Текст книги "Adultery"

Автор книги: Paulo Coelho

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

“Excuse me, sir.”

We’ve been interrupted once already. He politely asks his assistant to postpone his next appointment. My newspaper is the most important in French-speaking Switzerland and this interview could prove crucial for the upcoming elections.

He pretends to convince me and I pretend to believe him.

Then I get up, thank him, and say that I have all the material I need.

“You don’t need anything else?”

Of course I do, but it’s not up to me to tell him what.

“How about getting together after work?”

I explain that I have to pick up my children from school, hoping that he sees the large gold wedding ring on my finger declaring: “Look, the past is the past.”

“Of course. Well, maybe we can have lunch someday.”

I agree. Easily deceived, I think: Who knows, maybe he does have something of importance to tell me, some state secret that will change the politics of the country and make the editor look at me with new eyes.

He goes over to the door, locks it, then comes back and kisses me. I return his kiss, because it’s been a long time. Jacob, whom I may have once loved, is now a family man, married to a professor. And I am a family woman, married to a man who, though he inherited his wealth, is extremely hardworking.

I consider pushing him away and saying that we’re not kids anymore, but I’m enjoying it. Not only did I discover a new Japanese restaurant, I’m having a bit of illicit fun as well. I’ve managed to break the rules and the world hasn’t caved in on me. I haven’t felt this happy in a long time.

I feel better and better, braver, freer. Then I do something I’ve dreamed of doing since I was in school.

Kneeling down, I unzip his fly and wrap my mouth around his penis. He grabs my hair and controls the rhythm of my head. He comes in less than a minute.

“God, that was good.”

I say nothing. The fact is that it was far better for me than for him, since he came so quickly.

SIN is followed by a fear of being caught.

On the way to the office, I buy a toothbrush and some toothpaste. Every half an hour or so, I go to the toilet to check that there’s nothing on my face or on my Versace shirt, intricately embroidered and perfect for hiding stains. I observe my work colleagues out of the corner of my eye, but no one has noticed (or at least none of the women, who have a special radar for these things).

Why did that happen? It was as if someone else had taken over and propelled me into a situation that was purely mechanical and non-erotic. Did I want to prove to Jacob that I’m independent, free, my own woman? Did I do that in order to impress him or in an attempt to escape what my girlfriend called “hell”?

Everything will continue as before. I’m not at any crossroads. I know where I’m going and hope that, with the passing of the years, I’ll manage to change my family’s ways so that we don’t end up thinking there’s anything special about washing the car. The really big changes happen over time, and time is something of which I have plenty.

At least I hope so.

When I get home, I try to look neither happy nor sad. The children notice at once.

“You’re acting funny today, Mom.”

I feel like saying: Yes, I did something I shouldn’t have done and yet I don’t feel the tiniest bit guilty, just afraid of being found out.

My husband gets home and, as usual, he kisses me, asks what kind of day I’ve had and what we’re having for supper. I give him the usual answers. If he doesn’t notice anything different about the routine, he won’t suspect that today I gave oral sex to a politician.

Which, it should be said, gave me no physical pleasure at all. But now I’m mad with desire, needing a man, needing to be kissed, and needing to feel the pain and pleasure of a body on top of mine.

When we go up to bed, I realize that I’m terribly aroused. I can’t wait to make love with my husband, but I must keep calm; if I’m too eager, he’ll suspect something is wrong.

After I shower, I lie down beside him, take the tablet he’s reading from his hands and put it on the bedside table. I begin stroking his chest, and he immediately becomes aroused. We make love as we haven’t done in a long time. When I moan a little too loudly, he asks me to keep the noise down so as not to wake the children, but I tell him I don’t want to, that I want to be able to express my feelings.

I have multiple orgasms. God, I love this man! We end up sweaty and exhausted, and so I decide to take another shower. He comes in with me and playfully turns the showerhead on my clit. I ask him to stop, saying I’m too tired, that we need to sleep and he’ll just get me all excited again.

While we’re drying each other off, I suggest going to a nightclub sometime—another attempt to change my routine at all costs. I think it’s then that he suspects something has changed.

“Tomorrow?”

I can’t tomorrow, I have my yoga class.

“Since you’ve brought it up, can I ask a direct question?”

My heart stops. He goes on:

“Why exactly do you go to yoga classes? You’re such a calm, well-balanced person, and a woman who knows what she wants. Aren’t you wasting your time?”

My heart starts beating again. I don’t answer. I simply smile and stroke his face.

I collapse onto the bed, close my eyes, and, before I fall asleep, think: I must be having the kind of crisis that comes after ten years of marriage. It’ll pass.

Not everyone needs to feel happy all the time. Besides, no one canbe happy all the time. I need to learn to deal with the reality of life.

Dear Depression, please keep your distance. Don’t be nasty. Find some other person with more reason than me to look in the mirror and say: “What a pointless existence.” Whether you like it or not, I know how to defeat you. You’re wasting your time.

MY LUNCH with Jacob König goes exactly as I imagine. We meet at La Perle du Lac, an expensive restaurant on the lakeshore that used to be good but is now owned by the city. It’s still expensive, but the food is awful. I could have surprised him and taken him to the Japanese restaurant, but I know he would think it was in bad taste. For some people, décor matters more than food.

And now I see that I made the right decision. He tries to show me that he’s a wine connoisseur; he talks about “bouquet,” “texture,” and “legs,” the oily drops that fall in rivulets down the side of the glass. In truth, he’s telling me that he’s grown up and no longer a schoolboy; that he’s learned how to behave and has risen in the world; that he knows about life, wine, politics, women, and ex-girlfriends.

What nonsense! We’ve been drinking wine all our lives. We can tell a good wine from a bad one, and that’s all there is to it. Until I met my husband, all the men I went out with—men who considered themselves “cultivated”—acted as if the choice of wine in a restaurant was their big moment. They all did the same thing: with great solemnity, they sniffed the cork, read the label, allowed the waiter to pour a little into the glass, turned it this way and that, held it up to the light, smelled the wine, rolled it around in their mouth, swallowed, and, finally, gave an approving nod.

After witnessing the same scene endless times, I decided to change my group of friends and join the college’s nerds and social outcasts. Unlike the fake, predictable tasters of wine, the nerds were at least real and made no attempt to impress me. They joked about things I didn’t understand. They thought, for example, that I really ought to know the name Intel because “it’s written on every computer.” I, of course, had never noticed.

The nerds made me feel like a plain-Jane ignoramus, and were more interested in pirating things on the Internet than they were in my breasts or legs. As I got older, I returned to the safe embrace of the wine tasters until I found a man who didn’t try to impress me with his sophistication or make me feel like a complete idiot with conversations about mysterious planets, hobbits, or computer programs that erase all traces of the webpages you’ve visited. After a few months of going out, during which we discovered at least one hundred and twenty villages around Lake Léman, he asked me to marry him.

I accepted without hesitation.

I ask Jacob if he knows any nightclubs, because I haven’t kept up with Geneva’s nightlife (“nightlife” being just a manner of speaking) and I’ve decided to go out dancing and drinking. His eyes shine.

“I don’t have time for that. Thanks for the invitation, but, you know, apart from the fact that I’m married, I can’t be seen out with a journalist. People will say your articles are …”

“Biased.”

“Yes, biased.”

I decide to take this little game of seduction a step further—it’s a game that has always amused me. What have I got to lose? I know all the methods, diversions, traps, and objectives.

I ask him to tell me more about himself, about his personal life. I’m not here as a journalist, I say, but as a woman and a former girlfriend.

I stress the word “woman.”

“I don’t have a personal life,” he says. “I can’t, unfortunately. I’ve chosen a career that has transformed me into an automaton. Everything I say is scrutinized, questioned, published.”

This isn’t quite true, but I find his sincerity disarming. I know that he’s mostly seeing how the land lies, that he wants to know precisely where he’s putting his feet and how far he can go. He suggests that he is “unhappily married,” and goes into an exhaustive explanation of how powerful he is, just like all men of a certain age once they’ve hit the wine.

“In the last two years I’ve had a few months of happiness, a few of difficulties, but most are just a matter of hanging in there and trying to please everyone in order to be reelected. I’ve had to give up everything that I used to enjoy—like going dancing with you, for example. Or listening to music for hours, smoking, or doing anything that other people deem to be wrong.” That’s absurd! No one cares about his personal life.

