Collected Stories by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa, J.S. Bernstein Page B

night. It was then that I remembered theusual thing, when I said to her: ‘Eyes of a blue dog.’ Without taking her hand off the lamp she said to me: ‘That. We’ll never forget that.’ She left the orbit, sighing: ‘Eyes of a blue dog. I’ve written it everywhere.’
    I saw her walk over to the dressing table. I watched her appear in the circular glass of the mirror looking at me now at the end of a back and forth of mathematical light. I watchedher keep on looking at me with her great hot-coal eyes: looking at me while she opened the little box covered with pink mother of pearl. I saw her powder her nose. When she finished, she closed the box, stood up again, and walked over to the lamp once more, saying: ‘I’m afraid that someone is dreaming about this room and revealing my secrets.’ And over the flame she held the same long and tremuloushand that she had been warming before sitting down at the mirror. And shesaid: ‘You don’t feel the cold.’ And I said to her: ‘Sometimes.’ And she said to me: ‘You must feel it now.’ And then I understood why I couldn’t have been alone in the seat. It was the cold that had been giving me the certainty of my solitude. ‘Now I feel it,’ I said. ‘And it’s strange because the night is quiet. Maybethe sheet fell off.’ She didn’t answer. Again she began to move toward the mirror and I turned again in the chair, keeping my back to her. Without seeing her, I knew what she was doing. I knew that she was sitting in front of the mirror again, seeing my back, which had had time to reach the depths of the mirror and be caught by her look, which had also had just enough time to reach the depths andreturn – before the hand had time to start the second turn – until her lips were anointed now with crimson, from the first turn of her hand in front of the mirror. I saw, opposite me, the smooth wall, which was like another blind mirror in which I couldn’t see her – sitting behind me – but could imagine her where she probably was as if a mirror had been hung in place of the wall. ‘I see you,’ I toldher. And on the wall I saw what was as if she had raised her eyes and had seen me with my back turned toward her from the chair, in the depths of the mirror, my face turned toward the wall. Then I saw her lower her eyes again and remain with her eyes always on her brassiere, not talking. And I said to her again: ‘I see you.’ And she raised her eyes from her brassiere again. ‘That’s impossible,’she said. I asked her why. And she, with her eyes quiet and on her brassiere again: ‘Because your face is turned toward the wall.’ Then I spun the chair around. I had the cigarette clenched in my mouth. When I stayed facing the mirror she was back by the lamp. Now she had her hands open over the flame, like the two wings of a hen, toasting herself, and with her face shaded by her own fingers. ‘Ithink I’m going to catch cold,’ she said. ‘This must be a city of ice.’ She turned her face to profile and her skin, from copper to red, suddenly became sad. ‘Do something about it,’ she said. And she began to get undressed, item by item, starting at the top with the brassiere. I told her: ‘I’m going to turn back to thewall.’ She said: ‘No. In any case, you’ll see me the way you did when yourback was turned.’ And no sooner had she said it than she was almost completely undressed, with the flame licking her long copper skin. ‘I’ve always wanted to see you like that, with the skin of your belly full of deep pits, as if you’d been beaten.’ And before I realized that my words had become clumsy at the sight of her nakedness, she became motionless, warming herself on the globe of the lamp,and she said: ‘Sometimes I think I’m made of metal.’ She was silent for an instant. The position of her hands over the flame varied slightly. I said: ‘Sometimes, in other dreams, I’ve thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some