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A tender morning, as pink as the Greek fingers of Dawn, an insistent, simple greening, fragrances in the air and warnings of music, all gave me their signals: the time was near. Not only the time of the journey that was approaching, at a joyous little trot on the hooves of a vigorous steed. Not just the new meeting with rough places that had perhaps been softened by memory. It was, once again, the season of love.

I understood this all of a sudden one noonday (the revelation of love, not love itself, happens in an instantaneous flash) when I saw Rosaura dos Carballos, in jeans and tennis shoes and a little blouse tight over those small breasts (no less carnally attractive for belonging to a fairy). I confirmed then, with as much disquiet as joy, that I was already irremediably in love with the red hair, small nose, dreamy eyes, and mocking intelligence of this little transmarine Galician whom, on a certain summer evening, chance had set down on my lap.

But, oh!, as anyone who has ever loved knows, love does not only or always bring happiness, but also brooding and sorrows. And mine, for sure, were only too copious. In the first place, I loved without the least certainty of my love being reciprocated. You'll tell me, Santiago, that most lovers pass through that awkward experience. But my case was not comparable to that of an average lover smitten with some ordinary lady of flesh and bone. On the material of Rosaura's body (which sometimes appeared so white, soft, and tangible and which was capable, nevertheless, of erasing or diluting itself in a matter of seconds) I had reached no conclusion, and I must add that my own flesh and bones raised unsettling and shameful uncertainties for me.

It was not just a matter of asking myself whether Rosaura loved me or might love me. The lover aspires toward the consummation of his love and I too desired it, for my bodily memory was strong, vigorous, and pleasing and had remained deeply embedded in the shifting structure of my soul, as if to warn me that the human creature is a body with a head before it is a head with a body. The first notice of spring brought me a sweet agitation and dissolved the rust in my joints. All of my siestas and my nights of love - in summer beneath mosquito nets, in winter beneath blankets, in spring in the countryside under the stars above - all the gestures, movements, avatars, and dreams of a body that, to tell the truth, had been generous with me, were gathered up against my rough cortex, like the delicate leaves of the plum tree or the dense, strong, golden wafers of the chestnut tree, which were already sprouting.

One morning I surprised myself by doing something that I had not practiced in solitude since my remote mid-teens. I can tell this to you, Santiago - asking you, nonetheless, not to spread it around much - with the trust given by the camaraderie between old friends. Imagine the spectacle! a fully-grown man in his forties, with a well-grown beard and a few white hairs, obtaining for himself the poor but imaginative ecstasy of beardless youth ... But no one can measure how far his powers will take him if he does not first test how well they work. And as for working, they worked, yes. With acceleration of heart, creaking of vertebrae, and a dizzying commotion in my kidneys, I joined anew in the explicitly physical exercise of sexuality (because mental eroticism, even as a ghost, I had never abandoned). What upset me a little was the concrete result of this practice, which, to tell the truth, is never so abundant as the intensity of joy makes us suppose. It seemed to me, at first, somewhat less solid, as if the years and vestiges of ghostliness might have diluted it. But the most improbable thing was the aromatic novelty. The room was saturated with a tenuous vapor of moist jasmine wherein I thought I recognized the bouquet of Parisian l'eau de toilette preferred by Rosaura and also, perhaps, of the little white bough that more than ninety years ago I had, at a banquet, presented to my admired Sarah Bernhardt.

I felt, no point in denying it, profoundly humiliated and above all perplexed. Should I interpret it as a kind of degeneration, the result of a Frenchification that I had believed superficial but which had apparently sipped at my most intimate humors? Might it be a paradoxical effect of the seeds from Broceliande? A practical joke, or else a most delicate amorous attention from Rosaura, so concerned about me that she was blowing her favorite fragrance into my erotic life? The worst thing was that there was no one - clearly - whom I could ask without having to explain the circumstancs in which the aroma had been produced. Condemned to silence by my natural modesty and by the extensive and weighty virile tradition of Western civilization, I decided to keep my curiosity until a better occasion for satisfying it should present itself.

And the best occasion would undoubtedly be in the very brilliance of the carnal or transcarnal experience itself (or whatever you might call it), if it happened to take place and if we survived it. My fear did not consist only of the possibility that the subtle, unstable, and evasive færie transcorporality of Rosaura might suddenly vanish from between my arms. The thing is that I too felt myself to be in danger of disappearing. How could I be sure that my strange materialization would be enduring and unalterable in all circumstances? Whether from lack of habit or because of a certain fragility contingent upon my particular condition, what is certain is that this vernal and perhaps puerile activity had exhaustively shaken all of my skeletal and psychic structures. Which produced in me a grave worry and - why not? - even fear. What if at the greatest moment, consumed or seized by joy, I was to find myself unforseeably subject to a shameful process of evaporation or liquefication? And what if all that was left of me after so much exhuberence was that floral extract lost in the deep, silky conch, or shining on the edge of those exquisite thighs?

A shudder of horror was joined then to all of my lyrical fantasies about love and death, which from mere metaphor were threatening to pass to the most crude literalness.

A fine thing it would be to hear from my dissolved person the peals of laughter with which Rosaura dos Carballos was quite capable of regaling me! Nevertheless that ridiculous possibility did have its heroic and admirable side. The ardent speeches of lovers tend to remain mere words. Who has been really and truly undone from love? Who can boast of having died melting in the soft rose of his love's innermost being or in her curly pubic down (which in this case I imagined to be a gentle shade of bronze) of his amatory object? Although the prospect of evaporating and losing my laboriously acquired corporeality did not entirely please me, I had been formed in a romantic generation. So I was willing to take on the sublime absurdity of that disappearance, which any woman who shared my feelings (but did Rosaura? ... ) would accept as the most touching of posthumous homages.

I must confess to spending several days in these delirious or well-founded doubts, until I became ashamed of myself. "Ah, Lucio," I said to myself, "being a ghost has been very bad for your health. Who would have said that you would ever be afraid of the most fleshly and joyous, the most intense of all earthly pleasures? What the hell do you want a body for, if you're not going to spend it in love? ..." That utterly free captivity in which the eyes of the beloved are the window to all space, that festive death warrant, that serene tumult that opens the doors of dream, the distance of imagination and the proximities of tenderness. Love had been all of that for me, always and every time. I was born, as I said, in a romantic generation, and my natural gifts added temperature to love's already warmed atmosphere. Often enough this had meant wearying my loves with excessive expectations. Or had this not perhaps occurred to me when, approaching sixty years of age, I spent my early mornings writing passionate letters to Mónica Torromé, my sweetheart at that time? She would answer with suspicious celerity, suspiciously as if she had prepared her epistles the previous day, before going to sleep, in order not to have to get up so early to answer me.... But I did not hold that against her and I married her. If she was not fond of early rising, she had other good qualities instead. I must recognize, Santiago, that in respect to common sense, I have always been surpassed by the fair sex.

And even after so many years, love, that sparkling, versatile subject that filled half of my life, had not left me. The other half was glory and neither of the two did I completely exhaust. Perhaps that is why, since my transit on the earth was a welter of inconclusive threads, I am here in front of some fragmentary sheets, writing.

Someday the little hands of Rosaura dos Carballos, and her eyes of clear water, will clear away the sound and the fury from my distant heart.