“Perhaps it’s the return of Saturn. Every twenty-nine years the planet returns to the same point in the sky that it occupied at the moment of our birth.”

The return of Saturn?

He realizes that he’s said more than he should, and suggests that it might be best if we went back to work.

No, my Saturn return has already happened. I need to know exactly what it means. He gives me a lesson in astrology: Saturn takes twenty-nine years to return to the point in the sky where it was at the moment we were born. Until that happens, everything seems possible, our dreams can come true, and any walls hemming us in can still be broken down. When Saturn completes this cycle, it puts an end to any romanticism. Choices become definitive and it’s nearly impossible to change direction.

“I’m not an expert, of course, but my next chance will only come when I’m fifty-eight and Saturn returns again. Although, if Saturn is telling me it’s no longer possible to choose another path, why, then, did you invite me to lunch?”

We’ve been talking now for almost an hour.

“Are you happy?” he asks suddenly.

What?

“There’s something in your eyes, a sadness I find inexplicable in a pretty woman like you with a nice husband and a good job. It’s like seeing a reflection of my own eyes. I’ll ask you again: Are you happy?”

In this country where I was born and raised, and where I’m now raising my own children, no oneasks that kind of question. Happiness is not something that can be precisely measured, discussed in plebiscites, or analyzed by specialists. We don’t even ask what kind of car someone drives, let alone something so personal and impossible to define.

“There’s no need to answer. Your silence says it all.”

No, my silence doesn’t say it all. It isn’t an answer. It merely reflects my surprise and confusion.

“I’m not happy,” he says. “I have everything a man could dream of, but I’m not happy.”

Has someone put something in the water? Are they trying to destroy my country with a chemical weapon designed to create a sense of profound frustration? Why is it that everyone I talk to feels the same?

So far I haven’t said anything. But tormented souls have this incredible ability to recognize and approach one another, thus compounding their grief.

Why hadn’t I noticed this in him? Why did I see only the superficial way he talked about politics or the pedantic way he tasted the wine?

The return of Saturn. Opposition. Unhappiness. Things I never expected to hear Jacob König say.

At that precise moment—it’s 1:55 p.m., according to my watch—I fall in love with him all over again. No one, not even my marvelous husband, has ever asked if I’m happy. Perhaps in my childhood, my parents and my grandparents asked that question, but no one has since.

“Shall we meet again?”

I no longer see a boyfriend from my adolescence sitting in front of me, but an abyss that I’m blithely walking toward, an abyss from which I have no desire to escape. The thought flashes through my mind that my sleepless nights are about to become even more unbearable now that I really do have a problem: a heart in love.

The red lights in my mind start to flash.

I tell myself: You’re a fool, he just wants to get you into bed. He doesn’t care about your happiness.

Then, in an almost suicidal gesture, I say yes. Perhaps going to bed with someone who just touched my breasts when we were teenagers will be good for my marriage, as it was yesterday, when I gave him oral sex in the morning and had multiple orgasms with my husband later that night.

I try to get back to the subject of Saturn, but he’s already asked for the bill and is talking on his cell phone, saying that he’ll be five minutes late.

“Ask them if they’d like a glass of water or some coffee,” he says.

I ask who he was talking to, and he says it was his wife. The director of a large pharmaceutical company wants to meet and possibly invest money in the final phase of his campaign to be elected to the Council of States. The elections are fast approaching.

Again, I remember that he’s married. That he’s unhappy. That he can’t do anything he enjoys. That there are rumors about him and his wife, that they have an open marriage. I need to forget the spark that dazzled me at 1:55 and realize that he just wants to use me.

This doesn’t bother me, as long as things are clear. I, too, need someone to sleep with.

We pause on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. He looks around as if we make a highly suspicious couple. Then, when he’s sure no one is looking, he lights a cigarette.

So that’s what he was afraid people might see: the cigarette.

“As I’m sure you remember, I was considered the most promising student of our year,” he says. “And of course I had to prove them right, what with my need for love and approval. I sacrificed nights out with my friends to study and meet other people’s expectations. I finished high school with brilliant results. By the way, why did we stop going out again?”

