Javier finished his tequila with one swallow and poured his glass full again.
“It’s going to hurt your stomach, Javier. Tomorrow you’ll feel sick and you’ll be complaining that now your vacation has been spoiled.”
“Take another drink yourself. If I could only be sure about it.”
“About what?”
“My stomach. If I could only say, operate on the duodenum, take out the gall bladder. But no one knows where the trouble is. Upset stomach. Tiredness. Cold hands. Gas pains. A longing never to open my eyes again. Insomnia. Shit. What were you humming?”
“Cannonball Adderley. Lillie. Sweet and slow. And listen to Yusef Lateef’s flute. There’s a Mephistopheles for you. A Negro one.”
Javier calmly threw his tequila glass at the bureau mirror. You watched him and went on quietly, “Their only way of communicating is their music. Lillie. It’s a song of desperation. That’s all.” The mirror shattered and the pieces fell, showing black paint on their backs, their sound covered that of the glass falling.
“Do you want to bet?” Javier said.
You got up and retrieved his unbroken glass and filled it with tequila again.
“I don’t bet. You win, it’s not broken.”
Javier looked at the glass. He rubbed it and smiled. “It’s very simple. Mirrors break and glasses don’t. But suppose it were the other way around? Suppose mirrors never shattered and glasses always did. Take your boyfriend German, for example.”
“What do you mean, my boyfriend German? He…”
“Yes, it may all be necessary. To do what you ought not do, to do it anyhow, saying so what. I, on the other hand, when I was a kid I used to shut myself up in the bathroom and write words I was afraid to speak. Do you understand that? On the walls of the toilet, the words I was afraid to say to the bullies at my school.”
“Gold butterfly. No, brass butterfly. God knows why I love you, knowing your defects so well.”
“Precisely because you do know. To be innocent is to be indecent. And the advantage in losing innocence is that at the same time you lose prejudice. N’est-ce pas?”
“Aye, aye, Gautama. Now sit cross-legged.”
Javier chuckled. “Maybe I ought to. And you, don’t move now. Stay just the way you are with your hands at your sides and realize that light is slowly wasting you, Ligeia, slowly wearing you away. Light, not time. Or light because it is time. And time stops, but light doesn’t. So time becomes light, and it’s light that carries you away.”
“Write it, Javier, write it.”
He moved from the bed and knelt before you. He tied the belt of your robe tight around your waist. He opened the robe at your breasts and took your breasts in the cups of his hands, lifted them, dropped them. He stood and put his hand in your hair.
“Javier. You’re hurting me.”
He put his face near yours.
“Now you can say it, if you will.”
“All right. It was only a dream. Just a dream. That’s all.”
His fingernails were digging into your scalp and you wanted to free yourself. He, not realizing that he was hurting you, was saying, “When we opened the window in Falaraki that morning, just to be there was to believe in what we had never seen…” Slowly he released you.
“Okay. We could believe only what we had never seen or said. Sure. Go join the Navy, Javier, join the Navy.”
“It was there and like this that I loved you,” Javier murmured.
You put your hands to his and your fingers interlaced. Then, you told him softly, when you woke, the curtain of the summer was a crown of poisonous flowers and you looked beyond them at the sun still resting on the bed of the transparent Aegean. And you had knelt as you were kneeling now and had whispered his name and looked for him and as you repeated his name over and over the very sound of your voice became thick. And now as then he was standing before you, you were kneeling before him with your arms around first his legs and then his buttocks and your hands in the small of his back. Then you released him and fell back to the floor and he stood tall before you with his penis rising and stiffening, and you got up and led him to the bed, then, in Falaraki, to see day born of night’s placation of the silver sea, the last darkness fading, and now far away you heard cars and the horns of cars on the Mexico City-Puebla highway as you both leaned backward and joined with no need for kisses or caresses, joined and supported each other until Javier fell back and you fell with him, on him, unable to separate from him, above him in his position imitating him, doing to him what he did to you, tied together at the genitals, your damp and long pubic hair against his dry curly hair, you thinking that now you were possessing him as he usually possessed you, that your pleasure in imitation of his was entering his thighs as he, prone under you, was entering yours, and time counted its own seconds and minutes, words spoke themselves in an effort to prolong the dark and vibrating sensations of your intercourse, he transformed into your woman and you into his man in shared desire that was a fruit falling from but still hanging to a single tree; you and Javier, Javier and you on the hot stone floor of the cabin, on the cold wooden floor of the hotel room, you and he, father and mother, mother and son, father and daughter, brothers, brother and sister, sisters, two women, two men, you and he making love now with your mouths while the first pleasure ebbed, seeking a different way that it might be sustained, your buttocks, your armpits, his hands in your hair, your feet covering his eyes, your teeth at his ear, his face near your navel, your thighs spread above his head, his fingernails digging your neck, your knee doubled upon his belly. And it could not end. You hid yourselves in the sheets in order to discover yourselves again. Slowly, Javier walking toward you from afar, you moving toward him until you both stretched your hands and as in a dream removed the veils that concealed you, slowly, expectantly as in a dream, and saw yourselves naked again and again felt passion. You lay down and he took your feet and pulled you, your head down, until he had your body at the height he wanted and you looked up at him with your eyes, your forehead, your lips, while a double pleasure flowed through you, one from what he was giving you, the other from what he was taking from you, flowed and fused somewhere between your crotch and your breasts. You kiss and join again and you fall face down as he turns your body over and opens your buttocks and tears you apart and asks for your sweat, your smell, your breath, your farts while you lie with your face against the floor and your thighs gripping his chest. You don’t know how to stop. You don’t want to stop. You grab your bra and wrap it around Javier’s dark chest covering his nipples, put his shirt on, smell and kiss the inside of his shoes. Sitting side by side on the bed you masturbate, each watching the other, he with his penis wrapped in your stocking, you with your hands wet with his eau de cologne, finding now the only pleasure that had been lacking, that of a child alone; and you don’t want to stop, you want it never to end: to die in this moment renouncing life if the pleasure can only go on. Trembling you let him rub your nipples with his shaving brush and then offer him your belt and fall on the bed as he lashes your legs and buttocks and back while you beg him to go on, go on, leave nothing undone, speak the secret names of the girls he had wanted but never been able to take, of the adolescent boys he had liked, and you in turn will speak your names, not only the men you have wanted but those who have wanted you, and now in making love with each other, you will make love with all of them, the rabbi who once sat you on his lap when your mother took you to see him, the priest who took Javier by the hand during confession, the nun he caught peeking at him while he bathed, his mother the first time he saw her naked, all the names, all the bodies and faces, until at last you fall asleep not to awaken until the day is as warm as your skin and Elena knocks on the door …