It’s pointless. I can’t go on with this novel. I woke up today in a terrible rage, eyes bloodshot, fingers trembling with the desire to rip the two copies and the original of the first chapter to shreds. Not because I think what I’ve written so far is definitively and irredeemably awful, but because I feel certain I won’t be able to continue it:
A) Because I’m too young to work on autobiographical material; much as I feel like a total wreck, physically and mentally, morally and spiritually, and will soon have to face, naked, defenceless and with my senses dulled, the surgeon’s knife, I am, objectively speaking, a young man – young when it comes to writing something like this, anyway. I should wait at least another thirty years. This sort of text should be written when most people you know have died, or at least deteriorated enough that they either don’t understand what you’ve written, don’t recognise themselves in it, recognise themselves but don’t feel hurt, or simply don’t realise that anyone has written anything at all.
B) Because although I think I’m too young for this sort of work, I’m old enough to forget a lot of things or get them mixed up; for example, the story about the dog that I told so enthusiastically is riddled with errors and accidental lies: it didn’t happen in the period I said it did (a year before the daemon began to write) but rather a year later, or so I believe; in fact, what I did was mix up the story about the dog with a story about a little girl with green eyes. It’s understandable, from a profound, psychological perspective, because both stories had a similar effect on me; but even so, when it comes to reporting the facts, I’m crap.
C) Because, sneaking a peek at the topics I’ll have to cover almost immediately if I carry on writing, I realise I can’t go on dodging certain ideological positions – positions that would very much annoy some powerful groups: the government, the opposition, the far left, the left, the centre, the right, the far right, and even that anonymous floating mass which appears in keys to surveys as ‘undecided’ or ‘don’t know/no response’. They would probably also annoy the Catholic Church, the Masons, the Mormons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, the various occult sects, the Rotary Clubs and the Lions Clubs, and most likely a few social clubs, sports clubs and boules clubs.
D) Because I can’t accept my narcissism as brazenly as all that; the whole of the first chapter is nothing but I, my, me, myself, and there’s no reason to think that will change as I carry on.
E) Because, and this is the most important point, I know it’s a hopeless task; that it will be unpublishable, not only because no publisher will be interested in it, but because I myself will keep it jealously hidden.
Well then: it’s a pointless task, and that’s exactly why I need to do it. I’m sick of going after things that have points; for too long now I’ve been cut off from my own spirituality, hemmed in by the demands of this world, and only pointless things, only indifferent things, can give me the freedom I need in order to get back in touch with what I honestly believe is the essence of life, its ultimate meaning, its first and last reason for being. There’s one problem: when I do something pointless, I feel guilty, and everyone around me – family and friends – actively colludes to make me feel that way. If I want to continue, I need to be prepared to stand firm against the ghost of that guilt, to attack it on its own turf and beat it to a pulp, armed with nothing more than the wavering conviction that I am entitled to write.
With that matter decided, I’ll begin the chapter proper by correcting a few mistakes and filling in some gaps in the previous chapter. First of all: due to the pressing demands of the plot, there was never a good moment to pause and explain that I was no longer writing with Indian ink on very high-quality paper. The time came when, exhausted from reading my own handwriting, I realised I needed to type it all up, and as I did, I made a few corrections, cut some things out and added others in, and then carried on using the typewriter for the final sections. In doing so, I understood why I’d begun writing by hand, which will be revealed later on if I can find a way of doing so without upsetting certain sensibilities. And now, without further ado, I must tell the story of the little girl with green eyes. It’s very simple.
I was on a bicycle, not far from the place where, one year later, I was to encounter that fateful dog. Back then, though this may be hard to believe, I used to get up at seven every morning and go out on a bicycle to deliver newspapers. Even in the cold, wind and rain. And I did it for free; I didn’t earn a cent. I did it for the same reason I’m writing this now: because it fit with my way of thinking. It’s just that I used to think in a very different way to now. It’s unfortunate that my current mindset doesn’t include an urge to get up at dawn or do any healthy exercise on a bicycle; it’s unfortunate that the will to do something can only be developed under the weight of a mistaken belief – as History has made very clear. But I mustn’t get carried away by these reflections, or begin explaining how I thought then and how I think now; I have a duty to those green eyes, those enchaining, burning, liberating eyes. The girl, who was very young, was sitting on a fence (it must really have been a wall, since fences aren’t very comfortable to sit on, but I remember it as a fence), and there were other people nearby. I got off my bicycle, walked across some grass or down a dirt path, and delivered the newspaper. I don’t remember which of the people who lived there I delivered it to. I know I saw the girl, and saw her very clearly, though I don’t remember looking at her; it’s possible to see things without looking at them and look at things without seeing them. I know I saw her because later I dreamed about her.
