Winning the Game and Other Stories Read Free Page B

didn’t look at me, later, men didn’t look at me … You just met me today, how is it that—”
    â€œSymbiosis,” I said.
    She lit a cigarette, and examined my eyes by the light from the match.
    â€œI know you’ll be patient and delicate with me. Symbiosis,” she said.
    â€œThen we agree. One question: were you really going to have an operation? A man and a woman have to trust one another.”
    I heard her answer, and the answer wasn’t very important.
    It’s complicated having two mistresses. Logistical problems. Not forgetting the woman you married, she has to enter into the things you do with the others, and those things are many: there’s the distribution of endearments and laughter, you can’t do without that, and then there’s the buying of jewels, which is easy, it’s enough for a jewel to be very expensive for it to be appreciated, and there’s the buying of clothes, which is very complicated—some like to show their legs, others like to show their breasts—and there are visits to friends, which is even more convoluted; certain friends can’t meet certain other friends, and then there are trips, it always happens that all three like the same city that you hate, and the premiere on Friday of the musical all of them want to go to, and there’s the confidential and embarrassing visit to the gynecologist that you can’t get out of, and there’s the painter and the carpenter and the electrician, women love remodeling, and there’s the decorator and the relatives, I shudder just thinking of the relatives, and even if you manage to set up all these things in perfect order, like a tile roof or the scales of a fish, so as to let the water flow without making puddles or getting swept into the whirlpool, you’re going to have to program your life the way a general plans a war.
    I came to an agreement with Gisela; I don’t like to see anyone suffer.
    Maria José stopped smoking and her teeth are no longer so yellow.
    The new book is almost completely written. It’s going to be even better than the first.
    Success, that’s something I understand.

the hunchback and botticelli’s venus
    FLUTTERING LOCKS OF REDDISH HAIR whipped by the wind and rain, smooth and radiant skin, she is Botticelli’s Venus walking down the street. (The one in the Uffizi, born from a seashell, not the one in the Staatliche Museen, with a black background, which is similar but has dry hair arranged around the head, descending evenly down the body.)
    Don’t think that I boast any extraordinary perspicacity, but the fact is that if the woman I observe is as motionless as a statue, I can still tell the rhythm of her steps when she moves. I understand not only muscles, but also skeletons and, according to the symmetry of the bone structure, can predict the articulation of the ankles, knees, and ilium, which determine the rhythm of the body’s movement.
    Venus walks unbothered by the rain, sometimes turning her head toward the sky to wet her face even more, and I can say without the slightest poetic stuffiness that it’s the walk of a goddess.
    I have to create an elaborate strategy to get close to her and achieve what I need, a difficult task, as women, at first contact, feel repulsion towards me.
    I follow her to where she lives. I watch the building for several days. Venus likes to walk in the streets and to sit in the square near her home, reading. But she stops all the time, looks at people, especially children, or else feeds the pigeons, which in a way disappoints me; pigeons, like rats, roaches, ants and termites, don’t need any help. They’ll be around after bacteria finally put an end to us.
    Looking at her from a distance, I am more and more impressed by the harmony of her body, the perfect balance among the parts that make up her wholeness—the extension of the members in relation to the vertical dimension of