I didn’t call her on the phone, for the agreement was that we wouldn’t write to each other, wouldn’t even open a secret email account, this wasn’t about words or spoken things: we followed the rules of the arrangement that she’d obstinately set out, defining the conditions of her relationship with me and the borders of our passion.
There was something theatrical in those performances, in the invented characters and extreme games, a sort of fiction lived between two strangers. They were deviations on rainy afternoons, abstract representations of real situations. In the department lounge, as I exchanged comments and jokes with colleagues in that room of fogged-up windows and bright lights, I thought of it as an attempt to invent a life that was more intense, more real. The academic world was too closed-off, it occupied too much space and left little room for other experiences, so that you had to create points of flight and clandestine lives in order to escape its formality. That’s why there was so much administrative oversight around improper conduct, a prison fence of moralistic and puritanical regulations. At the same time that her professional achievements were increasing, she told me one night, she sensed a need for submission and humiliation growing inside her. Playing with fire in the smoking rooms of those university fortresses.
We would meet in the hallways and talk about something or other, never exchanging any conspiratorial looks or gestures. She too seemed to live in isolated series, with friends, colleagues, lovers, students, professional acquaintances, and none of those spaces was contaminated by the others. She was a North American woman: intelligent, enthusiastic, and highly organized, going out for early morning runs along the tree-lined streets of the town, monitoring her pace and heartbeat with a tiny digital aerobic device that she wore on her left wrist. She had an innate ability to impose a distance, an obstruction, and it was impossible to cross the invisible glass that kept her isolated from the world. She lived a secret life and respected the safety rules; in her other life, she was just a professor getting bored at a department party.
I remember one of those nights clearly. Tired smiles and resentment passed like bolts of lightning as we drank Californian wine and chatted in little groups around platters of curried chicken and tuna empanadas. Ida, dressed in a knit skirt that showed off her hips and some kind of white blouse with a Mao collar, was having a friendly conversation with a colleague. I approached and greeted her with a nod. I’d had a few too many drinks and was in a state of mind that I know well, when I begin to tread dangerously along the edge of the abyss, but she left me there talking to a stranger in a yellow tie and went over to D’Amato to ask him how the deep-water cetaceans in the basement of his house were doing. I watched her from the corner and wanted her; how could I escape that desire, if I couldn’t stop thinking of the nights we spent together?
There was a feeling of anticipation in the air, as if all of the blind signals presaged dark omens. I was familiar with this state—or conviction—without any certainties, one that seemed more like hope than belief. It’s the magical thinking of love, the hypnotic state of someone in love, bound to a woman he desires and pursuing her with clumsy, foolish determination. To escape from all of those confused thoughts, I spent my afternoons working in the library, the best way to change the subject. (“Since we can’t change the conversation, let’s change reality,” my friend Junior in Buenos Aires would say.) Nevertheless, Ida’s image would interject, and in the end, I’d stop whatever I was doing, gather my books, and go out into the street. Ida knew the art of interruption, could cause a displacement of bodies with only a wave of her hand, was like the heroine of a novel, trapped inside its plot. Of course, she wasn’t the heroine of any novel, though I wish she would have been if it could have altered her fate.
I would get into my car and start driving along the roads with no certain direction. Why had she gone off into a corner with D’Amato? She must have been to his house, since she knew about that stupid aquarium in his basement. Back then, I was unable to think about the nature of other people’s relationships, because I was only concerned with others’ attitudes toward me. I can remember following the course of the Delaware River and even taking a walk along the New Jersey coast, stopping at little seaside bars. One afternoon I parked on some street in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Atlantic City, went into a casino, and won a decent amount of cash playing roulette. I walked back to my car and went rambling around the ruined streets that lay behind the area with the seaside resort, the boardwalk, and the hotels. The neighborhood looked like it had undergone a bombing: there were burnt-out buildings, looted houses, mounds of steaming trash, homeless people sleeping under a bridge. A large group of kids in baggy jeans and hoodies were blasting rap at full volume, sitting on the sidewalk in front of a drugstore, smoking hash and dozing. On a side street, in the city’s Barrio Latino, there was a gym, the Sandy Saddler Boxing Club.
The sound of the gloves against the bags, the smell of resin, the rhythmic movements of the fighters shadowboxing made me recall the days when I used to train twice a week at La Federación de Box on Calle Castro Barros, just after I’d moved to Buenos Aires and was living in the Hotel Almagro. Boxing categories aren’t
