He was aware at the time, or rather now, that there were doubtless many ways to say what he was doing and many words with which to say it — I’m fucking her, for example, or I’m laying her, I’m boning her, giving it to her, or I’m screwing her brains out, he could have put it, or perhaps he expressed it the way his friends always expressed it — but it seemed to him that none of those even came close to what was happening there and that, just the opposite, they were creating an unfillable space between what was going on there and how to express it, between what they were doing, or, rather, what was happening, and what was done or what happened by naming it, a gulf that, for all the words or ways of expressing it he might try, continued growing wider rather than narrower.
You can’t know, he said to himself, you can’t know what is really being said when you say it. He understood gratitude and tenderness when he picked a piece of fruit or observed the slowness of growth in a plant or the blossoming of a bud; he understood skill when he grafted one branch onto another or composed a sentence at the printshop, when he released a spring, when he wielded a tool; he knew about violence from digging and about vigor from grabbing a lump of earth and breaking it into pieces, and he knew, too, about exhaustion and satisfaction, but all that — tenderness and violence, vigor and fatigue, skill and satisfaction — was just one part of that which was nevertheless much more than all of it put together. A body that calls out to another body, a body that is no longer a body, however, because of its being so much something else, and tenderness that is no longer tenderness, because of its being so much body and flesh, secreted fluids and oozing pores, licking tongues and sucking lips and also blood and nerves and mud with no need for anything to resort to words that might come later, just like the Egyptian vultures or the great, bearded vultures adhering to their agreement.
He fell asleep with his hand in the mud of the irrigation ditch that ran at the foot of the elders, and embracing her again after he awoke, he accidentally smeared her side and cheek with muck. She laughed — or perhaps the foliage, the river, and the birdsong laughed — with a calm, gentle peal that gave him the feeling he could see through the world for just an instant, and the world was good and cheerful and it reached everything and everywhere. Without knowing what moved him to it, motivated, perhaps, by the incitement of this unveiling, he went on slowly slathering her entire body with mud, and when he had finished, he stretched out on the ground to rest, thinking that everything was finished and, therefore, everything could now begin.
Perhaps obeying the same instinct, she, too, went to gather mud from the irrigation ditch and then set about rubbing it over his face, over his forehead and his cheeks and his mouth, to the point of pretending to suffocate him, and then over his chest and his legs and his pubic area. Completely coated, as if they were mud sculptures of themselves, they began gamboling and gesturing and moving like primitive creatures, fragile creatures, but at the same time creatures of great power who shrieked without words and moved without meaning, and then, giving themselves no time to laugh or howl, they sprang toward the riverbank and, sunken deeply into the silt, he dissolved his mud into hers and into the river’s mire, penetrating her again as if that would allow him to encompass everything, just as the mud had soaked in through their pores and mucked up their hair and their bodies and thus become one with them somehow forever. Then they rested, a rest to end all rests, the resting of matter in matter, of breath in light, the resting of image in mud, of cessation in the river, of creation in nothingness.
After a time, after a time they’d have been hard pressed to judge whether infinite or infinitesimal, a single instant, and as if there existed something to be frightened of in the face of such unaltering plenitude, they leapt up and ran to a pool in the river a few yards away. Until that moment, until that moment that seemed to him to contain or to be the consummation of all the previous moments of his life, he had always swum there alone, or in the company of his father, but from that day on, the memory of the smell of her body that afternoon, of her body or the mud, and the memory of the shrieking and the laughter, the dunking and the flailing and the splashing of that time so infinite and yet so fleeting, would conjure up for him, indelibly and forever, the sound and the smell of paradise, the raindrops, lit up and hanging there for just a moment, that would make the dark background against which they shone have less power to absorb everything and swallow it all up.
Suddenly, shots rang out from some poacher, disorienting them. They couldn’t tell if they had sounded from far away or close by, just behind them, or if they’d just begun or it had been going on for a good while and they’d only noticed them right then, and they hurried back to look for their clothes, as if they’d only just then realized they were naked. She wanted to cover herself with her hands as soon as she got out of the water, her breasts and her pubic area and her face if she could have, and he thought about doing it, too, but then he burst out laughing. What are you doing, he asked her. Don’t tell me you’re embarrassed?
PART TWO
12
Back in his village, to which he had been returning for a few days at a time in summers, at first with his wife and two sons and then gradually only occasionally, with Felipe, a good part of the people he had known and who had made up his world had either died or gotten very old, some sick and in wheelchairs in the nursing home, others debilitated, feeble, and weak, and those he remembered as energetic and chatty were now often listless or just waiting out their time.
It’s true that some houses had been fixed up or, as people put it, made decent, but it had been done with a new, out-of-control sort of bad taste that was contagious — contagious as only stupidity can be, he recalled having heard his father say — and stood out even more in a place where what little there was was at least harmonious and could therefore seem like a lot. Neither the materials used — he thought — nor the improvement ideas they had come up with were appropriate there, and they would never be appropriate, and that’s just the cases when the old houses, some of which were unquestionably valuable and elegant, hadn’t been torn down completely in order to erect bland apartment buildings like the one he’d been living in for the past twenty years.
You might say that from a certain moment on, people had stopped caring a fig — a flying fig, he emphasized, not a whit, less than a whit — about what had been in those places before or how things were done before; people had begun not to care even the least bit about things that were right in front of their noses, or beside them, or behind them. Their relationship with the adjacent, he said to himself, their relationship with the adjacent, and he stopped then to think a moment. Everything seemed to have begun continually bumping up against everything else, lines, dimensions, shapes, all bumping up against everything, against everything except bad taste and conceit. Could this be the new thing, the new era? And what comes after bad taste, he wondered. What came before conceit?