I’ve said there was something inside me that had banned me from thinking (in a particular direction), but I haven’t mentioned another ban, which was related to that one but much more terrible: a ban on loving.
I’m getting into a terrible mess. There’s no honest way of continuing this story without explaining exactly what my life had been like until that point, but nor is there any way of changing the subject or interrupting the narrative without everything falling to bits. What’s more, I feel exhausted at the very thought of confronting all that again, even if it’s only in my head. Perhaps, while I’m trying to process all this, I could permit myself a few lines on the problem of consciousness.
The way we normally perceive things means they fit easily enough into our daily routine. And yet if we paused to look at anything whatsoever as closely as anything whatsoever deserves, there could be no daily routine, there could be no social contract. Our perception is managed by our consciousness according to its tastes, and the narrower our consciousness, the duller our perception. Perception is a painful act; it’s an act of surrender, of psychological disintegration. That’s why we’re careful about the focus and extent of it. We’re blind because we don’t want to see, and we don’t want to see because we know, or think we know, that we don’t have the strength to change everything.
It wasn’t convenient for me, it wasn’t convenient for my narrow consciousness, to perceive that girl. My eyes were meant to slide off her lovely surface. Perhaps I got as far as thinking: ‘She’s beautiful,’ but that was all. At the same time, a teeming mass of other thoughts, which must at that moment have crashed against the doors of my consciousness, were barbarically suppressed. I returned to my bicycle and pedalled away, completely oblivious to the most important thing that had ever happened to me.
In the early hours of the next morning I woke up with a start, covered in sweat, my teeth chattering, as if I’d had a terrible nightmare. I switched on the lamp and lit a cigarette. I thought back over the dream I’d just had, and when I finally switched the light off and settled down to go back to sleep, I was a different person.
I’d dreamed about the eyes of that girl, nothing more; it was just the perception of what had happened a few short hours ago rising to the surface – it took a while, but it succeeded despite the ruthless system of censorship. Very simply: she had looked at me with love.
In the dream, her eyes seemed to accuse me of something; to pierce me, burn me, destroy me. But her gaze was still there, in spite of those tricks from the censors; the censors who must have woken me up, calling desperately on the resources of my clumsy waking state to put a stop to things. But her gaze was still there. There was nothing accusatory, or piercing, or burning, or destructive about it. There was only love, love that I wasn’t ready to accept. Love, what’s more, that wasn’t necessarily aimed at me, although I was part of what she loved – which was probably everything in the world, because her capacity to love hadn’t yet been destroyed. Until that moment I’d never seen love in anyone’s eyes. Not even in films. They weren’t the shining eyes of a girl in love, but a docile loving gaze. And the gaze was still there. And it was still there. And it is still there. And it’s still here now, I promise you it’s still living inside me, you glorious girl; it doesn’t matter that I never saw you again, it doesn’t matter if you’ve become a plump woman laden with children and your gaze has turned bovine. That girl is alive, I promise you, and she always will be, because there’s a dimension of reality in which these things don’t die; they don’t die because they’ve never been born and nobody owns them and they’re not subject to time and space. Love, the spirit, is an eternal breeze, fluttering down the empty tubes that we are. It’s not your photograph I carry in my soul, featureless girl; it’s your gaze, the very thing that was never yours, that was never you.
