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PARTISAN REVIEW
desire him. I leaned over and kissed her. On her hair for the time being.
She did not return my kiss but reddened and burst out laughing, Look,
Theo, it's so funny, your bossy moustache has started quivering. And yet
when we met in Caracas, Noa and I, I was fifty-two, I had been loving
various sorts of women for thirty years, I was, in my own opinion, ex–
pert, I was acquainted with menus of pleasures such as she had not seen in
her wildest dreams, if she had ever had wild dreams. I imagined not. De–
spite which, the words she spoke to me in the ruins of that church, See
for yourself how light you are now, moved me so powerfully that I had
to remind myself almost by force that I had stopped in the eighteenth
century and I had yet to tell her about how the church and the whole
town had collapsed in the great earthquake of 1812 and about the cyclical
element that really underlay the shifting power-alliances between the
Church, the secret service, the Maoists, the anny, the Liberals, and the
Republican Guards. I recommenced my lecture, and continued it pas–
sionately, lingering over each detail, digressing, enthusing, embarking on
Borgesian myths, until she said, That's enough for today, Theo, I can't
take any more in.
In the course of four months we may have seen each other only
seven or eight times. We went to art exhibitions and concerts, to restau–
rants that, after her slip-up the first night, we agreed between us she
should not be the one to choose, and sometimes on a Sunday we went
off for a few hours in the Jeep to the high mountains of the Cordillera del
Litoral. She knew only a few hundred words of Spanish, but nevertheless,
directly after listening to a short conversation I had had with a petrol
pump attendant or a technician from the administration, she would de–
clare without the slightest hesitation that this man was a liar while the
other, the fat one, actually liked people but was rather ashamed of it and
that was why he was so
gruff.
What have you swallowed, Noa? A seismo–
graph? A lie detector? She didn't hurry to answer these questions. When
she did finally reply, I couldn't see the connection: I grew up, she said,
with a paralyzed father and an aunt who was demented by her own ideal–
ism, I had to keep my eyes open.
At the end of the evening I would accompany her to the apartment
that the Embassy had taken for her; on the floor of a house belonging to
some wealthy Jews. We parted at the gate with a goodnight kiss on the
cheek or the hair; she had to stand on tiptoe while I almost bowed to her;
breathing my
fill
of that scent of honeysuckle. Gradually I noticed that
my trips were tending to bring me to Caracas more and more often. I
bought her a pair ofwoollen socks and a llama wool scarf She bought me
a pot of honey. Then one night, in the spring, there was a thunderstonn
and a long power cut and she decided that this time I could stay the
