The Foreigners - Maxine Swann [40]
“I haven’t exercised in two years,” he said. “I’m out of shape. I’m going to start.”
But his body felt nice to her. They were kissing again. He pulled back for a second and looked at her. Due to the effect of the kiss, that gaze of his, dark and sheltered, had changed. She must have looked different too.
“It’s like we’re on drugs,” he said.
The cars swishing by, the stars coming out. That’s what I want, Isolde thought, for him to always look at me like that.
“Why did you kiss me at that party?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I just felt like doing it.”
He leaned in and kissed her again.
“This is the first sex I’ve had in years,” he said.
“What?”
“Yeah, really.”
“You mean this kissing?”
“Yeah. I was involved with this girl. She was there at the party. She really fucked me up.”
“Who? Leonarda?”
“Uh-huh. What you don’t want to ever do is fall in love. That’s what fucks you up. No, no, you want to stay away from that.”
thirteen
“Just imagine,” Leonarda said, “that we’re hunting him down.” We were walking again through the Plaza Las Heras. “See, he’s there, running. You remember that movie The Conformist, when they’re hunting Dominique Sanda between the trees? Oh, just picture it, there he is running, scared shitless. I take a shot, not even trying to hit him, just to scare him. But I mean really scare him. The primal fear at the heart of all human beings, reverberating back into the very deep past when they were hunted by predators, giant animals, the fear of being overtaken, killed and eaten. This was before they discovered how to build fires.”
She stopped walking to explain this last point to me.
“You see, the fires allowed them to change the dynamic. Predators were afraid of fires, so if the humans stayed near the fire, they could no longer be surprised in the night. The other idea, of course, was to form bands. They began hunting the big predators, bears, lions, in groups. A man was helpless before a large predator, but a group of ten could kill it.You see? Look at books for kids. They’re all about tapping into that fear of predators. We still have it. I want to reawaken that fear in him, awaken it to its most acute point.”
“But wait,” I said,“wasn’t he actually already involved in violent combat? Doesn’t he know something about this?”
She looked at me full of annoyance. It was as if she’d dropped her rifle right then and there. “He wasn’t involved in shit,” she said.
I had ruined the moment. I wanted to see her again like a boy, sighting him with her rifle between the trees.
In Crowds and Power, Canetti describes the four possible reactions to attack by a predator: fight, flight, paralysis—the pursued hopes to be given up as dead—and metamorphosis. In this last, the being neither flees nor fights, but transforms into something else entirely—Daphne, pursued by Zeus, turns into a tree. Leonarda’s tactic was metamorphosis. Sometimes I’d see her in the course of one of our walks transform her entire physiognomy five times. That was also what was riveting. She kept escaping out of your hands, a girl, then a furry creature, a monster, a brightly winged insect, a boy, while I would slink along beside her, the reptile she always said I was. In appearance somewhat frail, compared to me, she could walk for hours.
Those days, I felt lonely when I suspected that she was going back not to her mother’s, that witch, but to see the guy Miguel, winner of the prize. Once I even dropped her off at the corner of The Palace of Pigeons and walked on alone, up Las Heras Avenue. It changed at this point, on one side of the street a high wall, the Zoological Gardens, the beasts behind the wall—sometimes you could hear them, a bellow or breathing—no more people coming in and out of stores, just the street beside the wall, the cars swishing by, the wall casting a shadow. It was the end of happiness,