As I smoked that cigarette and waited for my pulse to slow down, I didn’t know – I couldn’t know – everything that was at stake at that moment. Had I known, I would probably have found the strength to repress, to suppress, the image of those eyes once and for all. Because at that moment the end of my marriage was secretly being decreed, along with my forthcoming marginalisation – to the very edge of society – and what many, including me, see as ‘my madness’. Strangely enough, until that moment it hadn’t occurred to anyone to say, or presumably to think, that I was mad. And yet I was absolutely out of my tree. My consciousness was narrower than the head of a pin. No one applauded when I ended my marriage, quit my job and began spending my time drifting around and doing ‘strange things’ – but I’m getting it wrong again: there was a rambunctious and brutally frank Galician man who congratulated me heartily, roaring with laughter, when he heard about my divorce; and I have him to thank for what little oxygen I was able to breathe during that long and difficult time. On the faces of everyone else I knew, both family and friends, was written blame, suspicion or pity, or a combination of all three.
Although I then went back to work, even fairly enthusiastically, albeit with a great deal of freedom and not much responsibility, it was only so I could make up for my isolation by purchasing culture, alcohol and prostitutes. The mention of alcohol, I hasten to add, shouldn’t be taken too seriously; it was partly to impress people, most of all myself. I owe a lot to the films I saw during that time, however, and the books I read. As for the prostitutes, they deserve a chapter of their own. One of them does.
All this was decided imperceptibly while I was remembering the dream gaze and the real gaze, which were one and the same, and smoking a cigarette, and accepting that gaze. By the time I turned off the light to go back to sleep, I’d surrendered to it entirely. It extended over my whole being, opening up ever more avenues of sensitivity, preparing me for a new destiny. Afterwards, I did the right things. I didn’t look for the girl; in fact, I forgot all about her for a while, and even when I did remember her, it never occurred to me to go looking for her. Certainly not. I did all the right things. I had to destroy everything I’d been, thought, believed and felt. I had to get rid of every trace of that delirious life I’d been dragging along like a clumsy worm behind me for the past twenty-five years. I didn’t do it consciously, deliberately; I should have done. Accustomed as I was to my narrow consciousness, I carried on within its limits; but that gaze had injected me with the dimension of love, which everyone knows works of its own accord. My narrow consciousness fought back against the dimension of love; it shouldn’t have done. The battle was lost – or rather won – because God didn’t allow that dream to go unnoticed. STOP RIGHT THERE! DO YOU EXPECT US TO BELIEVE YOU’RE GOING TO TELL US ABOUT LUMINOUS, MYSTICAL, SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCES, WHEN YOU’VE TALKED ABOUT NOTHING BUT WOMEN, DESTRUCTION, ALCOHOL AND PROSTITUTES? ALL THAT’S MISSING IS DRUGS! GO ON, MINIONS, TAKE THIS MISERABLE WRETCH AND THROW HIM INTO THE MOST PESTILENT DUNGEON! Little old ladies in dark-green shawls are whacking me on the head with their umbrellas. You can hear the beating of a drum. A multitude of mothers with their children in their arms, their eyes full of tears, silently mouth the letters of a curse. The pyre is ready. While my body burns in resignation, I think: ‘They weren’t patient enough, they weren’t curious enough. If only they’d carried on reading … ’ And I raise my eyes to the heavens, wanting to exclaim piously: ‘Forgive them, oh Lord, for they know not what they do,’ but a final flicker of consciousness makes me shout instead: ‘The bastards! The fucking bastards!’
Excuse this digression, reader; a trivial matter I had to debate with my superego. Now I’m back in the novel. A little agitated and confused, yes, but I think triumphant. Don’t forget that in order to survive over the past few years, it’s been necessary to look like everyone else, and even – as far as possible – to think like them. So much inner work, destroyed! So much subtle development, demolished! But I’m with you now, although I need to make one small concession to the superego:
Young people, listen closely: there’s nothing good about alcohol, cigarettes, prostitutes, pornography or drugs. They destroy you, body and mind. Don’t think for a second they could be tools of liberation: on the contrary, they lead to dependency and alienation, they ruin you and, in the end, they kill you. My only tool of liberation was that loving gaze God sent me in the eyes of a woman; the rest of the story was nothing but one long mismatching of my means and my ends: ignorance; solitude; lack of support and affection; an enormous world which that gaze released within me and which I didn’t know how to control. I had to destroy myself because I didn’t know about the tools I could use to build myself up. It’s not a fail-safe method. Don’t try to follow in my footsteps. Besides, it was only one liberation, nothing definitive.
