While the Women are Sleeping Read Online Free Page A

something fearful too, as if suddenly I no longer dared to ask him anything and as if, from that moment, I had no option but to listen to whatever he chose to tell me. It was as if that abrupt, indelicate remark had taken over the conversation entirely. And I realised that my fear came also from his use of the past tense. He had said ‘exactly as she was’ when referring to Luisa, when he should have said ‘exactly as she is’. I decided to leave him and go back up to our room. I wanted to see Luisa and to sleep by her side, to lie down and reclaim my space in the double bed that would doubtless be identical to the one shared by Inès and Viana, modern hotel rooms being all the same. I could simply bring the conversation to a close. I was feeling rather angry. However, the silence lasted only a few seconds because Viana continued talking, without this pause I have made, writing, and it was too late then not to continue listening to him.
    ‘What you say is very true, but it hardly takes a genius to work that out. It’s actually quite hard to know who will die first, it’s tantamount to wanting to know the order of our dying. And to know that, you have to be a part of that order, if you know what I mean. Not to disrupt it, that would be impossible, but to be a part of it. Listen, when I said that I adore Inès, I meant it literally. I adore her. It’s not just a turn of phrase, a meaningless, common-or-garden expression that you and I can share, for example. What you call “adore” has nothing whatever to do with what I mean by “adore”, we share the word because there is no other, but not the thing described. I adore her and have adored her ever since I first met her, and I know that I’ll continue to adore her for many years to come. That’s why it can’t last much longer, because that feeling has been the same inside me for too many years now, without variation or attenuation. There will be no variation on my part, it will become unbearable, it already is, and because, one day, it will all become unbearable to me, she will have to die before me, when I can no longer stand my adoration of her. One day, I’ll have to kill her, don’t you see?’
    Having said that, Viana lifted his dripping foot out of the water and rested it carefully and distastefully on the grass, the sodden silk sock out of the water.
    ‘You’ll catch cold,’ I said. ‘You’d better take off your sock.’
    Viana did as I suggested and immediately removed the drenched sock, mechanically, indifferently. For a few seconds, he held it, still distastefully, between two fingers and then draped it over the back of his lounger, where it began to drip (the smell of wet cloth). Now he had one bare foot: the other was still covered by a pale blue sock and a rabidly red moccasin. The bare foot was wet and the covered foot very dry. I found it hard to look away from the former, but I think that fixing my gaze on something was a way of deceiving my ears, of pretending that what mattered were Viana’s feet and not what he had said, that one day he would have to kill Inès. I preferred to think he hadn’t said that.
    ‘What are you saying?’ I didn’t want to continue the conversation, but I said precisely the words that obliged him to do so: ‘Are you crazy?’
    ‘Crazy? What I’m going to tell you now is, in my view, totally logical,’ replied Viana and he again smoothed his non-existent hair. ‘I’ve known Inès since she was a child, since she was seven years old. Now she’s twenty-three. She’s the daughter of a couple who were great friends of mine until five years ago, but who no longer are—it’s perfectly normal, they’re furious that their eighteen-year-old daughter went off to live with a friend of theirs whom they’d always liked and respected, and now they want nothing more to do with me, and not even, almost, with her. I often used to go to their house and I’d see Inès, and I adored her. She adored me, too, but in a