FOR TASTE:
Place your tongue on my tongue. Stir it around and pour out the pound of abstraction all at once: “The only two people in this room are her and me.” Repeat it three times to yourself: “The only two people in this room are her and me.”
Now that I felt a little surer of myself, we had our second date in a lighted place. We arranged to meet in the pub in front of my house, where I arrived having to overcome the customary obstacle of those few yards that to me were like quicksand. It was spacious enough, with huge wooden tables and long wooden benches on which people would randomly take a seat as they came in. I remember what I had on because it was the first time I’d made myself up in a while. I was wearing a very simple red shirt with a plunging neckline, dark pants, and heels, and I wore my hair down—black, long, natural. My new hair, newly born, quickly became my sterling feature, and I was so proud of it. It let me believe I’d been cured of that latent disease, radioactivity, I’d been afraid of triggering all these years and am still in wait for.
HE WAS ALREADY THERE when I arrived. So I asked for a beer to settle my nerves. I hadn’t drunk alcohol in a very long time, and I think I am intolerant to ethanol, which modern science has shown often has a strong effect on people of Asian origin. So a single beer launched me into a state of euphoria that made me react eagerly to Irrational Number’s hands on my thighs. We had barely seen each other’s faces, and yet there I was sitting on his lap. What attracted me most was his size, not because I felt any special attraction to large men, but because it reminded me of Jim. When I sat on his legs and later, when he got up to ask for another beer, I could see other people respected him for the mere fact that he was so tall and robust, even were tolerant of our public show of affection, which was usually reserved for the private sphere at a time and especially in a place as reserved and puritan as that was. But his mind was as troubled as mine was, and though on that second date neither of us could have imagined it, the way we clutched each other, the immediate connection we experienced, the feeling that we completed each other (almost always false), the hunger we felt not for a day but for an entire lifetime beside a relative stranger—all these were signs that something was off, that we were both hollow and needed to be filled. Unfortunately no man, no woman, no child, no friend, no army can fill someone else’s loneliness. The only way to appease loneliness is by embracing it, accommodating it in some nonthreatening place. Just leave it alone, let it live in peace, breathe; don’t fight with it or try to deploy things outside its territory like loves, friendships, companionships, since the kingdom of loneliness abides, and any attempt to fight against it will only turn it back against you.
Irrational Number and I made love that night. I didn’t have to explain the peculiarities of my vagina. He just entered me, and I thought if that man, who was born in one of the most racist enclaves of the entire planet, was capable of allying himself precisely with the people he had been educated against, then he’d also know how to connect with my sexual difference, a minority in the vaginal universe. And that’s how it went. He entered me, saw me, and was unperturbed. He got up later and I watched him, a Viking, over six and a half feet tall. So white. So blond. His build wasn’t perfect, but it was so commanding it was impossible not to admire the energy nature had invested in constructing him. He came back a minute later with four beers. He put my head on his chest and told me to sleep, that he just wanted to look at me as he drank. Admittedly, I can’t remember other moments more peaceful than that; I wasn’t accustomed to that pleasant feeling of having a man admire my body that way.
That’s how it went that night and how it continued to go for several more in the following months. We made love and he forfeited his sleep while I let exhaustion carry me off to that vaporous place smelling of sex, beer, and sweaty hair. And not only hair but down too, since my pubic hair had grown back, and I think more abundantly than normal from what I could see in photos or comparing with friends. It was curly, so its length was measured by thickness, and to me it was a sign of life that I would never have cut, though I allowed him to do it while he kissed me, fascinated, with as much tenderness and respect as when he talked about black writers.
