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It would be a clever move to marry Renata before she could learn that I was broke. This should not be done merely to hit back. No, in spite of her shenanigans I was mad about her. Loving her, I was willing to overlook certain trifles. She had provoked me by locking me out one night and by the conspicuous display of her birth-control device at the top of her open bag in Heathrow last April when we were parting for three days. But was that, after all, very significant? Did it mean more than that one never knew when one was going to meet an interesting man? The serious question was whether I, with all my thoughts, or because of them, would ever be able to understand what sort of girl Renata was. I wasn’t like Humboldt, given to jealous seizures. I recalled how he had looked in Connecticut, when he quoted me King Leontes in my yard by the sea. “I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances; but not for joy, not joy.” That heart-dancing was classic jealousy. I didn’t suffer from classic jealousy. Renata did gross things, to be sure. But perhaps these were war measures. She was campaigning to get me and would be different when we were settled down as husband and wife. No doubt she was a dangerous person but I would never be greatly interested in any woman incapable of harm, in any woman who didn’t threaten me with loss. Mine was the sort of heart that had to overcome melancholy and free itself from many depressing weights. The Spanish setting was right for this. Renata was acting like Carmen, and Flonzaley, for it probably was Flonzaley, was being Escamillo the Toreador, while I, at two and a half times the age for the role, was cast as Don José.

Quickly I sketched the immediate future. Civil marriages probably didn’t exist in this Catholic country. The knot could be tied at the American Embassy by the military attaché, perhaps, or even a notary public for all I knew. I would go to the antique shops (I loved the Madrid antique shops) to look for two wedding bands and I could throw a champagne supper at the Ritz, no questions asked about Milan. After we had sent the Señora back to Chicago, the three of us might move to Segovia, a town I knew. After Demmie’s death I traveled widely, so I had been to Segovia before. I was beguiled by the Roman aqueduct, I recalled that I had really gone for those tall knobby stone arches—stones whose nature was to fall or sink were sitting there lightly in the air. That was an achievement that had gone home—an example to me. For purposes of meditation Segovia couldn’t be beat. We could live there en famille in one of the old back streets, and while I tried to see if I could really move from mental consciousness to the purer consciousness of spirit, it might amuse Renata to comb the town for antiques she could sell to decorators in Chicago. Perhaps she would even make a buck. Roger could attend nursery school and eventually my little girls might join us, because when Denise won her case and collected her money she’d want to get rid of them immediately. I had just enough cash left to settle in Segovia and give Renata a commercial start. Perhaps I would even write the essay on contemporary Spanish culture suggested by Thaxter, if that could be done without too much faking. And how would Renata take my deception? She would take it as good comedy, which she valued more highly than anything in the world. And when I told her after the marriage that we were down to our last few thousand dollars she would laugh brilliantly, larger than life, and say, “Well, there’s a twist.” I evoked Renata laughing brilliantly because I was in reality undergoing a major attack of my lifelong trouble—the longing, the swelling heart, the tearing eagerness of the deserted, the painful keenness or infinitizing of an unidentified need. This condition was apparently stretching from earliest childhood to the border of senescence. I thought, Hell, let’s settle this once and for all. Then, not wanting the nosy Ritz staff to talk, I went to the central post office of Madrid,