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We arrived at the shop. Before I even learned my new host’s name, S began to explain the series of objects on display. There was something peculiar smack in the center of them all, at the room’s axis, a strange-looking object that stood out imposingly like some sort of a belly button: the exact reproduction of a dildo found in Hungary that archaeologists date from the Mesolithic period, some 9,000 years before Christ. There was a little card stuck to the pedestal with the name of the site where it was found, the date, the materials, and measurements, making the dildo a proper ornament for any salon. But its decorative quality by no means reduced its functional use, thanks to the detachable base, which meant it could easily be set to task. Later I found that this smoothly polished stone, almost eight inches long, became the object of desire of certain historians who wished to plumb the enigmas of the Stone Age in passionate paroxysms. As I said, as an element of this testimony and my life’s story, the object is more the weapon of my crime than anything else, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was so drawn to it that I asked S for a silicone replica. Finding out what weapon has been used to commit a murder is of vital importance in finding the murderer. Well, here you have it, confirmed in writing that it existed, because the real one, the one I employed, can no longer be recovered.

I imagine what called my attention to that Mesolithic dildo was the idea that some prehistoric woman or man, with only rudimentary language and something like a hundred and ten centuries before the so-called feminist revolution, had decided to think about her or his sexuality as being outside of the other. How could I not help identifying with that prehistoric act of resistance—I, who have spent my life being defined by the names other people have used to categorize me? But I saw other things in that place S brought me to once I pulled my glance and my thoughts away from that object. For example, something that is now familiar, but there I saw it for the first time. There they were. Life-sized dolls that felt and looked so real I had to check for pores; they seemed so human that even their motionlessness wasn’t enough of a contradiction. S told me a close friend of hers, a manufacturer of automata, made them, and she went on to explain that unlike other versions, these ones didn’t move because they were made to be passive women, receivers of anything anyone wanted to do to them. The exact price hadn’t been listed yet, but they’ll be expensive, she said. What’s more, they came with the manufacturer’s promise that if the owner died within the first two years of cohabitation, the doll would attend the funeral the same as any other mortal unless the deceased left a widow behind, and even in that situation if he had it on record that his wife should recognize the inflatable woman as being a part of the family.

I can’t help but go back to the Mesolithic penis. It gives me pleasure, you know? I mean it pleases me to think what I did with it, stick a wick up the urethra to do you know what. Look at that—now you have proof that I am unrepentant. As I’m writing this, all these feelings of love that I’ve always thought define my character dissolve before the pleasure of that violent scene in my memory. If I had to write my last sentence right this instant, it would be the following: let peace rot. I’ve got some life yet to live, just enough to go calmly, to reconcile myself with the love that has abounded in me, bar a few exceptions.

S showed me other gadgets that now are relatively easy to find but back then only flabbergasted me. Anal lanterns for lovers of the black hole; stethoscopes that allow you to listen to the friction produced by any object entering the body; vibrating panties designed to go off at random, even at the least expected moments in a twenty-four-hour cycle. S designed sexual objects, so for someone like me who had never seen one before, the revelation was colossal. But this was only a means to an end, financing her main project and what she considered her greatest accomplishment, which was the design and later manufacture of a sweet little object that was an exact replica of her genitalia, a duplicate of her interior landscape, from the lips to the uterus, as true to life as two drops of the same water. It might look like a conventional dildo, but it worked in a different way: to find someone else whose intimate hole was the same size and complexion as her own. She called the mold, the intermediary, the dildo, Solitude. Solitude represented S’s longing to find her double, her sexual soulmate, someone who would fondle S as she fondled herself. It goes without saying the solace it provided me to find that S was obviously as lonely as I was. Maybe like me, she too needed to believe in fairy tales every once in a while, in stories of princes and princesses, to find her Cinderella by way of something much more intimate than a magical glass slipper.

S designed many gadgets that today can be found in any sex shop around the world. Vaginal pumps, erectile rings, and a genital enlarger based on the principles of traction lengthwise for men, breadthwise for women, and backdoor orifices for both; double vibrators for simultaneous applications, and others with cone-like ends for anal use, called plugs; prostheses; a wing or a trapeze for aerial postures, with a security belt and instructions manual included; an enema bullet resistant to any type of liquid or any temperature, depending on the moment’s sexual mood. Have you tried any of these things, sir? An anal plug, perhaps? A penis enlarger? Did you know the idea that Japanese men have little dicks is just a myth? Personally, penis size isn’t an issue for me, but I want to give testimony here that not only do Japanese men not have small dicks, but from what I’ve been able to gather, theirs are bigger than those of the Americans. Well, you just let me know when you see me whether you’ve ever tried one of these toys, hey? All of them, sir, I would have used them all simultaneously on those unspeakable louts. Why does hatred suddenly sweep over me again? Well, as I said, if I’d had any one of these objects on hand, along with the Mesolithic dildo, I wouldn’t have flinched, I’d have used all of them at once.

I ask myself now, just how high a temperature can those enema bullets withstand? The package states “any temperature,” but what exactly does that mean? Any temperature! Would it endure the temperature of the sun? Could it be that the wholesalers who supplied materials to S didn’t realize that since Hiroshima, one has to be a little more careful when talking about temperature? I would have tested it on the flesh of those oafs—exactly how many degrees Fahrenheit can the bullet withstand?—and then I’d have written to the factory asking them to be just a little more precise. You do know that they do these sorts of things in these parts, right? Of course all they use are humble plastic bottles, and it’s not the woman who introduces them into the body of the man, but the other way around. Later I’ll tell you about Jeanette. No, you’re not going to be shocked by reading this. What you must find strange, though, is that it’s me, a woman, who thinks this way, as the doer of the deeds. So are you going to add malice to my murder now? Why don’t you just go right ahead then, tack it on: add malice, because lack of malice had nothing to do with not having the objects at hand to use them as instruments of pain. Instead it was related to the fact that I was clever enough not to allow hatred to cloud my strategic ability: I’m a woman and I acted alone; they were men and there were more of them; I knew I had to act quickly and surreptitiously. But yes, let’s not forget then, add malice to that list of degrees, because you can be perfectly sure that the instant I grabbed the prehistoric phallus, my whole body trembled with the third and final orgasm I had yet to experience. You see, one thing you can’t ever call me is frigid. Not only have I had an orgasm as a man and as a woman, but also the primeval orgasm of the human race: the pleasure of the kill.