Stretched out on the sand, I was watching her dig the moat for one of her complicated castles, and I realized how close I wanted to be to this body that simultaneously surrendered and withheld itself. I didn’t say a word, but I fought insistently to find the form in which I could make my emotion evident. You know you love someone when you are afraid to make her suffer. There, by her side, blinded by the midday sun, I was anguished by a pain that was not my own, one that I could do almost nothing to stop. At this moment, Li was much more than a body I desired, or a Chinese person, or even a woman. Completely engrossed in her sand castles, she was then a human being whose secret pain I had glimpsed. Her circumstances, what she did or didn’t do, what she knew or didn’t know about herself, ceased to be relevant. She was plainly and categorically a living being with the ability to overwhelm me because I knew just how deeply she had been wounded. She was similar to me, without a doubt, but I desired more than anything, more than even my own happiness, that she not suffer, that she might be forever so: playing in the sand, as free from cares as the childhood that history had robbed her of. Love was, I realized on this beach, the impossible and failed attempt to protect someone from her own life story.
— You know something, Li? I asked, watching her through half-closed eyes.
— What?
— You’re very beautiful.
She remained kneeling on the sand, biting a lip. I had never seen her blush before.
Later that afternoon, we went to one of the restaurants in Naguabo. We were ravenously hungry, and we waited impatiently for our snappers. I remembered I had last been there with Julia and Javier, more than six months earlier. After I discovered the author of the messages, I avoided them, and I finally had to explain the last time Julia called. Had I ever felt something like this about Julia’s suffering? I guessed I had. The proof was this moment, when I was remembering her and wishing things had worked out differently. Had the women in my life shared this feeling? I couldn’t be certain, but I suspected I hadn’t always enjoyed that benefit, and this contaminated the memory. We live our love unconsciously, as pleasure, and what we miss upon its end is living bereft of memories, the life this small-format, manageable eternity created.
Li luxuriated in her meal, picking the fish’s backbone, the salad plate, and the dish of tostones absolutely clean. Then she ordered a flan and nearly ordered a second. The sun had done her well, toasting her cheeks and shoulders, making her healthy and flush.
We returned to San Juan at dusk, when Route 3 was a pit of suburban melancholy. Li took the hand that rested on the gear shift and pressed her body close to mine. She was exactly repeating the gesture that had begun our relationship. I felt her very close to me, as if we were witnessing a new beginning.
After we bathed and settled in to spend the night at home, I noted something odd about Li. She was moving incessantly around the living room, rummaging through her bag, bringing a glass of milk and cookies from the kitchen, taking off clothes, changing clothes. She was choreographing a dance, and I was her only audience.
She finally settled on a pair of shorts and a sleeveless top, and she lay on the sofa in them. She stretched out her legs, waiting, lying in wait. This time she hadn’t taken a book or the drawing implements from her bag, which she had left in the bedroom by the bed. I saw her smiling. I saw her make faces at me. I laughed when I saw her pantomimed boredom: fixing her eyes on the ceiling, she twiddled her thumbs, fingers interlaced, hands on her belly. With rare talent, accompanied in her case by a parody of common gestures, Li had a unique power of seduction. The messages she had used to kick-start our relationship weren’t the only example of her abilities.
I fell upon her on the sofa and in a single movement we were joined, hands running under clothes that sloughed off our skin like paper wrappings. I took her breasts and sank my face, my chest, my groin in them. Our bodies moved like a sphere rolling from the sofa to the living room rug and then past it, onto the cold, naked floor. We didn’t utter a word. We understood each other from our bellies, the muscles of our legs, from the insides of our mouths.
Holding tight, almost dragging ourselves, as if escaping a fire, we got into bed. Only our blind, fixed gazes through half-closed lids assured that this was not a fight, for we each moved the other’s limbs with a force that, while striking no blows, respected nothing: no separation, no modesty, no limits.
Li sat down on me. I grabbed her hips, but she stopped me with a smack. My proud member slid over the sweat-drenched skin of her belly, from the top of her pubis to her navel. Then her arms immobilized mine. Her hair fell across and almost covered her reddened face, engrossed in what she was doing. Her lips were full and shone wet with her saliva. Alerted by the elation of pleasure, I realized we were on the edge of something unstoppable. Li was crossing a threshold and overflowing with an energy that would be impossible to subdue.
She took my member and brought it to her mouth. It was hers, it was something she massaged with her tongue, with its surface of wet and tenderly rough tissue; it was a piece of vibrant flesh for which she was the master builder. And then, in a movement that took one second but on which she staked her whole life, from the muddy rice fields on the outskirts of Beijing to the filth of the Chinese kitchens in San Juan, the rooftop bedrooms above the restaurants, the control asserted by her relatives and the loneliness, the pain, and the hope, she sat down once more on me, with one hand tight on the thing she would now not let go, using it to stroke the entrance to her sex.
So, with such absolute concentration that Li seemed lost beyond recuperation, breathing irregularly, about to weep, she let me, millimeter by millimeter, enter her, moving her hips just so, settling in, as if my member were a lost piece or the flavor of a fruit from another continent. When half was in, a single movement made me enter her and her body fell atop my chest. Then there was one second, an almost imperceptible pause, when we were both aware of what was happening and we knew there was nothing to be done. It was a magical moment, without a word, without a glance, without coming into the most absolute contact, a space that we were both discovering simultaneously and where we offered each other the freedom to lose ourselves in a pleasure that was almost self-absorbed. An instant later, back from the world we had glimpsed beyond time and identity, our hips were moving in a quickening rhythm that fought against pain and separation and became fused in our minds with ecstasy and perhaps also with love.
Her head was pressing against my neck, against my face, against my breastbone. Force drained from within through conduits swollen with pleasure in a wave of fury and jubilation that led to momentary spasmodic death in which life flowed out and, at the same time, was reborn.
And afterward, I learned that an indefinite time had passed when I felt her moving atop me once more, panting in a rhythm that sounded like weeping, while I rubbed her sweat-soaked back. “At last, at last,” I repeated in my mind, as if that were the clearest statement of happiness. Then she lifted her head and found my lips and resumed the movement of her hips, rubbing my still-erect member against the semen-coated walls of her sex. And once more it was a body that was action and surrender, and I knew I was witnessing something whose forcefulness I would never be able to forget: this body, striving to breathe, bearing down on me and bathing me in its sweat, ready to burst, to come undone, to fall to pieces, with enormous hips that were focused on surrender and on sacrifice.