...of a past between friends

"Be quiet, m'girl," Polanco said to Celia. "Let him go on putting corks in bottles. Thirst comes before quenching and it's worth a lot more. Basically, of course, you were quite right, because when this one here gets all enthusiastic over his coagulations or whatever they are, he really puts the cork in for us."
Helene remained silent, slowly smoking a mild cigarette, attent and alien as she was whenever I was speaking. I hadn't mentioned her a single time (what had I told them, after all, what strange mixture of mirrors and Sylvaner to make them happy on Christmas Eve?), and yet it was as if she knew she was alluded to, she took refuge behind her cigarette, in some casual observation to Tell or Marrast. I went on courteously with my tale. If we had been alone I think she would have told me: "I'm not responsible for the image that walks beside you." Not smiling but almost in a friendly way. "If I happened to dream about you, you wouldn't be responsible," Helene might have told me. "But that wasn't a dream," I would have answered, "and I don't know for sure either whether you had something to do with it or whether I put you in out of habit, out of stupid custom." It wasn't hard to imagine the dialogue, but if I had been alone with Helene, she wouldn't have said that, she probably wouldn't have said anything to me, attent and alien; I had included her once more without any right, imaginarily, as a consolation for so much distance and so much silence. Helene and I no longer had anything to say to each other, we who had said so little to each other. In some way that escaped us both and which perhaps was so clear in what had happened that night in the Polidor, we no longer came together in the zone or in the city, even if we met at a table at the Cluny and talked to our friends, sometimes briefly to each other. Only I still stubbornly insisted on hoping; Helene remained here, attent and alien. If in the last redoubt of my honesty she and the countess and Frau Marta were joined together in one same abominable image, hadn't Helene said at some time to me - or would tell me later, as if I hadn't known it all along - that the only image she could keep of me was that of a man dead in a hospital? We exchanged visions, metaphors, or dreams; sooner or later we would continue on alone, looking at each other so many nights over cups of coffee.

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