28

SITTING ON THE RUG in my empty living room, in front of a poster with a man licking another man’s neck—an image from a movie I’ve never seen—I try to explain myself or justify myself or save myself, but it’s all guilt. The guilt is no longer just a throb in my stomach, it’s also a throb in my throat, my groin, and an icy sweat on my hands. I try to understand, but everything I do is a surprise even to me, as if I were an unknowable amalgam full of errors, an open wound closing up and splitting open, always wavering between criticism and self-pity: I arrived at the cave, the door was open, I went into the kitchen and found a box, a red box in the shape of a T-shirt, or a tie, I don’t know, it was shaped like a man’s garment, I saw the stupid thing and trembled, my hand shook and I also laughed, there’s no way, what’s a cardboard box in the shape of a T-shirt doing here. I got closer, there was a sense of movement to the box, the color really was moving, red solicits: this man has a life, I want to make that life mine, I don’t want to love him, I want his life that’s made up of ridiculous objects, of a strange organization that saves me from the emptiness of having lost everything: what does it mean to love but that first immanent solitude put on someone else’s life. The stranger the objects, the more anchored my feet. I don’t want to open the boxes because I’ll fall in love, and this doesn’t have anything to do with him but with what I’m going to find there: doilies and netting for covering food, on the floor the white cover of an album I blasted in a far-off adolescence, a board among the trees, sheet music on the stove or the chaise, girl’s underwear on the drying rack. This whole objectuary of inconsistencies as ordinary as they are beautiful that he so carelessly collects. A strange singularity that in this man was the visible layer and his totality and that I desired so much I was prepared to destroy. He comes in and finds me looking at the doilies. We sit there, on the kitchen floor, and I entertain myself with the image of a cow in a painting hanging crooked on the wall. The cow’s teats make me happy, and I fall into a story; it’s one of the few times the man tells me a long story. It’s the plot of a movie he wants to make; he’s already written several songs for it, and it’s about a guy who disappeared in the bars of downtown Quito. The man was a guy who wrote fabulous poems, or stories, or maybe songs, he didn’t know, but he’s so often heard about this popular hero who wrote everything on napkins, some of which, he swears, survived. In the bars he frequented, things almost always got riled up when he sang or recited his poetry, leaving his soul hanging in the hands of his audience, he says it just like that, because his songs or his poems or his stories, a mix of parody and philosophy, made people get drunk and make promises that later, of course, as with any promise, they’d break and they’d break the glasses and they’d break the bottles and in one of those moments this hero, who’d been the victim of many women who’d fallen in love with him, who looked a little like Popeye with fat arms and short legs, who’d write and then stir up the sausage party and leave, one day he disappeared in the hands of some mafia members (though it’s also possible he slit his own throat while looking in a mirror; the man didn’t believe this version—the downtown mafia or some cuckolded and jealous husband had disappeared him).