Synopsis: “Circe” is a short story by Julio Cortázar, published in 1951 as part of the Bestiario collection. Dark rumors surround Delia Mañara, a young woman marked by the tragic deaths of her two former boyfriends. Mario, a neighbor in the neighborhood, decides to defend her from the gossip and begins to visit her, gradually entering the secretive world of the Mañaras. There, Delia attracts him with her unique culinary skills and domestic rituals, while the young man tries to unravel the enigma of a woman who seems to exert a disturbing influence on everything around her.
Circe
Julio Cortázar
(Full story)
And one kiss I had of her mouth, as I took the apple from her hand. But while I bit it, my brain whirled and my foot stumbled; and I felt my crashing fall through the tangled boughs beneath her feet and saw the dead white faces that welcomed me in the pit.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Orchard-Pit
Because it won’t matter to her now, one way or the other, and yet at the time it hurt: the coincidence of the piecemeal gossip, the servile face of Mother Celeste telling Aunt Bébé, the incredulous grief in her father’s look. First the woman from the highrise, the way she turned her head slowly, like a cow, chewing gleefully on the words as if on the cud. And the girl from the chemist shop – “not that I would ever believe such a thing, but how horrible if it were true” – and even Don Emilio, always as discreet as his pencils and his plastic-covered notebooks. They all spoke of Delia Mañara somewhat bashfully, not at all convinced that this was who she might be, and yet Mario felt a wave of rage rushing up to his face. He suddenly hated his whole family with an inefficient burst of independence. He had never loved them; only blood and the fear of being alone tied him to his mother and his brothers. With the neighbours he was brutally direct, and he called Don Emilio every name in the book the very first time the comments were repeated. He refused to greet the woman from the highrise, as if that would ruffle her feathers. And on his way home from work, he’d deliberately call on the Mañara and, with an offering of sweets or a book, greet the young woman who had murdered her two boyfriends.
I barely remember Delia, but I know she was blonde and slender, too slow in her gestures (I was twelve then, and at that age, time and all things seem achingly slow) and she wore light-coloured dresses with loose skirts. For a while, Mario believed that it was Delia’s charm and her clothes that fanned people’s hatred. He said as much to Mother Celeste: “You hate her because she’s not trash like you, like me”, and he didn’t blink when his mother made as if to slap his face with a towel. After that, the break-up was obvious: they’d leave him to his own devices, wash his clothes as if they were doing him a favour, and on Sundays they’d all go to Palermo or on a picnic and never even ask him to come along. Then Mario would go and stand outside Delia’s window and throw pebbles. Sometimes she’d come out, sometimes he’d hear her inside, laughing a bit maliciously, never encouraging his hopes.
The Firpo-Dempsey fight took place and there were tears and indignation in every household, followed by a colonial and humiliating melancholy. The Mañara moved some four blocks away, which is far in Almagro, so that other neighbours became friendly with Delia; the families of Victoria and Castro Barros forgot all about what had happened, and Mario went on seeing her twice a week on his way home from the bank. It was summer already and sometimes Delia wanted to go out; they’d go together to the tea-rooms of Rivadavia or to sit on the benches of Plaza Once. Mario celebrated his nine-teenth birthday. Delia, still in mourning, saw her twenty-second arrive without any kind of celebration.
