The Death of Isolde

The first act of Tristan and Isolde was drawing to a close. Tired from the day’s agitation, I stayed in my seat, very pleased by the lack of neighbors. I turned my head toward the hall, and immediately fixed my eyes on a balcony box.

Evidently, a married couple. He, a husband like any other, and perhaps—owing to his mercantile vulgarity and the difference in age between him and his wife—less than any other. She, young, pale, with one of those profound beauties that reside not so much in the face, even though it is quite lovely, as in the perfect solidarity of gaze, mouth, neck, the way she half-closed her eyes. It was, above all, a beauty for men, without being in the least provocative; and this is precisely what women will never understand.

I looked at her for a long time with unshielded eyes because I could see her very well, and because when a man is thus in a state of tension, fixedly aspiring to a beautiful body, he does not resort to the feminine artifice of lorgnettes.

The second act began. I turned my head toward the box again, and our gazes crossed. I, who had already appreciated the charm of that gaze wandering from one side of the hall to the other, lived in a single second, upon feeling it rest directly on me, the most adorable dream of love that I have ever had.

It was all very fast: her eyes fled, but two or three times, in my long minute of insistence, they returned fleetingly to me.

It was likewise, with the sudden bliss of having imagined myself her husband for an instant, the most rapid disenchantment of an idyll. Her eyes turned back once more, but at that moment I felt that my neighbor to the left was looking that way, and after a moment of immobility on both parts, they bowed to each other.

Thus, then, I did not have the remotest right to consider myself a happy man, and I observed my companion. He was a man of more than thirty-five, with a blond beard and blue eyes of a clear and slightly hard gaze, which expressed unmistakable willpower.

“They know each other,” I told myself, “and quite well.”

Indeed, after the middle of the act my neighbor, who had not looked away from the stage again, fixed his eyes on the box. She, her head thrown back a little, and in the semi-darkness, was looking at him too. She seemed even paler still. They looked at each other fixedly, insistently, isolated from the world on that parallel line from soul to soul that kept them motionless.

During the third act, my neighbor did not turn his head for an instant. But before it concluded, he left by the opposite aisle. I looked at the box, and she had retired as well.

“End of an idyll,” I told myself melancholically.

He did not return, and the box remained empty.

“Yes, they repeat themselves,” he shook his head bitterly. “All dramatic situations can repeat themselves, even the most improbable ones, and they do. One must live, and you are very young... And those of your Tristan as well, which does not prevent there being the most sustained shriek of passion that a human soul has ever cried out there... I love that work as much as you do, and perhaps more... I do not refer, you would like to believe, to the drama of Tristan, with the thirty-two situations of the dogma, outside of which all are repetitions. No; the scene that returns like a nightmare, the characters who suffer the hallucination of a dead bliss, is something else... You witnessed the prelude to one of those repetitions... Yes, I know you remember... We didn’t know each other then... And it was precisely to you that I had to speak of this! But you judge badly what you saw and believed to be a happy act of mine... Happy!... Listen to me. The ship is departing in a moment, and this time I am not coming back... I am telling this to you, as if I could write it down, for two reasons: First, because you bear a striking resemblance to what I was then,” only in the good, luckily. “And second, because you, my young friend, are perfectly incapable of pursuing her, after what you are going to hear. Listen to me:”

I met her ten years ago, and during the six months that I was her suitor, I did everything possible to make her mine. I loved her very much, and she, immensely, loved me. Because of this she yielded one day, and from that instant, deprived of tension, my love grew cold.

Our social milieu was different, and while she was intoxicated by the bliss of my name—I was considered a handsome fellow then—I lived in a sphere of the world where it was inevitable for me to flirt with girls of good family, fortune, and sometimes very pretty ones.

One of them carried the flirtation under garden-party parasols to such an extreme that I grew exasperated and proposed to her seriously. But if my person was interesting for those games, my fortune did not reach to promising her the necessary lifestyle, and she made it clear to me.

She was right, perfectly right. Consequently I flirted with a friend of hers, much uglier, but infinitely less adept at these tortures of the tête-à-tête at ten centimeters, whose exclusive charm consists in driving one’s flirt crazy while keeping oneself master of oneself. And this time it was not I who grew exasperated.

Sure of triumph, then, I thought of the way to break with Inés. I continued seeing her, and although she could not deceive herself about the cooling of my passion, her love was too great not to light up her eyes with bliss every time she saw me enter.

Her mother left us alone; and even if she had known what was happening, she would have closed her eyes so as not to lose the vaguest possibility of rising with her daughter to a much higher sphere.

One night I went there determined to break it off, in visibly bad humor for that very reason. Inés ran to embrace me, but stopped, abruptly pale.

“What’s the matter with you,” she said to me.

“Nothing,” I answered with a forced smile, stroking her forehead. She let me do it, paying no attention to my hand and looking at me insistently. At last she pulled away her contracted eyes and we went inside.

The mother came, but feeling a storm brewing, she stayed only a moment and disappeared.

To break off is a short and easy word; but beginning to do it...

We had seated ourselves and were not speaking. Inés leaned forward, pushed my hand away from my face, and fixed her eyes on me, painful with anxious examination.

“It’s evident!...” she murmured.

“What,” I asked her coldly.

The tranquility of my gaze did more harm to her than my voice, and her face altered:

“That you don’t love me anymore!” she articulated in a desperate and slow oscillation of her head.

“This is the fiftieth time you’ve said the same thing,” I replied.

No harsher reply could be given; but I already had the beginning.

Inés looked at me for a while almost as if I were a stranger, and abruptly pushing away my hand and the cigarette, her voice broke:

“Esteban!”

