“More, yes, yes, more,” the victim says, “that’s it, keep going, more, more.”
On his back red dots have sprung up that lengthen into drops. The eye contact resumes and it’s like a tense thread about to break; they see something in each other that I can’t see, a phosphorescence, an apparition.
At some point everything stopped. Gato was untied. He was trembling and swaying, panting. He took off his mask and tears were falling down his cheeks and blood down his shoulders, his back and ribs. The young man helped him sit down on the floor. “Cover yourself,” he told him, solicitous, “cover yourself.” And he put a damp towel over Gato’s shoulders and sat down next to him. I left the two of them shivering in an embrace on the floor under that towel, and I rushed off to the bathroom to find a line I desperately needed.
That inversion was a cruel game, but it was consensual. Completely different from the unilateral horror, from the power imposed by one body on another. We are taught to be ashamed of our instincts. Our hypocritical education, a gag. There’s a tyrannical pleasure in the degradation of oneself. We are that, too. In the underworld of that dark, bewitched house, I lived it frenetically, like one returning to a lost Paradise — not the sterilized and anodyne paradise of Genesis, but a cruel and delicious unleashing, a plunge into the burning and confused sea of our origins, a sudden fusion with the savage animal that inhabits us and that we deny ourselves. In that pit I touched the bottom of the truth that we deny ourselves, the truth that we invent. Not “The Truth” but rather instants of vehemence, vertiginous truths like bites or burns, momentary passions that I lived deeply and free of doubt.
FORTY-SIX
I say to Flaco: I’m going to leave you, I’ll retire and start my own security business. Don’t you think I’d be able to start a security business and make money?
And he says: Of course. You could start a business and make a lot of money. I have no doubt.
And me: And you know what I’m going to do with all that money?
And he looks at me with questioning eyes, and waits.
And me, smiling: I’m going to buy myself a penthouse, or, more like it, a penis-house.
And he: Oh! Really? That’s what you want?
And me: It’s not what I want; I need it.
And he: A penis-house. .
And me, very seriously, holding back the laughter: Exactly. So I can have lots of penises in my house.
And he, laughing: So you need lots of penises. .
And me: Yes. One night with one, another night with another. To miss out on all of them, except yours, shows a serious lack of consideration.
And he: You’re unfaithful to the core. You can’t help it.
And me: Who told you? The thing is, I’m a different person with every man I like. That’s why I don’t feel guilty. It’s just that I’m a different person.
And he: You like to change men, then.
And me: Change penises.
And he: Ah, really?
And me: Sure, we’re living in the era of diversity. The same thing every day gets boring, even if it’s Iranian caviar.
And he: Have you tried Iranian caviar?
And me: Never. But I read in some magazine that it was the best caviar. Iranian beluga. And you know something else?
And he: What?
And me: I want them with money. I’m tired of these poverty-stricken guys; I’m past the stage of hot, handsome guys, boys who are strong but who are ultimately pretty poor, like you. Let’s see, what’s the most an intelligence official can make? That’s that! Now I want hard, big, thick penises and you know what else? I want them stuffed with money. That’s what I want.
And he: But who wants that? Do you, really? Or is it just that you want to get married and you’re thinking about your kids, so they’ll have a good life?
And me: Maybe yes, maybe no. But above all the one who wants that penis-house is the one you’re imagining and you keep quiet about. Above all, her.
And Flaco bursts out laughing and gives me a kiss that his own laughter interrupts. He pulls off my dress and kisses my nipples and I fall onto the bed and he penetrates me without even removing my underwear.
I’m not going to deny it: I loved Flaco Artaza. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to stand doing what I did, I think now. Can anyone understand that? He was a man who pleased me, I was a person to him, and he took care of me. He had problems with his wife, she suspected there was another woman. So many times he came home at dawn, or just he didn’t come home at all. Work, he said. She had her doubts. But divorce was unthinkable. Their two little girls came first. I knew that very well, and I had no illusions. Or at least, I had them but I denied it.
FORTY-SEVEN
Suddenly, Flaco is tormented by the future. He tells me: “We have to wipe out the terrorists. We’re in the process of exterminating the rats in this country.” That’s what Central’s director had told him that morning. He’d asked for an audience so he could “expound on” a few things, as he put it. Flaco did not agree with what was happening. It’s impossible for me to connect the person talking to me now with the one who goes with me to the Malloco house. Of course, the same happens with me and with everyone else who goes there. Images of Wild Cat cross my mind, and I wish I were there with him now. But he’s talking to me about his problems, sitting on the worn black leather sofa in the apartment at Tajamar Towers. The sky over San Cristóbal Hill is gradually losing its light.
It’s a conversation that he would never have with his faithful wife or with women like his faithful wife. Part of the attraction I have for him is that with me, he can talk about these things as if I wasn’t a woman and, at the same time, not as though I were a man. It’s a small hollow where a warm intimacy is born, one that is novel for him. Because he’s never encountered women like me before. Because for him — for all of them, really — a woman doesn’t participate in this open and cruel world, she is outside of “History” and completely absorbed in the petite histoire of the family. He goes on talking in a tired voice, and I think about my long, tedious Saturdays and Sundays spent alone and thinking about him, imagining him going to the supermarket and the cinema with his faithful wife. Does he still sleep with her? He showed me a photo once. I asked him to. I needed to have an image to anchor my imaginings. She wasn’t a bit ugly, the bitch. I was furious.
“Just to capture one single enemy combatant,” he is saying, his forehead wrinkled and his voice contrite, “too many people are martyred: people who are mere dissenters, lefty kids who are treated like full-blown terrorists. And they’re not, they’re just members of the opposition, they are not military enemies. Poor kids. They get treated like shit. We’re confusing the Opposing Front with the Subversive Front. . In the inspections, the assault teams swoop in at night on a house and grab everyone in sight. Well, I put my balls on the line, I told the director what was what, I called a spade a spade.”