Double

a gloom that was almost darkness, she heard her husband's slow, regular breathing, and was suddenly aware that there was another breathing in the house, someone had come in, someone was moving around, perhaps in the living room, perhaps in the kitchen, behind the door that leads into the corridor, anyway, right here. Shaking with fear, Helena reached out her arm to wake her husband, but, at the last moment, reason stopped her. There's no one here, she thought, there can't possibly be anyone out there, it's just my imagination, sometimes dreams do step out of the brain that dreamed them, then we call them visions, phantasmagoria, premonitions, omens, warnings from beyond, the person who was breathing and walking about the house, the person who just sat down on my sofa, the person hidden behind the curtains, isn't that man, but a fantasy I have inside my head, this figure heading straight toward me, touching me with hands identical to those of this other man asleep by my side, looking at me with the same eyes, who would kiss me with the same lips, who in the same voice would say the everyday words and the other, tender, intimate words, those of the spirit and those of the flesh, is a fantasy, nothing but a mad fantasy, a nightmare borne out of fear and anxiety, tomorrow everything will return to its place, I won't need the cockerel to crow to drive away bad dreams, the alarm clock will be enough, everyone knows that no man can be exactly the same as another man in a world in which they make machines to wake us up. A ridiculous conclusion that offended both good sense and a simple respect for logic, but to this woman, who had spent all night wandering among the vaguenesses of obscure thoughts composed of shifting scraps of fog constantly changing form and direction, the conclusion seemed unanswerable and irrefutable. We must even be grateful to absurd reasoning if, in the midst of the bitter night, it restores to us a little serenity, however illusory, and gives us the key with which we can finally, hesitantly, open the door to sleep. Helena opened her eyes before the alarm was due to go off, she silenced it so that her husband would not wake up, and, lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling, she allowed her confused ideas to gradually come to order and to follow the route that would at last draw them all together into rational, coherent thought, free of inexplicable phantasms and all-too-easily explained fantasies. She could hardly believe that given all the real and mythological chimera, the sort that spit fire and have the head of a lion, the tail of a dragon, and the body of a goat, for the flaccid monsters of her insomnia could have appeared to her in this form too, she could hardly believe that she could have been tormented, like some lewd, not to say indecent, temptation, by the image of another man whom she would not even need to undress in order to know what he was like physically, from head to toe, every inch of him, because an identical man lies beside her now. She was not ashamed of herself because these ideas did not really belong to her, they were the ambiguous fruit of an imagination that, shaken by unusual, violent emotions, had jumped the rails, what matters is that she is lucid and alert now, the mistress of her thoughts and her desires, the hallucinations of the night, be they of the flesh or of the spirit, always dissolve into air with the first light of morning, the light that reorders the world and restores it to its usual orbit, once more rewriting the books of the law. It is time to get up, the travel agency she works for is on the other side of the city, every morning on her way there she thinks how wonderful it would be if she could get them to transfer her to one of the offices in the center, the wretched traffic, at this time of day, more than deserves the term 'infernal' coined by someone in some happy moment of inspiration, who knows when, who knows where. Her husband will remain in bed for another hour or two, he has no filming to do today, and the current project, it seems, is coming to an end. Helena slipped out of bed with a lightness that, though natural to her, has been perfected during her ten years as attentive, devoted spouse, then she moved noiselessly about the room while she took clothes off hangers and got dressed, before going out into the corridor. This is where the night visitor had walked, she heard his breathing next to this gap in the door before he came in and hid behind the curtain, no, don't worry, this is not another evil assault made by Helena's imagination, she herself is making fun of her own temptations, so trivial, now that she can compare them with the rosy glow coming in through that window, the one in the living room where, last night, she had felt as frightened as a little girl left alone in a wood in a fairy tale. There is the sofa on which the visitor sat, and it was not by chance that he did so, of all the places where he could have rested, if that was what he wanted, he chose that one, Helena's sofa, as if to share it with her or to appropriate it for himself. There are plenty of reasons to think that the more we try to drive our imaginations away, the more they will amuse themselves by seeking out and attacking those points in our armor that, consciously or unconsciously, we left unprotected. One day, this woman Helena, who is in a hurry and has a professional timetable to keep to, will tell us why she too went and sat down on the sofa, why, during one long minute, she cozily lingered there, and why, having been so resolute when she woke up, she is behaving now as if the dream had taken