15

I SENT A MESSAGE from my phone I can come over tonight and got a smiley face in response. And of course, one nail drives out another, the cave was the nail and the door and it was the window and it was the buzzing of insects that contained the excess my body couldn’t resist, a ferment that flowed through me. The cave offered me a strength and a future, and at the same time, it opened to the past to show me there was no place for me there (both an invitation and a prohibition, like every gesture made by the man who inhabited it). I run to the cave and the man who greets me doesn’t touch me, he doesn’t touch my scars or lick them or fondle them. He touches me with a delicacy I spring at and gives me a sip of rum, he says my daughter’s sleeping, and then I think the moans will be soft and the morbid curiosity juicy, and I bury my face in his chest and curl up like a cat on his sofa feeling a love that suddenly ignites a great fire in my chest, and my vagina feels like a sponge full of little holes from which a thin milk is slowly squeezed and moistens my underwear while he, already a little drunk, plays the guitar. I again have the sensation of gaining a little comprehension, I understand his white fingernails strumming the strings of his red guitar and ask when he started playing (he plays the guitar like the rain falling on the sea, that image is him; he plays the guitar like strange animals being born, organisms he steals with an imperturbable passion; he plays the guitar with the vertigo of looking down and overcoming the separation between his fingers from which sprout apparitions and evenings and absences that come together, the map of the planet with its flora and fauna colored by melancholy). And he, who is a man of few words but who says everything without slowing down when he does speak, tells me: Yugoslavia, end of the eighties, his diplomat father is assigned a mission. He attends a school full of tall, white girls. He doesn’t have friends and spends the afternoons playing around with his older brother’s guitar. His neighbor asks who plays the guitar in his house, he’s heard it and says it sounds good. He, somewhat modestly, a modesty he was born with and that will never leave him, a modesty contained in his eyes and hands and that can be confused with shyness or indifference or arrogance, a modesty that when he is naked huddles anxiously between his fingers but that isn’t shyness or indifference or arrogance; he, somewhat modestly, acknowledges that he’s the one who has been intoning certain melodies. The neighbor invites him to play in his metal band that needs a guitarist, and he accepts, goes to a few rehearsals, gets drunk for the first time, and speaks a foreign language he isn’t fluent in for the first time, and for the first time since he’s been in this immense country or perhaps for the first time in his life, he loses his fear, not his modesty, but his fear, he loses his fear of everything, the emotion that rises and falls in his thorax is new and it incredibly feels like a rebirth.