298
PARTISAN REVIEW
lightly, and wetly in her incomparable way. Her kiss coursed through
me, softening and pervading my whole body like blood.
She was unique, just like every woman is, like every person is. She
started stroking my hips, my thighs and my groin again with her palms.
She touched me swiftly, with experience, saying nothing. The dark had
lost its strength.
It
would be light in a little bit.
"You are beautiful," I said again, very close to her.
"You're beautiful, too," she answered in a whisper. She continued, close
to my face, "beautiful in how you want to see things better than they really
are, in what love has taught you or hasn't taught you yet-in how you're
young, barely grown-up. For the little hatred that I've seen in you even if
you speak about" it. For the childish desire you have to get revenge. For
your silly sense of fairness. How you warm me as if I was going to freeze
any second. The way you touch me; how and why you came to see me."
Her words contained everything that was and would be; what hadn't
happened and never would again.
"This is the last time, here and now, that you'll look the way you do
and be the way you are," she whispered. "How you could be with me
or without me; how I could be myself too."
She kept touching me. She didn't have to convince herself anymore. She
was ready for me, as much and as many times as I would be ready for her.
Then we were together, beyond the world of thoughts, but not their
echo, by something that joins mutual consent and desire and longing and
which no one understands. The way a person is still an animal but at the
same time himself; what is made of him with someone who takes him in
as if he was accepting himself. I sensed what stood for her last proof of
freedom, what made her body hers so that she was allowed to decide
what and how and with whom she would be. The way in which she
could retain her dignity and still be what she was. Was this the last free
choice she had before they forced her to go someplace where the words
freedom or choice don't exist-a place where all a person tries to do is
survive, only survive, without any idea for how long and at what price?
She embraced me yet again. The strength in her arms, chest, hips, and
lips joined with mine.
It
was a gentle, tender power. Then she spread
herself open like a fissure running through stone, like a mouth opening.
The light dawn brings flooded her with rays which slipped all over her
skin. The moon had long moved to the morning side of the sky. She held
me with parted lips and her eyes wide. I held her the same way in my
arms before the streak of morning swelled.
Her beauty was like light and dark, twilight and daybreak that touch
and swallow each other. She was dazzling in the way nature is dazzling,
