~ ~ ~
He grabbed one of her hands. She inserted one of her fat legs, either one, perhaps someone else’s, under his right leg, which was bent back as if ready to kick. His face burned red like a traffic light or the sign for a late-night pharmacy. Suddenly it turned, and there appeared another face, identical to the first, only yellow. This was the sign to stop. She remained impassive like a prostitute. She smiled candidly, dug her leg in further, and bit her lower lip without blinking. Ramón grew thinner. She grew fatter. Ramón was a beast that was beginning to have ideas. She was a woman who was beginning to become a beast. Suddenly the sun lit up with a terrible, rose-colored light of alarm. The night train passed with a deafening roar. She and Ramón boarded the last car. A sad and dark freight car.
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She was a fierce taster of boys. All of us were to roll our heads over her firm, round little bosom. In this way, from this inevitable love, we created an era: “When I wooed Catita. ” But it was Catita who wooed us. When we looked at her, she winked without noticing. Her eyes: round like the rest of her. And her name did not name her well. The i in the penultimate syllable made her long, dreary, distant: she who was close, round, happy. And, above all, a sucker for love. Catalina is a Gothic name; it makes one think of gray ogives at twilight, of bronze moss-covered fountains, of dwarfed chaotic villages, of bulky chastity belts. And Catita was a blond window at noon; a clean, modern, white cement fountain; a large, tattered sunshade for the beach; a schoolgirl’s crazy hair ribbon. Lalá, that’s her real name. But Lalá was a quick and cautious girl. Lalá, Lalá, Lalá. Soft heart and doll eyes and a laughing face. Ramón threw himself into Catita like a swimmer into the sea, from head to foot, hands first, then the head, and finally the feet: flexed and worn down at the heels. Atop the staff of the month of January — still greased with dirty, cold clouds — Ramón hung in the sky: in the air, in the middle, in balance, in his bathing suit, at the very top, with a hundred trembling boys pushing him from behind, onto Catita, the sea. Ramón had a bad fall — a belly flop that splashed all of us unprepared observers. Catita, a sea to bathe in at twelve o’clock noon with the stupefying sun overhead, a dry butterfly, jaundiced brambles, or a yellow bathing cap. Catita, a sea with waves because there are no old ladies, because there are boys. Catita, round sea surrounded by a semicircular pier, emblazoned with cities. Catita, subtle boundary between the high and the low tides. Catita, sea submissive to the moon and the bathers. Catita, sea with lights, seashells, with little potbellied boats, sea, sea, sea. O love without old ladies, straw sunshades, advice, genuflections. Catita, love, with fat and gentle hope, love that rises and falls with the moon, round love, close love, love in which to sink oneself, to snorkel about in with open eyes, love, love, love. Catita, sea of love, love of sea. Catita, anything and nothing. Catita — appearing in all the vowels, whole, complete, in body and soul, in the a and disappearing little by little, feature by feature, in the others; in the e: tender and foolish; in the i: skinny and ugly; in the o: almost her, but not quite. Catita is honest and pretty; in the u: albinistic and moronic. Catita, like some consonants, so much like the b, in her hands; the n, in her eyes; the r, in her walk; the ñ, in her personality; the k, in her character; the s, in her bad memory; and the z, in her good faith. Catita, a round field in the sea, a round kiss in love. Catita, sound, symbol. Catita, any old thing and exactly the opposite. Catita, in the end, as pretty, sincere, alive, and flirtatious as only she could be. To trap her was as impossible as stopping up with the tip of the index linger the flow of water from the mouth of a large spigot; flesh firm under the pressure of a touch, flesh that escaped through the cracks in the nail, through the lines on the skin; that jumped out at us; that, if deposited in a receptacle, quietly, would be only dense light, water to drink and to launch paper boats in. Water, water, water. And, in the end, a pretty, lovesick girl, a taster of boys, Catita.
