"Are you calling me fat?" Doña Lucrecia became livid.
She had been distracted, hearing the boy's voice as if it were background noise, thinking about the anonymous letters—seven in just ten days—and the letter she had written to Rigoberto the night before, which was now in the pocket of her robe. She recalled only that Fonchito had begun to talk and talk, about Egon Schiele, as usual, until "plump" had caught her attention.
"Not fat, no. I said plump, Stepmamá," he apologized, gesturing.
"It's your papá's fault I'm like this," she complained, looking at herself. "I was very slender when we married. But Rigoberto had the notion that being fashionably slim destroys a woman's body, that the great tradition in beauty is abundance. That's what he called it: 'the abundant form.' To make him happy I put on weight. And I haven't been thin since."
"You look terrific just the way you are, I swear, Stepmamá," Fonchito continued to apologize. "I said what I did about Egon Schiele's skinny girls because don't you think it's odd for me to like them and like you too when you're at least twice their size?"
No, he couldn't be the author. The anonymous letters complimented her figure, and in one of them, entitled "In Praise of the Beloved's Body," each part mentioned—head, shoulders, waist, breasts, belly, thighs, legs, ankles, feet—was accompanied by a reference to a poem or emblematic painting. The invisible lover of her abundant forms could only be Rigoberto. ("That man is crazy about you," Justiniana declared after reading it. "How well he knows your body, Señora! It must be Don Rigoberto. Where would Fonchito find those words no matter how grown-up he is? Though he knows you pretty well too, doesn't he?")
"Why are you so quiet? Why aren't you talking to me? You look at me as if you didn't see me. You're acting very strange today, Stepmamá."
"It's those letters. I can't get them out of my head, Fonchito. You have your obsession with Egon Schiele, and now I have mine: those damned letters. I spend the whole day waiting for them, reading them, remembering them."
"But why damned, Stepmamá? Do they insult you or say ugly things?"
"Because they're not signed. And because sometimes I think a phantom is sending them, not your papá."
"You know very well they're from him. Everything's working out perfectly, Stepmamá. Don't worry. You'll make up with him soon, you'll see."
The reconciliation of Doña Lucrecia and Don Rigoberto had become the boy's second obsession. He spoke of it with so much certainty that his stepmother no longer had the heart to argue or to tell him it was nothing but another daydream of the inveterate daydreamer he had become. Had she been right to show him the anonymous letters? Some were so bold in their intimate references that after reading them she promised herself: "I certainly won't let him see this one." And each time she did, watching his reaction to find out if some gesture betrayed him. But no. Each time he reacted with the same surprise, the same excitement, and he always came to the same conclusion: the letter was from his papá, one more proof he wasn't angry with her anymore. She noticed that now Fonchito also seemed distracted, far removed from the dining alcove and the Olivar, caught up in some memory. He was looking at his hands, bringing them close to his eyes. He clasped them, extended them, spread his fingers, hid the thumb, crossed and uncrossed them in unusual positions, as if projecting figures on the wall with his hands. But on this spring afternoon Fonchito was not trying to create shadow figures; he was scrutinizing his fingers like an entomologist examining an unknown species through a magnifying glass.
"Can I ask what you're doing?"
The boy's expression did not change, and he continued his movements as he replied with another question: "Do you think my hands are deformed, Stepmamá?"
What was the little devil up to today?
"Let's see, let's have a look at them," she said, playing at being a specialist. "Put them here."
Fonchito wasn't playing. He was very serious as he stood, walked over to her, and placed both hands on her extended palms. At the touch of smooth, soft skin, the fragile bones in his fingers, Doña Lucrecia felt a shiver run down her spine. He had delicate hands, thin pointed fingers, pale pink fingernails, neatly trimmed. But there were ink or charcoal stains on the fingertip. She pretended to subject his hands to a clinical examination as she stroked them.
"They're not at all deformed," she declared at last. "Though a little soap and water wouldn't hurt."
"What a shame," the boy said without a trace of humor, pulling his hands away from Doña Lucrecia's. "It means I don't resemble him at all as far as that's concerned."
"There it is. It was bound to happen." The game they played every afternoon.
"Explain what you mean."
The boy quickly complied. Hadn't she noticed that hands were Egon Schiele's mania? His hands and the hands of girls and men he painted. If not, she ought to now. And in the blink of an eye Doña Lucrecia had a book of reproductions on her knees. Did she see how much Egon Schiele hated thumbs?
"Thumbs?" and Doña Lucrecia began to laugh.
"Look at his portraits. The one of Arthur Roessler, for example," the boy insisted passionately. "Or this one: the Double Portrait of Inspector General Heinrich Benesch and His Son Otto; the one of Enrich Lederer; his self-portraits. He shows only four fingers. The thumb is always out of sight."
Why would that be? Why did he hide it? Was it because the thumb is the ugliest finger on the hand? Did he prefer even numbers and think that odd numbers brought bad luck? Was his own thumb disfigured, did it embarrass him? Something was wrong with his hands; if not, why, when he had his picture taken, did he conceal his hands in his pockets or twist them into such ridiculous poses, curling the fingers like a witch's, placing them right in front of the camera, or raising them over his head as if he wanted to let them fly away? His hands, the men's hands, the girls' hands. Hadn't she noticed? Those naked girls with their well-formed little bodies, wasn't it inconceivable for them to have masculine hands with rough bony knuckles? For example, this engraving from 1910: Standing Nude with Black Hair, weren't those mannish hands with their square-cut fingernails out of place, weren't they identical to the ones Egon painted in his self-portraits? Hadn't he done the same thing with almost all the women he painted? For example, Standing Nude, 1913. Fonchito took a breath. "I mean, he was Narcissus, just like you said. He always painted his own hands, even if the person in the painting was someone else, another man or a woman."
"Did you find this out on your own? Or did you read it somewhere?" Doña Lucrecia was disconcerted. She leafed through the book, and what she saw confirmed what Fonchito said.
"Anybody who looks at his pictures a lot can see it," the boy said with a shrug, not giving the matter much importance. "Doesn't my papá say that if an artist doesn't develop motifs he never becomes inspired? That's why I always pay attention to the manias that painters reflect in their pictures. Egon Schiele had three: he put the same out-of-proportion hands, with the thumb missing, on all his figures. He had the girls and men show their things by lifting their skirts and spreading their legs. And third, in his self-portraits, he shows his own hands in forced positions that are very conspicuous."
"All right, all right, if you wanted to leave me dumbfounded, you've succeeded. Do you know something, Fonchito? You certainly have your motif. If your papá's theory is correct, you already have one of the requirements for being inspired."
"All I need to do is to paint the pictures," he said with a laugh. He lay down again and resumed looking at his hands. He moved them about, imitating the extravagant poses displayed in Schiele's pictures and photographs. Doña Lucrecia was amused as she observed his pantomime. And suddenly she came to a decision: "I'm going to read him my letter and see what he says." Besides, if she read it aloud she would know if what she had written was all right, could decide if she should send it to Rigoberto or tear it up. But when she was about to begin, she lost her courage. Instead, she said, "It worries me that all you think of night and day is Schiele." The boy stopped playing with his hands. "I'm saying this with all the affection I have for you. At first I thought it was nice for you to like his pictures so much and identify with him. But because you try to resemble him in everything, you're not being yourself anymore."
"But I am him, Stepmamá. Even though you take it as a joke, it's true. I feel that I'm him."
He smiled to reassure her. "Wait a minute," he murmured, and as he stood, he picked up the book of reproductions, turned the pages as he looked for something, and placed the open book on her knees again. Doña Lucrecia saw a plate in color; against an ocher background a sinuous woman wore a carnival costume with zigzag stripes of green, red, yellow, and black. Her dark hair was under a kind of turban, she was barefoot, she looked out with a languid sadness in her large dark eyes, and her hands were raised over her head as if she were about to play castanets.
"Looking at that picture, I knew," she heard Fonchito say with utter seriousness. "I knew I was him."
She tried to laugh but failed. What was the kid up to? Trying to frighten her? He plays with me like a little kitten with a big mouse, she thought.
"Is that so? And what in this picture revealed to you that you're the reincarnation of Egon Schiele?"
"You still don't understand, Stepmamá," Fonchito said with a laugh. "Look again, at each part. And you'll see that even though he painted it in his studio in Vienna in 1914, Peru is here in this woman. Repeated five times."
Señora Lucrecia examined the image again. From top to bottom. From bottom to top. Finally she noticed that on the multicolored clown costume of the barefoot model, there were five minute figures, at the height of both arms, on her right side, on her leg, and on the hem of her skirt. She raised the book to her eyes and examined the figures calmly. Well, it was true. They did look like Indian women. They were dressed like campesinas from Cuzco.
"That's what they are, little Indian women from the Andes," said Fonchito, reading her thoughts. "Do you see? Peru is there in Egon Schiele's paintings. That's how I knew. For me, it was a message."
He continued speaking, showing off a prodigious knowledge of the painter's life and work that left Doña Lucrecia with the impression of omniscience, and the suspicion of a scheme, a feverish ambush. "There's an explanation, Stepmamá. The lady was named Frederike María Beer. She was the only person whose portrait was painted by the two greatest painters in Vienna at the time: Schiele and Klimt. The daughter of a very wealthy cabaret owner, she had been a great lady who helped artists and found buyers for their work. A little while before Schiele painted her, she traveled to Bolivia and Peru and brought home those little Indian rag dolls that she probably bought at some fair in Cuzco or La Paz. And Egon Schiele had the idea of painting them into her dress. I mean, it was no miracle that made five little Indian women appear in the painting. But, but …"
"But what?" Doña Lucrecia encouraged him, fascinated by Fonchito's story, hoping for a great revelation.
"But nothing," the boy added, with a weary gesture. "The Indians were placed there so that I would find them one day. Five little Peruvians in a painting by Schiele. Don't you see?"
"Did they start talking to you? Did they say that you painted them eighty years ago? That you've been reincarnated?"
"Well, if you're going to make fun of me, let's talk about something else, Stepmamá."
"I don't like to hear you talking nonsense," she said. "Or thinking nonsense, or believing nonsense. You are you, and Egon Schiele was Egon Schiele. You live here, in Lima, and he lived in Vienna at the beginning of the century. There's no such thing as reincarnation. So unless you want me to get angry, don't say stupid things anymore. Okay?"
The boy nodded reluctantly. His face looked very sad, but he did not dare to respond, because she had spoken with unusual severity. She tried to make peace.
"I want to read you something I've written," she said softly, taking the rough draft of the letter from her pocket.
"You've answered my papá?" The boy was overjoyed and sat on the floor, craning his head forward.
Yes, last night. She didn't know yet if she would send it. She couldn't bear any more. Seven, that's a lot of anonymous letters. And the writer was Rigoberto. Who else could it be? Who else could speak to her in that familiar, exalted way? Who else knew her so well? She had decided to end the farce. She wanted to know what he thought of her letter.
"Read it to me right now, Stepmamá," the boy said impatiently. His eyes were shining and his face revealed enormous curiosity, as well as a hint, a hint of—Doña Lucrecia searched for the words—mischievous, even wicked, delight. Clearing her throat before she began, and not looking up until she had finished, Doña Lucrecia read:
Darling:
I've resisted the temptation of writing to you ever since I learned you were the author of the ardent letters that for the past two weeks have filled my house with flaming joy, nostalgia, and hope, and my heart and soul with the sweet fire that consumes without burning, the fire of love and desire joined in happy wedlock.
Why would you sign letters that you alone could write? Who has studied me, shaped me, invented me as you have? Who but you could speak of the little red marks under my arms, the pink tracery of nerves in the hidden spaces between my toes, that "puckered little mouth, bluish-gray, surrounded by a circle in miniature of happily wrinkled flesh to which one ascends by scaling the smooth marble columns of your legs"? Only you, my love.
From the first lines of the first letter, I knew it was you. And for that reason, before I finished reading it, I obeyed your instructions. I took off my clothes and posed for you, in front of the mirror, imitating Klimt's Danaë. And once again, as on so many nights so profoundly missed in my present solitude, I soared with you through the realms of fantasy we explored together during the years we shared, years that are now, for me, a spring of consolation and life from which I drink again in memory in order to endure the empty routine that has replaced the adventure and plenitude I enjoyed at your side.
To the best of my ability I have followed every detail of the demands—no, the suggestions and requests—in your seven letters. I have dressed and undressed, put on costumes and masks, lain on my back, bent, straightened, squatted, and incarnated—body and soul—all the whims in your letters, for what greater pleasure do I have than to please you? For you, because of you, I have been Messalina and Leda, Mary Magdalene and Salome, Diana with her bow and arrows, the Naked Maja, chaste Susanna surprised by the lecherous elders, and, in the Turkish bath, the odalisque of Ingres. I have made love to Mars, Nebuchadnezzar, Sardanapalus, Napoleon, swans, satyrs, slaves both male and female; I have emerged from the sea like a siren and assuaged and inflamed the desires of Ulysses. I have been a marquise by Watteau, a nymph by Titian, a Virgin by Murillo, a Madonna by Piero della Francesca, a geisha by Fujita, a poor wretch by Toulouse-Lautrec. It was difficult for me to go up on my toes like a ballerina by Degas, and believe me, in order not to cheat you, I even attempted, at the cost of many muscle cramps, to turn myself into what you call the voluptuous Cubist cube by Juan Gris.
Playing with you again, even at a distance, has been good for me, and bad for me. Once more I felt that I was yours and you were mine. But when the game was over, my solitude intensified and I grew even sadder. Have we lost everything forever?
Since receiving the first letter, I have lived for the next one, consumed by doubts, attempting to guess your intentions. Did you want an answer? Or does sending letters without a signature mean that you do not wish to engage in dialogue but want me only to listen to your monologue? Last night, however, after obediently playing the industrious housewife by Vermeer, I decided to respond. Something in the dark depths of my being, something that you alone have touched, demanded that I set pen to paper. Have I done the right thing? Have I broken the unwritten law that prohibits the figure in a portrait from stepping out of the painting and speaking to the painter?
You, my darling, know the answer. Tell me what it is.
"Golly, what a letter," said Fonchito. His enthusiasm seemed quite sincere. "Stepmamá, you love my papá very much!"
He was flushed and radiant, and, Doña Lucrecia also noticed—for the first time—even confused.
"I've never stopped loving him. Not even when what happened happened."
Fonchito immediately assumed the blank amnesiac expression that emptied his eyes, as he did whenever Doña Lucrecia referred in some way to that adventure. But she watched the pink drain from the boy's cheeks, replaced by a pearly whiteness.
"Because even though you and I wish it hadn't, and even though we never talk about it, what happened did happen. It can't be erased," said Doña Lucrecia, trying to look into his eyes. "And even though you stare at me as if you didn't know what I was talking about, you remember everything as well as I do. And must regret it even more."
She could not go on. Fonchito had begun to look at his hands again, moving them, imitating the exaggerated positions of Egon Schiele's figures: holding them rigidly parallel at shoulder height, the thumbs hidden as if they had been amputated, or placing them over his head and well forward, as if he had just hurled a lance. Doña Lucrecia finally started to laugh.
"You're not a devil, you're a clown," she exclaimed. "You ought to go into the theater."
The boy laughed too, stretching, making faces, constantly playing with his hands. And without stopping any of his tricks, he surprised Doña Lucrecia with this remark: "Did you write the letter in a sappy style on purpose? Do you think, like my papá, that sappiness is inseparable from love?"
"I wrote it imitating your papá's style," said Doña Lucrecia. "Exaggerating, trying to be solemn, high-toned, elevated. He likes that. Do you think it's very sappy?"
"He's going to love it," Fonchito assured her, nodding several times. "He'll read it and reread it, over and over again, locked away in his study. You're not planning to sign it, are you, Stepmamá?"
In fact, she hadn't thought about it.
"Should I send it to him anonymously?"
"Of course, Stepmamá," the boy declared emphatically. "You have to play his game."
Perhaps he was right. If he had sent letters without signing them, why shouldn't she?
"You know all the tricks, kid," she said, almost to herself. "Yes, that's a good idea. I won't sign it. But he'll know exactly who wrote it."
Fonchito pretended to applaud. He had stood and was getting ready to leave. Today there had been no toasted sweet buns because Justiniana had gone out. As always, he picked up the book of reproductions and put it in his bag, buttoned the gray shirt of his uniform and straightened his tie, observed by Lucrecia, who was amused to see him repeat the same actions every afternoon when he arrived and when he left. But now, unlike other times when he would say only, "Ciao, Stepmamá," he sat very close to her on the sofa.
"I'd like to ask you something before I go. But I feel embarrassed."
He was speaking in the thin, sweet, timid little voice he used when he wanted to awaken her benevolence or her compassion. And though Doña Lucrecia never lost the suspicion that it was pure farce, sooner or later it always did awaken her benevolence or her compassion.
"Nothing embarrasses you, so don't tell me any stories or play the innocent," she said, giving the lie to her harsh words with a caress and a tug on his ear. "Go on, ask."
The boy turned and threw his arms around her neck. He buried his face in her shoulder.
"If I look at you I won't be able to," he whispered, lowering his voice into a barely audible murmur. "That puckered little mouth surrounded by wrinkles, in your letter, it's not this one, is it, Stepmamá?"
Doña Lucrecia felt his cheek move away from hers, felt two thin lips travel down her face and rest against her own. Cold at first, they instantly came to life. She felt their pressure, felt them kissing her. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth: a wet little viper came to visit, strolled across her gums and palate, and ensnared her tongue. For a time she was out of time, blind, transformed into sensation, annihilated, transported, doing nothing, thinking nothing. But when she raised her arms to clasp Fonchito to her, the boy, in one of those sudden changes of mood that were his most distinctive trait, released her and moved away. Now he was leaving, waving goodbye. His expression was quite natural.
"If you like, write out a clean copy of your anonymous letter and put it in an envelope," he said from the door. "Give it to me tomorrow and I'll slip it into the mailbox at home without my papá seeing me. Ciao, Stepmamá."
No Cattail Boat or Pucará Bull
I understand that the sight of the flag waving in the wind makes your heart beat faster, that the music and words of the national anthem produce the prickling in the veins and bristling of hairs called emotion. You do not associate the word "patria," or "fatherland" (which you always capitalize), with the irreverent verses of the young Pablo Neruda:
Patria,
a melancholy word,
like thermometer or elevator
or with Dr. Johnson's lethal sentence ("Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel") but with heroic cavalry charges, swords embedded in the bosoms of enemy uniforms, bugle calls, the sound of guns and cannon fire not caused by bottles of champagne. You belong, apparently, to the mass of males and females who look with respect upon the statues of leaders that adorn public squares, deplore the fact that pigeons shit on them, and are capable of rising before dawn and waiting for hours on national holidays so you'll find a good spot on the Campo de Marte for the armed forces parade, a sight that inspires you to appreciative comments sizzling with the words "martial," "patriotic," and "virile." Sir, madam: crouching inside you is a rabid beast that constitutes a danger to humanity.
You are living ballast that has dragged down civilization since the time of the tattooed, pierced cannibal with his phallic sheath, the pre-rational magician who stamped on the ground to bring rain and devoured the heart of his adversary to steal his power. In fact, behind your speeches and banners exalting this piece of geography blemished with boundary stones and arbitrary borders in which you see the personification of a superior form of history and social metaphysics, there is only an astute aggiornamento of the ancient primitive fear of separating from the tribe, of no longer being part of the mass, of becoming an individual, and a nostalgic longing for that ancestor for whom the world began and ended within the boundaries of the familiar, the clearing in the forest, the dark cave, the high plateau, the tiny enclave where sharing language, magic, confusion, customs, and, above all, ignorance and fear with his group gave him courage and made him feel protected against thunder, lightning, beasts, and the other tribes of this planet. Though centuries have passed since those distant times, and because you wear a jacket and tie or put on a tight skirt and have your face-lifts in Miami, you believe yourself far superior to that ancestor wearing a tree-bark loincloth and adornments dangling from lips and nose, you are he and she is you. The umbilical cord that connects you across the centuries is called terror of the unknown, hatred for what is different, rejection of adventure, panic at the thought of freedom and the responsibility it brings to invent yourself each day, a vocation for servitude to the routine and the gregarious, a refusal to decollectivize so that you will not be obliged to face the daily challenge of individual sovereignty. In ancient times, the defenseless eater of human flesh, submerged in metaphysical and physical ignorance regarding everything that happened around him, had a certain justification for refusing to be independent, creative, and free; in our day, when everything and more that needs to be known is already known, there is no valid reason for insisting on being a slave and an irrational being. You may think this judgment severe, even extremist, when applied to something that for you is simply a virtuous, idealistic feeling of solidarity and love for one's native land and one's memories ("the land and its dead," according to the French anthropoid Maurice Barrès), the frame of environmental and cultural references without which a human being feels empty. I assure you this may be one side of the patriotic coin, but the other side of the exaltation of one's own is the denigration of what belongs to someone else, the desire to humiliate and defeat others, those who are different from you because they have another skin color, another language, another god, even another way of dressing, another diet.
Patriotism, which actually seems to be a benevolent form of nationalism—for "patria" seems more ancient, deep-rooted, and respectable than "nation," that ridiculous politico-administrative contrivance manufactured by statists greedy for power and intellectuals in search of a master, that is, a Maecenas, that is, a pair of prebendal tits to suck on—is a dangerous but effective excuse for the countless wars that have devastated the planet, for despotic impulses that have sanctified the domination of the weak by the strong, and for an egalitarian smoke screen whose noxious fumes, indifferent to human beings, clone them and impose on them, under the guise of something essential and irremediable, the most accidental of common denominators: one's place of birth. Behind patriotism and nationalism there always burns the malignant fiction of collectivist identity, that ontological barbed wire which attempts to congregate "Peruvians," "Spaniards," "French," "Chinese," et cetera, in inescapable and unmistakable fraternity. You and I know that these categories are simply abject lies that throw a mantle of oblivion over countless diversities and incompatibilities, and attempt to abolish centuries of history and return civilization to those barbaric times preceding the creation of individuality, not to mention rationality and freedom: three things that are inseparable, make no mistake.
And therefore, when anyone says in my hearing, "the Chinese," "the blacks," "the Peruvians," "the French," "women," or any similar expression proposing to define human beings by membership in a collective of any kind rather than viewing that as a passing circumstance, I want to pull out a pistol—bang bang—and fire. (This is a figure of speech, of course; I've never held a weapon in my hand and never will, and have shot off nothing but semen, ejaculations to which I make claim with patriotic pride.) My individualism does not lead me, obviously, to a praise of the sexual soliloquy as the most perfect form of pleasure; in this area I am inclined toward dialogues between two persons, three at most, and of course, I declare myself a bitter enemy of the promiscuous partouse, which, in the realm of the bed and fornication, is tantamount to political and social collectivism. Unless the sexual monologue is practiced when one is not alone—in which case it becomes a highly baroque dialogue—as illustrated in the small watercolor and charcoal sketch by Picasso (1902–1903) that you may view at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, in which Sr. D. Ángel Fernández de Soto, fully dressed and smoking a pipe, and his distinguished wife, naked except for stockings and shoes, drinking a glass of champagne and sitting on her spouse's knees, engage in reciprocal masturbation; a picture, incidentally, that with no desire to offend anyone (least of all Picasso), I consider superior to Guernica and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
(If you think this letter is beginning to show signs of incoherence, think of Valéry's Monsieur Teste: "The incoherence of a discourse depends on the listener. The spirit apparently is not conceived in a way that allows it to be incoherent with itself.")
Do you want to know the origin of the bilious antipatriotic outburst in this letter? A speech by the President of the Republic, reported this morning in the press, according to which he stated, as he was opening the Handicrafts Fair, that Peruvians have the patriotic obligation to admire the work of anonymous artisans who, centuries ago, modeled the clay vessels of Chavín, wove and dyed the fabrics of Paracas, or threaded together the feather capes of Nasca, the queros of Cuzco; as well as contemporary makers of Ayacuchan altarpieces, little bulls from Pucará, figures of the Infant Jesus, rugs from San Pedro de Cajas, cattail boats from Lake Titicaca, tiny mirrors from Cajamarca, because—I quote the Commander-in-Chief—"crafts are popular art par excellence, the supreme display of a people's creativity and artistic skill, one of the great symbols and manifestations of the Fatherland, and none of the objects bears the individual signature of the artisan who made it because all of them bear the signature of the collectivity, of nationality."
If you are a man or woman of taste—that is, a lover of precision—you probably smiled at this artisanal-patriotic diarrhea from our Head of State. As for me, I find it, as you do, not only witless and vulgar but instructive as well. Now I know why I despise all the crafts of the world in general, and those of "my country" (I use the formula so that we understand each other) in particular. Now I know why my house has not seen and never will see a Peruvian pot, or a Venetian mask, or a Russian matriuska, or a little Dutch doll with braids and wooden shoes, or a miniature wooden bull, or a Gypsy girl dancing flamenco, or an Indonesian puppet with articulated joints, or a toy samurai, or an Ayacuchan altarpiece, or a Bolivian devil, or any figure or object of clay, wood, porcelain, stone, cloth, or bread manufactured serially, generically, and anonymously, usurping, despite the hypocritical modesty of calling itself popular art, the very nature of an artistic object, something that is the absolute domain of the private sphere, an expression of total individuality, and, consequently, the refutation and rejection of the abstract, the generic, everything that aspires to justify itself, directly or indirectly, in the name of an allegedly "social" lineage. Patriot, there is no impersonal art (and please don't talk to me about Gothic cathedrals). Crafts are a primitive, amorphous, fetal expression of what one day—when particular individuals separated from the mass begin to put a personal stamp on these objects and pour into them an untransferable intimacy—may reach the category of art. That crafts flourish, prosper, and reign in a "nation" should not make anyone proud, least of all so-called patriots. For flourishing handicrafts—that manifestation of the generic—is a sign of backwardness or regression, an unconscious desire not to progress through a devastating whirlwind of frontiers, picturesque customs, local color, provincial differences, rustic spirit, toward civilization. I know that you, Señora Patriot, Señor Patriot, hate civilization, if not the word itself then its devastating content. That is your right. It is also my right to love and defend it against all odds, knowing that the battle is difficult and that I may find myself—the indications are countless—in the army of the defeated. It does not matter. This is the only form of heroism permitted to those of us who oppose obligatory heroism: to die signing our first and last names, to have a personal death.