The Mañara thought that wearing mourning for a boyfriend was unjustified, even Mario would have preferred a discreet, invisible mourning. It was painful to watch Delia’s muted smile as she put on her hat in front of the mirror, she looked so very blonde over her weeds. Distractedly, she allowed herself to be adored by Mario and the Mañara, she let herself be taken out and bought things, be returned in the fading light and receive visitors on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes she would go walking by herself in the old neighbourhood, where Héctor had courted her. Mother Celeste saw her go by one afternoon and, with ostentatious contempt, closed the shutters. A cat followed her; all animals seemed to fall for her, whether through love or a sense of command no one knew; they kept close to her without her even looking at them. But Mario once noticed that a dog shrunk away as she was about to pat it. She called it to her (this happened in the neighbourhood of El Once, one evening) and the dog trotted along tamely, maybe happily, until it reached her fingers. The mother said that, when Delia was a girl, she had played with spiders. Everyone was astonished, even Mario who was not really afraid of them. And butterflies would land on her hair (Mario saw two in a single afternoon, in San Isidro) but Delia would wave them away with a soft gesture. Héctor had given her a white rabbit who soon died, some time before Héctor. Héctor had thrown himself into the river at Puerto Nuevo, one Sunday at daybreak. That was when Mario first began hearing the stories. The death of Rolo Medicis hadn’t aroused anyone’s interest, since most people seem to die of heart attacks these days. But after Héctor died, the neighbours began noticing what seemed like too many coincidences. Mario conjured up again the servile face of Mother Celeste telling Aunt Bébé, the incredulous grief in her father’s look. And what’s more, a broken skull, because Rolo fell flat on his face as he was leaving the Mañara’s doorstep; even if he was already dead, the brutal blow against the stone was yet another ugly detail. Delia had stayed inside; how strange that they shouldn’t have said goodbye at the door. The fact remained that she was the one nearest to him and the first to cry out. Héctor, on the other hand, had died alone, one night of white frost, five hours after having left Delia’s house, like every Saturday.
I barely remember Mario, but they say that he and Delia made a handsome couple. Though she was always dressed in mourning for Héctor (she had never worn mourning for Rolo, who knows why?), she accepted Mario’s company to go for a walk around Almagro, or to the movies. Until then, Mario had never felt that he belonged to Delia, as part of her life, even her house. He was always “a visitor”, and among us Argentinians the word has an exact and dividing sense. When he took her arm to cross the street, or climbing the stairs of Medrano Station, he sometimes cast a glance at his hand pressed against the black silk of Delia’s dress. He measured that white on black, that distance between them. But Delia would no doubt draw near when she returned to grey, to the light-coloured hats of Sunday morning.
Now that the gossip was no longer sheer fiction, what made Mario miserable was the fact that people would connect indifferent events and give them a dark meaning. Many die in Buenos Aires of heart attacks or drowning. Many rabbits languish and die in houses, in courtyards. Many dogs shrink away, won’t allow themselves to be patted. The few lines Héctor left for his mother, the sobbing which the woman from the highrise said she’d heard on the Mañara’s doorstep the night Rolo died (before the fall), Delia’s face on those first few days … People put so much meaning into these things, like knots piling up one after another and giving birth at last to a shred of carpet. Mario would sometimes see that carpet with disgust, with terror, when insomnia would enter his room to win over his night.
“Forgive me for doing this, it’s impossible for you to understand but please forgive me, Mamma.” A strip of paper torn from the margins of Crítica, weighed down with a stone next to the jacket left like a marker in the morning for the first sailor passing by. Until that night he had been so happy, of course they’d noticed him a bit odd at times during the last few weeks; not odd, rather distracted, staring into space as if he were seeing things. As if he were trying to write something in thin air, to find the solution to a puzzle. The boys at the Café Rubí all agreed. In Rolo’s case, however, it was different; his heart had suddenly failed him. Rolo was a solitary, quiet young man, well-off, the owner of a double phaeton Chevvie, so that not many had spoken to him in the last few days. Things echo so loudly in the entrance hall, the woman from the highrise maintained for days and days that Rolo’s sobbing had been a sort of choked cry, a scream stifled by choking hands that seemed to claw him to shreds. And, almost immediately, the terrible blow of his head against the doorstep, Delia’s wailing run, the now useless flutter.
