Cars on Fire

by Mónica Ramón Ríos

  Inside the gate, we looked at each other and tried using our words to remember what had happened:

  At night, my twelve tails writhed at the sensual memory of all the men now crossing the valleys and the hills. We walked through where the boldo forests shifted into pine and damp, into desert and dust. Our twelve pairs of paws and tails slipped away in the sun, dulling our skins that startled at the smell of the factory, repulsive as a magnet.

  Their voices unfettered on the other side of the gate, they told us we’d been crawling around the entrance when the factory guards spotted us there. The uniformed men crossed themselves at the sight of our bushy bodies, our dirty hides, our lush tails, our plugged snouts. Before their insensitive muzzles, in their mechanical eaglet eyes, in their mouths full of illogical promises, I was the very vision of human misery.

  Whispering, they told us that men in white appeared with the same name sewn onto their hearts: Laroote Matte Paper Mill. With their voices dark in the murky night, they reminded us what that woman had said: despair will come from white. But we didn’t remember. Our memory had moved away from us when their touch petrified our tails. Through the guards’ peephole, the men in white suits, white aprons, white togas with their hearts stitched in Ls, As, Rs, Os, Ts, Es, Ms, and Ss offered me combs and silver beads to decorate my tail with. All twelve of us crossed through the gate.

  Their voices sullen, they told us that the men in white had put us in a swimming pool with chlorinated water. White were their words recited from a book of white pages. White was the god who wished to donate his patronymic to us so that we would no longer be one. They sloshed us with water and scrubbed us down. They plunged our heads underwater to christen us with the name. They called us: María de las Trinidades Jesús de la Concepción Consuelo Magdalena José. Our lanugo fell out and our tails fell off. The channels swept our fur toward the river and then out to sea, along with the rest of the factory waste. And they stitched our hearts with the same surname as everyone else’s. We were Javieras Fernandas Renatas Rosas Encomenderos Gutiérrez de los Laroote Matte. Now we, all twelve of us females, were the factory, they told us, and we’d become one with the white doctors, the white priests, and the white workers who had arrived to construct the building, which was also white. But we were also the females who were supposed to make paper by threading the fibers of the trees where that woman had given birth to us. Little by little, our skins dulled, our hairs lightened, and we started forgetting about the root.

  The moon barely illuminated the faces of our interlocutors. Not even twelve pairs of eyes could make out their blue bodies on the other side of the white gate. They asked us if we remembered our name. I answered for all of us: María Martirio de la Eterna Concepción, number twenty ninety fifty-five and six. They inquired, touching their long fingers to our twelve white uniforms, if we knew who had conceived us. We told them what was said in the factory aisles: that our parents lived in Santiago de los Chiles, but they’d be visiting us soon to pet and school us.

  With their voices, they told us the news from beyond the gate: rumor had it that the Laroote Mattes appeared one day at dusk and were staying in a house by the ocean. When they looked out the window, they might very well see the dark stain on the river’s mouth, the mixture of the factory waste and our lanugo.

  And in their conspiratorial whispers, they confessed to us: we’re looking for that woman. And with the caresses their tentacles lavished on our hair, now lighter in color and gathered into a bun, they asked: do you know what’s become of her? And as they loosed our hair from its tie, letting our curls tumble down over our white apron, their muted voices asked about that woman’s body. They threatened us with every touch: your secret hair will grow and twelve tails will make you remember.

  We let ourselves be loved that night as we’d done once on the muddy riverbank. But a couple of our eyes saw that their hands held notebooks to write down our secret name.

  For days, we allowed their muted voices to tell us our stories, allowed their course hands to coax our black lanugo into growth. At dawn, we’d comb each other’s long curls and thick-haired spots, which were starting to appear on the short tails we now had between our legs. And we remembered:

  We dug a hole in the material made with ground canelo wood all the way down to where the rank green earth appeared with its boldo fluff. We kept digging until we found the very first bone that had belonged to that woman. We dug deeper and deeper in search of the second bone, then the third, then the twentieth, then the hundred seventy-fifth, until we collected two hundred six bones altogether. Up on land, we promised her a burial.

