He wants to tell the story that warrants the drinking and friendship and, while you’re at it, poetry and music, which are the same, aren’t they? This is the last thing he says, and when he says it, I feel like I’m mixing up characters and think fucking hell, it isn’t possible. This is a damned coincidence, again the ghost, the shadow, my husband here. I get up to leave, but when I stand up, he, sitting on a piece of my skirt, keeps holding onto the fabric. Then he takes off my underwear and slowly covers my orifice with this tongue and that calms the anxiety, calms everything, I stay quiet, the cave gets dark, and like a catalog of shadows out file the cats, the cow, the little shirt-shaped box, the guitar, and a long etcetera that I’d already made mine, that I erratically but persistently loved. Everything messy like the music of the river. That was the first time I tried to run away from this cave because my body said run, but it would take me months to do it, months and a pregnancy that I now don’t know what the hell to do about. Looking at the poster, with the nostalgia throbbing in my pussy and the guilt now like a throbbing of my whole body, an accelerated and arrhythmic throb, I slowly pull the piece of skin that covers the cut on my lip; I savor the blood, and a drop falls to the floor, staining the tile. I’ve always so liked the image of red on white, and then comes a sudden, far-off memory: my mom’s sanitary pad, that as a girl I stared at, enthralled, while she peed.

29

I LIKE TRAVELING by bus even though in these conditions the nausea and dizziness put me on the verge of vomiting for ten hours straight. On the curves I feel like the bus is going to keep going and am flooded with images of ambulances, blood, and tragedy. On the straight-aways I think about the future, but each scenario is less sustainable, at times everything makes me embarrassed, at times I cry, at times I delude myself only to immediately panic again. At times I fall asleep. Having arrived at the terminal with two little suitcases, I take a taxi. The taxi driver speeds, at one point a car cuts him off and annoyed, he screams Ol’ Gil and on top of that yell suddenly comes the image of myself, old and alone, sitting, looking through a window and everything echoes in my uterus, I heave but luckily get to my sister’s house and can vomit in peace. I don’t know my little sister very well; she’s my half sister on my father’s side. We lived together years ago, when one time her mom, a woman I’ve only seen a few times in my life but whose lack of affection makes me who I am, kicked her out of the house. She’s lived in Guayaquil for months with her girlfriend, who got a job in a local bank. I sit down at the table to drink the tea she made for me and say I have to tell you something. She says go on, but let’s go get a beer and catch up there. The landscape when we leave the apartment is pinkish, gelatinous, and the river feels like an infinite eye indifferently watching me. I immediately feel another gaze find me and when I look around for it, it’s a rat’s eyes. It’s under one of the benches in the park we’re cutting through. I feel its whole heavy body, I imagine its rough tongue licking me, and I want to find it, but it hides behind a man’s legs, and the man picks it up and says twenty dollars. My sister says don’t be an idiot, the man lets the rat go, laughs, and walks off, and I look at the rat and walk toward it, but it runs away, only leaving behind a line in the dust from its long tail. My sister asks what the hell is going on with you? I say I’m pregnant. She pulls out a cigarette, lights it, says something generic, and we go into a bar with blue lights that’s just barely standing despite the noise from a metal concert. It’s eight. We start drinking, me a beer, she two beers, then two vodkas, and not a single word. She seems to enjoy the music, I feel like the concert will never end, and that’s for the best. At one point I realize we’re waiting for someone who may be a dealer and who doesn’t show. The concert ends and I say I’m going to Spain, and she asks what about your fear of flying? And I say I’m fine now. She asks if the baby’s father is in Spain, and I pause, but I feel immensely lazy about telling her the whole story so say yes, and she asks about my husband, and we both crack up. Then she says everything’s going to be OK, and when she says that and when she hugs me after saying it, I feel better. We start walking back to her house, and she says fucking son of a bitch, I paid him up front and he didn’t show. Then she asks if I’ve thought about getting an abortion, and our conversation gets jumbled, and we realize we left the keys inside the apartment, and then she says I need to go find Ile, her girlfriend, who doesn’t have a phone. I sit down on the bench under her building and send a message to the poet, the Guayaquil pioneer, and he shows up because by coincidence he’s close by, and seeing him takes me to another time and makes me happy.