After opening the door of her home to me, and then the door to her bedroom, while she still lived in the little villa with her mother, and before stretching out on the mattress on the studio floor, Leda would always do just one thing, a single action: she’d put on a record. Invariably, a piece for piano solo. Which meant we were assured of twenty or so minutes of unbroken piano music ahead of us, the duration of one side of the record, before having to get up and turn it over or put on a different disk.
DURING THE FEW MONTHS OF MY . . . how shall I put this . . . of my time frequenting Leda, no longer as Arbus’s sister, but as a young woman and nothing less or more, I didn’t have any other girlfriends, nor did I make the slightest effort to get any, because I felt, though without any basis for that feeling, that I had a commitment with her. Time and again I found myself wishing that she would reject me, break up with me, so that I might feel free to look for another girlfriend, or else other girls I could just have some fun with (I use this expression without ever having actually put it into practice—certainly not as fun, but as a sort of predation, a venting, an obsession or a form of deceit, anything you can think of, in other words, but fun). For that matter, in order to be able to reject me, Leda would have needed me to put myself forward in some explicit manner, something that actually never happened, and so the equivocal situation stretched out. And yet I continued to secretly wish that she would put an end to it by rejecting me, which would have brought me every bit as much relief as a positive outcome.
In that case, why go on seeing her?
Inertia is a disease: witnessing from outside, from above, what the body does or doesn’t do, without intervening, without wanting to intervene, waiting for things to happen on their own, because in the meantime (this would be the underlying idea), if something’s going to happen, it will happen in any case, and if not, oh well, it wasn’t meant to be.
Cursed fatalism! Sometimes you’ve made my life easier, but far more often you’ve ruined it! How I have been stupidly indolent and perhaps even cowardly, letting things and people flow over and past me instead of seizing them or decisively rejecting them! Because of the sweetness, the gentleness, which was in fact unequaled, of a handful of occasions in which everything occurred naturally, without any effort, in how many other situations have I failed because of my inertia, my inaction, expecting the river to reverse course and start flowing toward me, to bathe me with its waters?
(And then, of course, my doubts, which aren’t really all so much a matter of: Will I be capable? as, rather: Will I be able to get to the point where I’ll be able to prove that I’m capable? At the appropriate instant? If it’s not the instinctive reflexes of the world’s Don Giovannis, what is it that actually drives a man to try to hook up with a woman, with a certain woman, with a certain woman at a given moment, in that one specific situation? Is it really nothing more than a question of putting your hands on them or pursing your lips until they meet and lock with other lips? Isn’t it this and nothing more?)
AFTER A WHILE, I kissed Leda, but this didn’t inaugurate any change, if anything, it was a new stretch of stasis.
Between Leda and me, the kisses were so long and drawn out, you couldn’t really call them kisses anymore. Anything, any event, in order to be given a name, must have a beginning and an end, a shape or a duration: if the lips never break apart, then how can that be a kiss, and if one never ends, you can never give another, and another, and yet another, to paraphrase Catullus’s well-known wording, and his equally well-known phrase about “thousands of kisses” doesn’t mean the lips remain locked for hours, without ever parting, because in fact that would no longer be a kiss, just as the ones we exchanged weren’t really kisses, with our eyes closed, wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket, Leda and I, that was by no means a kiss at all, but rather a morbid or childish or animalistic contact, the likes of which you might see in documentaries, on the verge of insensibility, of catatonia, like the incubation of an insect’s eggs in another insect’s body or the exhausting intercourse between shellfish that lie there, glued together, sucking on each other’s membranes for days at a time. More than once, Leda, with her lips attached to mine, dropped off to sleep, in a state of peaceful abandonment, and I realized it from the fact that her breathing slowed and grew regular, and she was breathing into my mouth, the only significant signal, seeing that as she kissed me she already had her eyes closed and her arms lay slack at her sides.
ON OCCASION I WOULD TAKE ADVANTAGE, in an extremely limited fashion, truth be told, of these little catnaps of hers. We were under cover of the usual tartan blanket because it was cold in her studio. I placed a hand on Leda’s belly and I pulled her shirt from her trousers. Leda always and only wore pants. I never saw her in a skirt or a dress. I lifted the shirt and touched the flesh of her belly. It was soft and cold. Skinny though she was, if I pressed down, I could feel my fingers sinking into her skin. Since I couldn’t descend beneath the belt of her trousers, which were very snug and high-waisted, as was the style in those years, I raised my hand ever so slightly to where Leda was skinnier and the flesh was more taut. In the meantime, she went on breathing into my mouth, caressing my face with the breath that issued from her nostrils. I hesitated to raise the blanket so I could see what my hand was getting up to down there, I might easily have awakened her, and the mystery of that flesh, so chilly and insensitive, pumped so much blood into my face and my abdomen that I had the impression, in contrast with her, of burning, of being scalding hot; and so I overcame my hesitation and uncovered her, first lifting the blanket and then sliding it down over her legs. And I saw that her belly was snow-white and smooth, like a little girl’s. But when I tried to lower those skintight corduroy trousers, as soon as I unbuttoned them at her waist, I realized that from that point down, a scar began, running vertically, slightly raised, and I immediately abandoned the idea of finding out how far it went.
