When he heard me crying he put his arms around me. The only thing I wanted was to again be the little girl whose father could make everything right with the world. I’m sure that’s what he wanted too. It felt wonderful to burst into tears in his arms; I felt myself growing calm little by little, though I didn’t stop crying, pressed close to him and wanting to never let go. I wanted to go with him to El Quisco, I told him, that very day, to swim in the sea, play paddleball on the beach with him. . I made him lie down next to me on the bed. I laid my head on his chest. I felt the thin cotton of his shirt and the cold silk of his tie on my cheek. I felt his beating heart against my ear. “Daddy,” I said to him.
It was dusk when I woke up. How long had I slept? There was barely a trace of light floating behind the curtains. Then he started talking to me, he told me he loved me so, so much, and that for all these years he had thought of me every day, every day. He was talking in a soft murmur, and I took refuge in his tenderness. I felt that, like an incubator coaxing chicks out of shells, his warmth was bringing me back to myself, to what I had been, to a lost peace. Happiness had existed, and I could get it back.
Suddenly he was asking, in the same sweet and masculine tone, why I had gotten myself into this trouble; he said he had told me not to get mixed up in politics, it was a foolish thing to do under a dictatorship. I jerked away roughly and ordered him to leave the room. My teeth were chattering in rage. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t control my jaw. He tried to soothe me, he told me he was sorry. I wouldn’t relent, and I threw him out of my room. He told me that no matter what happened or what I did, he would always love me and I could always count on him. He closed the door gently. I tried to cry, but I couldn’t.
TEN
My inability to coincide with myself, when did that begin? The distance from myself that I seem to have always felt, what caused it? And my resentment? I go back, then, inevitably, to the rupture that came from my parents’ divorce, my harsh disdain for my mother after my father left — my mother, who didn’t know how to keep him with her. Her efforts to be motherly only seemed like signs of her impotence. I go back to my father, the love I felt — the resentful love of an only child for the man who had left us both — my jealousy of his new wife, who was not my mother but who wanted to be something like it, and thus let me punish both him and her in revenge for my scorned mother. I go back to my intense devotion to Mary, virgin and mother who never knew a man’s sex. She was my solace, she and my grandmother, my grandmother with her white hair that would turn yellow and her natural, easy laugh, whom I went to visit every afternoon.
And I’m haunted by my terror of the nuns, of their sparse moustaches and their rancid odor, their severity that intimidated and disciplined me; later, my disdain for them would grow, for their irredeemable infantilism, their sinful vigilance. I feel the desolation of the day of my first period, my disconsolate sobbing. I didn’t want to stop being a little girl yet, I was still very short, and I couldn’t, just couldn’t accept that my childhood had ended so suddenly and with such strange discomfort, a pain down low in my belly, and this dark blood, viscous, foul-smelling, and mine — no, I didn’t want to be a woman, not yet. But it was forced on me, just like my parents’ divorce and the sudden death of my grandmother, who took the Virgin with her. She left me her embossed silver mirror. I still have it.
And then the fear of my body; fear of its desires, then, the desire at its core, in its hidden depths and cavities. And the humiliation of that market of little virgin whores in the parties and clubs, which our mothers prepared us for — with help from hairdressers, stylists, makeup artists, and aestheticians — marinating our bodies as if in a stew, transforming them so we could seduce brutish teenagers who dream of animal sex and flee from intimacy. I certainly couldn’t make friends with either boys or girls at those animal markets.
I grew up alone and separate. I had the feeling that I was inert, and I needed to keep myself soft like clay, always soft, waiting and waiting for the man to arrive who would be able to give me shape. Because in spite of everything, I wanted my Pygmalion to appear, even if he was nothing but a beautiful animal.
But I didn’t like the way I looked. I was pained by the women whose looks I did like, the pretty ones, the ones who felt men’s eyes following them. I was saddened by other women’s beauty. I wished I could just deflower myself. My mother would stay working at the hospital until very late. Her duty was to the sick. Her daughter would just have to understand. My mother never created a relaxed atmosphere where I could be myself. She didn’t know how. This was never more obvious than when she took it upon herself to forcibly construct that “homelike atmosphere” and would start to make dinner, asking me to light a fire. My mother didn’t like how I looked, and that made her feel desperate. She would have liked to have a very beautiful daughter. Who wouldn’t? She used to inspect my hairstyle and would always suggest a change. The change that could make up for the beauty I was lacking. She says that to me with the cold calm behind which she hides her frustration. She says it while putting on her glasses and peering at me in the mirror with the same harsh seriousness she has when she looks at X-rays. She comments on my eye shadow, gives advice. She speaks like a doctor prescribing medicine. Then she smooths a lock of hair yet again, and her gaze becomes even harsher, as if she hates me for not being the beauty she wanted. That’s how I feel. The pimples that sprout on my face drive her crazy. She wants to squeeze them. She can’t resist. Same with my blackheads. She has to pinch them out of my skin. She can’t resist. She’d use her teeth if she could. She’s like a monkey picking lice.
And finally, my great love — because desire creates the object of desire — came to me, came to me while I was studying French language and literature at university and reading that it’s the Devil holds the strings that move us, and adoring the Black Sun of Melancholy. I recited idiotically to my stupid and beautiful animaclass="underline" J’ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité, I’ve dreamed of you so much that you’re losing your reality. And it was true. I’d been dreaming of him for so long.
I met him on the beach at El Quisco. He hypnotized me as he played paddleball in his bathing suit. I found myself watching the deft movements of his lithe, hairless body — his legs that were firm and a little crooked, his slender back — and then lowering my gaze to his, how to put it, his unforgettable green bathing suit. Yes. The “gluteous” shapes beneath that green bathing suit were momentous for me. I don’t think that word exists. It would have to be invented for him, for his “gluteous” form. I’ve never seen anything like it since. I shivered, and felt ashamed. He lost the game but he won me over.
And with him, I will dare to go out past the breaker zone, deep enough to swim. The feeling of floating in the ocean, as if I were free from gravity’s force. Sometimes he lets himself float, other times he swims fast, driving his arms into the waves and showing me the strength of his grown man’s shoulders before I lose him from sight. He dives underneath me, under the water, and reappears here or over there. If I got a bad cramp and doubled up and started to drown, Rodrigo would save me. It would be wonderful to be saved by him. Really, I wanted to dance with him. That’s all I wanted, for the moment.