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Excerpt

    Aida complains about anonymous telephone calls; a clandestine caller who does not dare give his name, or speak, or suggest a rendezvous, who accepts her angry "Hello" and then listens passively to a string of filthy words.

    "How do you know it's a man?" I ask with feigned indifference.

    "Women are braver," says Aida.

    She doesn't know that I could be that anonymous caller; trembling, I too could dial her number, and anxiously await the sound of her voice. And to avoid the harsh "Hello" of an irritated Aida (to avoid her filthy words when confronted by a timid silence), I would call her at different hours; then, unguarded, Aida's "Hello" would not be harsh or furious, it would be a spontaneous "Hello," with resonance, coins and a fish in water.

    "Sometimes he taps softly on the receiver, perhaps with his fingernails, as though drumming out a phrase that I have to decipher," adds Aida.

    Aida doesn't know Morse code. The anonymous caller does not know that Aida has no knowledge of Morse, and that possibility may excite him: what he doesn't say with his voice, he expresses with small coded taps. Bold or unexpected encounters: "At five o'clock, in Havana: I'll be wearing a dark suit and a white shirt, there will be a lilac handkerchief in my coat pocket, I'd like you to have on sandals."

    With the dawn, I pass the time thinking about all the frustrated trysts of the anonymous caller.

    "Surely, there's nothing lyrical about what he's suggesting to me," says Aida, who cannot believe in anyone's lyricism. Not even mine. So, I am condemned to bear it alone.

    Sometimes, unintentionally, I defend the anonymous caller.

    "Only lyricism is secret, it can't be confessed," I tell Aida. Kiosks filled with magazines, pictures with large sex organs like the throats of bestial, primal, antediluvian animals. "Obscenity is public," I add, "it doesn't create excitement or surprise these days,"

    Only a madman, a solitary lyricist, would be capable of proposing a rendezvous with Aida at the conservatory of the Ciudadela, a walk along the seaside steps, a visit to the museum of zoology. On the other hand, Aida turns down several invitations to intimate parties where people exhibit themselves, nude, and where there are sexual exchanges. Proposals from men and women.

    "I don't think anything is so sinful that it can't be spoken aloud," I declare. (And yet, Aida, some of my fantasies cannot be confessed. I would be ashamed, not that I have those thoughts, but to confess them to you.)

    "I don't know what that man wants," says Aida, and for an instant I blush: did she, unintentionally, mean those words for me?

    "You'd better leave, I don't want the child to find you here when he wakes."

    Dawn breaks, yellow-brown in color. Every day it dawns the same color, in this city of languishing, pasty skies that soften contours. I would like to remain in your house a while longer, to look at the metallic clarity of the sky through the windows. The roofs are made of dark tiles: the blue plumage of giant eagles.

    "I don't like eagles," I tell Aida.

    "I have to put the clothes in the washing machine, make breakfast for the child, and do the shopping."

    She comes away from love with an extraordinary vigor for common things. As if love were only a pause in her everyday affairs, a fugitive island in the dense sea of routine. An island where we, intermittent travelers, have scarcely rested. I, on the other hand, drown in nebulous, distant waves: love carries me off, transports me, separates me from things. I wander, a lost traveler, in vague hollands, in foggy denmarks. I could not say when pleasure began nor how it ended. It might not have begun on the skin, or ended with a clitoris thrust into the mouth like a key fitting perfectly in a lock. And nothing would have changed.

    Enveloped in languid dreams like veils, like blue whorls, I see her stand, light a cigarette, drink some water.

    "If you look at me that way, I won't be able to get up," she says, already on her feet.

