I would run into Ida in meetings or in the hallways, and she always seemed rushed. “We need to talk,” she’d say—alone? I’d wonder—until finally, one Friday, as I was getting onto the train to New York, I saw her step into the car, beautiful and dazzling, and sit down beside me. There were several things she wanted to talk about, so, if I had nothing better to do, we could take this opportunity to catch up with each other. Her eyes were bloodshot as if she hadn’t slept or had a fever. Of course, she knew all about what we’d been doing in the seminar. The students were happy with my classes. Had I talked with John III? He was the most brilliant and the most problematic. He was still on about that ridiculous idea to write his thesis on only one book. “You just don’t write a thesis about a single book anymore,” she asserted categorically, as though referring to a shift that was obvious to any of the other passengers on the train. But what was I going to be doing in New York? “Nothing special,” I told her, “just walking around a bit.” She escaped to the city every chance she got, tried not to spend all of her time buried away on campus. She needed to breathe, in New York she was a different person, she’d grown up in Manhattan and knew the city well, her father was a doctor, an old-school doctor, the kind who visited his patients. He used to take her with him when she was a girl, and she would wait in the car while he made his rounds. Her father always came out with a scent on his skin like dry ice, and she could sense the cold air from the alcohol on his pale white hands when he touched her face, and he would joke around with her before starting the car to drive across the city for his next consultation. She seemed to have told that story many times and managed to make the image of a child waiting in the car for her father seem personal enough that you could envision a happy childhood. She possessed an assurance and self-confidence that had been given to her when she was a girl; that’s what Ida wanted you to think. In her own interpretation, she was the way she was as a result of the education of a girl adored by a secure and virile father who knew how to treat women and was always present as a protective figure. She spoke of herself in dramatic sequences, the epic of a New York City girl who’d achieved all of her desires and taken charge of her own life and never did what others had told her to do. “I’m not a woman, in the strictest sense,” she said. “But,” she clarified, “I’m not a man either.” She was teasing, trying to get a rise out of me. But her father had died, and her sorrow was that he hadn’t lived to see her triumph. Triumph? “Yes of course, teaching at this university, my father would have loved to know that. In his day women couldn’t even get in here,” she said, as though describing the advances of an army that has successfully conquered an enemy position. She gave a provocative smile; she was the youth who kept on surprising the elders. She was ten years younger than me but seemed even younger. She was at that uncertain age when it’s impossible to tell whether a woman has just left adolescence or is already beginning to grow old.
We changed trains at Junction and went to find the smoking car, which still existed back then. “You don’t see many men smoking in the street,” she said, “fewer and fewer. But women still come out of their offices and light cigarettes even though people look sideways at them; there’s a grace—a gift—in addiction. A weak vice, if you can call it that. Junkies still hide it. It’s no bad thing to hide so as to cultivate your own sins.” She was so beautiful that I had trouble associating this woman with the quick and startling way she spoke. She wore a purple dress, perfectly cut, which revealed the lines of her body so that my eyes strayed to the space between her breasts. Was she wearing a bra? I moved slightly to try to reveal the mystery, and she slid her scarf around her neck with a swift motion. She was attractive, sexy, but she didn’t believe she was beautiful, just as some women believe they are attractive—and may indeed be so—yet it destroys them. To her, this beauty of hers was something superfluous, and she smiled in resignation at gazes that—like mine—attempted to undress her. She used present-tense verbs, and her ironic tone added to her charm. She spoke as though constantly putting certain words between quotation marks, and sometimes she would even hold up two fingers from each hand in hooks to show that she was distancing herself from the things she said.
