Skylight

29

Nothing was said about the night when Justina had revealed herself naked to her husband for the first time. Caetano kept quiet out of cowardice, and Justina out of pride. All that remained was a still-greater coldness between them. After leaving work, Caetano spent the rest of the night and the following morning in someone else’s bed. He returned home only at lunchtime, after which he slept all afternoon. They kept the bare essentials of communication as brief and monosyllabic as possible. Their mutual dislike of each other had never been so complete. Caetano avoided all contact with his wife, as if he feared she might suddenly appear before him again stark naked. Justina, on the other hand, eyed him with scorn, almost insolence. He felt the weight of that look and seethed with impotent rage. He knew that many men beat their wives, and that some husbands and wives found this natural. He knew that, for many men, this was considered a proof of their virility, just as some believed that catching a venereal disease was a sign of manliness. However, although he could boast of having been afflicted by various forms of the French disease, he could not pride himself on ever having beaten his wife, not as a matter of principle, as he would like to have claimed, but, again, out of cowardice. He was intimidated by Justina’s serenity, whose calm surface he had seen crack only on that one occasion and in a way that filled him with shame. The vision returned to him over and over of that scrawny, naked figure and that strange sobbing laughter. The sheer unexpectedness of his wife’s reaction had only increased his feeling of inferiority in relation to her, which is why he avoided her, spent as little time as possible at home and shrank from lying beside her in bed. There was another reason too. He knew that if he lay down with her in the same bed, he would feel impelled to have sex with her. When he first became aware of this impulse, he felt frightened. He tried to suppress it, called himself an idiot, listed all the reasons that should make such a feeling impossible: her graceless body, the many times she had rejected him, her scorn. But however many reasons he added to the list, his desire only grew in intensity. He tried to quench that desire elsewhere, but never succeeded. He would arrive home drained, unsteady and hollow-eyed, but he just had to smell the peculiar smell of Justina’s body for a wave of desire to wash over his innermost being. It was as if he had emerged from a long period of sexual abstinence only to find a woman lying within arm’s reach. When he went to bed after lunch, even the warmth of the sheets was a torment to him. His eyes would be drawn to some item of clothing his wife had left draped over a chair. In his mind’s eye, he endowed that empty dress, that folded stocking, with the shape and motion of a living body, of a tense, vibrant leg. His imagination constructed perfect forms that bore no relation to reality. And if, at that moment, Justina came into the room, he had to draw on every ounce of willpower not to leap out of bed and drag her onto it. He was filled with a base sensuality. He had the kind of erotic dreams that had besieged him as an adolescent. He exhausted his various temporary lovers and heaped insults on them because they could not assuage his longings. Desire, like a bothersome fly, constantly buzzed about him. Just as a moth, with one side of its body paralyzed by the light, flies in ever-diminishing circles until it’s burned by the flame, so he circled about his wife, attracted by her smell, by her gaunt, unlovely shape.

Justina had no clue as to the effect her presence had on her husband. She noticed that he was unusually nervous and excitable, but attributed this to her redoubled scorn. Like someone toying with a dangerous animal and perfectly aware of the risks she is running, but too consumed with curiosity to flee, Justina wanted to see just how much her husband could take. She wanted to gauge the depth and breadth of his cowardice. She shifted from silent disdain to becoming almost talkative, so that she might have more opportunities to reveal her disdain. In every word, in every inflection of her voice, she was showing her husband how unworthy she considered him. Caetano reacted in a way she could not have foreseen. He had become a masochist. All her insults, all her blows to his pride as a man and a husband, provoked in him new paroxysms of desire. Justina, all unwitting, was playing with fire.

One night, unable to resist any longer, Caetano raced home after leaving work. He completely forgot that he had arranged to meet someone else, not that the woman expecting him could possibly have satisfied him. Like a madman who could still remember the place where reason would be restored to him, he hurried home. He hailed a passing taxi and promised the driver a fat tip if he got him to his destination quickly. The taxi bounded along the deserted streets and covered the short distance in no time at all. The tip was generous, even extravagant. As he entered the apartment, Caetano suddenly remembered the humiliation he had suffered the last time he had come home at that hour. In a brief moment of lucidity, he understood what he was going to do and feared the consequences. Then he heard Justina’s regular breathing, felt the warmth of the room, touched the body lying stretched out on the bed, and a sexual frenzy rose in him like a wave out of the depths of the sea.