THIS DETAIL STIRS IN MY MEMORY, obscenely open to allowing itself to be corrupted by trivial juxtapositions, the umpteenth ribald joke that circulated back in school days.
“Do you know what Princess Anne has six inches below her belly button?”
“No.”
“The socket for her Philips.”
(A pun on the surname of Mark Phillips, the queen of Britain’s son-in-law, and the well-known brand of electric appliances.)
ONE TIME I CAME ON HER. Breaking the state of paralysis, I climbed on top of her. Leda neither rejected me nor welcomed me, making such a show of her passivity that it made me think it might have been a tactic. She can’t have been utterly indifferent to that act of mine. As was her custom, she shut her eyes and let out a sigh. The fact that she didn’t look at me, wasn’t encouraging me, stopped me again; it killed my initiative aborning. Leda turned her head to one side, still with her eyes shut, but not as if she were displeased or disgusted. And then she smiled in a fleeting fashion and said in a whisper: “Do as you please.” As I please what? I thought to myself. She hadn’t told me, “Do what you please,” but rather “as you please,” and what difference is there, what does it mean? At that point I stopped bracing myself and let my whole weight sink down on top of her, forcing her to spread her legs just enough so that I could lay my member atop her sex and rub mine against hers. And as I continued rubbing the crotch of my pants against the crotch of hers, I could feel that I was about to have an orgasm, in spite of the fact that my member had barely started to swell, but the idea of coming in my pants seemed ridiculous to me, so I unbuttoned them just in time for my member to spray a spurt of semen onto Leda’s white pullover, right between breast and neck. Feeling me crush her, Leda had just opened her eyes again, and she witnessed this development as if it were a natural phenomenon, limiting herself to lifting her pullover between thumb and index finger, to keep my semen from soaking through to her blouse. Then she got up and went into the bathroom without a word. When she came back, she had changed out of the white pullover and into a red V-neck sweater. She smiled and lay down next
to me again; I was properly dressed again, and she took my hand, not the one that had held my member during the orgasm, but the other one.
Then she asked me:
“Have you ever been to Switzerland?”
“Switzerland? Yes, a couple of times.”
“What do you think, is it nice there?”
“Yes, very nice.”
“Are there mountains?”
“Yes. Lots of them.”
Those are the exact words we exchanged.
I couldn’t explain why, after that one time, I was stuck with the obsessive thought that I might have gotten her pregnant. And that thought never abandoned me until after we stopped seeing each other.
7
ABOUT LEDA AND ARTISTS. From what I know about her, and that’s very little, she had been in love only once before our relationship. With a very strange young man, tall and gawky, taciturn, conceited, who tormented her not so much because he mistreated her but because he was too caught up in allowing his soul to be tortured by problems of all sorts, foremost among them his almost total ineptitude at interacting with the world, understanding others, and making himself understood. Gustavo Herz was his name. From this inability of his, along with an intelligence that was acknowledged by and large as a virtual reparation, perhaps, for his odious and all-too-concrete shortcomings (in fact, those who maintained that this was the case tended always to place the adverb “still” before the compliment: he may be an ugly lunk, he may be a solitary and maniacal egotist, he may be a blight on humanity . . . “Still, how intelligent he is . . .! You have to admit”), Herz had deduced that his was an artistic personality, distinctly artistic, and therefore, necessarily, misunderstood. An artist cannot help but have all of society arrayed against him: therefore, if society is against you, you’re an artist. Even though he had never once actually heard its siren call, he never ceased telling Leda all about his “artistic vocation,” the need to follow it at all costs, sacrificing to its requirements any and all things or persons (by which he meant, first and foremost, her), and he laid upon that vocation blame for all his difficulties, with his family, with his fellow man, with the system, with his depressing classmates (he was in fact attending, intermittently, either the first or second year of university), with the people in power, the bourgeoisie, the ignorant and the learned, motorists and pedestrians, and with anyone who tried to give him a hand, invariably rejected, with those who ignored him, dismissed as shallow, and finally with all those, and they were a great many, who couldn’t stand him, and to them Herz, as if repaying in the same coin, tit for tat, and with a certain smug complacency, never tired of providing them with fresh and excellent reasons to detest him. And thus the cycle came back around, since he could sense the dislike and even hostility growing around, he had persuaded himself that he was simply sharing the fate common to every radical artist, surrounded by Philistines, and hindered by a wall of general misunderstanding.
(People who are unilaterally convinced they are on a mission tend to make those who are close to them pay the highest cost, even more than their adversaries: in Gustavo’s case, those were the members of his family and Leda.)
He had enrolled at the university, majoring in chemistry, a department he’d chosen on the basis of a whim, really, rather than any true interest or predilection, but he soon abandoned the idea of taking the exams (“Those are tests for stupid people, they’re worthless and meaningless, the worst students always pass, I don’t have time for that”), and therefore also the fantasy of even studying for them, by going to class or just reading the textbooks. He delighted in the consternation of his parents when he announced his intent, their opposition offering proof that he was doing the right thing. Like a patch of mold on food gone bad, Gustavo thrived on disapproval: letting human relations rot was, for him, the best way of putting them to the test, and that is what he did with Leda. And yet she remained attached to him. Perhaps she thought she’d found in Gustavo certain traits of her brother or of her eccentric, wretched father, except that those two members of her family were truly geniuses—while Gustavo Herz was anything but.