In case that wasn’t clear – young people, listen once again: there’s nothing good about television, newspapers, money, politics, religion and work. They destroy you, body and mind. Don’t think for a second they could be tools of liberation: on the contrary, they lead to dependency and alienation, they ruin you and, in the end, they kill you.
Only your soul, young man, can show you the way. Wind it up, set it in motion, and let it be whatever God wants. The sublime, that dimension we never consider, that thing we’re missing: it’s nowhere and it might be anywhere; here today, there tomorrow, gone completely the day after, and in twenty years it’ll be back again, or perhaps it won’t; it all depends on the Grace of God – and how you’re getting on with yourself. Once, perhaps by chance, Grace brushed against me in a church. I was thirty-six years old, and that experience, which I’ll write about in due course, made me take Communion for the first time. Not even churches are off limits to the hand of God.
But I return urgently to the story of A, which I interrupted in the last chapter and absolutely must finish in this one, in order to make way for the rest of the novel, which, what with one thing and another, seems to be escaping from my clutches.
She came back. After a long time, maybe a year, or two, or three. But she came back. She wasn’t the same any more. I could see other men had passed through her life, marking her in new ways. Other men, other problems, who knows – I know, in fact, but I’d better not go into it. I’m sure the abortion also played a part, and this was clear from her behaviour in bed: fearful, worried, never fully letting go; she didn’t always reach orgasm, and afterwards, of course, she picked fights. She had begun to see flaws in me. We almost, almost ended up behaving like a married couple. I realised what was going on when, on one occasion, she actually pushed me out of her body, afraid of getting pregnant again. Then the day came when I decided to indulge her in one of her whims. It was something she brought up often, hesitantly but with a certain insistence over time. I attributed it to experiences she must have had with a different sort of man, and which I didn’t, and don’t, find very appealing. She wanted anal sex. Well, if she was that afraid of getting pregnant, I thought, I might as well agree; at least then, perhaps, she’d be able to let go and surrender to the experience. I was able to slide quickly and comfortably inside her; it was a tight squeeze, but not so much that I couldn’t make the necessary movements back and forth. There was just a slight problem: three reasons for overexcitement on my part. Namely, the aforementioned extra tightness; the position; and, last but not least, the sadistic brute that’s sometimes unleashed in these situations, the feeling of dominating someone completely, the desire to hurt them and make them suffer, mixed with the perverse frisson of transgression, the mockery of nature. In short, I soon realised I was on the brink of an orgasm I couldn’t contain, and that if I tried to hold it in through some kind of mental gymnastics, the overexcitement might actually make me beat her to death. I thought it had all been a terrible failure because it was over so quickly. However … as soon as the first drop of semen hit her mucous membranes, she was seized by the most extraordinary orgasm imaginable. All the muscles in her body began to shudder as if they were plugged into the mains, subsumed in wave after uncontainable wave, the waves of many turbulent oceans, layer upon layer; and before the electric current had left her body, another jet of sperm set off the exact same effect, with no reduction in voltage, and you could feel the waves colliding as they came and went, those on the way back violently colliding with those just setting out, and all the muscles in her body trembling uncontrollably under her skin, although her body remained perfectly still; like background music, her voice, which I always heard as if it were coming from deep inside me, modulated the deepest, longest amorous moans, full of subtle variations, with notes that rose from Hell itself, the moans of lost souls, up to the songs of birds on branches laden with fruit in the blazing sunshine, and, higher still, the sky a mass of angels with mandolins, intoning sublime canzonettas and canticles, and an orchestra conductor in an immaculate tailcoat with a rose in his lapel, indicating precisely when each voice should come in, each subtle variation, each sigh; and so it went on, until the final drop of sperm had been released; sperm which, I confess with pathetic amazement, had very rarely been put to such good use. Then the waves gradually subsided, and with them the voices, and in the end there was silence and stillness and, on my part, amazement and amazement.
