She held a cup of coffee with both hands, as if to do so with one were an indecorous risk. She burrowed on the corner of a large camelback, as if to spread were an impingement on the comfort of future crowds. Her eyes ranged without focus, as if her mind were elsewhere so as not to occupy figurative space. She was collected, as only the grief-stricken are collected. I stared for a moment. “Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.” I then looked at my watch.

Naturally, she was devoted to a routine, of which I had caught an important slice. Every day at three, she would hold her coffee with both hands. I was not impatient to glance at the rest, no. For weeks I simply passed by on my way to Yáñez. Our times are so self-conscious that the idea of being watched has grown perverse; thus, all would-be observers assent to the inner censor at the sound of creep. Not I, however, for I know that observation is the greatest step toward conquest. I am spared the cues that would have me salivate. I seize. Oh, Crocale, I still remember the knot that melted into the loose sienna that covered your freckled shoulders—at distance under an agonizing sun and at proximity under a flickering light! So I learned the minuet of my Diana almost askance. It indicated the vacillation of one unacquainted with the ways of the world. Unacquainted and eager.

I extended the scope of observation, and therefore obtained a firm support. She was a student at Yáñez, but she refused the typical lures that structure a student’s life. Her day was seemingly uneventful: she had breakfast alone at the cafeteria, she dined alone at the café, and she left alone by train. Seemingly, because the vacillation of which I spoke accompanied her at all times. The true outcasts among us take no heed of their brethren; they wilt equally in their self-made cells or out of them. A most exquisite beauty can approach, a most riveting event can develop—they will remain tainted by their inarticulate natures. But my Diana was attuned to the slightest pulse around her. A couple’s laugh would make her vibrate. She was neither the crumbling psyche that hopes in vain for a voice which will renew nor the statue ensorcelled by its own composure amid the gazing votaries. Yet as becomes proud youth, she would not acquiesce to the bumbling suitors. To open itself, a delicate spirit is in need of accident, for accident hints at fate. Indeed, Nephele, I relish at unaccountable hours the wide-eyed gratefulness with which you received your forgotten keys and the subsequent walk that reconciled us to the nightspasms, furors, reversions, and hyperventilation of this city.

Yáñez had a reputation for the picaresque, so that my sitting next to Diana during breakfast was bound to assist in our union. We endured the public belligerence of infirm love, the wholesome slapstick of daydreams, the embittered élan of imminent senility, the spiritual corrosion of sinecures, and still exchanged nothing. I fought the urge to bloom ironic; I fought the urge to grin. Diana, in her novitiate, surely expected a pensive turn from the puppet thrust upon her by chance. I withstood, serene; she withheld, sedate. Then a gentle glance in my direction: spilled tea. Ah, yes, she shared only in the tame discomfiture. I was perplexed, and ceded somewhat to the abrupt felicity that overcame me, for in its natural surge it suffuses banality with charm, and banality is inevitable if one hungers to shape. I leave to the dilettanti the grand overture, which immediately chains them to a feeble lineage of compensation, where opulent balls, dazzling fireworks, and triumphant toasts lead axiomatically to spells of masturbation and demoralizing sleep. Is it not so, Hyale? Did I not sculpt perfervid turpitude from a block of pleasantries? From a courteous kiss, Mezzofantic cunnilingus. From a play with strands, the straining of a rope. From a reassuring hug, a synorgasmic reach-around. From blushing, gagging. From giggling, bawling. Were we not blessed by natural continuity? I bewail only the apportioned end.

