A Beautiful Young Woman

by Julián López

  Everything was turned upside down. Everything was a mess.

  There were no more postcards from extraordinary adventures, no Aztec suns with colored beards, there were no more photos of men and women sent to us by my uncle. There was no boyfriend in a beret with a red star, a beard, and a cigarette.

  There was no sofa, no bed. No lamp on the side for afternoons of reading. There were no more centuries of solitude, no more golden branches.

  There was no more worn parquetry or stuffed animals on the bookshelves. There was nothing.

  My house was destroyed.

  I remembered the scrap in my hand, and raised it before my eyes, swimming with light. The pages slipped away by themselves, like dead leaves in that song that says we’ll meet again, that you love me and I love you and that we’ll be together. Like leaves that spiraled to the ground as the whole world trembled because a very beautiful young woman was returning from somewhere along a path toward me. A woman like I’d never seen before. A dark-haired woman with bluish and noble skin, with hair that is black and lavish as a bullfighter’s cape.

  I looked up again, and once more I saw white, nebulous light. A light like I’d never seen before. I saw my destroyed house.

  I looked down again at the scrap and read the shred that fell apart in my hands.

  It was the cover of The Manipulated Man. The book dedicated to those too old, too sick, too ugly.

  I’ll never read again, I thought. Never. Elvira arrived and embraced me from behind.

  On my desk there’s hardly anything but a cup of tea. Leaves from a tin of Earl Grey, when it’s possible. Black tea. I like to bring it to my desk steaming and let it cool beside me, the air around me becoming charged from the modest chimney steaming from my cup. I like porcelain cups or old china. I like to buy them on impulse, without searching for them, in local shops. Every time I come across one, I go in and buy the remnants of sumptuous tea sets, old possessions from families who perhaps had to divest themselves of their crockery. Inheritances that went to the state because a little old lady died alone in her house full of cats, the sole survivor of her history, a big house with cobwebs in the door hinges, with a huge jacaranda tree that stains the spring purple, in her house with no gas or electricity, because there’s no way to pay the bill.

  Sometimes I ask the vendor if he knows where these incomplete sets came from, trying to fulfill my fantasy of gaining all the necessary information to locate the old house and compose a story that, at the very least, has a face that will see me for a moment and remember me.

  But every bargain comes from a swindle, and for the vendor it’s much better to know nothing at all of the history of the people he buys his treasures from, for a price much lower than it should be.

  I like buying these objects, reservoirs of something unknown, vestiges of time crossed with the tiny empires of family and the inevitable advent of obscurity.

  I love black tea. Earl Grey from a tin of Asian tea leaves, slightly damp if possible. I want it to appear like an almost solid lake that gradually recovers its lightness as it melds with the air and mixes with the memories of bergamot from English tins.

  I like drinking tea in deep sips, when the temperature of the surface and the depths of the teacup become uniform and palatable for the lips.

  I love the last mouthful, as rough as a cat’s tongue and astringent like nothing else, solid.

  I love the stray drop that sits in the belly of the teaspoon, on the saucer, next to the teacup. I love the tiny square of courtesy in the narrow bottom of the cup, in the smaller circumference that holds the tea on the inside and fits perfectly on the outside into the little ridge on the saucer.

  I love tea with water crackers, and although sometimes I can’t finish it because I can’t stand crumbs turned to mush, I can never fully resist, and I break the crackers in half and drop them gently into the tea, taking care to scoop them up quickly so that they maintain their crunchy texture but take on some of the puddles of tea. Earl Grey, if possible.

  I began to enjoy the taste of tea as an adult, and I think it required a certain discipline. At first it was more or less an unconscious decision: one day I simply walked into one of those stores and bought a teapot along with the teacups that remained from the set.

  I arrived home keen to learn: what blend of which type of tea, what origin, what temperature, how salty the water, how long to infuse. I began to make tea not in secret, but with great discretion. I didn’t quite know what I was building, but I couldn’t distract myself with questions or justifications. I had never liked tea, my mother drank yerba mate, I drank yerba mate. Who knew what I was doing?

