by Romina Paula
6.
You know how cats always position themselves in the most attractive spots? Exactly where you’d go if you were similarly sized. Right now your cat is curled up in the sink. She’s in the sun that way, and she’s arranged herself over a blanket your mom left there to wash. Meaning it smells like people too. It couldn’t be more ideal. Who was it that said that man living in the city is a mammal living like an insect? I don’t know. I do know that being here you’re overcome by sleepiness, no two ways about it, and I am now a viable contender with your cat in terms of hours of sleep. I sleep a lot, as though being awake no longer held any attraction for me.
Yesterday I finally ended up going for a walk, around the neighborhood and a little bit beyond. At first I tried to kind of avoid all the potential problem areas, my route determined by all those spots I preferred to not pass by. I went around the city center, crossed the boulevard, walked along the outside of the bus station, and then I started going up, went from asphalt to dirt road without really realizing it because it starts with just the asphalt getting quietly underneath the dirt and the gravel, and then suddenly walking, taking steps, has a soundtrack, raises dust. I went up a little ways towards the lake, but the sun was intense and I started sweating, but I also didn’t want to take off any of my clothing because the air was cold, and my T-shirt was already damp, so I came back, back downhill, and started towards the highway, towards Trevelin, wanting to see a little of the countryside. Everything is so exactly the same . . . If it weren’t for the sneakers I’m wearing that I definitely purchased this year, I might doubt my age, doubt my historical moment, the point on the line of my life where I am currently positioned—I’d doubt the line. But there can be no doubt about it, there ought not to be, these sneakers are new, new soles, they’re red, I picked them out, recently, Manuel went with me, it took me three hours to decide, he and the salesperson conspired against me, mocking my indecisiveness, while meanwhile I was dealing with another type of issue, I knew I wanted these ones, the red ones, but they were expensive and I felt guilty, but at the same time there was no point in spending money on others because these were the ones, and then I had an argument with Manuel because he’d been on the side of the idiot sales guy, Manuel being like, come on, it wasn’t that big of a deal, how I’m too sensitive. Thus these shoes became my shoes, shoes of discord; therefore it is me in the year two thousand something, there can be no question. But outside of me it’s all so chillingly exactly like itself. It’s so cold here, I’d kind of forgotten how that felt, my lips are already chapped, the corners cracked, and I can barely open my mouth, such a dry cold, and so cold. I sit by the highway for a while, in some grass, in the shade but with my legs in the sun, and if I smoked I would definitely smoke a cigarette. I fish around in my pockets for a piece of candy, but they contain nothing, nothing edible. I swallow and miss how candy tastes and how cigarettes taste, in my imagination, anyway. It smells dry here, weed-like, mountain-like, hay-like, southern, a smell barely discernible due to how dry it is, so dry it nearly impedes the possibility, the constitution, of a smell, of a fragrance. This absence of moisture, this suction, this cold, could truly drive you insane, truly induce it. Moisture, moistness, makes things work, brings things together, permits them contact. With prolonged exposure to this cold and this dryness, to this dry cold, connections sooner or later stop working and then I want to see you with your centrals nervous, nerves frayed, and this desert in the back of your forehead.