I KNOW I SHOULD wrap this up soon. It seems inevitable now that the verdict will come down on me. I can sense judgment drawing ever closer, as if my ear were to the ground and I could hear the sound of the approaching train. So I’ll move on to the most relevant point for closing the story, but before I do, allow me to include some pages I wrote to Jim. In all seriousness, you don’t deserve access to this part of the story, the most personal part, and I can imagine that none of it really matters to you anyway, even if to fulfill some perverse curiosity. Familiar as you are with the taste of blood, you don’t understand the value of stories. All you crave is to feed again off that human flesh you ripped from a neighbor one day, and in so doing lost the chance of ever being a person again. You’ve been hunting for that taste ever since—a taste for cash, for the protein of banknotes. Skip as many pages as you want. If I transcribe a few of my letters to Jim here it’s only to leave this world hoping one single reader might comprehend. One person’s regard is healing enough for me. You know? I don’t give a hoot about happiness anymore. I used to think that knowing Yoro is safe would suffice; that I could die in peace. But it didn’t happen that way. Now that I know where she is, have touched her, kissed her, saved her, now that I know that she’ll survive not only me but probably you too, I will admit her love made me want to live as long as she is alive. And now I’m sad. Of course I am. But I don’t fight that sadness. Yes, the right to happiness exists. But not the duty. I relinquish my right. Today. Tomorrow. Who knows, maybe tomorrow I’ll be happy again. Or maybe I won’t ever be.
BUT BEFORE I TRANSCRIBE my letters to Jim, let me just give an account of what I am observing right now. The sea isn’t visible from the cabin, but I can see the river. A broad, muddy river. I can see it from the terrace. The friend of mine who built it has good taste and a steady hand. The sun peeks from behind the trellis, but it doesn’t prick, and it creates shadows laced with flowers I’ve never seen anywhere but in Africa. They look like fruit. There’s a baobab just to the side. I remember the legend about this tree. It was so beautiful that the gods punished it by turning it upside down, burying its flowers, its leafy branches, and its treetop. That’s what they did to Yoro for a long time, the most beautiful of them all; she was born and grew in the earth, alongside diamonds and gold. But I pulled her from the ground and placed her straight up. I put her on an airplane and now she’s in safety, far away from you, from this earth made miserable by the hands of foreigners. Yoro is missing the vision I have right now, this Africa whose sacred trees are upside down, but I know she’ll get accustomed to her new earth like I did, another transplanted woman.
Fifteen years in Africa. Who would have thought I would land in this place fifteen years and a handful of days ago, and stay so long? My whole life I thought I would die young, from some manifestation of radiation poisoning, and here I am, writing from illness, that’s true, but my only diagnosis is old age. Dotage, that sickness I never thought I’d experience after all those sleepless nights shrouded in the panic of dying. Suffering now from old age, I write from a hidden cabin looking out over sights that are golden to my eyes, accompanied by the constant buzzing of life, night and day, sounds of animals and at times even plants that crackle as they grow. Of course it had to take place here, where human life began, where despite the exploitation they’re subjected to, the land and its people resist annihilation.
I’m having breakfast and writing here on the terrace. Looking out over a stretch of river that is teeming with hippopotami. If I wanted to disappear, all I’d have to do is walk into the water. But I don’t want to do anything like that right now. Every morning in this beautiful land is another sun. The roots of the trees are strong, deep, and able to hold straight to nourish themselves. The baobab roots help; they sustain the earth with the strength of their flow
ers that open to subterranean fauna, offering leaves and petals for nests. I remember those joyful days. But who isn’t happy in the spring, even when it feels like winter? Now my tired old body won’t admit any more resurrections.
So here, now you can read some of the pages I wrote to Jim, which made me feel closer to him, at least while I was writing them:
Jim my love, Irrational Number lives on the sixteenth floor of a building in Harlem. Gradually, I got used to staying there and not going out, the same as in our own apartment. He has several reproductions of William Blake’s watercolors on the walls. The one titled Pity hangs just above what is now my bed too, a huge one that overwhelms the size of a so-called marriage bed. Blake painted an androgynous figure on horseback flying through the air, holding a baby and lowering its eyes toward a woman lying on the ground with her arms over her breasts, looking up. Irrational Number interprets the watercolors for me. Not only Blake’s visual or written work, but also the simplest words Blake uses. Blake uses language in a virginal way, allowing himself to be moved by the singular aura each word has the first time you hear it, and conveying—to me, like I imagine he did with his students—that quiver of primordial significance. The piece hanging over our bed, he told me, was inspired by a few verses in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which Blake alludes to from the very title, a word that means mercifulness or compassion. I never wrote out the verses and I can’t transcribe them now by memory, but seeing the watercolor evokes them very precisely. They show a naked baby boy as a symbol of compassion and an angel meant to express horror before everyone’s eyes, until the number of tears shed drowns the wind; but by contrast the voice of whoever is speaking—Macbeth, I imagine—is distressed by having such towering ambition, so excessive a drive, that when he mounts the horse of good intentions, he always ends up falling off the other side.
