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Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
- T. S. Eliot -
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Buenos AiresDoes the night have a pulse? Is the darkness alive?
It feels like that when I lie here. What is this time of the day we call night, anyway? Is it absence or presence? Should it be said: it is the time when light has gone away. Or would it be more correct to refer to it by saying the darkness has arrived? I don't know. But it interests me. Nowadays more than before.
The darkness is so complete now. It's everywhere, and I mean everywhere. I know I could make it vanish by turning the lamp on the nightstand on, but what would that serve? It would be temporary and vain. The moment I'm in is the moment of darkness and there aren't enough lights in the world to change that.
Light or no light it still is night.
Some things are like that, unchangeable. It's funny how turning on a light makes the darkness seem threatening. Albeit you can hear people everywhere chanting that worn-out phrase claiming that you can make a difference, there are things that are unchangeable.
Sometimes you can make a difference. Sometimes… You can't.
Although I can't see him I know he's there. Maybe the colourless blackness is deeper in the space his body fills or maybe he radiates it. I know he's there, right by my side. It sounds so romantic… Right by my side. But when I say – think – so, I don't mean it like that. I just know that he is there. Maybe I wish that it would be indifferent for me but it isn't, and it never will be. I have no power over that.
There he lies and he's not indifferent. He is he and that alone makes the thought of his insignificance impossible; he matters just because he is he. And I am I. Are we we? Is there a we for us? Is there even an us?
I get up very quietly. Even if he was awake I'm not all that sure if he could hear me. I go to the cupboard, open it, and reach for the top shelf. There, behind a shoebox, it is. I wrap my fingers around the cold metal and pull it towards me. Silently I walk back to the bed. He is on his back and I sit astride on his chest. He is awake in a quarter of a second but does not move. I see his eyes in the darkness; whether the glow from within their fiery depths are real or just in my head I don't bother to analyse. I press the gun against the soft flesh under his jaw. He doesn't even so much as flinch.
I feel his hand moving up my thigh.
I am as naked as he is.
His touch moves higher and then stops at the curve of my waist.
I tighten my grip on the gun and press it harder against him. His hand simply rests on my waist, thumb brushing against my stomach.
We stay like that for a while. An odd sculpture. Then, slowly, I lean in to kiss him. As I devour him with my lips I pull the trigger.
The click the trigger makes into an empty barrel produces an unbelievably loud sound… In the darkness.
He takes a firm hold of me and pushes me on my back. I'm trapped between the bed and his body. We continue kissing, building up the heat once again. His fingers at my breast, in me, fucking me deliriously.
After a while, just before he enters me, he looks at me in the darkness and asks a question.
I don't answer. We both know that I wasn't sure.
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A woman, almost fragile in her near ethereal beauty stands on the porch. The morning air has a biting chill to it that soaks into one's bones, but she does not seem to mind. Her mind is on other, more important things than the weather.
He comes up behind her and wraps a pair of lean yet powerful arms around her. She smiles very faintly; just enough to assure him his touch is not unwanted. It is still strange to see them like that, so close. So used as we are to the invisible barrier around both of them it is slightly puzzling to view this new level of interaction between them. It fights against something basic and familiar, something we take for granted. Their relationship, their desire for one another is something that should not exist and perhaps it's the very thing that keeps us attracted.
His arms at her waist, keeping her very close, he says something very softly we have to strain to hear it. His manner is silent yet far from weak.
"What are you thinking of?"
"Happiness."
"Do you have it?"
"I don't even know what it is."
"Hmmm."
They both stay quiet for a while. He enjoys this, having her heart so close to his. Her body is so warm, almost like she had a fire burning inside her. He absorbs her heat into himself, slipping a needle fine as a hair into the vein of her arm before replacing his arm at her waist. When she speaks again neither of them knows exactly how long they have been standing there. There is no change in her demeanour. Or if there is, it is unnoticeable to anyone but Dr. Lecter.
"I'm not unhappy." She wets her lips.
"And not happy." Always stating, never questioning.
"I can't be. Not yet."
"I know."
He leans closer to her; his red mouth almost touches her ear. His words ride on the currents of exhaled air.
"Would it make this easier for you to have someone to blame?"
She takes a long time before she decides to answer. When she does, her voice is perhaps slightly distorted. Because of what, is impossible to say.
"Probably not."
"Probably not, Clarice…" He turns her around to face him. His eyes capture her wholly. She does not turn away, meeting him on even terms.
Dr. Lecter leans to her, his mouth again next to her ear. He hisses the words.
"Tell me honestly, Clarice…"
He pauses, as if to think what to say next.
"Doesn't it tempt you to hate me?"
She closes her eyes. Dr. Lecter knows this because he can feel her eyelashes sweep on his face. She is thinking, or at least trying to. There are some things better left unsaid and she settles for the first intelligible thought that comes out of the jumble of her mind.
"Don't ask me questions for which I don't have the answers."
"You never even tried to answer this one," he takes a step backwards and puts his hands on both side of her face. "Tell me this, Clarice: do you hate me?"
