But once it came time to haul you out of the river and onto the shore, you seemed angry at my rescuing you. “Why do you have to do such needless things,” you murmured, “I was about to remember everything.”
“I didn’t want you to forget me.” We both flopped onto the grassy shore like landed fish, gasping for breath.
“That would be all right. All my memories go in the river, so I’m sure I’d remember you again somewhere along the way.” But your voice had lost its reproachful tone.
“You don’t need to attack me any longer. Just look at me.” I turned my head to gaze at yours as you looked up at the sky.
“I’ll look you up and down like a dancing girl at a café would do,” you replied, and stared down at the space between my toes.
“I would like it if we could dance again together at your café.”
“In that case, I’ll disguise myself as you and watch you dance.” And then you laughed like you had a secret. Your long lashes and the creases at the edges of your eyes formed darkened hollows that filled me with an emotion so sweet it threatened to melt my insides. I withdrew the red handkerchief from the pocket of my discarded pants and handed it to you.
“Use this to dry yourself. I borrowed it from your room last night.”
“You visited me to steal it?”
“I was going to stab you, but not for the handkerchief.” “So you accepted a job to kill me even though you knew me?”
“I didn’t know it was you until I saw you.”
“I wonder why someone would want me killed.”
“I never ask my clients why.”
“Who is this ‘client’?” There were doubtless many who I’d forgotten, who hated me. But it was possible I’d gotten wrapped up in something far more serious—I just couldn’t remember.
“I could never tell you that. I’m still that much of a professional.”
“So you say even as you betray your mission. When did you come to my apartment?”
“While the soccer game was on. It was on your television and you were sitting on your sofa, watching. Or sleeping, now that I think of it.”
“I’d never have had the soccer game on. That was someone else’s house.”
“But isn’t this handkerchief yours? Well, no matter. Maybe I’m misremembering.” I was getting confused.
Even as I listened to you tell me this, I didn’t think I’d discovered why I thought I’d seen you before. I began to realize that nothing you remembered from your past could ever explain my déjà vu. The reason why I felt like my time with you was a repetition and yet that you were also somehow unique had nothing to do with whether I’d met you before. And as you realized that you were as bound by memory as I was and that your comprehension of things was no less constrained than mine, I grew to love you even more. I touched your long hair. You sniffed the red handkerchief and then brought your nose to my naked stomach, saying, “They smell the same.” You licked at the droplets that remained around my navel. I let out a sigh from somewhere deep within me. There were still some trapped in the downy hair along my side and in my pubic hair; it surely looked to you like spun silver. You began to lick each droplet with your tongue, one by one.
The droplets on my tongue tasted sweet yet sour, like dew licked off berries. The kind of berries used to make jam. Berries I once fought my way through thickets to gather. Touched with morning dew, lit by light from I knew not where, these berries would shine like gold. The dew was part of the light. I wanted to taste it, and I painted your body again and again with riverwater. Droplets ran down the nape of your neck and across your chest to drip from your pinkish nipples; they ran across your stomach and the breadth of your hips to pool at your thighs. Countless droplets ran over each other and dried, forming scales along your legs. The process seemed to tickle and agitate you, and you let out a hoarse, breathy cry as you dribbled riverwater to lick off my body as well.
It was difficult to distinguish your cinnamon skin from the deepening orange of the sky, and you seemed to melt into the air even as my own skin remained resolutely conspicuous, a luminous white that refused to blend with the orange. You were my last, and if you disappeared, so would my final chance to love again. I felt left behind. But as I watched, the orange shaded slowly into a purpled red, and as it grew bluer and bluer, it turned the deep violet hue of jacaranda blooms , fading into the color of the river. You were painted this same color, as was I; I rejoiced in our common shine. But even so, we shone hardly bright enough to dazzle the eye. I no longer felt lonely, but my anxiety had yet to disappear.
