But now something is happening that shuts my brain up. We are hurtling through a darkness so complete its texture is the total absence of texture. There is no boundary between self and air. My hand, inches from my eyes, is an indistinguishable part of the mass of black particles careering about me, interrupted here and there by thin wisps of light. Near the end of the tunnel, the white threads spin together. The light becomes shapes. The shapes become objects, disappointing in their familiarity.
Nimal claps his hands on his thighs. He looks past my shoulder at a train station, barren except for a man in a sarong, picking his teeth on a shady bench. “I exit at the next stop,” he says. “Would you like to come with me?”
I cross my arms over my chest and stare at the seat back in front of me. “I am married,” I lie.
“I wish you and your family happiness and good health.” He retrieves his bag from the overhead rack and explodes in laughter by way of goodbye.
So long, stranger.
—
And now we come to the land of infinite plywood shacks with plastic tarps for roofs. The only visible earth is a small rectangle of dirt in the center of every four shacks. In one of these tiny yards a dog lies on its side, unblinking. In others, kids chase one another and shout. The train continues past a mound of garbage several stories high. I block my nose against the stench. Scavengers walk atop the compressed mass of refuse: insects crawling atop a mountain of colored sand. Nearby, barefoot kids play cricket in a field.
A family gets on the packed train and settles in the passageway between cars. The mother and three children immediately fall asleep, draped over one another. The father remains awake, sitting in the open doorway with bent legs to keep his family from falling to the tracks below. As they near their destination, the parents wake the kids with chocolate cookies, which the baby laughingly smears in her sister’s hair until the older girl cries. The father takes the baby while the mother fixes the toddler’s ponytail, murmuring in her ear. A family. The most natural thing in the world, for some.
MIRIGALLE
I get off the train in a beach town whose name appeals to me. On the street outside the station, well-dressed men fall into step alongside me, offering me the best room in town, very good price, special price just for me, come and see, they drive, no problem. I find an unaggressive rickshaw driver, fit my bag into the back of the tiny three-wheeler, and ask him to take me to the Retired Peacock, a guesthouse recommended to me by a pimply older man just before I got off the train—“Italian lady owner. You say Tharaka sent you.” The driver barrels past vans and flatbed trucks piled with timber, then turns down a narrow coastal road. The air is alive—vapor exhaled by leaves after a rainstorm. Or something. Droplets of sunlight flirt with the surface of the ocean. It’s pretty, is what I mean. Boys in torn shorts stand on fishing stilts in the shallows. A pile of rocks covered in wire separates the road from the sand, protection against another tsunami, more hopeful than actual.
We turn down a dirt path. I am all alone in the back of this rickshaw on this unknown road under a pale pink sky, just visible through the gaps in the silly palm trees. My freedom is huge and it adores me. The driver honks at a cow blocking our path. The beast moos in protest before ambling into the woods. Rebar juts out of crumbling pastel walls, the remains of houses decimated by the tsunami. The driver stops in front of a white picket fence. “Welcome” is written in English, Italian, and Sinhala in small, neat, golden letters. As I step out of the rickshaw, a pack of dogs bounds toward the gate, leaping and growling.
“Dogs okay,” the driver tells me, extending his palm to collect the fare.
“You don’t scare me,” I lie to the dogs as I walk through a yard of patchy grass and unpainted stone huts. A lanky boy lugging a dead palm leaf stops short when he hears my footsteps. He looks terrified, like I did that time in Paris when two giggling girls passed me as I was walking in the Jardin des Plantes and I shrieked and dropped my book. I spent so much time alone then—raking the dead leaves of my thoughts, staring at the piles and hoping a pattern would emerge—that the intrusion of laughter frightened me.
“Do you have any rooms?” I ask the startled boy.
“I get Manuela.” He walks to a stone patio attached to a house. Fluffy blue cushions are scattered on the ground. A solid stone coffee table and bench seem fashioned directly out of the earth, an ancient boulder resigning itself to the quaint human need for furniture. A woman rises off the bench and sets her book on the ground. She wears a yellow linen skirt and a loose tank top, no bra. Her hips are wide, her arm muscles conspicuous, her hair long and dry and white, tied in a ponytail slung over one shoulder. “You want a room? You did not phone?”
