It happened between Małysz's decline in form and the Pope's funeral. She was beautiful, and I was cynical; she was moderate, I was inept. I met her at a disco or some club, where I'd probably gone for the ultimate humiliation. She was standing against the wall, smoking a cigarette, though smoking cigarettes was no longer fashionable, and feigning conversation with her potential boyfriend, husband, fiancé, friend, lover, or father of future children. I had a terrible urge to smoke.
"Before opening the foil package, I gently moved it inside so as not to damage anything by tearing it. I didn't use any sharp objects. I handled it carefully. I removed it from the package so as to avoid damage from fingernails, jewelry, etc."
She might have looked at me expressively, but I dismissed it with feigned indifference. However, as soon as she looked the other way, I began to stare hungrily at the object of my desire. A cigarette, and not a menthol or superlight; the cigarette she was holding in her hand, which so obviously didn't fit that delicate hand; the same one that was no longer fashionable, trendy, jazzy, or however they say it now. It was this cigarette I wanted to light then, and its smoke I wanted to fill my lungs with. For only it had this miraculous power to justify my idle presence and my stay at the bar by the wall. If I had stood there smoking, my existence (here and now) would have been supported by something. I would have stood and had an alibi for the eventual question: why are you standing here, pointlessly? But I'm not standing pointlessly—I'm standing because I smoke. I stand to smoke, I exist to stand, and that's something.
"I squeezed the container with one hand and put it on with the other. It fit snugly against the top. I left a little space, eliminating the air from inside by squeezing it with my fingertips."
I don't know what she saw in me. Were some strange emotional chemistry operations going on in her head? Was she already stuffing herself with dreams, imagining me as her potential boyfriend, husband, fiancé, and so on? What mattered was that it was me she left that disco or club with, and it was me she decided to go to. Perhaps in the twilight, my stature resembled her lofty ideal, or perhaps she was so desperately bored that she was seeking a personal Quasimodo to rekindle her impressions. Perhaps she'd had a little too much to drink and lost her composure, or perhaps, on the contrary, everything had been planned, and I'd been reduced to just another item on her list of conquests. What did it matter, anyway, as long as we went to my place?
Along the way, I managed to reframe my mentality to meet her spiritual needs, making the conversation even flow. We burst into unforced laughter time and again.
"I'm having fun with you, you know?" she said, trying to emphasize her cheerful tone as we sat on my couch. And from then on, as if by magic, everything went wrong. Suddenly, the last vestiges of spontaneity vanished, and a compulsion to "have fun" took over. From then on, everything we did was marked by this crushing necessity.
"I performed the above actions carefully so as not to damage her. I carefully backed away, held the edge, then slid it off, wrapped it in paper, and was about to throw it in the trash."
Not knowing how to react, I decided to kiss her. I did it the way you kiss women who don't matter much. I took off her clothes, the way you take off clothes from a woman you'll then avoid. I did everything as you would in a neutral situation, until finally I started having sex with her, the way you would have sex with a woman who means everything to you. There's no other way, because this is where fucking ambition comes into play.
I didn't say I loved her; I also didn't say she was beautiful or anything like that. I could have said she smelled nice, because that happened to be the truth. She smelled nice—at most, that much.
"So why the hell did it break?"
I thought, summing up the sequence of unfavorable circumstances, and threw the leaflet that came with the Unimil condoms in the trash. What a decline in morals, what a moral dullness must have befallen us, since we went to bed after knowing each other for only a few hours. We should have realized this sooner; we should have fled the moment she handed me a cigarette with that smile that didn't hide the ugliness of her intentions. I sat in the gynecologist's waiting room and realized that the broken condom was a punishment for our internal degradation, for the defilement and betrayal of the only value that could give our lives any meaning. For a moment, I saw very clearly that love wasn't something you could do by following the instructions on the package, that you couldn't ride on the wave of learned tricks and tricks that would surely lead you to your desired goal. And then she left the office, I looked at her, and I remembered that love doesn't exist.
We went to the pharmacy and, with the money I was planning to drink away, bought Postinor. Then we said goodbye without unnecessary emotion, and I walked slowly home. I deeply believed that it would be better if she read the instructions on the leaflet this time.
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