her in its arms again and was gently rocking her. And why too, dressed and ready to leave, she opened the telephone directory and copied Tertuliano Maximo Afonso's address onto a piece of paper. She pushed open the bedroom door, her husband is still apparently asleep, but his sleep is nothing more than the final, diffuse threshold of wakefulness, she can therefore approach the bed, kiss him on the forehead, and say, I'm off now, and then receive on her mouth his kiss and the other man's lips, good heavens, this woman must be mad, the things she does, the things she thinks of. Are you late, asked Antonio Claro, rubbing his eyes, No, I've still got a couple of minutes, she replied and sat down on the edge of the bed, What shall we do about this man, What do you want to do, Last night, while I was trying to get to sleep, I thought I should go and talk to him, but now I'm not so sure that would be a good idea, We either open the door to him, or we close it, to be honest, I don't see any other solution, one way or another our life has changed and will never be the same again, The decision is in our hands, But it's not in our hands, or anyone else's, to make what happened unhappen, the arrival of this man is a fact that we can neither erase nor remove, even if we don't let him in, even if we close the door on him, he'll be there waiting on the other side until we can't stand it anymore, You're taking a very grim view of things, perhaps, after all, we can resolve matters with a simple meeting, he proves that he's identical to me, I tell him, yes, sir, you're quite right, and once that's done, it's good-bye and good riddance, please don't bother us again, He'll still be waiting on the other side of the door, Well, we won't open it, He's already come in, he's inside your head and inside mine, We'll forget him eventually, Possibly, but we can't be sure. Helena got up, looked at her watch, and said, I've got to go, I'm going to be late, she took two steps toward the door but still had time to ask, Are you going to phone him, are you going to arrange to meet, Not today, replied her husband, raising himself up on one elbow, or tomorrow, I'll wait a few days, it might not be a bad idea to let indifference and silence do their work, to allow time for the matter to die a natural death, Oh, well, it's up to you, see you later. The apartment door opened and closed, and we will never know if Tertuliano Maximo Afonso was sitting on the stairs outside waiting. Antonio Claro stretched out in bed again, if life really hadn't changed, as his wife claimed it had, he would turn over and sleep for another hour, it seems to be true what the envious say, that actors need a lot of sleep, it must be a consequence of the irregular life they lead, even when they go out at night as rarely as Daniel Santa-Clara. However, five minutes later, Antonio Claro was up, unaccustomed to the early hour, although, to be fair, when his professional duties demand it, this actor, who gives every appearance of being somewhat lazy, is as capable of getting up as the most early-rising of larks. He peered at the sky out of the bedroom window, it was not hard to predict that it was going to be another hot day, then he went into the kitchen to make some breakfast. He thought about what his wife had said, He's inside our heads, but she was like that, peremptory, no, not peremptory exactly, what she has is the gift of concision, of coming out with short, condensed, pithy phrases, using four words to say what others wouldn't be able to say in forty. He wasn't sure if his was the best solution, waiting a while before going on the offensive, either in the form of a secret meeting, face-to-face, without any witnesses who might blab afterward, or in the form of a terse telephone conversation, of the kind that leaves the other party dumbstruck, breathless, nonplussed. However, he doubted the efficacy of his dialectical skills to put a stop, once and for all, to any plans, present or future, that this wretch, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, might have to introduce into their lives the kind of pernicious psychological and conjugal disquiet of which he had implicitly boasted and to which he had explicitly given rise, for example, Helena, last night, having the boldness to declare, Every time I look at you, it will be as if I were seeing him. Only a woman whose moral foundations had been severely shaken would have thrown such words in the face of her own husband unaware of the adulterous element they contained, diaphanous, it is true, but highly revealing. Meanwhile, going around and around in Antonio Claro's head, although he would doubtless angrily deny this if we so much as mentioned it, is the outline of an idea that, out of pure caution, we will not go so far as to classify as being on a par with a Machiavelli, at least not until its eventual effects, doubtless negative, have been revealed. This idea, which, at the moment, is nothing but a mental sketch, consists, neither more nor less, and however shocking it may seem to us, in working out whether, with skill and cunning, it would be possible to obtain from the resemblance, similarity, or absolute identity, should this be confirmed, some advantage of a personal nature, that is, whether Antonio Claro or Daniel Santa-Clara could find a way of profiting from a business that, at the moment, appears not at all favorable to their interests. Since we cannot, at the moment, expect the person responsible for the idea to illumine the doubtless tortuous routes via which he vaguely imagines that he will reach his objectives, do not count on us, mere transcribers of other people's