This time her reply comes immediately and her voice is clear. "Just as much as you hate me."
He smiles wryly. "I suppose that's fair enough."
He pulls her face to him and kisses her forehead. Then he releases her, turns around and walks away.
After he is gone Starling continues what she was doing before he came, just stands on the porch. Her forehead burns where his lips touched and she cannot decide whether she likes it or not.
In the end, it doesn't matter.
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Under the purple half-light of yet another moon, another lunar cycle to mark the time she has spent with a man from whom society at large would have shrunk from in horror. Instead, she lays her face within the comforting confines of his arm, her lips against his ante-cubital. That thin portion of skin that links the powerful biceps to the flexors of his lower arm. Her mouth rests there, tongue tasting, tickling the pulse of an unseen vein. The vein where they would have injected a lethal cocktail of drugs had he been caught, brought to trial, and inevitably, sentenced to death.
How much she is aware of herself these days, we do not know, or how much control of her faculties she has, for theirs is a game of seduction and secrets that neither one can ever hope to win without first giving in to the other.
Just minutes later, she is awake. Moving out of bed, she picks up the shirt she had literally torn off his back earlier. The top three buttons are useless, are nowhere to be found and so she contents herself with leaving it half-closed, for in the dead of the night what prying eye could see the pale expanse of her creamy skin other than him?
A silent ghost, she glides through the hallways of the empty mansion, her bare feet noiseless against the cold stone floors. A left turn and then another left, past a marble bridge that overlooked the abandoned ballroom where they had danced that evening, down another dark corridor, odd shapes and shadows on the walls cast by the moonlight filtering past the great mullioned windows acting as a sieve. A final right turn to face a heavy oak door. A clockwise turn of the big brass key in an old-fashioned lock and she is in the study.
The large cabinet on the far off wall where he keeps bottles of assorted liquor for some unknown reason. Tonight's choice is Tequila. Sit in the big leather chair, the one he stays in during the day, the one she occupies during the nights.
Twist open the cap, the familiar crackling of the seal being broken, aluminium cap scraping against the grooves of glass. Toss that there stopper aside. Then the pungent aroma of some good ol' Cuervo just before the bitch hits your tongue, glides down your throat in a blaze of fucking glory and screws with your guts. One tequila. Two tequila. Three tequila. Floor.
It is how one of the servants finds her in the morning, when the diminutive little maid opens the door to the doctor's study to clean it.
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"I cannot imagine how someone such as you would find all of this so…new." She ran her fingers through her tousled red hair, feeling languorous and insouciant. He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, the sheets covering the lower half of his body.
"It isn't that much difficult, really. I had countless opportunities but never the drive nor desire to actually pursue the act other than for purely educational purposes. "
"And did Ms. DuBerry attempt to…educate you?" she said archly. An inevitable question
"She offered, yes."
The all too typical follow-up. "And did you accept?"
"I shall never tell."
Her jealousy is palpable and exquisite to him. He is so distracted in savouring it that he failed to notice she had drawn her arm back for a powerful right hook.
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A roster of various hurts and scratches. Beneath the silk of scarves and gowns lie the impressions of his teeth. Purplish-brown bruises placed there in an act of love, yes, but to the untrained eye they might seem cruel and animalistic. There is a cluster of them on the soft white flesh under her arm, coincidentally or considerately placed where it might be hidden carefully by the stole of an evening gown. On him, the marks are more blatant, more obvious to the public. The servants keep their thoughts to themselves, but it is hard to ignore the bruise on the bone under the doctor's right eye, or that scratch on his forearm.
The relationship these days between Dr. Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling cannot be quantified by any known means. The battles they fight against each other are emotional, are physical. He taunts her at times simply because he wishes to see her cry and drink of her tears and more often than not, she retaliates by physical means.
To make love is to make hate. One cannot exist without the other, and to these two foes, the act of love is a battle in itself. Each one fights not to give in, knowing that it is impossible when one cannot resist the other, when one cannot exist without the other. If either the doctor or Clarice Starling is frightened by the growing exigency that they have for one another, they do not show it.
"You hate me, don't you, Clarice?"
"I want to."
"Why don't you?"
"I did not know what hate felt like. Not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate, and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right, it grows a little more monstrous, " she said.
"That's a very eloquent way of putting it, don't you think?"
"I don't know whether I want to kiss you or kill you or hurt you or. . . I don't know. Now and then I think I just might go insane. How can I be your lover? I must be mad."
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They are in the garden, on a stone bench. In the depths of her mind, Starling imagines she can feel the grey gargoyles on the fountain stare at her with their granite eyes. She feels the cold spray of the waters hitting her face, on the beauty mark high on her cheek.
"I can't change the way the world goes round," she says abruptly.
"Would you?"
"I can't."
"If you could, would you?"
"You know the answer to that."
"No, I don't. Tell me." he moves aside a lock of her hair, brushing his thumb against the embedded specks of dark gunpowder.
"No."
"Why?"
"Because I can't change it."
"Clarice –" he looks into her eyes.
"I can't change it. I don't know why but I can't change it. I can't change it."
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