  We emerged from the ground. We appeared on the barren, fetid plots that housed the Larootes and the Mattes, our parents, in bedrooms with sealed windows. From the roofs, we could see them sleeping on the lanugo lost to years and years of obscurity. With our long tails, we inserted sensual dreams into their bodies, which were covered in our color of hair. They jolted awake, terrified, splashing themselves with water from the depths of the earth, which sprouted up as black as when the ground was ours. It dirtied their hair and the mud stripped them of our lanugo, which they’d planted on their skins with the secret name that belonged to us.

  The twelve of me sprouted into a hundred. Once there were a hundred of me, we became legion. With the power of the breeze from our lips, we blew the progenitors of oblivion right from their beds. We yanked their mattresses out from under them, we jerked the bristles from their beards and their backs, we wrested away our skins. And we took the curls, which were our curls. We dragged heaps of them over the hills and valleys until we reached the streambed where the land turned to water. We buried that woman’s bones in the mud, we buried that lanugo from which I was born, and we sheathed the name that marked the earth and me in water and earth.

  Then the storm hit and made the land grow wild with roots. Wherever the men in white aprons happened to be, they would see lanugo burgeoning between the concrete and the industrial mushrooms, and they would hear the secret name spoken loud and clear: the name that hails from all our fragrant winds, our own damp earth.

  Instructions for the Eye

  Our voice sounds at the first light in twenty centuries of affliction: we envision the entrance to the exhibition space as a glass pane with nothing attached to it, not even a handle. It would open at the merest touch of a hand or the nearby presence of a body at room temperature. Entirely transparent, lacking any fixture for the hand to clutch, passers-by would continually bump into it as it swung open.

  Our narration sounds better than the Champs-Élysées: we’d glimpse a gallery-goer, hopefully the artist herself, walk right into the glass and gash her eyebrow, leaving a permanent scar. We’d notice a line of blood trickling into her eye.

  Our voices sound like anesthesia: eventually the swelling and dried blood would make it impossible for her to actually see the exhibition space. We’d also strip the artist of her capacity to make out the people milling around the gallery, looking at her art or entering through the glass doors.

  Our narration sounds like silk threads stitching skin: no one in the massive audience would recognize the woman with the swollen, bloody eye as the creator of the works on display.

  Our voices sound like the subway screeching: we’d notice a half-blind older woman with bluish hair and tremblingly painted eyebrows who’d squint her eyes, clutch the artist’s arm, and ask her to narrate what she saw.

  Our voices sound like tradition: we envision the exhibition space as a plane painted on the ceiling, hopefully onto a mirror or some lighter reflective material. The plane would indicate the kinds of movement and specific actions with which the viewers should approach the works. Occasionally, we would see the visitors twist their necks to regard their own bodies at unusual angles.

  The narration sounds like a multitude: we’d see the artist, who is also hard of hearing, leading the old woman into the adjacent room, inventing how the works should be heard. We follow her with our eyes.

 
; Our voices sound like solace: there would be markings on the floor to instruct the observers how to position themselves before the works of art. Never in a fixed position, always in motion, always at an uncomfortable angle for the eyes. Solid bodies would impede them from looking.

  Our voices break the glass and smash the cornets: the first piece would be made of a shaft of light emerging from the floor and aiming at the roof. Laser-like, it would give the impression of piercing the bodies it illuminates. If a viewer were to stare directly into the beam, it would blind her.

  Our narration is diluted by the wind: ideally, a passing body would activate a camera and a flash.

  Our voices have no origin: one of the people photographed would have a swollen eye.

  Our narration sounds like a distant continent: when the flash went off, the old woman would clutch the arm of the artist with the scab over her eye, marking her skin with her enameled nails.

  The voice rises up from the afterlife: beside the artist with the bruised and blood-caked eye and the old woman with blue hair, we’d observe a woman doing a performance and announcing the artist’s name into the microphone. Nobody would know where to look.

  Our voice multiplies eternity: we’d notice tiny metal balls scattered all over the floor that would occasionally deprive bodies of stability as they stopped to observe the art. We’d offer alcohol to their organisms so that they feel they’ve lost their way entirely.

  Our narratives resound in several cities: observed from up close, the little metal balls would clearly reveal themselves as elongated, eye-like objects. More than one person would stuff some into their pockets.

  We look like solitary animals as we narrate: we would try to keep the little metal balls from straying beyond the hall and rolling across the dribbles of blood that would streak the gallery floor after trickling down from an artistic eye.