I have no idea, either. I think at the time everyone was simply busy hooking up with everyone else, and no one stayed with anyone for very long.

“I graduated from university, became a defense lawyer, and spent my life between crooks and the completely innocent, between scoundrels and the totally honest. What started out as a temporary job became a permanent decision: a need to help. My list of clients grew and grew. My reputation spread throughout the city. My father insisted that it was time for me to give it all up and go and work in the law practice of a friend of his, but I was just too excited by each new case I won. Then I came across a completely archaic law that has absolutely no relevance today. We needed major changes in how the city was governed.”

All this is in his official biography, but hearing it from his lips feels quite different.

“At one point, I decided I wanted to stand as a candidate for deputy. We campaigned with almost no money, because my father was completely opposed. But my clients were all in favor. I was elected by a tiny majority, but I was elected nonetheless.”

He looks around again, having hidden the cigarette behind his back. But since no one is looking, he takes another long drag. His eyes have a vacant look as he gazes back at the past.

“When I started out in politics, I used to sleep only about five hours a night, yet I was always full of energy. Now I can easily sleep for eighteen hours at a stretch. The honeymoon is over. All that’s left is my need to please others, especially my wife, who has fought like crazy for me to have a great future. Marianne has made a lot of sacrifices and I can’t let her down.”

Is this the same man who, only a few minutes ago, suggested that we start going out again? Or is this what he wants: someone to talk to who will understand him because she feels the same way?

I have a gift for inventing fantasies with extraordinary speed. I’m already imagining myself lying between silk sheets in some chalet in the Alps.

“So when shall we meet again?” he asks.

It’s up to you, I say.

He suggests meeting on another day. I tell him that’s when I have my yoga class. He asks me to skip it. But I’m always skipping it and have promised to be more disciplined.

Jacob seems resigned. I’m tempted to change my mind, but I mustn’t appear too eager or too available.

Life is becoming fun again, my previous apathy replaced by fear. How wonderful it is to be afraid of missing an opportunity!

I tell him it’s impossible, and that we’d better rearrange it for Friday. He accepts, phones his assistant, and asks him to put it in the diary. He finishes smoking his cigarette and says good-bye. I don’t ask him why he’s told me so much about his private life, and he adds nothing very significant to what he said in the restaurant.

I would like to believe that something has changed during that lunch, just one among hundreds I’ve had where I eat extremely unhealthy food and pretend to drink wine that remains almost untouched when the time comes to order coffee. One can never lower one’s guard, despite all that fuss about tasting the wine.

The need to please everyone. Saturn in opposition.

JOURNALISM is not as glamorous as people think—it’s not all interviewing famous people, being invited to amazing places, brushing shoulders with power, money, the fascinating world of criminality.

The fact is that we spend most of the time at our cubicle desks, talking on the phone. Privacy is only for the bosses, sitting in their glass aquariums, with curtains that can be occasionally closed. When they draw them, they still know what’s going on outside, but we can no longer see their fish mouths moving.

Being a journalist in Geneva, with its 195,000 inhabitants, is the most boring job in the world. I glance through today’s issue even though I already know what it contains—endless reports on foreign dignitary meetings at the United Nations, the usual complaints about the end to banking secrecy, and a few more things that have made it to the front page: “Morbidly Obese Man Banned from Plane,” “Wolf Decimates Sheep on Outskirts of City,” “Pre-Columbian Fossils Found in Saint-Georges,” and, finally, in banner headlines, “Newly Restored GenèveReturns to the Lake Looking More Beautiful Than Ever.”

My boss summons me to his office and asks if I managed to get an exclusive out of my lunch with that politician. Needless to say, someone saw us together.

No, I didn’t. Nothing that isn’t in his official biography. The lunch was intended to get me closer to a source. (The more sources a journalist has, the more respected he or she is.)

My boss says that another reliable source has told him that, even though Jacob König is married, he’s having an affair with the wife of another politician. I feel a pang in that dark corner of my soul where depression keeps knocking but I refuse to answer.

My boss asks if I can get closer. They’re not particularly interested in his sex life, but hissource suggests that König might be being blackmailed. A foreign metallurgical company wants to airbrush out certain tax problems in its own country, but has no way of getting in touch with the minister of finance. They need a little help.

