Read The Complete Stories for Free Online Page B

decided to be transformed. As mad as it sounds, he’d repeat several times: he wanted to transform me, “to breathe into my body a little poison, that good and terrible poison” . . .
    My education had begun.
    He spoke, I listened. I learned of dark and beautiful lives, I learned of the suffering and the ecstasy of those “privileged by madness.”
    “Meditate on them, you, with your happy middle ground.”
    And I would think. The new world that Daniel’s persuasive voice made me glimpse horrified me, I who had always been a docile lamb. It horrified me, yet was already pulling me in with the magnetic force of a fall . . .
    “Get ready to feel with me. Listen to this passage with your head thrown back, eyes half-closed, lips parted . . .”
    I’d pretend to laugh, pretend to obey as a joke, as if begging pardon from my former friends. And from myself, for accepting such a heavy yoke. Nothing, however, was more serious for me.
    He, impassive, preparing me as if for a ritual, insisted, solemnly:
    “More languor in your gaze . . . Relax your nostrils more, get them ready to absorb deeply . . .”
    I would obey. And above all I would obey while trying not to displease him with any single thing, placing myself in his hands and begging forgiveness for not giving him more. And because he asked nothing of me, nothing that I’d hesitate any longer to offer him, I fell even further into the certainty of my inferiority and of the distance between us.
    “Let yourself go even more. Let my voice be your thought.”
    I would listen. “For those who remain incarcerated” (not only in prisons, Daniel would interject) “tears are a part of daily experience; a day without tears is a day in which the heart has hardened, not a day in which the heart is happy.” “. . . since the secret of life is to suffer. This truth is contained in all things.”
    And little by little, really, I was understanding . . . That slow voice ended up burning in my soul, stirring it profoundly. I had been wandering through grottos for many long years and was suddenly discovering the radiant passage to the sea . . . Yes, I once shouted to him barely breathing,
I was feeling
! He merely smiled, still not satisfied.
    Yet it was the truth. I, so simple and primitive, who had never desired anything with intensity. I, unconscious and cheerful, “because I possessed a cheerful body” . . . Suddenly I was awakening: what a dark life I’d led up till then. Now . . . Now I was being reborn. Lively, in pain, that pain that had been lying dormant, quiet and blind in the depths of my self.
    I grew nervous, agitated, but intelligent. My eyes always uneasy. I hardly slept.
    Jaime came to visit, spending two days with me. When I got his telegram, I went pale. I walked as if dizzy, figuring out how to keep Daniel from seeing him. I was ashamed of Jaime.
    Using the excuse that I wanted to try a hotel, I booked a room. Jaime didn’t suspect the real motive, as I expected. And this brought me closer to Daniel. I distantly yearned for my husband to react on my behalf, to snatch me from those hands. I don’t know what I was afraid of.
    Those were two awful days. I hated myself because I was ashamed of Jaime yet did everything possible to hide with him in places where Daniel wouldn’t see us . . .
    When he left, finally, I, somewhere between relieved and helpless, granted myself an hour of rest, before returning to Daniel. I was trying to put off the danger, but it never occurred to me to flee.
    I had faith that sometime before I left Daniel would want me.
    However, news that Mama had fallen ill called me back to Rio before that day arrived. I had to leave.
    I spoke with Daniel.
    “One more afternoon and we may never see each other again,” I ventured fearfully.
    He laughed softly.
    “You’ll come back for sure.”
    I got the distinct impression that he was trying to suggest that I return, as if it were an order. He’d said to me one day: