You ask about the brother. And I’ll tell you: the brother is the sister is the girlfriend. “Despite the immediate recognition that occurs between these bodies, the affective encounter did not transpire until months later, when I wasn’t I nor was she he, when we were nothing but curls and tails, furs and wools, softnesses invoking the other’s touch. First, we caressed each other with words, we learned our secret names and relished our accents. Then touching on the shoulders and on the arms ensued. Words that invoked our need for the other, an exchange of scents seeping all the way into us. This was followed by the touching of hands, and, trembling, of the face and hair. Then lips and earlobes, until the golden curls that tumbled down over our foreheads had tangled together. Then came the clasps and embraces. Clothing fell to the ground and the buttons of our breasts appeared, little tits, tails that were penises, milk between the legs, feet that were claws, teeth marks that were scratches and which left gorgeous sketches tattooed across our many-colored coats. That’s how we’d suddenly end up: two naked bodies utterly given over to each other, beyond all material circumstances. She was inhabited by her brother, my boyfriend, and his lovers. The animal and spiritual kingdoms appeared, built atop the haze and the brightest clarity. There was nothing but her and me, and that presence was everything, the problem and the solution, the certainty of my individual existence and the impossibility of existing alone. We’d see the past as a wave of the future. Face to face, woven into time and circumstance, we were the everlasting paradox.”
“What will become of us tomorrow?” you’ll ask about the last line in the book. My response can be none other than its echo: “The brother confirms what he already knew, what he’d sensed in the dreams that drenched him at night and seized him by day, the sexual movements of his girlfriends, his sisters, and his mothers. A conversation full of contained emotion transpires between the three of them. Anyone would say that they share a secret language. Desire circulates in endless forms between these three, a desire so carnal that it filters through space and materializes in the bodies of other members of the collective. The conversation lasts for days, weeks, months, perhaps an entire lifetime. The brother finally makes a decision, the one he knew was approaching, given the way of the world. He determines the sacrifice of his masculinity, sphere of afflictions. Now he will be part of them and he will be made manifest only in the communion between the two. The women weep for days, though they aren’t sure if it’s because of the brother’s sacrifice or because he has passed down his physical and intellectual traits to them, his cathexis and his petit object-a, his cracks and his powers for their inhabitation. Now they have to exist with that. They’d never imagined such a world when they stood naked before each other. They mourn the past that was also the future, because they lost what they love most, adding and adding: the sublime brother and the carnal brother. Will it be possible, they’ll ask in the future, to bring him back to life and leave him in a museum, say, half alive and half dead, or maybe incorporate him into their own bodies, thus forming a new entity with six legs, six arms, three heads, little tits lining up like a fan? He said yes because he isn’t part of the sacrifice that’s been made, but his games delay them for days, months, years. Little by little, they find a way, exchanging parts of their body. But the women soon miss the pleasure they found in their orifices and they despise the murderous impulses triggered by wearing their tails in front. They get used to it. In the end, love becomes absolute in the submission of the brother’s and the boyfriend’s masculinity, so as to resemble and acquire—half god, half mummy—a coat of golden curls.”
You think I don’t remember the life we lived together. It was a full year in which you and I fused together in body, intellect, and spirit. We could never ignore the fact that we inhabited each other in every single stroke of our pens. The everlasting lives in us.
When you woke from this brief dream, she was the first image to appear before you.
Her long body stretched out across the cloth, coiled around itself, enveloped in its own blanket, sometimes white, sometimes tiger-print, her eyes half-closed, emitting a piercing light that followed her every movement. He caressed her legs’ fleecy coat until her thighs parted. Irises and purring arose. And with them, a soft tail that shuddered when it brushed against her back. He stroked her belly, offered up as it was, and amid the fur he discovered six little teats, lined up in rows, which he explored with his fingers and then with the tip of his tongue. He waited before her, nearly panting now, his lips so wet that they seemed to release a trickle down his chin, swollen with dense hairs that the man would have to shave the next day. He felt the brilliant pelt of her tail curl around his back from the right and slip into his left ear. He imagined her naked. Her furred spots fell, opening like a chrysalis, revealing virgin sunbeam skin, still flecked with a few dark marks of animal hide. She clawed off his shirt. He slowly peeled open her pelt, a little confounded by the foreignness of her body. His own felt foreign, too, invaded by unearthly desire, even when he lay beside the doctor who sometimes shared his bed. He hid his erection and made his way to the bathroom, wiping up traces of viscous liquid from the polished floor of the new house. In the bathroom, their union was absolute. Her golden curls tumbled down her back, and as his tongue, fingers, and member entered into the slick cavities of that body, he lost all grasp of what was ahead and behind, above and below, what he was and what he was not. It was a fleeting, totalizing, and wholly addictive sensation, light, mesmerizing, embodied in that other body that could very well have been someone else with him.