I find myself on Juli’s block. His parents’ place. Everything is exactly the same: the dirt road, the same houses, everything the same. They put in some bars here and there, but apart from that it’s identical, even the same dogs, and I’m inundated/ overwhelmed by sadness . . . I don’t know if it’s a bad sadness or a good sadness, it definitely makes me cry, but I couldn’t really say if that’s out of relief or despair, the kind you need to avoid and leave behind or just a good sadness, I don’t know what it is. In any case I am a little glad to be here, weird, like this sense of my own self in my gut, of ownness, of recognition, of belonging. Something. And while I’m trying to deal with all of that the bars part, I’m already at the corner, and automatically I dart behind the hawthorn that’s just in front of me. I don’t think about it, if I had I wouldn’t have opted to look so ridiculous, but fear leads me directly to stupidity, to acting stupid. So now that I’m here and everything I do will look suspicious, I pay homage to the Benny Hill–ness of the situation and peek out from where I’m hiding. But what I see when I do so is vastly less amusing than Benny and a blond losing their clothes behind a bush: I see his mother leaving the house with a kid in her arms. Jesus. I know it, I knew it, it’s Julián’s, it’s Julián’s, I know it, I know it, no one needs to tell me for me to know. Jesus, fuck, and meanwhile I am hiding in a plant. So pathetic, the story of my life: other people start families while I cower behind a bush. What’s worse, I spy. I want to run away, but that would probably draw a lot more attention, so I don’t. Susi sets up her grandkid in a stroller, kind of tucks him in, hesitates, and then finally heads off in the other direction. I stay for a second in my hiding place, more out of bewilderment than anything else. I look back at the house, no sign of life inside though, now, and for a split second I consider ringing the doorbell. Just to get it over with. Say, hey, how’s it going, I wanted to meet your new family. Hey, what’s up, so you’re a dad now. But no, I couldn’t handle it, or I wouldn’t want to. So I’m off, I head off, leave the foliage behind me, leave.
7.
Education as formative. Hours and days and years in institutions; lots of long hours per day and not much aside from that. Education. Inhibition. How they work. Together. One at the root of the other. Being afraid, fearing. And, at the same time, wanting to steal your friend’s boyfriend. Wanting to tempt him with a fruit—from which tree? On the playground—of which school? One of those with the fruits like cotton that comes in a double shell that closes over itself. The silk floss tree? Is that silk floss fruit? Or what is it? Is it the fruit of the green silk floss’s pink flower and spikes? From one of those two-story schools with the hundred-percent-cement play area, perfect for knees. And fear, after. Fear of the teacher, above all, of authority. Fear of them kicking you out? Of them calling you out? Pulling you aside? Getting set apart? Maybe most of all that they will call you out on it. A past of insolence, an initial becoming insolent. I’ll do what I want to do, I’ll do what I want to do, I’ll do what I want to do. A first act of insolence or challenge to authority or lack of recognition of hierarchies, punishments with switches. By force: force of words, of order. Threats. Of what? With what? When they say: what you’re doing isn’t right. Not only that, but also: it’s wrong. When who knows what—in a human being—is actually wrong.
Like in that article about the big serial killers, vicious, greedy murderers. One of the examples was Ted Bundy, a very smiley person, suntanned, such a go-getter; another was that old couple who killed children in England. What were their names? Point being, in the article there were these specialists who said how there’s a certain grade of wrongness that will not fit into any psychological framework, that is of some other order, unclassifiable: pure wrong. Unadulterated wrongdoing. It was kind of like they were freaking out about it a little bit, these psychologists; they didn’t even want to get into religion or morality, which would lead nowhere. They talked about psychopaths, some who’d end up killing, others not, and of course some of those serial killers are not even psychopaths. And there was a kind of scale they’d developed that went from one to twenty-one in order of severity to calibrate the degree of cruelty shown by the killer to the victims. After that I wondered how psychology positions—where, how—death itself, a person’s own death, I mean. One’s own death. What place it holds in the brain, in the mind. A person dying for him- or herself, an intransitive. The reflex of a person’s death, the reflexive act of dying, dying as reflex. Dying is therefore reflexive. I guess that’s something.
