by Naomi Holoch
But Sheila didn’t let that bother her. She was always full of ideas and was almost always in a good mood, and she was one of those people who could keep a conversation going indefinitely, asking lots of questions, which she answered herself, you didn’t have to contribute a thing. She was tall with reddish curls that she rolled up on curlers every evening, and she had these large, merry, yellow-brown tinderbox eyes that looked straight at Inger, and she said: “Oh, Inger! You’re lucky! You get so many letters! You get letters every single day. I never get any!” And Inger said: “That’s because I write them.”
This was her first decent, witty reply. She was proud and happy. Sheila answered: “Well, then. No wonder you get them.”
No wonder! That was how you said it! No wonder! Never again would she be stumped by “No wonder.” No wonder, you could say. No wonder.
This was a wonder.
Sheila’s words ran incessantly through her head. When she wasn’t there, Inger still heard her. It was a remarkable phenomenon, and she looked forward—to the daughter of the house coming home.
It took some time before she realized that was what she was doing. That she was actually doing it all the time. And when the daughter of the house was home, she was simply and unexpectedly happy.
One afternoon Sheila couldn’t find her gloves. Inger saw them on the desk and made throwing motions to her, because she was standing in the other end of the kitchen, but since she couldn’t think of the right English word for throw, she shouted “Fakk!”
Sheila got just as red as she had when Inger had handed her the sanitary napkins the week before. “You must NEVER say that when Mummy is listening, Inger! It’s not suitable.” “But what’s wrong?” “That word!” “Faak?” “Oh, stop it!” “But it’s Norwegian! … it means … to, to, to receive!” “Well it means something entirely different in English.” “But what does it mean?” “It means to sleep with someone,” Sheila said.
Finally Inger understood that what she had stood there shouting was nothing less than to fuck. “Fuck!” she had yelled, innocently. “So what do you say?” she asked. “Catch!” “Oh, ja,” said Inger, “you should hear what the past tense of that word sounds like in Norwegian.” “Caught?” Sheila said. “Yes,” said Inger, laughing. “But what does it mean? What? What? Don’t stand there making fun of me.” “It means to … to … to …,” Inger said. How could you translate kåt? Kåt was kåt and nothing but kåt. “It means to … want to sleep with someone,” Inger said.
Now they both laughed. Stood there not going anywhere. Sheila threw off her jacket. “Ish! I don’t feel like going to the university this afternoon. Let’s have some dirty words! What is ‘fuck’ in Norwegian?” Inger said the word, and Sheila repeated it. It sounded comical in an English mouth. “It’s a swear word in English. Fuck off.” “Not in Norwegian. You don’t fuck off unless you are really fucking off.” “What’s bloody?” “Blodig. But we don’t swear with that, either.” “But aren’t there any dirty words in Norwegian then?” “Sure there are. Faen i helvete!” “Faen i helvete,” repeated Sheila. “What does that mean?” “The devil in hell.”
Now they got around to sexual organs. But when they got to the female ones they got quiet. Sheila didn’t want to say the English ones, and Inger didn’t want to say the Norwegian ones. Fitte, thought Inger. Cunt, thought Sheila. And they were quiet.
This—the most wonderful place on the whole body, where all life began, had—on both sides of the North Sea—the worst and most unmentionable name of all. Here there was no difference. The other things you could and couldn’t say were ridiculously different in the two languages. But here they merged into a single gigantic linguistic disgrace. Cunt and fitte.
The two girls looked at each other. They’d been through everything. And here they stood. They looked down. Then they whispered their words. Sheila and Inger whispered the names of their sexual organs. For that was the worst thing that could be said, so it was amazing that it had any sound at all. And the strange thing was that the word that wasn’t their own country’s word, they could easily say out loud, without scruples and disgrace.
And this was how Inger managed to hold out at 6, Aberdeen Road.
