“You put him in danger. Good God, didn’t you know what you were doing?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Franz. “He chased them away better than I did.”
“Don’t make excuses for him! What if they had stampeded toward us?”
“As it turned out, they didn’t.”
“And he distracted you. You could have been gored. What a difference then!”
“Honestly, it isn’t important.”
“My God, what a difference!”
Javier smiled at you, Elizabeth.
Franz started the engine. He drove forward without moving his head. His blue polo shirt was wet with sweat. His gray flannel trousers and his shoes were covered with dust.
Isabel whispered something.
“What?” said Javier.
You straightened Franz’s corduroy coat on the back of the seat, Dragoness. His dark glasses fell out. You retrieved them and carefully cleaned them, using a handkerchief from your purse, and returned them to his pocket.
“This scene with the bulls,” Isabel whispered in Javier’s ear, smiling. “Why don’t you write it.”
“Isabel, Isabel,” Javier said, almost groaning.
* * *
Δ Javier had gone to sleep on the bed, Isabel, and you were reading his notebook and quietly humming “Moon River.”
… But one must suspect that despite their apparent freedom and disinterest, all of the elements of the sky bow before the stone memory of the serpent that girds and imprisons the base of the altar. They were men. Where are they now? Does a hidden river of blood flow down the stairs? Stone cannot see, but the time that culminated here could see. And death can see. The water-sun flows over this world and its men die by drowning. The earth-sun — and I see you, sculptured earth that bears the weight of the pyramid, tilled earth as rigid as the fangs of the serpent in stone which will not endure so long as you — the earth-sun receives the blood. The fire-sun, above and within at the same time, consumes and murders. The air-sun, most ferocious of all, in its silence contains the others, earth, fire, and water. And where are you, you who were once living men? Come forth. Speak to me. What will you say? Look, eyes, and see. Don’t lose a single heartbeat of this still living earth. We stand here, the four of us, facing your symbols, all that remains after the great conflagration of noon. Your symbols? And how are we different from you? Do we await, as you did, the cataclysm, the rupture of the veil, the appearance of the twilight monsters who will devour us? And are they not always here among us? I draw closer. I touch the stone feathers …
Beside you Javier moved and you closed the notebook and looked over at him. He was sleeping the stupor of Cholula’s afternoon. With one hand you covered your mouth to hold back your laughter as you read on:
… What beauty is this, and how does it differ from the beauty we know? Can you say? Yes: for us, our beauty is a model, an example to be followed, an incitement to transpose the model from its fixed expression into our own living experience. The example of art is held before us to be actualized again, though what we create may fall far short of the model, actualized in our daily life. Thus beauty ends up wasted in the merely fashionable. But the beauty I find here, this richness, this barbaric luxury of Xochicalco is something else. Something that is realized not as a model, not to be repeated, that indeed is incapable of further extension. The beauty of the barbaric ends in itself, lives in its distance from, not its identification with, life …
You could no longer restrain your laughter, Isabel. You say that it welled up from deep within you, from the very soles of your feet, and burst out, though you tried to stifle it with your hand and Javier’s open notebook. You laughed so violently, though still silently, that the bed began to shake and Javier drowsily opened his eyes. Now you had no time to return the notebook to the night table. Javier opened his eyes and your laughter burst into sound and he could not understand it, and you, feeling caught, read aloud: “You are in a moment when time seems to flee from you, yet stand still…”
Javier stared at you, his mouth hanging open. He still did not understand. You scrambled up and knelt on the bed beside him and read again: “The beginning and the end are identical, like the serpent…” You went on rocking with laughter.
Javier lifted himself on his elbows and across his face ran every possible emotion. He loves me, he hates me, you said to yourself. I please him. I humiliate him. I excite him. You read aloud a third time as he grabbed at your thigh and you jumped from the bed. “And therefore there is neither beginning nor end but only an opaque and eternal nightmare during which one waits vainly…”
He grunted and jumped after you. You had never seen him like that. But you still laughed as you spun away from him, escaping his lethargic hands: “… waits for another dawn…”
He leaped toward you and you fought back with the notebook, your mouth opened and your eyes shining. You dodged behind the table. Javier knocked the table over and you yelled something and ran swiftly toward the bed with the notebook between your hands. For the first time you were aware that you were naked. And he, just as naked, forgetting his flaccid exposed penis — that exhausted sunflower, Pussycat — and his flabby stomach, was seeing your nakedness for the first time, as if desire were being born again from his fury. You noticed something new in the swift rush of your blood, in the flush that spread over you as you stood there feeling fear for the first time, paralyzed, trapped, smelling all the smells that you had not left in the bathroom. He was attracted or even captured by those smells, you realized, and now only one decision was left to you, whether to walk to him and offer yourself quickly and quietly, or to stop and wait until he felt himself to be master of the situation simply because you were doing nothing. You say that you did not even turn your back on him, you continued facing him, so that he could see and feel your fear. But ah, Isabel, you understood that even that movement would have petrified him and made him see that you knew exactly what was happening. No, you didn’t move. You stood there, rigid and motionless, the notebook in your hands, trying to disappear without daring to close your eyes. You were an ostrich with its head sunk in who knows what dark sands of your body. You were a chameleon, trying to take on the transparent color of the air. And he walked toward you as if you were not really there and as he embraced you, sluggishly, almost like a child, almost helplessly, you were aware of his nakedness too and that he smelled of something sour and spoiled. He took your shoulders and turned you until your back was against his chest, your damp hair, of black sand, against his face. His hand spread your buttocks, first very gently. Then the fingers stiffened and entered your anus and the sand of your hiding place broke apart and you were concealed no longer as the opening that had been dry and tense now softened to a melted, smooth stickiness. He passed his other hand forward between your legs and rubbed your clitoris. You bent like a stretched bow, Isabel, and fell on the bed face down, already lost in a dark forest of salty flowers and rotted ferns and damp roots. The fish, hard as silver, as glass, sought its stinking algae. Now there were no secrets. The mine had been opened and pierced to its deepest, rose and black gallery. Your ultimate shame had been uncovered and the conquest had turned you into a statue of salt. Nevertheless, it was your victory, one that you had forced upon him without saying it or wishing it, making him believe that he had accomplished what in reality was the consequence of the strength of your passivity, that enduring strength you had never before put to the proof and that now had made him reveal himself in the act of sodomy, made him destroy with each thrust and withdrawal, telling you by his violent panting that now the words and apologies were behind, literature had ended, there was only this ultimate liberty which you granted with clenched teeth and a pain like that of giving birth. It was new for both of you, yet you understood quite clearly what was happening to you for the first time at the age of twenty-three. He himself had let you read the explanation not long after you had first met him, back during those days when he still behaved as if you were only another student he had seduced, a girl who wanted to receive not his love but his knowledge. They were words written in the same blue notebook that now had fallen from your hands: