Knowing what he already knows?
Forgetting everything?
What was the next step?
Everything configured an imperfect duel. Leo refused to look at them. He prayed that this scene would not make them tired of him, of themselves, of the irretrievable earlier situation. All of this flashed through his head; accepting habit was the greatest defeat, unacceptable to him. True, in the end, it was all an imperfect duel between desire and its consummation: repeatable or unrepeatable. Leo, with almost Edenic innocence (that’s right, with fragile compassion for himself, he thought), wanted only today’s satisfaction to leave us unsatisfied so we could desire and achieve the next day’s satisfaction.
Would the women understand it this way? Why didn’t they say anything? Why didn’t they move? Would one of them — Cordelia or Lavinia — dare to destroy the proposed trio, tacitly believing that in this way they would return to the earlier couple? Or had he, Leo, destroyed forever all possible relations with them? Did they (Lavinia, Cordelia) realize that Leo had done them the favor of showing each one that her life was false, that the artifice offered by Leo was the truth, in spite of the artifice, just as in the Japanese painting?
“Everything I’ve done is for the sake of happy families.”
How was he going to say this if he himself was incapable of believing it? Of believing anything? Even that these women might be happier with their husbands than with him?
This idea provoked irrepressible laughter in him. He decided to face them, laughing, gauging them, the two women. He, triumphant. This would be the propitious moment to bring the situation to a head. A laugh to absolve them and absolve himself, dispelling everything as a huge joke, an exquisite corpse of Leo’s surrealist spirit. Or perhaps dazzling, almost diabolical laughter, defying the women’s imagination, a fatal invitation to a shared copulation that would renew and even exceed relations among the three. The great pact, euphoric, gallant, transgressive, of Leo, Lavinia, and Cordelia.
He let them look at the Japanese painting. He turned on his heel to face the two women he had just imagined behind him, immobile, each one coming out of a bathroom, walking toward the bed they would share. Or moving away from the bed, returning to the bathrooms, disappearing. .
“You need to have a great lack of imagination to break off an amorous relationship,” Leo said to himself in a very low voice.
9. Sitting on the sofa in front of the picture of the turbulent sea and the immobile cliff, Leo smoked a light-tobacco cigarette, breaking his New Year’s resolution: to give up all secondary vices. He allowed the spirals to add a transparent, fleeting coat to the painting. Why was the sea turbulent if the cliff did not move? Why was the physical world so capricious? In Leo’s desire, on that night everything had to be transformed, crossed, multiplied. The sea would become calm. The coast would rise up murmuring, trembling, to culminate in a vast barren plain populated with unknown bodies that would advance naked but wrapped in transparent black veils, like the figures of Manuel Rodríguez Lozano in the main room of the apartment on Calle de Schiller.
He did not identify those two bodies. They were not familiar. He noticed that he did not recognize the colors offered him by the world of the painting. They were too new, perhaps happy, in any case, frighteningly pure. The colors were pure and bold. The figures, on the other hand, seemed impure and uncertain.
Leo shook his head. He looked directly at the painting. It was pure glass. It was transparent. It was the perfect work of art. Each person put in it what he or she wanted to see. Nothing more. And nothing less. That was the miracle of the Japanese painting. It was a virtual work. It was pure emptiness as liquid as the air, as aerial as the ocean. It was an invisible mirror. It was an eternally renewed story. .
10. When he went into the bathroom, he found the mirror smeared with toothpaste and the tube, used up, tossed carelessly into the wastebasket.
Leo shrugged. He did not want to calculate which of the two had used this bathroom.
they come from the north
they occupy the city of nuestra señora de la porciúncula de
los ángeles on the border with mexico
they come from the south
they occupy the city of tapatatapachula south of chiapas on the border
with guatemala
they divide up the city of los ángeles
the mexican mafia are the southsiders
the salvadoran mara sansalvatrucha are in control from thirteenth street
to central venice
the mestizos from venice thirteen to south central
the mexican wetbacks wherever night finds them
they invade the city of tapachula
they cross the coatán river
they vandalize silversmiths goldsmiths as they please
they steal orange saddles still redolent of
sacrificed cattle
they take off their pants to feel the down on the saddle
mix with the hair of their sex
the clicas confront the gangas of los ángeles
the salvadoran marassansalvatruchas against the
mexican mafia
the confrontation
each crew sends its big guys in front
its giant headbreaking fighters
the clash takes place at the devil’s corner calle
666 and eighteen
the raza endures
the maras break your head stomp on you fuck you up
but the mexican babes reward you with kisses after the brawl
the maras announce their attacks in tapachula
they close the schools
but nobody can run away
the maras come down whistling from the volcanoes
they walk like spiders with spiders
they pull out sawed-off shotguns and daggers that they saw off
they control the train run from chiapas to tabasco
they tie their victims to the train track
the train cuts off their legs
the gang members disappear in the forest
they reappear in los ángeles
they specialize in drive-by shootings
firing at random from their cars
at their mexican rivals
they pretend to be mexicans their accent gives them away
captain bobby of the LAPD the los ángeles police
force is capturing them one by one
they come from the wars of ronaldanger ronaldranger
ronaldanger in central america
sons of
grandsons of
exiles who identify themselves with a tattoo on the arm and they
give themselves away with a false mexican accent
they hate mexico
the captain smiles he knows
send them back to salvador captain bobby?
no way
fly them back home?
no way
they say they are mexicans? send them back through mexico
let mexico deal with them
from the south
from soconusco
from the north
from california
they advance toward the center mexicocity greattenochtitlán
baptismal water of the nahuas from sacramento to nicaragua