  I suppose I needed my own ritual, to build something from the ground up, something that began with me and had no history except for my own. Tea, in a teacup, at a particular moment during my day. A religion, a fetish for my exclusive solitude.

  Something of my own.

  Maybe I did it blindly, in that moment of blindness when I stumbled across something like a personal truth, like divers who feel their way along in the dark depths of a river. Although this was true, it wasn’t without history; I’m never going to have children.

  I don’t know how I know. I didn’t know that I knew it so well, and perhaps the beginning of the tea was the end of that certainty. I exchanged a legacy for my own ritual. I gave up the possibility of a future history, passing on my own blindness to a new body so I would feel better. I gave up the possibility of tying shoelaces on tiny shoes and running to the hospital in the middle of the night, convulsing. I gave up life. For tea.

  Fabiana figured it out on one of the afternoons when she saw me at my desk. She came in looking for something and was surprised. She was kind enough to flatter me for a while before bombarding me with questions: The teacup suits you, you look great lifting the cup up and placing it back on the saucer. You look sexy. It makes you look even more silent than you already are.

  I turned around to look at her and oblige her with a half smile. I said nothing and changed nothing about myself in that moment, I stayed seated, opposite the few things on my desk, bending over my work, bending over my study. I wasn’t doing either of these things. I wasn’t doing anything. I was just looking out the window.

  Fabiana left the study, hurt. That was our thing, our way of being together. She would bait me and then say something about my silence. I would get mad but never said a word to her. I would have preferred not to get angry, to be a little bit more communicative. I always tried to stay in my mold, not to change or move so that she wouldn’t notice my anger, like dry ice that visibly steams but never quite melts.

  Is every woman annoyed by the solitude of men?

  Fabiana resolves matters by tidying up—she says everything needs to be in its place so she doesn’t expend energy on things that can be resolved easily. She always complains about my laziness—she says it terrifies her to see how I can go on living with the lid to the jar of mayonnaise or a knife covered in cheese on the bedroom floor for days on end without moving it.

  I can’t imagine my life without Fabiana. We have make-up sex and that resolves everything. I never miss her; if we didn’t see each other anymore I would think of her as the hot woman she is. I would jerk myself off, remembering the way I’d rub my face across her stomach, opening her legs, firm and pulsing with arousal to breathe in her pussy, rub my nose in it with soft touches, then quickly withdrawing, coming back again and again, faster, with shorter and more precise movements, each time more present than the last. I love fucking her. It drives me crazy to hear her moan, lift her up by the hips, and watch her writhe in the bed when I enter her deeply.

  But I don’t miss her. I never miss her.

  I think Fabiana’s main activity is to delouse me, sitting me in her lap to pick at my skull for fleas that she expertly removes, putting them in her mouth and crunching them between her teeth. It’s not so bad after all; she likes taking care of me, and that crunching between her teeth gives me a jolt every now and then, k
eeps me more or less awake.

  —

  On my desk there’s hardly anything: it’s just my desk. It’s like a laboratory I’ve put together to create moments just for myself, a structure designed to induce the idea of work. On that surface I could re-create the frog dissection we did in middle school—a task that was undoubtedly fundamental to my education—going out and catching one of the creatures, putting it in a jar, and bringing it to school for natural sciences class. Who came up with the name for that class, what’s so natural about science, what’s so natural about this obsession with slicing the critter open just to find out that its insides are the very image of the devil?

  First they showed us how to knock it out with chloroform, then how to turn the skin inside out using a scalpel, then stake it out on a slab of Styrofoam so that its inner nature would be fully revealed to us and confess its secrets. Bored, I sat there pressing the frog’s heart with the tip of my pen, and I was very surprised to see that the organ would begin beating again with just one touch. The heart is a stupid organ.

