While the Women are Sleeping

one night of love

My sex life with my wife, Marta, is most unsatisfactory. My wife is neither very lascivious nor very imaginative, she never whispers sweet nothings and usually yawns whenever I happen to be in the mood. That’s why I occasionally go to prostitutes, but even they have grown increasingly nervous as well as increasingly expensive, and monotonous too, not to mention unenthusiastic. I would much prefer it if my wife, Marta, were more lascivious and imaginative and that I could be satisfied with her alone. I was happy on the one night when she did satisfy me.

Among the things my father left me when he died is a packet of letters that still gives off a faint whiff of cologne. I don’t believe the sender actually perfumed the letter herself, but rather, I assume that, at some point in his life, my father kept the letters near a bottle of cologne that one day spilled onto them. You can still see the stain, and so the smell is clearly that of the cologne my father both used and didn’t use (given that the contents were spilled), and not that of the woman who sent him the letters. Moreover, the smell is characteristic of him, a smell I knew very well, that never changed and which I’ve never forgotten, the same throughout my childhood and adolescence and a good part of my youth, an age in which I am still installed or have not yet abandoned. That is why, before age diminished my interest in things amorous or passionate, I decided to read the letters he bequeathed to me and about which, up until then, I had felt no curiosity at all.

The letters were written by a woman who was and still is called Mercedes. She wrote in black ink on blue paper. Her handwriting is large and maternal, made with rapid strokes of the pen, as if she no longer aspired to making an impression, doubtless aware that she had already caused an impression that would last forever. It’s as if the letters had been written by someone who had already died when she wrote them, like letters from beyond the grave. I can’t help thinking that it was some kind of game, one of those games of which children and lovers are so fond, and that consist basically in pretending to be what you’re not, or, put another way, in giving each other fictitious names and creating fictitious lives, afraid perhaps (this applies to lovers, not children) that their overpowering feelings will destroy them if they admit that they, with their real lives and names, are the people having those feelings. It’s a way of blunting the most passionate and most intense of emotions, pretending that the whole thing is happening to someone else; it’s also the best way of observing it, of being an aware spectator. Yes, experiencing it and, at the same time, being aware of it.

The woman who signed herself Mercedes had opted for the fiction of sending her love to my father after she had already died, and so convinced was she of the eternal place and time she occupied while writing them (or so sure that the addressee would accept this convention) that she appeared entirely unconcerned by the fact that she had to entrust her envelopes to the post-box or that they bore the normal stamps and postmarks of the city of Gijón. They were all dated, and the only thing missing was a return address, but that is more or less obligatory in any semi-clandestine affair (the letters all belong to the period of my father’s widowhood, but he never spoke to me of this late passion). Nor is there anything unusual about the existence of this correspondence — though I have no idea whether my father replied in the usual way — for there is nothing more commonplace than widowers in sexual thrall to bold, fiery (or disillusioned) women. The declarations, promises, demands, reminiscences, outbursts, protests, exclamations and obscenities (especially obscenities) that fill these letters are conventional enough and remarkable less for their style than for their audacity. None of this would be of any interest if, only a few days after deciding to open the packet and peruse the blue sheets with rather more equanimity than shock, I myself had not received a letter from that woman called Mercedes, of whom I couldn’t say: She’s still alive, because she seems to have been dead from the start.

Her letter was very proper, and she didn’t presume a relationship with me simply because she had once been on intimate terms with my father, nor was she so vulgar as to translate her love for the father, now that he was dead, into an unhealthy love for his son, who was and is still alive and was and is still me. Seemingly completely unembarrassed that I should know about their relationship, she restricted herself to setting before me an anxiety, a complaint and a demand for the presence of her lover, who, despite his repeated promises, had still not joined her six months after his death: he had failed to meet her in the place or perhaps I should say time agreed. This, in her view, could be put down to one of two reasons: to a sudden, last-minute cooling of his affections at the moment of death that would have caused the deceased to break his promise, or to his having been buried and not cremated (as he had requested), and which — according to Mercedes, who spoke of this as if it were the most natural thing in the world — could prevent or obstruct their eschatological meeting or reunion.

