On the Rebound
Part 1
'No, Desmond, I can't go on any longer,' she said.
'You can - maybe - let's not break up,' he said.
'I cannot.'
'We can try.'
'No. It would be too much for me. I once loved you, Desmond, I loved you very much. But I don't love you anymore. I can't stand it. It would be to violate myself.'
He had no counter-argument to this.
'The world without you will be a gray place. There'll be no fun anymore.'
'I'm sorry. Please don't call on me any longer. It'll make things only more difficult.'
'Don't you remember?'
'Desmond, please leave.'
Sir Desmond Desengard was talking to his bride-to-be, or to his ex-bride-to-be, the Lady Beryl. They were supposed to be getting married soon. At least it was what everybody was expecting. Desmond was desperately in love with Beryl. At the start it had been heaven, everything went right, they formed a beautiful young pair, a perfect match. But then after some six months of bliss, she changed, she became more and more impersonal, colder, more and more distant.
As they were talking one day, after that initial period of six months, she suddenly, unexpectedly, started to cry. They had been laughing a few seconds earlier. Desmond was astonished to see her crying without any apparent reason.
'What happened?' he asked.
'It's... It's...'
'What is it?'
'It's that I'm not sure that I love you,' she said. She wiped away the tears lightly with the back of her hands, fists unclenched, in a quick gesture. There were not too many tears to be wiped.
It was as if he had received a direct hit from a battering ram. Desmond's heart went small inside him. He felt an inner chill and there was a sort of internal paralysis.
'What are we going to do?' he said out of terror. This was said without any point, just a dilatory line. He didn't know what else to say or what to think. It was as if the curtains had been lifted all of a sudden to disclose a tragic scene to him, one of terror, and he was astounded. His dreams were all shattered. All the warmth had disappeared to give place to a dark grey void within his chest.
'I don't know,' Beryl had said.
Then after three days she sent him a message. She wanted to talk to him, could he come to her father's castle. She was happy when she met him, and she said she had thought about it all and she had come to the conclusion that she loved him. Desmond felt extremely happy, although he didn't feel the happiest man in the world anymore. The incident had left a mark inside him, made him lose his self-assurance, and there was the dark void haunting in the background. He had experienced the feeling of terror and it had left in his throat a persistent bitter aftertaste.
She subsequently broke off on other occasions after this first one.
'I don't want it anymore,' she would say each time. Her tone of voice was one of a person exhausted.
But then these spells didn't last more than two or three days, each one of the ruptures. He came after her or else she sent him a message calling him and they were reunited again. But this last time it had been unmistakably a definite break. There had been a serious one a fortnight before. In the last months Desmond had become more and more insecure, more and more frightened of a final split. It made things only worse. His courtship had become a nightmare. Instead of being radiant because he was going to meet his fiancée, he felt terror. He only met her to be terribly afraid all the time, to be on a constant watch for the impending break-up. When he talked to her he was not really talking but observing her, and himself, neither did he really listen to her. He watched himself to see whether he wasn't doing anything wrong that would displease her, that would precipitate the chaos, and he watched her to catch the minimum sign of an imminent rupture that was always lurking around the corner. This time it had come to a final disaster.
She was the Lady Beryl Laysanstone and they were in her father's castle. She was twenty years old and Desmond was twenty-two. After they talked for a brief moment, sir Desmond left, broken-hearted.
He didn't want to go home, he didn't want to go anywhere. He wanted to be alone and to remain alone, he didn't want to talk to anybody. He lived in his father's castle near the forest of Sherwood. There were his father and his mother. He was an only son. And there were the servants and the guards and the soldiers. The year was 1190.
He went to his den in the forest of Sherwood, a place he used to go to when he wanted to stay alone, when he wanted to dream, or think. There was a tree trunk from a tree that had fallen in a tempest. He sat on the trunk and stayed there, thouroughly dejected. He could not think, he just remained inert, he didn't want to do anything, just stay there. Deep sadness came from somewhere inside him, a very distant point, sadness, it looked, for which there was no remedy, and which overwhelmed him completely. It would be better to die, he thought. But then he didn't want to die.
How would he go on without her? He had made plans, and in his plans she was always present, how could he conceive life without her? He was so despondent it seemed his liveliness was draining out of him. He had never been so distressed in his life. Sitting on the tree trunk he kept gazing ahead of him on the ground.
Suddenly the dust on the ground in front of him started to swirl and dry chestnut leaves that were lying began to eddy round and round, the eddying becoming more and more intense. A cloud of whirling dust began to form, that whirled on and on, and then the form of a woman began to take shape from the cloud gradually and finally a woman appeared, just out of nothing she was there right in front of him. Desmond was so dejected he wasn't afraid or dazzled or astonished or anything. He simply watched.
