When she finished, her face wore a beatific smile. I was on the point of exploding. She grabbed hold of my sex and, waving the vibrator in the air, said to me: Your turn. Terrified, I had visions of a proctologist. Feeling my wrists tied tightly to the head of the bed I told her that I’d never done that and I wasn’t at all interested. You’re really stupid, she said, this one is vaginal; anal ones have a different shape. She grabbed her bag, slipped the metallic phallus back inside, then searched again through its interior. This time she took out a plastic bottle of honey. You carry honey in your purse? I asked her. It’s for coffee, she said, I don’t eat meat, so I’ve got to get my nutrients wherever I can. She popped open the top with her thumb, turned it over, and squeezed. A thread of gold spilled over my sex. Good little boys, she explained, come quickly when you do this to them because what happens is that the flavors mix. She closed the bottle, licking her finger. She put it back into her bag and fell to work voraciously. I came almost immediately. While she was untying me she told me that the bastard’s smile on my face had improved. Now, get cleaned up. You’ve got to look great, so that whore Teresa sees what she lost. Go on, you’re already way ahead of the game.
By the time I got out of the shower she’d left. On the bed she’d laid out for me my best-cut suit with a French-collared shirt and one of Raul’s Italian ties; he always spends more on clothes than I do. On the shirt was a note torn from a stenographer’s notebook in which she’d written that she’d come by to get me at eight thirty, and that I shouldn’t comb my hair until it was totally dry—that’s the secret.
Dawn, Friday, March 27.
The gallery owners from Colonia Roma made me an offer: bring Los Empeños to Mexico City, its natural location. They showed me the house that a couple of them had just bought together; the restaurant would go on the ground floor. The location is unbeatable and they’re prepared to invest in a kitchen that would be a faithful copy of the ancient ones I’ve envied.
Just as Susana predicted, Teresa appeared, now late, seated at the bar. She looked spectacular, more beautiful than ever behind the veil of an adult melancholy that I was not expecting. She was with someone. She’s always been more skillful than me in the fine art of watching her ass. We exchanged kisses in the air—I liked the shape of her crow’s feet—with the promise that we would talk; she introduced me to the millionaire she was with but I didn’t even listen to his name.
When at last I was able to get away from the gallery owners I went down to the bar to look for her and they’d already left. The bartender handed me a napkin on which she’d written the name and address of a café near Raul’s house, saying that we should have breakfast at ten.
Not only am I going to go, I’d marry her again right this instant.
Monday, March 30.
I find airports and airplanes exasperating: we’ve only just taken off and I already feel exhausted. The worst is yet to come: passing through the police fortress the gringos have erected to protect their obese bodies from the muscular universe beyond.
I enjoyed spending Sunday at home with my mother and sister: I was able to rest a little, go to bed early, eat reasonably well, visit again with the endless parade of my brothers and their wives and their children—I had no idea whose they were; they all look like each other and like the rest of us. I found it very moving to see how eagerly they listened to the possibility that I might take up the gallery owners’ offer and come back to Mexico. All this blood is your blood, said my sister after the second glass of anís, indicating the gathering around the table with a vague gesture that took in the whole family, as well as all those others who, at some time, had believed in the miracle of the Incarnation.
When I’d first arrived home, a little before midday, my mother was openly upset with me: Your aunts and uncles are pretty offended, she told me, that you haven’t gone to eat dinner with them; God knows how many days Alicia spent making tamales for you. I told her that I’d already explained how I’d run into Teresa: I hadn’t seen her in five years, we’d gone to lunch, and I was a total wreck when I called to cancel. It was better that way. You haven’t seen your aunts, either, she said. But I was never married to any of them. That made her laugh. I shrugged my shoulders and told her to believe me, that it hadn’t been easy. She nodded her head and pinched my biceps just like she did when I was little. It’s all right, kiddo, stone has got to be stone.
During the meal everybody asked me—with ageless wisdom—how Teresa was doing, but without prying into any of the details of our meeting, which I suppose went very well. I arrived at the café a little bit after ten o’clock and she was already there, nervous; Mexican women, like their counterparts in Lima, are the last women on earth who maintain the mysterious art of knowing how to style their hair. Who knows if it’s because they understand their body as one single harmonious mass, or because the bad taste of the hairdressers at large is so awful that they have to find some way to defend themselves. Contrary to all my own expectations, I acted like a wholesome, self-assured, grown man. She’d called in sick to work, so we had the whole day ahead of us.
We spent breakfast arguing, as if we were friends, the advantages and disadvantages of my moving back to Mex-ico, and some other minutiae: the eternal difficulty of her relationship with her parents, Tijuana’s shortcomings, how fucked life in the United States really is—the word Chicago never passed her lips—her fantasy of being a professional hooker, and her inability to carry it off: I turned out more prude than slut, she told me. Up until that moment I’d had all my senses focused on the spiritual quality of her mature beauty: I’d arrived at the café with my fear of another rejection weighing much heavier than my desire to have her, but the image of her receiving a succession of unknown men gave me an electric jolt that was immediately translated into the memory of her body beneath mine and a rending of the veil way down deep in my testicles. I asked for the check. What are we going to do? she asked me. I told her we should stop by the market then go cook something at Raul’s house. She thought that was a good idea.
