The Rhythm of Memory (35 page)

“You’re the only person who understands me now,” she said, tears now streaming down her face.

“You shouldn’t think like that, Salomé.”

“You were right to make me see my husband in his true light.”

“I never said that, Salomé.” He was now trying to peel himself from her arms.

“You didn’t have to…”

She was shaking and Samuel took off his coat and placed it around her shoulders. “Come,” he said softly. “Let’s go inside.”

In the few minutes it had taken him to run up and open the door to his office and usher Salomé inside, he had told himself that he had to apologize to his patient. What he had done was wrong,
a cardinal sin in his profession and to his marriage. But somehow, as he brought Salomé in from the rain, the sensation of her kisses still lingering on his lips and the traces of her fingerprints on his bones, all of his ethics seemed to vanish.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he tried to mumble. But, Salomé had already come close to him again.

“Salomé,” he whispered, and at the sound of her name she placed a trembling finger over his lips.

“You never speak this much in our sessions,” she said, her mouth curling slightly.

“Salomé,” he said once again. But this time, his voice was even fainter, his eyes locked on hers.

He believed he took her by the shoulders to speak some reason into what they were about to do. But he only ended up faltering. He slid the straps of her dress over her arms, the material falling to the ground like tissue paper.

She was so beautiful standing there in the moonlight, the beads of rain having moistened her olive skin. Her breasts were round and high. The small nipples like crushed raspberries, pink and textured.

He wanted to cover her in her nakedness, keep hidden to himself that which was so beautiful and fragile. Yet, he ended up bringing her closer to him, allowing her to unbutton his shirt, his trousers, until he too stood there naked against her, his pelvis nestling into hers.

“You are the first man to touch me since this happened to me.” She placed her small, delicate hand on her left rib and touched where the skin was red and raised.

He looked down at her and was overcome by just how beautiful and brave she seemed to be by standing there completely revealed to him.

“You’re beautiful, Salomé.” He lifted her chin so that her mouth nestled into his.

He felt her pushing herself closer to him. He felt her breath on his neck and her hair light against his skin. He could no longer think clearly, his mind made dizzy by her perfume. He did not utter a sound as he lifted Salomé’s tiny form and brought her over to his armchair. He sat down, his damp chest heaving, and held each of her hands as she mounted him, coiled her legs around him within the chair’s winged sides, pulling him so close to her that, in the moonlight, he could see the faint traces of her feather-light scars.

V
ESTERÅS
, S
WEDEN

M
ARCH
1975

Salomé couldn’t shake from her mind something in the way he made love to her. He had tenderly kissed her in all those red, raised places, where the skin had stitched itself up in a feeble attempt to camouflage where there had once been a wound. He had traced his fingers all over her body, like a navigator reading a map. She knew that he knew the story behind every scar he lingered over. He was aware of who had put it there, and how it had felt for her to be branded. Yet still he caressed every corner of her, for there wasn’t a part of Salomé that was not beautiful to him.

She had not felt that way—felt attractive—for some time. A year had passed since the Villa Grimaldi, and this was the first time she had ever revealed her body fully to anyone. Now, being embraced by a man, and disrobing completely, she was being seen and revealed in her entirety. Someone could see her scars and accept them as being part of her.

Yes, somehow, Samuel had restored her. She suddenly felt different. She suddenly felt alive and whole again.

Her heart did not love him the way it had loved Octavio in the past, but she craved him nonetheless. It was strange. Samuel knew so much about her, but she knew almost nothing of him.

Salomé knew that her doctor had spent a portion of his childhood in Latin America because she had questioned him once
during one of their sessions about the origin of his accent. He had told her that his family had fled France and settled in Peru, thus explaining his soft, melodic way of speaking Spanish, which was so different from a Spaniard’s or a Chilean’s, but beautiful nonetheless. She had loved the gentle, lulling way he slipped into the language. Having a doctor with whom she could communicate in her native tongue had made her feel instantly comfortable with Samuel.