The room lay in darkness. Justina recognized her husband instantly. Still half immersed in sleep, she tried frantically to defend herself, but he was stronger than she and held her pinned to the mattress. She lay there motionless, detached, unable to react, as if caught up in one of those nightmares in which some monstrous Thing, strange and horrible, falls upon us. She finally managed to free one arm and groped in the darkness for the bedside lamp. When she turned it on, she saw her husband. His face terrified her: the bulging eyes, the more than usually pendulous lower lip, the red, perspiring face, the animal grimace. The only reason Justina did not cry out was that her throat was so tight with terror she could not utter a single sound. Suddenly Caetano’s mask-like visage contracted in such a way as to become unrecognizable. It was the face of an utterly alien creature, that of a man plucked from a prehistoric animality, a wild beast in human form.

Then, eyes glinting coldly, Justina spat in his face. Stunned and still trembling, Caetano looked at her. He could not quite understand what had happened. He ran his hand over his face and looked at the still-warm saliva stuck to his fingers. He spread his fingers wide and saw how the saliva formed shining threads between them, threads that grew thinner and thinner until they broke. Then Caetano understood, finally understood. It was like the whiplash too far that causes the tame tiger to rise up on its back legs, claws extended, teeth bared. Justina closed her eyes and waited. Her husband still did not move. Fearfully, she half opened her eyes and immediately felt him begin thrusting away at her again. She tried to slide out from under him, but his body had hers in its grip. She tried to remain cold, as she had the first time, but that coldness had been quite natural, not an act of will. Now willpower alone could maintain that coldness, but her will had begun to weaken. Powerful forces that had lain dormant until then were stirring inside her, breaking over her like fast-running waves. A kind of bright light flickered on and off inside her head. She gave an inarticulate groan. Her will was drowning in the deep well of instinct. For a moment it managed to keep its head above water, before flailing helplessly about and vanishing. Like a thing possessed, Justina responded to her husband’s embrace. Her thin body was barely visible beneath his. She trembled and writhed, as mad with desire as he, subject to the same blind instinct. A simultaneous loud moan emerged from both and their bodies rolled about on the bed, entwined, pulsating.

Then, propelled apart by a mutual feeling of repugnance, they separated and lay in silence on their respective sides of the bed. Caetano’s heavy breathing drowned out Justina’s, whose breathing now came in the form of a few final shudders.

A void opened up in Justina’s mind. Her limbs felt limp and painful. The stink of her husband’s body had impregnated her skin. Sweat dripped from her armpits, and a profound lassitude prevented her from moving. She seemed still to feel the weight of her husband on top of her. She tentatively reached out an arm and switched off the bedside lamp. Caetano’s breathing gradually grew more regular. Sated, he slipped into sleep. Justina was left alone. The shuddering stopped, her tiredness diminished. Only her mind remained empty of thoughts. Very slowly, small scraps of ideas began to appear. They followed one on the other, fragmentary, inconclusive, with no connecting thread. Justina tried to think about what had happened, tried to grab hold of one of those fleeting ideas, which appeared and disappeared like beans in a boiling pot of water that rise to the surface only to vanish at once. It was still too soon for coherent thought; instead, she was suddenly gripped by horror. What had happened only minutes before seemed to her so absurd she thought she must have dreamed it. However, her bruised body and a strange sense of indefinable plenitude in certain parts of her anatomy gave the lie to that. It was then, and only then, that she was struck, or allowed herself to be struck, by the full horror of it all.

She did not sleep for what remained of the night. She stared into the darkness, disoriented, unable to think. She had a vague sense that her relationship with her husband had undergone a change. It was as if she had passed from the shadows into the blinding glare of day, preventing her from seeing the surrounding objects except as blurred, indeterminate shapes. She heard the clock strike each and every hour. She observed the withdrawal of night and the approach of morning. Bluish reflections began to seep into the room. The door that opened onto the corridor glowed opalescent in the dim light. With the coming of morning the building filled with vague sounds. Caetano was sleeping, lying on his back, one leg uncovered as far as the groin, a soft, white leg, like the belly of a fish.

Rebelling against the torpor in her limbs, Justina sat up and remained sitting, back bent, head hanging. Her whole body hurt. She slid out of bed very cautiously so as not to wake her husband, put on her dressing gown and left the room. She still could not string two ideas together, but her involuntary thought processes, the ones that evolve and develop independent of the will, were nevertheless beginning to work.