WAS GUSTAVO AN ARTIST? As he weighed what medium he might choose to express his talent, he decided that literature was a domain that demanded too much time to gain the confirmation of one’s gifts. As for classical music, the apprenticeship was even longer, and he by this point was too old to undertake it, while the field of the visual arts seemed to have been homesteaded by a band of wily foxes, and it was inadvisable to try to compete with them, either because they were better prepared than him in technical terms, even if that was in the execution of the crap they came up with, canvases ambitious and frivolous and that sort of thing, or else because they were capable of justifying their work with a pile of nonsense, in oral or written form, which served as a side dish to their performance art, installations, piles of dirt, or rusty heaps of iron.
That’s when Herz figured out that the shortest path involved songs.
Songs, yes, songs, the fantastic twentieth-century shortcut in which various geniuses expressed themselves who might have lost their way or been lost to posterity if they had been forced to negotiate more complex and articulated forms. A popular genre, and therefore attractive, which in the course of three minutes manages to condense centuries of theater, thousands of pages of literature, symphonies, and concerts, plus the peculiar sense of the present day, which has a special beat all its own, a pulse in which you can sense the quiver of youth, fashion, adventure, dance, seduction, all those things, in other words, whose heartbreaking beauty consists of an absolute state of ephemerality, from which a superconcentrated emotional juice is squeezed, and if and when it works, it casts a spell on the listener, churning and troubling in a way that the more complex arts can only dream of. And all this, thanks to a short and simple melody, played by a few basic instruments and accompanied by a few rhyming verses.
WITH HIS GUITAR, which he could strum and pluck like anyone else, and on the piano, where he could spread his fingers mechanically to form the chords Leda had taught him (at least the dozen basic ones), Gustavo composed three or four songs, then, as he became increasingly fond of humming and singing them all the livelong day, he came up with as many more, which brought him up to the canonical number of songs to make up a record, at least the way LPs were produced at the time, and therefore to be able to claim, and not only to the mirror on his armoire, that he was now “a composer.” A composer of songs. The first two songs he wrote were called “Dieci lire” (Ten Lire) and “Ballata per una Hoover” (Ballad for a Vacuum Cleaner) and I listened to them in a bar during an open-mic night. Herz sang those two songs so quickly that in five minutes he was done and had already hurried offstage, without even saying good night. Well, I have to admit that it wasn’t bad. Verging on the annoying, on the whiny . . . but there was no question that Gustavo had managed to capture the audience’s attention, especially with his “Hoover” song, during the performance of which he imitated the sound of a vacuum cleaner. He was right, after all: that combative nature of his had a certain magnetic je ne sais quoi.
wooo-wooo-wooo . . .
FIRST HE CALLED HIMSELF GUS. Then Gus-To. Then he changed his surname to Herzmutter, which I believe means nothing in German, but it sounded good. When he was tired of coming up with stage names by deforming his real name, he founded a group that he dubbed Weed, composed of just one musician, him, who did everything: he wrote words and music, he played all the instruments, he sang or, really, he whispered, because the songs were spoken more than anything else. With that handful of tracks, eight in number, and working on the opening and closing arrangements so that the overall running time didn’t seem too scant, he put out his first album, Hoover.
IT’S ONLY NOW THAT I’ve reached this point that I feel I can talk about Leda. The story of Gustavo Herz’s career could continue to be told separately, with no need to intertwine it with any other character, since that’s exactly how Gustavo wanted to run it: alone, imagining this sol
itude as a gift and, at the same time, as a cross to bear, typical of the true explorer, the pioneer, the innovator. That aside, I confess that I have some serious problems with talking about Leda, in general, and with having her talk to others, with imagining her wrapping her arms around Herz, talking to him or smiling at him, or having her clothes taken off by him, or else showing him, as she spreads her slender fingers, how to finger an A minor chord. I’m jealous, I’ll confess it, even if I have no right to be, and I’m terrified at the idea of contaminating her with the secretions of other creatures, with the glistening slime trail left by their passage through her life. They might be words or deeds, conversations, scoldings, embraces, mistreatments: everything that has to do with Leda troubles me deeply as if she weren’t Arbus’s sister but my own and I were touched in my own body by everything that happened to her. In fact, I never find myself thinking about what she did, but only about what other people did to her . . . The verbs that have Leda as their subject in my mind are all conjugated in the passive form. Does that mean she had a place in my heart? Does that mean I loved her, that I’d fallen in love with her—all of this? Maybe so. We give the provisional name of love to far too many contradictory sensations all jumbled together, while waiting for further developments to clarify what we’re dealing with. The developments that emerged between the two of us ought to force anyone to withdraw that conjecture. And so why do I bring it up myself now, after all these years?
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