My boss explains that Jacob König isn’t our target; what we want is to denounce the people who are trying to corrupt our political system.

“And that shouldn’t be difficult. We just have to say we’re on his side.”

Switzerland is one of the few countries in the world where a man’s word is still his bond. In most other places you need lawyers, witnesses, signed documents, and the threat of legal process if the secret were leaked.

“We just need confirmation and photos.”

So I’ll need to get closer to him.

“That shouldn’t be difficult, either. Our sources tell us that you’ve already arranged another meeting. It’s in his diary.”

And this is the land of banking secrecy! Everyone knows everything.

“Use the usual tactics.”

The “usual tactics” consist of four points: One, ask about something that the interviewee would like to discuss in public. Two, let him talk for as long as possible to make him think that the newspaper is going to give him lots of space. Three, at the end of the interview, when he’s convinced he has us nicely under control, ask the one question that really interests us. That way, he’ll feel that if he doesn’t answer it, we won’t give him the space he’s hoping for and he will have wasted his time. And four, if he responds evasively, reformulate the question and ask it again. He’ll say it’s of no interest, but you must get some answer, at least onestatement. In ninety-nine percent of the cases, the interviewee falls into the trap.

That’s all you need. You can throw the rest of the interview away and use that one statement in an article that isn’t about the interviewee, but instead about an important subject featuring journalistic research, official facts, unofficial facts, anonymous sources, et cetera.

“If he proves reluctant, tell him we’re on his side. You know how journalism works. And it will be to your advantage, too …”

Yes, I know how it works. The career of a journalist is as short as an athlete’s. We achieve power and glory early, then step aside for the next generation. Very few continue and progress. Most see their standard of living drop and become critics of the press, writing blogs, giving talks, and spending more time than necessary trying to impress their friends. There is no intermediate stage.

I’m still in the category of “promising professional.” If I can get those statements, it’s likely that next year I won’t have to hear someone say “We’ve got to cut costs” and “With your talent and your name, you won’t have any trouble finding another job.”

And if I’m promoted? I’ll be able to decide what goes on the front page: Should it be the problem of the sheep-eating wolf, the exodus of foreign bankers to Dubai and Singapore, or the ridiculous lack of properties for rent? What a thrilling way to spend the next five years …

I go back to my desk, make a few unimportant phone calls, and read everything of interest on various websites. My colleagues are doing the same thing, desperate to find some bit of news that will stop our plummeting sales figures. Someone says that wild boar have been found on the railway line linking Geneva and Zurich. Can I get an article out of that?

Of course. Just as I can out of the phone call I receive from an eighty-year-old woman protesting about the law banning smoking in bars. She says that in summer it’s no problem, but in winter we’ll have more people dying of pneumonia than of lung cancer because smokers will all be obliged to smoke outside.

What am I doing working at this newspaper?

I know: we love our work and we want to save the world.

SITTING in the lotus position, with incense burning and elevator music playing, I begin my “meditation.” People have been advising me to try it for ages. That was when they thought I was just “stressed.” (I wasstressed, but at least that was better than feeling completely indifferent about life.)

“Thoughts will come into your mind. Don’t worry. Accept those thoughts, don’t try to get rid of them.”

Perfect, that’s what I’m doing. I drive away toxic emotions like pride, disillusion, jealousy, ingratitude, futility. I fill that space with humility, gratitude, understanding, consciousness, and grace.

I think I’ve been eating too much sugar, which is bad for your health and for the spiritual body.

I leave aside darkness and despair and invoke the forces of good and of light.

I remember every detail of my lunch with Jacob.

I chant a mantra along with the other pupils.

I wonder if my boss is right. Is Jacob being unfaithful to his wife? Is he being blackmailed?

The teacher asks us to imagine ourselves surrounded by an armor made of light.

“We should live each and every day with the certainty that this armor will protect us from danger, and then we will no longer be bound to the duality of existence. We have to find a middle path, where there is neither joy nor suffering, only profound peace.”

I’m beginning to understand why I keep skipping my yoga classes. Duality of existence? A middle path? That sounds as unnatural as keeping my cholesterol level at seventy like my doctor is always telling me I should.