Those along the riverside gathered like ants beneath the streetlights and began to dance. From time to time their singing voices would reach us like far-off thunder. The sound of the musician’s guitar was like the sound of the wind as it rustled the leaves and cleansed the branches of the trees. I put my ear to your stomach, using it as a wall against these sounds. As I did, the sound of the river grew stronger. Countless pink scars dappled the tawny flesh of your side like raindrops. I traced them with my fingertip. You laughed and told me, “I’ve acquired one for every year I’ve been alive.” And so I counted them.
“There are twenty-eight scars.”
“You must have miscounted. If you include the little ones, there are three hundred and twenty-nine.” You turned to show me your dappled back that looked like paint corroded by running water.
“So you’re three hundred and twenty-nine years old?”
“Yes. And you’re three hundred and twenty-six.”
“I don’t believe I’ve lived so long as that.”
“It only seems long. Compared to the chiquilín, you’re still quite young.”
“In the river, he called out to stop me from leaving. It frightened me.”
I listened hard to the sound of the river.
“I heard singing too. Mano a mano, it said.”
“Is that you and I, you think? Five by five, mano a mano?” Your eyes filled with liquid, seemed about to overflow with a sound like a sparrow’s song. Looking into their darkness, I was dizzied by the countless grains of silver that swam within them. I wanted to kiss them, drink from them. And then bite down.
“I want to add us together and get ten.”
You brought your head toward mine. I mistimed my approach and ended up sucking on your lips before I intended to. Your lips felt expectant, waiting, taken a little by surprise, and I pressed my tongue through them.
Your tongue tasted like a mango’s flesh, slippery and sweet and a little bitter. You wrapped your arms around my body a split second before I could bring my arms around yours. You kept beating me to my every move, and we ended up in a clumsy embrace. My right arm wrapped around you neck while my other hand explored your hips, and then went lower.
My right arm wrapped around your hips and my left hand caressed the back of your head. Your buttocks felt like the skin of a pear, firm and slightly rough.
You brought your body on top of mine, and I looked up at you as my lips sought yours. Your legs tangled in mine, forcing them to open wide. Your hand had descended at some point and now grabbed hold of me.
I couldn’t take any more at that point, and I stopped, separating my lips from yours, and said to you as I looked into your flushed, wet eyes, “How is it that we fell in love, I wonder.”
Your eyes had absorbed the purple light and swam with sapphire liquid.
“I was just minding my own business and suddenly I was in love with you. It’s strange. Did you slip me an aphrodisiac? Was it in the melon you fed me? Did you put something in it?”
“All we needed to begin was for our eyes to meet. I’d waited so many years for it to happen. I’d looked at you so long, trying to catch your eye, but you never looked back. And now today, this day when everything seems so mad, your gaze met mine as if by accident. I hid from you by spending the night in the branches of that jacaranda tree, the pollen from its blooms showering down on me just as the sunlight and the fountain’s mist rained down o
n you.” Your dark, wet eyes were like a deer’s.
“I remember that. But I’m so distracted. I feel like I’m being kept alive just for you.” Your skin was like a screen, absorbing the light that fell upon it, making it flicker languidly.
“That’s the same as saying you live only for your own sake.”
“Touch me here,” you said, indicating your navel. I slipped a finger into the hole. “Wait, not there,” you said, and then pointed to your solar plexus. “Here,” you said, and my finger explored the spaces between your bones. “Not there either,” you sighed. “I don’t know where my center is. Everything I want to know is there, I’m certain.”
“It’s here,” I said, my finger inserted partway into your exposed vagina.
“It’s true, that seems like a center. But I want to find my midpoint from side to side, not just head to toe,” you replied. I licked my finger.
The air began to chill, and mist arose from the ground around us. The light’s rays grew visible within it. They split in all directions, clashing with a sound like breaking glass, and this sound fought with the velvety bandoneón rumble of the river, tangling and disentangling itself as it did. My skin trembled. You stood and brought me to my feet, and we carried our clothes with us as we headed back to the car.
I helped you into the car as if carrying you from behind. My naked body as it slid over yours felt like it was rubbing against velvet, and I sighed involuntarily. As I turned in my seat to shut the driver’s side door, you embraced me from behind. The warm, soft scent of honeysuckle arose from where we touched.
