elimae

Lovers Hate
Silvina Ocampo and A. Bioy Casares
English Version, B. Renner

In Alonso Cano's painting Death places a frozen kiss on the lips of a sleeping boy.
Leaving the office, Cornejo had turned toward Mary's room. He wanted someone -- other than the man of the funerary rites and some predictable policeman -- to bid farewell to the dead girl in the moment when the coffin enclosed her. On his way he met the mortician, who told him he was going to the bottom floor to find some tools. Passing down the hall Cornejo tore three sheets from the calendar advertising Langosta sandals to bring it up to date. (He enumerated these details minuciously, as if they bore some importance to the tale; perhaps they did so for the teller or, simply, served not to distract him, like those blueprints he had sketched the other night on the table cloth.) Then he went into Mary's room. Arriving at this point Cornejo became quiet, shuddered, dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief, and we thought he was going to faint. Something atrocious had presented itself, and those experiences we suffer alone reach the apogee of their intensity the first time we tell them to another. What he saw, Cornejo assured us, was so horrible that, from then on, the door to that room would be, both in his memories and his dreams, a terrifying place. In the central solitudes of that room, in the heart of the silence and stillness of that hotel interred in sand, the wavering light of the tapers seemed to project the shadow of an invisible foliage, and by that light he saw the boy Miguel kiss the dead girl on the lips.
The commissioner asked, "When you saw him, what did the boy do?"
"He fled," Cornejo replied, after a pause.
"Who remained in the room with the deceased?"
"When I left, the typist came in. I thought I ought to question that boy as soon as possible."
"I don't think that is a good idea," said Aubry. "It would create problems with his aunt."
"Children are quite sensitive," I said. "We might scar him, mark him for the rest of his life."
Dr. Cornejo looked at me as though he didn't understand Spanish.
"If we speak to him too soon," the commissioner said, "we may oblige him to lie to us. And you know very well, once the lies begin..."
I was about to speak, but the commissioner cut me off. "Don't," he asked me. "Let's not add anything to what has been said. What has already been said is estimable. I remember that passage in which Hugo says that difficult experiences, when they come too early, raise up in the souls of children a type of formidable balance in which they weigh God."

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