I arrived in a snow-covered New York City one December morning in 1953. I’d attempted, without success, to reserve a room in the Chelsea Hotel, which was in the midst of one of its many moments of splendor, and its rooms were occupied by musicians, playwrights, actors, and—most important to me—poets, who lived there for long periods of time. Undaunted, I’d managed to book a room in a nearby hotel that would allow me, at least when I passed the Chelsea’s doors, to breathe the “creative” air that was supposed to emanate from it.
Vera was arriving from Chile on a long flight with planned stops in Lima, Guayaquil, Panama City, and Miami. I waited for her, first pacing around my room, then walking back and forth in the hotel lobby, and eventually tramping through the neighboring streets. I was used to experiencing a certain nervousness at the prospect of an encounter with a woman. My list had grown during the recent months in Geneva, but not considerably. Conquest seemed to come pretty naturally to me. Such assignations featured a proper balance of romanticism, expectation, and adventure. I must confess that on some occasions, after reaching the point where the impending conquest was a sure thing, I would just as soon have declared myself satisfied and skipped consummating the act itself, like a fisherman who savors the desperate tugging on his line for a while and then sets his prey free. But I suppose good manners and pride prevented me from doing that.
When Vera’s cab stopped in front of the hotel, I was waiting for her at the entrance, under the marquee. The double doors were opening and closing without letup. So much time had passed since I’d been in her company, and our moments together had been so scanty, that her image had grown distorted in my memory. At the age of thirty-five, a year older than me, she radiated youthfulness, but even so, time had clearly not passed over her in vain. I was afraid of what she might think of me. I should add that those unequivocal signs of her maturity, instead of disappointing me, heightened my desire. She wore a long coat of silver fox fur that gave her a majestic air. She set her suitcase on the ground, and we exchanged cautious cheek kisses. Once again I smelled that soapy fragrance I’d noticed almost a year previously, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“I’m hungry,” she said, smiling and brushing the hair from her forehead with one smooth gesture.
“We can put your bags in the room and then go out,” I proposed.
I hadn’t been able to reserve a room with a street view, and so our window faced the back and overlooked an ice-skating rink surrounded by buildings on all sides. We stood at the window, with our coats on and our hands thrust into our pockets, and watched together as two young people on skates, holding hands, emerged from a little wooden house in Hansel and Gretel style and began to pirouette on the ice.
“Shall we go?” I suggested, a little nervously. And we went out to the street.
I took her to breakfast at a diner on Twenty-fourth Street. It was diabolically cold. The sounds of the pedestrians’ footsteps and the passing automobiles were absorbed by a layer of snow.
Once inside the diner, we took a seat next to a window that offered a good view of the street. Vera took off her coat. She was wearing a vermilion silk sweater that highlighted her pale skin. She pushed her sleeves up past her delicate wrists and, after studying the menu attentively, ordered coffee with milk, toast with marmalade, and a slice of strawberry pie. We spoke about her trip and mine, about the disagreeable sensation of landing on an all-white surface. The pleasure Vera took in eating produced a feeling of tranquillity in me. When we fell silent for a second, I spoke to her about something I’d been turning over in my mind for weeks.
“After you decided to meet me here, you wrote, ‘My senses are shutting down.’ What did you mean by that?”
Vera turned toward the window. Droplets of water sparkled on the glass. “I don’t remember. I really don’t. I can imagine the feeling, but I don’t remember it. Maybe I was referring to the way one gradually loses the ability to perceive the world. Or maybe not even that, maybe…” She stopped in the middle of her sentence.
With one index finger, she drew a line on the foggy window. I noticed that she wore a ring composed of three interlaced circlets on her right hand.
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe I just said it like that, the way I made this line. Can you see it from there?”
The dim exterior light slipped in through the line Vera had drawn.