A crescent moon appeared low in the sky and absorbed the pale, bluish light from the river until it shone sharp and bright. Stars began to twinkle too, refracting the light into an arpeggio. But indigo still filled the air, and even as everything grew bright as midday, nothing shone so bright that its light threatened to exceed its edges. Light fell across the left side of your face as you sat in the passenger seat, your lashes splitting it into shadowy zigzags as your moistened, pale green eyes absorbed it. When you looked back at me, was my face silhouetted, backlit and outlined by tiny glowing hairs? As you wet your lips slightly with your tongue, they grew shiny as jelly, and those enormous eyes of yours, their whites so large they betrayed every flicker of your gaze, now grew dark, their pupils widening. I turned my head toward you slightly, and then, after a moment’s pause, I turned back forward only to feel you close enough to me that the downy hairs along our jaws nearly brushed. Raising your jaw and letting your lips part slightly, your wet teeth shone a bluish white, enticing me until our pleated, blood-engorged lips met. Each tiny crease along their surfaces meshed perfectly, as did the warmth of our bodies, the rhythm of our blood’s pumping, the melodious breathing of our pores, everything in sync, nothing in excess. We slipped beneath each other’s tongues. We licked each other’s gums. We explored the slick inner surfaces of each other’s cheeks.
I paused a moment to take a breather, then dove back into your lips. They were suffused with a taste I recognized, a familiar smell—and I, who had been so scared of repetition, now quietly succumbed. A pale, heart-shaped breath escaped your mouth. Moonlight gathered within it.
Beside each other in our seats, our bodies dovetailed perfectly, from the soft skin of our breasts to our long, long limbs and the warmth of our lower bodies, and we shared everything between us: our warmth, the rhythm of our heartbeats, the sound of our smooth, sweat-free skin sliding. You watched me with your bottomless eyes that seemed to overflow with night.
As if to regain dominance, you mounted me, staring unblinkingly into my eyes all the while.
You teased the points of my breasts with your tongue where the light that limned them seemed to concentrate.
You traced the edges of my body if testing their limits, gazing at them, touching them, biting them, licking them, sniffing them, slapping them. My body hardened to its very core, no longer animal or vegetable but mineral, my outline sharpening as a familiar scent filled my nostrils, a wavering smell like burning grass; blue-tinged, milky light poured over your skin and flowed across my stomach.
The soft, heavy feeling between us seemed to clarify your boundaries like light and comfort you, but I felt as if there was still a space between us and remained unsatisfied. I feel like this car’s too small, it’s forcing us together, it annoys me, I whispered as I reached behind my back to grip you where you arched up to bathe in the light of the moon.
You left the car with nothing covering your naked skin and leaned against the hood. Your voice blended into the rumble of the river, ruffling the nearby grassy plain. Your breath enveloped me, slightly wetting my skin. Steam arose from between you and I, and we became the water, mist rising off our surface, became the river that rumbled like a tree trunk being beaten, became the riverside alive with grass that rustled in the wind. Lying face up across the front of the car, our every crease and fold opened to each other as we slid together. You’d become the moonlight, the starlight, the riverlight; you’d become the grassy plains filled with rising mist; we’d become like mucous membranes exposed and superimposed. Soon we would exceed that boundary too, and our flesh would meet directly, our blood and fluids mixing unimpeded. I want to go that far. I want to. I murmured this into your chest and your hoarsely whispered answer filled my head: I will become you. Your heartbeat was my heartbeat; my chest hurt, constricted.
As I reached my climax, I was suddenly overcome with the desire to throw it all away. We should tie our bodies to the car, pitch it into the river and disappear into the darkness of its depths, I thought. I despaired of there ever being a future for you and me. Yet there you were, unthinking, bathed in moonlight as satisfaction filled you. Unaware that something had changed forever in that instant, you stroked my hair just as you had before. You no longer had the power to leave this city, I thought. I wanted to wash your fluids from my body. I wanted to demand that you give back the fluids of mine on yours. I came to a decision. Either I would die, or you, or both of us together; those were the only options left. Why did you have to be me too? I was alone: this I knew for certain.
