“Do you desire me?” she asks.
I feel like saying, “Yes, I desire you when you’re far away, when you’re just a fantasy. Today I practiced aikido for nearly an hour, thinking about you all the time—about your body, your legs, your breasts—and yet the fighting used up only a tiny part of that energy. I love and desire my wife, and yet I also desire you. I’m not the only man who desires you, nor am I the only married man ever to desire another woman. We all commit adultery in our thoughts, ask forgiveness, then do it all over again. But it isn’t fear of committing a sin that keeps me from touching you, even though you’re here in my arms. I don’t suffer from that kind of guilt. There’s something far more important now than making love to you. That’s why I feel perfectly at peace lying beside you, looking at the hotel room lit by the glow from the building site next door.”
However, instead I say, “Of course I desire you. Very much. I’m a man, and you’re a very attractive woman. Besides, I feel a great tenderness for you, a feeling that grows with each day that passes. I admire the way you can change so easily from woman to child, from child to woman. It’s like a bow touching the strings of a violin and creating a divine melody.”
The ends of our cigarettes glow more intensely as we both inhale.
“Why don’t you touch me, then?”
I put out my cigarette, and she does the same. I continue to stroke her hair and try to make that journey back into the past.
“I need to do something very important for us both. You remember the Aleph? Well, I need to go through the door that frightened us both so much.”
“And what should I do?”
“Nothing. Just stay by my side.”
I begin to imagine the ring of golden light moving up and down my body. It starts at my feet, goes up as far as my head and then back again. At first, I find it hard to concentrate, but gradually the ring begins to move more quickly.
“May I speak?”
Of course she can. The ring of fire is not of this world.
“There’s nothing worse than being rejected. Your light finds the light of another soul, and you think that the windows will open, the sun will pour in, and all your old wounds will finally heal. Then, suddenly, none of that happens. Perhaps I’m paying the price for all those men I hurt.”
The golden light, which had come into being by dint of sheer imagination—a well-known way of getting back to one’s past lives—is now beginning to move of its own accord.
“No, you’re not paying the price for anything. Neither am I. Remember what I said on the train, about how we’re experiencing now everything that happened in the past and will happen in the future. In this precise moment, in a hotel in Novosibirsk, the world is being created and destroyed. We’re redeeming all our sins, if that’s what we choose to do.”
Not only in Novosibirsk but everywhere in the Universe, time beats like God’s vast heart, expanding and contracting. She draws closer, and I feel her small heart beating, too, ever louder.
The golden ring around my body is moving faster now. The first time I did this exercise, right after reading a book about “discovering the mysteries of past lives,” I was immediately transported to mid-nineteenth-century France and saw myself writing a book on the same subjects I write about now. I learned what my name was, where I lived, what kind of pen I was using, even the sentence I had just written. I was so scared that I returned at once to the present, to Copacabana, to the room where my wife was sleeping peacefully by my side. The following day, I found out everything I could about the person I had been and, a week later, decided to meet myself again. It didn’t work. And however often I tried, I failed every time.
I spoke to J. about it. He explained that there is always an element of “beginner’s luck,” conceived by God simply to show that it’s possible, but after that, the situation goes into reverse and returns to what it was before. He advised me not to try again unless I had some really serious issue to resolve in one of my past lives—otherwise, it was just a waste of time.
Years later, I was introduced to a woman in São Paulo. She was a very successful homeopath who had a deep compassion for her patients. Whenever we met, I felt that I had known her before. We talked about this feeling, which she said she shared. One day, we were standing on the balcony of my hotel, gazing out at the city, and I proposed doing the ring-of-fire exercise together. We were both projected toward the door I had seen when Hilal and I discovered the Aleph. That day, the homeopath said good-bye to me with a smile on her face, but I never spoke to her again. She refused to answer my phone calls or to see me when I went to her clinic, and I soon realized that there was no point in insisting.
The door, however, was open; the tiny crack in the dike had become a hole through which the water was beginning to gush forth. Over the years, I met three other women whom I a
lso felt I had known before, but I didn’t make the same mistake again and performed the ring-of-fire exercise alone. None of those women knew that I was responsible for some terrible event in their past lives.
The knowledge of what I’d done didn’t paralyze me, though. I was determined to put it right. Eight women had been the victims of that tragedy, and I was sure that one of them would eventually tell me how the story had ended. I knew almost everything, you see, apart from the curse that had been put on me.
That was why I had set off on the Trans-Siberian Railway and, more than a decade later, plunged once more into the Aleph. The fifth woman is now lying by my side, talking about things that no longer interest me because the ring of fire is spinning faster and faster. No, I don’t want to take her with me back to where we first met.
“Only women believe in love; men don’t,” she says.
“Men do believe in love,” I say.
I am still stroking her hair. Her heartbeat is slowing now. I imagine that her eyes are closed, that she feels loved and protected, and that the idea of rejection has vanished as quickly as it appeared.
Her breathing slows, too. She moves, but this time merely to find a more comfortable position. I move as well, to replace the ashtray on the bedside table; then I fold her in my arms.
The golden ring is spinning incredibly fast from my feet to my head and back again. Then suddenly I feel the air around me vibrating, as if there had been an explosion.
THE LENSES OF MY EYEGLASSES are smeared. My fingernails are filthy. The candle scarcely gives off enough light for me to make out where I am, but I can see that the sleeves of the clothes I’m wearing are made of coarse fabric.
Before me is a letter. Always the same letter.