Cars on Fire

by Mónica Ramón Ríos

  In the daydream, I felt your hands on my wounds. They didn’t stop, not grasping whether we were the set design or the performers inhabiting it.

  The next day, still in bed, you’d try not to imagine the taut nipples of that actress who was me, shedding a certain shame that would overcome you when you’d stare obsessively at the hard points beneath her blouse, your gaze so piercing that the woman who was me would turn around murmuring when she heard you. The same thing happened that evening as you tended my wounds, kneeling before the woman who was me and was not me.

  After the second day of the season, you looked at the lesions from the doorway. My onstage fall and the lead actor’s violent outburst had been, more than realistic, real. It was unclear whether the final ovation came from the catharsis prompted by action or by the incontinence of an audience uncomfortable with its own stillness in response to the explosion of violence. With the aid of a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers, you extracted the shards of glass encrusted from knee to foot in the legs that were sometimes mine. With water and rubbing alcohol, you erased, from the leg that was or wasn’t mine, the sketch left by the blood-trails along the skin and its tangled hair. With no other remedies at hand, you placed your cold fingers on the skin that would soon turn mottled purple with the actor’s blows. You helped that woman who was and wasn’t me to clothe herself in a pair of broad pants, pulled tight around the dancer’s leotard that was required of her character, which was also my character. She stood up, wiping off the smears of makeup under her eyes. She applied lipstick and gathered her mane, which had previously tumbled down her back in a flood of curls, at her neck. Together, they went up to celebrate with the rest of the company on the second floor.

  After the continuous, thunderous applause, my work was meteoric. A full year in which you and I fused together in body, intellect, and spirit. Your pen began to change, and you’d inhabit the pages in front of me, on your knees. Mine began to harden and I’d take to the stage, delivering speeches on red love as my golden curls shook fiercely free. Our encounters were many, sporadic, and banal, like you. But we could never ignore the fact that we inhabited each other in every single stroke of our pens.

  You ask the questions. I’ll limit myself to answering them. You must know that excessive attention exacerbates my asthma. My condition demands specific measures of besiegement, affection, and endearment, if they’re to vanish from our shared horizon.

  You ask about my ear. Imagine, if you will, that you were so lucky as to consult a specialist who could selectively erase your memories. I don’t know what you’d ask of him, but I’d certainly request that he erase as many sound-memories as possible, so that I could experience hearing them for the first time. Can you imagine what it would be like to encounter a piece of music, or a performance on an instrument as glorious as a piano, or the voice of someone you love as if it had never before existed, but without forgetting everything else that has made you what you are? In the absence of such a thing, I have this and my fantasies to drive it all away—what I find pleasant and what I don’t. You’ll understand when you’ve gone. The idea is to inhabit the everlasting.

  You ask why I bother writing about a subject as common as love after my successive works on death, illness, and ghosts. I felt that I was running out of time, and that my writing invoked the actions I’d find myself engaged in soon after. Meanwhile, outside, were all the indications of true disaster. The streets teemed with death and the work was increasingly arduous. I endured it with greater and greater hunger. A student in Germany who read my texts attentively was the the one who made me see it. And so I set out to write about things that endure over time. I wanted to integrate the freedom I’d experienced with my partners and lovers into my tormented spirit. I wanted to create an other, beyond me.

  You ask about the image of the nursing child that appears in the novel. No, I’m not interested in filial relationships; I’m interested in the prototype of all romantic relationships, in the image that represents the search for the beloved object. The topic of physical nutrition also comprises the possibility of feeding one’s spirit, experienced in love and in sexual satisfaction. Representing love in this way thus manifests desire in close affiliation with a culture of care that doesn’t necessarily inhabit the genital areas. Contained in this image, then, which we find in the paintings of Christian and proto-Christian culture, is the seed of a feminine love that my work seeks to explore.

  You ask about my love life. My answer is that this has nothing to do with what I write. The novel you hold in your hands is an invocation.

  I’d like to inform you that we’re straying from our subject, because my answer is simply a copy of the mental image of the perfect answer, never more than an effect. Your questions remind me of my past: the images of absent bodies that spread from the page to the screen, from the screen to the scene, and then to a mock-up in which the scene could eventually be filmed with dolls. What could possibly express love better than a copy? All the images that have seeped into us, affixed themselves to our bodies. All the images we recognize in our gestures. Perhaps love is simply the imitation of words, writings, works for the stage. What I ask myself is how to experience love after all those descriptions that tell us how to love. And I’m obsessed with how, in spite of it all, the whole melodrama that’s performed in gazes and violent gestures is experienced as something utterly unique.

  You ask about the paradox contained in the love between women, a secret, uncharted territory manifested in the brush of a hand, a strangeness barely populated by words.