It was true that despite my fathers request to be cremated, although he had not insisted on it (perhaps because he made this request only at the end, when his willpower was weakened), he had nevertheless been buried alongside my mother, because there was space for him in the family vault, and Marta and I felt it was the appropriate, sensible, convenient thing to do. Mercedes’ letter seemed to me a joke in the very worst taste. I threw it in the rubbish bin and was even tempted to do the same with the old letters too. Like them, the new envelope bore fresh stamps and was postmarked in Gijón. It didn’t smell of anything though. I wasn’t prepared to disinter my father’s remains merely in order to set fire to them.

The next letter arrived soon afterwards, and in it, Mercedes, as if she could read my thoughts, begged me to cremate my father because she could not go on living (that’s what she said, go on living) in that state of uncertainty. Rather than continue waiting for him for all eternity, possibly in vain, she would prefer to know that my father had decided not to rejoin her. In this letter, she still addressed me with the formal usted. I can’t deny that I was fleetingly moved (that is, while I was reading the letter, not afterwards), but the conspicuous Asturias postmark was too prosaic for me to be able to see it as anything but a macabre joke. The second letter took its place in the rubbish bin as well. My wife, Marta, saw me tearing it up and asked:

‘What is it that’s annoyed you so much?’ My gestures must have been somewhat violent. ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said and carefully gathered up the pieces so that she wouldn’t be able to put them back together again.

I waited for a third letter, which, precisely because I did wait for it, took longer than expected to arrive or perhaps time spent waiting just seems longer. It was quite different from the previous letters and resembled those my father used to receive. Mercedes addressed me now with the familiar tu, and offered me her body, if not her soul. ‘You can do what you like with me,’ she said, ‘whatever you can imagine or wouldn’t even dare to imagine doing to someone else. If you grant my plea to disinter and cremate your father and allow him to rejoin me, you will never forget me for as long as you live, not even when you die, because I will gobble you up, and you will gobble me up.’ I believe I blushed when I read this for the first time, and for a fraction of a second I toyed with the idea of going straight to Gijón to offer myself to her (I’m drawn to the weird and the dirty in sex). But then I immediately thought: ‘How absurd. I don’t even know her last name.’ That third letter, however, did not end up in the rubbish bin. I still have it hidden away.

It was about then that Marta underwent a change of attitude. I don’t mean that, from one day to the next, she stopped yawning and became a woman of unbridled passion, but she did begin to show a greater interest in and curiosity about me and my no longer very young body, as if she sensed an infidelity on my part and was on the alert, or as if she herself had been unfaithful and wanted to find out if some newly discovered technique might be possible with me as well.

‘Come here,’ she would say sometimes, and she had never made such overtures to me before. Or she would utter a few words, for example: ‘Yes, yes, now.’

The third letter that had promised so much had left me waiting for a fourth letter even more anxiously than the second irritating letter had left me waiting for the third. But no fourth letter arrived, and I realised that I was beginning to wait for the post each day with growing impatience. I noticed that my heart turned over whenever an envelope arrived bearing no return address, and then my eyes would glance rapidly at the postmark, to see if it was from Gijón. But no one ever writes from Gijón.

Months passed, and on All Souls’ Day, Marta and I took flowers to my parents’ grave, in which my grandparents and my sister are also buried.

‘What will happen to us, do you think?’ I said to Marta, as we breathed in the clean cemetery air from a bench close to our family vault. I was smoking a cigarette, and she was studying her nails, holding her spread fingers some distance from her, like someone urging a crowd to remain calm. ‘I mean, when we die. There’s no room here now.’

‘The things you think about.’

