9

I DIDN’T GO HOME that night either. After dinner, which was exquisite as always—salmon, Indian spices, yucca, coconut and tomato sauces, dirty rice, eggplant in a mushroom and anise sauce, all with cinnamon water or beer or something harder or all three—we sat down at that enormous, uneven table with broken legs, in the midst of the cold, again the penetrating cold of the mud, of the dirt, of the ceiling paint peeling off, and drank tequila I’d brought. He always got drunk before me, our bodies a bit lost in the world, feeling an inner strength as much deceitful as it was supreme. His body trembling and brows furrowed, he showed me some videos. The first was a clip of a man visited by a girl; it was an animated film accompanied by a sad song that made me cry and that made him say that for him, up on the stage, he was the canary, he was the tiger, he was the old man, and he was the little girl. He could be all that. With his fingers he could cook and play the guitar and caress without touching. I thought his fingers were truly beautiful, and I kissed them, he doesn’t remember this, he doesn’t remember that I slowly put his skinny fingers in my mouth and sucked them one by one. He doesn’t remember that later I opened his shirt and licked his nipples that were two raisins, I’ll repeat: I’d never savored any other man’s or woman’s nipples like that. And kissing them, the sensation of the two of us outside the world returned. But he doesn’t remember any of this, he drank tequila and then smiled with a maniacal expression just like the one he made while playing his red guitar. What he says he remembers are exact words. He remembers, he says, that I talked about the mystery of certain coincidences and about our meeting, and he remembers that at one point I talked about orgasms, I told him every orgasm with him was different and that was the mystery of the universe for me. Every orgasm, he says I said, is different. He says I described it like veins that vibrate and dance and swing dizzily over the chaos of the body and like raw waves of blood that burst membranes open and throng together shaking a point, a single point that’s red but that has white mucus, soft skin that cedes and that I can scrape with my long fingernail. The clitoris, which I described, he says, like the nib of a Bic pen, the nib touching the paper, all the pleasure, or like the pistil a finger grazes and plucks, and that plucking is painful, and I want to stay there, he said I said, I want to stay in that pain, I want to prolong the orgasm, I stay in it so that, in the diminutive space, amid that pain, the pleasure is made and nothing can be distinguished; there’s a strange adjustment of everything in that instant, he says I also said.