She also knew that he was married and that he had a young daughter. She had seen their photograph on his desk. The little girl had been dressed in her Midsummer’s costume—all in white with a wreath in her hair—and Salomé couldn’t help but think of her own daughters, who would back in Chile pick flowers from the garden and place them through the straps of their dresses and slip the larger blooms behind their ears.

Walking down Föreningsgatan, Salomé’s fingers still ached from the intensity with which he had grasped her hands. She could still recall the taste of his mouth and the movement of his shoulders pressing into hers. She could not possibly wait until the following Thursday when her next appointment was scheduled. She wanted to see him before then. But by the time she returned home to her apartment, to find Octavio asleep and the children in their rooms, she realized she had other things to attend to first. So, for the moment, the matter of Samuel would unfortunately have to wait.

V
ESTERÅS
, S
WEDEN

M
ARCH
1975

Samuel walked home that evening, discoving Kaija awake and playing with Sabine.

“You worked late tonight, darling,” she said softly. “I’m afraid your dinner got cold.”

He immediately felt so guilty seeing her crouched on the floor with their child on her knee. The little girl was fingering the tiny wisps of her mother’s blond hair and pulling it toward her own.

“I think she realizes how much we look alike,” Kaija said as she stood up and held her daughter close to her hip.

“Yes, it’s remarkable,” Samuel agreed quietly. Just looking at the two of them together, the traces of Salomé’s taste still lingering on his tongue, intensified his already horrible guilt.

“Shall I warm up your dinner?”

“No,” he stammered. “No thank you, I mean.” He tried to smile. “It’s just that I’m really not hungry.”

“But you look exhausted, sweetheart.” She smiled, her green eyes tranquil and full of affection for him.

“Don’t go to any trouble. You should save your strength.”

“No, really, Samuel, I am feeling much better today,” she insisted. “Let me reheat it for you.”

He couldn’t believe that, on this day, with all that had just
happened with Salomé, he would return home to find his wife in such improved spirits. The irony of the situation overwhelmed him.

Kaija walked over to Samuel and placed Sabine in his arms. The little girl smelled like baby powder. He touched her softly rounded limbs and buried his nose in her freshly washed hair.

The whole familial scene made him feel sick with self-loathing. He couldn’t believe that Kaija had suddenly rebounded with so much energy. It was as if the woman he had courted years earlier had returned. Her face was full of color and her voice cheerful. She hadn’t been this way for several months.

He did not realize that Kaija had had an epiphany that afternoon. That she had picked herself up from her incessant moping and stared at herself hard in the mirror. “You have a beautiful daughter,” she told herself, “so consider yourself blessed. Not having another child isn’t the end of the world.” She tried to tidy up the house and to make herself look attractive by changing into a freshly starched dress and applying rouge to her otherwise pale cheeks. Above all, she tried to remain positive about her husband’s reaction to the news. Tonight, she promised herself, she would tell him of her condition.

That evening, as he sat at the kitchen table, pushing his food around the plate in a desperate attempt to mask his lack of appetite, Samuel’s anger at himself intensified.

How could he have betrayed his wife? And let alone with a patient! He shook his head in disgust.

“What’s the matter, Samuel?” Kaija asked him from behind. “You look just awful. Wasn’t your dinner all right?”

“Yes, yes. Of course it was, darling,” he said apologetically. He swung around the chair to face her, but could not look her straight in the eyes. In a strained voice he blurted out, “It was just a difficult day at the office, and the rain delayed me from coming home.”

She nodded and went to the sink, tying the apron strings around her waist. The water from the faucet hissed.

“I think I’m going to get to bed early,” Samuel suggested. “Has Sabine already been put to bed?”

“Yes, I did that while you were eating.”

“I’ll kiss her good night after I take my shower,” he murmured in a barely audible voice.

“Why not before?” Kaija asked, befuddled by her husband’s odd behavior and clearly disappointed that he had ruined the atmosphere she had tried to create for when she would inform him of her situation.