Diana, then. Soon after our meeting, I terminated my daily excursions into the cafeteria. Once a week we would have an amiable conversation. And again through a certain triviality of subject I managed to understand more about her life: a joke revealed the absence of the mother, a side-remark the improvidence of the household. Having gathered a fuller account of these misfortunes and a fuller trust, I saw her once every two weeks. Our interactions suddenly acquired an edge. Her scant syllables lost their drowsy glow; her leisurely bearing tensed into a working of gears. And now my leave was something of a climax. Among the many valuable subtleties seduction has accrued over the centuries, none has the ever-renewing power of selective indifference, for it exploits the crude predictions of sympathy. The reunion of souls that rises unobstructed is a universal wish, and as all universal wishes it is tepid in the common mind. Subvert it and see the turmoil of doubt’s birth. Yet doubt is infinitely delicate; it solidifies into despair rather quickly, and despair is barren. Doubt must be assuaged. Here, at last, is irony useful; its opaque festiveness upsets and placates the spirit. Thus my Diana softened her pride enough to ask for a less restricted encounter. I let her arrange the particulars. Now, there is a lot of talk about confidence. One finds in its proselytes the detestable literality of mind that has begotten the modern pickup artist. To equate confidence with the narrowness of a drill sergeant is to betray a tawdry mind. Surely among the myriad meek something can be gained so, but compulsive pleasure loses all adherents. Confidence works only as background; its colors are far too dour to sustain an attentive eye, and is not the ambivalent eye mercilessly attentive? Let your interest lead. In following, learn. As did I by the side of Rhanis, who suffused my gestures with a feigned tenderness that grew authentic and outlined my mask so that it lost its slickness. Yes, there is more gusto in the stick brandished as a sword than in the hollow replica!

My candid Diana was fond of those restaurants that merge with the decaying architecture of the past. She immersed herself in visions manufactured for the poor and the foreign. But was I not immersed too in visions of my own? As flimsy, as uninspired? For I confess that her bodycon made light of any aloof disposition. Her figure, erstwhile hidden under garments derived from the farthingale, irradiated sensuality—preternatural because unforeseen. I grant, then, the supremacy of her method. “Even innocence itself has many a wile.” She now constructed long, complex, unpredictable sentences, in which I detected a similarly long, complex, unpredictable assemblage of values. Physically and intellectually I was being outmatched. An autobiographical extravaganza was improper: she had always shown a moderate interest in my past, which could be attributed to her aperiodic decorum. I essayed droll glosses, but every one of my improvisations was received with a raised eyebrow. While her words were polite, I could see that waves of uncontainable irony impelled her movements. There was need for rearrangement. It would have been foolish to comment upon her ways: this is the solution of the desperate, of the humbled, and it gains either commiseration or contempt. Worse still to withdraw into coldness, province of the sour. Therefore, I added a disarming sincerity to my questions, as if conceding that up until then I had been shouting from the other side of a barrier. It worked, of course. She probably believed this change tied some loose ends about me.

I am aware of the tone into which I’ve lapsed at this point. Thus with Ovid I reply: “How often it has happened that the man who begins by feigning love ends by falling in love in real earnest. Ah, my fair ones, look with indulgent eye on those that give themselves a lover’s airs; the love, now feigned, will soon be love indeed.” Not long after that first evening, the realization struck. A problem of the very highest order, for I was transgressing the pace that had ever assured attainment. Yet also a spur to yield upward. She that overruled I would oversway.

There were no further invitations. We resumed our mornings at the cafeteria. Recency seemed to fail. She was determined to make of me the tritagonist of her tardigrade plotting. It would have been a simple matter: she merely had to overlap the images of my irresolution. It would have been a simple matter had I gone for compensation, but I never permit contrast to work against me. I catered to consistency, undeterred by the prospect of beginning anew. When there is a path set out, love quickens. Were we not, Psecas, a pairing of innumerous dawns? And did not I in each govern you in lust? Solisequious as you were, I marshaled the night, where desire sees best of all. But “when the goal is gained, we die.” A lesson is an echo is a sound.

I could sense a growing feeling of command in her. Once again I confronted the Diana of the evening. Her autobiographical fragments were dangerously whole now. Dangerously, yes, for there is no strand of life that escapes my imagination. I weave with and secure. The woman who is momentarily restrained in motherhood then rebels edifies her progeny. More so, when the man withholds recognition. A drama of symbols, forever lodged in the inaccessible strata of the spectator’s psyche—heightened by the climax of dereliction. Oh, Diana! I sought the mother in you, tender and trapped, indrawn and ornery. I sought the father too, mulish and mum. I sought so that I played in counterpoint. Pair of hermaphrodites! All for release. In you as cathartic tribute, in me... likewise. I was, am, and will be nothing that interferes. I was, am, and will be for you. Not for them, the most vulgar fiction. Even if a crowd is lined after a lifetime, its every soul, to the artist, exists one-on-one.