  You ask about the girl’s evolution into womanhood in the novel. I can’t respond with anything other than what I already wrote: “The sun rose out of a hollow in the Andes Mountains, like a woman’s face with her gold beads tumbling down the slopes, filling the dryland bushes with a yellow clamor. By this time of day, the mosquitos were sipping their way along the row of walls, lashed away by striped lancets. Resounding, too, was the buzz and the movements of the man in his little cart rattling up dust from the cold dirt road. He peered through the bushes and saw the legs of a naked girl stretched out on a bed of poppies. He made sure that she hadn’t been dismembered and said to himself there she is. The mosquitos suddenly retreated and the girl dreamed that a river of stones and insects flowed out from between her legs. Writhe, flushed and embodied. The little girl’s eyes closed every time she tried to open them. As the man in the cart approached her, he saw that she was dreaming of him. He mounted his horse. The sun was staring straight ahead by now, and only a trail of dust was left high up in the mountains. The girl had had sensual dreams all night long and wasn’t sure what kind of hard body was protruding from the end of her buttocks, her feet now downy with lanugo. She went home to her parents’ house, slipping in through the window, and stood at the foot of their bed. Look a cat, they said. And they decided to keep it, maybe recognizing a sort of sadness in her eyes.”

  You ask about the girl when she’s almost a teenager. I can’t respond without citing what I’ve already written: “The dew fell as if in small flames. Through the window, she could see her mother feeling the iris buds that had risen up from among the varicose pistils with her fingertips. The mother, like the dawn, seized one whose leaves were scattered across the ground, drawing Ss over the meadows. The cat’s tail instinctively swirled and shuddered, prompting a loud screech. The inhabitants of the mountainside peered out their windows at her.

  The room with the cat in it filled with the smell of tobacco and the windowpane misted up. She felt the father’s eyes dense at the base of her back, where golden curls tumbled down. Through them, she felt the semi-smile of the face framed by thick hair, white and tangled. The father caressed her lower back and said those irises are like your curves, I won’t let you leave the house with them. But she escaped. She leapt into her mother’s arms, the woman too bathed in the yellow dust of her fingers. Clutched in those arms, the cat began to dream of the Virgin Mary, one breast exposed, like in the painting on th
e wall of the church where she’d go to wait out the afternoon heat. Tiny toothless mouths scratched at the Virgin’s smooth skin like little claws, simultaneously stroking her with their white shelter. The milk-nursers would molt. Some of them. Others wouldn’t be able to, forced instead to spend their lives in a coat of lanugo. They wanted to nurse so they could stand naked before the eyes, the light bulbs. When she woke, she felt the father’s tobacco-smell pacing around behind the rosebushes. The hens were trailing him, and the chicks she longed to chew into bloodlessness, their feathers lined up in a little row. From the window, looking dawnward, she saw the mother with yellowed fingers. The blight scattered onto the grass, into the dust-breeze. The mother brought an iris to her lips and ate it. Then another, until she’d finished every last one. The yellow sores on the mother’s face, the falling beads, watering down her neck—she saw it all. Buds blossomed from the cat’s striped tail.”

  You ask about that teenage girl who becomes a woman. As you can see, the transformation was ultimately incomplete, because she’s hung with tails, she has a hairy dorsal, a set of claws she uses to scratch the backs of the village men. I’ll answer your question with another passage from a book I didn’t write: “Her age was exactly what attracted the monsters.” I took, from this invocation, the image of a teenager and a long branch she uses to write her name and age in the sand, as if titling an identification file: “Under the grape arbor one summer evening, drowsing against her mother’s belly, she felt the earthquake, a kick that shot out directly from inside her mother. She was overcome with fear. She sprouted claws that dug into the mother’s naked skin. The pregnant woman’s shouts shook their way into the cat’s heart, where the tremble lived from then on. The mother flung her aside with a slap and the next day a hairless child emerged from her belly. The mother’s hands now had eyes for nothing but him. The cat roamed on all fours like a colo-colo, tail between her legs, feeling an earthquake in her pulse. She struggled to breathe. Her legs weakened and she couldn’t vault the walls as easily as before. She fell into a ditch and barely managed to limp her way back into her older brother’s room. She settled into a corner of the bed and regarded the rhythm in his chest, those elongated, female features, evoking the mother. She curled up onto his pillow. She coiled around his head as she caught a faint scent of tobacco and freshly cut flowers amid the milk-smell that invaded the bedroom and the sheets. She never left him after that. She molted under his caresses and sometimes forgot all about her tail, which seemed to hide among the folds of her skirts. She now wore them with pompoms, hoop earrings, and organdy. The brother, impeccably behaved, led her on his arm through the pine and cedar door to the annual party. The cloth of the dress, pulled tight with thread and percale, lent a certain sensuality to the music sounding from the speakers. They made their way over to a woman. This is my girlfriend, the brother said. The sister’s little glove split open when she extended her hand to the woman, who was maybe thirty-five years old, slender, with symmetrical features, short hair and exquisite manners. When she touched the woman, her torn gloves took on a scent of tobacco and iris, with an acidity she immediately recognized as milk. The woman’s arms were uncovered. Visible, too, were the long golden curls that tumbled down her back. Her heart wasn’t in her chest anymore. It was earthquaking in the pit of her stomach, in her legs, in the liquid that trickled from the triangle between the cat’s legs and tail.”

