Do you want another crazy and eccentric story? This might be the best one: a young woman of twenty-two decides to give her virginity to her philosophy professor, who is married. After a class on the pre-Socratics, he takes her to a motel — this happens in Latin America — penetrates her for the first time gently, softly, until she says, oh, do it stronger, so he penetrates her again and they both laugh and kiss and she, filled with ecstasy, cries out in French, Je suis une sirène! They fuck and fuck as if we had invented original sin exclusively for them — and for that night — and then, having already been penetrated through most of the orifices in her beautiful body, when they’re having a beer and he’s smoking a cigarette and she’s preparing a line of coke, the young woman realizes she’s lost a lot of blood and the sheets of the modest motel bed are soaked, as if the Red Sea had burst into that little space of adultery and pleasure.
As they’re about to go, the young woman suffers an attack of modesty and says: I can’t leave it like this, it’s a shame and an embarrassment, I’ll take the sheets away and wash them, and send them back by courier. The Dionysian philosophy professor, who’s exhausted, says, don’t worry, they’re used to it, they’ve seen worse things, but she insists, she’s had a French education and is stubborn, she thinks that faced with any situation in life there’s only one way to proceed that’s the right way, so she grabs the sheets and puts them on the back-seat of the car.
As luck or fatum would have it, that night, returning to the city — the motel was on the outskirts — there was a routine police roadblock, and when the officers searched the car they found the sheets. Blood! They arrested him on suspicion of murder. There was no point explaining that it was her virginal blood, and the tests would take a couple of days. They were taken to the local police station. The philosopher had to call a lawyer, and of course his wife.
6
I was a happy child, Consul, but in a sad, opaque world. A black and white world. And why? I still ask myself that. There was very little in that happiness, if you looked into it: clouded landscapes, gray people who hated their lives and dreamed of something different, people who never managed to live up to anything they thought was beautiful, banal creatures conscious of their own banality, prisoners of something that had no end and could never have an end. I was a little queen as long as I believed that the world was the same for everybody. Then I realized it wasn’t and that made me angry. I’m still angry, but anyway, that’s not what I want to tell you about.
As in children’s stories or Russian novels, I’ll begin at the beginning. Even though the beginning is boring. I was the spoiled child of the house until, when I was four, they told me I’d be having a brother. I felt as if they’d betrayed me and that triggered a hatred in me, a feeling of abandonment, even a kind of sense of being an orphan, and when the child was born I wanted him to die. He was an intruder, a stowaway. Seeing him crawling through my space, watching with horror as he took over my things, I had a lot of ideas: to push him down the stairs, to open the door so that he got out onto the street and was lost. But then I noticed that in spite of the novelty I was still being spoiled, and that saved his life. My position wasn’t in danger and in order to be sure I forced them to choose. I put them to the test. Father always opted for me. So I kept quiet. My little world continued to function more or less as before, and the years went by. I continued to ignore him. Don’t you love your little brother? they would say, and I’d say, yes, I love him, he’s the king of my country, and I’m the queen, and everybody would laugh and say we were cute, but they didn’t realize how much I despised him. His diapers, his talcum powder, his mournful crying. I hated him and told myself: God sent him to put me to the test, because in those days I believed in God, you know? I thought: he’s only here to see what I do, but then God will get him out of my way. He’ll have to be very careful. That was what I always thought, and I waited and waited, but God never granted my wish.
Father idolized me.
I never loved him as much as he loved me. He was a poor man whose neck had been wrung, whose wings had been scorched. What could I do? I decided to keep quiet and wait. My school friends were luckier, their families were rich and important and there wasn’t that rancid taste in their lives, that atmosphere of desolation that lived in my house. What did I do? I kept quiet. I waited.
One day I thought God had heard me, because my brother got ill. They took him to the clinic, and I said, goodbye to all this, back to a world without him and it’ll be better. I could see from my parents’ faces that it was serious, but I noticed (and somehow knew) that it wasn’t going to be a great loss for them. They had me, why did they want more?
One Saturday they suggested I visit him, and I accepted, all right, I’ll make a little sacrifice, but looking up I said, God, I know what you’re playing at, I’ll go see him and then you’ll take him away, right? As I walked into his room, I looked him in the eyes and something very strange happened. It was the first time I’d looked at him in that way, and what I saw changed my life. How to explain it? I realized that there was no God and that nobody had sent him to put me to the test; he was simply a little person who was terribly alone and fragile and who seemed to be saying: here is the other half of your soul. I heard that in his eyes, and there was more, a kind of path, or a world; in those days I hadn’t yet read Rimbaud, but later I understood: “In the dawn, armed with an ardent patience, we will enter splendid cities.” These were the words of the path I thought we had to take, he and I, alone, because deep down what there was in his silent eyes was a voice, the voice of a ghost that seemed to whisper: you too are here, we contain the same breath, my soul and yours are united, don’t break it, so I reached out my hand and touched him, understanding profoundly who he was, and immediately, for the first and only time in my life, I felt love, a cataclysm that almost buried me, a storm that took my breath away, something so big that from that moment it filled my life and I could never again love anybody else, not even today, only my son who is also called Manuel because they are both made of the same matter: the flesh and the bones and the blood and the look of that love.
It wasn’t necessary to speak. We didn’t say anything to each other, we were very young! But we knew that we were together: we had recognized each other. That was why I devoted myself to protecting him. He was my younger brother. I protected him as much as I could from the wickedness of that city, and from that cruel thing known as childhood. I also tried to protect him from the family. I don’t know if I succeeded. And later, as he grew, I became aware of his unusual intelligence. His opinions about life and the world, and later about art, were exceptional. Everything in him was like that: brilliant, enigmatic, superhuman. Inside him something was growing that was beautiful and I was there to look after it, like a lighted ember you have to cradle in your hands to turn it into a fire. That gave us strength. Sometimes two cowards together can produce courage. That was the case with us.
When I turned fifteen I felt that I had to find a way to escape. One day we saw the movie Papillon, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, and we told each other this was how it had to be for us, to get away from a prison island by taking advantage of the tides, to keep trying until we escaped, it was that or death, to leave our sad house, that middle-class neighborhood with its social pretentions, that sad, hated city. Our prison island. We had to jump when the tide was high, like in Papillon.