I headed toward the hotel, walking quickly, hands in my pockets. It was almost eleven o’clock; it would be tough explaining myself to Tilde. But I doubted she was asleep, and I desired her, I’d desired her all day, even though it was hard to tell if it was an autonomous desire on my part, or one derived from the certainty that she desired me and was waiting for me. Teresa’s playful threats hadn’t changed my mind. Desiring a woman even if you’re married isn’t evil. Teresa had simply jousted a bit with her words: she’d used petty adultery, about to be fulfilled after years of fidelity, as a foil, just to make conversation. At the end of it all, what did she mean to suggest? She meant to suggest that, because of the things we’d confessed to each other, both she and I tended to think that the other was base. But the turn that our lives had taken indicated exactly the opposite: in this terrible world we lived in, we were good people. Only that, unlike the other good people, we knew we could also become base, we knew it so well that due to innate honesty, we had put ourselves in the base category, and now believed that our goodness was a fiction. Instead, we didn’t pretend at all, we really were good—good people who now and then did awful things. This was because life was terrible, and whoever was exposed to it ran a continuous risk. But Good Lord, the harm that we good people could commit was never serious compared to what base people were capable of doing. Sure, evil is evil. And yet, wasn’t even thinking of a proposition of this kind—evil is evil, without qualifications—proof that we circulated in a system of goodness? One had to aspire to cold, inflexible perfection in order to feel base the minute one stepped out of line. But becoming an adult—I told myself—means giving up, in fact, on perfection. Therefore, yes, ethical marriage, lovely and affectionate conversation, it’s a nice game. I, however, now wanted, at all costs, to conclude the evening by slowly taking off Tilde’s intimate apparel. I could already feel them under my hands: the tepid, slightly humid fabrics, clothes just pressed by an iron, poker-hot.
I stepped into the hotel, out of breath. She was in the lobby, sitting with her legs crossed on a gilt-framed armchair, and reading some of the page-proofs she always carried around with her.
—Your wife called twice, she said. Since they told her you weren’t in the hotel, the third time she called, she asked for me.
—Sorry, I was held up.
—No need to explain yourself to me, but to her yes. I told her that the event went long and that it dragged on even after the bookstore closed.
—I’ll give her a call.
—I’ll wait for you.
—Did you have dinner?
—An hour ago. You?
—I didn’t eat.
—Shall I order you a sandwich?
—Thanks.
I ran off to call Nadia. She picked up with the voice she had when, for some reason or other, I would wake her up.
—Why are you calling me? What time is it?
—Ten past eleven.
—You know I’m asleep at this hour.
—I wanted to tell you that it all went well.
—I know, I spoke with Tilde. What made you so late?
—There were teachers who wanted to keep talking, and they dragged me to a café that was close to the bookstore.
—You tired?
—A little.
—Go to bed.
—The kids?
—They’re fine.
—Good night.
—Good night.
I went back to Tilde, relieved. Nadia had sounded calm. I devoured the sandwich, drank another beer, spoke jokingly with her, and she spoke jokingly with me.
—Done?
—Yes.
We left the gilt-framed armchairs and headed toward the elevator, now talking about the proofs Tilde was reading. She pressed the button for the fourth floor. My room was on three. We kept talking about the proofs as if it were the only subject that really mattered to us. She stepped out of the elevator and I followed her. She searched for her key, and I kept suggesting random ways to improve the text in the event that she wanted to publish it. She opened the door to her room, stepped inside, and I stepped in after her, leaving the door open. She turned around, placed her bag on a chair, and asked:
—Aren’t you going to close the door?
I distinctly recall the very long beat that followed that question. I suddenly sensed that I had no real need to embrace that woman, to caress her, to enter her body in multiple ways in spite of the exhausting day and my drooping eyelids. I closed the door, and she said:
—I need to go to the bathroom.
She disappeared from the room with a graceful step, almost on tiptoes. I was alone. I looked around the room that was identical to the one I had on the third floor. I heard water running. The desire remained, yes, but not the necessity: nothing and no one was commanding me to extract pleasure from Tilde’s body and sleep with her in that room. It was merely a matter of deciding: either to snip the threads that, almost unawares, we’d been weaving for quite some time, certainly since the time she’d eaten that piece of cake off my fingers during a breakfast we’d consumed in some hotel, in some city I could no longer even remember; or to draw the scenario we were in, painted with increasingly deliberate shades, to its conclusion. I asked myself why I was in that room and not my own, and why that woman, married, with children, gorgeous, had welcomed me into that space and now—I’m guessing—was brushing her teeth, preparing herself for me and for the night ahead. I told myself that it was all happening because she thought of me not as I, in fact, was, but as I’d always wanted to be, and how, to my surprise, in recent years, I was now beginning to really feel. And it occurred to me that if I wanted to hold on to the affection, respect, even the desire Tilde had for me, I’d have to live up to the person who had piqued her sensibility, her intelligence. Tilde came out of the bathroom. She was barefoot, and all she wore was a blue slip. I took her left hand, kissed it devotedly, and passed my tongue across her fragrant palm, which smelled of body cream. I said:
—You’re extremely beautiful, and I want you, very much, but I can’t go any further. What will happen after tonight? We’ll make love, and then? No, I can’t cheat on my wife, I love her, I love my kids. I thought I could, but I can’t, it’s not in me, I’m not made that way.
I said this last bit with the genuine pride of a man in the right. Tilde abruptly withdrew her left hand and slapped me hard in the face with her right. My glasses went flying and landed on the bed. I touched my cheek and felt tears coming to my eyes, and so I escaped her furious gaze with the excuse that I needed to pick up my glasses.
—Good night, I said.
She said quietly:
—Wait, I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to do, I was wrong, come here.
—No, I said quietly in turn. I’m the one to blame. Let’s eat breakfast together, at eight o’clock?
—Yes.
I left and took the stairs down to my room on the third floor. My cheek was burning, but I hadn’t lost my footing, I hadn’t fallen, if anything, I felt lighter. Everything that seemed solid was made, instead, of an air that sustained my weight, like an airplane in flight, whose route was finally clear. And I was content.