    Like a photograph in sharp contrast, in black and white, her nude body is outlined against the back of the wall. The photograph, fixed, would hold this moment forever: Aida in the act of putting on a sandal, bending over slightly, her back to me, her twin thighs barely separated by a brief line (darker), the vertebral column arched softly, the nearly straight line of the shoulders, the hollow at either side of the neck where I scavenge, as at the bottom of an antediluvian lake. Aida has a slender waist, and this gives an extraordinary harmony to her body; there are no abrupt curves, no entrances or exits, only a bare slant to the belly (I put my ear against its surface and try to listen to the sound of her viscera: the slow stirring of the liver, the imperceptible contractions of the pylorus, the vibrations of the colon, the invisible clepsydra, the slow purr of the bladder -- a tortoise sunk in the cistern -- the workings of the stomach and the yawn of the intestines). The legs, solemn -- columns without arches -- stretch upward. Aida does not move in parts like other women; she is a single entity, indivisible, with something of a giant on an empty beach, with something of a Roman matron on a stone patio. As I watch her I see that she is nothing like a rush, not at all like those fragile porcelain pieces of our grandmothers, of romantic dreamers. The pubic hair, dark and abundant, protects her from obscene looks. My gaze is multiple: I look at you from the remote past of the sea and of the stone, of the Neolithic man and woman, of the ancient fish that we once were in some far distant time, of the volcano that spewed us out, of carved wood, of fishing and hunting; I look at you with the eyes of others who are not entirely myself and yet; I look at you with the cold clarity of your mother and the confused passion of your father, with the rancor of your brother and the disparaging envy of your women friends; I look at you from my ashamed "macho" animal-self and from the part of me that is woman in love with another woman; I look at you from old age -- "I'm tired," you say -- it sometimes shows in the circles under your eyes, in the wrinkles on your forehead. My gaze, hypnotized, follows her like a dog, hungry, passive, and patient; as some eyes follow the meandering movements of the fish in the aquarium; as the apostle follows the red parables of fire; as the puma follows the trace of blood; as the hair follows the undulating fluctuations of the wind; as the timid novice follows the power of the sorcerer. Aida does not notice my bewitchment, and so can do nothing to exorcise me; I am condemned to bear it in painful solitude.

    "It's late," says Aida.

    Is time passing? Installed in a fixed eternity like a crystal lake, I become immutable, perpetual: I have only one dimension, that of space. My pores look at you, my veins look at you, my arteries, my cavities. I have not heard the sound of the washing machine that you started: sounds have no time to cross over in my motionless contemplation.

* * *

    I read old newspapers. Time exists only in reverse: some Tuesday, some previous Friday when a man raped a little girl, a man killed his wife, there was a fire, a building burned down, the stock market went up, an actress committed suicide.

    Only when I leave Aida's house am I able to break my fascination with the crystallized time in which I have been floating, a somnambulant fish. I go out to the street, ejected from my pond. Then, suddenly, the sounds arise, abrupt, brutal. Creaking orthoptera with wheels and horns cross madly over the long avenues. Trembling syringes spasmodically puncture the ground, they dig holes. Brakes scrape the grayish pavement. I am born violently into sun and noise. I am born among waste and rasping. Life is bustling, filthy, foul-smelling, noisy. The instruments become jumbled, the musical score is confusing. I am born and immediately I am expelled to an island of gravel and cement, a roaring, barbaric anthill. Weaned too soon, I am Aida's orphan in a world unfamiliar to me, one that wounds me with its violent light, with its rush and its noise. I walk aimlessly, a lost traveler in a land colonized by others. It is difficult for me to join the hive, I have lost my identity.

    "When someone is up against neurosis and delirium, it is best to subject himself to a routine, like a diet," says Raul. "If a person can put his actions in order, day by day, he may be able to organize his inner structure."

    A routine: that is what Raul is recommending to me.

