8

EVERY TIME I went back to the cave, what surprised me most was its smell. It smelled of mud, drugs, cat piss. The cave was in the middle of the city, close to a university, next to an immense auto repair shop in which everything from car parts to drugs were trafficked. I learned about all this because the man from the cave took a shortcut through the mechanic to get to his house, and sometimes I took it with him after eating a breakfast of a sandwich and orange juice at the bakery, our only outing. Certain clues were revealed in those outings. Across from the mechanic, there was a dead-end street, Pasaje H, and at the end, a brown building next to which was the cave. In the entrance to that building stood two brass sculptures, one was a rat in a frock coat, the other an anteater with human hands. I now know that a sculptor lived in the building as well as a Chinese hairdresser couple and a woman with a deaf daughter. The girl once saw us making love, but I don’t actually know if it was her or if it was the man from the cave’s daughter, or if it was just the shadow of some girl I imagined in my delirium, or if it was the desire for someone to see the vehemence with which the two of us made love, or if it was an omen, or a ghost. To enter the cave, you had to open a series of doors and, once inside, the sludge unleashed a smell as cozy as it was grungy. The walls looked like they were made from mud, covered with a coat of pink paint that, peeling, revealed other colors, ancient, beautiful. After a few months visiting and moving within the darkness of its spaces, from the hallway to the bedroom to the kitchen, I identified a secret passageway that led to a storage space filled with hundreds of cables and junk arranged so that every pile of trash looked like a toy. The room, on the other hand, had only an immense bed that occupied the entire space, an old bed full of big pillows that felt like flesh or dust. I’m not going to talk about that bed that was the bed of the world in its disorder and plenitude. I won’t get lost in that description, though I can say that his bed was hard as a rock and was also delicious grass. What I want to describe really has to do with the corridor, which ended at a door that was always closed and that one day, when the man left his cave to buy orange juice, I opened. One morning I woke up while we were making love—I woke up or made love in a state of somnolence because of the two Lyricas we’d taken the previous morning. At midnight, after listening to and watching videos of a Japanese singer with a baby face, I got my period with a force intensified by the rubbing of his cock, so we had to go to the drugstore. After buying pads, we decided to get some underwear because mine were dripping blood. And while we picked out the underwear on sale in the Fybeca pharmacy, we said what the hell, give us two Lyricas. Back at the house, we got into bed and swallowed the pills dry—we were too lazy and it was too cold to go to the kitchen for water. And all this to say that in that frenzy in which a poet’s voice sang the light, the light, the luminosity and yelled occurs when the truly beautiful are together, that voice or that line or that moment reminded me of my husband, and I thought about how to make love with a man was to make love with others, always to evoke or recognize past bodies; in the midst of those useless thoughts, I opened my eyes and it was already day and he was softly penetrating me, respecting my sleep and my blood, which oozed out, staining the dirty sheets. I told him I’m dying of thirst, and he went to the bakery for some juice, and I couldn’t stand the curiosity anymore and stood up, put my new underwear on, and, lost in the darkness and the cold of that morning in the cave, went to the closed door and opened it.