“No. I just—someone on the train told me about this place. Tharaka? He said he knew you.”
“This is a resort. This is not a backpacker hangout. Really, you should have called. You should not trust a stranger on the train.” She stares out of pale, pale blue eyes.
“How much are your rooms?”
“We have private cabanas. They start at three thousand rupees.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“How much were you hoping to spend?”
“More like six hundred.” I have thousands of dollars in the bank. Still, it feels true that I could not afford to pay thirty dollars a night for a private hut on the beach. I’m so accustomed to frugality, never having counted on myself for a steady income. That’s partly why it felt like I was doing something really good when I brought Suriya and Rajith to a fancy hotel. But it was just another idea from which I wanted too much.
“I can’t open up one of the cabanas for six hundred rupees,” Manuela says. “I’m sorry to turn you away. I’ll have one of the boys take you back to town at least. I was about to send him to the market anyway.” She has the indeterminate accent of a nonnative English speaker who’s been speaking English for many years in a country of nonnative English speakers. “Might as well take off your pack and have a drink before you go.” She walks into the main house and returns with a lopsided hand-blown glass filled with ice water. She sits down cross-legged in front of the bench and rolls a cigarette. I walk to the edge of the patio, which extends to a cove. Upturned canoes lie on the sand. Hammocks link palm trees. Manuela coughs.
“How long have you been here?” I ask.
“Twelve years.”
“And you stay here year-round?”
She nods inside whorls of smoke.
“You never go back to—”
“To Italy? No.” She smiles with abrupt tenderness.
“Do you mind if I walk down to the beach?”
“Please.”
The wet sand mirrors the sunset. I raise my skirt above my knees. Warm water pools around my ankles. “Oh,” I say out loud, and cup my hands over my smile. Could I ever love anything more than the ocean? A huge wave rears up. I run backward, but the water crashes down on my legs and knocks me off my feet.
Manuela calls out from the patio. “Why don’t you just stay here? I don’t have any reservations for a while. Eight hundred rupees?”
—
My cabana is a hollowed-out stone containing only a white bed frame—high off the ground and net-free, since there are screens on the many circular windows. We eat bread and bananas for dinner. Manuela eats with one hand and reads with the other, sitting cross-legged with her back against the stone bench. I float in a chair swing. Cicadas fill the gaps between the crash of waves. Manuela offers me a glass of wine. I hesitate for a moment, afraid of my excitement at the prospect of breaking the alcohol fast my body has been relishing since I got to Sri Lanka. “I’d love some wine. Just one glass.”
“I wasn’t offering more than a glass.”
She walks toward the kitchen. Acne covers the surface of her back, pustules so tiny and white they are almost pretty on her leathery skin. She returns with two glasses half full of lovely maroon liquid. A dog sighs and rests its chin on its paw. The ceiling lights are dim, their fixtures clogg
ed with dead insects.
“For a resort, this place doesn’t seem all that hedonistic,” I say. “It’s more like a monastery.”
“Or a prison. A voluntary prison.”
“Why did you put yourself in prison?”
Manuela’s laugh is like a glass half full of lovely maroon liquid. Convenient metaphor that happens to be accurate. When she first came to Asia, she tells me, she had all these ideas of changing her life. She had been trying to party her way out of misery for most of her adulthood. She spent two years at a monastery in Bodh Gaya, the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment. Although she never actually took the vow, Manuela lived as a nun—celibate, no eating after noon, barely speaking. And then she realized that for her being a nun was just another extreme, another way to avoid herself. She got to know an Italian couple staying in Bodh Gaya—nouveau Buddhist fanatics who were in the process of divesting themselves of their worldly goods, one of which was a large property on the Sri Lankan coast. They offered it to Manuela dirt cheap when it seemed like the war would never end. Manuela never (“nev-er,” she repeats, separating the syllables) thought she’d be the kind of person who would operate a resort, but it’s ended up being perfect for her. As soon as she started hiring local boys to build the cabanas, she felt immense relief, as if the vague inner demand she had spent all her life trying to ignore suddenly shut the hell up.
