10

ONE NIGHT during one of those months, naked in his bed, playing around with our tongues, intensely aroused but not yet penetrating, the phone rang several times, and one of those times he said it must be my daughter, I’m going to answer. He stood up, naked, and I watched his figure disappear and then heard his voice, I heard a voice I hadn’t heard from him; it was as if in his being existed a voice that was a continuation of him, full of the weakness that precedes strength, words that contained a firmness prepared for anything, that found no space in that skinny body but that coincided with the raisins on his chest and the paleness of his agile legs. His voice said delicate, passionate things and then began to softly sing a song and he said sleep well and then the girl’s name and then he started singing again es el miedo lo que pone el mundo a girar. And time kept passing as he sang and talked to his daughter and told her a story and I felt the loneliness fall over me: smack my ears, open my chest, penetrate my holes, and then I felt the water, the deluge, the hail pour from my tear ducts, my nose, and start flooding me, drowning me as the wetness took over everything and my body got smaller and smaller, diminishing. When he returned, I’d already disappeared, and he hugged a wet piece of flesh and even though he wanted to give me something of his body, he quickly fell asleep and started snoring. Orphanhood. Not what’s missing, but what never was. I wanted to grab onto some strength. I’m leaving, I meant to say; how many times had I wanted to say I’m leaving but never managed to do so, I was what was left over, there was no way to pick myself up whole and leave. Again, the wound, the little girl forgotten in my chest who came to tell me you don’t have a father or a mother or anything, and the red and the white throb in the depths of your desertion. Abandonment issues, the child psychiatrist diagnosed when I had my first crisis of insomnia, and my mom and I believed him; she full of guilt and me of fear. He had fallen asleep, and I gathered my strength, gathered my things, and left. I got downtown, went into a bar, and luckily ran into a friend with whom I drank tequila after tequila and did a line of coke, and while I was having an absurd conversation in the bathroom, now with a little strength returned to my body, María’s message came in. I’m with Ta who just broke up with Gordo, come console her. I got behind the wheel, left the bar, and accelerated. I sang at the top of my voice a radio hit that was the theme song of the telenovela La fiera, a telenovela I watched devotedly back in ’87 and that went No seas coqueta, no.