so that when they arrived at one of the numerous passages that seemed particularly memorable they changed their tone of voice or gazed at each other to elicit emotion, simulating the greatest intimacy. Also, Julio, on one occasion, allowed himself to declare that he only now truly felt that he was reading Proust, and Emilia answered with a subtle and disconsolate squeeze of the hand.

Since they were intelligent, they did not slow for the episodes they knew to be famous: the world was moved by this, I will be moved by that. Before starting to read, as a precautionary measure, they had agreed on how hard it was for a reader of In Search of Lost Time to recapitulate the reading experience: it’s one of those books that still seems pending after reading it, said Emilia. It’s one of those books that we will reread forever, said Julio.

They stopped on page 372 of Swann’s Way, specifically the following sentence:

Knowledge of a thing cannot impede it; but at least we have the things we discover, if not in our hands, at least in thought, and there they are at our disposal, which inspires us to the illusory hope of enjoying a kind of dominion over them.

It is possible but would perhaps be abusive to relate this excerpt to the story of Julio and Emilia. It would be abusive, as Proust’s novel is riddled with excerpts like this one. And also because there are pages left, because this story continues.

Or does not continue.

The story of Julio and Emilia continues but does not go on.

It will end some years later, with Emilia’s death; Julio, who does not die, who will not die, who has not died, continues but decides not to go on. The same for Emilia: for now she decides not to go on, but she continues. In a few years she will no longer continue nor go on.

Knowledge of a thing cannot impede it, but there are illusory hopes, and this story, which is becoming a story of illusory hopes, goes on like this:

They both knew that, as they say, the end was already written, the end of them, of the sad young people who read novels together, who wake up with books lost between the blankets, who smoke a lot of marijuana and listen to songs that are not the same ones they separately prefer (of Ella Fitzgerald’s, for example: they are aware that at that age it is still acceptable to have recently discovered Ella Fitzgerald). They both harbor the fantasy of at least finishing Proust, of stretching the cord through seven volumes and for the last word (the word “time”) to also be the last word foreseen between them. Their reading lasts, lamentably, little more than a month, at a pace of ten pages a day. They stopped on page 373, and, from then on, the book stayed open.