“And now you’re helping people. Giving them a place to get that same kind of relaxation.”
Manuela shrugs. “Everyone wants something different from this place.”
I push off the ground and swing toward the far wall, where drawings hang suspended from a wire with clothespins. Several of them feature Christmas trees of increasing precision, neon green and covered in sparkles. “Buon Natale!” is written in red and green block letters. I ask who drew them.
“Emil. My son.” Manuela stands and tucks her book under her arm. “Take care walking to your cabana. I don’t have the ground lights on.” From the darkness beyond the patio, she asks me to forgive her, she never asked my name.
—
I dream of a middle-age man wearing a dirty sweat suit, carrying a cane. His belly droops over the exhausted stumps of his legs. His few hairs are slicked against his sweaty scalp. I’m lying on the edge of a bare mattress. His wide hips hold my knees apart. He puts the unlit end of a candle inside me. Even my dreaming self is ashamed for conjuring this cliché grotesquery. But once he moves my underwear to the side and sticks his thing in me, I no longer see the man. I think only of his thoughtless, greedy enjoyment. I come in my sleep, my legs clenched around my hand.
Immateriality gives way to the material—the soft sheet sticking to my sweaty shoulder, roosters crowing outside, interrupting the susurration of broom on stone. It’s soothing to have a grotesque fantasy in a sweet setting. Maybe the particulars of my desire don’t matter much at all. Maybe it’s not so bad that all of my fantasies involve women being degraded. It would be less morally confusing, of course, if another kind of sexiness were possible, but I don’t think it is, not for me. To express love explicitly through the physical—hands clutched overhead, eyes locked, murmured “I love you’s,” mutual orgasms in which I felt like a sweet little bird soaring over a waterfall—how unerotic it seems. I used to worry that I’d been broken by bad casual sex and online porn, which I started watching during the gray, gray Paris winter, alone in my tiny maid’s room on the attic floor with a two-euro bottle of wine and a couple of chocolate croissants, convinced the world owed me whatever inkling of pleasure I could wring from it. I would cover the worn, fake-tanned faces of the girls on my computer screen so I wouldn’t have to see the way their eyes and mouths floated, detached and vacant, in the midst of the fucking. I just wanted to see fucking, humans making themselves feel so good they lost all control. But the guys went on talking and talking, calmly planning to make their sex partners drink gallons of cum or stretch out their assholes or destroy their pussies with their huge cocks. The scenes made me queasy and upset but they also got me wet (a self-protective evolutionary adaptation, I told myself later), so I’d go from video to video in search of something I could conscionably get off to. Finally I’d just stick my hand down my pants and start coming almost instantly and the orgasm was hard and tiny like a pebble and then I was all alone with the gross porn thing that had made me come, feeling now that its eroticism was really rage at the inaccessible things we could not keep ourselves from wanting and the unreasonable demands the grown-up world placed on us. Some of the girls seemed genuinely turned on by the violence done to their orifices—“Pound that pussy! Stretch that asshole!”—as if their bodies belonged to some hateful stranger. Every ejaculation would only increase their willingness to be used like this again and again, just as my porn-inflicted orgasms felt good only insofar as they briefly relieved an incessant itch. The videos are addictive because they do not satisfy; each offers only the shallowest consolation for the inaccessibility of satisfaction.
A man gives orders to a girl on her knees, speaking as if he were ordering a hamburger. “Look at the camera. Open your mouth wide.” He jerks off and ejaculates without sound or expression, the dumb enactment of an image—man’s semen, woman’s face. I once heard a radio interview with a porn star promoting her memoir. Her advice to the numerous male callers who wanted to get involved in the industry: If you can masturbate in a crowded room and stay hard for an hour and then ejaculate the instant someone tells you to, congratulations; you’ve got what it takes. And that’s the classy, official stuff. The free, amateur videos have no rules at all: A woman being asphyxiated and whipped while her asshole is simultaneously fisted and fucked. Vaginas being electrocuted. REAL LIVE RAPES captured on film! A black woman in a hotel room into which more and more white men keep entering, laughing, wagging their cocks in her wide-eyed face, their own faces obscured to protect their identities, the woman turning in circles like a cat cornered by coyotes. A group of blobby, laughing men fucking a woman with a champagne bottle. If it broke, it would puncture her organs, her bowels would stop functioning, she would need a colostomy bag for life like that character in that David Foster Wallace story—stop, please stop. These are a few of the scenes I stumbled on while trying to find a video of two people fucking. How to forgive myself for being an ordinary human? How to forgive the world that ordinary humans made?
