unless "white" here means "pale and fearful" or "cowardly". She knows, she knows what happened, and therein lies her guilt, but she was still not the person who committed the crime, however much she may regret it or claim to regret it; staining her hands with the blood of the dead man is a game, a pretence, a false alliance that she makes with the person who did the killing, because you cannot kill someone twice, and the deed is done; "I have done the deed" and there is never any doubt about who that "I" is: even if Lady Macbeth had plunged the knife again into the chest of the murdered Duncan, not even then would she have killed him or contributed to his murder, it was already done. "A little water clears us of this deed," she says to Macbeth, knowing that for her it's true, literally true. She likens herself to him, thus trying to liken him to her, to her heart so white: it's not so much that she shares his guilt at that moment as that she tries to make him share her irremediable innocence, her cowardice. An instigation is nothing but words, translatable, ownerless words that are passed from voice to voice and from language to language and from century to century, always the same, provoking people again and again to the same act for as long as there have been people and languages and ears in the world to hear them. The same actions that no one is even sure they want to see carried out, the actions that are always involuntary, no longer dependent on words once they've been carried out, rather they sweep them away and remain cut off from any "before" or "after", isolated and irreversible, whilst words can be reiterated and retracted, repeated and rectified, words can be denied and we can deny that we said them, words can be twisted and forgotten. One is guilty only of having heard them, which is unavoidable, and although the law doesn't exonerate the person who spoke, the person who speaks, that person knows that, in fact, he's done nothing, even if he did oblige the other person with his tongue at their ear, his chest pressed against their back, his troubled breathing, his hand on their shoulder, with his incomprehensible but persuasive whisper.
IT WAS LUISA who first put her hand on my shoulder, but I think that I was the one who first began to oblige her (to oblige her to love me), although that task is never one-sided and never constant, and its efficacy depends in good measure on the person obliged occasionally taking over the role of obliger. I think, however, that I was the one who began it and, until a year ago, at least until the time of our marriage and our honeymoon, I was the one who proposed everything that was subsequently accepted: seeing each other regularly, going out to supper, going to the cinema together, accompanying her to her door, exchanging kisses, changing our shifts in order to spend a few weeks together abroad, occasionally staying the night at her flat (that was what I proposed, but I always ended up leaving after the kisses and lying awake in each other's arms), looking for a new apartment for the two of us later on, once we'd decided to get married. I think I was also the one who proposed that we should get married, perhaps because I was older, perhaps because I'd never done it before, either getting married or proposing marriage, or rather I'd only once before proposed marriage, half-heartedly and because I'd been given an ultimatum. Luisa eventually accepted, certainly without knowing if she really wanted to or not, or perhaps (purely by chance) knowing it without actually having to think about it, I mean, simply doing it. Since we got married we've seen less of each other, which is what people say tends to happen, but in our case this is not due to the general falling away that often accompanies what appears to be an end or a conclusion, but to external and temporary factors, an imbalance in our work timetables: Luisa was less and less prepared to travel and spend her eight weeks abroad, and
IT WAS LUISA who first put her hand on my shoulder, but I think that I was the one who first began to oblige her (to oblige her to love me), although that task is never one-sided and never constant, and its efficacy depends in good measure on the person obliged occasionally taking over the role of obliger. I think, however, that I was the one who began it and, until a year ago, at least until the time of our marriage and our honeymoon, I was the one who proposed everything that was subsequently accepted: seeing each other regularly, going out to supper, going to the cinema together, accompanying her to her door, exchanging kisses, changing our shifts in order to spend a few weeks together abroad, occasionally staying the night at her flat (that was what I proposed, but I always ended up leaving after the kisses and lying awake in each other's arms), looking for a new apartment for the two of us later on, once we'd decided to get married. I think I was also the one who proposed that we should get married, perhaps because I was older, perhaps because I'd never done it before, either getting married or proposing marriage, or rather I'd only once before proposed marriage, half-heartedly and because I'd been given an ultimatum. Luisa eventually accepted, certainly without knowing if she really wanted to or not, or perhaps (purely by chance) knowing it without actually having to think about it, I mean, simply doing it. Since we got married we've seen less of each other, which is what people say tends to happen, but in our case this is not due to the general falling away that often accompanies what appears to be an end or a conclusion, but to external and temporary factors, an imbalance in our work timetables: Luisa was less and less prepared to travel and spend her eight weeks abroad, and
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