Let me say it, once and for all, and horrify you: the only "patria" I revere is the bed occupied by my wife, Lucrecia ("Noble lady, let your light,/Conquer my sightless, gloomy night," Fray Luis de León dixit), her splendid body the only flag or banner capable of drawing me into fearful combat, and the only anthem that can move me to tears are the sounds emitted by that beloved flesh, her voice, her laugh, her weeping, her sighs, and, of course (cover your ears and nose), her hiccups, belches, farts, and sneezes. Can I or can I not be considered a true patriot, in my fashion?
Damned Onetti! Blessed Onetti
Don Rigoberto awoke weeping (recently this had been happening fairly often). He had moved from sleep to wakefulness; in the dark his mind recognized the objects in his bedroom; his ears, the monotonous sea; his nostrils and the pores of his skin, the corrosive damp. But the horrible image, risen from some remote hiding place, was still there, swimming on the surface of his imagination, tormenting him just as it had a few moments earlier in the somnolence of his nightmare. "Stop crying, stupid." But the tears ran down his cheeks and he sobbed, seized with fear. What if it were telepathy? What if he had received a message? If, in fact, yesterday, that very afternoon, like a worm at the heart of the apple, they had discovered the lump in her breast that foretold catastrophe and Lucrecia had immediately thought of him, trusted in him, turned to him to share her sorrow and anguish? It had been a call in extremis. The day of the surgery had been set. "We caught it in time," the doctor declared, "on the condition we remove the breast, perhaps both breasts, immediately. I can almost, almost put my hand to the fire and say with certainty: it has not yet metastasized. On the condition we operate within a few hours, you will survive." The miserable wretch had begun to sharpen his scalpel, a glint of sadistic pleasure in his eyes. And at that instant Lucrecia thought of him, fervently desired to speak to him, to tell him, to be listened to and consoled by him, to have him at her side. "My God, I will crawl like a worm to her feet and beg her forgiveness." Don Rigoberto shuddered.
The image of Lucrecia lying on an operating table, subjected to that monstrous mutilation, caused another sharp stab of anguish. Closing his eyes, holding his breath, he recalled her firm, robust, identical breasts, the dark corollas with their granulate skin, the nipples, wooed and moistened by his lips, gallantly, defiantly standing erect at the hour of love. How many minutes, hours, had he spent contemplating them, weighing them, kissing them, licking them, toying with them, caressing them, fantasizing that he had been transformed into a Lilliputian who scaled those rosy hills to reach the high tower at the summit, or into a newborn who, sucking the white sap of life, received from those breasts his first lessons in pleasure when barely out of the womb. He recalled how, on certain Sundays, he would sit on the wooden bench in the bathroom to watch Lucrecia in the tub, submerged in bubbles. She would wrap a towel around her head like a turban and proceed with her toilette, very conscientiously, granting him an occasional benevolent smile as she washed her body with the large yellow sponge that she soaked in the foamy water and passed over her shoulders, her back, her beautiful legs raised for a few seconds from the creamy depths. At those times it was her breasts that drew all his attention, attracted all the religious fervor of Don Rigoberto. They appeared on the surface of the water, the white dome and bluish nipples gleaming in the foaming bubbles, and from time to time, to please and reward him (the distracted caress of his mistress stroking the docile dog stretched at her feet, he thought, more calmly) Doña Lucrecia would hold them and, on the pretext of soaping and rinsing them a little more, caress them with the sponge. They were beautiful, they were perfect. Their roundness, firmness, and warmth would fulfill all the desires of a lustful god. "Now pass me the towel, be my valet," she would say as she stood and rinsed her body with the hand shower. "If you're very good, perhaps I'll allow you to dry my back." Her breasts were there, glowing in the darkness of his room as if illuminating his solitude. Could a villainous cancer savage those creatures that ennobled the condition of women, justified their deification by the troubadours, vindicated the Marian cult? Don Rigoberto felt his earlier despair turn to fury, a feeling of savage rebellion against the disease.
And then he remembered. "Damned Onetti!" He burst into laughter. "Damned novel! Damned Santa María! Damned Gertrudis!" (Was that the character's name? Gertrudis? Yes, that was it.) That's where his nightmare came from, it had nothing to do with telepathy. He continued to laugh; he was liberated, excited, ecstatic. He decided, for a few moments, to believe in God (in one of his notebooks he had transcribed Quevedo's sentence from El Buscón: "He was one of those men who believed in God out of courtesy") in order to give thanks to someone because Lucrecia's beloved breasts were still intact, safe from the ravages of cancer, and because the nightmare had been no more than a reminiscence of a novel whose terrible beginning had shaken him with horror during the first months of his marriage to Lucrecia, filling him with the fear that one day his bride's delicious sweet breasts might fall victim to a surgical onslaught (the phrase appeared in his memory with all its obscene euphony: "ablation of the mammary") similar to the one described, invented, rather, in the opening pages by Brausen, the narrator of the unsettling novel by that damned Onetti. "Thank you, God, for making it not true, for keeping her breasts safe and sound," he prayed. And without putting on his slippers or robe he stumbled through the dark to his study to look at his notebooks. He was sure he had left some testimony to having read the disturbing novel that—why?—had risen from the depths of his unconscious to trouble his sleep tonight.
