The next day, I was due to meet him at that fateful house. I went there, as always, dressed entirely in black, hidden behind a large veil. I was deathly pale, and my heart was pounding furiously. It was a moment of crisis. I had made up my mind to have a clear, definitive, unequivocal discussion with Rytmel. If he were to say so much as one sharp or indifferent word or make an impatient gesture, I would consider myself as having been abandoned, exiled from life. I would retire to a chalet in Switzerland or to Jerusalem or to the melancholy of a cloister in the South of France. That, I had decided, was the only solution to my predicament.
When I arrived at the house, he had not yet arrived. For a long time, I sat motionless in an armchair. The noises from the street seemed to rise up from the depths of a dream. The room was lit by the subdued light entering through the opaque glass windows. I was filled with the indefinable feeling that overtakes you when you have spent too long in some quiet, sad place watching the silent falling of rain.
Suddenly the door creaked open and he came in.
He had been in the countryside and brought me a bunch of tiny flowers picked from the hedgerows. He came and leaned on the back of my chair and dropped the flowers into my lap.
Then, speaking very softly, his face next to mine, he said:
‘I’ve been thinking of you all day as I wandered across the fields.’
I made no response, and with my eyes fixed on the coloured pattern of the carpet, I cruelly pulled the petals off those little meadow flowers. I took a kind of bitter glee in destroying those delicate things, which had come from him and which, it seemed to me, had learned from him how to lie.
‘You were in my thoughts all the time, and the walk itself was enchanting,’ he repeated in a gently insistent voice.
I raised my eyes to him.
‘Tell me: do you know how to lie?’
‘Goodness,’ he said, drawing back, ‘you don’t seem to like me very much today!’
Again I said nothing, but my lap was full of mutilated flowers.
He knelt down beside me and, taking my hands and gazing into my impassive eyes, he waited, with loving, patient concern, for me to break my silence. I felt my whole being, body and soul, drawn helplessly towards him, but managed, nonetheless, to control myself. In the end, he got slowly to his feet, flung himself down on a sofa, where he remained, as though seeking refuge there, leafing through a volume of Musset’s poems he found lying on the table.
I stood up and snatched the book from his hands.
‘The problem is this. I don’t understand the situation, and you have to explain it to me, frankly and clearly, syllable by syllable! You don’t love me, that much is obvious. Please don’t deny it. I could tell from the tone of the very first letters you wrote to me from London. And now I can see it in your eyes, your words, your silence even. There’s something there, I don’t know what, but there is. The truth is that you’re leaving me, you don’t love me. You have to explain. It can’t go on like this. I’m in such pain. If you only knew! I cried all night…’
And I promptly began to cry again, sobs shaking my whole body. He had taken my hands and begun to speak to me in the sweetest of terms, with all the tenderness of a lover and the solace of a friend. I pushed him away and, holding back my tears, said:
‘No, no, you need to tell me everything. I don’t know what it is exactly that I want to ask you or perhaps I don’t dare. But you know what you need to say to me. Tell me the truth.’
Folding his arms, he answered with great composure:
‘My dear friend, the fact is that your imaginings are our misfortune. It’s not your fault, I know: it’s part of being female. Women cannot bear serenity. If they have a quiet life, they look for romance, if they’re involved in a romance they look for sadness. Those small, lovely craniums of yours are always harbouring a storm. So, what can I say? Didn’t I come to Portugal of my own free will? Hasn’t my love always been by your side, like a faithful dog? What more do you want? You say you find me reserved. But if I raged like an Othello, you would doubtless find me ridiculous. Besides, you know perfectly well that I love you! I say it to you now, sitting here on this sofa, in my tailcoat, in an ordinary house with a street number, and from which I will set off shortly to dine, perhaps to play chess, and to don – who knows? – a dressing gown! That’s all very regrettable, I know. But is that why you have no confidence in me? Tell me candidly, then: if I were to go into paroxyms of passion like Mark Antony, or were to put on a Venetian costume, or if this were a feudal abbey, or if I were setting forth from here to conquer Jerusalem, tell me – would you be more inclined to trust me?’
‘That’s all meaningless nonsense…’
‘Oh, my dearest…’
‘Your dearest,’ I said, interrupting, ‘asks only an honest, loyal heart. So it’s all in my imagination, is it? There’s nothing to keep us apart? Well then, I am going to say something, and I swear that my decision is binding and I say it calmly, coolly, unemotionally, having thought it through from every angle.’
‘For God’s sake, tell me, what is it?’
‘You accept this resolution of mine?’
‘A resolution? What does it involve?’
‘It involves the only thing that will make me believe in you to the same degree that I believe in myself. Do you accept?’
‘How could I not?’
‘Well then,’ I began, and taking his hands, my lips close to his face, I said in a voice as ardent as a kiss:
‘Let us elope tomorrow.’
Rytmel turned slightly pale and, slowly withdrawing his hands from mine, said:
‘You do realise that there can be no going back afterwards?’
‘Yes.’
He had sat down, his eyes fixed on the carpet, while I, standing beside him with my hand resting on his shoulder, was saying to him in a dream-like murmur:
‘I’ve been thinking about this for a month. Let’s go to Naples. Let’s go wherever you would like to go. I adore you… I’m like someone sliding into sleep. I adore you and I want to be with you…’
I placed my hand on his brow and tilted his head back in order to see the answer in his eyes; they were filled with tears.
‘But Rytmel, you’re crying!’
‘No, no, my love! I was thinking of my mother, whom I may perhaps never see again. But that’s nothing. I love you, I love you… so avante!’
And he folded me in a passionate embrace, as if sealing an everlasting pact.