While the Women are Sleeping Read Online Free PDF

children. Parents refuse to see their children transformed into old people, they hate them and jump over them and see only their grandchildren, if they have any. Time is always opposed to what it originated—to what is.’
    Viana buried his face in his hands, as I’d seen him do from above, from the balcony, but not from down here, by the pool. And I saw then that this gesture had nothing to do with suppressed laughter, but with a kind of panic that nevertheless failed to negate a certain serenity. Perhaps he had to make that gesture precisely in order to cling on to his serenity. I again glanced up at my balcony and at the other balconies, but all still lay in silence, dark and empty, as if beyond the balconies, beyond the windows and net curtains, inside the repeated and identical rooms, no one was sleeping, no Luisa, no Inès, no one. But I knew they were sleeping and that the world was sleeping, its weak wheel stopped. Viana and I were merely the product of its inertia for as long as we were speaking. He went on speaking, his face still covered:
    ‘That’s why time offers no solution,’ he said. ‘Rather than allow my adoration to die, I would rather kill her, you understand; and rather than allow her to leave me, rather than allow my adoration to continue, without its object, I would also rather kill her. That, from my point of view, is perfectly logical. That’s why I know what I will have to do one day, possibly far off in the future, I’ll delay it for as long as possible, but it’s only a matter of time. Just in case, though, you see, I video her every day.’
    ‘Haven’t you ever considered killing yourself?’ I blurted out. I had been listening to him not because I wanted to, but because I had the feeling there was nothing else I could do and that the best way of not taking part in the conversation was to say nothing, to behave as if I were the mere repository of his confidences, without offering any objections or advice, without refuting or agreeing or being shocked. But it seemed to me harder and harder to bring this conversation to a close, the path it had taken was interminable, or so it seemed. My eyes felt itchy. I wished Luisa’s sheets would slide off and wake her up, that she would notice my absence and, like me, go out onto the balcony. That she would see me down below, by the swimming pool, in the feeble glow cast by the moon on the water, and summon me upstairs, that she would say my name and rescue me from this conversation with Viana; all she had to do was call. What a drag, I thought, as I sat listening to him, I’ll have to read the newspapers closely from now on and each time there’s a headline about a woman who has died at the hands of a man I’ll have to read the whole article until I find their names, now I’ll always fear that Inès could be the dead woman and Viana the man who killed her. Although it might all be lies, here on this island, while the women are sleeping.
    ‘Kill myself? That wouldn’t be right,’ answered Viana, removing his hands from his face. He looked at me with an expression more of amusement than surprise, and the corners of his mouth almost lifted in a smile, or so it seemed to me in the darkness.
    ‘It would be much less right—if I’ve understood you correctly—for you to kill her just so that you can continue to adore her on tape once she’s dead.’
    ‘No, you don’t understand: it would be right for me to kill her for the reasons I’ve explained, no one willingly gives up his way of life if he has a fairly good idea of how he wants to live it, and I do, which is unusual. And, how can I put it, murder is a very male practice, just as execution is, but not suicide, which is as common among women as it is among men. Earlier, I mentioned that she had a glimmering of what lies beyond me, but the fact is that beyond me there is nothing. As far as she’s concerned, there is nothing; she may not realise that, but she should. And if I were to kill