When we arrived at Penn Station, she wrapped herself in a long tweed coat and put on a wool hat. She looked at herself in her little hand mirror before we got off and touched up the rouge on her lips, and I asked if she wanted to get a drink. We went to Dublin, a pub in upper Manhattan that I’d discovered on my adventures around the city. We sat at the bar and in the mirror could see a dimly lit area in the back, with couples in the semidarkness. She looked around the bar distractedly as if it were a natural landscape, the unkempt garden of an abandoned house. A heavy-faced guy was talking to the bartender about the curse of a woman he couldn’t stay away from. He was drunk, or seemed to be, and spoke about the woman with a mixture of passion and anger. “I can’t leave the house,” he said, “I have a workshop in the basement, and that’s where I spend the best hours of my life.” The bartender nodded with such a slight movement that it could have passed for a blink while he served us whiskey the North American way, with lots of ice in a rather small glass. People who serve drinks in bars could hold an entertaining conversation with a silent partner. Ida took a sip, pensive. When she was doing her doctorate at Berkeley, she shared a room with a black activist on the fringe of the Black Panthers, a beautiful girl from Alabama who’d quickly latched onto all of the revolutions of that era: sexual, feminist, Maoist, racial, and she psychoanalyzed herself, stood up for black identity, took birth control pills; she was doing her thesis on John Brown, the nineteenth-century abolitionist revolutionary, was going out with the black poet LeRoi Jones, and wanted to convert to Islam. She was killed during a demonstration against the Vietnam War when she was nineteen years old. Her name was Assia Morgan, and she’d been planning to change her name to Scheherazade Baraka but ran out of time. Ida had to gather all of her belongings before the police cleared out the dorm room. She didn’t really know what to do with all of it, and when she found a revolver in the bottom of one box, she put it in her handbag and took a taxi to the Panthers’ headquarters in San Francisco. It was a kind of fortified house with little porthole windows and a large iron door. She rang the bell several times until a guard finally appeared, and she gave him the suitcase and the address where the rest of Assia’s things could be found. The man thanked her and gave her a stern look as though she was guilty of being white. That girl, Ida said, made everything she touched beautiful, the girl who died; according to her, she had an innate capacity for life, and she’d told her that she was descended from Egyptian royalty. Sometimes she’d gone with her to speakeasies with black musicians in Boston, where she was a militant activist, and when she went to those bars Ida realized that this country contained several countries with antagonistic cultures. Suddenly she stopped, left the story hanging, looked around the room again, and smiled. “Doesn’t this place feel sad to you?” she said. It was sad. “Let’s go somewhere else,” she said.
Ida had an apartment in the Village, on Bleecker Street. A small place with two rooms and plenty of light, where she shut herself away to live her life as an independent woman. I put my arms around her as we entered, but she extricated herself with a smooth motion. “Not so fast, man,” she said. “We have our whole lives ahead of us.” It wasn’t true, but we spent that night and the next as though those words were, more than an omen, a threat.
Ida opened a little silver box in which she kept some rose-colored pills, and I don’t know if they were ecstasy or LSD or maybe those silver nitrate poppers, but for the next few hours I felt like a monkey that had climbed up onto the ceiling fan to look down on the two bodies below, naked in bed or standing before of the mirror, realizing fantasies never imagined.
“Before you can talk, you have to go to bed together first,” she’d said. She had a gift for establishing an immediate sense of intimacy, a trust that went beyond the body. Then I asked her what it was she’d said to me the last time, as we were leaving the restaurant. “That you turned me on,” she said. She was tired of listening to me talk about how I’d separated from my wife and was feeling kind of lost. “We’re all lost; if that’s the reason then don’t worry, we’ve all separated from a woman.”
Time passed as if we’d known or loved each other in the past and had suddenly met again in this unknown New York apartment. In Spanish her name meant an action, Ida, the way out, the journey of no return, a signal of someone leaving. And a strangeness as well (she’s a little off, está ida or es medio ida). On top of that, she had the same name as my mother… can you believe that? It was the first word I ever learned to read. “Ida, do you see?” my mother used to say as she spelled out the letters of her name, engraved in the doorway at my grandparents’ house.
We caught the last train back on Sunday night and sat in separate cars since she didn’t want any trouble. What kind of trouble? She didn’t want there to be any talk in the department. She didn’t want me to call her on the phone under any pretext or write personal emails to her. She was a single woman, and she wanted to be a single woman. None of that domestic nonsense or false entanglement. “It’s better this way,” she said, “we’ll be clandestine lovers.” She always joked around when she talked (just like my mother) and kept her secret vices apart from her professional life. I got off at Junction and from the platform could see her still on the train as it moved off toward town; illuminated in the little window, she was checking her hair and eyes in a hand mirror.
