With animals?
Fetishism?
The mirror. Perhaps we hadn’t played with mirrors enough.
I couldn’t develop that fantasy because when I looked in the mirror on one of the closet doors I saw the eyes of the Metaphysical Cowboy Clint Eastwood, and right then and there I figured it all out. I knew what Diana wanted.
Naked in bed that night I could sense her frigidity and asked her if she wanted to make love.
“Wouldn’t it be better if you asked me if I like making love with you?” she said, curling up between the sheets.
“Okay. I’m asking you.”
“What?”
“Do you like making love with me?”
“Jerk,” she said with her most dazzling, most dimpled smile.
“I’d like to make love to you in the name of all the men who’ve made love with you,” I told her, thrusting my mouth next to her ear.
“Don’t say that.” She trembled slightly.
I grasped her around the waist. “I don’t know if I should say it.”
“We’re free. We don’t hold anything back, you and I.”
“There’s something I like about you. You always pretend we’re alone when we screw.”
“Aren’t we?”
“No. When we go to bed I see a horde of men pass over your skin, from your first lover up to the ones who aren’t here but who are still on the active list…”
I glanced at the photo of the star of A Fistful of Dollars and felt a chill.
“Go on, go on.”
I no longer knew what I was doing with my hands. I only knew my words.
“Can there be sex between only two people?”
“No, no.”
“Do you like to know that when I’m screwing you I think about all the men who’ve enjoyed you?”
“You have a nerve, telling me that.”
“Didn’t you know that, Diana? Don’t you like it, too?”
“Don’t say that to me, please.”
“Do I disillusion you when I say that?”
“No,” she almost shouted. “No, I like it…”
“To think that along with me all the men who’ve ever screwed you in your life are with me?”
“I like it, I like it …”
“I thought you weren’t going to like it.”
“Don’t say anything. Feel what I’m feeling…”
“Why don’t we dare to feel that pleasure if we like it so much?”
“Which pleasure? What are you saying?”
“This pleasure. The one I give to you thinking I’m someone else, the one you feel imagining that I, too, am someone else— admit it…”
“Yes, I like it, it drives me crazy, don’t stop …”
“I wish that all of them were here, seeing us screw, you and I …”
“So do I, don’t stop, go on …”
“Don’t come yet…”
“But you’re giving me lots of dicks today …”
“Wait, Diana, they’re all watching us, from that mirror, they’re watching us and they’re jealous …”
“Tell me you like it, too, that they’re looking at us …”
“I like that you pretend we do it alone. I like to know you like it …”
“I like it I like it I like it …”
When we finished, she turned toward me, half closed her gray (blue?) eyes that were like a forgotten mist, and said, “You have no imagination.”
XVI
Reasonably or not, I’ve lived to write. Literature, almost since I was a child, has been the filter of experience for me, from fear of being punished by my father to my most recent night of love. Sex, politics, soul — it all passes through my literary experience. The expectations of the book refine and strengthen the facts of lived life. Perhaps nothing of this is true, or perhaps in reality it’s the other way around: it’s literary imagination that determines, provokes the “real” situations in my life.
But if that’s the way it is, I’m not aware of it. Yes, I would like to be aware that for me reality is not a simple fact or that it’s defined by only one of its dimensions. There are people for whom reality is only the objective, concrete world — the chair is the chair, the mountain has always been there, the cloud passes over but obeys the laws of physics — all that is real. For other people, the only reality is internal, subjective reality. The mind is a vast unfurnished room that slowly but surely fills us up as we live with the furniture of perceptions. The objective world exists, but it has no meaning unless it passes through the sieve of my mind. Subjectivity gives reality to a world of mute, inanimate objects.
But there is a third dimension, which is where my individuality comes into contact with others, with my society, my culture. That is, something exists that is neither paradox nor impossibility, something called collective individuality. Within it, I feel myself to be most complete, in greatest consonance with the world. It’s in that shared individuality where I find family, women and sex, friends … So reality for me is a three-pointed star: matter, psyche, and culture. Material reality, subjective reality, and the reality of the contact between my ego and the world. I don’t like sacrificing any of them. Only when the three are present can I say I’m happy.
Our evening parlor games continued and one of them was Scrabble. Now, the alphabetic combinations change according to which language you play in: Spanish abounds in vowels, while English is rich in consonants. The English w, the sh, the double tt, mm, or ss make for inconceivable conjunctions in Spanish. On the other hand, we do have that clitoris of language, the ñ, which drives foreigners insane because they think of it as a Hispanic, medieval extravagance comparable to the Holy Inquisition, when it’s actually a futurist letter that embraces and suppresses the laborious gn of French, the nh of Portuguese, and the unpronounceable English ny.
The three of us — Diana, Lew, and I — played like a bored, well-established family, using an English alphabet. While I know English well, it isn’t mine nor I its. I’ve never dreamed in English. I speak it, but I’m mentally translating very fast from Spanish. It’s easy to see because my English abounds in Spanish cognates, in locutions derived from Latin or Arabic rather than Saxon or German. My error that night came when I had before my eyes the word wheel, perfectly formed, and with six spaces after it that I could fill in to pick up some great points. All that I could think of was wheelbarrow, because sometimes I’d hum a pretty Irish song about “Sweet Molly Malone,” who “wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets long and narrow,” but though barrow was six letters, I didn’t have the right ones. I had to pass, and Lew filled the space I coveted with his six letters, wright—the old Saxon word wheelwright. I said I didn’t know that word. Diana gave me a mocking look. Then she brusquely turned my letters around and showed that I could have filled at least five of the spaces with chair and gotten wheelchair.
“So you think you’re going to teach in a university in the U.S.?” she asked, her tone unbearably sarcastic. “Be careful. The students might end up teaching you.”
“Do they know everything, or do they only think they know everything?”
“They know more than you, you can be sure of that,” said Diana. Lew lowered his eyes and asked if we could go on playing.
But it was Lew Cooper who suggested another game for our nights of Durango tedium. Let’s imagine, he said, that we’re Rip Van Winkle and we’ve been asleep for twenty years. When we wake up, what kind of country will we find?
“Mexico or the United States?” I asked, to make it clear there was more than one country in the world.