...of remoteness

It was a kind of ceremonial rotation - getting up for a glass, lighting or putting out a lamp or a cigarette, embracing interminably or with a violence that separated them at the same instant, as if the distance from desire was growing bitter. And always beneath it all a crouching silence where enemy time throbbed, and that obstinacy of Helene as she hid her face in her forearm as if trying to sleep while her shoulders trembled with cold, and Juan, looking for the sheet with an uncertain hand, covering her for a moment, making her naked again, rolling her over face up or caressing a new path of oblivion or a new start on her dark back.
There could be no respite, for as soon as the pauses became prolonged beyond momentary satiety, we would look at each other again and were the same ones as before, lying outside recognition and reconciliation, even though we rolled around again amidst moans and caresses, using the weight of our bodies to smother the beating of the other time that was waiting indifferently in the flame of another match, in the taste of another drink. What good was it telling ourselves that it wasn't surfaces and illusions? What good talking as if we'd never pass on to the other side and complete the sketch if we kept on looking for each other in dead men and dolls? What use was it to tell Helene when I myself felt so far away, still looking for her in the city as I had for such a long time in the zone, in the hope that something of her remote smile was only for me. And still I had to tell her, because from time to time we spoke in the darkness, mouth to mouth, with phrases that came from caresses or interrupted them to bring us back to that other postponed meeting, to that streetcar where I hadn't even got on because of her, where I'd found her through some mere luxury of the city, the order of the city, losing her almost immediately as on so many other occasions in the zone or now, tight against her, feeling her getting away now and then like a repeated wave that couldn't be grasped. And how could I answer that anxiety that was looking for me and hemming me in as his lips came to mine in an interminable recognition, I, who had never met Juan in the city, who knew nothing about the chase interrupted by one mistake more, by the stupidity of getting off on a different corner...

[62: A Model Kit, Cortazar, J.]