"I know," the trumpeter admitted sadly, "but my loathing, my absolute distaste, is stronger than all my good intentions."

"Tell me," Bertlef said with surprise, "are you a misogynist?"

"That's what they say about me."

"But how is that possible? You don't seem to be impotent or homosexual."

"That's right, I'm neither. It's something much worse," the trumpeter admitted melancholically. "I love my wife. That's my erotic secret, which most people find totally incomprehensible."

This confession was so moving that both men kept silent for a while. Then the trumpeter went on: "Nobody understands this, my wife least of all. She thinks that a great love keeps us from having affairs. But that's a mistake. Something's always pushing me toward some other woman, and yet once I've had her I'm torn away by a powerful spring that catapults me back to Kamila. I sometimes feel that I look for other women only because of that spring, that momentum, that marvelous flight-filled with tenderness, desire, humility-bringing me back to my wife, whom I love even more with every new infidelity."

"So for you Nurse Ruzena is only a way of confirming your monogamous love."

"Yes," said the trumpeter. "And it's an extremely pleasant confirmation. Ruzena has great charm at first sight, and also it's an advantage that her charm totally fades away in two hours, which means that there's

nothing urging you to go on with it, and that spring launches you into a marvelous return flight."

"Dear friend, excessive love is guilty love, and you are certainly the best proof of it."

"I thought my love for my wife was the only good thing about me."

"And you were wrong. The excessive love you bear your wife is not the opposite pole to your insensitivity, it is its source. Because your wife means everything to you, all other women mean nothing to you; in other words, for you they are whores. But this is great blasphemy, great contempt for creatures made by God. My dear friend, that kind of love is heresy."