    When she gets up, Aida turns on the shower. The water runs down, even though she is not there: I listen to the limpid tinkling -- sometimes I confuse it with the sound of her urine -- as she goes toward the bathroom she passes next to me with a dress over her shoulders, I hear the water, I look at the skirt, "Get up," she says to me, "Have grapefruit with your breakfast," advises Raul, every morning, a person must build a routine. Build a routine like an edifice with several floors: the bottom floor, the base, a good breakfast. I buy oysters for breakfast with Aida. She opens her mouth. "It's a mollusk -animal," I tell her. "And mosslike," she says. Mucus against mucus; oyster, mouth. The zeal of the oyster, her mouth. Her mouth zealously devours the oyster. On her tongue, the oyster is a muscle . Moist animals, in avid contact. And yet Aida's nudity has something ascetic, impermeable about it: like that of great Assyrian idols. It is a clean nakedness, without nocturnal secretions, without accretions. As though she were always just coming from a bath. Then the words, the old words of a lifetime, appear suddenly, and they are also naked, fresh, resplendent, crude, with all their potency, with all their weight, unused, in all their purity, as though they had been bathed in a primal spring. As if Aida had spawned them between her teeth, and once the fabric of the lips had been broken -- the prenatal bag -- they would explode, red, pubescent, equal to themselves. Conventional language explodes, a defoliated forest, I am born between Aida's sheets, and other words, other sounds are born with me, death and resurrection. I do not love her skin, but her epidermis: the white membrane covering her arms, her extremities, her neck, the nape, her feet, her arms, her elbows, her femurs, her armpits, and her phalanges. I suddenly recover my lucidity with language. As if the words surged from a hidden cavern, forced out with pick and hammer, separated from the others, hard gems whose beauty is to be discovered under the patina of bitumen and gangue. I do not love her odors, I love her secretions: the slight, salty sweat that appears between her breasts; the thick spittle that gathers in the corners of her mouth, like a well of froth, the sinuous bile that she vomits out when she is tired; the rusty menstrual blood with which I trace out Cretan signs on her shoulders; the clear moisture from her nose; the splendid, sonorous horse urine that falls like a cascade from her long, ample, outspread legs. I am born and I strip myself of euphemisms; I do not love her body, I am loving her membranous liver and its imperceptible heaving, the white sclerotic of her eyes, the bleeding endometrium, the pierced ear, the lines of the fingernails, the small, turbulent intestinal appendix, the tonsils as red as cherries, the hidden mastoid prominence, the creaking jaw, the meninges that may become inflamed, the arched palate, the roots of the teeth, the hazel-colored mole on her shoulder, the carotid artery as taut as a string, the lungs poisoned by smoke, the tiny clitoris clasped to the vulva like a beacon. I do not touch it: I run my fingers over it with the lust of a blind man.

* * *

    Blind men don't see, they recognize. The darkened eyes of blind men are not turned toward things or beings -- which they do not see -- but to certain ideal, abstract models in the grotto. The eyes of blind men are not limited to seeing earthly objects; instead, they perceive at a higher level: in the space of the dream. Only their hands are at the height of objects. Their operation is essential: the message from the hands -- form, texture, heat, cold, moisture, weight -- is sent to the memory of the species, to some ideal models, the object is only one of their possible representations. On the other hand, we, the seeing, remain bound to the diversity of the apparent, to the multiplicity of the perceptible, to special deception. Seduced and trapped in inexhaustible diversity, we do not raise our eyes. I touch Aida like a blind man: slowly and meticulously, to recognize her. I need not raise my eyes because I look with two simultaneous views: the evident one that surveys the surface, and the look of the blind man that sends what is seen to the memory of the species. I run my hands over her like one who must have (re)cognition before giving something a name: Aida opens her white silk blouse, two concentric half-worlds appear, parallel (the earth and its double), she takes them in the palms of her hands, holding them by the sides and pushing them together, the earth and its image slowly draw together, and the space that held them apart disappears, now the half worlds are umbilical twins, they swell and become inflamed, reddish, opulent: ubres . The word surges forward, it bursts forth from the forgotten past of my infancy, it explodes with its primal force. I lick at your udders like a gluttonous calf and I listen to the rustle of the blood in your mammary glands, the crowding in your heart, and immediately, when you separate one breast from the other, palpitating like cities, the other word surges forth, dense, charged: urbes . Now I see your breasts as two heavily populated cities at rest from the activity of the day. Two distant cities, separated by a river, unknown to one another. The one rising on the left bank of the river must be Bilbilis. The city of Martial. The city that has disappeared.

    "You only love cities that no longer exist," murmurs Aida.

    Cities that no longer exist, towns that have disappeared. Those that the tide has dragged off and buried far away. Those that the tornado lifted and scattered, like ashes. Those that the fire devoured. Those that were burned to cinders by war, and are now wasteland. Cities that no longer exist, like extinct languages.

    The one that rises on the right bank of the river must be Viedma, from Patagonia.

    "One city that no longer exists, and another that is not yet," grumbles Aida.

    "We have recovered the space of what is sacred," I tell Aida: we have the capacity to baptize once again.

    I begin giving names to the parts of Aida, I am the first man, astounded and dumbfounded, stammering, stuttering, spluttering, and in the midst of the confusion of my birth, immersed in the mystery, I murmur visceral sounds that need (re)cognition. I touch her body, the image of the world, and I baptize her organs; filled with emotion, I take out words like ancient stones and install them in the parts of Aida, as links of my ignorance.