Without being aware, Mario began collecting fragments of the events, and found himself making up explanations that ran parallel to the neighbours’ accusations. He never asked Delia herself, vaguely expecting her to say something. At times he wondered whether Delia knew precisely what was being said about her. Even the Maftara were strange, the way they alluded to Héctor and Rolo with no mention of the violence, as if the dead men were away on a journey. Delia remained silent, protected by their unconditional and cautious agreement. When Mario joined them with the same discretion, the three of them sheltered Delia under a thin and constant shade, almost transparent on Tuesdays or Thursdays, more palpable and obliging from Saturday to Monday. Delia now recovered her brief episodic vivacity: one day she played the piano, another she joined in a game of Ludo. She seemed kinder to Mario, she’d have him sit next to the window in the living-room and she’d explain to him her projects of sewing or embroidery. She never said anything about the desserts or the chocolates; this surprised Mario but he attributed it to a feeling of delicacy, to the fear of boring him. The Mañara praised Delia’s liqueurs; one night they offered to pour out a small glass for him, but Delia said brusquely that those liqueurs were for women and that anyhow she’d spilled most of the bottles. “Héctor loved …” the mother began, but said no more so as not to upset Mario. Afterwards they realized that Mario wasn’t troubled by the references to the boyfriends. They didn’t mention the liqueurs again until Delia recovered her good humour and decided to tryout new recipes. Mario remembered that afternoon because he had just received a promotion, and the first thing he did was buy Delia a box of chocolates. The Mañara were patiently trying out the crystal wireless set, and had him stay for a while in the dining-room to hear Rosita Quiroga singing. Then he told them about the promotion and that he had brought a box of chocolates for Delia.
“You shouldn’t have, but go ahead, take them to her, she’s in the living-room,” and they followed him with their eyes as he left the room, and then they looked at one another, until Mr Mañara took his earphones off as if they were a laurel wreath, and Mrs Mañara sighed and averted his eyes. Suddenly they both seemed lost and unhappy. With a clumsy gesture, Mr Mañara switched the crystal set off.
Delia stared at the box and didn’t pay much attention to the chocolates, but as she was eating the second one, mint with a nut topping, she told Mario that she too knew how to make chocolates. She seemed to be apologizing for not having confided in him so many of these things before; then she began briskly to describe the method for making chocolates, the fillings, and the cocoa or mocha dip. Her best recipe was for orange-flavoured chocolates filled with liqueur; with a needle she pierced one of the ones Mario had brought her to show him how it was done. Mario watched her fingers, so white against the chocolate; seeing her explain, he thought she looked like a surgeon pausing for one delicate surgical moment, the chocolate like a tiny mouse in Delia’s fingers, something minuscule but alive, stabbed by the needle. Mario felt a strange discomfort, an abominably distasteful sweetness. “Throw that chocolate away,” he wished he could have said to her. “Throw it far away, don’t put it in your mouth because it’s alive, a live mouse.” Then his cheerfulness about the promotion returned, he heard Delia repeat the recipe for tea liqueur, rose-hip liqueur … He plunged his fingers into the box and ate two or three chocolates one after the other. Delia smiled as if making fun of him. He kept imagining things and felt fearlessly happy. “The third boyfriend,” he thought oddly. “Say to her: your third boyfriend, but a live one.”
Now it’s no longer hard to talk about this, it’s so mixed up with other stories that one adds to it, based on minor forgotten incidents, on small untruths that we weave and unweave in our memories. It seems that he started visiting the Mañara more frequently; Delia’s return to life had tied him down to her whims and pleasures, even the Mañara asked him cautiously to give Delia some encouragement … and he would go out and buy the ingredients for the liqueurs, plus filters and funnels which she would receive with solemn satisfaction in which Mario suspected an edge of love, or at least some oblivion of the dead.
Sundays after lunch he would stay with his family, and Mother Celeste would thank him for it without smiling, but giving him the best portion of dessert and the coffee nice and hot. At last the gossip had stopped, at least there was no talk of Delia in his presence. Who knows if having slapped the youngest of the Camiletti or his bitter fury against Mother Celeste were the reason; Mario brought himself to believe that they had thought things over, that they had absolved Delia and even that they had come to respect her once again. He never spoke of his family to the Mañara, nor did he mention his girlfriend at home, after Sunday lunch. He began thinking that this double life, four blocks apart, was possible; the corner of Rivadavia and Castro Barros was the necessary and efficient bridge between the two. He even hoped that in the future both households and both families would be brought together, deaf to the footsteps which he felt deep down inside him (sometimes, when alone), all dark and strange.
No one else seemed to visit the Mañara; this absence of friends and family was somewhat surprising. Mario had no need to invent a special way of ringing the bell, everyone knew who it was. In December, in the sweet, damp heat of summer, Delia succeeded in preparing a concentrated orange liqueur which they drank blissfully one stormy evening. The Mañara refused to try it, certain that it wouldn’t agree with them. Delia wasn’t offended, but she seemed transfigured while Mario sipped appreciatively a purple thimbleful of orange light, with its scorching scent. “It will make me die of heat, but it’s delicious,” he said once or twice. Delia, who spoke very little when she was happy, said: “I made it all for you.” The Mañara looked at her as if wanting to guess her recipe, the meticulous alchemy of a fortnight’s hard work.
