Blood Red

Gabriela Ponce

Contents ( 79)

GABRIELA PONCE

BLOOD RED

Translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker

RESTLESS BOOKS

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents herein are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

First published as Sanguínea by Editorial Candaya, Barcelona, 2020

English edition arranged through Sophie Savary Agent Littéraire (Montpellier, France).

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted without the prior written permission of the publisher.

First Restless Books paperback edition October 2022

Paperback ISBN: 9781632063304

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022937672

This book is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Cover design by Kelly Winton

Set in Garibaldi by Tetragon, London

Printed in the United States of America

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Every love is inseparable from the bearer thereof.

No earthly love’s meaning can be deciphered.

The body strains toward something unknown never to come.

PASCAL QUIGNARD, VIE SECRÈTE

TRANSLATED BY LOUIS BOUCHER

I hate and I love. Wherefore do I so, peradventure thou askest.

I know not, but I feel it to be thus and I suffer.

CATULLUS, THE CARMINA, EPIGRAM 85

TRANSLATED BY RICHARD BURTON AND LEONARD SMITHERS

1

WE ROLLED INTO the warehouse spraying spit that glittered amid an uncontainable excitement while the night seeped in through our skirts and sleeves. Hands smelling of menthol and eyes vibrating with a dazzling intensity. Keeping our skates on, we entered and started dancing frenetically, trying to embrace the untouchable or unnameable while pouring ourselves out among the crowd and the noise: an intense beautification of everything. We felt as if we were just one body—bone, blood, flesh—that momentarily splits apart to come back together, pulled by the irremediable need for touch. We grabbed each other’s hands and waists and long blonde, black, golden, red hair. Our rhythms were synchronized and every now and then our lips touched, our breasts brushed against one another. In one of those impulses to flee that strikes in moments of greatest pleasure, flashing from my tailbone up my body, I skated toward the bar, ordered a whiskey, and grabbed the hands that were at my side, hands that were familiar and eyes that felt like accomplices even though I’d only ever seen them once or twice. I slipped in the sweat of that body, smelled it, and pulled it outside, back onto the street, to skate again in the open air and experience the night as a black volute that attracts unstable bodies within its reach, showing no mercy to those who ask for help. The sentence outside is the night echoed inside me, and I skated.