I’m not sure if you can tell, but I’ve breathed life into a deranged monster that’s now pursuing me relentlessly. Of course, of course there was a reason why I resisted and prevaricated so much before writing the first lines of this novel. The most ridiculous episodes of my life are all flooding into my head and they won’t leave me alone; I can hardly eat or sleep, I wake up very late and go to bed when the sun’s already risen; yesterday I saw serious signs that more biliary colic is on the way; and since even before starting to write, I’ve been in a constant flu-like state, which is obviously false: an excuse to waste all my time writing. I live for the novel; I think about it all the time; I write up neat versions of the drafts, making additions and cuts, and I think and think and think and think. My life has turned into a speech, an uninterrupted monologue completely beyond my control. I’m in thrall to the delirium, the search for catharsis, the demands of the work I must do, whether I like it or not, with the single vague hope of one day reaching a full stop and finding myself empty, exhausted, cleaned out – and ready for another. Because the point is that none of the luminous experiences and none of the liberating experiences have served to make me say ‘Enough now’, ‘I’ve made it’, ‘That was the one’. What’s more, although there was a time when I tried – and oh, how I tried – to reach something that would allow me to say ‘Enough’, ‘I’ve made it’, I’m now very aware that we only get to this point when we die, and I recoil from that even more than from the very demon itself. Readers, do not be deceived: I have no great wisdom to pass on, and I hope I never acquire any. The name of wisdom is: arteriosclerosis.
I chase after my thoughts, then, because they’re demanding to be set down on paper, and that’s the only method I can think of that’s guaranteed to get rid of them.
Since I’m very meticulous about my work, the first thing I need to do on returning to it now is clarify something in the second chapter. It’s easy to get carried away by the writing at the expense of the truth, or to tell only some of the facts, the ones you want to highlight – and all the more so when it comes to polemical literature like this. So you make countless mistakes and commit countless injustices and, as a result, almost without meaning to, you lead the reader astray. For example, when I read the scene involving the green-eyed girl, I realised I’d written it in such a way that no one would understand it properly. My description of the gaze and its after-effects made it sound reminiscent of certain religious paintings, and the gazes of certain virgins, or apostles or saints. That was certainly part of it, but there was something else as well: sex, desire, sensuality and the physical realm. In other words, the unknown dimension doesn’t override the usual dimensions; it completes them. Nothing could be more misleading than the false dichotomy between spirit and matter, which we’ve had so forcefully pressed upon us. I’ll come back to this later, adding a detail that I think should be far more widely known, which involves the number four, the Virgin and the Devil, and is drawn from the work of a distinguished thinker. Now I’d like to explain a bit more about the problems I have with what I call ‘dimension’.
Philosophers, scientists, occultists and writers have all given considerable thought to the ‘fourth dimension’. Some say this fourth dimension is time; others say that the dimension of time could never be incorporated into space; others still talk about the ‘fifth dimension’; and in mathematics, you can end up at infinite dimensions as easily as you can at any other kind of infinity. I understand very little of all this, and when I talk about the ‘unknown dimension’, for want of more precise terms, I mean something that’s part of the natural existence of things, but is only revealed when something special happens deep within us. I don’t know of anything that can be done voluntarily to reach this state. There is, however, a certain kind of perception, which has an affinity with the luminous experience, though it’s not exactly what I’d call a luminous experience itself, and which supports the theory that time is the fourth dimension of space. I’ve only experienced it when I’ve had a need for close communication with someone. On those occasions, what would happen is that I’d begin to see variations of that person’s face; generally the face would alter as if it were going back in time, and instead of seeing before me a woman of forty, for example, I’d see a girl of six. Rarely, I managed to confirm that my perception was accurate, that it matched reality, either through photos or through some particular detail – if the person wore her hair in plaits when she was a girl, if she was chubby, etc. Less often, I actually saw the whole spectrum of ages, all the way to the person’s maturity, or even old age. I know, in my heart of hearts, that a certain very young girl I met a few years ago is on the way to becoming a plump, stocky matron. And some confirmations or assurances about the truth of these perceptions have come indirectly, since, along with the image from the past or the future, I’m always given an intimate detail about the person; generally something medical, since I’m a frustrated doctor. A painting by Velázquez, Venus at Her Mirror, has also given me much food for thought: if you look closely, you can see the temporal variations in her face reflected one after another in the oval mirror; including the open eyes, which suddenly close. Youth, age and death. It’s occurred to me that Velázquez must have experienced this kind of perception himself. And don’t ask me how he managed to produce a painting that moves.