Damned Onetti! Uruguayan? Argentine? From the Río de la Plata region in any case. How he had made him suffer. What curious paths memory took, what capricious curves, baroque zigzags, incomprehensible hiatuses. Why now, tonight, had the fiction come to mind after ten years when he had probably not thought of it even once? With the lamp in his study projecting its golden light onto the table, he hurriedly leafed through the pile of notebooks which, he calculated, corresponded to the period when he had read La vida breve. Onetti's vita brevis. At the same time he continued to see, with increasing clarity, Lucrecia's breasts, snowy, high, warm, in their nocturnal bed, in their morning bath, peeking through the folds of her nightgown or her silk wrap or the deep plunge of her neckline. And coming back, returning with the memory of the ghastly impact the original image had made on him, was the story of La vida breve as clear and sharp as if he had only just read it. Why La vida breve? Why tonight?
He found it at last. Underlined, at the top of the page: La vida breve. And beneath that: "Superb architecture, highly refined, astute construction, prose and technique far superior to his impoverished characters and insipid plots." Not a very enthusiastic sentence. Why, then, the agitation when he remembered it? Simply because his unconscious mind had associated the surgically removed breast of Gertrudis in the novel with the longed-for breasts of Lucrecia? With great clarity he could see the first scene, the image that had come back and shaken him so. In his sordid apartment an ordinary clerk in a public-relations agency in Buenos Aires, Juan María Brausen, the narrator, agonizes over the idea of the mutilating breast surgery undergone by his wife, Gertrudis, the night before or that very morning, as he hears, on the other side of the thin wall, the stupid chatter of his new neighbor, Queca, a former or still-active whore, and vaguely imagines the plot for a movie that had been requested by his friend and superior, Julio Stein. Here were the dreadful citations: "I thought of how difficult it would be to look without disgust at the new scar Gertrudis would have on her chest, round, complex, with red or pink venations that time would perhaps transform into a pale confusion the same color as the other scar, thin, flat, as brisk as a signature, that Gertrudis had on her belly and that I had traced so often with the tip of my tongue." And this one, even more punishing, in which Brausen takes the bull by the horns and anticipates the only way he can really persuade his wife that the amputated breast did not matter: "Because the only convincing proof, the only source of joy and confidence I can give her is to turn on the light and raise and lower my face, rejuvenated by lust, over the mutilated breast, and kiss the spot and become wildly excited."
The man who writes sentences like these, sentences that after ten years can still make my hair stand on end and give me goose bumps like stalagmites, is a true creator, thought Don Rigoberto. He pictured himself naked, in bed with his wife, contemplating the almost invisible scar in the place where that goblet of warm flesh and silken curves had once reigned supreme, kissing it with exaggerated desire, pretending to an excitement, a passion he did not feel and would never feel again, and on his hair he recognized the hand—grateful? pitying—of his beloved letting him know it was enough. There was no need to pretend. They, who each night had lived the truth of their desires and dreams down to the very marrow, why would they lie now, telling one another it did not matter when both of them knew it mattered tremendously, that the missing breast would continue to hover over all their successive nights? Damned Onetti!
"You would have had the surprise of your life," Doña Lucrecia laughed with the trill of an opera singer ready to go onstage. "As I did, when she told me. And even more so when I saw them. The surprise of your life!"
"The enchanting breasts of the Algerian ambassador?" Don Rigoberto was astounded. "Reconstructed?"
"The Algerian ambassador's wife," Doña Lucrecia corrected him. "Don't play the fool, you know very well who I mean. You spent the whole night looking at them at the dinner in the French embassy."
"It's true, they were lovely," Don Rigoberto admitted with a blush. And as he caressed, kissed, and looked with devotion on the breasts of Doña Lucrecia, he tempered his enthusiasm with a compliment: "But not as lovely as yours."
"I don't care," she said, ruffling his hair. "What can I do, they're better than mine. Smaller, but perfect. And firmer."
"Firmer?" Don Rigoberto had begun to swallow nervously. "I didn't know you had seen her naked. Or touched her breasts."
An auspicious silence fell, though it did coexist with the thunder of waves breaking against the cliffs down below, beneath the study.
"I have seen her naked, and I have touched them." His wife spelled it out for him, very slowly. "You don't care, do you? But that's not the point. The point is, they've been reconstructed. Really."
And now Don Rigoberto remembered that the women in La vida breve—Queca, Gertrudis, Elena Sala—wore silken girdles over their panties to control their waistlines and display better figures. What was the date of that novel by Onetti? Women didn't wear girdles anymore. He had never seen Lucrecia in a silken girdle. Or dressed as a pirate, a nun, a jockey, a clown, a butterfly, or a flower. But he had seen her as a Gypsy, wearing a scarf on her head, large hoops in her ears, a peasant blouse, a full multicolored skirt, and strings of beads around her neck and arms. He remembered that he was alone, in the damp Barranco dawn, separated from Lucrecia for nearly a year, and he became saturated with the hideous novelistic pessimism of Juan María Brausen. He felt, too, what he read in the notebook: "the unforgettable certainty that nowhere is there a woman, a friend, a house, a book, not even a vice, that can make me happy." It was this awful solitude, not the scene of Gertrudis's cancerous breast, that had disinterred the novel from his unconscious; now he had sunk into a solitude as bitter as Brausen's, a pessimism as black.
"What does that mean, reconstructed?" he dared to ask after a long, uneasy parenthesis.
"It means she had cancer and they were removed," Doña Lucrecia informed him with surgical brutality. "Then they were gradually reconstructed at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Six operations. Can you imagine? One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. It took three years. But they made them more perfect than before. They even made nipples, with little wrinkles and everything. Identical. I can tell you that because I saw them. Because I touched them. You don't care, do you, my love?"
"Of course not," Don Rigoberto quickly replied. But his haste betrayed him, as did the changes in the timbre, resonance, and implications of his voice. "Could you tell me when? Where?"
"When I saw them?" Doña Lucrecia put him off with professional skill. "Where I touched them?"
"Yes, yes," he pleaded, no longer observing the forms. "Only if you want to. Only if you think you can tell me, of course."
"Of course!" Don Rigoberto gave a start. He understood. It wasn't the emblematic breast, or the narrator's essential pessimism in La vida breve; it was the astute means Juan María Brausen had found to save himself that had provoked the sudden resurrection, the return of Zorro, Tarzan, or d'Artagnan, after ten years. Of course! Blessed Onetti! He smiled, relieved, almost happy. The memory had come back not to drown him but to help him or, as Brausen said when describing his own feverish imagination, to save him. Isn't that what he said when he transported himself out of the real Buenos Aires and into the invented Santa María, and fantasized a corrupt physician, Díaz Grey, who accepted money for injecting the mysterious Elena Sala with morphine? Didn't he say that this transposition, this move, this carefully elaborated act, this recourse to fiction, saved him? Here it was, in his notebook: "A Chinese puzzle box. In Onetti's work of fiction his invented character, Brausen, invents a fiction in which there is a doctor, Díaz Grey, based on himself, and a woman, Elena Sala, based on Gertrudis (though her breasts are still whole), and the fiction is more than the plot for a movie requested by Julio Stein; confronting reality with dream is his defense against reality, his way of annihilating the horrible truth of his life with the beautiful lie of fiction." He was overjoyed, ecstatic at his discovery. He felt as if he were Brausen, he felt redeemed and safe, and then another citation from his notebook, below the ones from La vida breve, troubled him. It was from "If," the poem by Kipling: "If you can dream—and not make dreams your master."