Instead of going back to the hotel, we walked through the snowy streets, and with each step we seemed to conquer a new stretch of territory. Or rather, to adjust reality to match the path we’d covered in our correspondence. Even so, when I saw her walking on the icy sidewalk, stepping along merrily and a little unsurely, her shoulders straight and her fur coat hanging down to the ground, I couldn’t help feeling alienation again. The wind blew, slipping under my shirt collar. We went into a couple of art galleries to take shelter from the cold, and in one of them we found, along with works by other Latin American painters of lesser note, a canvas by Jesús Rafael Soto. One of his first geometrical and abstract paintings, with flat, brilliant colors. Soto was living in Paris at the time he produced this piece, and he hadn’t yet reached the level of fame he would later achieve. Vera impressed me by recognizing his work. I had so many questions to ask her; behind that face—the high cheekbones, the green eyes that looked on everything with enthusiasm and delight—there were so many mysteries.
“Do you do this often?” she asked me as we were walking toward Grand Central Station.
Her question took me by surprise. “How about you?” I asked.
She laughed heartily. “That’s cheating. I asked you first,” she said, sounding like both a child and an experienced woman.
“Aside from a partner I had a long relationship with, I’ve never spent the night with a woman.”
I had spoken honestly. In my previous romantic encounters, I’d always made sure that my companions in adventure had their own rooms in the hotels where we met. And when assignations took place in my apartment, I’d take my date home before sleep could overcome us.
“How about you?” I asked, returning to the charge.
“Manuel’s not the only man I’ve been with,” she replied.
I remembered what María Soledad had told me and was pierced by an instantaneous stab of jealousy. I imagined all the times when Vera, behind her husband’s back, had delivered herself into other men’s arms. We kept walking at a good pace and didn’t speak again. A driver hit his brakes and skidded on the icy asphalt. We both shuddered. Vera grabbed my arm, and we continued our march.
When we got to Grand Central, the cold was nearly unbearable. We went upstairs to the second floor, sat at a table on the west balcony, and spent several minutes warming our hands with our breath. High above us, the aqua-green ceiling and its constellations made us forget the harshness of the winter. Down on the concourse, men in dark suits and women dressed with careful elegance were hurrying around.
After a glass of wine, Vera displayed the worldliness and self-confidence I’d glimpsed at the Argentine embassy. She spoke at ease, sliding from one subject to another, laughed blithely, moved her hands about, and lit her cigarettes with a gold lighter. But I also caught sight again of the distant look she’d had that day in the country, or the melancholy I’d observed one evening through the window of a bookstore. Especially when she fell silent, took a deep drag on her cigarette, and stretched her neck out toward the vaulted heights of the station. All of a sudden, as though impelled to emerge from her world and obliged to adopt an attitude both courageous and merry, she rose from her seat, drew herself up to her full height in front of me, and said, “Horacio Infante, I want you to know I’m never going to hang on your neck.”
She exhaled smoke toward the ceiling and fixed her eyes for a second on one of the delicate drawings, perhaps the centaur or the winged horse, as if she needed a witness to her words. Having said them, she sat back down. I stared at the pallor of her cheeks. An unseen weight seemed to be holding her in some dark place. But at the same time, her expression was defiant, not unmarked by irony, and above all, shot through with eroticism.
Much later, I would figure out that those words, spoken in a place unfamiliar to me at the time, had triggered my fervent resolution to conquer Vera Sigall’s heart.
We finished lunch and went out to the street. Snow was falling again. It couldn’t have been later than four o’clock, but it was already getting dark. Tiny crystals of snow hung suspended on Vera’s long eyelashes. We buttoned up our overcoats and hid our gloved hands in our pockets. We walked a few blocks in the snow and then took a taxi to the hotel. We’d passed the day wandering around the city, and now the moment when we would find ourselves alone together was at hand. I felt immensely anxious. Judging by my lists, and according to my self-image, I was an experienced man. So what was happening to me? Could it be, by any chance, that I was afraid of hurting her? Or was it, maybe, a premonition that she might destroy something in me?
