We walked in silence along the one-way road, toward the car my mother had loaned us. Barbara phoned the cleaning woman and asked if she was free the following day. The lady suggested her sister-in-law. They made their arrangements, and Barbara paused in front of me, as I held open the car door with excessive good manners, due to the tenderness I was feeling toward her.

Finally she got in, and clicking her seat belt, she squeezed her eyes so tight, the mask slipped, was swallowed up, and set free, she broke into tears and began to sob.

I started off, and got her out of there. From that moment on, I think, she became my wife.

My Mother

I was sensible how much gratitude I owed to her, but in truth, I never thought of it, and whether she served me or not, it would ever have been the same thing. I loved her neither from duty, interest, nor convenience; I loved her because I was born to love her.

—JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU,
Confessions

With springtime, my sister has opened her house to everyone, perhaps to help Barbara find a job: guests coming and going through the rickety glass doors, curtain rods slipping off their brackets, tumbling down, my sense of bourgeois order threatened, strange women sleeping on couch cushions tossed to the floor … Keys handed to girlfriends just returned from China or Belgium. Irene suddenly disappearing for a week, then reappearing one night, and I find her preparing a dinner with some men I don’t know, one of whom is now in the kitchen with Barbara, chopping up onions, standing together, side by side. I know what he’s after. But I’ve learned not to rush out of the house to get her attention, I stand in the corner and have a drink with someone, one of the girlfriends, and this skit between my wife and this stranger, seen from behind, makes me fiercely interested in everybody, I touch the others’ wrists, laugh with this woman I don’t know and mistakenly thought was one of my sister’s exes; not thinking, I pull her close, all the women read like lesbians to me, they’re combative, dry, short, all except one silent, lanky woman … One night, in this perennial confusion, the doorbell rings, I check the peephole and, on the landing, there in wide angle, stands my sister-in-law, Daniela.

I open the door and Daniela, intimidated and shivering in the cold, sets her turquoise roller bag against the door, leans forward awkwardly, and kisses me near the mouth; I adjust my face, and we brush lips, and a small breeze rises from the stairwell. I plant my palms on her pink cheeks, she hesitates, and I kiss her on her closed eyelid, and I’d like to kiss her entire face, I have the strangest sensation that I’m kissing Barbara, that Barbara’s spirit has migrated into Daniela’s body.