Translated by Margaret Hayford O’Leary
Esther Tusquets
In her novel The Same Sea as Every Summer (El mismo mar de todos los veranos, 1978), which is excerpted here, the Spanish writer Esther Tusquets creates a complex portrait of a sexual relationship between a university professor and one of her female students. Born in Barcelona in 1936, Tusquets is one of the most influential feminist writers in contemporary Spain. Although the novel appeared at a time that encouraged more liberal attitudes toward homosexuality and women’s rights, it nevertheless created controversy, given the primacy and explicitness of its lesbian content. These excerpts evoke the life of a previous student generation as seen through the eyes of an older woman in search of remembered vigor; her liaison with a young Colombian woman, Clara, draws her into the passion of the “New World.”
from THE SAME SEA AS EVERY SUMMER
I am behind the desk—definitely on the other side—on the platform, and just by stretching out my hand, I can touch the blackboard at my back. And a little farther, between the blackboard and the first of the high windows, a relief map of Spain. Greens and ochers attenuated by the dust of a thousand years. I didn’t believe that they still made this type of map, although it is very possible that it is the same one from back then, useless and forever forgotten between the blackboard and the first window, because the strange thing about my return this October—this time on the other side of the desk and on the platform—is not the things that have changed, the uncontrollable outrage of time, of so many years, of almost thirty years—I returned to the university after almost thirty years and everything was, of course, very different!—the surprising thing, the incredibly strange thing, is that here—as in the shadowy well of the library—almost nothing has changed. You wake after centuries with the prescribed words already on the tip of your tongue: “Where am I? What does all this mean?” You are ready to glance around with astonished wonder, but the glance of astonished wonder happens by itself, only in this story what produces it is that you are in the same place and among the same objects as when you went to sleep, because in the Enchanted Forest everything has slept while you slept for the very same one hundred years, everything has slept under the influence of a good fairy so that you won’t feel uncomfortable when you awaken. The same benches of dark wood, with inscriptions patiently carved during the drowsiness of the classes—some, many, have probably been added, but surely those from my time are still there, unharmed by possible new coats of paint—the same tender, wavering green behind the panes of the high windows—you don’t hear, but you can see the murmur of the trees in the plaza, and just seeing those branches moving up there, it is as if all the warmth of spring were brashly seeping into the still-cold, dark classroom: it was on mornings like these, in the Mays of exam time, when spring murmured outside and inside it was still the worst of winter, mornings in which we were already at the classroom door, about to enter the library or the seminar room, it was on mornings like this one when we would suddenly decide that the very essence of human freedom, the fullness of an existence in which our truest essence was rooted, consisted of something as simple as going out into the street and walking down to the sea (the Ramblas were like a big, green, purring cat, the tip of its tail submerged in the sea), and if we all had not gotten out of bed when the alarm rang, had not dressed and breakfasted quickly (to be there at nine on the dot), had not run the risk of running into the chubby little priest in the hall who supposedly taught us Greek or Latin, because we escaped from class minutes, seconds before the arrival of the teacher (now I am on the other side of the desk, on that grotesque and worm-eaten platform that will fall down any day now, and perhaps I don’t recognize the faces of the boys and girls who probably sneaked off toward spring right next to me as I was coming inside a
