I the wanderer, she the Carthaginian

For nights, I lay awake, supine, my rise-and-fall, breathing, until I noticed the sound of my own exhalation.

Outside, the hammering had finally ended, and the clouds had quit the night sky, bequeathing moonlight to the pavement. As I wandered outside to inspect the completion of the road-digging, the light from the bar burst forth, caught the moonrays flush on the jaw, and I spun around to stare into the window (I have a flash of Hopper's "Nighthawks").

Inside, the cocktail-drinking intellectuelles smiled coyly and beckoned from beyond to where I hovered in the floating world. The first, she pulls to the fore and extending her wrist across the threshold she draws me inside, to where the scent of tobacco freshly burning abounds.

Inside, I signal the barman, and order a large single malt, specifying a cold glass but without ice. Margarita orders her namesake, and it comes with near instantaneity, a sparkling crust at the glass' rim. I am tempted to call for a cigar, but before conscience and craving can be resolved, my companion interrupts with the first of her probing interrogatives:

"Why?"

"Why what?" I reply

"Why the cigar?"

"I don't have one, and I didn't ask for one"

"I know"

"So why ask?"

"I asked that first" (She grins, coolly)

I pause, perturbed at the immediate convolution the dialogue has taken. I was hoping for something sweeter, simpler, better to access some kind of easyspeak. No matter, this is the falling of the dice, there are many throws to be played. I make my case:

"I haven't smoked in a while. I leave it mostly to occasion, and even then I indulge myself sparingly. The scent of the smoke, it sent me elsewhere (even though elsewhere is as I am now, not being fully conscious). As in the midst of an indiscriminate crowd; like catching a wisp of wafting perfume, the scent triggering an old familiarity; so reminiscent of a lover long gone - for a moment, you reclaim the sensation of love, and desire overcomes."

"What you speak of," she laughs breathily, knowingly, "are the residues of sweeter harmony."

Sweeter harmony! How apt! Indeed the past was sweeter, and I know this to be true. Confounded by the bewitching turn of her phrase, my mind gathers pace, friction melting away into the slipstream of her candour.

Disoriented, I call for the Romeo y Julieta No.2.

The cigar is bought for sterling in double digits. The aluminium tube lets forth a soft wheeze as the cap is twisted off. I draw out the roll and, not having a cutter to hand, push the butt of a match into the nub. Testing the draw with a deep inhalation, simultaneously I separate the sheath of cedarwood and place the tip into the candle flame. I hold it, as a taper, to the open folds of the cigar and puff, puff, pout my lips into a ring and O...

Margarita is not impressed.

"A disgusting habit," her voice raises, "and do not think to redeem it through your little pantomime of method!" So quick is her temper, that by the last word, she is shouting.

Our conversation immediately changes tack, the fault at my doorstep for having baited the violence of this dream-vision, coaxing the coals of her immaculate feminine incarnation. I try authority:

"Everyone else, in every other building on this street, under all manner of influence, is asleep." I remonstrate, "and with all the conversation that is to come, mind your mouth doesn't wake them."

"It is not just here. In America, they're asleep too," she points out. "We don't see it, because we think they are hours behind, so it appears to us that when we are at night they are barely at dusk - we fantasise that light remains there. But we fail to see that, whatever hours we yield, there is always the point of the night where we are all in darkness, and night falls upon us all."

I smile, knowingly: "What you have said is not untrue. They may be asleep, yet for us to speak loudly it is to no consequence for them. For from here they cannot hear us."

There was a pause of recognition, a softening of her look. Our eyes met with equity, and so we edged and eddied into a conversation of politics...