When she woke up, she was called Alba, or Aurora, or Lúcia. In the evening, she was Dagmar. At night: Estela. She was tall, very white – not that opaque, milky sort of white so common in northern European women, but with the light whiteness of marble, translucent, under which you could follow the impetuous flowing of her blood. Even before seeing her I was already afraid. When I did see her, I was speechless. Trembling, I handed her the folded envelope on the back of which my father had written For Madame Dagmar, in that ornate calligraphy that made any note, however simple, even a recipe for soup, look like a Caliph’s decree. She opened it, and with her fingertips took out a small card, and as she looked at it she couldn’t hide her laughter:
‘You’re a virgin?!’
I felt I was about to faint. Yes, I was turning eighteen, and I’d never had a woman. Dagmar led me by the hand through a maze of corridors, and I realised then that the two of us were now in an enormous room, haunted with sombre mirrors. Always smiling, she raised her arms and her dress slipped with a murmur to her feet:
‘Chastity is a pointless agony, kid. And one I’m happy to fix…’
I imagined her with my father in the burning gloom of that same room. In a lightning-flash, in a revelation, I saw her, multiplied by the mirrors, undo her dress and release her breasts. I saw her wide hips, I felt her heat, and I saw my father, I saw my father’s powerful hands. I heard his grown-man’s laugh slapping against her skin, that vulgar language. I’ve lived that precise moment thousands, millions of times, with terror and revulsion. I lived it to the very end of my days.
I sometimes think of an unhappy line, I can’t remember who it’s by – I probably dreamed it. Maybe it’s the chorus of a fado, or a tango perhaps, or some old samba I used to hear when I was a child.
‘The worst of sins is not to fall in love.’
There were many women in my life – but I fear I didn’t love any of them. Not passionately. Not, perhaps, as nature requires. I’m horrified to think of it. My current condition – and it torments me to believe this – is some sort of ironic punishment. Either that, or it was no more than a careless mistake.