I ran into her the next day in the faculty lounge, and we greeted each other with the usual tone of two colleagues passing each other in the halls, making no reference to our nights hidden away in her forgotten apartment in the Village. Polite, ironic, indifferent, she made me see that it was best to conform to the academic code of cordial and detached relationships, forgetting the things that took place off campus (out of frame, as photographers say).
It was a dark and rainy afternoon, and there were scones and coffee in the lounge and newspapers to read. The Russian film specialist, a former experimental filmmaker who had shot a few Super 8 movies inside Soviet psychiatric hospitals, was sitting by the window, reading an old issue of Sight and Sound. After making a slight gesture of greeting to us, Ida went over to the young Kalamazov to mention that two of her students were passionate about his course on darkness in the films of Tarkovsky. Straight away they were joined by the invisible professor of Slavic literature and several graduate students from Ida’s course. After a while, the casual meeting turned into a kind of political-cultural gathering. We drank coffee and talked about the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the esoteric tradition in Polish culture while waiting for evening to fall so that we could return home. I stayed until the end, held captive by tedium and the harsh atmosphere of the situation. I’d been through similar confusions in my life, sitting in a meeting with a woman I was seeing in secret and talking to her about trivial things while her husband made the rounds serving clericó; there were no husbands here, of course, aside from the fact that she was married to Academia in the way that nuns in a convent are wedded to Jesus Christ; in short, the point was to protect her private life from outside eyes, as if someone was indeed spying on her and she had to play a role all the time. And it was true that she was being observed. She was a young, single woman who protected her reputation with steely determination and knew that sexual harassment and political incorrectness could ruin a woman’s career as well; or perhaps, more simply, she just liked things to happen that way: going out at night, disguised as a femme fatale, for a rendezvous with a half-stranger in the nighttime curve of a park under trees. The double life was part of the culture in this country, and every now and then a male senator would be discovered dressed up as a woman in a dark room; the real heroes were minor figures who transformed at night into queens—or servants—of the underground world, or into invincible superheroes (oh, Batman).
I didn’t call her on the phone, for the agreement was that we wouldn’t write to each other, wouldn’t even open a secret email account, this wasn’t about words or spoken things: we followed the rules of the arrangement that she’d obstinately set out, defining the conditions of her relationship with me and the borders of our passion.
There was something theatrical in those performances, in the invented characters and extreme games, a sort of fiction lived between two strangers. They were deviations on rainy afternoons, abstract representations of real situations. In the department lounge, as I exchanged comments and jokes with colleagues in that room of fogged-up windows and bright lights, I thought of it as an attempt to invent a life that was more intense, more real. The academic world was too closed-off, it occupied too much space and left little room for other experiences, so that you had to create points of flight and clandestine lives in order to escape its formality. That’s why there was so much administrative oversight around improper conduct, a prison fence of moralistic and puritanical regulations. At the same time that her professional achievements were increasing, she told me one night, she sensed a need for submission and humiliation growing inside her. Playing with fire in the smoking rooms of those university fortresses.
We would meet in the hallways and talk about something or other, never exchanging any conspiratorial looks or gestures. She too seemed to live in isolated series, with friends, colleagues, lovers, students, professional acquaintances, and none of those spaces was contaminated by the others. She was a North American woman: intelligent, enthusiastic, and highly organized, going out for early morning runs along the tree-lined streets of the town, monitoring her pace and heartbeat with a tiny digital aerobic device that she wore on her left wrist. She had an innate ability to impose a distance, an obstruction, and it was impossible to cross the invisible glass that kept her isolated from the world. She lived a secret life and respected the safety rules; in her other life, she was just a professor getting bored at a department party.
I remember one of those nights clearly. Tired smiles and resentment passed like bolts of lightning as we drank Californian wine and chatted in little groups around platters of curried chicken and tuna empanadas. Ida, dressed in a knit skirt that showed off her hips and some kind of white blouse with a Mao collar, was having a friendly conversation with a colleague. I approached and greeted her with a nod. I’d had a few too many drinks and was in a state of mind that I know well, when I begin to tread dangerously along the edge of the abyss, but she left me there talking to a stranger in a yellow tie and went over to D’Amato to ask him how the deep-water cetaceans in the basement of his house were doing. I watched her from the corner and wanted her; how could I escape that desire, if I couldn’t stop thinking of the nights we spent together?