It took only a matter of seconds for Justina to reach the bathroom and another moment for her to look at herself in the mirror. She looked and did not recognize her own image. The face before her either did not belong to her or had remained hidden until then. The dark shadows encircling her eyes made them seem still duller. Her cheeks were hollow. Her unruly hair was a reminder of the night’s agitation. None of this, however, was new to her: whenever her diabetes worsened, the mirror showed her just that face. What was different was the expression. She should be indignant and yet she was calm, she should feel offended and yet she felt as if she had pardoned an insult.

She sat down on a bench in the enclosed balcony. The sun was already slanting in through the topmost panes, striping the wall with a sliver of pink light that gradually grew longer and brighter. In the fresh morning air she could hear the twitter of passing swallows. On an impulse she went back into the bedroom. Her husband had not moved. He was sleeping, his mouth open, his teeth very white in his beard-blackened face. She crept slowly toward the bed and bent over him. Those inert features bore only a remote resemblance to the contorted face she had seen earlier. She remembered that she had spat in that face, and she felt afraid, a fear that made her draw back. Caetano stirred slightly. The sheet covering him slipped from his bent leg and left his penis exposed to view. A wave of nausea rose from Justina’s stomach. She fled the room. Only then did the last knot binding up her thoughts come undone. As if trying to make up for lost time, her brain whirred furiously into action until it fixed on one obsessive thought: “What am I going to do? What am I going to do?”

She felt neither scorn nor indifference now, only hatred. She hated her husband and she hated herself. She knew that she had given herself to him with the same uninhibited frenzy with which he had possessed her. She took a few indecisive steps about the kitchen, as if lost in a labyrinth. Wherever she turned she met with closed doors and dead ends. Had she been able to remain indifferent, she could have seen herself as the victim of brute force. She knew that, as a married woman, she had no right to refuse, but pure passivity would have been a way of refusing. She could have allowed herself to be possessed without surrendering herself, but she had surrendered herself, and her husband had seen that she had; he would consider this a victory and would behave like a victor. He would impose what laws he liked and laugh in her face when she tried to rebel. A moment’s madness, and the work of years had been destroyed. A moment’s blindness, and strength had become weakness.

She must think about what she should do, and think quickly before he woke up. Think before it was too late. Think while her hatred was still raw and bleeding. She had given in once and did not want to give in again. However, the memory of what she had felt that night began to trouble her. Until then, she had never scaled the highest peak of pleasure. Even when she used to have normal sexual relations with her husband, she had never experienced the kind of intensity of sensation that makes one both fear and desire madness. She had never been thrown, as then, into the maelstrom of pleasure, with all ties broken, all frontiers crossed. What for other women was an ascent into the heavens was, for her, a fall.

The sound of the doorbell interrupted her thoughts. She ran on tiptoe to the door. She paid the milkman and returned to the kitchen. Her husband had still not woken up.

The situation was clear to her now. It was a choice between pleasure and power. If she kept silent, she would be accepting defeat in exchange for other such moments, always assuming her husband was prepared to grant them to her. If she spoke, she ran the risk of having him throw her impassioned response back in her face. It was easy enough to set out those two alternatives, but rather harder to choose between them. Shortly before, she had felt nausea and disgust, but now those moments of sexual ecstasy roared inside her like the sea inside a shell. Speaking out would mean that last night’s experience would never be repeated. Saying nothing would mean subjecting herself to whatever conditions her husband chose to impose on her. Justina moved between those two poles — newly awoken desire and the desire to be in control. One excluded the other. Which to choose? And what scope did she have to make such a choice? If she chose control, how could she resist desire now that she had experienced it? If she chose submission, how could she bear submitting to a man she despised?

The Sunday-morning sun flooded in through the window like a river of light. From where she was sitting, Justina could see the small, raggedy white clouds chasing across the blue sky. Good weather. Bright skies. Spring.

From the bedroom came a mumbling sound. The bed creaked. Justina shuddered and felt her face flush scarlet. The line of thought she had been carefully drawing snapped. She sat paralyzed, waiting. The creaking continued. She went to the bedroom and peered around the door: her husband was sitting there, eyes open. He saw her. There was no going back. She entered in silence. Caetano looked at her in silence. Justina didn’t know what to say. All her powers of reasoning had abandoned her. Her husband smiled. She did not have time to find out what that smile meant. Almost without realizing she was speaking, she said:

“Just pretend that nothing happened last night, and I’ll do the same.”

