18

IN WHAT COULD BE a never-ending script, I repeat the phrase I deserve this. I’m a telenovela. Watching soaps was, in addition to my sentimental education, the origin of my fear of airplanes and my fondness for someone breathing on my neck. Sitting on the lap of my older cousin, who was also watching the telenovela, I’d suck on a heaping spoonful of Nutella up until the first commercial break when the spoon was left bare. The rest of the soap lasted an hour with commercials, but really it was thirty minutes of pure drama. I’d lick the empty spoon, its hollow just as tasty as the Nutella, and the pleasure would grow while on my older cousin’s lap because I could feel his breath on my neck. Sitting on his legs, or on my uncle’s, or on my grandmother’s, any of them breathing on my neck, me no longer licking the spoon but biting it, the woman on the screen about to come in through the door, to discover what’s going on inside, the broadcaster interrupted: there has been a plane crash, the president has died. Then, the images of the machine, the broken remains, me not understanding who the president was but seeing everyone cry, everything interrupted. My ballerina tutu with holes, for the first time the shiver from the holes in the fabric. How can you love someone without the slap, there’s no love without the slap, he betrays her, she slaps him, please, don’t change the story. (That night, the night I finished packing up his things, like so many nights, I dreamed about him, about his double tattoo and his unnerved chest waiting for me, me saying please, hit me while I got naked, and he, crying, and me saying I waited so long for you, this was all a big misunderstanding; then I’d slip on the wet dirt of the cave, he’d place his muddy foot on my heart, his little muddy foot pressing on the inflamed organ made visible in my chest, then my collarbone, and finally, my neck: he’d look at me and with a loving smack, he’d hit me in the face and then on the ass and he’d fuck me and I’d feel my skin getting hotter, a heat that made me sweat and get wet all over while I watched a plane writing out do you want me to read you a story in the sky. His semen raining down on my breasts, my pelvis, entering my vagina. I was a river that didn’t stop his semen, white liquid inflating my body with all those words that are excess and that included: maybe a child could save us. Finally, again, we’d be together, my sore, red butt and one of my nipples with a drop of blood that upon looking at myself, disassociated, splitting in two, I’d try to lean down and suck, but the effort would awaken me: he wasn’t there. It was true, he wasn’t there anymore, damn it, my nipple was red, inflamed, but not bleeding, and he’d left, it’s been a year since he’s slept—the son of a bitch, what pain and what a relief—at my side.) The dismantled plane. Me at five years old wondering how a machine could fly—why, what for?—it doesn’t make sense. Let the living fly. The machine must fall. The machine in the air must fail at some point, emptiness always prevails.