There was a feeling of anticipation in the air, as if all of the blind signals presaged dark omens. I was familiar with this state—or conviction—without any certainties, one that seemed more like hope than belief. It’s the magical thinking of love, the hypnotic state of someone in love, bound to a woman he desires and pursuing her with clumsy, foolish determination. To escape from all of those confused thoughts, I spent my afternoons working in the library, the best way to change the subject. (“Since we can’t change the conversation, let’s change reality,” my friend Junior in Buenos Aires would say.) Nevertheless, Ida’s image would interject, and in the end, I’d stop whatever I was doing, gather my books, and go out into the street. Ida knew the art of interruption, could cause a displacement of bodies with only a wave of her hand, was like the heroine of a novel, trapped inside its plot. Of course, she wasn’t the heroine of any novel, though I wish she would have been if it could have altered her fate.
I would get into my car and start driving along the roads with no certain direction. Why had she gone off into a corner with D’Amato? She must have been to his house, since she knew about that stupid aquarium in his basement. Back then, I was unable to think about the nature of other people’s relationships, because I was only concerned with others’ attitudes toward me. I can remember following the course of the Delaware River and even taking a walk along the New Jersey coast, stopping at little seaside bars. One afternoon I parked on some street in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Atlantic City, went into a casino, and won a decent amount of cash playing roulette. I walked back to my car and went rambling around the ruined streets that lay behind the area with the seaside resort, the boardwalk, and the hotels. The neighborhood looked like it had undergone a bombing: there were burnt-out buildings, looted houses, mounds of steaming trash, homeless people sleeping under a bridge. A large group of kids in baggy jeans and hoodies were blasting rap at full volume, sitting on the sidewalk in front of a drugstore, smoking hash and dozing. On a side street, in the city’s Barrio Latino, there was a gym, the Sandy Saddler Boxing Club.
The sound of the gloves against the bags, the smell of resin, the rhythmic movements of the fighters shadowboxing made me recall the days when I used to train twice a week at La Federación de Box on Calle Castro Barros, just after I’d moved to Buenos Aires and was living in the Hotel Almagro. Boxing categories aren’t defined by age but by weight. Back then I was a lightweight (62.3 kg), and later I was a welterweight (66 kg), and today I’d be a middleweight (72 kg).
The guys who trained there were fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boys preparing for the Golden Gloves. Some, however, came to strengthen their arms for fastball pitches in baseball. They practiced jabs and cross punches against the sandbags, exercising the thrust of their shoulders and the rotation of their bodies so that they could throw a ball at eighty miles per hour without tearing a muscle. Their exercise routines followed the rhythms of a match: three minutes of rigorous training and one of rest. When they saw me come in, some of them thought I was there to take notes for an article about gyms and they started telling me their stories, saying that they were friends with the author Joyce Carol Oates, who lived in New Jersey and had written a fine book about boxing, and they all called her Olive because of her resemblance to Popeye the Sailor’s girlfriend.
The coach was an old Cuban exile who claimed to have been a featherweight champion in some socialist boxing championships far away in Moscow. A very laid-back, mixed race man, he was a fan of Kid Gavilán and Sugar Ray Leonard. In a boxing match, he told me, style depends on eyesight and speed, in other words something he gives the “scientific” term of instant vision. If only I could gain that instant vision and be able to see Ida between the shadows. What was she doing when she wasn’t with me, what was she thinking about when I passed her in the hallways, when she spoke to me as if I were a stranger from some distant, indistinct country?
I taught my classes, ate at the restaurant in Prospect House, and sometimes spent a few hours reading in Small World, at a table by the window, thinking that I might see her passing along the street that led to the entrance of campus. And indeed, I saw her one afternoon through the front window of the bar; she crossed right in front of me and, barely even pausing, made a signal to me and said, silently mouthing the words behind the glass, that she’d stop by my office. She showed up there a while later and, in a low voice, proposed that we meet on Friday at 9:00 p.m. in the Hyatt Hotel—off the side of the highway to New York. We could find each other in the lobby and then spend the night together.
