“The reference is there ,” he said, pointing at the figures holding each other at the bottom of the painting.
“Those two?” She came closer, wearing that intrigued look that always melted him. “How is that masturbation?”
“They aren’t two people.” He stopped pointing, and just watched her face while she looked at the painting. If she noticed his change of focus, she didn’t show it. “Look, you have a human figure. A man, there. He’s holding another figure, but that figure has a vaguely human shape, it looks half transparent. In reality, she’s not there. He’s holding a ghost, a dream. He’s in an embrace with himself. There’s your masturbation.”
She straightened her back, placed her hand on her chin, and replacing the intrigued look for a neutral one. He kept on melting.
“Ok. That makes sense. And that stone?” She indicated the oval shape presented in the painting as half buried. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“It’s not a stone, look at the shape. It’s an egg. A lost seed. Also consistent with masturbation.”
Here she couldn’t resist smiling, and finally looked at him.
“But if that’s really it, then why does the name comes from a such a small part of the painting? What about the rest?”
He was about to answer, but she interrupted him with her hand. She took her cellphone out of her pocket, and answered a call he didn’t hear.
He waited.
“It was Adriano,” she said when the called ended, her eyes lighting up like they did every time she talked to her boyfriend. “You were talking about the rest? What else do you see?”
“Nothing,” he answered, trying to smile while looking towards the painting. “I don’t see anything else.”
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