After our meeting in New York, we started to write each other every day. The level of physical intimacy we’d reached in those three days was now translated into a mounting epistolary passion. Nevertheless, when I told her I loved her for the first time, as simply as that—“I love you very much”—Vera wrote to say that she would never leave Pérez, that she’d managed to build a family by dint of great effort, and that although she loved me too, that feeling would never be able to overshadow what she felt for her husband. Her response, disproportionate in relation to the simple and hardly compromising letters I’d been sending her, made me understand not only that the bond uniting her to Pérez was made of some apparently indestructible material that I didn’t recognize, but also that Vera took words seriously. From that time forward, I began to use them with extreme caution, and when the word love appeared in our correspondence, it did so after hundreds of other, weaker words that had nonetheless prepared the way for that one. What I felt for Vera was genuine, of that I had no doubt. But I wasn’t about to forget what she’d said in Grand Central Station; the limits she’d imposed by warning me that I could never be more for her than what I was at that moment had resonated with me as a challenge. Her resistance was the stimulus that incited me to overcome it. And there was nothing new about that, after all. Millennia ago, Ovid advised married women to close their bedroom doors and make access difficult for their husbands in order to arouse their desires.
It was only after nine months had passed that we finally saw each other again. A few days after my thirty-sixth birthday.
During that time, her life and mine had gone through ups and downs. Pérez had taken Julián to view the stars through a big telescope for the first time; Vera had spent nearly three weeks in bed with a bronchial infection, and her letters had turned gloomy; I’d moved to a bigger, brighter apartment and published Corolla, my third book of poems.
We saw each other again in Rio de Janeiro one Saturday in August 1954, on the occasion of a United Nations conference that was taking place in that city. My flight arrived a few hours before hers, and I waited for her in the airport. A man standing a few meters away from me was ringing two iron bells suspended from a cambered arch. They made piercing sounds in samba rhythm. I took up a position against the wall, and I can clearly remember the moment when, as I was reading Paradise Lost, I heard her voice.
“Horacio,” she said, calling to me from some distance away. It was the first time she’d ever said my first name without adding my last.
In the few seconds that it took her to reach me, I had the feeling that the man whose name she’d said wasn’t me, that in her mouth I lost my identity. This sentiment would grow stronger as time passed.
We embraced shyly. She gave off the same fresh, penetrating scent I’d noticed the very first time I ever got close to her. After we let go, we exchanged gazes, smiling nervously, and then we started walking toward the terminal doors, peering at each other sidelong, recognizing each other. Vera was wearing a pink dress, and in spite of her thirty-seven years, her smooth white skin had an almost adolescent glow. Once again, I had the sense of alienation I’d felt when I saw her in New York. On each occasion, Vera was the same woman and another, both at once. She’d lost a bit of weight, and all her features appeared accentuated: her cheekbones higher, her nose pointier, her mouth bigger. An automobile from the United Nations was waiting for us outside the entrance to the airport. For a moment I thought uneasily that travel, airports, and official automobiles were old hat to Vera, and that this trip was in some way a pallid duplication of what she was used to as Pérez’s wife. I had to make an effort to keep this reflection from tarnishing the joy that my anticipation of her body produced in me. We drove into Rio in silence, holding hands, gazing at each other and smiling. Vera pressed her thigh against mine.
The city that received us had the bright, festive atmosphere of those years, when you could peer far out into the darkness of the sea from the side of the road. The wind was shaking the palm trees, and we could see the sand swirling around in the few illuminated areas of the beach. A car passed us. Its radio was playing, at full blast, Johnnie Ray’s song “Cry,” which had been all the rage for some time.
From the following day on, after the morning meetings I had to attend were over, we closed ourselves in our room and almost never went out. The sea, spread out before our eyes in all its enormous vastness, produced an impression of spaciousness and freedom, despite our rather close quarters. But the real freedom was, of course, inside, between those four walls, in our amorous encounters, which attained a degree of erotic intensity I had never reached before. At night, the distant sounds of the sambas and the wind, gently beating against our window, accompanied the urgency with which each of us sought the other’s touch.
The morning of our second day in Rio, Vera said she wanted to read aloud the poems in my new book. Wearing high-heeled shoes with black tips and a long nightdress, she stationed herself against the window. Behind her the sea was visible, smooth and whitish, as if covered by an immense, freshly ironed cloth.
“Why are you wearing shoes?” I asked her, laughing.
“For decorum.” With her thick hair loose on her shoulders, she performed a ballerina’s pirouette.
