In Search of Klingsor. Jorge Volpi

He explored those specimens with the eagle eye of the collector, and somehow this always prevented him from ever coming close to anything like tenderness.

      For some reason, Vivien was not like the other girls. It had been several months since Bacon had first laid eyes on her brave, sad face. Later he would try to remember the exact date of their first encounter, to identify the precise starting point of their relationship, but for some reason he never managed to mentally retrieve the information. He couldn’t even remember if it had been summer or fall, or if it had been before or after his twentieth birthday. All he could remember was the distant sound of his voice when he finally spoke to that young woman who seemed little more than a girl. That day, instead of grabbing the New York Times from the pile and leaving the coins on top of some women’s fashion magazine, as he usually did, Bacon looked straight at Vivien and asked her for the paper himself. As she handed it to him, Bacon noted a stifled expression of pain in her eyes. The exchange may have lasted only a few seconds, but it was enough time for her somber, delicate face, like a pin stuck into a piece of cloth, to pierce his imagination and remain imbedded in his mind. This woman possessed a certain kind of beauty that he had never appreciated until just then. From that day onward, he would go to the newsstand every Sunday hoping to find her there and, perhaps, learn a bit more about her.

      The way the young woman looked at him made him feel both uncomfortable and intrigued. One day he tried striking up a conversation with her, commenting on some aspect of current events—the war was always a good pretext—but she didn’t take the bait. All she did was smile wanly, without even opening her lips, and then returned to whatever she had been thinking about.

      “Cat got your tongue?” asked Bacon in a playful tone that he immediately regretted. “How old are you, anyway?”

      “Seventeen,” she responded. Her voice was low and deep.

      Bacon paid for the paper and slowly walked away, as if he was waiting for her to call out to him at the last minute. She, on the other hand, didn’t even seem to have noticed the anonymous face that had just asked her age. The next day, Bacon returned. His legs trembling, he somehow managed to speak in a neutral, firm tone of voice.

      “Would you like to go to the movies with me?” he asked her.

      For the first time, she looked up at Bacon, displaying a set of teeth that made the newsprint in front of her look yellow and old. She watched him with imploring eyes. Was this some kind of joke?

      “I can’t.”

      “Why not?”

      “Because I can’t.”

      “Are you afraid?”

      “No.”

      This scene would be repeated over and over again during the months that followed. Bacon would stop by, pay for his New York Times, and tell her about the various movies playing at the nearby theaters, in the hopes of finally eliciting a yes from her. But she always just shook her head violently from side to side, as if trying to scare away a bothersome fly. Bacon refused to be discouraged, however; from his perspective, the situation was slowly evolving into a weekly routine. He was genuinely surprised, then, when one morning, she finally granted his request. At the end of the day, he met her in front of the box office of one of the local movie theaters, a highly undesirable place, it was said. The movie was (how could he forget?) Gone With the Wind, which had just recently opened, and was the first film Bacon had ever seen in color. Later on he would remember little of the plot, having been far more interested in sneaking covert glimpses of his companion’s profile, silvery blue in the light reflecting off the movie screen. He did, however, manage to memorize both the name and the gestures of the film’s starring actress, Vivien Leigh. And that was the name with which he chose to baptize his new lady friend. Later on, she told him her real name, but he stated quite plainly that he preferred calling her Vivien. By doing this, he had invented a new creature, blessed with the qualities and characteristics that he saw fit to imbue her with.

      The following Sunday they repeated the scene from the previous week, even seeing Gone With the Wind again, as if testing the full range of laws of inertia. Again, they spoke very little. It was as if they had signed a tacit agreement to spend time together, nothing else. Their first kiss took place on the way to the movies. Just like almost everything Bacon ever did, this kiss was inspired by a curiosity that was more scientific than romantic. After a few weeks, they added a twist to their incipient tradition: the small cottage in the country that was the one thing Bacons father had left him when he died. Even there, they never spoke more than they absolutely had to. But he would have liked to know, for example, if she felt the same pleasure he did, or if she was subjecting herself to this intimate physical activity just to make him happy. He really had no idea of the emotions that they felt for one another; to speak frankly and openly about their relationship, prohibited and precarious as it was, would have been an unnecessary provocation. And as the days stretched on, he slowly accepted that his relationship with Vivien could exist only by observing this vow of silence.

      One day, Bacon was just returning home from a statistics class when he received an unexpected visitor: his mother, who now called herself Rachel Smith. After her husband’s death, she had become a wealthy, haughty woman. She dressed like a New Yorker: tailored black dresses, an anachronistic gamine haircut, and a grayish animal wrapped around her neck, his dead eyes a pitiable sight. Though born into middle-class America, she had managed to find her place among the local aristocracy, thanks to her second marriage. She considered herself an equal to the women around her, and she carefully noted and copied all their habits and idiosyncrasies. For a long time Bacon didn’t even notice this new attitude, until one day when she happened to unleash her venom on the city sanitation workers.

      “How can you humiliate me this way?” she implored as she burst through Bacon’s front door, on the verge of tears, as her turquoise-colored purse fell upon his desk. Her tone was timid, almost inaudible, despite her worldly appearance. “I had to learn from one of my friends that instead of studying, my son uses the money he inherited from his father to go out on dates with a whore. Is this true?”

      “She’s not a prostitute, Mother.”

      “Don’t be coy with me, Frank.”

      They argued for several minutes until, worn down by his mother’s histrionics, Bacon swore that he would stop seeing Vivien for good. Of course, he didn’t really intend to keep the promise, at least not fully. The next time he saw Vivien, he simply told her that he would rather not see her out of doors. Vivien’s eyes filled with tears when she heard this, but just as he had imagined, she said nothing. Not one single reproach or protest, just the same sadness. Nor did Vivien say anything when Bacon refused to go to the movies with her the following week. From that day on, they never went out together again. Bacon didn’t even have to explain why: Vivien knew the reason all too well, and the last thing she needed was the additional humiliation of being lied to. Finally, when Bacon mentioned something about a job in a newsstand being beneath the dignity of a girl like her, Vivien began working in a cafeteria.

      It didn’t take Bacon long to realize that when you despise the woman you love, the love becomes a cruel, solitary vice. He trusted her, but he was also aware of the hatred that was slowly building up behind the wall of her submissiveness. Vivien, however, acted as though she had no idea of what was going on in her lover’s head, behaving as if nothing at all had changed between them. She continued visiting his house, twice a week at least, with the apathy of a rabbit who allows himself to be fattened up, knowing full well that the day will soon come when he will have to take his place on his master’s dining room table.

      One day, at one of the little social gatherings she loved to organize, Bacon’s mother introduced her son to a perky, freckled young woman from “one of the best families in Philadelphia,” as Bacon’s mother noted with great pride. When the girl actually seemed interested in what he had to say, young Frank decided it wouldn’t be so terrible to dance with her, or tell her that he was currently unattached. Vivien didn’t even cross his mind; she had evolved into something of a sexual phantom that appeared at his bedside like a figure from one of his erotic dreams. Vivien, in fact, did materialize at Bacon’s