My tragedy was this: how could I fornicate after Juana? Was it worth swapping the lubricious flames of hell for a soft mattress? With her, each time was an event. A deplorable pleasure. An act of transcendental evil. With other women, sex was scarcely sex. From the moment I met Juana, my occasional companions, particularly the more progressive ones, seemed dull, predictable, exasperatingly normal. What we did together wasn’t terrible, or atrocious, or unpardonable. When we touched, neither of us betrayed our principles. We pretended to meet for dinner. Made polite banter. Bored each other discreetly. As time went on I progressed from apathy to phobia, and came to loathe the empty gestures I exchanged with my one-night stands. The wary foreplay. The tiny contractions. The controlled cries. I no longer knew how to be with anyone, anyone, anyone.
The last night I spent at Juana’s, she was dressed as usual, in a flared skirt and old shoes. Hair unkempt. No make-up on. Covered in goose bumps. Flesh on fire. When she tore off her clothes and I contemplated once more her bushy sex, I couldn’t help kissing her and whispering in her ear: I’m in love, Juana. She clenched her thighs instantly. She curled up on the couch, raised her chin and said: In that case, go. She said it so earnestly I didn’t even have the strength to protest. Besides, I was the one who had broken my promise. I dressed, ashamed.
As I crossed the living room cluttered with crucifixes and Holy Virgins, I heard Juana clicking her tongue. I turned round hopefully. I saw her coming towards me naked. She was walking quickly. I could see her feet were cold. She looked me in the eyes with a mixture of resentment and compassion. You can’t go to hell for love, she told me.
Then the light went out.
A TERRIBLY PERFECT COUPLE
IT IS WORTH RECALLING that clumsiness can sometimes arise from an excess of symmetry. Elisa and Elías were a case in point. Incapable of embracing each other without their respective right and left arms colliding in mid-air, both equally aroused the admiration of their friends. They had the same habits. Their political views did not clash even over incidental details. They enjoyed similar music. They laughed at the same jokes. In whatever restaurant they ate, either of them could easily order two of something without consulting the other. They were never sleepy at different times, which, however stimulating for their sex life, was annoying from a strategic point of view: Elisa and Elías secretly competed to be first in the bathroom, for the last glass of milk in the refrigerator, or to be the first to read the novel they had both planned to buy the week before. Theoretically, Elisa was able to reach her orgasm at the same time as Elías without the slightest effort. In practice, it was more common for them to find themselves tied up in knots, created by their always simultaneous desire to be on top or beneath the other. What a perfect couple, two halves of the same little orange, Elisa’s mother would tell them. To which they both replied by blushing, and stepping on each other’s toes as they rushed to kiss her.
I hate you more than anyone in the world, Elías wanted to howl in the middle of an eventful night. He was unable to get Elisa to hear him, or rather he was unable to distinguish his own protest from hers. After an unwelcoming sleep filled with synchronized nightmares, the two of them had breakfast in silence, without any need to discuss what was going to happen next. That evening, when Elisa came home from work and went to pack her bags, she was not surprised to find the wardrobe half-empty.
As usually happens, Elisa and Elías have tried several times to patch things up. However, it seems that whenever either of them tries to call, the other’s phone is busy. On the rare occasions when they have succeeded in arranging to meet, perhaps offended at how long it has taken the other to make a move, neither of them has turned up.
THE THINGS WE DON’T DO
I LIKE THAT WE DON’T do the things we don’t do. I like our plans on waking, when morning slinks onto our bed like a cat of light, plans we never accomplish because we get up late from imagining them so much. I like the anticipatory tremor in our muscles from the exercises we list without doing, the gyms we never join, the healthy habits we conjure as if simply by desiring them, our bodies will glow from their radiance. I like the travel guides you browse through with that absorption I so admire, and whose monuments, streets and museums we will never set foot in, as we sit mesmerized in front of our milky coffees. I like the restaurants we don’t go to, the light from their candles, the imagined taste of their dishes. I like the way our house looks when we picture it refurbished, its startling furniture, its lack of walls, its bold colours. I like the languages we wished we spoke and dream of learning next year, as we smile at each other in the shower. I hear from your lips those sweet, hypothetical languages: their words fill me with purpose. I like all the proposals, spoken or secretive, which we both fail to carry out. That is what I most like about sharing our lives. The wonder opened up elsewhere. The things we don’t do.
RELATIVES AND STRANGERS
DELIVERY
Midwives are complaining that men are infiltrating the Obstetrics ward. The Hospital management characterizes the situation as “an isolated incident”.
4 FEBRUARY 2003
AND IT WAS TRUE that the light came in fragmented and warm through the windows, or rather, let’s be frank and call them slits in the walls, and there was something more urgent than beauty, a new beauty, in the simple strength with which the light filled the room in the clinic, in the way it rewarded us, welcome, it announced, all this clarity is just because, and there was a violent sweetness about that other way of feeling myself a man, I was yelling, my wife gripped my wrists and steered me like a bicycle and I ran, I realized I could ask her for help, why shouldn’t we share this pain too, I thought, and those nurses with quivering breasts, Doctor Riquelme’s white, serious face, the sheets rough with time, the pillow with different layers of perfume and sweat-soaked, my wife whispering in my ear, all of them helping me to be strong, to ask for them to rally round me because a tunnel was rushing along inside me, a miraculous haste was robbing me of my breath and giving me another, two breaths, that’s it, my love, that’s it, breathe the air out slowly, my wife’s contracted lips called me, that’s it, that’s it, she shouted that night in the moist darkness of that hotel heaven-knows-where that suddenly saved us, we’ve rediscovered our innocence, she whispered to me afterwards, joined at the shoulders like Siamese twins, that’s it, invade me, she shouted, and I no longer knew who was inside whom, it’s hard for men to love, it’s a risk being the first to feel emotion, to leap into the void without knowing what the reply will be, or where the bicycle is headed, being loved is different, they contemplate us, all comfortable and frozen, in the third person, she loves me, and a third person was precisely what was going to gestate from that night on like a microscopic spider’s web, that’s it, go on, invade me, and at last I could say to her, for once in this fucking life, that I loved her beyond all bounds and the rest did not matter, including her reply, and it was so strange to give oneself, take me, I said to her, and she gave me the mirror of her belly and the anchor of her tongue and her raised thighs but no, I was the one who said take me, letting myself be stirred by the oar of the night, we’ve rediscovered our innocence, she told me, with her shoulder sunk in my shoulder, and it was true that the light came in timid, fragmented under the door like a faint, slightly orange intruder, possibly day was dawning, and then it turned out it was time, they dressed me slowly, observed me in silence, the nurses put on tight rubber gloves as though to preside over a sacrifice, the hour has come, sir, one of the nurses announced, and that word