I tried watching feminist porn a few times, but it only left me unsettled. The loving looks, the tonguey kissing, the focus on cunnilingus (depressing that the clinical Latin term is less unappealing than the slang—carpet-munching, muff-diving—which I cannot even write without laughing). I should have desired these images but did not. Jared told me to stop worrying about it. “You’re not blowing some fat fuck on camera because your daddy didn’t love you,” he said. “You’re blowing me.” He took my jaw in his hand and pulled my lips apart. I reached for his belt buckle. We had sex and I came twice, imagining a group of overweight men ejaculating into the various orifices of an underage ballerina. Or some other scenario that I pray never happens to anyone in real life.
A therapist might say that my fantasies are a sublimation of my distress over the pervasive portrait of sex as ruthless masculine aggression, the way a rape survivor may fantasize about rape to reclaim the experience, make it a means to sexual pleasure instead of an obstruction. The therapist would probably be right, and maybe I would be a more balanced person if I had agreed to see one, as Brian wanted me to. But I don’t want to subject my mind to someone else’s idea of a good life. I want to do my own research. God knows I have the time.
—
I have barred myself from checking email until I finish the translation. A kind of superstition: If I pretend that the publisher wants to buy it, he will buy it. I force myself to work for two hours before lunch, efficace et machinal, waiting for my real day to begin.
Every meal at Manuela’s is mango and bananas and spicy cashews and dhal and thick slabs of coarse bread. In the afternoons
, we drink tea and then read, cocooned inside hammocks. I borrow books from the shelf on the patio. A few are in French, romantic and frivolous. It’s good to engage with French besides my translation. I adopt Manuela’s easy dress—tank top, loose skirt, no bra. I cover myself when the boys come to clear palm leaves or fix the plumbing in one of the cabanas, but they hardly seem to register my presence. In the late afternoons, I walk on the beach, clambering over rock embankments that separate one cove from the next. The dogs are giddy companions, sprinting and digging and burrowing and wiping their sandy snouts against my skirt. I stand atop the rocks and watch the coming waves. Their whitecaps mist and froth as they gather force and speed until they lose control of their own momentum, hurl themselves against the rocks, explode upward like geysers, spritzing me in saltwater.
There is no point to my life. The sentence appears in my head several times a day. If I said the words out loud, it would sound like a lament. But kept to myself, it’s the best thought I’ve ever had.
—
I sit on my bed in the mornings and evenings, remaining still for long enough that I become attuned to my body’s involuntary movements—abdomen filling and deflating, air rustling my nose hairs, pressure building and easing in my guts, itchy pressure at the center of my chest that gradually grows into the sensation I used to call my annoyment knot. If I can sit still and endure the knot for what seems like a long time, the feeling of agitation gives way to the nearly pleasant pins-and-needles tingling that arises when a numb body part regains sensation, and my heart and groin begin vibrating and floating like those curlicues of light that drift through bright skies, and the only thought I know is a line from a song—oh my little love—which plays in the head of a character in one of my favorite stories when he has sex with his wife. The shift is like opening the door to a gas station restroom and finding a deserted beach. Sky sand ocean stop sky sand ocean stop sky…Only after hours of listening to inner monologues—“Can you see the line of my underwear through these pants? Where did I buy these pants again? And when was that exactly? And what was I wearing that day? I am such a loser for never having read Thomas Hardy. I wish Manuela knew that I have no idea how much I weigh. Is this fart going to make a noise? What about this one?”—do I believe that the monk at Shirmani was not just making a cute philosophical metaphor when he compared the mind to a mug with a hole in the bottom. The entire Indian Ocean could never fill the mug. But I do not need to fill the mug. The mind provides exactly what the mind needs. I just sit; I’m free.
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