8.<
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I mean. The ABCs of my psychology, my building blocks. Yesterday I saw Juli’s mom with a kid, with a baby, and today I wake up overwhelmed by him, because of him, because of dreaming him, exhaustively and at length. Dreaming seeing him, dreaming him talking, me still going through that same old awful thing of not being able and not wanting to simply let him go, and at the same time not wanting to stay with him. Or not being able to. I don’t know. The with-or-without-you thing, that whole thing, with or without you. Like Fanny, like Depardieu. That pit in your stomach, in your heart, that hole where nothing ever, nothing you can do is or ever will be enough. Ever. That sense of reduction, of absence. That’s what I felt, that pit, I felt it in my dream, having Juli there in front of me, and at the same time I was happy, I mean, a specific sense of happiness, so towards him, seeing him there, being face-to-face with him and knowing that I wasn’t going to shatter into a thousand pieces, at least not yet. That sensation too—that of my heart in my throat just from wanting to know, basically, if he’s okay, what he’s been up to. So in my dream we were talking, and he was telling me that he had kids and a wife or I don’t know if he was saying that, but the feeling was that he was with someone, and that there was something that wasn’t possible anymore for the two of us, that was it, impossibility, and, nonetheless, the undeniability of that which does remain, of what we do still feel, that chemistry, that charge, that need. It’s like I could ingest, devour him in those moments, so he would stay inside me forever. Or have him kill me, I also think that, I think that that could happen, and it’s almost like I want it to happen, like I’m expecting it to happen, for him to kill me. If I close my eyes or rest my head on my arms on the table, and he smoothes my hair, I think or I feel that in that moment he could crush my head in one fell swoop, kick me directly in the head and kill me, but I don’t open my eyes, I just stay there with my eyes shut, not feeling fear, only resignation, surrendering to that, surrendering to him, to his capacity to crush me. The death drive, I guess, and I guess it always felt like that with him, that death drive. Like being at the midpoint between wanting to avoid and needing to go ahead. Knowing, hearing that it would be good/would be better to get out of it, and nonetheless not being able to, not really, not being able to escape, and going going going on and on and on, as though magnetized, by something. Maybe the kid’s not his, maybe Susi was watching some other kid, why would it have to be her grandchild? Yesterday I didn’t have the guts to ask your parents any questions over dinner, I kept feeling so shocked about that baby that I didn’t want to talk about it at all, I’m sure it’s his, that he’s the father, and I need to kind of get used to the idea before it gets confirmed for me, I need to be able to handle the confirmation in a stoic manner, when it’s given. Right now I’m a wreck, I’m not sure why it’s killing me this way, obviously it was always there within the realm of the possible. I mean: he isn’t and wasn’t a part of my life anymore, even if he was before, and he’s free to do whatever he wants, and I always wanted him to do well, to be happy, or maybe not happy because maybe that’s too much to ask, but I did want him to get to some sort of stability, I guess, at least an emotional one. But now it’s hell for me that he has that, it makes me angry or sad that I couldn’t give it to him, and worse, still, that he’s been able to find it with someone else. Fundamentally, I can’t tolerate the idea that he’s had children with another person, another girl, another woman. The idea that there could be little hims in the world, and that they would have nothing to do with me, is painful, I don’t know why, or I don’t know why it’s so bad, I guess I hadn’t ever really imagined it, I’d always assumed he’d be kind of lost in the world, trying to reconstruct his life, and now it turns out that he didn’t waste any time at all, didn’t waste a single second, and obviously he wouldn’t have been on his own for this whole time, with his charisma, which you’ve got to give him. The son of a bitch is enchanting. Ali watches me, eyes wide, in that cat’s pose that’s somewhere in between complete surprise and watching like a hawk and beholding the face of a corpse. I find it funny when she looks at me like that: I hold her gaze, try to replicate her bewildered face, and for a while we just stare at each other. I wonder if she’s trying to convey something to me that I can’t quite understand, or whether she sees something in my face that I don’t know about. It’s such a bummer, this stuff with Julián. It really bums me out. He always really bummed me out. The same thing that attracts me to him bums me out about him, that’s it, really. What I find attractive depresses me, or I’m depressed by what I find attractive, I don’t know, I don’t know what order everything happens in.
