13

I’M HERE, read the message M—the man from the letters—sent to my phone. I felt like the chaos swallowing me was bringing me closer to what I was fleeing. Nothing to do about it. I came to Lima to resolve company matters and am spending a night in Quito (M, the Spaniard with whom I’ve exchanged letters for years but with whom I’d never had more contact than admiring his beautiful ass frequently traveled to Lima for matters related to his dad’s air-conditioning company). I’m here with an Argentine friend. I felt my hand tremble, my body step onto a new amorous stage, and I burst into laughter. I met M in a workshop. Back then I was very married, and even though fidelity had already been trashed in my eyes and my husband’s, I didn’t hook up with him. It was a writing workshop, or a performance or art therapy or biodrama workshop, I don’t remember. Those days, I signed up for any workshop with the firm belief that I was on the threshold of finding a calling. M came from Lima to take the same workshop. On the last day, when each participant was supposed to present something, he, who had an irreverent sense of humor and had done nothing but get bored listening to the instructor’s melodramatic, simplistic stories, left us all dumbfounded when he pulled his pants down and started humping a table. He really pushed the table with his pelvic thrusts, imitating a violent penetration, and he did this while reciting a monologue from Hamlet. It was, the teacher explained insipidly, a successful though somewhat impertinent metaphor for man’s loneliness. What left me cold were his butt cheeks, which weren’t a metaphor for anything. His two round butt cheeks. Little slabs of flesh pertinent to the world. I could fit inside those cheeks, or my hands or at least my teeth could. Everything fit perfectly in that white curve. I felt like I could reach out my arm and press my finger deep in, opening a hole in which my index finger could perfectly remain. When the presentations were over, we all went out for beers and later to a karaoke bar, where I broke down while singing telenovela songs. His bus to Lima left at midnight. We hugged goodbye. I wanted to touch his butt, caress it through his jeans. But it didn’t happen. He said it was lovely meeting you, and somewhat ironically also said the Daniela Romo song suits you. And I said yes, it was lovely meeting you. And then he hugged someone else, and when he was leaving I rushed up to him and said yes, it was nice, it was really nice to meet you, what a great meeting; and he looked at me for a moment and said give me your address and I’ll write to you, and I said give me yours, and he said but by hand, no emails, and that felt like an unprecedented romanticism so I accepted. That night of our goodbye I had a dream in which I voraciously bit things. I bit glasses. Bread. Calamari. Scraps of pads. Apples. Wax, a red wax that melted between my teeth. And I also bit the body of an unknown man whose eyes were bleeding. The next night I wrote to him and told him about my dream and described my admiration for the roundness of his butt, and that’s how our correspondence began. And it’s been years of that, years of writing to each other about our intimate thoughts and fears, years of this romantic correspondence I treasured for its closeness but that also terrified me in its transparency.