This allows for the possibility of seeing time as the fourth dimension – not necessarily of space, but certainly of life. The perception I describe has never worked for me with inanimate objects (and to tell the truth, only very rarely with men), but I wouldn’t want to say it’s impossible. [Revising this in 2002, I notice my memory was deceiving me when I wrote that. There was in fact an extraordinary incident of this sort involving inanimate objects in 1968.] However, based on my experiences alone, I’d say I have a strong sense that human beings are four-dimensional and that, whatever happens, each one of us is a single object, whole and complete, containing its own birth and death; that we see ourselves grow and age because we only see a bit at a time, but that the old person and the child are present in the same being all along. We’re like a kind of sausage going by behind a slot, and all we can see of this sausage is what the slot allows. There are countless people who, presumably after similar experiences, think the same way as me, or more or less the same. But I wouldn’t bet my life on this way of thinking, and since it doesn’t seem to have any practical purpose for the time being, and since for the time being anything without a practical purpose is highly dangerous to a person’s sub-existence, I’ve simply stopped having these perceptions. But take note: since I stopped having these perceptions, and all other perceptions and intuitions of the ‘unknown dimension’, my depressions have been getting worse, and lasting longer.
Since I’ve mentioned the girl who’s turning into a plump, stocky matron, I should add that she has an important place in this torrent of thoughts that’s been unleashed within me. Not in relation to my perceptions, which I only just remembered about, but in relation to the desperate need many people have for a madman. When all else fails, when you’ve lost your way and feel that nothing and no one can help you, find a madman. I’m unlikely to be remembered as a writer, though for a time I might appear in critical analyses of the period, for reasons, I suspect, of emergency or scarcity. But I’m sure I’ll be remembered for a good long while by the people who knew me, and the one thing they’ll remember me for is being mad. In other words, my true social function is madness.
Supporting evidence: all kinds of people have come to me for advice on their personal problems, especially ‘educated’ people – doctors, notaries, psychologists, psychoanalysts, orthodontists and, of course, artists. In fact, it was a psychoanalyst who helped me to understand this mysterious tide which, ever since that rumination about the dog, has been flowing non-stop to my door: ‘I come to you for advice on these problems,’ he said, ‘because you’re mad. I couldn’t talk about this with anyone else, especially not my friends.’ Strangely enough, my daughter said something very similar not long ago. I hadn’t found the right way of approaching her until then – until she needed a madman. ‘I know you’re mad,’ she told me, and we’ve spoken easily and openly together ever since, which makes me very happy. (In parenthesis: this novel, which I promised her, is part of the answer to her questions. And the reader should know that I’m writing it with all the good faith and sense of responsibility of a father writing for his daughter. She needs to know these things so that her life is worth living.)
That girl, then (I mean the plump, stocky matron), showed up one day in the company of some mutual friend or other. I was at the very zenith of my madness. A few days later she reappeared, alone. Or not quite alone: accompanied by an enormous and very beautiful bouquet of roses, which I learnt much later she’d stolen from a park. Observe, reader, how tragically blinkered human consciousness can be: from that moment on, with absurd persistence, I set about trying to rape her. She always rebuffed me, and I’m not a fully fledged sex offender, so things never went too far and she kept, to what end I don’t know, her precious hymen intact. Nor did I ever find out what she wanted, though now I have my suspicions. She came, and she sat in silence. Then she left, and, in spite of my shadowy intentions, she came back. Again and again. There’s no point deploring my blinkered consciousness; to have avoided acting so stupidly, I’d have to have known then what I know now. This story is painful, unflattering, deeply embarrassing. She needed a madman, not a fool. And yet, and yet, I feel marginally better when I think that she must have found some of what she was looking for in me, since she came back. From time to time, she even brought a new bunch of flowers. Serious, quiet, intent, she always addressed me politely and formally, even while I was trying to remove her clothes. I think what she found in me in the end was laughter. I was quite taken aback when one day I heard her laugh for the first time; tinkling, crystalline peals of laughter. I think that must have cured her a little, because soon afterwards she disappeared.