Sitting in the taxi, wrapped up in our overcoats, we gazed in silence at the illuminated store windows. In the glow of the streetlights, the snowflakes turned golden.
We climbed up the hotel stairs without haste. In the darkened windows of our room, we could see only the outlines of our standing figures. We kissed. I remember the warmth of her body against mine. On the sheets, her white nakedness caused me a certain sadness. Not because there was anything pathetic about it; on the contrary, Vera was even more desirable than I had imagined. Every female body has its own special characteristics, but on the other hand, they’re all the same. And Vera’s was, in the final analysis, just one more of the many I had known, and that fact, so banal and so vulgar, was what made me sad. At that moment, I wanted everything that happened between us to be unprecedented, for her, for me; while the snow kept falling peacefully on the other side of our window, I wanted us to discover together, for the first time, the pleasures of merging with another’s body. It was this longing that gave every gesture, every advance, a fresh imprint, at once breathtaking and melancholy.
We fell asleep under the bedcovers, my hand on her hip, our breaths colliding.
When I woke up the next morning, Vera was sitting on the edge of the bed and looking at me, an unlit cigarette in her fingers. It had stopped snowing outside, and the room was drowned in a cold white light. Soon we were making love again, with even more assurance, as if her body and mine recognized each other over and above the brief experience they’d shared during the past few hours.
That evening we went to a performance of The Cherry Orchard. Dark though it was in the theater, I was able to see that Vera was crying. I wondered what it was in those lives, created by Chekhov to express the dreariness of human existence, that could move her so, and later I was sorely tempted to ask her. But the level of physical intimacy we’d reached didn’t translate into total confidence and trust. We could show each other our naked bodies, touch each other, make love, but what lay hidden under our skin still constituted a territory to be explored with caution.
Back out on the street after the play, we found the cold even more penetrating than it had been the previous day. We walked to an Italian restaurant about half a block away. The thick white layer of snow continued to absorb sounds, and the air was filled with a calming, almost mystical silence. Vera had asked me to bring along my latest poems, so I was carrying some of them in a folder under my arm. While we were walking, I tried to help Vera step across a frozen puddle and dropped the folder. Papers flew out and lay scattered on the frosty sidewalk. With incredible good humor, we gathered up each page, many of them already useless, and put them back in the folder. Vera, however, took one page, stopped under a streetlight, and read the poem in silence; then she raised her eyes and looked at me. “You’ve got talent, Horacio Infante,” she said with a serious expression in her eyes, behind which I detected a mischievous glint. “You’ll go far. But I wouldn’t use the word dayspring. At least not in this sentence.”
I knew where that word was, between two longer words, together forming a prayer whose purity had enthralled me. Which was precisely what Vera meant to point out, namely that the word thus placed was too conscious of itself and of how it would affect the others, and that this made it stand out in a way that destroyed the poem. Her astuteness and her conviction impressed me. Not only was she right, but her commentary evoked a new criterion for putting words together. Pride wouldn’t allow me to concede that her point was well taken, but I did agree, feigning lightheartedness, to give the matter some thought.
We went into the restaurant and ordered a bottle of wine. Vera looked jolly. Her pale face glowed in contrast with her black turtleneck sweater and the pearl necklace she’d put on. Seated facing her in that little oasis, I wondered if Vera had told anyone about her trip to meet me, and the idea that she must necessarily have lied—to Pérez, certainly—didn’t please me at all. At that moment, I couldn’t know how concealment and deception, in their most disturbing and intricate forms, would become a central theme and, at the same time, an engine that would define her life and mine.
I asked her to talk to me about her son Julián.
“He’s obsessed with the stars,” she said, her eyes shining. She paused to think for a few seconds and then went on: “He would have marveled at the constellations we saw yesterday on the ceiling in Grand Central Station.”
She took a cigarette out of her evening bag and flicked the lighter with a firm hand, without turning her eyes on me, as if this was her way of closing a book that had to stay closed for now.
Toward the end of the evening, when we were splitting a red currant tart, she asked me, “How many?”