  You ask about the perspective shifts in the novel. I wanted to explore a change in voice toward a place without boundaries between bodies. I’ll answer with another excerpt narrated by the thirty-five-year-old girlfriend: “She had seen me in one of the concerts she attended with her brother a few months before we met. We realized this one day, later, when I was already her brother’s girlfriend. Looking at her in her bathing suit, I saw that she didn’t have a tail anymore, just a protuberance at the front of her legs. With her flat chest, she’d suddenly taken on her brother’s figure, but she was graced with a beauty that shone from her like lunar light. The first time we saw each other after her transformation, my eyes deceived me again and I struggled to focus on her. It was like staring into a sun. She stood beside me, waiting for me to put down the book I held in my hands. She told me about other writers I hadn’t read, emphasizing her superiority despite our difference in age. We spoke for over two hours that day, and though I had serious apprehensions about hiring her, given her youth and her paltry qualifications, the desire that swelled between us obliged me to do so. Without understanding how, her body lodged itself in me during the month we didn’t speak. Her smooth voice on the phone was a purring in my ears. That day, I offered my home to her for the first time, saying that there was enough space for her and her cats while she looked for an apartment that would allow her to live near mine. She refused. The second time she came to see me, I was struck by her bare arms, slim and browned by the sun. I could still sense the summerscent on her skin. We sat so close to each other that our long back-length curls jumbled together.”

  You ask why I write about melodrama if what I depict in my work is mere crisis. In recent years and their intensifying wars, various battles have been fought on the field of love, mainly over how to forge an adequate form of collectivity. Family can no longer serve as the only foundation for the collective, as we have been led to believe it must. Nor can working relationships, that retrograde hierarchy in which women have always been treated with suspicion. Nothing that can be taken for Greek tragedy, for a myth about the genealogical proximity of everyone who resembles each other in their bodies and features, in their customs and speech. It is, if we consider it with the depth it deserves, a reductive way to define love’s existing potentiality as a social connection. The text in which Alexandra Kollontai addresses young workers, who long to see love as part of a proletarian republic, is rooted in the ideal according to which all intimate acts are also social, and which are likewise at the service of a collective good. Kollontai puts it very innocently—pedagogically, I’d say—so that the youths would integrate their desire for other bodies into the proletarian project. By contrast, in her novels, or in the staging of such ideas, Kollontai slips in criticism, especially when members of proletarian society allow the individual to take precedence over the masses. She describes it as a constant tension between one and the others. The future lies in this confrontation. According to Kollontai, then, the point isn’t to solve the mystery of love, but rather to experience it in all its many political dimensions, turning love against the capitalist program. She also tells us that love may be read in its sociological contexts. She describes this in a broad, not terribly interesting way, because she focuses on major power structures, belonging to those who occupy the summits of society and write its history. And you know how untruthful that is. The interesting thing about Kollontai is how she posits fleeting sexual relationships as a benchmark of this development, the problem of property with respect to fidelity and amid the clamor of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. But she also describes these ephemeral relationships as a form of love that neither transforms our will nor engages in nor tarnishes rational work. Love stripped of such acts offers us no wings, she tells us. It neither tires nor consumes, but neither does it move us or catalyze transferences or new means of coexistence. When this collective becomes tangible in the material sphere, only then can it be conceived as a winged Eros: the emotional energy gradually accumulating in these selves seeks to manifest itself in the love-experience. The romantic melodrama that restores everyday development against a backdrop of class tension may be interpreted as a sexual instinct manifested as a seed of plenitude.

  You ask me about your interpretation of this text. What can I say, apart from the words I’ll invoke from that same book: the collective must be founded through a camaraderie that is contingent on the emotional and intellectual ties connecting its members. The collective is a single tapestry of friendship, passion, maternal touch, infatuation, mutual understanding, sympathy and compassion, admirat
ion and familiarity. So why deny oneself a feeling of profound friendship when one feels attracted to or tenderness for someone else? Winged, one experiences both sexual pleasure and the manifestation of love in each everyday element: the creativity that underlies the collective as an idea and an ideal. The point, then, is not to focus on the form taken by love, but rather on mutual acknowledgment, on the creation of a reality that belongs to us in an egalitarian rather than an individual way. A camaraderie-love, then, that recognizes the other’s integrity. What is this other than the most intense possible experience of an ethical program? What is sex if not the chance to build another world? What are the wings of this Eros if not what Audre Lorde describes, decades later, in her essay on eroticism as a feminist weapon? Eros isn’t only a biological force, but also a profoundly social emotion.