We drove there, each on our own, and met in the bar, where a black piano player was tentatively playing Ellington tunes. The hotel was enormous and empty; maybe it was used for conventions or by travelers who missed their flights at the nearby Newark airport, or it could have been a place meant for the clandestine meetings of furtive lovers from around the area.
I’d reserved a room under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Andrade and only had to slide a hundred-dollar bill across the front desk along with my driver’s license for the night attendant to jot me down in the guest book and give me two key cards for the door to the room. I told him I was waiting for my wife and went back to have a drink at the bar. She entered the lobby a short while later, dressed in her gray overcoat, and we went up to the room. It was desolate, with white furniture, designed for executives or prospective suicides, but as soon as the door closed it was as if a sequence of tiny actions had suspended time, and we instantly rekindled the same intimacy and intensity we’d experienced in her hideout in New York.
She enjoyed secrecy, enjoyed these clandestine rendezvous at roadside hotels. She left first, early in the morning, and I waited until I saw her cross the parking lot and get into her car. After a while I left the hotel and went back home, driving along the deserted roads as the sun rose over seeded fields and the first lights were flicking on in the tall colonial houses at the beginning of town.
We repeated this game two or three more times, as if she was faithfully obeying the points of agreement as she’d promised, the passionate clandestine nights, the wall of silence that shut us off from the world, the longed-for repetition of motions, words, precise requests, a strict and meticulously prepared list of obligations and terms that she submitted to with pleasure and delight. Maybe, perhaps, we could bring someone else along, a stranger I’d go looking for in the lobby bar or at a bus stop off a bend on the freeway, someone who would come up to the hotel and spend the night with us. There were a few clubs in New York where you could go, she said, to get together with strangers. Fantasies in the anonymous night: she yearned to be swept away, alone, astonished, alive.
And then, on the outside, everything would be impassive and distant yet again. In each nocturnal rendezvous everything was the same, but the language and private rituals changed. It wasn’t just with me, I realized later; secrecy dominated every aspect of her life, and everything had its inverse, its parallel reality, as if each experience must be abstracted to some omnipresent and threatening enemy force.
In a sense, despite everything, the arrangement worked for me: I could go on being the single man I wanted to be, with no commitments and with the anticipation of those luminous nights in the future. Sporadic meetings with a woman at a roadside hotel, each time recreating the intensity of the first. Nothing more was needed, and I didn’t want to go back to the stupid appeal of commonplace feelings. She was right; that immediate and intense intimacy could never last if we subjected it to the harsh light of reality.
And so, whenever we passed each other in meetings or in the hallways, there was a kind of strange happiness, as if our private arrangement could be glimpsed there in the indifferent way we acted when we were around other people, or in certain stray words and phrases—appointment, device, attachments, desert island—that might come up in the middle of a meeting, spoken only for me.
The first half of the semester was about to end, and spring break was approaching. Of course, I felt at the time that everything was an anticipation of those nights with Ida in the bright, impersonal rooms of the towering Hyatt on the way to New York. In those days, like a lunatic, I thought that anything anyone said was an allusion to my secret life.
In class the following Monday, John III gave a presentation on A Crystal Age. According to him, utopia in Hudson’s novel consisted precisely in a transparent, neutral, desexualized world, an earthly replica of life in paradise, where sexual difference and desire had no place. John III noted that utopias never knew how to handle the body, and they tended toward worlds without desire because sexual drives operated independently from collective needs and interests, failing to account for equality and indeed often working at its expense. “Pleasure can’t be socialized, and it has no regard for balance,” John III said. “It escapes the logic of economics. For that reason, utopias tend to deny sexuality outright, because they can’t regulate it democratically.” There were sexual utopias, of course, but these were always arrogant and despotic. Rigged lotteries regulating the selection of sexual couples and improving the race in Plato’s Republic; Justine’s desire for philosophical slavery in the novel by Sade; brothels in the life of Bataille; bodies as living currency in Klossowski’s aristocratic exchanges. “Can these regimes organized around sex be called utopias?” John III asked, rhetorically, to conclude his brilliant exposition.