I don’t think I’d be able to recollect the meaning if it weren’t for hearing the verses when I saw the image, and feeling the empathy in the words, imagining myself a rider trying to flee the rancor and hatred, having seen the eyes of compassion, yearning to carry what is reflected in them to others like new links in a chain of kindheartedness, but I too always leap too far, overreach, and fall off into that territory where nothing I do matters or signifies, that no-man’s-land where one is drained by the sieve of one’s own intentions, regardless of how good one is. Now, for instance, aren’t I giving you too much information, Jim? Should I skip over my amorous adventures with other men? I’ve been talking to you about someone else for weeks now. I think in spilling the details I’m confirming the fact that you can no longer hear me, even though I don’t want to face up to that. Now I can appreciate the need for secrets. Keeping something hidden implies respect. Absolute sincerity is incompatible with life, with love. If only I had the desire to hide things from you, it would mean you’re still alive to me. If someday I feel the need to restrain myself in my writing for fear you might find something out, it’d mean you weren’t dead after all, and I’d leave this diary, throw your impostor’s ashes into the garbage, take a shower, moisturize my skin, and run out to welcome you.
But I was talking about Blake. Pity is what I need more than anything else. The world’s pity, the pity of some other, even a single one, and pity for myself, to love myself even though I haven’t accomplished anything in my life, nothing beyond changing my body, loving a few people, and looking for your daughter, a girl who not for a single second of her life has ever had me in her thoughts, since she doesn’t even know I exist. I can no longer tell whether that girl is the same one I am carrying inside. My pregnancy no longer seems like a miracle to me, not even an achievement; birth eludes me. I’m beginning to feel as if it’s no more than a punishment, that I’m a Sisyphus watching how the stone he’s lugged to the top of the mountain insists on rolling back down again. Only what in Greek myth is a stone, in real life is me. I’m the gargantuan rock I bear; the gargantuan rock I’ve created so as not to be alone.
When I consider the few things I’ve actually accomplished in my life, I can’t help but wonder where I’m going to get the strength to pull myself out of the well I’m in. I have no faith or hope in a future or in the tenderness of your love, which is now stored in the past; nor do I have the will to inhabit the present. For years, I think, I’ve lived like a puppeteer; all my energy has gone into making something move, something that is lifeless without me, but that has only the appearance of being alive with me. More than anything else, I feel exhausted. I wonder when the puppet will free itself so it can hold me up, pull the strings that move my back, my ankles, my head—especially my head. It seems as though every time I wake up, I am forced to organize these strings that have touched nothing but my hands and the ground, to separate and clean the strings that I’m dragging, with the sole purpose that if one day my puppet should return me the favor and pull me up, make me jump or fly or run or trip, it doesn’t find the strings in a tangle. But that day is slow in coming, and for that reason, my love, sometimes I consider cutting the strings. Of course I think about it. Cutting the strings and forever falling like a stick and a piece of cloth to be shunted about and broken by the tip of some random passerby’s shoe, nobody imagining that there at one time a brain had fired and a heart thumped. How easy it would be to disconnect myself, and yet how difficult it is to grab the scissors and cut those strings if not of life, at least of motion.
One simple act is what separates my life from my death, one stroke of the scissors, something a toothy rat could accomplish. How can it be that the only thing keeping such dissimilar states apart from each other is no more than an artless nip or nibble? Why now, when I’ve emptied my life of all value, does it still have enough consequence to suck me dry just trying to keep my breath kindled—all that effort to feed myself, wash myself, put my hair up, turn the lights on or off? Why is so much sacrifice needed just to maintain something that is supposed to be so valuable but in fact can be obliterated just like that, in a snap? It seems so strange to me, once I’ve decided I don’t want to live anymore, that people who see me in the subway or walking down the street aren’t able to distinguish how little I want to be alive in comparison with others. How can such an enormous decision be invisible to others or not alter their perception of me somehow? I contemplate all these things, and yet, you see, I’m alive, and not only that—sometimes I’m overcome with a sense of rage that leads me to consider not cutting my own strings, but perhaps one day, who knows when, cutting the strings of others.