The image of the armor lasts only a few seconds before it’s shattered into a thousand pieces and replaced by the absolute certainty that Jacob likes any pretty woman who comes anywhere near him. So why am I bothering with him at all?

The exercises continue. We change posture, and the teacher insists, as she does during every class, that we should try, at least for a few seconds, to “empty our minds.”

Emptiness is precisely the thing I fear most and the thing that troubles me most. If she knew what she was asking … But then who am I to judge a technique that has lasted for centuries?

What am I doing here?

I know: “De-stressing.”

I WAKE up again in the middle of the night. I go to the children’s bedrooms to see if everything is all right—it’s a bit obsessive, but surely something all parents do now and then.

I go back to bed and lie staring up at the ceiling.

I don’t have the strength to say what I do or don’t want to do. Why don’t I just give up yoga once and for all? Why don’t I go to a psychiatrist and start taking those magic pills? Why can’t I control myself and stop thinking about Jacob? After all, he never suggested he wanted anything more than someone to talk to about Saturn and the frustrations that all adults face sooner or later.

I can’t stand myself any longer. My life is like a film endlessly repeating the same scene.

I took a few classes in psychology when I was studying journalism. In one of them, the professor—a very interesting man, both in class and in bed—said that all interviewees go through five stages: defensiveness, self-promotion, self-confidence, confession, and an attempt to put things right.

In my life, I’ve gone straight from self-confidence to confession. I’m starting to confess things to myself that would be best left unspoken.

For example: the world has stopped.

Not just my world, but the world of everyone around me. When we meet with friends, we always talk about the same things and the same people. The conversations seem new, but it’s all just a waste of time and energy. We’re trying to prove that life is still interesting.

Everyone is trying to control their own unhappiness. Not just Jacob and me, but probably my husband, too. Only he doesn’t show it.

In my dangerous confessional state, these things are beginning to become much clearer. I don’t feel alone. I’m surrounded by people with the same problems, all of whom are pretending that life is going on as normal. Me. My neighbor. Probably even my boss, as well, and the man sleeping by my side.

After a certain age, we put on a mask of confidence and certainty. In time, that mask gets stuck to our face and we can’t remove it.

As children, we learn that if we cry we’ll receive affection, that if we show we’re sad, we’ll be consoled. If we can’t get what we want with a smile, then we can surely do so with our tears.

But we no longer cry, except in the bathroom when no one is listening. Nor do we smile at anyone other than our children. We don’t show our feelings because people might think we’re vulnerable and take advantage of us.

Sleep is the best remedy.

I MEET Jacob as arranged. This time, I choose the place, and we end up in the lovely but neglected Parc des Eaux-Vives, where there’s another awful restaurant owned by the city. I once had lunch there with a correspondent from the Financial Times.We ordered martinis and the waiter served us Cinzanos.

This time, we don’t have lunch in the restaurant, we just sit on the grass and eat sandwiches. He can smoke freely here, because we have a private view of everything around us. We can watch the people coming and going.

I’ve decided to be honest: after the usual formalities (the weather, work, a “how was the nightclub?”/“I’m going tonight” exchange), the first thing I ask is whether he’s being blackmailed because of, how shall I say, an extramarital relationship.

He doesn’t seem surprised. He merely asks if I’m speaking as a journalist or as a friend.

At the moment, as a journalist. If you say it’s true, I give you my word that the newspaper will support you. We won’t publish anything about your personal life, but we will go after the blackmailers.

“Yes, I had an affair with the wife of a friend, which I imagine you already know. He was the one who encouraged it, because we were both bored with our marriages. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The husband encouraged it? No, I don’t understand, but I nod and remember what happened three nights ago, when I had multiple orgasms.

And is the affair still ongoing?

“No, we lost interest. My wife knows about it. There are some things you can’t hide. Some people in Nigeria photographed us together and are threatening to publish the pictures, but that’s not news to anyone.”

Nigeria is where that metallurgical company is based. Didn’t his wife threaten divorce?

“She was pretty annoyed for a few days, but no more than that. She has great plans for our marriage, and I imagine that fidelity isn’t necessarily part of them. She pretended to be a bit jealous, just to show that what happened was important, but she’s a terrible actress. A few hours after I’d confessed, her mind was already on other things.”