“The dream of the thirties. Of my early reading, of the romantics…”
“The witness will please define what is a romantic.”
“Someone who paws your dream.”
“That is sufficient. Go on.”
“Everything is impending. Everything is an aberration. Both the beautiful and the criminal.”
“You need not follow chronological order. Let the first be last.”
“I can say on oath that I have remembered Raúl and Ofelia only to try to know whether they lived for my sake. But I don’t want to go on talking about them. If I can, I’ll stop.”
“The witness will endeavor to be born again.”
And the girls wait, staring at Long Dong’s blooded razor, his lecherous shadow, his Nestle tower, his golden banana, his octopus nerve, his black fish. “Who wants in the raffle?” “Here, Capitana, here’s my ten pesos.” “Here’s mine.” Stone ear of yellow-kerneled corn. Slim head of a slant-eyed fox. Fur of a puma. And the humpbacked older woman, squat Elenita, the towel girl, with her wrinkled elephant skin, tough hide that will never serve for a lady’s gloves. “Pay up, girls, pay up.” The Capitana’s teeth grin like piano keys. “What’s he saying to her there?” “Christ knows. They’re speaking Chinese or something.” “… And the point is, a few minutes ago the attorney for the defense spoke about rediscovering the unity we have lost. About desire fulfilled simply by being desired. And I realized…” “Yes, my love. Deeper. A little deeper.” “… that both the poets and the criminals…” “You, too, Elenita? You can’t resist a horn like that either? Well, pay up, pay up. God will choose the winner.” “… could be born of the same mother. Sade is named Auschwitz. Lautréamont is Treblinka. Nietzsche is Terezin…” “No more now. The cards go into the chamber pot and each of you will draw one. The girl who draws the rooster wins the cock.” “… And our dream, the dream I could never write, was born of the spirit of those times…” Into the white chamber pot drop the cards one by one: the Soldier, the Serpent, the small Negro, the Watermelon, the Rooster … “… and was part of those times and had to die with those times…” “Quick, my love! Now, quick! Don’t worry about who’s next. Come for me now, I’m first.” She has her legs locked around his waist. “… to end with the end of that world which had crippled all of us…” The Charro. The Skeleton, with its tapers. The Hunchback. One card for each whore. “… and the only way to destroy that world was to do just what the attorney for the defense said. Put everything to the test. Compel reality to submit itself to will and our purpose. Our desire that no man had dared to feel before…” The Capitana hoists the chamber pot and shakes it well, rotates it, mixes the cards. “Wait your turns. No cheating. Everything square and aboveboard. We’re whores all right, but we’re honest whores.” “More, my lover! More, more!” “… So there had to be two revolutions instead of one. One in the world. One within ourselves.” “Oh, my love, my love, my love!” “Victory for will and desire at last. At last an end to the terrible oppositions that for centuries had isolated us from each other. Yours and mine. Word and action. Dream and waking. Body and soul. Homeland, flag, family, property…” He stops. If he were to go on, his words would be drowned, he would have to squirt them out as foam.
“And was that your dream too, Elizabeth?” asks Brother Thomas.
The whores draw their cards one by one and hold them face side down. At a signal from the Capitana, they all turn the cards over. “Ooooooh, nooooo! Look who has the rooster!” “God, what luck!” “What saint did you pray to, Elenita?” “But she doesn’t know her cunt from a hole in the ground. She’s no more a whore than I am a copper.” “If that black-haired bitch who came with them hasn’t tired him out, you’ll be flying high in a minute or two, Elenita.” “A pearl before a sow … shit, shit!” And the Capitana, the only gentle voice: “Put down your towels, Elenita. Your chance has come.” “Better have an alcohol rub first. You’ll need all the pep you can find.” “We were cheated. Capitana, you did that on purpose!” “I? I didn’t do anything. Didn’t you see her draw it herself?” So Elena the towel girl wins the raffle. Short stooped figure wearing black cotton stockings, a checked gingham dress, a tattered white sweater. The towel girl. Flabby breasts. Wrinkled face. Sinewy arms. Brown hands accustomed to wiping away blood and semen, to cleaning the cunts of whores and the pricks of apes like King Kong, monarch of the jungle. Elena of the warm washcloths, the soft white towels, always ready, quick, Long Dong is yours, you can forget your towels for a while.
In the hot season, snakes leave their dens. Their old skin is no longer good enough, and abandoning their solitude they go out into the sun to join their brothers in a tangled mass and wriggle over the trampled fields of Eden, scraping across the bristled earth until their skin is pulled away in strips and they become naked skeletons with egglike eyes. And I don’t know who touches whom when Rose Ass-Long Dong-Javier rises from the bed and we all pile in. I don’t know what he says to Elenita, the runt, twisted, ugly towel girl who has seated herself on a stool beside him, still holding her stack of towels, while the Capitana amuses me with the black kiss and a pair of socks that I think belong to Jakob fly past my nose.
“I wrote a short book. I left my mother. I met a woman and we went to Greece. That much I know is true. At least I believe it is true. But the world didn’t change. It denied me and refused to notice me.”
“Look, young señor, the rooster!”
“I wanted to be one with the world, with my dream, with art, action…”
“Look, señor, just look.”
“Did I lose confidence in the strength of my desire?”
“See, señor, I have the rooster.”
“Now let me try to stand beside Franz. Accuse me too…”
“I won, señor! I won!”
“We are just alike. Except that what was action in him in me was only possibility, latency. In me it lacked all greatness, all courage. I have been a kind of larva Franz.”
“I won the raffle, señor.”
“Try to see it, Elenita. We were told that the world could be made over only when we all acted together, as one. A single man, alone, could do…”
“The raffle, I won the raffle!”
“But history never thinks. History acts.”
“And my prize, señor? What about my prize?”
“My isolated desire could do nothing. Nor could love, the proclamation of the desire we all have.”
“Aren’t you going to be nice to me, señor?”
“Can love be a summary of everything the world is? Can we be one with the world by making ourselves one with a woman?”
“That’s in God’s hands, señor. Are you going to force me to be satisfied just watching?”
“And isn’t love really a struggle, a resistance, a desire: like the world, something we must conquer or let conquer us? Doesn’t one lover always impose his being upon the other, prevent the other from becoming what he might? And … what? What the hell comes next? Damn my memory, I’ve…”
“Elena! Elenita! A towel to Number 6! Damn it, where has she taken off to now? Elena! Why in God’s name do we pay her? All she does is sit and listen to the drunks make their confessions. Elena! I’m dripping like a sponge, damn it, hurry up!”
“Touch it if you want to, Elenita.”
“Oh, I want to, señor.”
“You have very pretty hands.”
“I have to have something pretty. The rest of me…”
“I like your hands. They’re heavy as two wet stones. They’re heavy as a bag full of silver.”
“That’s from carrying the towels all the time. Sometimes my arms are so numb I can’t feel them.”
“Is it enough for you just to watch?”