The Eagle's Throne

5. NICOLÁS VALDIVIA TO MARÍA DEL ROSARIO GALVÁN

I don’t know what to admire more, my dear lady, your beauty or your cruelty. Beauty has but one name, no synonym can do it justice. To what can I compare the incomparable? Please don’t think me innocent, or blind. I’ve seen many (perhaps too many?) women in the nude. Yet I’d never truly seen a woman stripped of all her clothes until I saw you.

I’m not referring to your beauty, my dear lady — I’ll discuss that in due course — but to the obscene totality of your nudity. Nor do I wish to play word games here (you think my knowledge precocious, but in reality I possess only the most meager collection of erudite references), but when I say that, I am saying that your nudity is ob-scene, off-scene, incomparable and invisible, and unfathomable if it did not materialize beyond the stage of your — and my — ordinary existence, your — our— everyday life, beyond the realm in which you dress and carry yourself in the normal world. . When you’re nude, o f-scene, ob-scene, and menacing, you are another woman and yet you are the same, do you understand me? You’re the same and yet you are transfigured, as if by taking off your clothes, my dear lady, you hinted at a final beauty, the beauty of a death that lives on eternally. A charming paradox. The way I saw you, that is how you will always be, until your death.

No, let me amend that. I should have said “Even in death” or “Only in death.” Since the day I met you, I sensed you’d give me extraordinary pleasure, the greatest sensuality I’d ever known, not comparable to anything I’d experienced or imagined before. What an undeserved reward to spy on you from the woods while in front of the one lit window in the house you removed your black cocktail dress, and then, arms stretched behind your back, unhooked your black bra in an equally dark and audacious movement, revealing those two cups filled to overflowing, and you lifted up the front part of the bra and freed your breasts with a double caress, and there you were in nothing but your black panties, which you removed as you sat on the edge of a bed that seemed — forgive me for saying so — too cold and lonely, absurdly so, and instantly you rose, my lady, in all the splendor of your sexual maturity, white all over, twice pink, once black, facing me before turning your back to me so that I could admire that ass, the ass of Venus Callipyge, adored until she sank into the earth with trembling buttocks, so I could have what you spoke of the other day, the vision of a pleasure I must conquer at a price— I laugh at myself, madam — that is very possibly beyond my reach.

Yes, that glimpse of you is all I would have needed. And I would have treasured the trifle you deigned to present to me and only me, María del Rosario, because I thought: This is for me, only for me. This midnight spectacle, unfolding before my eyes from the only lit room in a house tucked away in the middle of a pine forest, she offers it all up to me. .

Why did you do it, dear lady, what infinite cruelty, what evil compulsion drove you to make me share the vision that I believed was incomparably mine with another peeping tom, another voyeur like myself, standing a few meters in front of me, whose presence was revealed by the rustling of branches, normally an imperceptible noise but thunderous to my sensitive, lovesick ears? Why? Why that intruder into a vision that I thought belonged to me, or us, you and me alone?

Who was the other voyeur? Was he a random intruder? Does he know your habits, my dear mistress? Did he, as I did, keep a date that you had made with him, a rendezvous befitting — forgive me if I offend you — a professional courtesan, a high-class whore? Can you tell me the truth? Can you at the very least save me from being a vile, pathetic peeping tom, a madman, a deceived lover?