A few years later, thanks to my reflections on this and other experiences, and above all to the psychotherapeutic help I received, I was able to embark on another acquaintance that was similar to this one in a way, though in other ways almost the complete opposite. I saw a girl, who was also very young, sitting at a table in a bar; she looked so depressed, so sad and alone, that I went into the bar and sat down opposite her. I tried to find out what was wrong, but she wouldn’t say. Then I told her to keep me in mind, and to pay me a visit if she ever thought I’d come in useful. One afternoon, she came. And she began to spray me with all the pus that had been festering inside her. Few things have made me feel so ill, or been so painful, so difficult to take. The girl was playing at cynicism, relishing – it seemed – recounting each and every one of her perverse experiences, which included almost all the sexual perversions under the sun. I listened with an outward display of monastic passivity, while inside me, all my moral and emotional fibres trembled and contorted. Then she left. Very soon she came back again with another dose.
I knew that if I showed the slightest disapproval or ventured any sort of moral judgement, that little soul would be lost once and for all in the flames of its hell. What’s more, I felt the need to act, to do or say something, though I didn’t know what. I was desperate. I consulted a friend who used to be a priest. He said: ‘You have to love her, really love her.’ Which, incidentally, was what I’d been doing, but the advice reassured me and helped me persevere. Fortunately, my genitalia didn’t get in the way. Through therapy, I’d dealt with much of my lack of confidence in my own virility, so I no longer felt the need to sleep with all the women I met. What’s more, at that time I was well furnished with intellectual adventures and, what’s even more, it was one of the periods when my relationship with A was active – and at the same time, a parallel relationship was developing with a woman who danced and played the castanets. I could give myself over, then, to the genuinely paternal love I needed to show to this ‘lost sheep’, as my priestly friend and I called the perverse girl. A difficult, harrowing love; the kind of love that requires you to give, give, give, give, give, give, give until you’re utterly drained, and receive nothing in return but those filthy darts of cynicism. One afternoon I suggested she lie next to me in bed. She looked at me with misgivings, but what she saw must have reassured her because she did as I suggested. We stayed there in silence for a long time. Then, spontaneously, she shifted to lie on top of my body – both of us dressed, motionless, silent. The feeling of peace at that moment was tangible; it descended and settled inside us, a peace I remember simply as the colour white filling the whole of my body. The genitals, the mind, the senses: everything seemed dead, and happily so. An impossible-to-measure time passed, then suddenly we felt the moment was over. We got up, and she kissed me on the mouth and then left. She came back another day and we did the same thing; we didn’t need words any more. And she came back again. Every now and then she said something, the remains of some sin, some little piece of rubbish I was able to absorb perfectly calmly. One afternoon, during one of these strange sessions, something made me place my left hand on her waist and softly press down. Nothing more. As if I’d pushed a button on a machine, immediately and with no warning, the little sheep began to cry. She cried and cried, and then carried on crying and crying. An ancient, primitive sobbing I knew very well from my own experience. And the more she cried, the happier I felt. She was free at last.
The story should end here in order to be perfect, but nothing is perfect in this world, and there’s almost always a less than elegant coda. Still, I’ve promised to tell the truth, and that’s what I need to do. She came to see me one more time. By then I felt completely detached from her. My love had run out, the madman had fulfilled his purpose; what more could she want from me? The lying down didn’t work, the peace didn’t descend, we were tense and irritable. She said something I didn’t like; I don’t remember what. In response, I gave her a few resounding slaps on the rear end. She didn’t like that much, either; it seemed I’d strayed from my role as an entirely benevolent, indulgent father. She glared at me furiously and shed some tears that were in no way proportionate to what minimal physical pain I could have caused her. The next thing I knew, she’d ripped off all her clothes and, in a voice brimming with spite and contempt, she told me to possess her. I did so, very unwillingly; it was a real effort and I didn’t enjoy it at all. Then she left, and that time she never came back. Years later I saw her in the street. Her face looked healthy and happy, and there was purity and maturity in her eyes. She told me she was doing very well; she was married and had children, and all those things that good therapeutic stories ought to end with. Sometimes I think what happened on the last visit came about simply because she felt a need to pay me for the therapy. Oedipus fulfilled, etc.? I don’t deny it; but don’t, reader, deny me that other dimension which I’m trying to shed light on by means of this work, and don’t deny me the tangibility of that mysterious white peace that descended over our bodies and illuminated us from within.