When she woke from a post-coital nap that Saturday afternoon, in her bedroom under the eaves, the Amazing Cavalieri was standing in front of her scarf-draped mirror, looking with remarkable interest at his own naked reflection. Rosa pulled a pillow over her head and lay very still so that she could watch him watching himself. She could smell the trace os his breath in her own exhalations, the indeterminate but distinctive flavor of his lips, somehere between maple and smoke. At first, as she watched him, she thought that he was engaging in rank self-admiration, and since she considered his lack of vanity about his appearance – his ink-stained shirtfronts, rumpled jackets, and ragged trouser cuffs – to be itself a kind of vanity, one for which she loved him, she was amused. She wondered if he could see how much wight he had added to his long, spare frame over the last several months. When they had first started going out, he was so absorbed by his work that he rarely took time for meals, existing quite mysteriously on coffee and bananas, and as Rosa herself, to her considerable satisfaction, had begun to absorb Joe more and more, he had become a regular guest at her father’s dinner table, where there were never fewer than five courses and three different varieties of wine. His ribs no longer stuck out, and his skinny little-boy’s behind had taken on a manlier heft. It was as if, she thought, he had been engaged in a process of transferring himself from Czechoslovakia to America, from Prague to New York, a little at a time, and every day there was more of him on this side of the ocean. She wondered if this could be what he was looking at now – this evidence of his irrefutable existence here, on this shore, in this bedroom, as her Joe.
meus grifos sobre The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