“What,” I said to her again.

This time it was enough. She slowly let go of my hand and leaned back on the sofa, keeping her livid face fixed on the lamp. But a moment later her face fell sideways beneath the arm tensed against the backrest.

A while passed still. The injustice of my attitude—she saw nothing but injustice—increased my profound disgust with myself. That is why when I heard, or rather felt, that the tears were coming at last, I got up with a violent click of my tongue.

“I thought we weren’t going to have any more scenes,” I told her, pacing up and down.

She did not answer me, and I added:

“But let this be the last one.”

I felt the tears stop, and beneath them she answered me a moment later:

“As you wish.”

But immediately she fell sobbing onto the sofa:

“But what have I done to you! what have I done to you!”

“Nothing!” I answered her. “But I haven’t done anything to you either... I think we’re in the same boat. I’m sick of these things!”

My voice was surely much harder than my words. Inés sat up, and bracing herself on the arm of the sofa, repeated, icy:

“As you wish.”

It was a farewell. I was going to break it off, and they were beating me to it. Pride, vile pride touched to the quick, made me answer:

“Perfectly... I’m leaving. May you be happier... another time.”

She did not understand, and looked at me with strangeness. I had committed the first infamy; and as in such cases, I felt the vertigo of wallowing even further.

“Of course!” I backed it up brutally, “because you’ve had no complaint about me... right?”

That is to say: I did you the honor of being your lover, and you should be grateful to me.

She understood my smile better than the words, and I went out to look for my hat in the hallway, while with an “ah!”, her body and soul collapsed in the living room.

Then, at that very moment when I crossed the gallery, I felt intensely how much I loved her and what I had just done. Aspiration for luxury, high-society marriage, everything stood out to me like a sore in my own soul. And I, who offered myself up at auction to wealthy, ugly society women, who put myself up for sale, had just committed the most outrageous act against the woman who has loved us too much... Weakness on the Mount of Olives, or a vile moment in a man who is not vile, lead to the same end: a yearning for sacrifice, for a higher reconquest of one’s own worth. And then, the immense thirst for tenderness, of erasing kiss by kiss the tears of the adored woman, whose first smile after the wound we have caused her is the most beautiful light that can flood a man’s heart.

And finished! It was not possible for me before myself to take back what I had just outraged in that fashion: I was no longer worthy of her, nor did I deserve her anymore. I had soiled in a second the purest love that any man has ever felt for himself, and I had just lost with Inés the unrecoverable happiness of possessing someone who loves us so deeply.

Desperate, humiliated, I walked past the door, and saw her lying on the sofa, sobbing her whole soul out into her arms. Inés! Lost already! I felt my misery all the more profoundly before her body, all love, shaken by the sobs of her dead bliss. Without quite realizing it, I stopped.

“Inés!” I called.

My voice was no longer that of before. And she must have noticed it well, because her soul felt, in mounting sobs, the desperate call that my love was making to her, this time yes, immense love!

“No, no...” she answered me. “It’s too late!”

Padilla stopped. Rarely have I seen a bitterness more exhausted and tranquil than that of his eyes when he concluded. For my part, I could not tear my own away from that adorable beauty in the box, sobbing on the sofa...

“You will believe me,” Padilla resumed, “if I tell you that in my many bouts of insomnia as a bachelor discontent with himself, I had her thus before me... I left Buenos Aires without seeing almost anyone, and much less my great-fortune flirt... I returned eight years later, and learned then that she had married six months after I left. I went away again, and a month ago I returned, quite tranquil now, and at peace.”

I had not seen her again. She was for me like a first love, with all the dignifying charm that a virginal idyll has for a mature man who has loved a hundred times afterward... If you are ever loved as I was, and you outrage as I did, you will understand all the virile purity that exists in my memory.

Until one night I ran into her. Yes, that very night at the theater... I understood, upon seeing her husband of opulent fortune, that she had rushed into marriage, just as I had to the Ucayali... But upon seeing her again, twenty meters away from me, looking at me, I felt that in my soul, asleep in peace, there surged, bleeding, the desolation of having lost her, as if not a single day of those ten years had passed. Inés! Her beauty, her gaze, unique among all women, had been mine, well mine, because they had been handed over to me with adoration—you too will appreciate this someday.

I did the humanly possible to forget, I broke my molars trying to concentrate all my thought on the scene. But Wagner’s prodigious score, that cry of sickening passion, kindled into a live flame what I wanted to forget. In the second or third act I could take no more and turned my head. She too was suffering Wagner’s suggestion, and was looking at me. Inés, my life! For half a minute her mouth, her hands, were beneath my mouth, my eyes, and during that time she concentrated in her paleness the sensation of that bliss dead for ten years. And Tristan always, its shrieks of superhuman passion, over our frozen happiness!

I went out then, crossed the stalls like a sleepwalker, approaching her without seeing her, without her seeing me, as if for ten years I hadn’t been a wretch...

And like ten years ago, I suffered the hallucination that I was holding my hat in my hand and was going to pass in front of her.

I passed, the box door was open, and I stopped, crazed. Like ten years before on the sofa, she, Inés, stretched out on the divan of the anteroom, was sobbing Wagner’s passion and her shattered bliss.

Inés!... I felt that destiny was placing me at a decisive moment. Ten years!... But had they passed? No, no, my Inés!

And like then, upon seeing her body, all love, shaken by the sobs, I murmured:

“Inés!”

And like ten years before, the sobs redoubled, and like then she answered me from beneath her arms:

“No, no... It’s too late!...”