Rolo had enjoyed Delia’s liqueurs. Mario learned this because of something said in passing by Mr Mañara once when Delia wasn’t there: “She made many drinks for him. But Rolo was cautious because of his heart. Alcohol is bad for the heart.” To have had such a delicate boyfriend: Mario now understood the sense of liberation in Delia’s gestures, in her manner of playing the piano. He was about to ask the Mañara about Héctor’s tastes, if Delia had also made liqueurs and sweets for Héctor. He thought of the chocolates Delia had begun to make once again, now lined up to dry on a shelf in the pantry. Something told Mario that Delia would achieve wonderful things with her chocolates. After asking many times, he got her to give him one to taste. He was about to leave, when Delia brought him a white and airy sample on a silver-plated dish. While he was savouring it (a touch of bitterness, with an undertaste of mint and nutmeg in an unusual combination) Delia kept her eyes lowered and an air of modesty about her. She refused to accept his praise, it was nothing more than a try-out and she was still far from her goal. But on his next visit (at night again, and before saying goodbye, standing next to the piano) she let him taste another sample. He was told to close his eyes and guess the flavour, and Mario obediently closed his eyes and guessed a taste of clementines, very slight, coming from the depths of the chocolate. His teeth crushed a few crunchy bits, he wasn’t able to make out their taste and all that remained was the pleasant sensation of finding a steady hold among the rest of that sweet and evasive pulp.
Delia was pleased with the results, she said to Mario that his description of the flavour was close to what she had expected. There were still more tests to be made, there were subtleties to balance. The Mañara told Mario that Delia had not sat down at the piano since, that now she spent her time preparing liqueurs and chocolates. They didn’t say it accusingly, but neither did they seem pleased; Mario guessed that Delia’s expenses worried them. So he asked Delia, in secret, for a list of the necessary essences and other ingredients. She did what she had never done before, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. Her mouth had the slow scent of mint. Mario closed his eyes, carried away by the need to inhale the scent and savour the taste from underneath his eyelids. And he returned the kiss, harder and as if complaining.
He wasn’t certain if he had returned the kiss, maybe he’d just stood still and passive, tasting Delia in the darkness of the room. She played the piano, as she now so rarely did, and asked him to come back the next day. They had never spoken in this voice, they had never remained silent like this. The Mañara suspected that something was going on because they arrived waving newspapers and announcing that a pilot was lost in mid-Atlantic. In those days many pilots lost their way in mid-Atlantic. Someone switched on the light and Delia left the piano angrily; for an instant, Mario thought that her gesture in the light had something of the blind flight of the centipede, a crazed escape along the walls. She stood on the threshold opening and closing her hands, and then she came back as if ashamed, casting a sidelong glance at the Maiiara; a sidelong glance and a smile.
With no surprise, almost as if confirming a fact, that night Mario was able to measure the brittleness of Delia’s calm, the persistent weight of the double death. Rolo’s, bearable up to a point; Héctor’s overflowing the cup, shattering the mirror, stripping it naked. What remained of Delia were the delicate oddities, the handling of essences and animals, her relationship to dark and simple things, her painful breath in the midst of so much death. He promised himself infinite charity towards her, a several-year cure in well-lit rooms and gardens far from her memories; maybe without even marrying Delia, simply prolonging this quiet love until she no longer saw a third death trotting by her side, another doomed boyfriend, the next one in line to die.
He thought the Maiiara would be pleased when he started bringing Delia her extracts; instead they sulked and became sullen and gruff, making no comment; finally they gave in and left, especially when the time came to test the concoctions, which always happened in the living-room and when it was almost dark, and he had to shut his eyes and describe (sometimes with many hesitations because of the subtle qualities) the taste of a new substance, a small miracle on the silver-plated dish.