Leaving the café, it was no trouble at all to hold her hand while we walked along; I was telling her about the success my restaurant was enjoying thanks to the enormous public humiliation of being the first contestant eliminated from Lard. My clients began bringing their friends out of pure sympathy—it’s true, I didn’t say it just to amuse her.
I bought a big piece of rump roast so I could stuff it with pulped carrot and guava; also dried shrimp and rosemary for a broth; dragon fruit with cream and honey, amaranth, a chunk of heavy brown cane sugar, and pumpkin seeds to make alegría balls. We stopped to pick up a bottle of Ribera del Duero wine, and some Tehuacán spring water. Loaded down with shopping bags, we walked the four or five blocks that separated us from Raul’s house, the sunlight streaming through the blossoming jacarandas.
While I unpacked the bags, she crouched down to check the oven—we had no idea if it worked. As she was walking by, taking the meat and the dragon fruit to the fridge, I calmly reached out and grabbed her ass as if we had never been apart. She stood straight up, turned around, and planted a tight, high-pressure kiss on my lips. We went running upstairs to the bedroom.
We undressed without any formalities. There was no strategic foreplay, simply the dialogue of tongues working as a metaphor for the communal vortex of the flesh and the desperate wish to disappear into its depths. To enter her body, to feel again the clean, precise embrace of her vagina—we’re tailor-made for each other—was to return to a state of original, mysterious grace: achieving the shamanic power of entering the other, being transformed inside her, with her; becoming indistinguishable, like the spiraling, entwining strands of DNA in their mesmerizing chromosomal dance at the wondrous instant of conception.
I can scarcely recall the ghost of her tight lips, the color rising in her cheeks, her eyes so wide yet seeing nothing, because I no longer possessed a body. We synched up with the same steady rhythm as always. Our extremely slow ascent toward orgasm r
aised a heat wave that shook the curtains in the room. I clenched her hair in my teeth. Coming was like momentarily abolishing the opacities of the world and making it transparent, like a drop of saliva that contained the sketch of the universe that God never showed to anybody.
That’s the paradox of what English speakers call true love, which I can find no way of correctly translating to Spanish, perhaps because in the end we always turn out to be bigger bastards. To be able to use the body to escape the body, to be transubstantiated into a mortal mess of secretions, to forget about oneself and the other, to be nothing but a surface: the odor we give off, the oils that lubricate us, the skin that protects us. To be a nameless sum of muscles and fat. To feel pleasure is to trade the body for bodily sensation; sex at its best is the most spiritual experience available to us.
I returned to wandering her back, the ridge of her coccyx, her buttocks. I let my fingers play in the tiny bushland around her ass and masturbated her to a climax, and then I entered her from behind, my hands squeezing her fists.
The third time she sucked me. With Teresa I take more pleasure in giving than in receiving, so that when I felt myself on the verge of exploding I told her I wasn’t going to hold out much longer, and how did she want us to do it? She rose up and without unclenching my member she told me that she wanted me to come in her mouth, that I could take however long I wanted but I should drown her in semen. I sat up comfortably against the headboard to get a better view. She curled up perpendicular to my body and scooted forward a little, so that I could put my hand between her thighs or her breasts, follow the curve of her back down to her buttocks, and play with her toes. When she felt like that was enough, she opened my legs and dove between them. She looked me in the eyes and said: Come. I did so, exorbitantly, until it hurt. She gave me a salty kiss and thanked me. I lost myself in an almost dreamlike trance and slipped into sleep.
I was awakened by her riotous laughter—like shrieking in a cathedral—mixed with the deep sound of Raul’s voice. I got out of bed, put on my shorts to go to the bathroom and, in that near state of grace, descended to the kitchen. It turned out that besides Raul and Teresa, who were drinking some tequila in the living room, in the kitchen there were also—knocking back their first drink and gossiping in whispers, surely about me—the movie critic and his wife, Socrates and his young lover, and Tijuana sans husband. Teresa gave me a long kiss and sent me to say hello to the other guests, among whom I went delivering hugs and kisses. Tijuana stuck a finger in my belly button and told me I looked very cute. I told her that I’m no angel.
We chatted about nonsense while I brewed myself a cup of mint tea. When it was ready, Socrates poured in a little tequila and told me that they’d heard I was going to do the cooking; that was why they all came over. I told him that I’d need some galley slaves because people were already hungry. Tijuana and the movie critic volunteered to help, and the others went to the living room. Teresa came in with a stack of pots and pans.
