One day I will inhabit my dreams and have a great orgy of love with all the people I love, all the people I have loved.
Twenty
“Do you want to?” the man asked me.
He was tall, quite sturdy, with two burning black eyes and curly black hair that thinned over his forehead.
He was holding out a half-open wooden box with one hand; in the other he held a hundred-Euro note and a slim box cutter.
I stared at him and imagined that he was the chief of an African village, simultaneously offering me the treasure of his land and handing me the sacrificial dagger with which I was to cut my finger and mingle my blood with his.
“It’s really good, excellent stuff,” he went on.
I imagined the men of the village digging the dark, dry earth to remove the precious, crystalline material.
He gestured to me to accept his gift.
I stared into his eyes and saw he wasn’t really there. He saw me, but he wasn’t looking at me.
He wasn’t fully in control of his faculties, and he didn’t understand that he was looking at a little girl who was barely of legal age and who looked at least four years younger than she really was.
I shook my head.
He smiled at me and tipped his powder onto a silver tray, splashed here and there with a few drops of champagne. He wiped away the droplets with his shirt cuff and muttered something.
All of a sudden he sniffed. He raised his head and threw it back and closed his eyes, twitching his nose like a rabbit.
For a moment I thought I saw his body turning transparent; I saw his skin melting and his internal organs becoming visible. They were darker than his eyes, and here and there the mucous membrane was torn by an ulcer. The crystal powder spread all the way through his body, branching like a river into different streams, and it looked almost like a divine spring, a purifying fountain.
Then a large belly appeared, followed by the rest of the body of a beautiful woman, who walked over to African-chief-guy and stroked his hair, asking him if it was good.
He took a deep breath, widening his nostrils, and replied, “Divine.”
The woman pulled a face, as though to say, “A shame I’ve got a brat in my belly, otherwise…”
Then she looked at me and asked me, “You’ve never tried it, have you?”
I shook my head and answered, “No, I don’t like it.”
She nodded, walked toward a big chest of drawers, opened one of them, and took out a joint, already rolled.
She looked at it as I might look at a particularly fine penis and then she sighed.
She lit it and lay back on the bed, smoking with gusto.
A few weeks later I saw her acting in a film; her hair was longer and she didn’t have the belly yet. Her pupils were tiny pinpricks.
Twenty-one
It happened all at once. I was sitting on the toilet and felt first an itch in my ovaries and then a dull splash in the toilet bowl. When I was little I was convinced that frogs could come out of the toilet and climb up my back. I lifted myself up from the bowl, holding my legs wide, and blood dripped to the floor.
There were no frogs in it. There was a tadpole. A human tadpole. It was red, floating in a golden swimming pool, looking at me with its one black eye, which was almost bigger than its own head. With a little tail, its body was elongated like a lizard’s.
“Suttu ’n palazzu c’è ’n cani pazzu, te pazzu cani stu pezzu ri pani,” this disgusting creature whispered, a nonsensical tongue twister in the Sicilian dialect of my childhood, something about a mad dog and a piece of bread.
I felt my heart tremble and my thoughts blurred. The tadpole swam there, moving back and forth as though enjoying its aquatic game. I could hear the shrill laughter of a child in the distance while the tadpole went on swimming and swimming, repeating its curious phrase.
Then, afraid that it was a monster, I flushed the toilet. A mighty whirlpool dragged it down to the sewer.
Because of the noise of the water I didn’t hear Thomas arrive. He had closed the door and was putting his bag on the ground.
“I’m home!”
Grabbed him. That’s what I should have done. Grabbed him and strangled him.
“Where are you hiding?”
Strangled him with rage, with keen love, with the love that made me love him for an infinitesimally short length of time, and for the death that he dragged from my belly.
“Pequeña…where are you?”
I came out of the bathroom, looking at the floor, and smiled at him.
“What were you doing?” he asked.
“I was in the bathroom,” I replied.
Lick away the blood and hold him naked and clean under the pillow.
“Hey, listen, I’ve brought you a surprise…!” he said enthusiastically.
Touch his soft limbs and plunge a finger into his chest. Rip out his heart and lift it to the sky.
I know it took two of us, but I put up no resistance…
Attach him to my nipple for a few minutes, long enough to weep.
Then I felt a hairy head stroking my calves and for a moment I thought my son had returned in the form of a velvety ghost.
I looked straight ahead and asked Thomas, “What is it?”
He stared at me and then he said, “It’s a dog…”
I lowered my head, eyes full of tears.
And then I burst out crying.
The darkness had already entered the room, and the red curtain floated slightly in the breeze, while the noise from our neighbors’ TV filled the still silence.
“What shall we do?” he asked me, stroking my feet.
“He’s already done what had to be done. Everything’s just as it was,” I replied crisply.
He got to his feet, lit a cigarette, and went to look out the window. I heard him breathing.
The cowering dog took refuge in a corner and followed all my tired movements with the corner of its eye. “Everything’s just as it was,” I repeated.
The smoke from his cigarette rose in circles and dissolved in the air.
“Why did you throw it away?” he asked me in a tone of voice that I had never heard him use before.
“It came out all by itself, I…”
“No, no,” he broke in, “why did you flush the toilet?”
I stopped and thought for a moment, because I didn’t really know either.
The dog went on staring at me, and that phrase echoed around in my head: “Suttu ’n palazzu c’è ’n cani pazzu, te pazzu cani stu pezzu ri pani.”
“Perhaps out of fear,” I replied.
“Fear of what?” he asked me.
I shrugged, but he couldn’t see me.
“You should have shown it to me,” he said.
“What difference would that have made…,” I replied, tears beginning to sting my eyes again.
Then he turned around and said, “I’m sorry.”
Everything’s as it was.
Is everything as it was?
Twenty-two
You’re almost black and I’m white as a Q-tip; you’re cheerful and I’m melancholy.
I remember your yellow car very clearly: a yellow Fiat 127, an old model you never see around anymore. It was funny, it looked like a cartoon, and we were the main characters. You had a raincoat the same shade, canary yellow. For me you were “the lady in yellow.” You had two earrings that looked like sweets, yellow and soft with a slight dip in the middle. I watched them as you drove. I looked at the mole behind your ear, the mole that identified you as my mother. You were that mole. Without that mole you wouldn’t have been yourself, not even with the yellow raincoat and not even with the sweets in your ears.