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PARTISAN REVIEW
"Hilda, darling," Gabina said with pity, putting her arms around the
porcelain doll who sobbed on her stately breast. "Listen to me, Hilda dear.
A beautiful girl like you can have a normal man and not some old house–
shoe. You're only wasting time and all your opportunities with him."
"But I love him," Hilda sobbed. "I'll never love anyone the way I love
him. If I could break it off I would, but I can't. I think about him all the
time and I dream about his witch-almost every rught I dream about her
and I'm looking for him but can't find him. Sometimes I wish I was old
already and didn't need a man-I wish I was past caring."
"So stop wanting him," said Jana. "If you let him go, he'll come to you
on his own. We never get the things that we want too much-isn't that
true, ladies?"
We agreed.
"If he would only tell her," Hilda said, weeping, "maybe something
would give a little."
"Good God," Gabina shouted. "She thinks that the witch will help her.
That she'll throw him out and then he'll come to her. But you're quite mis–
taken. If she was nasty to him before, now she'll start being ruce. When a
man can't see any other way out he clings to his wife, runs back to her, and
she takes care of him and chases off the other woman. Then everything is
as it was and he goes looking for a little something on the side again."
"Or she gets sick," said Jana. "I knew one WOlTlan who decided that
she had cancer, and he started to jump at her every whim-of course he
wasn't such a monster that he would leave a dying woman. He stayed home
and is there to this day. She's as healthy as a horse and he has migraines.
Whenever he just can't stand it anymore he throws himself on the bed and
draws the curtains, and she can't get to him."
"Only society ladies who aren't happy with their sex life and don't
know it have migraines," said Gabina, who was still cradling Hilda in her
strong embrace.
"Men can have them too," said Jana. "They can get all possible illnesses
from women, except heart attacks, which they get from work."
I thought about the pure thing, which cannot be soiled, but which can
leave us of its own will if we don't respect it enough. Love is given to peo–
ple by God, and when he fails to give it to someone, they seek it in vain
their whole life. What do we want to hear about our future? That we will
love and be loved. Once, when I told a fifty-year-old woman, happily mar–
ried, grandmother of two, that another love would come into her life, she
blushed gently and shyly as if she were twenty. What is better: to love or to
be loved? And who can say, at the end of their life, "I loved as much as I
could and I regret nothing, because my life has been fulfilled." How can
this feeling be recognized? Does love have some limit?