“I’m just a bit clammy from the rain, that’s all.” He stood up abruptly, slightly kicking the leg of the chair as he made his way upstairs. Kaija remained downstairs.

Samuel had hoped the shower would cleanse him. Erase the traces of his infidelity. Yet standing there naked in the shower, he could still smell the scent of marzipan rising off his body and fading into a thick cloud of steam. The same steam would permeate the terry towels and his cotton robe, so that even after his bathing, Salomé’s scent clung heavily to the cloth and navigated its way back again into his skin.

V
ESTERÅS
, S
WEDEN

M
ARCH
1975

When Salomé returned home that same evening, she had tried to smooth out her dress and dry her hair with one of her linen handkerchiefs, but she realized soon after walking through the apartment’s corridor that no one was around to even notice that she was arriving home slightly disheveled.

The apartment seemed so crowded now. Her collections lined the bookshelves and handfuls of potpourri spilled out of dried papaya skins. But those were familiar and comforting things. It was the children’s toys and Octavio’s shoes that contributed to the clutter. However, now was not the time to say anything to them about it. She wanted time to herself, a few more moments to savor what had just transpired and to relish the memory of how Samuel had traveled through her. Even now, as she looked at the goose bumps on her arms, she wondered if it was his perspiration and not the rain that had caused it to glimmer as it now did.

She stood in front of her full-length mirror, hearing her husband snoring in the background. From the side of the glass, she could see he had once again gone another day without shaving, the thick black stubble spreading over his brown cheeks. She had learned from Samuel that all of this was a sign of Octavio’s depression—his incessant sleeping, his unwillingness to go to job
interviews, his lack of grooming. All that opposite to what he had once prided himself on long ago.

Nevertheless, she refused to feel sorry for him. It did not occur to her that perhaps
she
was the reason that he had tumbled into a downward spiral of depression. That all he craved was her forgiveness and her affection. She had chosen not to think that way. She now had little sympathy for the man she had once sworn to be her eternal love.

Instead, as she slid her dress around her bare shoulders and over her hips, trying to simulate what Samuel’s fingers had just done to her, she was lost in the sensation of his kisses that had covered her breasts, her hipbones, her neck.

In the mirror, she stared at her naked image. She imagined she was Samuel gazing upon her body for the first time. She cupped her breasts and stood in profile to see if her abdomen seemed flat and firm. She placed her fingers around her waist and tried to see if her two thumbs could still meet in the small of her back.

Then she stepped closer to see her scars where the electric wires and nodules had been placed over her areolae, in the faint creases of her navel, and in the folds of her inner thighs.

In the faint light of her bedroom, she could see them clearly. She traced one of the lines on her breast with her forefinger. She felt none of the pain she had endured thirteen months before. That gripping, terrifying sensation of electricity going through her body, entering through her thinnest and most delicate pieces of skin. Now, all that was left of that experience were her memories and those thin, pink scars. They blended in with the breast itself, just as the ones by her navel and genitalia did, but still she could not deny the obvious: those men who had tortured her had left their hideous mark on her forever.

They had branded her in her most intimate places. Left her with these faint tattoos that basically told the world, “Yes, we have been here. We have touched this and destroyed this. And we will never be punished for any of it.”

She thought of how the two men who had truly ever made love to her did so in such different manners. While Samuel seemed to embrace every inch of her body, never shying away from a trace of something uncomely, Octavio had only ever gravitated to those features on her that he found the most beautiful. And perhaps that was part of the problem—perhaps that was just another reason why Salomé felt she couldn’t undress in front of her husband anymore. She didn’t think he could get over that she was no longer unblemished. That her most beautiful features—her breasts, her waist, even her insides—they all now had scars.

But, should a man make love differently to a woman after she has been abused? Should he hold her differently—more gently—to keep her from breaking? Should he address these remnants of her attacker and kiss them as if his lips had the power to heal? Salomé didn’t know the answer, for Samuel had never known her before her torture. He was seeing her for the first time the way she was now. Octavio had known her both before and after her scars.