  Our narration sounds like a cap and gun: one of the pieces, a wax doll, would imitate the security guards. The doll would wear a black suit, pants, vest, and jacket. Its shirt would be white and a delicate tie would cut across its torso. It would be wearing pale blue shoes. The doll made to represent a male or female guard would have an intercom at its ear and its hand would conceal a diminutive notebook that, if moved, would allow it to take notes on the viewers it monitored.

  A voice rings out: the doll that represents a male or female guard would have a liquid eye. This would be barely perceptible. Someone in the crowd would take a long, prudent while to realize that the person monitoring them was not in fact a person but just a doll. To do so, she would have to look the doll directly in the eye. Its texture would disappear with any change in the angle of observation.

  The narration seeks half-tones: visitors would reach a wall where what looks like a painting is hung, but which is actually a 1.3 by 2.8-meter low-thickness Plexiglas block. The surface would be marked to imitate patches of lawn. The drawings would suggest the blueprint of a garden. But it would be indiscernible to the naked eye. To make it visible, one would have to fix it with a light source, which means that all we’d see would be the shadow of the lines on the Plexiglas.

  Our narrative grows raucous: in the adjacent hall, the floor would be scattered with ears. Ideally, the bodiless organs would be located in the garden, in the middle of nature, in such a way that the pieces are clearly the remnants of a massacre.

  Our voice will never go silent: in the middle of the hall of ears, there would be a glass box with a handwritten book and a series of drawings and seals. Some of them would say: “popular tragedy,” “smoking in the sun,” “landing as a group,” “dressing up in costume and going out,” “distant mirror.” They would be printed on wood, cork, or plastic with fluorescent ink and a seal of a wine glass or a loaf of bread between the words. At the end, it would say “In Memoriam, Édouard Levé.”

  We read from the book in a weary voice: it would say that a tongue cleans the broken eye in its studio. There’s a typewriter hammering away at the instructions for the eye. With each click-clack, a text is fashioned out of prostheses: fake legs, corsets bound to a lover’s back, a cast sheathing a great-aunt, a drunk tongue on a false eye, the paper tongue fluttering at a gold tooth, a hand sketching shapes on a misty pane of glass, a wig on the shelf.

  Our voices echo like dismembered animals: the artist would thus envision a space with different human body parts suspended in a metal ring.

  Our narration is also a mantra: there are people who would travel to the gallery like participants in a religious procession.

  Our voices fade into silence: there would be a mirror in the middle of the room. The old blue-haired woman and the artist would make their way toward it.

  The narration fuses into the ambient noise: as people walk along, the origin of every human species would be explained. Pages and pages of bodies would pass by. It would all look like the inside of a subway car, paneled with posters telling the story of humanity like an endangered animal.

  The narration is confused with the people following the artist and the old blue-haired woman: the mirror wouldn’t reflect the entire image, just what the observer could see. In this way, neither the old blue-haired woman nor the artist with the swollen eye would see her own reflection. They would only hear the tales told by the visitors to describe their actions, as if they too were part of the exhibition.

  Notes

  “Dead Men Don’t Rape” first appeared in Tupelo Quarterly. An excerpt from “Cars on Fire” was published in Anomaly.

  Cars on Fire contains quotes by many other writers and artists, including Marosa di Giorgio, Gabriela Mistral, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Cathy Caruth, Julia Kristeva, Édouard Levé, Ernst Jünger, Lourdes Casal, Audre Lorde, Alexandra Kollontai, Ovid, 7 Year Bitch, a message from immaterial beings, and several speeches by former presidents whose names we would do well to forget.

  MÓNICA RAMÓN RÍOS was born in Santiago de Chile. She is the author of the novel Segundos (2010) and the twin novels Alias el Rucio and Alias el Rocío (2014-2015). As a scholar, she has written extensively on Latin American literature and film. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies and journals such as Anomaly, Granta [Spain], Asymptote, Alba, and Buensalvaje. Ríos is also one of the creators of Sangría Editora, a publishing collective based in Santiago and New York.

  ROBIN MYERS was born in New York and is based in Mexico City. She is the author of several collections of poetry published as bilingual editions in Mexico, Argentina, and Spain. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Waxwing, Inventory, and elsewhere. Her translation of Ezequiel Zaidenwerg’s Lyric Poetry Is Dead was published by Cardboard House Press in 2018.

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