When he finishes speaking, tossing yuccas into the pot, I return to his hands and suck them. I bring them to my mouth, bite them, coat them in slobber, put them between my legs, I want those hands, and we make love. We eat octopus and drink rum and have sex several times. He ejaculates and stays there, tucked away, and I say don’t pull out, and then I feel the turgidity of his penis inside my vagina, I’ve never felt the flesh fill with blood while inside me and, hardening, slowly fill the hole so that everything starts again, an immense thickness of pleasure, but the girl might wake up, she might see us making love, then he’ll cover my mouth, but he won’t be able to fully silence me. We’ll hear her say daddy, what’s happening, he’ll immediately pull out, run off, and the hole will be the immense orifice from which vapor escapes. Grab the cat, squeeze it against my body, softly insert my finger in my hole, picture the semen like red snow, have an orgasm, and wait for him to sing her a song and then tell me you can’t sleep over, and I’ll gather my things and get in the car and leave, hallucinating on the highway back to my house and, in that hallucination, I’ll say out loud, the only thing that could really save me would be to have a child, and I’ll laugh. You have the calendar and clock of my life, mister, says the broadcaster, while I pull into my garage half drunk and still turned on, and I feel things start to collapse. Everything in this house is him. And I start packing up all the things the asshole still hasn’t gotten.

16

IT’S LATE and I’ve gathered most of his things. The nostalgia is extraordinary. It’s the well, the puddle, the quagmire in which I get wet, console myself, crawl. I grab his albums, the photos, the books, and I pack them up, drowning in snot and sweat. My tangled hair covers me, wrapping me up with something before the terror I feel coming on. How will his now faraway days transpire, given that every morning I’d caressed the face that admired me for a transparent beauty, always about to break down, a beauty I felt only I could protect, what will I do with my eyes? For every part of his body, one of mine cries. So many years. I don’t know how to go on with all this. Luckily María arrives with a bottle. I’m still hungover, but I must do this today. I ask her to help, and she asks why did you break up? The question elicits a nervous laugh. I think about an easy answer: the fucking waiting, I answer. It was killing me. Waiting was always, for me, a renewed possibility of the end. My sphincters, all the sphincters of my body—which I now know total more than fifty—would close, spheres squeezing their little muscles, and I’d start chewing my fingers (my cuticles are especially tasty, but mostly it’s the precision of ripping them off that fascinates me; by removing the cuticles the nail is left unprotected, it touches the finger. If the cuticle is carefully removed, a task that can take hours, it doesn’t bleed. Those on the thumb are a little more prone to bleeding. When they do, they do so in fat drops. A night of waiting could be ten bloodless cuticles. In addition to the cuticles, there are other parts of the fingers that are more difficult to rip off. Those are, due to the time they take, the ones that interest me more; they’re on the edges of the nails). My fingers sufficiently chewed, I could stand at the window and glue my nose to its coldness and stay there for a long time, replaying some painful scene. The cold coming in through my holes and installing itself in my feet. It would be difficult to pull my nose from the glass, and sometimes I’d tell myself when the next car goes down the street, I’ll leave. But I didn’t leave. Some nights of waiting I’d look for a pill and take it, feeling my sphincters relax a little. I’m not going to give an exhaustive description of everything that would go through my head, but there is something I need to say: the suspension allowed me to imagine the most absurd stories of loss, and the shock went well with the action of ripping off a cuticle or hangnail or the entire edge of a nail. At some point I started giving speeches that put me in complete control of the situation. I’d tell myself this doesn’t make sense, I’d tell myself I can do it alone, I’d tell myself this is happening again, I’d tell myself it can’t happen again.