She rarely talked about herself. Her efforts to contact me had been a very effective way to avoid confessions. She armored herself in other people’s words and, at the same time, used them to express herself elliptically. Her lesbianism didn’t come as a surprise, but her decision to tell me about it did. She was trying to draw me out of my shell and force me to see her. She didn’t want our relationship to be a failure. Neither did I. I wanted something from her, and despite her confession, I felt I wasn’t far away.
I took her hand, and we gazed eye to eye until we both looked down at the same moment. A man and a woman are transformed when they look straight at each other and for the first time the silence doesn’t weigh on them. After that they’d be fooling themselves if they pretended nothing was going to happen. A new story begins then, and there’s no backing away.
I asked for the check.
— I want to show you something now, I said.
The avenues had freed up. I went down Ponce de León to the bridge that connected with the islet of San Juan, turned around, and drove to San Patricio. We felt a peace and calm in the confines of the car that we hadn’t shared till then.
In front of the shopping center where we had first met, I made a U-turn and took Avenida Kennedy toward San Juan. On a Friday at that hour, in this area lined by dealerships where they sold every model of car on the country’s roads, there wasn’t a soul to be seen. As I held the gear shift, Li rested her hand on mine and brought her head close until it rested on my shoulder. I turned toward her and, for a second, held the warmth of her lips on mine.
— Now look at the lights on the bridge, I said.
We looked ahead at the streetlight poles. Constitution Bridge was a kilometer and a half away. Crossing it, we would have Hato Rey on our right and on our left San Juan Bay. I was going exactly fifty miles an hour. I had it all calculated: I had done it countless times. The streetlight poles created the illusion of rising up until, for a few seconds, with the magical precision of optical illusions they formed two gigantic question marks on either side of the avenue. Realizing what she saw, Li squeezed my hand, and I heard her speak so close that her voice seemed to be coming from inside me.
— I’m sorry. I must have filled your head with questions. If it’s any consolation to you, you don’t know how many questions you’ve raised for me.
— Tonight is full of the hardest questions.
— I know, and perhaps they have no answers.
A little later, we were back in Santurce and once again were driving along sections of Avenida Ponce de León. The city seemed to constrict us with its limited circuits. It wasn’t worth repeating the same trip. Undecided and fearful, I asked:
— What do you want to do?
I felt her search for the answer, hold it in her mind for a second, and dare to say it.
— Take me to your place. All I ask you is not to penetrate me.
I had never made love under such a severe restriction, but as in so many other things, Li led me through unexplored territory. Her full breasts, the graceful curve of her belly, the skin of her shoulders, which seemed covered by a film of wax, the matchless warmth and skill of her tongue, her ability to be present even in the slightest movements, made it so that the impossibility of consummating the act forced me to discover the delights of holding back.
The prohibition heightened our yearning. Our sessions were oblivious of time, lacking an obvious ending. Our movements stretched out endlessly and effortlessly. The act was unfulfillable, at least it was for me, and the energy traveled through my body without ever running out. In joining our bodies, we were creating an uncharted territory where past experience was no guide, and the wide field before us defied all assumptions. It was impossible to know what we’d find in it and what was expected of us.
The loneliness and suffering that had accumulated for years, the weight of an entire lifetime, had brought us here. We were castaways sharing a single raft in the ocean of San Juan’s streets and it was clear that if we hadn’t been so deprived we would never have met. What we were doing, to be honest, was unworkable. In the impossible place where we were making love like cripples, we were blind people at the edge of an abyss. We would fall on each other, biting, sliding tongues over nipples and navels, obsessed with slowly examining the forbidden orifice, observing it, circling it, tensing it, without blinking, without looking away. We surrendered to each other with no rules but the one we were testing, discovering our next movement only at the moment of making it. Her breasts struck against my chest, I grabbed her arms tight, pulled on her ponytail, then went down again to her groin until the irresistible power of a great wave made her arch her back again and again. We would go on without resting and throw ourselves upon each other, wordlessly, sometimes looking at one another with a gaze harder than an erect member, and more memorable. After hours, when we were on the verge of collapse, Li would take me in her mouth, with the total devotion that she reserved for her drawings, until a graceful and solemn overspilling came almost from beyond my body. My semen would fall, sprinkling on lips and neck and then running down to the belly or dripping from her chin like a teardrop, dense and enormous.
Then, arms and legs entwined, our bodies would begin to come back to life: we’d rediscover that our limbs were each our own and that they marked the difference and distance between us. There was no need for a concrete event to come along and undo us. It had already happened; not in the history we were making, but in what came before us. Since Li lost her father; since she crossed half a world and came here; since I resolved to survive, disgusted with everything but clinging to my disgust; since we began, we were condemned to fail.
Silence would descend upon us like a membrane, solidifying until it undid our embrace. We’d remain beside each other for a while, in growing and indefinable unease. Our thoughts lingered on the sweat-dampened sheets, the semen crystalizing on skin, the hunger, the thirst, or the embarrassment of a newfound modesty. The battle to build a citadel with our two bodies, to find some answer or security, was over. Li would stand up and disappear into the shower without saying a word, eager to erase the marks of our relations with soap and water. I would watch her clumsily cross the room, getting tangled up in shoes and pieces of clothing tossed to the floor, and my spirit would quickly go from tenderness to something that could be called many things and that was nothing but affliction. It was a hard, stubborn grief I had known since I was first aware of time, of loneliness, and of grief itself.
Li had conquered me with the brilliance of her messages, and she didn’t conceal from me that behind them lurked an ambition of control. A lesbian had fallen in love with a man, and he returned her love, but she was the one who decided on the rules of the game. I wasn’t happy with the role I’d been assigned, and the prohibition seemed a constant threat. I had never imagined keeping up a relationship of this nature. If I had ventured to try, it was because Li was a mystery. I didn’t know, beyond the obvious reasons (and even those were not all that obvious), why she had sought me out, why she had confronted herself and confronted me with a love (is that what it really was, or was I completely deceived?) that might at any moment prove impossible. Where was Li’s body and where was mine when I was with her? Didn’t I have the absurd absence of her body before me, a distance that would forever be unbridgeable and incomprehensible? Could I live with a woman with whom, as I traveled toward her, I always lost myself?
Li would emerge from the shower without looking at me, combing her fingers through her well-drenched hair with overly studied slowness. She would climb into bed and run her fingers through lock after lock, repeating the same gesture over and over without a break. When she felt my hand, she would seek my eyes. Invariably, after we had made love, in her eyes I saw fear.