In exchange for these services, Mario would obtain from Delia the promise of a movie or of a walk in Palermo. He noticed signs of gratitude or complicity in the attitude of the Maiiara when he’d come to pick her up on Saturday afternoons or Sunday mornings, as if they preferred to stay at home on their own, listening to the crystal set or playing cards. But he also suspected that Delia felt uneasy, leaving the old people at home. Even though she didn’t seem sad in the company of Mario, the few times they went out taking the Maiiara with them, she seemed more cheerful; she really enjoyed herself at the Agricultural Fair, she wanted mints and accepted toys at which she would stare unflinchingly on the way back home, studying them to exhaustion. The fresh air suited her; Mario noticed her skin becoming clearer and her step more decided. Too bad the late return to her laboratory, the unending concentration on the scales and the pincers. Now the chocolates absorbed her to the point of neglecting the liqueurs; now she seldom let him taste her discoveries. She never offered them to the Maiiara; Mario suspected, with no grounds, that the Maiiara would have refused to try new tastes; they preferred ordinary sweets and if Delia left a box on the table, without inviting them to help themselves and yet invitingly, they would select the simple shapes, the old-fashioned ones, and would sometimes slice the chocolate in two in order to examine the filling. Mario was amused by Delia’s wordless displeasure at the piano, her fake distracted air. She kept the novelties for him; at the very last moment she’d come from the kitchen with the silver-plated dish; once it got late playing the piano and Delia allowed him to accompany her into the kitchen to get the newly-made chocolates. When she switched on the light, Mario saw the cat asleep in the corner, and the cockroaches fleeing across the tiles. He remembered the kitchen at home, Mother Celeste sprinkling yellow powder along the skirting board. That night the chocolates tasted of mocha and had a strangely salty undertaste (in the furthermost corner) as if at the end of the flavour were a hidden tear; it was idiotic to imagine such a thing, but he thought of the rest of the tears shed on the night of Rolo’s death on the doorstep.
“The goldfish looks so sad,” said Delia showing him the bowl with pebbles and artificial vegetation. A translucent pink fish seemed to slumber to the rhythmical movement of its tail. Its cold eye stared at Mario like a living pearl. Mario imagined the salty eye like a tear sliding between the crunching teeth.
“You should change the water more often,” he suggested.
“It’s useless, he’s old and sick. He’ll be dead by tomorrow.”
The announcement sounded, to his ears, like a turn for the worse, to the Delia of the early days, anguished and in mourning. Still so close to all that, the doorstep and the quay, photos of Héctor appearing suddenly among the pairs of stockings or the summer petticoats. And a dried flower – from Rolo’s funeral – held fast by a religious image pinned to the inside of the wardrobe.
Before leaving, he asked her to marry him in the fall. Delia said nothing, she looked down as if hunting for an ant on the living-room floor. They’d never mentioned the subject, Delia seemed to want to become accustomed to think about it before answering. Then, suddenly lifting her head, she looked at him with a sparkle in her eyes. She was beautiful, her mouth trembled slightly. She made as if to open a little door in thin air, an almost magical gesture.
“Then you’re my boyfriend,” she said. “How different you seem, how changed.”
* * *
Mother Celeste heard the news without saying a word, set the iron to one side and all day long didn’t leave the room into which the brothers came one by one, and from which they left with long faces and small glasses of liver tonic. Mario went to watch a soccer game and in the evening he brought Delia a bunch of roses. The Mañara were waiting for him in the living-room, they embraced him and said a few congratulatory words, they uncorked the obligatory bottle of port and offered petits fours. Now their treatment was intimate and yet more distant. He’d lost the simplicity of a friend and they looked upon him now with the eyes of a relative, of one who knows everything about you from your earliest childhood. Mario kissed Delia, kissed Mamma Mañara, and as he embraced his future father-in-law he wanted to tell them that he was to be trusted, a new pillar of the household, but the words wouldn’t come. Noticeably, the Mañara also wanted to say something to him but didn’t dare. Rustling their newspapers, they returned to their room. And Mario stayed on with Delia and the piano, Delia and “The Indian Love Call”.