Before the book of poems was published, I’d sent them to her one by one, and her acute, substantive comments had become indispensable. After I read her observations, I’d even left some poems out, and I’d changed others in essence or form, with the result that, taken as a whole, they’d turned out far superior to what they’d been originally. She read them standing up, her profile serious and angular, her shapely figure outlined against the window, while the cries of a group of kids playing ball reached us from Copacabana Beach. Vera read my poems calmly, without heavy emphases or theatricality, but with a depth that gave the words, as she spoke them, a new dimension. All this made me feel ineffably happy, as if it were the antechamber to the future that was awaiting me.
On the first afternoon, while we were both dozing on the damp sheets with the five-bladed ceiling fan whirling overhead, Vera said, “Horacio Infante.” Her voice, breaking the drowsy silence, sounded as though a bubble had burst inside her throat.
“What?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
She rolled to her knees on the bed, her torso erect, her breasts pointing toward the window, her eyes shining hopefully. We hadn’t turned on the lights, and the last rays of the setting sun, entering horizontally through our window, made the room look like a phosphorescent box.
“I brought something for you,” she said, stretching her arms above her head and clasping her hands. The pale skin of her armpits gleamed in the yellowish light.
Then she bounded off the bed and took a notebook with red covers out of her suitcase. “I’ve been writing,” she said, her cheeks flushing slightly.
“Poems?”
“No, no, no,” she replied vehemently. “I couldn’t,” she added, pursing her mouth and looking at the floor. “They’re short stories.”
She cradled the notebook in both arms against her naked breasts. She looked like a teenager. That was something that happened frequently, especially after we’d made love and she was lying relaxed on the pillows, looking me in the eyes with a placid, satisfied smile.
“Promise to be indulgent. Not like me with you.”
“You’re ruthless.”
“I know.”
“I promise,” I said. “I’m dying to hear you read them.”
“I’d prefer that you read them yourself. There are only two.” She thrust the notebook under her pillows, walked over to the closet, and took out a very simple white dress.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to take a walk while you read. I can’t stay here. I’d die of nervousness.”
“But I can’t let you go.”
“Of course you can.”
She hadn’t put on a bra, and her nipples showed through the thin fabric of her dress. I felt desire for her and also a twinge of jealousy at the thought that other men would see her and feel the same way I did.
“Stay close to the hotel. Don’t go very far. It’s dangerous,” I declared.
She gave me a kiss, told me not to worry, put on some low-heeled white shoes, picked up her purse, and left. I took her notebook out from under the pillows where she’d left it and started reading. Down in the street, a horn sounded for a while and then sank into the background hum. From the first sentence, I knew that the text before my eyes was both very accomplished and very unusual.
The first piece was about a girl who tells her bedridden mother stories while the older woman is in an advanced stage of dementia and dying of syphilis. I remembered María Soledad’s words, and I was moved at the thought that the text I was holding in my hands might be based on Vera’s life, on that life I’d barely gotten a glimpse of. The stories the girl tells her mother transport them to a world filled with details, characters, smells, and places. It’s as if her mother’s illness belongs to the world of horror, of the implausible, and needs to touch reality through fiction. Day by day, the girl’s efforts grow increasingly desperate, while her mother ineluctably continues to die. It’s at this point that the narrative, without resorting to dramatics, becomes almost unbearable, and I had to stop reading it. I opened the window and tried in vain to spot Vera among the people walking along the seashore. A little airplane crossed the sky. The beach umbrellas vibrated in the wind. The bathers had disappeared, and a peaceful solitude reigned over the sand. After a few minutes, deeply affected, I went back to my reading. Vera’s innate talent aroused feelings in me that were at once troubled and exultant. Ambiguous. I read the second story. It was less touching than the first, but equally well told. The rest of the red notebook was blank. Most probably, she’d transcribed the two stories from her original drafts, because neither of the two contained so much as a blot. They possessed the same precision that she’d brought to bear on my poems. I looked out the window again. Very far away, I could make out a group of young people playing volleyball in the fading twilight. I needed to express to Vera what she doubtless already knew. I needed to tell her, furthermore, that I would support her, I would guide her, I would be at her side on the road that she must inevitably travel. She had to keep on writing; she had to show the world that she was already a great writer.
I waited for her—impatient, excited, inflamed. When she knocked on the door of our room, I rushed to open it and embraced her.
“Did you like them?” she asked, as best she could, between my hindering kisses.
I kissed and hugged her again.
“Yes, yes, yes. You’re a great writer, Vera Sigall.”
That night we put on fancy clothes and went out to celebrate.
After our days together, we traveled the road to the airport without talking. But it wasn’t the same silence as after our arrival. It was a sad, downcast silence. We were separating again, and once again, we hadn’t discussed when or where our next meeting would be. A deliberate omission, which we executed with feigned naturalness, masking our feelings.