nd going against the current into winter), if we had not known that there were only three four fifteen days to go before exams and there still remained ten fifteen twenty all the lessons to study, perhaps walking out into the street and down to the sea (first filling our mouths with the taste of a thousand strawberries submerged in whipped cream) would not have assumed that character of a gratuitous, free, almost perfect act, and I believe that in part it was the expression, the words that we liked so much, because cutting class and walking down to the sea sounded good, and at that time, perhaps more than at any other moment in our lives, our performance was influenced by the magic of words and we enjoyed playing our roles as we loudly and disdainfully pushed our way along the shadowy walk, interrupting each other, overdoing poses that we had just learned, often poorly learned at the movies or from books, we acted out an impossible House of Troy for the old people who—like the attendant in the library—would look at us reprovingly from their benches, for the women that we almost knocked down on our way and who puffed and snorted like aggressive whales behind their children and their shopping carts, and this was definitely a performance in their honor (young insolent students who cut class and walked down to the sea), then more than ever obliged to present an image, to turn ourselves into a show, to live by words, as if being young did not by chance entail, as it always had and I imagine still does today—because they don’t seem so different to me, however much they smoke grass, make love freely—freely?—wear blue jeans and haven’t read, don’t even know what The House of Troy is—lying hours on end in dark rooms behind locked doors, sick from smoking, from literature, from this lethal May air, our bodies limp, restless, and exhausted, struggling clumsily in the sadness and in the anguish that had been pursuing us since adolescence—or perhaps, as in my case, since childhood—and which now, on the verge of disappearing, or at least becoming transformed or toned down, reached its final paroxysm and seemed on the verge of destroying us, poor victims of the greatness and servitude of being only seventeen years old, because among ourselves, in rooms overflowing with smoke and the strumming of guitars, between the cheese sandwiches still associated with our childhood and the Cuba libres of our newfound freedom, we admitted that we were alone and sad and frightened, infinitely bereft of support and direction, but on the street, and especially on the Ramblas, and above all during exam time, if we walked down to the sea, we felt obliged to present this noisy, violent, somewhat irresponsible and insolent image, this image that was brought out in us and then rejected by those unsmiling old people sitting on the benches, the whale women behind their children and baskets. The same benches of dark wood, the same tender, wavering green behind the tall monastic windows, the same platform, worm-eaten and threatened with collapse even then, the same long old desk—as old then as it is now—the same relief map of Spain. All a bit grimy. Worn, grimy, dusty. Cold. Today I feel an urge to go up to the map and run my fingertips carefully along the peaks of the mountain ranges, submerge them in the river basins: if not for this, what is the purpose of this absurd map, lost forever in a university classroom where geography has never even been taught? But since I am on the other side of the desk and on the platform—the fact that I don’t really know why or what the devil I am doing here is another story—since I definitely can no longer fill my mouth with a thousand strawberries with whipped cream at the farmers’ market, because strawberries are almost nonexistent this year in my insipid city, and where there used to be stands, a sinister supermarket opened a short time ago, since I can’t walk down to the sea, because I have lost my companions and spring and even the desire to do so, it will be better for me to stay very, very still at my place, talking to them about something—as soon as they finish filling out the cards with a few questions that I gave them simply because I didn’t know how to begin today—without giving them an opportunity to take me, now that I have almost finished the course, for a half-crazy person. In mid-May, with the trees waving their tallest branches behind the high monastic windows, with all the murmuring and the stifling sensations of spring in the wide plaza, with the parks more obscene than ever as the luxuriant new leaves burst forth, with all paths open to the sea—I wonder if the Colombian girl could be walking along one of them now, or if she is under the magnolia in a flowering garden, or sitting with the idiots who stayed behind and are toiling over the cards—it seems absurd to be installed on the other side of the desk, on the platform, absurd to be here this morning. But it seems even stranger that they—I repeat that I don’t think they are all that different from us, although they wear sweaters and blue jeans, have their hair curled or long, their cigarettes or joints (that certainly has changed) permanently lit—hand the cards to me one after the other with great seriousness, return to their places, and sit down in silence, their eyes fixed on me—not on the tall branches—while I began to talk to them about Ariosto.