Rachel immediately drew a connection between that ascetic condition and the rejection of belongings, and she read one of Hudson’s letters from 1884: “I do not share your feelings regarding continued ownership and keeping your possessions with you. If someone brings me a cup and saucer to replace a broken set I feel sorry. The less tied I am to any place and the fewer things I possess, the freer and lighter I feel. I believe that lightness is connected to my style: I seek the same dispossession and the same clarity.”
“Divesting oneself of all property, forgetting the body; the great prophets—just think of Tolstoy—chose lives of poverty, asceticism, and nonviolence. They reversed society’s regime of signs,” she concluded, making a tacit reference to her French readings.
The discussion became general, and, while the students were debating and arguing, I thought about my next date with Ida and glimpsed stray images—the white cloth curtains of a room, identical to every other room in the hotel—with the same euphoric feeling I had when I was driving along the road at night and saw in the distance the approaching lights of the Hyatt’s entrance sign and imagined Ida’s ritual as she dressed up in her house and then covered herself in her gray overcoat before venturing out into the street.
At that time I was never able to stop my ideas from revolving around my rendezvous with Ida; they were flashes, visions, as if a projector had been plugged in, searing images into the wall of my mind, of her and me, at once protagonists and observers. They would appear unexpectedly, always set in the future, and my memories from that time are made of that luminous, fragile material.
I was in my office one afternoon, checking calls on the answering machine or responding to emails, and as I was going out to pick up my mail from the department office I ran into Ida in the hallway. She paused for a moment as if she’d been waiting for me and then came into my office. I think we barely spoke at all; I took her in my arms, and we kissed and, quickly, urgently, like two fugitives meeting in the waiting room at a station in the suburbs, we made a date for Friday. It was slightly ridiculous the way we made all of our arrangements in person, face to face, never using any other message or means of communication (not even a handwritten note). “Erase your traces,” Brecht said in a poem. Spring break was starting on Friday and there were no classes the following week, so we could meet in the hotel for a couple of days and spend the rest of the week in New York. Ida had set down a book and some papers on the table and was searching for something in her jacket pocket, but at that moment someone knocked at the door and she quickly separated and moved away from me. It was John III, who greeted us with a calm air and apologized at once for the interruption, but she said she was already leaving and walked out past us. “See you at the department meeting tomorrow,” she said on her way out. I spent a while talking with John about his presentation in class but realized that Ida had left her papers on the desk, and so I spent the whole time trying to distract him, as if Ida’s papers were a trace of something forbidden. It was nothing, just a book by Conrad, a folder with a list of lectures for the second half of the semester, and a letter from a student explaining his absence from class with a doctor’s note.
The next day, I went to the department committee meeting. Ida was already there, with her relaxed and absent quality. There were six professors, and we sat around a large oak table in a room with wide picture windows. Don arrived a short while later, and we began. We discussed exam dates and a few budgetary matters, and everything was going along smoothly. My colleagues sitting around me were used to hiding their irritation but not their boredom, so the committee progressed normally. After getting what she wanted (a supplementary budget for guest lectures), Ida made her excuses and left the meeting before it ended. I went out after her a minute later. I wanted to return her papers, but that was just a pretext for giving her the number of the room I’d reserved. “You left some papers on my desk.” She was surprised. “The other day.” “Papers?” “Well, a book and a few handouts.” “No, give them to me some other time, I don’t want to take them with me right now.” She’d gone to pick up her mail and held up the letters and packages as if she didn’t have any space in her hands. She was in a hurry. I watched her leave and get in the elevator to go down to her car in the garage.
The meeting stretched on a while longer, and it was past seven by the time it ended. I left my things in my office and took the stairs down to avoid sharing the elevator with any colleagues and having to talk to them. I was tired and didn’t really know what I was going to do that night. The snowstorm was getting worse. I crossed the campus and went out the door that led to Palmer Square. On one side, sitting on a bench by the taxi stand, was Orion, wrapped up in a sheet of plastic and sheltered under the bus stop. He’d acquired a large portable radio, one of the old kind with round batteries and large speakers. He was listening to it attentively, putting his ear up to the device. I realized that he wanted to hear only music, because whenever a human voice appeared he’d get anxious and immediately change the station. Sometimes he lifted the radio up or moved it around, placing it strategically to fix the reception. I stopped in front of him, but he just stared at me indifferently; he too had his moments and segments of life.