    Language should be born like this, from passion, not from reason. I am the first man, astounded and dumbfounded, who, before the majesty of the oceans, mad with terror, must name the water that lays siege to him, the waves that attack him, the fear of darkness, the pain of being bitten, the horror of death. I am the first man who, astounded and dumbfounded, must name his anguish, his happiness and his rage. The first man who, from the darkness of his viscera, impetuously extracts a deep, guttural cry, a cry full of tatters and branches, of blood and spittle, to name the passion that relentlessly pursues him. I am the first man and the last: what I do not name will die in silence, the worst punishment. And when your nipples swell under the black blouse that I moisten with spittle, they rise, erect, beneath the cloth, when your nipples, stuck to the fabric, protrude, firm and straight, the word sprouts from my apocalyptic desire: tuning pegs, I say; then, with the delicacy and knowledge of a handler of violins, my fingers, from a distance, begin the operation of approaching; my fingers, which I have previously washed and rubbed with cold cream, descend, and pressing your nipples, I turn them, I adjust them, I gird them to the trough of your breasts. I am the turner of breasts, the violinist who adjusts the pegs before I listen, yearning to hear the first sound from your half-opened mouth, from your mouth wet with ponds of saliva, the note forced from your throat, the cry of the whale on the high sea, the inconceivable sound, the cosmic shout. The earth prepares for its birth while I touch you; from your red mouth, inflamed (a frothing crater), a sound, a scream begins to rise; I adjust the pegs one last time and your shout rushes out, it is uttered from deep within the bowels, from the throat, the womb, and the lungs: the shout names you and identifies you, it lays your foundation and establishes you, it baptizes and confirms you: Aida.

* * *

    "Women invented language so they could name their offspring," says Aida, from the bed. Her back leaning against the coral-red wall, her large back, etched like the figure of an Assyrian idol, legs open, with knees lifted and thighs spread, languid arms resting at either side of her body, her right hand holding a cigarette, her black blouse half-open, revealing crimson, erect nipples.

    "Once," I tell her, "I dreamed about two parallel moons. One facing the other. Both shining in the sky together. It was night, and in the dream I felt a revelation looming. I didn't know (or I forgot) that the symbol of the Apocalypse is two parallel moons."

    But I still don't know what your two nipples, parallel suns, are proclaiming. I look at them and they look back at me. Sometimes, when I'm lying down, they lean downward a little too, so that they can observe me more closely. I have the sensation that you are looking at me with two pair of eyes: those of your face that wander over my naked body, and the eyes of your breasts, searching for my face, examining my mouth, my nose, my forehead, my cheeks. I say that your blouse is a balcony, and that your nipples, curious like women, peer forward so that they may see outside: they cannot endure the cloistered life too long. Your nipples, two confined women in search of light, the outside, the diverse. And when you dress, it is as though you were closing them in again. As if you were suddenly closing their eyes. Then you are left only with the eyes of your face to look at me, and I yearn for the others. (Aida's eyes have no lashes, they look out, cold, devoid of pity.) With only the eyes of her face, Aida is an indifferent woman: she is lacking something, like the women in Magritte's paintings.

    "You lose something when you close the eyes of your breasts," I tell her.

    Aida covers her breasts the way one closes a book. Her dress, the book covers. Then it is as if she has been left blind. Her fleshy eyelids fall, the pupils cloud over, light flees. Dressed, Aida is a woman who does not see. Dressed, Aida is a woman alone.

    "There are people who are dressed by nudity," I tell her, "and there are people who, when they dress, find themselves alone."

    Aida's full measure is her nudity. Surely, if she could walk naked through the streets, if she could go to work naked, if Aida always moved about her house, strolled along the avenues and went to the movies naked, no one would say that she is a woman alone. Her breasts, her nipples, her long pubic hair would accompany her wherever she went, and around her, like a forest, respect would grow. Her body, a shade less than opulent, would protect her. On the other hand, dressed, Aida is a vulnerable woman. As if her clothing were a second skin, uncomfortable, a slightly inimical disguise. The dress is the restriction.

* * *

    To speak in tongues . This expression, which I discover by chance while talking with another woman, takes me back once again to Aida. We love each other in tongues, I think to myself, like two strangers, each understanding only a few phrases, certain signs, some symbols from the other.

(Continues...)

Copyright © 2000 Cristina Peri Rossi.