You brushed my hand away and got back in the car. Your body trembled unceasingly. The moisture our skin had accrued evaporated, the air swallowing it, disappearing under exposure to the shine of the moon, of the stars, of this river that flowed with a sound that was somehow round, like a bouncing, multicolored ball. I tried to talk to you, but you replied with only sighs. Suddenly, I turned on the ignition and looked at you again.
“Don’t look at me.”
“You look at me like I’m a dancing girl.”
“You seem to think you can see through me somehow, but I assure you, it’s all your own delusion, an effect of the too-bright light. It’s all just trickery. You’re hardly something grand yourself.”
“True enough. I’m just a puppet of the knife.”
At the word knife, my body responded, and I stroked its leather sheath. It emitted a scent like an animal’s hide. I wanted more than anything to slip the knife from it and slide it into your flesh. I’d be the one to stab, I thought. I felt as if I’d done so countless times before. My hand remembered, as did the knife. Yet you just looked at me, a smile on your face so bright it seemed able to make all the flowers of the world bloom at once. I felt about to weep, surer more than ever that we must be split apart. Stabbing was the only way. I pointed the blade at you, but it seemed as though even a breeze so slight it barely shook the pollen from a mimosa flower would be able to point it back at me.
Realizing I could no longer control my actions, I left the car, saying as did, “Your aphrodisiac’s worn off.” You tried to coax me back, but I was intent to avoid this terrible situation, and I pulled on my underwear, my white shirt and flaxen pants, spitting, “You’re quite the vain one, aren’t you,” as I walked away. Shaking off your arm and words as you tried to make me stay, I walked to the highway that ran along the riverside and flagged a black taxi to take me back to my café.
&n
bsp; Pulling on not the hibiscus-colored dress you’d left behind but my dirty shirt and pants from before, I rushed to follow you in the car. Its intense red met the night’s blue light and fluctuated bewitchingly. I followed the river’s southern flow, driving along its edge. The road, the sky, the river: all were bluish white, as if I were swimming through water, flying through air. The wind bathed my face like a free flow of water. I was gripped by the impulse to drive into the river. I felt as if I could drive right through to its far shore. We could have driven together across this oceanwide river, I thought, we could have driven through the city that glittered like a mirror along its opposite side, we could have made it all the way to the tropical north, and as I thought about these things, I was gripped with fierce regret. They say that in the tropics of the north, the rain falls like light, wetting the skin of the men and women there without them having to go the river, unlike here. The air is hot as fire, turning everyone the color of roasted cocoa beans, producing a scent that attracts everything: insects, animals, those of the opposite sex, those of the same. When they dance, their sweat turns to steam beneath the light and rises to the heavens, soon to descend again as rain. Pieces of the sun and moon fall with it, but this causes no problem, since these too just rise again as well. Mysterious darkness yawns black and deep at the feet of these women and men, like holes that trail them wherever they walk. The southerners, unfamiliar with such things, say that if one touches you, it emits a poison that eventually makes you disappear. If you even just approach one too closely, the southerners say, your equilibrium upends, you’ll grow dizzy, lose consciousness. Wandering into the jungle in such a state, you’d be sure to mistake the river there for the ground and fall right in. No one knows where this river flows, this river like the earth itself turned liquid; green trees grow plentifully within its earth-colored water, coloring it in places shades of emerald and pale green, while dirty yellow grains of gold churn along the bottom and mix into the mud, invisible to human eyes. Houses are built along this river, and people live there, harvest crops, search for gold, dance. From time to time the water rises and wipes them out, leaving behind vast, dried-out ghost towns filled with clouds of golden dust when it subsides. They say if you lose your way amid them and eat a passionfruit from the vines that grow there, you must throw its seeds into the river. If you throw it to the ground instead and take a nap, within hours you will awaken entangled in vines growing over you faster than a hummingbird wing, strangling your breath from your body. As the sun descends, the black holes at the feet of the people and everything else merge to become the nightfall, and within the hot steam of the rain forest all bodies grow wet with darkness.
We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) Page 23