The jasmine calls to her. She falls finally, naked, into his arms.
The little girl she becomes in his arms rejoices in love, she proclaims it and shouts it out. She likes to hear her own cries. The poor vulnerable girl feels protected in his arms. She believes that he loves her.
This love reinforces her faith. And her faith reinforces her love. Should one of these two supports break, she will come tumbling down. And he doesn’t want her to come tumbling down, does he?
She hurts him. He hurts her. That’s what she says.
What she believes. She is happy. Her entire body overflows with joy. It is a tortured body, he should never forget that. Often, she wants him more than her body can stand.
“I’m strong,” she says. “I’ll survive separating from you.” But she only says that when she’s angry.
When the ancient anger deflates, she feels vulnerable, helpless. “I’m helpless,” she says, “because, as you yourself say, I haven’t two faces, but only one. I’ve abandoned myself completely to love. To my love for you. And I love the whole world too. I love everything in the world. You are the only one I ever let into my solitude. To pillage all that I kept, hermetically, for myself. Now there isn’t a place inside me that isn’t also yours. I want to share everything with you.”
This young woman that he leads with a sure hand along the path of joy, he also loves. Because she is tender and good and joyous and pure. He tries to instill evil in her, just to give her a taste of bitterness, not to make her truly bitter, but she resists him. Her space is marked out with clear borders. There’s nothing mixed up inside her head. She wants love. And love is both of them together, predestined to meet by God, or whatever exists beyond them, because there is a force greater than themselves.
A million attempts to seize her castle, to undermine it, have failed. He tries to put a worm in her that will eat away at her, making the fruit rot. It’s impossible. The ripened fruit is offered to him, that and none other.
She gives him the gift of her sweetness, and he grabs it greedily and keeps it in his safe. Why?
Deprived of sweetness all his life, he craves it. The sweetness of the other. For this he has trained her to walk in her sweetness. By now the path is taken without difficulty. One and two. The sweet road strewn with the honeys of the world. Honey everywhere.
Sweetness everywhere. Everywhere pleasure. Joy. He rejoices. He rejoices.
He leads her. He possesses her. Like a marvel-of-Peru, her face opens and closes according to his mood.
Oriented toward his sun, she turns like a sunflower.
Her gaze follows him as soon as they part. It annoys him to have her gaze follow him everywhere. But there’s nothing she can do. A liquid, like mercury in a thermometer, attaches her to him. As soon as he touches her, her temperature rises. As soon as he leaves her, it drops. Her needle moves, like a magnet, toward his north. He draws her to him; she can’t say what it is exactly that attracts her. She’s never known such a pull. This is the first time. She tells him so. That
“first time” makes him giddy. As he has never deflowered a girl before, “the first time” is like a balm for him. He keeps asking her: “Is it true?”
“I don’t know how to lie the way you do,” she answers.
He lies due to the excessive secretion of his imagination. She is more grounded. She functions differently. Everything comes to her from below, rising from the earth. She is a tree with deep roots into the soil of the centuries. With him, it’s as if his roots are in the sky. He comes downward. This is how they were paired, by intertwining their branches, they both believe.
He leads her. He teaches her words she doesn’t know, which, by repetition, become familiar, sweet. As far as she knows he doesn’t say them to other women.
Now she knows, she tells him, that he’s faithful to her.
That he hasn’t another. Because he doesn’t need to. He has found in her, he tells her, and she believes him (it would be terrible if she did not!), the woman who encompasses all women. She herself becomes, is, so different. She changes face, skin, hair. He tells her so and he believes it himself. And she too believes him. It intoxicates her. His tongue in her ear, his voice in the shell of her ear, envelops her in a cloud. She needs this cloud so she can take off. And with him she takes off.
She travels. She tells him: “With you I take my most beautiful journeys.”
The landing is always a success. Always
dangerous, like every landing, but never an accident.
They’re both proud of this. Touchdown is always good, both on land and on water. The passengers always applaud. He’s a good pilot during their journeys. He flies her well. Air turbulence, whenever there is any, obeys the laws of the atmosphere. Before, he loved trains. Now, he refuses to travel without his personal airplane. He leads her. Sometimes to a field of daisies. Sometimes to a stone terrace, bleached white in the midday sun. Sometimes to the glistening sea. Sometimes to the jasmine garden. Sometimes to the hill covered with pine needles. He takes her by the hand. And she gives herself to him. He asks that she give herself. As a condition of their relationship.
And the days go by. The weeks go by. And the Easter of the massacre is constantly postponed. She waits, like a good little sheep. But the confidence she gains each day helps her cement a foundation. It’s fundamental. She tells him so. Before, he used to tell her stories about other women. Now he’s cut down considerably. She feels as if she is him. The two have become one, a curious union. She is interested in Siamese twins who never separate. He asks her about her twin sister.
Her world is infinite. She experiences infinity.
And each day is a nail that fastens the blue of the sky to the frame of her horizon. Her knowledge is deeper than knowledge, because it encompasses the fall of man. They have said everything; all the harsh, near-cynical words he has said to her. They have explained everything. What she wants. What he’s after. At times, she’s called him every name in the book. Put all the world’s curses on him. They didn’t work. Nothing works in the realm of the word. The depth lies elsewhere. In this elsewhere, it’s something else that counts. What is it? Every popular song contains a truth about love. In every verse hides a life story. That’s why people love songs. Because they express their feelings. “There are thousands, millions of people like us,” she tells him. “Write.”
He is her poet. That is the only way she will accept him. She wants poetry. She wants expression.
Her own porno video is the “Song of the Songs.”
He leads her steadily along a road. Abyss Street.
Number 0. For Doña Rosita it’s a new life. She gathers twig after twig, wherever she finds them, and builds her nest. For Don Pacifico, these are weights hanging from his wings. Roaming all day around the wild edges of word, he hunts, like his grandfather before him, for rock partridges, will-o’-the-wisps. Days go by, time goes by. On television, the disasters continue. First in Colombia, where the dormant volcano erupts, causing twenty thousand deaths; then the earthquake in Mexico City, soon replaced by a concert to benefit the victims.
Just like for the children in Ethiopia or for all of Africa.
“It’s not necessarily bad,” she says.
“No, it’s not. They’re raising money for charity.
And that’s good.”
And yet there is, deep down, a certain deception.
Deep down, a shipwreck is replaced by a floating stage upon which famous stars sing. At the site of the shipwreck, of course. For the victims of the shipwreck.