I gazed off into the distance in order to give myself an appropriately dreamy air that would justify what I was about to say, and I said:

‘I’d like to be buried. Burial is more suggestive of repose than cremation. My father wanted to be cremated, do you remember, and we didn’t do what he wanted. We should have, I think. It would bother me to think that my wish to be buried were ignored. What do you think? I’m thinking we ought to disinter him. That way, there’d be room for me when I die. You could go to your parents’ vault.’

‘Let’s get out of here. You’re beginning to give me the creeps.’

We set off among the graves, towards the exit. It was sunny. But we had only gone a few steps, when I stopped, looked at the tip of my cigarette and said:

‘Don’t you think we should cremate him?’

‘Do what you like, but let’s get out of here.’

I threw down my cigarette and buried it in the ground with my foot.

Marta refused to attend the ceremony, an emotionless affair of which I was the sole witness. My father’s remains went from being vaguely recognisable in his coffin to being entirely unrecognisable in an urn. It didn’t seem to me necessary to scatter the ashes and, besides, that’s not allowed.

When I got home, late, I felt quite depressed; I sat down in my armchair without taking off my coat or turning on the light and stayed there, waiting, musing, thinking, perhaps recovering from the responsibility and the effort of having done something I should have done some time ago, of having fulfilled a wish (someone else’s wish), while, in the background, I could hear distant sounds of Marta taking a shower. After a while, my wife, Marta, emerged from the bathroom wearing her pink robe and with her hair still wet. She was lit from behind by the light from the still steamy bathroom. She sat down on the floor at my feet and rested her damp head on my lap. After a few seconds, I said:

‘Shouldn’t you dry yourself off? You’re making my coat and trousers wet.’

‘I’m going to make all of you wet,’ she said and revealed that she was naked beneath her bathrobe. We were both now lit by the distant light from the bathroom.

That night, I was happy because my wife, Marta, was both lascivious and imaginative, whispering sweet nothings to me, and she didn’t yawn once, in short, I was satisfied with her alone. I’ll never forget that. It hasn’t happened since. It was a night of love. No, it hasn’t happened again.

A few days later, I received the long-awaited fourth letter. I still haven’t dared to open it, and sometimes I feel tempted simply to tear it up and never read it. This is partly because I think I know and fear what the letter will say; unlike the previous three addressed to me, it smells slightly of cologne, a cologne I have not forgotten and that I know well. I haven’t experienced another night of love, which is why, precisely because it hasn’t happened again, I sometimes have the odd sense that, on that one night, I betrayed my father or that my wife, Marta, betrayed me with him (perhaps because we gave each other fictitious names and created lives that were not our own), although the truth is that on that night, in our apartment, in the dark, lying on her bathrobe, only Marta and I were there. Just Marta and me.

I haven’t experienced another night of love nor have I ever again felt that she alone could satisfy me, and so I still go to prostitutes, who are increasingly expensive and increasingly nervous. Perhaps I should try transvestites. Not that I really care, it doesn’t worry me and won’t last, although it might for a while. Sometimes I find myself thinking that, when the time comes, it would be easiest and most convenient if Marta were to die first, because that way I could bury her in the place in the vault that was left vacant. That way, I wouldn’t have to explain why I’ve changed my mind, because now I would prefer to be cremated; in fact, under no circumstances do I want to be buried. On the other hand — I surprise myself thinking — I don’t know that I would gain much from that because my father will have taken his place, my place, next to Mercedes, for all eternity. When I’m cremated — I surprise myself thinking — I’ll have to bump off my father, although I don’t know how you can bump off someone who’s already dead. Sometimes I wonder if the letter I haven’t yet opened says something quite different from what I imagine and fear, whether it offers me a solution, whether she perhaps expresses a preference for me. Then I think: ‘How absurd. We’ve never even met.’ I look at the letter, sniff it, turning it over in my hands, and always end up hiding it away again, still unopened.

(1989)