The smile vanished from Caetano’s lips. A deep frown line appeared between his eyebrows.

“Perhaps that won’t be possible,” he answered.

“You know plenty of other women. You can amuse yourself with them.”

“And what if I demand my conjugal rights?”

“I couldn’t refuse you, but you’d soon grow weary of that.”

“I see — at least I think I do. How do you explain your behavior last night, then?”

“If you had an ounce of dignity, you wouldn’t ask such a question! Have you forgotten that I spat in your face?”

The expression on Caetano’s face hardened. His hands, resting on the mattress, clenched. He seemed about to stand up, but stayed where he was. In a slow, sarcastic voice, he said:

“Ah, yes, I’d forgotten about that. I remember now, though, but I also remember that you only spat in my face once…”

Justina saw what he was driving at and said nothing.

“Come on, answer!”

“No, I feel ashamed for you and for me.”

“What about me? I’ve had to suffer years of being despised by you.”

“You deserve it.”

“Who are you to despise me?”

“No one, but I do.”

“Why?”

“I began to despise you as soon as I knew you, and I only really knew you once we were married. You’re depraved, you are.”

Caetano shrugged impatiently:

“You’re just jealous.”

“Jealous? Me? Don’t make me laugh! You can only feel jealous of someone you love, and I don’t love you. I may have once, but it didn’t last. When my daughter was ill, did you care? You spent all your time with your fancy women!”

“Now you’re talking nonsense!”

“If that’s what you think, fine. I just want you to know that what happened last night won’t happen again.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“You called me depraved. Maybe I am, but what if, for some reason, I should start taking an interest in you again?”

“Don’t bother. Besides, it’s been years since you thought of me as a woman.”

“You sound almost sorry.”

Justina did not respond. Her husband was eyeing her malevolently:

“Are you sorry?”

“No! If I was, I’d be sinking as low as all those other women you know!”

“Going with them, of course, is less convenient. With you, I just have to reach out and grab you. I am your husband after all.”

“Unfortunately for me.”

“Now you’re being nasty. Just because I didn’t react when you spat at me doesn’t mean I’m prepared to put up with all your back talk.”

“You don’t frighten me. You threatened to beat me to a pulp once, and I didn’t so much as turn a hair.”

“Don’t provoke me.”

“Like I said, you don’t frighten me!”

“Justina!”

She had moved closer as she spoke. She was standing by the bed, looking down at her husband. He reached out his right arm and caught her by the wrist. He didn’t pull her toward him, but held her firm. Justina felt a tremor run through her whole body. Her knees were shaking as if they were about to buckle beneath her. Caetano said in a hoarse voice:

“You’re right… I am depraved. I know you don’t love me, but ever since I saw you naked the other night, I’ve been mad for you, do you hear, mad. If I hadn’t come home last night, I would have died!”

It wasn’t so much his words as the tone in which he said them that troubled Justina. Feeling her husband drawing her toward him, she desperately tried to free herself from his grip:

“Let me go!”

What little strength she had was ebbing away. She could feel herself being drawn downward, feel her own pulse pounding in her ears. Then her eyes fell on the photograph of her daughter and her stubbornly sweet smile. She pushed hard against the edge of the bed, resisting his efforts to pull her down, and when she saw that he was about to grab her with his other hand, she squirmed around and bit the fingers gripping her. Caetano let out a scream and released his grip.

She ran into the kitchen. She understood now, understood why he had acted as he did. If she hadn’t given in to that impulse to reveal herself naked to her husband, none of this would have happened. The Justina she was today would be the same Justina she had been yesterday. She had spoken out, but what had she gained? Only the certain knowledge that everything had changed. It was pure chance that she hadn’t given in this time. The photo of her daughter would have been of little help if the conversation with her husband earlier hadn’t given her the strength to resist; that, of course, and what had happened only a few hours before… “Which means that if, instead of trying to have sex with me so soon afterward, he’d allowed a day or two to pass and then tried again, I probably wouldn’t have resisted…”