~ ~ ~
On the rooftop, the unique and multiple air, wrapped entirely around itself, rolling invisibly in currents like Bulgarian milk in bacillus culture; on the rooftop, in the air, dense with rubber bands made of sun, with colorless mucilage of humidity — on the rooftop — the wife’s undergarments. It is here in the humid regions of the air where the blue of the sky is bluer, and when an unnamable bird goes past, it grows and grows as if seen through a magnifying glass. It is a window in the house’s single story — a dreamy view into the gaping, dirty, insane room through glass whitened by the afternoon’s oblique reflection, the gentleman’s jacket with its silver chain and its watch hidden in the pocket. Through the same window appear — instead of the gentleman’s flesh supported by the gentleman’s clavicle — two naked spheres on top of the back of the Viennese chair. Old bones, already the appalling color of skeletons exhumed long years after burial. With my back to the sun, I open with the shadow of my head a calyciform hole in the light of the glass. There they are, without the horror of a nightmare, the jacket and the chair — human, familiar, spontaneous, frank, at home. A pot-bellied gentleman. His cashmere jacket sags at the bottom and jokingly nags the wicker to fatten up, set it straight, fill it out. The wicker: skinny, pious, a spinster. All the buttons on the jacket are closed except the last one whose corresponding buttonhole has the round and empty malice of an old man’s eye; a truthful, sexual eye, out in the air like the lady’s undergarments on the rooftop. The jacket might be a sixty-year-old drunkard, a cynic, a womanizer, an oaf — if it had a nose, it would be red, oily, hairy, covered with pimples. In a silence that sounds abrupt, sudden, violent, we might believe we hear the ticktock of the clock, the jacket’s impious and stubborn heart. The chain is arched and expresses nothing — hence, nearly horizontal, relaxed, it is the jacket’s conscience. The wicker sits in the wooden chair with the most austere decency, as if she were in church or at a conference on domestic hygiene; the torso and thighs at right angles. She has eliminated her belly, her breasts, her legs, out of a sense of modesty; her arms, we know not why; her face, for the sake of decency. She has avoided sinning by removing one dimension from herself. That is why we imagine the wicker — two ascetic, round lividnesses — with a curl of hair on her forehead to banish bad thoughts; with only one gray hair in her black lacquer bun to remind her of death when she looks at herself in the mirror; with a mole on the tip of her nose, we don’t know why; with a short Latin prayer on her lips to avoid useless words. The day cackles. A hen cackles like the day — secretive, implacable, manifest, discontinuous, vast. A frond rubs against a house as the chaste swallows protest. Above, the cirrus sky. Below is the street, extensively, energetically stained with light and shadow as if with soot and chalk. The gentleman’s jacket belches, swells, and belches again. With their brooms, sharp and straight like paintbrushes, the street sweepers make drawings along the tree-lined streets. The street sweepers have the hair of aesthetes, the eyes of drug addicts, the silence of literary men. There are no penumbras. Yes, there is one penumbra: a burst of light in vain spreads through the street that grows longer and longer in order to cancel it out. Here a shadow is not the negation of the light. Here a shadow is ink: it covers things with an imperceptible dimension of thickness; it dyes. The light is a white floury dust that the wind disperses and carries far away. A shabby young girl inserts a cord into bare spools of thread. I insert wooden adjectives into the thick, rugged rope of an idea. At the end of the street, blocking it, a blue wall grows pale until it turns into the sky itself. This city is definitely not a village. The donkeys devoutly respect the sidewalks. Donkeys that only bray in the neighborhood at determined hours. Donkeys that do the unmentionable behind a tree or a pole without lifting a leg. Donkeys that dare not graze on the grassy patches but stick close to the cement edge of the gutters. Donkeys that sing like the roosters when the roosters oversleep. Donkeys on the side of the street with a sidewalk that graze on the low, cart-driver-beheading branches of the trees. Oh, these donkeys — the only remaining villagers in the city — have become municipalized, bureaucratized, humanized.! Donkeys want to be deemed worthy of obtaining their election rights: to elect and be elected. Through the kitchen odors of frying oil, a world enclosed within this world is revealed to me: the world of the barnyard. The roosters also become human, though not in a sane, patriotic, sensible way like the donkeys but rather in a strange, impertinent, exotic way. Not turning into men, but rather into Englishmen. As for the roosters: eccentric gringos who wear Scottish wool, engage in a foolish sport like worm-hunting, play golf with gnawed bones and cobs of corn, constantly shiver from the cold, rise at dawn, and do not understand females. Soon they will smoke pipes, read magazines, play polo — instant gentlemen — and take pleasure trips to Southampton on a P.S.N.C. ship. Hens are good mothers who still make an effort to please their husbands. Moral standards in the barnyard are falling. If it weren’t for the solid good faith and austere habits of the ducks. If it weren’t for the antimilitaristic and clerical traditionalism of the turkeys — scanty hygiene, bad smells, omissions, lawsuits, bad moods, great-great-grandfathers who were counts, mortgages. Female ducks don’t know about the following things: the husband, the shop, themselves, the house, and the children; one must be eat well, be virtuous, and save for old age.