You think I don’t remember the life we shared. The closing night we sat at a long table with the rest of the company. In the corner was the actor with the dancer’s body, unwaveringly fixated on his psychoanalytic therapy and on flying back to his native British island as soon as possible. Beside him was the girl who was also a boy, whose ambiguity didn’t seem to belong to her. She’d squirrel away any hint of intelligence behind her convulsive desire to please. Farther down was the girl with green eyes and black hair, diligent in her inventories and convinced that success meant following instructions. Her life was as planned out as a script. Facing her was the young critic who hovered between the least compelling subjects possible, so fearful of destroying any conversation with her intellect that she’d vanish into wholly superficial matters that didn’t actually interest her in the least, beyond serving as a pretext for watching how the others acted and moved about life as if on a stage she could analyze. Beside her was a skeletal woman who gave off the consuming sorrow of someone who still doesn’t understand this world and is branded by a confidence that can only be attained with age, experience, and love of life. And beside her, a girl who seemed to be running a thousand-meter race, her voice agitated because she’d given her all in the first hundred, staring with cavernous terror into the future.
I could keep describing what I remember from the night we met again. If I did, I would recall the women seated at the head of the table, two women utterly different from each other, but chameleonic together, each adopting the other as her model, delving into the fascination that one woman can feel for another. Or I could talk about the couple who prevented us from ordering more drinks from the bartender. In the cab, cutting across the city through tunnels and bridges, you asked me about the character who was you in this scene. It’s my future, you told me, and the woman writing it was both of us.
Scenes from the Spectral Zone
Extermination
The Extermination showed up a few weeks before the machines came to Zanjón de la Aguada and drained the swamp (rank, fetid, black). That’s what I called him because he didn’t scare me like he scared everyone else, and he seemed to like it, or else he just liked that I was nice to him (get away from that filthy thing, you hear me?). I also wasn’t scared when I stood at a distance and watched him swallow a frog and then a lizard into the lower half of his body. It actually made me laugh, because that’s when I realized the Extermination trailed a little neon path whe
rever he went, like snails (come on, come look). Which he also ate. He stepped right over them and then they were gone, except for two bright little trails that crisscrossed over each other and a bigger one that kept moving (vrooom). I liked him right away, because I know what it’s like to be low-down and not have any friends. Besides, when the Extermination showed up, Remigio was hitting me and everyone else just watched and didn’t do anything. The Extermination scared them (every last one, one by one, I told her. And she said: so what did he do to the other kids? ’Cause I sure as hell don’t want to fight with the neighbors) and no big kid ever hit me again and I never left the Extermination’s side (get over here, you fuckin’ brat). We didn’t do much that first day. I went up to him and offered him part of a buttered roll my mom had wrapped up for me in a napkin (I’ll be home at seven). I took it out of my pocket and the napkin had come off and the butter was smeared all over the place. The Extermination didn’t care. He ate it anyway (who knows what kind of shady shit that kid’s gotten into). I stuck it into the little hole that opened up in front of me at head-level. I figured it was his mouth because there was a bad smell coming out of it, because he always forgot to brush his teeth (and what about that stench?). Then we sat together on a rock overlooking the river. When night fell, the Extermination gestured to me and disappeared, dragging himself off toward the water (come on, bring your ironing, the telenovela’s about to start). The next day, I went looking for him and saw him coming out of the swamp as if it were a cradle. He rose up like a crocodile: first his eyes, then his scaly body, then those gushes of color that seemed to be his clothes (he’s hanging out with that crook. He better not go in there or I’ll drag him out by his hair). Then I told him I wasn’t allowed to swim in the river. He gave me something wrapped up in the same stuff his clothes were made of (nothing but garbage, you know). I went and held it under the faucet. The water started to reveal an orange. We ate it in the middle of the day, when the heat was worst. It tasted good. Remigio showed up at eleven-thirty sharp with Gaby (trashy, stupid, gross) and they started pelting us with green peaches. One smashed me right in the face and I couldn’t really see what happened next. But people said later that it was like they’d sprinkled him with water, it slid right off him, and Gaby and Remigio were scared, because the Extermination had sort of stretched himself out long somehow and he looked huge, like he’d hit a growth spurt. (And then he stepped over them and ate them up, just like he’d eaten the snails and the frogs and the lizards. I saw him do it with my own two eyes.)
Then things got weird. People started yelling stuff at us on the street. And since the Extermination started eating other people, the ones who talked, the ones I told him were saying mean things about me and him, they got even more scared (hello, Police, hello, City Hall, hello, Health Services). Meanwhile, the Extermination started to grow, and he grew until he was as big as a house. And people started blaming him for everything (looks like the Extermination nabbed the Gallego, Maribel’s husband. I mean, he loved her too much to just walk out, don’t you think?). And people started showing up with cameras and they filmed me with the Extermination, and the talking lady covered her nose and mouth with a handkerchief (in this filthy, foul-smelling place, the stench is overpowering. Living conditions are deplorable. Children are dirty and abandoned). Then she threw up, but they left that part out. So I invited the Extermination over to my house so we could watch the nine o’clock news, but my mom wouldn’t let him in (get out of here, you revolting thing, don’t you dare set foot in my house) and I left with him, because he’s my best friend and he eats people to defend me and nobody else ever bothered me or hit me or said anything mean to me again. Then the machines came (toot, toot, toot, vsst, vsst, vsst, vsst) and it was awful, because the Extermination didn’t have a place to live or take a bath anymore. We sat on the rock to watch the machines pulling up the mud that had replaced the mucky water that had once been the Extermination’s home and they found plastic bottles, little bags of chicken bones, orange peels, cans, clothes, cardboard, a man’s skeleton, the top part of a car, some tires, a shovel, some photos, a notebook, a backpack, a piece of plastic from who knows what, cooking pots, an unbroken glass cup and another one made of plastic, a triangular glass, rotten flowers, plates of food, computers, cables, a lamppost, a stuffed panda bear, a petrified tree, an entire armored car, a house, an enormous hole that hurtled forward and shot all the way into the center of the Earth, a pencil, and a pencil sharpener. At least that’s what I could see from where we sat. And it rose up like a crazy wind, the steamy haze that had hung around us every day of our lives (finally someone is doing something and let’s hope all that garbage goes away, people here don’t have anything to eat, kids don’t have anywhere to play).