“How many what?” I asked, smiling.
“Women,” she answered.
There was no trace of resentment in her expression, but rather a genuine and somehow morbid curiosity.
“Thirty-three.”
“You keep count?” She laughed flightily, but without affectation.
“On occasion…” was my cautious reply.
In spite of her evident good mood, I didn’t know how far this particular subject could take us. Above the building across the street, among the clouds, an astonishing half-moon appeared, lighting them up.
“And you?”
The idea that Vera was an experienced woman, an inhabitant of territory in those days reserved for men, increased both my excitement and my confusion. Outside the moon had hidden itself behind the clouds again, leaving a white background of nocturnal light.
“And you?” I asked, once again.
“Do you really want to know?” She drew deeply on her cigarette. Her gaze grew intense.
My desire for her escalated.
“I was twenty-two when I married. Since then I’ve had two. I didn’t spend more than two nights with either of them, and neither ever heard me say a single affectionate word.”
“So counting our nights, that makes three,” I replied.
“But don’t expect affection from me,” she said, suddenly serious, though still absolutely dramatic.
I had never been much for sweet-talking my lovers either. Although admittedly, the use of such language by some of the women I’d been involved with had in certain instances made me yield more than was advisable. I remembered Francisca, an oversized accountant, married to a more or less mediocre colleague who mistreated her. She used to call me “sweetheart” or “honey,” epithets that undermined my plans to keep her at a distance. Maybe it was the absence of that amorous lexicon throughout my life that produced the malfunction. My having been surrounded by people not given to displays of affection beyond the limits of what was acceptable for an emotionally austere upbringing. At some point I was even tempted to ask her to leave her husband and make a new life with me. But I didn’t do it. As it happened, she left him anyway. I realized then that I didn’t love her at all, that the woman hiding behind her sugary words and her unconditional surrender had in reality but one desire, to escape the life she was living, and when all was said and done, all I represented for her was a vehicle that would carry her to her goal. My suspicions weren’t unfounded. Not long after breaking up with me, she was impregnated by another man, and when he washed his hands of the entire affair, she got desperate and asked me to marry her. I told Vera about Francisca in vague terms and never named her. I also talked about María Angélica, a Colombian with whom I’d had a recent fling. A slight, ambitious woman who’d committed the sin of loving me more than I was disposed to bear. The situation had brought to light a depth of cruelty that simultaneously disconcerted and demoralized me. I was impressed by the good-humored way Vera listened to these excerpts from my romantic life. As if, instead of distressing her, they not only lightened her heart but also made me more attractive in her eyes. This was paradoxical, because there was nothing even vaguely heroic about either of those affairs; on the contrary, they made evident a certain lack of integrity and a lot of cynicism and coldness.
When I pointed that out to her, she replied, “I like that you speak to me honestly,” tossing her hair to one side and holding it there with one hand on her shoulder.
I was trying to give her an adequate response when she pointed at the window and exclaimed, “Look!”
The past always returns in the form of small things. And what comes back to my memory now is the transparent and gleaming veil of snow, carried along by a breath of wind, that moved past our window. Vera extended an arm over the table and touched my hand.
It was almost midnight when we left the restaurant. The temperature had gone up a few degrees, and thin streams of dirty, icy water were running in the gutters. We’d had quite a lot to drink. Vera stumbled and then laughed, as if the fact of being intoxicated amused her in a particular way. We must have hailed the last taxi that was still cruising the streets that night. Back in the hotel, we embraced anxiously at the door of our room. One of our neighbors had held a little banquet, and its remains were piled up in the corridor.
On the day we left, a timid sun was falling on the half-thawed snow. Vera and I said our farewells in the airport. I watched her moving away from me, past the partition, and I thought that our confessions, instead of inflaming the passion each of us felt for the other, had established its limits. We both feared to venture to the place where our meeting could have taken us. During the days we spent together, we never spoke, not even once, about the future, or about the possibility of seeing each other again.