Yours, however, bifurcated. Much hid in the first mention of his name. You made sure that each syllable struck my ear with vehemence. Did I know him? I did, and I focused on my composure: memory served a slouching homunculus whose voice trickled like a laggard wad of cum. Diana was examining this stag with veiled oeilliades?

Enraptured though I was, I could not possibly be prey to jealousy. This particular state requires something to instigate speculation, and the stag instigated only discomfort akin to that caused by nipple clamps. He lacked an abundance of ire, of lust, of play. That is, he lacked all three emotions which give rise to the phenomenological experience of love, for it is exclusively in abundance that one can be said to possess an emotion. Had he displayed the slightest competence, I would have attributed it to xenoglossia. It is owing to men of his temper that a girdle of Venus has ever loomed in the relations between the sexes. Now, injustice will be readily imputed to my characterization. I talk of a refinement of spirit and yet refuse to grant Diana grounds for her interest. Obfuscation. That is the sole reach of the unripe. Certainly, the stag, buried as he was in a more rarefied atmosphere, could manage the tricks of irrationalism and so assume the pose of an iconoclast. He whispered into Diana’s ears a scurrilous defiance of what I represented: I was a minister of stale arcana, who in his way preserved the line of Sprenger and Institoris; somewhat paradoxically, I also defiled the deluded aspirants and allowed no ascendance. I find myself more aligned with Angéle de la Barthe, to be sure. But the words had an effect, and the modest halo they provided would have to be dislimned. Although I did not have the drive of jealousy, I had the greater drive of calculation.

The stag had been sly. Everything I had to gather from Diana’s hints. Once privy, however, I could dispose of him swiftly. The method would be jarring, but by then I knew Diana’s underlying leniency. Thus I intruded erratically upon their meetings. At first, he pouted and left in haste. He realized eventually that my presence was insidious; he felt he had to take a stand. His dimwitted approach was faux-Socratic. The “pointed” questions of early youth are invariably an embarrassment: they do not have the innocent charm of a morning or the weighty pathos of an evening; they have only the suffocating dullness of noon. I was, therefore, scathing. And alert to Diana’s reactions. While I grazed the boorishness of a Thrasymachus, I took care to retreat when nearing cruelty. Yet the stag grew obstreperous. His insolence, its insolence, finally alienated la belle dame avec merci.

I hasten to add that I was, and remain, immensely pleased with the performance. The debris of chivalric codes of conduct has never found a restorative bent within me. A call to invigorate the will is sovereign. Can Phyale’s eyes, filled as they were with fear and infatuation, ever dim in remembrance? To have known the unscrupulous inclination and to have indulged it—this alone enslaves us exaltedly to our loves, this alone is a bond. And time consecrates it, without undue pain. Indulgence, Diana! Otherwise, betrayal. Had I relented to your subsequent distancing, we would have missed a crucial bar. Indulgence, Diana. Thus only were we permitted to know ourselves in so adventitious a key. Indulgence.

I knew her underlying leniency, yes. Once again, she gladdened at my sight, and her autobiography resumed. Then the setting of our play. At last, Yáñez ceased dictating our orbit. I followed Diana through the curated ruins that were her innocuous obsession, and she followed me through the befouled initiatives that were mine. Wherever we treaded, the melancholy impressions brought intimacy. Guadalajara has, at least, this merit among the nightmare cities: its efforts at self-reinvention are permanently undercut by its misshapen children, who, try as they might, contribute only to its unreality—all pragmatic motives diffuse into figments. Indeed, I came to wonder whether Diana and I were not dissipating in imitation. As if heedful, she extended her hand.

The evening was slack—the enervated drivers talked of eight—bureaucrats gathered round a grungy stand, slumberous though somewhat awake to the desolate flirt; some trudged while others tried. Everything failed to coalesce. Everything, that is, which failed to trace Diana. There was nothing in the drenched vendors who cat-called youth, nothing in the trailing schizoids who screamed for touch, nothing in the tourists who basked in transience, nothing in the fathers who outlived lust, nothing in the mothers who outlived love. At this hour, I tensed in forethought. I was I as shadow of a larger triumph. All tentative steps had somehow led to a clearing, and there I collected. There would be no rest. There could be none. Still I thrust—