I set Tijuana to prepare the brown sugar and Teresa to cut the dragon fruit. I gave the movie critic—clearly the least talented—very specific instructions for how to prepare the shrimp broth, handing him the little bunch of rosemary that he had to use, and precisely measuring the salt and the water, never taking my eyes off him. I sliced open the roast, so fresh that it was dripping blood. I set my cutting board next to the one Teresa was working on. Her hands were stained with the vegetable blood of the fruits—she was slicing them with careful devotion, as cleanly as coins. Another tequila. We made potatoes with the remaining rosemary and a jar of mole sauce we found in the refrigerator. When the critic finished with the broth—anyone else would have done a better job in half the time—I set him to work peeling carrots. We heated the oven and I suddenly remembered the hellish family dinner awaiting me at home. I called my mother to cancel.
When I came downstairs again, Tijuana and Teresa were waiting for me in front of the bag of guavas without the least idea what to do with them. It’s an Aztec game: you’ve got to split the fruit in half and remove the pulp that surrounds the seed as if it were a heart, then you’ve got to peel it with the same tender loving care as if you were bathing a little child. We didn’t have a fourth knife sharp enough for the critic to use, nor enough faith in his ability to carry out such a delicate operation: what remains of a guava after the sacrifice is an extremely delicate little rosy pink strip barely an eighth of an inch thick, just a leftover, which is, simultaneously, the sweetest and most sour thing in the world, and which denotes the metaphysical nature of Baroque cuisine: more theory than food. I told them that rump roast stuffed with guava pulp was the favorite dish of Bishop Palafox. It’s out of this world, I said, the meat enveloping the remains of something that no longer has either an inside or an outside, just like the sacred host.
And my vagina, said Tijuana, sticking a finger in her mouth. She pulled it out shining with saliva and slipped it into Teresa’s mouth. We made the guava paste in the same bowl in which we’d cooked the sweet base for the alegría balls. I stuffed the roast while Teresa poured the cream over the dragon fruit and Tijuana mixed up the pumpkin seeds and amaranth with the honey and brown sugar.
By the time I finally put the meat in the oven I was exhausted. Teresa gave Tijuana a long kiss and she slipped her hand into my shorts. I let her do it for a moment, but at last I decided it’s always better not to mix things up too much, so I went upstairs to get dressed. They stayed a while longer in the kitchen. When I came in for a glass of wine to take with me to sit down in the living room they were chatting.
Everything turned out really well: we talked, we ate, we drank like gluttonous patricians. We sat over our coffee and brandy until very late, rendered every moment more civilized by the work that our excesses perform on the soft, pulpy flesh of our sad human lives.
Teresa helped me to clean up afterward and then spent the night. In the morning I didn’t even offer her a cup of coffee.
Mexico City—Washington, D.C.—Mexico City,
1996–2004
ÁLVARO ENRIGUE was born in Mexico in 1969. He is an essayist, critic, professor, and the author of several novels and short story collections. His first novel La muerte de un instalador won the 1996 Joaquín Mortiz Prize. In 2007, the “Bogotá39” project named him one of the most promising Latin American writers of his generation.
BRENDAN RILEY has worked for years as a teacher, translator, writer, and editor. Among other works, he is the translator of Carlos Fuentes’s The Great Latin American Novel and Juan Filloy’s Caterva, both for Dalkey Archive Press.
MICHAL AJVAZ, The Golden Age.
The Other City.
PIERRE ALBERT-BIROT, Grabinoulor.
YUZ ALESHKOVSKY, Kangaroo.
FELIPE ALFAU, Chromos.
Locos.
IVAN NGELO, The Celebration.
The Tower of Glass.
ANTÓNIO LOBO ANTUNES, Knowledge of Hell.
The Splendor of Portugal.
ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON, Theatre of Incest.
JOHN ASHBERY AND JAMES SCHUYLER, A Nest of Ninnies.
ROBERT ASHLEY, Perfect Lives.
GABRIELA AVIGUR-ROTEM, Heatwave and Crazy Birds.
DJUNA BARNES, Ladies Almanack.
Ryder.
JOHN BARTH, LETTERS.
Sabbatical.
DONALD BARTHELME, The King.
Paradise.
SVETISLAV BASARA, Chinese Letter.
MIQUEL BAUÇÀ, The Siege in the Room.
RENÉ BELLETTO, Dying.
MAREK BIECZYK, Transparency.
ANDREI BITOV, Pushkin House.
ANDREJ BLATNIK, You Do Understand.
LOUIS PAUL BOON, Chapel Road.
My Little War.
Summer in Termuren.
ROGER BOYLAN, Killoyle.
IGNÁCIO DE LOYOLA BRANDÃO, Anonymous Celebrity.
Zero.
BONNIE BREMSER, Troia: Mexican Memoirs.
CHRISTINE BROOKE-ROSE, Amalgamemnon.
> BRIGID BROPHY, In Transit.
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