Ida had an apartment in the Village, on Bleecker Street. A small place with two rooms and plenty of light, where she shut herself away to live her life as an independent woman. I put my arms around her as we entered, but she extricated herself with a smooth motion. “Not so fast, man,” she said. “We have our whole lives ahead of us.” It wasn’t true, but we spent that night and the next as though those words were, more than an omen, a threat.
Ida opened a little silver box in which she kept some rose-colored pills, and I don’t know if they were ecstasy or LSD or maybe those silver nitrate poppers, but for the next few hours I felt like a monkey that had climbed up onto the ceiling fan to look down on the two bodies below, naked in bed or standing before of the mirror, realizing fantasies never imagined.
“Before you can talk, you have to go to bed together first,” she’d said. She had a gift for establishing an immediate sense of intimacy, a trust that went beyond the body. Then I asked her what it was she’d said to me the last time, as we were leaving the restaurant. “That you turned me on,” she said. She was tired of listening to me talk about how I’d separated from my wife and was feeling kind of lost. “We’re all lost; if that’s the reason then don’t worry, we’ve all separated from a woman.”
Time passed as if we’d known or loved each other in the past and had suddenly met again in this unknown New York apartment. In Spanish her name meant an action, Ida, the way out, the journey of no return, a signal of someone leaving. And a strangeness as well (she’s a little off, está ida or es medio ida). On top of that, she had the same name as my mother… can you believe that? It was the first word I ever learned to read. “Ida, do you see?” my mother used to say as she spelled out the letters of her name, engraved in the doorway at my grandparents’ house.
We caught the last train back on Sunday night and sat in separate cars since she didn’t want any trouble. What kind of trouble? She didn’t want there to be any talk in the department. She didn’t want me to call her on the phone under any pretext or write personal emails to her. She was a single woman, and she wanted to be a single woman. None of that domestic nonsense or false entanglement. “It’s better this way,” she said, “we’ll be clandestine lovers.” She always joked around when she talked (just like my mother) and kept her secret vices apart from her professional life. I got off at Junction and from the platform could see her still on the train as it moved off toward town; illuminated in the little window, she was checking her hair and eyes in a hand mirror.
2
I ran into her the next day in the faculty lounge, and we greeted each other with the usual tone of two colleagues passing each other in the halls, making no reference to our nights hidden away in her forgotten apartment in the Village. Polite, ironic, indifferent, she made me see that it was best to conform to the academic code of cordial and detached relationships, forgetting the things that took place off campus (out of frame, as photographers say).
It was a dark and rainy afternoon, and there were scones and coffee in the lounge and newspapers to read. The Russian film specialist, a former experimental filmmaker who had shot a few Super 8 movies inside Soviet psychiatric hospitals, was sitting by the window, reading an old issue of Sight and Sound. After making a slight gesture of greeting to us, Ida went over to the young Kalamazov to mention that two of her students were passionate about his course on darkness in the films of Tarkovsky. Straight away they were joined by the invisible professor of Slavic literature and several graduate students from Ida’s course. After a while, the casual meeting turned into a kind of political-cultural gathering. We drank coffee and talked about the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the esoteric tradition in Polish culture while waiting for evening to fall so that we could return home. I stayed until the end, held captive by tedium and the harsh atmosphere of the situation. I’d been through similar confusions in my life, sitting in a meeting with a woman I was seeing in secret and talking to her about trivial things while her husband made the rounds serving clericó; there were no husbands here, of course, aside from the fact that she was married to Academia in the way that nuns in a convent are wedded to Jesus Christ; in short, the point was to protect her private life from outside eyes, as if someone was indeed spying on her and she had to play a role all the time. And it was true that she was being observed. She was a young, single woman who protected her reputation with steely determination and knew that sexual harassment and political incorrectness could ruin a woman’s career as well; or perhaps, more simply, she just liked things to happen that way: going out at night, disguised as a femme fatale, for a rendezvous with a half-stranger in the nighttime curve of a park under trees. The double life was part of the culture in this country, and every now and then a male senator would be discovered dressed