…
I have finished the repertoire of my stories—although it is only a feeling, since the stories are almost infinite—I have the feeling, then, of having finished the repertoire of my stories, stories that are almost always very similar, and that I renew, revive, and repeat in the face of each possibility of love, as if loving were only finding the best of pretexts to recall, or perhaps to invent, to take dusty old memories out of the closet, to open the costume trunk and to put on the costume of ancient sorrows—at bottom the same, single sadness—the costume of innumerable, renewed periods of loneliness that constitute a life, before an untried and perhaps—oh, miracle of love—even remotely interested onlooker, as if loving is a pretext for offering this precious image of myself once again—you are exaggerating, says Clara, you aren’t so narcissistic—yes, Clara, I am so narcissistic, although quite possibly I don’t even like this image, which I nourish and spoil, as my father spoiled and tended his image to the end, his image of a weak-willed, tired man, a bit cynical and perfectly capable of aesthetic infamies—quite possibly I don’t even like this image of myself—for offering this image in a sad mating ritual that, unlike those associated with many species of fish and birds, is much grayer and infinitely less showy, and I have already put on and taken off all my feathers, with their crests and plumes, I have fluttered my translucent fins and multicolored tails in warm tropical seas, I have poured upon Clara the bittersweet tide of memories, in the abysmal depths of my grottos—Clara, the most attentive and exceptional of all my listeners, because Clara isn’t (I have never wanted to say this) one more in a long line of lovers, and until Clara, absolutely no one came so close to sharing and taking on my unrecoverable past, so close to accompanying me in impossible, definitive loneliness—the bittersweet tide of memories that still live, but that may never have been the way I recall and tell them to her, I have related the furthest, most intimate of my stories to her—except the one that I have never told anyone until now, that I stubbornly refused to discuss or comment with anyone, the poisonous one lying hidden in the deepest part of my marshes, throbbing and burning like a wound that never heals, the story that expelled me, that destroyed and nevertheless condemned me forever to my labyrinths, and perhaps I have never told it to anyone, not even to Clara, because I am incapable of reducing it to a story, of putting in order and reducing to story form that lethal, interminable injury that in reality marked the end of all stories and started a gray period consisting only of data, facts, and quotations—I have told my stories, I have put on and taken off my costumes, I have exhausted all the recesses in my labyrinths and grottos, and now I am at peace—or almost at peace—with the ghosts of a past that I have lovingly reconstructed for Clara, or for myself, taking advantage of the pretext that Clara offered me, or perhaps I hoped that when I raised my past from the dead once again, raised it at last for a different listener, it would die once and for all, would stop wandering about like an unhappy, sleepless specter, would rest in peace under the flowering almond tree in the cemetery, because the ghosts are vanishing and the past is collapsing around us gently and softly, leaving me empty and calm
, while, in this landscape of ruins and remains, Clara—a laughing Clara who asks, when I finish the story of Sofía, “Why are you telling me these things? What are you trying to frighten me with or what are you trying to warn me about? About you? About myself? You know that I will risk it anyway”—Clara flourishes and relaxes among the ruins; I see a different Clara emerging in Grandmother’s old house, through which we seek each other and caress each other without respite, but also without impatience or apprehension, with new, recently learned gentleness, everything surely imposed by this smiling, expansive Clara who—having annihilated the ghosts of a past—seems to have taken sure command, because there has been no repeat of the desolately violent caresses of the first days, as dreadful as the croak of sea birds lost inland on stormy afternoons, or of the tender brutality on that afternoon when Clara came to the house and we made love in front of the dying embers in the fireplace, because now days and nights blur into a single act of infinitely protracted love, a love that Clara invents for me second by second—she had to invent it, since neither she nor I knew that it could even exist—a love devoid of programs and goals, as tender and clumsy and delicious and wise as that of two adolescents who might spend centuries engrossed in loving each other, a love unacquainted with paroxysm or weakness—there is no before or after—because where pleasure should culminate and desire die, a subtle, voluptuous live ember always remains, and even when we are both asleep, our bodies continue, rocking, cradling each other, entwined and seeking one another, and we love each other in dreams or in an interminable doze, although I don’t know whether Clara has truly ever slept in all these nights and all these days—she assures me that she has—because when I wake up, there are her wide-open eyes always spying on me, watching my sleep, her hands and her mouth are there for me, initiating the caress, her legs ready to encircle me, and the fact that I may feel sleepy or hungry at times—that I could feel any other thing that isn’t love—constitutes a