An opportune warning. Was he still master of his dreams, or did they now rule him because he had abused them so much since his separation from Lucrecia?
"We became friends after the dinner at the French Embassy," his wife was saying. "She asked me to her house for a steambath. A popular custom in Arabic countries, it seems. Steambaths. They're not the same as saunas, which use dry heat. A hammam had been built at the end of the garden at their residence in Orrantia."
A bemused Don Rigoberto still turned the pages of his notebook, but he was no longer completely there; now he was also in the densely planted garden filled with gaudy nightshade, white-and-pink-blossomed laurels, and the intense perfume of honeysuckle twined around the columns supporting the roof over a terrace. He was fully aroused as he spied on the two women—Lucrecia, in a flowered summer dress and sandals that revealed her powdered feet, and the Algerian ambassador's wife in a delicately colored silk tunic made iridescent by the luminous morning—walking through masses of red geraniums, green and yellow croton, and carefully trimmed grass, toward the wooden structure half-hidden by the leafy branches of a fig tree. "The hammam, the steambath," he said to himself, his heart pounding. He saw the two women from the rear and admired the similarity of their figures, their ample, unconfined buttocks moving in rhythm, their elegant backs, the graceful undulation of their hips as they walked, rippling their clothes. They strolled arm in arm, loving friends, and held towels in their hands. I am there, saving myself, and I am in my study, he thought, like Juan María Brausen in his apartment in Buenos Aires, who divides himself into the pimp Arce exploiting his neighbor Queca, and then saves himself by dividing into Dr. Díaz Grey in the nonexistent Santa María. But he was distracted from the two women when he turned a page in his notebook and found another quotation from La vida breve: "You appointed your breasts plenipotentiaries."
"This is a night for breasts," he said tenderly. "Are Brausen and I nothing but a couple of schizophrenics?" He didn't care in the least. He had closed his eyes and could see the two friends undressing, without shame, with easy assurance, as if they had celebrated this ritual many times in the small, wood-paneled antechamber to the steamroom. They hung their clothes on hooks and wrapped themselves in large towels, talking animatedly about something that Don Rigoberto did not understand and did not wish to understand. Now, pushing open a wooden door with no latch, they passed into a small room filled with clouds of steam. On his face he felt a blast of humid heat that dampened his pajamas and made them cling to his back, his chest, his legs. The steam entered his body through his nostrils, his mouth, his eyes, and it seemed to be scented with pine, sandalwood, mint. He trembled, afraid the two friends would find him out. But they paid no attention to him, as if he were not there, as if he were invisible.
"Don't think they used anything artificial, silicone or any junk like that," Doña Lucrecia explained. "Not at all. They were reconstructed with skin and flesh from her own body. Taking a bit from her stomach, another from her buttock, another from her thigh. And leaving no scars. She looked terrific, terrific, I swear."
It was true, he could see for himself. They had removed the towels and were sitting very close because there was not much space on the slatted wooden bench attached to the wall. Don Rigoberto contemplated the two naked bodies through the undulating clouds of steam. It was better than The Turkish Bath by Ingres, for in that picture the crowd of nudes divided one's attention—"Damned collectivism," he cursed—while here his perception could focus, take in the two friends at a single glance, scrutinize them without missing their tiniest gesture, possess them in a complete vision. Besides, in The Turkish Bath, the bodies were dry, but here, within a few seconds, Doña Lucrecia and the ambassador's wife were covered with brilliant beads of perspiration. How beautiful they are, he thought, deeply moved. Even more so together, as if the beauty of one empowered the beauty of the other.
"Not even the shadow of a scar," Doña Lucrecia insisted. "Not on her belly, her buttock, or her thigh. And, of course, not on the breasts they made for her. It was incredible, darling."
Don Rigoberto believed everything she said. How could he not, when he was seeing those two perfect women at such close range that if he stretched out his hand he would touch them? ("Oh, oh," he groaned in self-pity.) His wife's body was whiter and the ambassador's wife was tanned, as if she had spent her life outdoors; Lucrecia's hair was straight and dark, while her friend's was curly and auburn, but despite these differences, they resembled one another in their rejection of the modern taste for lanceolate thinness, in their Renaissance sumptuousness, in their splendid abundance of breasts, thighs, buttocks, arms, in the magnificent rounded forms that were—he did not need to caress them to know—firm, hard, taut, compressed, as if molded by invisible bodices, girdles, corselets, brassieres. "The classical model, the great tradition," he rejoiced.
"She suffered a great deal with so many operations, so much convalescence," Doña Lucrecia said compassionately. "But her vanity, her will not to be conquered or defeated by nature, to go on being beautiful, helped her. And finally, she won the war. Don't you think she's beautiful?"
"I think you are too," Don Rigoberto responded.
The heat and their perspiration had excited them. Both were taking slow, deep breaths that raised and lowered their breasts like the ocean's tides. Don Rigoberto was entranced. What were they saying? Why had a devilish gleam appeared in their eyes? He pricked up his ears and listened.
"I can't believe it," Doña Lucrecia was saying, looking at the breasts of the ambassador's wife and exaggerating her amazement. "They would drive any man crazy. They couldn't look more natural."
"That's what my husband says." The ambassador's wife laughed, not innocently, raising her torso slightly to show off her breasts. She pouted as she spoke, and her accent was French, though the j's and rr's were Arabic. ("Her father was born in Oran and played soccer with Albert Camus," Don Rigoberto decided.) "He says they're better than before, he likes them better now. And don't think the surgery made them insensitive. Not at all."
She laughed, feigning embarrassment, and Lucrecia laughed too and gave her a gentle pat on the thigh, which startled Don Rigoberto.
"I hope you don't take it the wrong way or think badly of me," she said a moment later. "Could I touch them? Would you mind? I'm dying to know if they're as real to the touch as they are to the eye. You must think I'm crazy to ask. Would you mind?"