Piety. Blake’s watercolor speaks of piety and that’s why I like it, and that’s surely why Irrational Number chose it to watch over me while I slept. His devotion to these pious images is not in vain, in the purely pagan or religious senses of the word; while piety in this work is rendered artistically as something traditionally religious, Irrational Number sees it as full of personal connotations. He’s always been avid to know the genealogies of words and feelings, so a few weeks ago he told me a story derived from his commitment to the ideas of empathy and compassion, which is supported by other pictorial works representing piety. It’s one of the most beautiful stories anyone has ever told me since you went quiet, with two main characters: a man in chains, usually an elderly one, in what invariably appears to be a prison; and a woman substantially younger than him placing her breast in the old man’s mouth. When Irrational Number explained who the characters were, I understood the tale to constitute the simplest act of kindness. Let me tell you the story. I think several versions exist, but they all share the same outline. A man is sentenced to death by starvation for an unspecified crime. He’s allowed to receive visits in the jail by his daughter, but permission is granted with a single condition: the daughter is not allowed to bring in food of any kind. Time goes by and the man shows no signs of dying, so the warden begins suspecting foul play. He can’t fathom what’s keeping him alive, since the girl, as he himself corroborates with every visit, hasn’t brought a single form of nutrition. One afternoon he decides to spy on them and fi
nally discovers what is afoot: the daughter, who had given birth a few weeks earlier, has been breastfeeding her father. The authorities, far from being outraged, take the act as a symbol of what would later be known as Roman charity and free the father—the father whom the daughter had transformed, through her charity, into her baby.
I’ve ruminated often on the image of the jailed old man ever since Irrational Number told me that story, particularly when he went out to buy something or walk the dog, and I felt even lonelier. I felt as miserable as I possibly could: old man and lonely woman, or lonely man and old woman, two sorrows and opposing genders, the kind that produce friction when they grate against each other, like a square wheel in the soul, rusty and timeworn. This was another period of descending into hell. I find it hard to keep track of them anymore, and it doesn’t really matter because instead of descents into hell, they are like numerous hells spread over the same floor. A colossal floor with rooms all on the same level, each one with its signature brand of suffering so unlike the rest that its very newness is what makes it seem like you’re falling again. That one was, as far as I remember, the third hell to the right.
Irrational Number tried to get me out of the house on several occasions during that time, but I always rebuffed his efforts. I just couldn’t. This continued until the morning he came up with an idea. He said that if I preferred not to walk, he would carry me on his back. At first it seemed a ridiculous notion. As you can see, I’m still reluctant to act the fool, I who have had to forgo my fear of ridicule so many times when people judged as extravagant or shameful attitudes that were wholly innate to me, intrinsic features of my nature, simply the way my mother brought me into the world—features that for a long time (as you well know) I was able to conserve.
So I left the house today on someone else’s back, holding on to his neck like a little girl clutching her father’s horse. If only you could have seen the way people stared. Him so huge and me with my big old belly in between, whose growth I have paused. Neither the gawping or my weight fazed him in the least. He also held the dog’s leash in his right hand, the dog who kept pace with us and was ostensibly the only normal thing about us. Remember that Bernini sculpture? Of Aeneas when he escaped from Troy carrying his father on his shoulder, and his son beside, so tiny in comparison to that sort of fleshy spiral crowned by the old man’s head? That’s how I imagined others would see our little cluster. The tiny dog nearly invisible, me atop Irrational Number, in an attempt to escape a city in flames that only I could see. It’s a strange feeling to walk so high above everyone else. Not only could I observe the streets again after so long—the people, the cars—but I saw it all from a height way above what I would on my own two legs. Today I took it all in from Irrational Number’s height of nearly six feet nine. I’d never have imagined how much the sight of things changed from a foot’s difference in height. I didn’t see individuals so much as groups, multitudes. Irrational Number explained not long ago how he had to put up with his schoolmates teasing him and poking fun all the time, treating him like a heartless giant, but he didn’t remember the hilarity coming from one person or two, but as a single hoot from a multitude below. I don’t think he sees singularity, only collective behaviors that steal into one person the same as they could steal into another. That’s why the beating he gave that man that sent him to jail hadn’t been a personal thing, he said, but a beating meted out to a body that symbolized the many together who constitute racism.
The Story of H Page 18