Once or twice, during those weeks of courtship, he was on the point of asking Pappa Mañara to meet him somewhere and there talk to him about the anonymous letters. Afterwards he thought it would be useless and even cruel because there was nothing that could be done against those bastards who were hounding him. The worst of the lot arrived on a Saturday at midday in a blue envelope. Mario stood staring at the photograph of Héctor in última Hora and the paragraphs underlined in blue ink. “Only deep unhappiness could have driven him to suicide, family says.” He thought it strange that Héctor’s family had never again visited the Mañara. Maybe they did come by in the early days. Now he remembered the goldfish; the Mañara had told him it was a gift from Héctor’s mother, a goldfish that had died on the day announced by Delia. “Only deep unhappiness could have driven him …” He burned the envelope, the clipping, he made a mental list of suspects and decided to speak with Delia, save her from that tangle of dribble, from the unbearable ooze of the rumours. Five days later (he hadn’t spoken either with Delia or with the Mañara) the second letter arrived. On the baby-blue card was a star (who knows why?) and then: “If I were you I’d watch out for the doorstep.” From the envelope came a vague scent of almond soap. Mario wondered whether the woman from the highrise would use almond soap, and he even had the clumsy courage to search through the chest-of-drawers of Mother Celeste and his sister. He also burned this one, and he didn’t speak to Delia about it either. It was December, one of the scorching Decembers of the 1920s; now he’d have dinner almost every night at Delia’s house and they’d talk as they strolled through the back garden or took a walk round the block. Because of the heat, they ate fewer chocolates; not that Delia had given up on her experiments but now she seldom brought samples into the living-room, she preferred to stash them away in old boxes, protected by cardboard moulds, covered by a thin lawn of green paper. Mario noticed her uneasy, as if on the alert. Sometimes, at street corners, she would look over her shoulder, and one night she made a defensive gesture towards the pillarbox of Medrano and Rivadavia. Mario realized that she too was being tortured from a distance; that, without telling one another, they both were sharing the same wicked harassment.
He met with Pappa Mañara at the Munich Restaurant on Cangallo and Pueyrredón. He filled him with beer and french fries without being able to draw him out of a vigilant moroseness, as if wary of the meeting. Mario said, laughing, that he wasn’t going to ask him for money, and coming straight to the point, told him about the anonymous letters, Delia’s anxiety, the pillarbox at Medrano and Rivadavia.
“I know that once we’re married, this horrible business will stop. But I need you both to help me, to protect her. Something like this can hurt her, she’s so fragile, so sensitive.”
“You mean she might go crazy, don’t you?”
“Well, not that. But if she receives anonymous letters like I do, and says nothing, it all adds up …”
“You don’t know Delia. These letters, she’d shove … I mean, they don’t affect her. She’s tougher than you think.”
“But you can see how nervous she is, as if something were troubling her,” Mario mumbled, defenceless.
“That’s not the reason.” Pappa Mañara drank his beer as if to hide his voice. “That’s how it was before, exactly the same, I know her well.”
“Before when?”
“Before they died on her, you fool. Pay up, I’m in a hurry.”
He tried to argue but Pappa Mañara was heading for the door. He vaguely waved goodbye and set off towards EI Once with his eyes to the ground. Mario didn’t dare follow, nor think about what he’d just heard. Now, once again, he was all alone, like in the beginning, facing Mother Celeste, the woman from the highrise and the Mañara. Even the Mañara now.
Delia obviously suspected something because she received him in a different mood, chatty and almost mocking. Maybe the Mañara had spoken of the meeting at the Munich. Mario waited for her to broach the subject, to help herself out of that silence, but she preferred “Rose Marie” and a little Schubert, Pacho’s tangos, rhythmical and seductive, until the Mañara arrived with biscuits and sweet Málaga wine and switched all the lights on. They talked about Pola Negri, a murder in Liniers, the partial eclipse of the moon and the cat’s poor health. Delia thought that the cat had swallowed a hair-ball and argued in favour of codliver oil. The Mañara agreed without really voicing their opinion, but they didn’t seem convinced. They remembered a veterinarian friend, certain bitter leaves. They suggested leaving the cat in the garden, to choose its own healing herbs. But Delia said the cat would die anyway, maybe the codliver oil would prolong its life a little. Then they heard a newspaper vendor at the corner and the Mañara ran out to buy Última Hora. In answer to Delia’s silent request, Mario went and turned off the living-room lights. There remained the lamp on the corner table, casting a yellow stain on the mat with futuristic embroideries. The piano sat in a shaded gloom.
