...of pause

"I don't like to talk about those days," Michele says.
"But you must have talked about it once," Pierre says argumentatively. "I don't know how I knew, but I knew you lived in Enghien."
The peach falls onto the plate and pieces of the skin stick to its flesh. Michele cleans the peach with a knife and Pierre feels the distaste again, starts grinding the coffee as hard as he can. Why doesn't she say something? She looks like she's suffering, busy cleaning the horrible runny peach. Why doesn't she talk? She's full of words, all you have to do is look at her hands, or the nervous flutter of her eyelids that turns into a kind of tic sometimes, all of one side of her face rises slightly, then goes back, he remembers once on a bench in Luxembourg gardens, he noticed that the tic always coincides with a moment of uneasiness or a silence.
Michele is preparing the coffee, her back to Pierre, who uses the butt of one cigarette to light another. They go back into the living room, carrying the porcelain cups with the blue design on them. The smell of the coffee makes them feel better, they look at one another, surprised by the period of silence and what went before it; they exchange a few casual words, looking at one another and smiling, they drink the coffee distractedly, the way you drink love potions that tie you forever. Michele has partly closed the shutters and a warm, greenish light filters in from the garden and wraps around them like the cigarette smoke and the cognac that Pierre is sipping, lost in a mild loneliness. Bobby is sleeping on the rug, trembling and sighing.

[Secret Weapons, from Blow Up and Other Stories, Cortazar, J.]