As the days passed and the swamp turned into a construction pit, the Extermination started shrinking and shrinking, until one morning he fit right in the palm of my hand. That’s when I thought about giving him a present so he wouldn’t feel bad or think people didn’t like him. So I got out the blender and stuck in a wooden board, a trash bag, a Coke bottle, some canola oil, a bat, toothpaste, an old engine from a toy car, a little bit of benzene, my mom’s hand, and some milk, and I blended it all up. I placed the Extermination on the kitchen floor and poured the mixture onto him. He suddenly started to grow, to feel like himself again. It didn’t last long, though. So I had to keep making lots of energy juices like that one, but I was running out of stuff. I didn’t have sheets on my bed anymore or underpants or neighbors to help out when they needed it. And I tried to explain it to him with a heavy heart. But I couldn’t, because a man showed up in a baseball cap with a logo on it (Why don’t you do us all a favor and calm the hell down, young man. You watch yourself now) and blasted us with water from an enormous hose without waiting for an answer. I was soaked. My pants fell down, because I’d given my belt to the Extermination. As I tried to haul them up again so that the new neighbors wouldn’t make fun of me, I saw how the Extermination was getting smaller and smaller until his tiny body disappeared, his mole body, his newborn kitten body, his fly body, and his whole self completely dissolved into the water.
The Root
They said there weren’t twelve of me when that woman gave birth to us, our arms and our chests and our legs coated in lanugo. The golden beads peeked over the mountains, advancing through the cold valleys of southern Chile. That woman seized us by the dark hair that tangled at our lower backs. She dragged us over hills and valleys until we reached the streambed where the land turned to water. She took the mud and christened us with my name. She sheathed everyone I was in a single word beneath the clay, our skin darkened in the damp. She told us we were one with that earth, it bore her name and she bore mine. Our curls and lanugo grew thickly down to our thighs. We slept on top of them in the fields. We learned to crawl across them. Ensnaring ourselves in them, we learned to follow that woman who wandered barefoot over the carpet of camouflaged leaves. We wore the paint of wet soil ever since we were born to that woman. That’s what they told us.
They told us our stories from the other side of the factory gate. Their voices were an Antarctic breeze. It sporadically dispersed the rotten stench expelled by pipes now laid across a streambed that had once belonged to us. The stench, they told us, bore the surname that replaced the root in us. As they muttered in secret, we recalled the first time we ever noticed that rank and penetrating smell. It was when we sprouted our tails:
One cold morning, I was sleeping alone on the hillside, among the bushes, just as that woman had instructed us. Sleep like a log, she’d say, because this land is yours and mine. All I wanted was to obey. A lone man came down the path in a horse-drawn cart. He got out when he saw my twelve bare legs entwined. He wanted to touch them, but he didn’t know which. He realized we were having sensual dreams about him and he fled toward the dawn edifice that grew like fungi, drying out everything around it. When we woke, we saw that a smooth, furry tail had sprouted from the base of our spines. It stirred up
dust and took on the color of the earth when it rustled against our curls. Our legs smelled of man and our twelve noses pricked at the whiff of industrial plague. Its smokes and waters rose artificially up the hills.
Their voices soft, their lips drawn close to my twelve pairs of ears, they reminded me what we did next. I took off my clothes by the streambed. Springy-tailed, I splashed earthy water onto my skin. That, they told us, was how they saw us for the first time. Our lanugo stood on end when we felt the Antarctic wind, the strong man-smell that accompanied their rhythmic voices. Our twelve pairs of eyes fixed the new arrivals with terror. I’d never seen anything like those creatures with their furry tails in front. They reminded us that they’d gotten into the water and the mud with us. They too had washed themselves of the pungent reek that had so abruptly pervaded the valley and the hills.
Their voices like breath, they told us how our twelve lips had joined their own and that our backs fused together in an obscene embrace. That our twelve pairs of sun-browned arms intermingled with legs as thick and long as sprigs of wheat. I unfurled my twelve tails to touch the neck of one of the new arrivals, seeping into their ears with talk that soon grew intimate. In the grit stirred up by all this anarchy, my curls inserted themselves into their earthy caverns until I lost count of how many bodies we were, how many words contained us.
Cars on Fire Page 11