Mario asked about Delia’s clothes, whether she was working on her trousseau, whether March was better than May to get married. He was waiting for a moment of courage to mention the anonymous letters, but the fear of being wrong held him back every time. Delia was sitting next to him on the dark-green sofa, her pale-blue dress painfully outlining her shape in the dim light. Once he tried to kiss her, and he felt her shrink back slowly.
“Mamma is coming back to say goodnight. Wait till they’ve gone to bed …”
Outside they could hear the Mañara, the rustling of the papers, their continuous dialogue. They weren’t sleepy that night, eleven-thirty and they were still chatting. Delia returned to the piano, as if forcing herself she played long Argentinian waltzes with da capo al fine again and again, scales and vulgar flourishes which Mario nevertheless loved, and she sat at the piano until the Mañara came to say goodnight, not to stay up too late, now that he was one of the family he had to watch over Delia even more attentively, careful not to sit up all night. When they left, seemingly unwilling but dead on their feet, the heat was wafting in from the front door and the living-room window. Mario wanted a glass of cold water and went into the kitchen, even though Delia offered to get it for him and was a little upset. When he returned, he saw Delia at the window, looking into the empty street down which, on nights like this, Rolo and Héctor would have left on their way home. A ray of moonlight lay on the floor close to where she was standing, and across the silver-plated dish Delia held in her hand like another tiny moon. She hadn’t wanted to ask Mario to taste it in front of the Mañara, he had to understand how tired she was of their nagging, they were always saying that it was asking too much of Mario’s kindness, to have him taste every new chocolate. Of course, if he didn’t feel like it, but she didn’t trust anyone as she trusted him, the Mañara were incapable of appreciating new flavours. She offered him the chocolate as if she were begging, but Mario understood the longing in her voice; now he understood everything with a clarity that didn’t come from the moon, not even from Delia herself. He put the glass of water down on the piano (he hadn’t drunk it in the kitchen) and held the chocolate with two fingers, Delia at his side waiting for the verdict, breathless as if everything depended on him, without saying a word but urging him on with her gestures, her eyes wide open (or was it the darkness in the room?), gently rocking her body as she breathed in heavily, because now she was almost panting as Mario put the chocolate up to his mouth, about to bite, then lowered his hand and Delia groaned as if in the midst of an infinite pleasure suddenly interrupted. With his free hand he gently squeezed the edges of the chocolate but without looking at it; he had his eyes on Delia and her plaster face, an ugly pierrot in the semi-darkness. The fingers separated, dividing the chocolate in two. The moonlight fell on the whitish bowels of the cockroach, the body stripped of its armoured plates and, around it, mixed with mint and marzipan, the bits of legs and wings, the dust of its pulverized shell.
When he threw the pieces in her face, Delia covered her eyes and started to sob, panting with hiccups that started choking her, her weeping becoming shriller and shriller as on the night she’d wept for Rolo; then Mario’s fingers fastened around her throat as if to protect her from the horror heaving up from her chest, a rumbling of tears and moaning, laughter broken by spasms, but all he wanted was for her to be quiet. He tightened his grip for her to be quiet, the woman in the highrise would be listening with fear and delight, Delia had to be silenced at all costs. Behind him, in the kitchen, where he had found the cat with splinters in its eyes, dragging itself around to die indoors, he could hear the breathing of the Mañara who had gotten out of bed, hiding in the dining-room to spy on them; he was certain the Mañara had heard everything and were there, against the door, in the shadows of the dining-room, listening to him forcing Delia to be silent. He loosened his grip and let her slide onto the sofa, convulsed and bruised but still alive. He heard the Mañara breathe heavily, he pitied them for so many reasons, for Delia herself, for leaving her to them, once again, for leaving her alive. Like Héctor and Rolo, he was going away and leaving her to them. He was dreadfully sorry for the Mañara who had been there, crouching, waiting for him – for someone, at long last – to make Delia stop weeping, to make Delia’s weeping finally stop.
THE END
