PARTISAN REVIEW
the kind of lovemaking that women respond to with much under–
standing. There was no tenderness in it, neither before nor after
the act was completed, with the frigid embarrassment first and the
satiety afterwards, both making him rough and coarse and nearly
speechless. He thought of himself as being no good with women,
and for that reason his relations with them had been infrequent and
fleeting.
It
was a kind of psychic impotence of which he was bitterly
ashamed. He felt it could not be explained so he never tried to
explain it. And so he was lonely and unsatisfied outside of
his
work.
He was uniformly kind to everybody just because he found it easier
to be that way, but he forgot nearly all of his social engagements,
or if he happened to remember one while he was working, he would
sigh, not very deeply, and go on working without even stopping to
call on the phone and say, Excuse me, I'm working. His attachment
to his work was really somewhat absurd for he was not an especially
good writer. In fact he was nearly as awkward in
his
writing as he
had been in his relations with women. He wrote the way that he
had always made love, with a feeling of apprehension, rushing
through it blindly and feverishly as
if
he were fearful of being unable
to complete the act.
You may be wondering why you are presented with these un–
pleasantly clinical details in advance of the story. It is in order to
make more understandable the relationship which the story deals
with, a rather singular relationship between the writer Kamrowski
and a Mexican girl, Amada, which began in the Mexican border
town of Laredo, one summer during the war when Kamrowski was
returning from a trip through the Mexican interior.
Because of
his
suspiciously foreign name and appearance and
a nervous habit of speech that easily gave the impression of an
accent, Kamrowski had been detained at the border by customs
and immigration officials. They had confiscated his papers for an
examination by experts in code, and Kamrowski had been forced
to remain in Laredo while this examination was in progress. He had
taken a room at the Texas Star Hotel. It was intensely hot, the night
he spent there. He lay on the huge sagging deck of the bed and
smoked cigarettes. Because it was such a hot night he lay there naked
with the windows open and the door open, too, hoping to make a
draught of
air
on his body. The room was quite dark except for
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