I can only think back on the true loves of my life in the dark, and only when I am alone and feel I have the strength. I can still be left shaken by the sound of a handful of women’s names. For the time being, I have no wish to name them, so as not to hear the sound my heart makes down there when, instead of ageing at its normal rate, it races headlong toward death. I know I do so in my dreams — say their names, that is — for I have sometimes woken myself up calling out to them. One of them sleeps naked in my head, a lifeless arm hanging limply in the air like Jacques-Louis David’s Marat; another, the one who would squat down to take snapshots of all of the cats in the neighborhood of Lavapies peeking out from the patios or sleeping on sawdust in bars, is sobbing, though neither of us will ever know why; and I can see another girl returning from the bookshop in Cuatro Caminos holding a copy of the Diary of Anaïs Nin and a recently shoplifted anthology by Alejandra Pizarnik. The rain is beating down in the street, and she has buried the books deep inside her handbag so as not to ruin them. I remember the scent of the raindrops in her hair and the inscription she wrote me in one of those books: “May your sadness shatter into a thousand pieces in the air like the dandelion on which a small boy has blown with all his might, like a swan shot down in mid-flight, like a Civil Guard.” Her room is filled with photos of female writers who took their own lives, tacked onto the wall with pushpins, and self-penned sketches showing Sylvia Plath with her head in the oven, Virginia Woolf flailing in the middle of the current, and Alfonsina Storni advancing, vacant and zombie-like, toward the center of an ocean filled with black waves rearing up. She would like to have been Max Ernst’s lover, but she stayed by my side, sometimes curled up in a ball at my feet and sometimes pulling on me in her flight to the center of the storms. She was anyone’s match drinking gin, and when she was tipsy she could sing Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” all the way through, falling into a lengthy silence when she was done, somewhere between exhaustion and oblivion. I always remember her with her bangs plastered against her sweaty brow. The neighbors were no fans of her early morning singing or the noise she made when she bumped into the furniture when she got up to vomit, not to mention her outrageous orgasms, making many a night a veritable war of pounding back and forth on the walls, with fists, with the sole of a shoe, to see who might give in first, until everything settled down more or less at the hour when the subway opened and the streets, still in darkness, began filling up with sleepwalkers making their way to offices and factories.
Life back then was on a knife’s edge between hell and warmth, anguished silence and cries of joy. Somehow we knew, no matter how fiercely tedium struck, that a well-chosen song or a bottle of something or other would always end up coming to our rescue. It was a matter of bearing witness to our own collapse without losing heart altogether, the paradox of having to kill ourselves in order to carry on living, like insects that feed off limbs ripped from their own bodies with their own teeth. Our wound was the show, and its condition, the highlight of the day, a sort of regular report giving an account of the state of the rot that had set in there in the gut, like a gangrene advancing like hordes on horseback, the liver swelling millimeter by millimeter as it turns to cardboard, the ever-stranger dreams in which the lizard in the sake bottle sometimes danced with the worms in the mescal bottle, the candles at the mercy of the night’s winds, infinity all set to be conquered, the valium, the tears, the transaminases.