I say I’m not going to stay long. I’m looking for a little peace and quiet, just to sleep.

I say I know I need to figure it out quickly.

I say the fear I feel is the fear I’ve always felt; it’s an anguish that pulses under my skin, that’s why I chew my fingers, the thick, spongy surface, I chew them because that’s how I alleviate the dread.

I say I became aware of that anguish the first time I saw the sea and felt the resonance of that eternal sound in my bowels. Every return to the sea, there’s that infinite openness containing all possibility of loss.

I say since then I started crying with the arrival of dusk and crawling under the kitchen table so that no one would ask what was going on.

I say the fear or the anguish became the constant perception of a hole in my stomach made of other holes, trypophobia.

I say sometimes I sensed in the silence of our encounters that my dad experienced something similar.

I say my dad’s silence was my first inquietude.

I say I felt a strange communion with my father that made me, every so often, hate him for his distance and his silence.

I say my dad has been anything but my dad.

I say when I was little, houses were places where I created hiding spots so that at dusk I could cry in peace and, sometimes, there, in those hiding spots, I’d fall asleep.

I say there was a boy who discovered one of those hiding spots and, right there, licked my pussy.

I say I went to that hiding spot many times so the boy would lick my pussy, which was an unrivaled, mysterious pleasure. Then I started undressing all the women I knew in my imagination to see their pussy.

I say I became obsessed with pussies and mouths.

I say I watched telenovelas all day just to see the big kiss and then go masturbate in the bathroom of whatever house I was in.

I say my grandmother was a supreme beauty, I adored her, and her vagina was the only one I never dared picture.

I say I saw my mother’s vagina very few times; I was always impressed by the abundance of hair, but what I was most impressed by was the day I went in the bathroom with her, and when she pulled down her underwear, I saw her bleeding and was fascinated by the image of blood on the pad, the red spreading over the white porosity of the cotton, and I was also fascinated by the smell that emanated from that image.

I say my grandmother took care of my brother and me from a young age; she did it with her strong, delicate hands, with her blotchy skin and firm heart.

I say my grandmother was of a singular rigidity and obsession, and she loved telenovelas like me, but I suspect she loved them not for the kisses but for the betrayals, which always happened and which gave her a strange pleasure: the betrayals would turn my grandmother on. Sometimes she’d turn off the TV and immediately pray on her rosary.