Justina was busy making lunch, her thoughts elsewhere. And what she was thinking was this: “He’s depraved, a lecher, which is why I’ve always despised him. He’s still depraved, which is why I still despise him. And yet, even though I despise him, I gave in to him, and I know that, given the opportunity, I’d do the same again. Is that a marriage? Must I conclude, then, that after all these years I am just as depraved as he? If I loved him, I wouldn’t use a word like ‘depraved.’ I would find it all perfectly natural and would always give myself to him as I did last night. But is it possible not to love a man and still feel what I felt? I don’t love him and yet he drove me mad with pleasure. Is it the same for other people? Do they feel nothing but loathing and pleasure? And what about love? Can pure animal lust give you the kind of pleasure you should only get from love? Or is love just lust in disguise?”

“Justina! I’m getting up. Where are my pajamas?”

Getting up? Already? Was he planning to spend all morning with her? Perhaps he was going out… She went into the bedroom, opened the wardrobe and handed him his pajamas. He took them from her without a word. Justina didn’t even look at him. Deep down, she still despised him, despised him more and more, but she lacked the courage to look him in the face. She was trembling when she returned to the kitchen. “I’m afraid, afraid of him! Me! If someone had told me yesterday that one day I would feel afraid of him, I would have laughed.”

Hands in his pockets, slippers flapping, Caetano slouched through the kitchen on his way to the bathroom. His wife breathed again: she had feared he might speak to her and she was not prepared for that.

In the bathroom, Caetano was whistling a tuneful fado. He stood in front of the mirror and interrupted his whistling in order to run his hand over his rough beard. Then, while he was preparing his razor, he began again. He lathered up his face and again stopped whistling to concentrate on his shaving. He had nearly finished when he heard his wife’s voice outside the closed door:

“Your coffee’s ready.”

“All right, coming.”

Caetano didn’t care two hoots about the conversation he’d had with his wife. He knew he had won. A bit of resistance on her part would just make things all the more interesting. Dona Justina was going to have to pay, however reluctantly, for the shabby way she’d treated him. He had caught her out. Why had it never occurred to him before that sex would be the best way to humiliate her? Her scorn and pride lay shattered and broken! And the slut had enjoyed it too! True, she’d spat in his face, but he’d make her pay for that as well. He’d do the same to her one day, possibly more than once. Yes, next time she began moaning and writhing around, he’d give her a taste of her own medicine — take that! How would she react, he wondered. She might get angry… but only afterward.

Caetano felt very pleased with himself. Even the pimples on his neck didn’t burst when he ran the razor over them. He was feeling calmer now. She may have had him under her thumb before, but now he had her in the palm of his hand. Even if his old feelings of repugnance returned, as they were bound to, he would not deny her his services as a husband.

The word “services” made him smile: “Services, eh? What a joke!”

He washed, using a lavish amount of soap and water. While he was combing his hair, he was thinking: “What a fool I’ve been. Anyone could have seen that the anonymous letter wasn’t going to work…”

He stopped, slowly opened the window and peered out. It came as no surprise to him to see Lídia; in fact, that’s why he’d stopped what he was doing. Lídia was looking down at something and smiling. Caetano followed her gaze, and in the yard belonging to the ground-floor apartment where the cobbler and his wife lived, he saw their lodger chasing after a chicken while Silvestre, leaning against the wall with a cigarette in his mouth, was slapping his thighs and laughing:

“If you don’t catch her, Abel, it means no soup for lunch!”

Lídia laughed too. Abel looked up and smiled:

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t see you there. Would you like to give me a hand?”

“No, I’d only make matters worse.”

“Well, it’s not very kind of you to laugh at my misfortunes!”

“I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at the chicken—” She broke off to greet both men. “Good morning, Senhor Silvestre! Good morning, Senhor…”

“Abel,” said the young man. “No need to bother with surnames, you’re too far away for formal introductions.”

Safe in a corner, the chicken was ruffling its feathers and clucking.

“She’s making fun of you,” said Silvestre.

“Really? Well, I’m going to make her give that lady up there another good laugh.”

Caetano preferred not to hear any more. He closed the window. The chicken resumed its agitated clucking. Smiling, Caetano sat down on the toilet seat while he put his thoughts in order: “That first letter may not have worked, but this one will…” He wagged his finger at the window in Lídia’s direction and murmured:

“I’m going to have my revenge on you too, or my name’s not Caetano.”