The last time, the deflowering was intense: it was one of the doctors in the clinic where I woke after being asleep for twenty-two weeks. I don’t know what his rank or position was — maybe he was an anesthetist, because it didn’t hurt — but he liberated my body, brought it back to life in a little room filled with medical supplies, bottles of alcohol, gauze, and hypodermic syringes, where there was also a photocopier — a strange place for a machine like that — and to be honest that was the most enjoyable part of it, because the doctor sat me down on the glass, and as he deflowered me — was it the twenty-seventh or twenty-ninth time? — he kept making photocopies, images of my backside flat against the glass and a cylindrical shadow lying in wait, a chisel striking the mass, I won’t go into detail, I’m dreaming now and losing certain nuances of reality, which is my closed garden, the place where my handsome men, my lovers, live, those who with their breath and their words take me out of this vegetable dream and take away my treasure, always restarted—toujours recommencée, like in the poem — which, when you come down to it, doesn’t have any more value than a counterfeit coin, something beautiful but not unique, and I think, why should unique things be better? I, at least, enjoy what’s banal, but that’s another story.
Where am I? where am I? Dare to look for me. Leave everything for me. Look for me. Look for me. Maybe I am that woman on the publicity hoarding that you long for so much, the one who sometimes pays you a visit at night. My bare legs emerge from a martini glass and move about. I am the only one who listens and attends to your prayers, because I live in your imagination.
Saying this, I remembered a man, one of the few I have loved and who was called, what was the name of my Beautiful Man? I’ve forgotten, but I’m going to give him a name in this dream, his name was Lars and he was a Danish sailor, he worked on the lower deck of a yacht that did cruises in the Baltic. Lars gave me the breath of life while I was asleep in the stern and took me to his little cabin where he lifted me onto his body, then, looking through the porthole, that circular window, he said, “We are passing a purple island, and on one of its plains there is a war, the soldiers are falling, their helmets are rising in the air, and their armor is bleeding.” That was what Lars said and I listened to him while other blood bathed my thighs, the wound of his body in mine, and I longed for this man not to stop, longed for him never to take his sword out of me and that the story of the war would last all life long, in short, that that little circular window would be life, but very soon something happened and a bell rang, Lars had to go up on deck to make sure that the sea monsters of the North didn’t sink the ship, or something like that, that’s what he told me, and when I looked through the porthole I saw the battle on the purple island, but all this happened on the old Telefunken TV set in the kitchen, which was what there was on the other side of the window, and I understood something, I understood the smell of fried oil and fish, which is what should be eaten at sea, what the sea should smell like, that mixture of salty water and fish and plankton and the remains of shipwrecks, and Lars left and I understood also that the movements that were carrying me away into a state of intoxication (in case anyone has lost the thread, I’m talking about sex, sex is my storm) came not only from the fury unleashed in Lars, but from the sea itself, or rather, from the storm that was lifting the sea and I wanted to take him out of his bed, like the men who touch me, and so I loved him, Lars and the storm, and on returning to my own cabin I heard cries and knew that Lars had fallen into the tempestuous water and the waves had carried him away, oh, what pain, and I fell asleep again, the world saddened me, and Lars’s face dissolved inside me and now nothing was left, that happens when I sleep and it’s because the world goes away, people leave or go out one day onto the street and never come back, and what saddens me most is that the world carries on in the same old way without all those people, nothing changes because Lars isn’t there, or because I’m asleep, because we are all dead, nothing changes, believe me, beneath the stones life emerges again, like a snake or a poisonous plant, and when it wakes there will again be poets and sailors and milkmen, desperate and solitary people, life will have the appearance of reality and some will cry out with pleasure while others decide to slash their wrists or go away forever, wandering about, kicking tin cans after being humiliated, and life will go on having that bitter taste until I open my eyes, and when I do someone will be happy, you can believe me, whom the sea will then take away, but I say, while I dream, that it’s better to be happy just for one moment, and let ourselves be carried away, than never to be happy and to live like a rodent, that’s what I say, that’s what I think, I’ve been happy, and as I say it I ask myself, what will my next beau be like? and you, beau, ask yourself, where am I? would you dare to look for me?
4
I had never been to Tehran, and to be honest it surprised me. The airport is modern and clean — as I’ve already said, everything seems clean after Delhi — the design rather similar to Roissy, in Paris, with wide open spaces, metal ceilings, stained-glass windows looking out on the desert and the sky, glass staircases, friendly people, good signposting and a pleasant smell, maybe of lavender, at any rate not of cheap air freshener.
When we got off the airbus of Mahan Air, the Iranian state airline, we saw a plane of the Venezuelan airline Conviasa parked next to it, which does the Tehran-Damascus-Caracas route and which, according to the press, is always empty, although in this case the line of passengers seemed infinite.
Tehran, like Santiago in Chile, is dominated by snow-capped mountains, and you have the feeling that the city is on a slope. Our hotel overlooked a large part of modern Tehran, which at first sight, and leaving aside its heritage, reminded me of a Latin American city (an impression I’ve also had in some Arab cities). But as soon as I entered my room, opened the window, and breathed in the cool air of the mountains, I became aware of something rather inconvenient, which is that there is no alcohol in Iran, so that I couldn’t carry out my usual ritual of asking for a bucket of ice, lying down, and having a drink while organizing my ideas. Those ayatollahs! I hate religions that ban alcohol.
That night, the Argentinian ambassador and his wife invited us to dinner at their residence in an area in the upper part of the city, full of large buildings, identical to the rich Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, and, much to my delight, the ambassador, a refined man of great taste, opened his bar, a large wooden chest, and offered us an aperitif. I spotted a bottle of Gordon’s, so I poured myself a generous measure, with a couple of ice cubes and two slices of lemon. The ambassador did the same, and so did the second secretary who had come with me, a pleasant young diplomat from Barranquilla, Mauricio Franco de Armas, whose posting to India was his first.
We were given an overview of the situation in Iran, how a process of reform was bound to be under way soon, given that 70 percent of its population was under forty and wanted to live in a system that was open to the world; we were also told why it was that Iran, which has borders with ten countries, was destined to be the leader of the region. Through its petroleum and other industries, it was an economic powerhouse. One example: 95 percent of the medicines they consumed were made internally. European companies were well established in Iran, as well as some Asian companies, especially Japanese and Korean ones. Thanks to the embargo imposed by Washington, there was no competition from North America. France built the freeways, manufactured the road signs, and assembled cars; the Spanish beer company Mahou, as well as the Dutch Heineken and Amstel, made alcohol-free beer that didn’t exist anywhere else, flavored with pineapple, vanilla, and strawberry; Hyundai cars from Korea were assembled here, as were Toyotas and Suzukis; German cars too, Volkswagen and Mercedes. The problem of payment, given that they were not connected to the international banking system, was solved by going through a third country like Jordan, which had grown rich thanks to the embargoes on Iran and Iraq.