“You’re a brave one,” I told him.
The words slipped out of me. The flicker of a smile went over his lips and vanished without ever taking shape. I caught a glimpse of his square teeth. He didn’t touch me, and I had an urgent need to feel the contact of his skin. I brushed against his face with a nipple. He didn’t move. With one hand I squeezed his shoulder, round and hard. I kissed an impassive mouth and, despairing, I grabbed at his pants. And I knelt down and took hold of his buttocks and pulled him toward me. His heart was pounding. I had my eyes closed. “Your sense of touch is delicate as a blind person’s,” he told me softly.
“Hit me,” I begged him. “Kick me.” And I curled up on the floor and waited. And he did nothing to me. “Spit on me, please, piss on my face.” And he did nothing to me. Now he was breathing slowly and rhythmically, and neither my fingers nor my lips or tongue could break through his willful indifference. Then I cried and I lay down on my back and opened myself. “Fuck me,” I told him. “You’re scared,” I told him. He sat down calmly on the floor. “You’re afraid you’ll like it and your revolutionary zeal will all go to shit,” I told him. “Look at me at least, you faggot.” I was putting on my pants, I was tying my shoes. “You’re scared to be a man and you hide behind the ‘solidarity’ of your gang.” I kicked him in the mouth. It bled a little, but he didn’t move or say anything. I kicked him again and I left. Who was that man and what had he done? Did he finally break? What ever became of him?
THIRTY
I spend hours alone in the apartment, in my room in the dark with the door closed. I don’t want to see anyone. I throw myself onto the bed. I don’t even take my shoes off. I don’t know what I’m thinking about, if I’m thinking about anything. Sometimes I wake up at dawn with my guts twisted in anguish, and I realize I never even put my pajamas on. I didn’t feel like it and I just stayed there, still dressed and stretched out on the bed. Cold. Morning comes and it’s so hard for me to get up.
I’m writhing. The earth opens up beneath my feet. I sink into the same bottomless swamp as always. This thing is stronger than I am. The handcuffs return, squeezing my wrists, the slave of memory returns. The mental torment takes my breath away. If only I knew how to howl like a wolf. If I just had more air. My stomach wrenches.
If I could only rest. I’m not complaining about the world. I’m the one who doesn’t belong here. I’m not interested in the question of the meaning of life. It’s obvious that life has meaning. How could it not? This isn’t just about a theory. I do not want to go on living. Period.
Keep in mind that Dante puts traitors in the last circle of the Inferno. Their tears freeze like a visor over their eyes and it keeps them from crying, and their anguish grows and accumulates without end. Their souls go to Hell even when their bodies are still alive in the world. A demon guards them on earth for as long as they live. But for them, hell begins not the day they die but the day they commit their betrayal.
THIRTY-ONE
I would lose it suddenly, I would seek it out and yearn for it, for his gaze close by me, covering me, and later I would find it again, contemplating me. Because what attracted me were those masculine backs and arms and legs and chins, and of course the mocking and tender smiles of some and the staring, intense eyes of others, but I enjoyed them most of all if I felt Flaco’s great, shining eyes on me. His peremptory orders in that cavernous voice, the release, the sweetness of fulfilling them, humiliating myself; and his forehead in concentration, his dilated pupils, and the trembling of his lips, it all made me throb. I didn’t know who the others were, nor would I ever know.
One of them told me, “My name is Phoebus,” just like that, like Apollo, and he was what you call an homme beau. He put his arms around me and pressed me against him and I felt it against my belly, against my thigh. After that night I found myself with him a few more times. An homme beau. There were thugs in that place, as you know, men and women of the repression who frequented the club, despicable and disgraceful — monsters, if you like. They hid themselves among slender whores and rent boys and gorgeous transvestites that you’d only recognize as transvestites, if you even did, by their muscular backs, and stupendous fags and horrible fags and maybe one or another prisoner who would return under the salt sky of dawn to the underground cell that I knew well, and pimps and young men with piercing eyes and old men who weren’t so old, well-heeled, gray-haired aficionados of these games, and simple mafiosos who put on airs and felt at ease here. Once I thought I recognized two actors I’d seen not long before in a play by Heiner Müller. I’m not sure.
There, inside that mansion cum club and hotel, sliding in the restless dark with those sharp guitar rhythms and provocative drums, we melted into a single high-voltage sea, and the hate coincided with attraction and the rage dovetailed with compassion and the fear with laugher and the violence with tenderness and the desertion with intimacy. Nothing is true, believe me, nothing of what they teach us is true.
In the bathrooms you could always find some upper or a line of white powder. In one of the bathrooms, there was always someone naked in the sunken bathtub, and bodies would go up to it with their kidneys full of beer, and they would unzip, draw, swords would cross for a moment, and they would empty themselves in a fountain spray. I liked to see that those repugnant things, it made me laugh to see those manly men clashing their swords and then forming, euphoric, a proud yellow arc of triumph. And someone received that golden water as a blessing. You wanted details, didn’t you? There’s a baptism for you.
THIRTY-TWO
I watch Macha in the cafeteria. Gato never sets foot in here. I watch Macha at his table eating his charquicán beef stew or his beans with noodles with a bottle of Cristal beer. His agents surround him, the women and men of his horde. I remember the scene exactly. Great Dane is there. I’ve already mentioned him to you: he was at Oliver with the girl with Siamese cat eyes, he’s the one who kicked in the door of the safe house I gave them. He’s a handsome and simple blond, with a huge body and a big head and long, well-tended hair. Sometimes I see him in a karate gi. Great Dane is a black belt and he smashes bricks obsessively on the patio with the calloused edges of his giant hands. There’s Iris Molina, skinny and gaunt, with a mysterious voice and an oily, astute gaze. She’s the one who went first into the safe house. She’s an expert in pistol shooting and she hopes to make the Olympic team. (She never will.) There’s Mono Lepe, with his rebellious hair, dark circles under his eyes, his flat nose crooked from some ugly punch, his narrow little shoulders. There’s Chico Marín, his lips always livid, his eyes always darting, abrupt and nervous like a lizard, his head shaved. He’s wide and thick like a cube. There’s Pancha Ortiz, whose anxious eyes follow Macha constantly; she has haughty, high breasts and is the mother, she confessed to me once, of a pair of fraternal twins. She was the one who talked to me about the beauty of guns. There’s Indio Galdámez, in a gray sweatshirt with dark spots of old perspiration. Indio is attractive, proud, and reticent. His hair is greasy and he has a green boa tattooed on his left forearm. And then there are the other men, coarse and forgettable, and women who are rougher and more common, with indiscreetly dyed blond hair and whose names I never learned. Am I exaggerating? From this home in Ersta, Stockholm, do I see things in black and white? Obviously, none of them had the words “I am a monster” written on their faces. Mono Lepe hovers at the bedside when his little Carmen has a fever. He makes her hot lemonade and won’t go to bed until the fever breaks and the girl falls asleep. He takes her to day care every day in the Nissan 4×4 that Central gives him to use. I know all this from Gato.