touching but rather incomprehensible weakness for this crazy adolescent, and she lets me sleep or brings me food with a condescending, mocking expression of consent, as if acceding to the necessities—so different from ours—of a small child or an earthling who has fallen, poor thing, with all his dead weight and limitations into a land of undines or Martians, and I am not sure whether she has slept a single hour in the days and nights that we have spent loving each other throughout the empty house, even though, when I ask her, she may assure me that she has, and that only to stop me from bothering her and wasting my time on silly things, and only so I will devote myself entirely to the only important and, especially, the only real thing—loving each other—she hurriedly and indifferently swallows the fruit juices or big glasses of milk with honey that I prepare for her, and only in the face of my insistence does she finally consent to call out and order meat, eggs, bread—solid, disagreeable nourishment for the exclusive use of a famished earthling, because the undine will stubbornly continue living on milk and fruit juice, apparently more compatible with love—although the exterior world—all that remains outside the door of this house—should not exist, and step by step, Clara’s will is turning Grandmother’s old house into the impregnable castle of Sleeping Beauty, and her desire causes a dense, thick growth of hedge and underbrush to encircle the walls, where the aspirations and curiosity of any violator of our solitude will die; it turns this house by the sea into the monster’s palace, in whose rooms and secret gardens the love of Beauty and the Beast triumphs (and now I know that we are both Beauty and we are both the Beast), where no one dares to interrupt or cross the bewitched fence where the white rosebush blooms, the palace inhabited only by invisible servants—I told the cleaning woman not to come these days and the dust is accumulating on the furniture, but it doesn’t seem to matter either to Clara or to me—because when someone really feels “my loneliness begins two steps away from you,” then the only solution is to wait for a thick wall, for an impenetrable forest to grow around the two lonelinesses magically fused into a single company, and there is nothing to do but wait for eternity to begin right now. And while Clara abolishes external reality with her constant, passionate insistence—if a reality really exists, if anything external could exist—while she keeps away this so-called world that exists on the other side of hedges and walls and that is alien and perhaps hostile to us, while she bites her nails and gloomily watches over my short, infrequent phone calls to Mama and Guiomar—the indispensable ones to keep them from coming to the house—calls in which I try to explain that I wanted to stay here for a few days to recover from Grandmother’s death or to clear up what they call my “problems with Julio”—what could they understand by my problems with Julio?—while she keeps the telephone off the hook for hours and hours, and she tells Maite—when the poor woman finally gets through—that I am not home or that I have died, and watches the mailman pass by the garden fence with infinite distrust—but Clara, Clara, who would think of writing to me here?—while she gets rid of the shopkeeper and the cleaning woman (who has finally come, surprised that we don’t need her) with feverish urgency, as if their mere presence on the threshold already constitutes a danger, as if she had sniffed out a hidden fire in some corner of the house and had to run and put it out, and dismisses them, thrusting exorbitant tips into their hands, though at other times she forgets to pay them—and they find themselves on the street without an inkling of what is happening here—while she does all of this, she is meanwhile constructing a different reality: a reality based on words, situated in an unknown place in time and space—on the other side of the silk cocoon in which she wraps me—because this is what Clara is doing: weaving a silk cocoon around me—she is building an impossible future for both of us, an improbable future that opposes and prolongs my implausible, perpetually reinvented past—which sleeps in peace at last under the flowering almonds—a future to which we will both fly very soon, transformed into radiant butterflies, a future that could as well be located in the suburbs of Marseilles as in Colombian jungles, and which at times seems to unfold in Paris or in New York or even in Barcelona, but in which we are invariably together, endlessly together, always loving each other and turning this love into a magic lever that can transform the world, because—Clara has decided—this exceptional love, this love that occurs only once every thousand years, can’t end in ourselves, it must also embrace all oppressed people, all sad people, all people downtrodden unjustly, all the lonely people in the world, this love must be capable of carrying us up to unsuspected heights, it must finally lead us to transgress all limits, to violate all norms once and for all, and then to reinvent them, and I am afraid—terribly afraid—that in her fantasies, Clara imagines the two of us in guerrilla uniforms, which certainly wouldn’t look bad on her, composing immortal sonnets or the definitive study on Ariosto—between armed raids and terrorist bombs—and caressing each other with caresses newly learned during the respite from combat—our hands still smelling of fresh ink and homemade gunpowder—the old dream of seeing art, love, and revolution joined.