  —

  The desk sits against the window in my room, where the glass reaches all the way to the floor. During the winter the sun appears in the early morning, warming my feet. I love that. I get up before eight, drink a whole thermos of yerba mate, read a little, trace a possible architecture of the day, listen to music, scribble down stupid ideas, sketch things. A grand moment, a breakfast that takes hours, alone, wrapped in a robe over the top of my pajama shirt, otherwise naked, as I watch people passing by, pulled along by packs of obedient hounds. I swear at the journalists I hear on the radio, laugh like crazy at the journalists on the pirate radio, look at the graffiti on the wall opposite that separates the street from what used to be a warehouse and from the network of rails behind it.

  Shortly before nine in the morning, the sun begins to hit my feet directly. It rises up the window and devours me slowly, like an old crocodile. At that moment I take my shoes off, removing them carefully using the tips of my toes, so they land exactly where they just sat, and that way I can rest my feet on the leather.

  Two lizards abandoning their shady nest to warm their cold skin.

  I live for this moment, and I truly know what it means for morning to break clear, without clouds. A frigate with its sails extended to the sea after a night of fiery and bloody battle. On every sunny day I whisper the “Marcha de San Lorenzo,” and only then do I understand the necessity of victory.

  Few things make me happy, but the sun on my feet, sitting at my desk in front of the window in my room, is my own private festival, the thing I enjoy the most. And to receive this happiness, all I have to do is place my body there and wait.

  On my desk there’s hardly anything, but there are things that are piling up. Books that at one point I wanted to read but then get lost right away under another book that won my interest, and so they begin to form mounds of suspended reading.

  I began to read again as an adult, partly because of laziness, because I was too lazy to see through my promise of not reading. After all, that’s all there is to do, I told myself. Reading is the only thing you can do.

  I like to read anything I can get my hands on, and I like not knowing what my friends are talking about when they talk about literature. I like to read because it is a brutal exercise in unmemory: each sentence strikes out the one before it, inscription after inscription after inscription. Every letter is the same letter, a smudge of blurry alphabet.

  Each time I close a book, I forget it. Even the books that can make me feel all the way down to the soles of my feet. Even the book with that poem in it by Emily Dickinson that made me howl as if the winter sun were crawling over my feet, lost in the tides of the high sea of my life, directionless, or with every direction dispelled, like a frog pegged open on a sea of student Styrofoam.

  Just the slightest touch from a pen to bring the heart back to life, a slight touch from Dickinson, and the blood flows again, the frigates weigh anchor after the merciless battle. How did that poem go, Dickinson? I have no idea. If I put myself in the air of the morning that I read it, something remains, like the idea of a memory: “I am nobody.”

  Emily and my heart; a stroke of the pen is enough.

  I like to read, and I like to drink tea. Each taste binds itself to the last and becomes definitive; I’m not interested in building anything that depends on the past.

  There are very few things on my desk, and luckily every now and again Fabiana comes past and hisses at me. She wakes me up a little; she reminds me of everything I’ve forgotten, she pushes me up against it, she puts me to work. She encourages me to go and visit Elvira at the nursing home. She insists that I take her freesias or red carnations in the winter. She knows that Elvira likes carnations, that she comes from another time when carnations were considered beautiful and evoked Spain.

  Elvira loves to see me. When she sees me arrive, she smiles in her tiny little body and her eyes fill with tears. I kiss her on each cheek and I stroke her face while she pulls out the embroidered handkerchief from her sleeve, wiping her eyes and holding in the weeping that threatens to overcome her.

  I give her the flowers, and I give her the pastries she loves that Fabiana orders specially so that all I have to do is stop and pick them up on the way to the nursing home. Afterward it’s more or less the same: I hope the afternoon is clear and we can stroll in the little garden, the only place in the entire nursing home that doesn’t smell, so Elvira and I can take some tea in the sunshine sitting next to each other on the benches by the blossoming wisteria, holding hands. Elvira takes my hand and puts it on her lap with the incredible softness of her old skin, with the full power of her weak, smooth, loving hands.