"Of course not, Lucrecia," the ambassador's wife answered warmly. Her pout had become accentuated, and then she smiled broadly, displaying, with legitimate pride, her brilliant white teeth. "You'll touch mine and I'll touch yours. We'll compare. There's nothing wrong with two friends caressing each other."
"You're right, you're right," Doña Lucrecia exclaimed with enthusiasm. And, out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at Don Rigoberto. ("She knew from the very beginning that I was here." He sighed.) "I don't know about your husband, but mine adores this kind of thing. Let's play, let's play."
They had begun to touch, at first very cautiously, very lightly; then more boldly; now they were openly fondling one another's nipples. They moved closer. They embraced, their hair became entwined. Don Rigoberto could barely see them. Drops of sweat—or, perhaps, tears—irritated his eyes so much he had to blink constantly and close them. I am happy, I am sad, he thought, aware of the incongruity. Was that possible? Why not. It was like being in Buenos Aires and in Santa María, or alone, at dawn, in the solitary study, surrounded by notebooks and pictures, and in that spring-like garden, in clouds of steam, dripping with perspiration.
"It began as a game," Doña Lucrecia explained. "To pass the time as we rid ourselves of toxins. I immediately thought of you. If you would approve. If it would excite you. If it would bother you. If you would make a scene when I told you."
He, faithful to his promise to spend the whole night paying homage to his wife's plenipotentiary breasts, had knelt on the floor between Lucrecia's parted legs as she sat on the edge of the bed. With amorous solicitude he held each breast in one of his hands, showing exaggerated care, as if they were made of fragile crystal and could break. He kissed them with the surface of his lips, millimeter by millimeter, a conscientious farmer who does not leave a speck of earth unturned.
"In other words, I was moved to touch them to find out if her breasts felt artificial. And she touched mine because she's responsive, because she didn't want to sit there like an idiot and do nothing. But we were playing with fire, of course."
"Of course," Don Rigoberto agreed, tireless in his search for symmetry, moving, in fairness, from one breast to the other. "Why did you both get excited? Why did you go from touching to kissing? From kissing to sucking?"
He repented immediately. He had violated the strict rules that established the incompatibility between pleasure and the use of vulgar words, especially verbs (suck, nurse) that did harm to any illusion.
"I didn't say sucking," he apologized, trying to bring back the past and correct it. "Let's stop at kissing. Who began? Did you, love of my life?"
He heard her faint voice but could no longer see her because she was fading quickly, like vapor on the mirror when it is rubbed or touched by a breath of cool air: "Yes, I did, isn't that what you told me to do, isn't that what you wanted?" No, thought Don Rigoberto. What I want is to have you here, flesh and blood, not a phantom. Because I love you. Sadness had fallen on him like a heavy rain, a downpour of impetuous water that washed away the garden, the residence, the scent of sandalwood, pine, mint, honeysuckle, the steambath, the two affectionate friends. As well as the heat and humidity of a moment ago, and his dream. The cold dawn chilled his bones. The sea crashed furiously against the cliffs with monotonous regularity.
And then he remembered that in the novel—damned Onetti! blessed Onetti!—Queca and Gorda had kissed and caressed behind the back of Brausen, the false Arce, and that the whore, or ex-whore, his neighbor Queca, the one they killed, thought her apartment was filled with monsters, gnomes, dragons, invisible metaphysical terrors who were pursuing her. Queca and Gorda, he thought, Lucrecia and the ambassador's wife. Schizophrenic, just like Brausen. Now not even his phantoms could save him, but buried him each day in deeper solitude, leaving his study, like Queca's apartment, sown with ravening beasts. Should he burn this house? With him and Fonchito in it?
In the notebook there gleamed an erotic dream of Juan María Brausen "taken from paintings by Paul Delvaux that Onetti could not have known when he wrote La vida breve because the Belgian surrealist had not even painted them yet," said a brief note in parentheses: "I lean back in the chair, resting on the girl's shoulder, and imagine I am leaving a small city made up of houses of assignation; a secretive village where naked couples stroll through small gardens, along moss-covered paving stones, hiding their faces with their open hands when the lights go on, when they cross paths with pederastic servants …" Would he end up like Brausen? Was he Brausen already? A failed man, a mediocre man who could not succeed as a Catholic idealist or an evangelical social reformer, as an irredeemable libertine individualist and agnostic hedonist or a creator of private enclaves of the highest fantasy and artistic good taste, a man defeated by everything, the woman he loved, the son he fathered, the dreams he tried to embed in reality, decaying day after day, night after night, behind the repellent mask of an executive in a successful insurance company, transformed into the "purely desperate man" mentioned in Onetti's novel, into a copy of the pessimistic masochist in La vida breve. At least Brausen finally succeeded in escaping from Buenos Aires and, by train, car, ship, or bus, had managed to reach Santa María, the city of his invention in the region of the Río de la Plata. Don Rigoberto was still lucid enough to know he could not traffic in fictions, leap headlong into dreams. He was not Brausen yet. There was still time to react, to do something. But what, what?
Invisible Games
I enter your house by the chimney, though I am not Santa Claus. I float to your bedroom and, very close to your face, imitate the buzz of a mosquito. As you sleep you begin to swat in the darkness at a poor insect that does not exist.
When I tire of playing the mosquito, I uncover your legs and blow a breath of cold air that numbs your bones. You begin to shiver, you curl up, you tug at the blanket, your teeth begin to chatter, you cover your head with the pillow and even begin to sneeze sneezes not caused by your allergy.
Then I become a Piuran, Amazonian heat that soaks you in perspiration from head to toe. You look like a little wet chick, kicking the sheets to the floor, pulling off your pajama tops and bottoms. Until you are stark naked, sweating, sweating and panting like a bellows.
Then I become a feather and tickle you, on the soles of your feet, in your ear, under your arms. Hee hee, ha ha, ho ho, you laugh without waking up, making desperate faces and twisting to the right, the left, trying to ease the cramps caused by your laughter. Until, at last, you wake, frightened, not seeing me but sensing that someone is moving in the darkness.
When you get up to go to your study and spend time with your pictures, I lay traps for you. I move chairs and objects and tables from their place so that you will trip over them and shout "Owowowww!" rubbing your shins. Sometimes I hide your robe, your slippers. Sometimes I spill the glass of water you leave on the night table to drink when you wake up. How angry you are when you open your eyes and feel around for it and find it in the middle of a puddle on the floor!
This is how we do it, how we play with the men we love.
Yours, yours, yours,
A Phantom in Love
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