Anyway, so dinner with your parents was great, albeit with me performing acrobatics the entire time in order to avoid or not broach certain topics. Basically they asked about my life in Buenos Aires, if I liked it, if I’d adapted, who I was hanging out with there, they noted how few people had made it in the city, that most of them had come on home (danger: Julián), they asked if I was happy with my job, and here I glossed over some stuff and only told them all the good parts, filtering out my fears, for their sake, emphasizing my flexible schedule and that I did with my time as I wished, that that really was great, and then they asked me about school, or no, I think they asked me about that first and with that I really laid it on thick, extolling all the many virtues, all the many benefits of institutionalized learning, citing more what I recalled of my hopes for college when I was about to go as opposed to what I found in fact upon arrival/ended up with. That yeah, I liked it, that yeah, it was taking me a while to graduate, that I still don’t have a board to lay stuff out at home but that I do have a big table, that when I have to I work at a classmate’s house, and that yes, I have met a ton of really cool people, and that there are all kinds of people, there really are, most of them from Buenos Aires, but from other places too, that there are just a lot of people period, so you get a little bit of everything, although I guess not everything everything, it’s an expensive major, the materials are all really expensive, yeah, really outrageous, and that my dad has to keep sending me an allowance for all the materials I need for my different classes, that, I mean, I got a scholarship but that my dad pays rent as well, which is a huge relief because if we had to pay rent we couldn’t go to school at all, definitely not. That yeah, that Ramiro is still in college too, but he’s kind of setting his own pace, taking it easier because he’s really into music right now, that he met some guys at school, I mean, he met one of them there and then through him the others, his group of friends, most of them from Buenos Aires or from the suburbs, all musicians, mostly rock, yeah, they have a band. Yeah, it’s great, Rami’s really into it and plays all day some days; he just bought a used keyboard from one of these guys, so now he’s doing both guitar and keyboard, and he’s beginning to compose. No, it doesn’t bother me at all, I actually really like it, I like the music they make, and I like having music and people around, that’s the main thing, is that I really like having people around. No, it doesn’t really bother me when I’m trying to study, that I either shut the door or go to some classmate’s house or some café, but in general it doesn’t bother me anyway, it actually helps me focus, I’d say it relaxes me. That in fact my boyfriend is the drummer for their band, so it could hardly bother me. Yes, exactly, Manuel, oh, yes, I’m very happy, that recently things have been getting serious between us. No, he’s from Mendoza, but he’s been living in Buenos Aires for forever. He’s just a little bit older, two years older than Ramiro. So that’s what they do, they have the band, they’ve been playing for quite a while, just that Rami joined them relatively recently because they had a fight with their guitarist, who was also their singer, so it was Rami and this other guy who sings who joined the band at the same time. He sings really well, it did the band a world of good to make that change, this guy really has an incredible voice, totally unique, and he also gets so enthusiastic about the band, about the group itself, in terms of the people too, which is really important. Reducido, that’s the name
of the band: Reducido. Yeah, they play quite a bit, on the south side mostly, I mean of Buenos Aires, and in little nearby towns as well, they play quite a bit in small towns, they get quite a few gigs. Yeah, they usually do play with other bands, they’re still not appearing on their own yet, or I mean, very infrequently, but it doesn’t really make sense for them yet, they’re not that likely to draw enough of a crowd to pay to rent the space and move all their stuff around, I mean, one of the guys has a truck, so that transports all the equipment, but even so, the idea is to make some money, even if it’s just to maintain all their instruments and such. And for food and what have you. Yes, I’m super happy, Manuel and I are going very strong, oh, yeah, he’s very laid back, yes, yes, I really care about him (danger: Julián), he cares about me too, we care a lot about each other. No, yeah, he also works in a store that sells instruments, on Talcahuano, yeah, right smack in the middle of the city, that there are a lot of them there, yeah, that he gets a little bored, but it’s not that bad considering. And it’s actually not under the table or anything. And besides it’s only temporary: he wants to start teaching music classes in schools, he likes kids. So I mean I definitely can’t complain, and your mother says how it’s so great that things are going so great, and I say, no, absolutely, I definitely can’t complain, and cheers, I say, and they say cheers.
We walk home, because we’d gone to the place on Rivadavia, which, of course, still has that old Nicolás as their main waiter, who told me how I’d changed, kid, while meanwhile staring at my chest, which made me fairly uncomfortable, but anyway we came back on foot, and you can’t possibly imagine how cold it was, and your mom laced her arm through mine, and your dad was holding on to her, and that was how we walked on back to your place, all of us drunk, almost a family.