  We don’t speak. I suppose neither of us wants to break out in tears. It can’t be easy to grow old, to be a lady who was once a tango singer, to see how the little flowers from the wisteria fall and to wait for the new buds, knowing that there is nothing to do but wait and wonder if you can.

  Elvira asks me to sing to her, but I’m a dog, and at the beginning I refuse. Fabiana found the lyrics to a waltz and a little tango song and taught me how to sing them, and so, at some point during the visit, I lean in closer on the bench until our bodies are touching, and then I begin singing, without her even asking. Slowly but surely, as if in another life I had been Floreal Ruiz. “That Ruiz was a chorus singer if ever I saw one,” said Elvira one day, and I was stunned by her comment. She likes it when I sing “Old Copper Clock” and pretend to have the mastery of Miguel Montero. She cheers and laughs to herself, without looking at me, her eyes full of tears.

  I have a memory of that nursing home that I cherish, one of those memories I want to maintain, but without the obligation of staying faithful to it, without using it, without pressing play every time I need to know who I am.

  That secret is just for me.

  I would have been about twenty-five years old, and it had been at least two years since Elvira had been at the nursing home. She was mostly fine; she only tuned out for short, sporadic periods, but she couldn’t live by herself anymore. One afternoon I went to visit her, and while we were there, in the little garden out the back, her sister surprised us with a visit. Desiré arrived without notice, and afterward admitted that she wanted to drop in on the nursing home when they weren’t expecting her, and she almost didn’t recognize me. When Elvira told her who I was, she couldn’t help smiling. I saw the very same woman, perhaps a little older, but she had the same impertinent curviness. Those rosy cheeks, her butt as high as the top of a circus tent, and that mouth just waiting to be kissed that opened up to smile at me. Modestly, but without any intent to hide. In any case, the modesty took hold of me, my face flushed, and my dick went hard instantly.

  Luckily we sat down and had tea. My eyes went from Desiré to the floor, I couldn’t stop looking at her, and whenever I realized I was staring I looked away, too obviously. It was so bad that at one point Elvira and her sister began to giggle too much for my li
king. At first it’d made me uncomfortable to be as hard as a post in the middle of a geriatrics’ garden that afternoon, sitting there next to Elvira, an old aunt with whom I had to behave myself. But sitting there with the table as a parapet, I could savor the happiness of my cock, even if it hurt a little. I didn’t care if anyone else saw me, appearing on the cover of a newspaper as the pervert from the nursing home didn’t bother me a bit. I was hornier than ever. The horniest I’d ever been, sitting there completely in love.

  That afternoon, when the wisteria was nothing more than a dark stain on the ground, we went back inside and left Elvira in her room to have dinner. The nurse was bringing her food as we entered the room she shared with two other ladies. Elvira paraded me around in front of the old ladies at the nursing home like a flag that filled her with pride. Desiré and I were all she had left of family, and she gloated that none of the other ladies ever received such a handsome visitor. I think they forgave her exaggeration because most of them had children of their own who visited, and she would always sing a tango if asked.

  When Desiré and I went out to the street, after kissing Elvira twice on the cheeks, stroking her face, and promising her that I’d be back to visit again soon, without thinking, without being able to do anything else, I took Desiré by the hand and stood next to her. This didn’t seem to bother her at all, and she accepted my hand in hers, warm and round.

  We began to walk in silence and then at the corner I stopped, kissed her, and whispered, “I want to fuck you, I want to be with you,” in her ear. I spoke in a low but desperate voice, unable to let her go, unable to hold back and try something more gentle.

  What happened afterward was like a jungle, with a texture I’d never felt before that made me feel like I’d been drugged. Desiré was quite a bit younger than Elvira, but even so, she was still an old woman, a woman who, when I saw her before me, seemed like Helen in retreat, like Malinche, the complete correntina.