 The Letter
Pedro de Jesús
translated by Dick Cluster
Enter the dancer. Till now I'd been able to keep him in the wings,
root him out in order to preserve at least the fantasy that what happened to me was not as
trivial and common as the histories of others. But the everyday bursts upon us with
irresistible force, as my professor of literature likes to say. I'm just one more, in no
way different: not even my fingers. Although the rest is absolutely dismal, this is what
annihilates me: to figure in a romantic triangle.
Still, if there had been no dancer, there would have been
no memory, no capacity to question myself.
I could recite them to the point of exhaustion, those two
paragraphs that I never should have written. Neither those, nor the ones that followed.
The letter should not have been a letter, a text for others, but rather for me, so as to
understand myself and then either love myself or be appalled.
He showed her the pages. He came to her house because she
had insulted him.
"I don't understand why you say I insulted you."
I watch him talking: he attracts me. With him is that
olive-skinned boy who I don't think is from the college. He seems like a dancer. He's
pretty but ordinary. He on the other hand is everything; his androgyny is unique and he
knows how to carry it off so I don't associate it with either sin or guilt. It suits him.
She imagines drowning this body this so-white skin, in
a torrent of water. A shower. I'd love to kiss him all over, in the shower, soap ourselves
up so I could slide my hands easily along his back, and close my eyes when my lips have
just broken the tiny droplet that was about to fall from his nose. The hotel has run out
of water. We're all soapy. Now what would we do?
I try to calm him, always. I find pleasure in
protecting him. On the beach I accompany him to take shelter under an umbrella; all day
long I share his terror of getting burned. I tried to keep on; he got hysterical.
He started cursing. I wrapped myself in a towel and
went out into the corridor. A woman who passed by with a broom looked at me as if I were
naked. I didn't have to ask her anything, she just pointed toward two blue tanks at the
end of the hall. Every room has a bucket, she explained as she headed down the stairs. I
went back in the room, where he was complaining that he had soap in his eyes.
"I'm not 'the dancer,' I have a name, and I'm
not even a dancer." He held out the pages of the letter again.
The cubicle cost them a hundred pesos a month. He
stole the mattress from the dorm. He knew a negrito who lived on the seventh floor
of the building next door. They handed the mattress from one balcony to the other in the
wee hours, so no one would see; then they carried it down, tied and wrapped in a pair of
curtains. She, I, was in the street waiting.
The cubicle is close to the dorm, we go on foo.t He
moves the mattress from one shoulder to the other and back again. He doesn't want my help,
it doesn't weigh anything, it's just awkward is all. He sweats, I see his shirt dampen in
the armpits and the back. His chest, not very" muscular, is suggestive. His body is a
promise that starts to fulfill itself and then holds back at the climactic moment and
remains postponed. An allusion, a stutter an unspoken syllable, but speakable perhaps.
His skin is white. That shouldn't upset him, she likes
it that way, skin which in and of itself requires cleanliness, so washing it becomes a
daily necessary repetition. His body hair is not black; light coming from behind reveals
it as latently blond.
We spread honey on our genitals. She anointed him with
this congealed liquid first. He was disturbed: Hurry is his expression of fear and
anxiety. He wanted to penetrate me with barely a kiss. To please him, I acceded. I loved
him so much. I opened myself to failure: He couldn't, she always could. I love him so
much. I had to remove the honey with my tongue. Then he coated me and the dehoneying
became mutual. The Fifth Glaciation, my god, with Heraclitan fire. That's how she defined
it, when, after they were finished, he asked her --a habit-- to think over their
acts. Or rethink them? Was there anything between them that wasn't thought out a priori?
Was there anything spontaneous? Was there anything at all? The fire joke fascinated him.
He said, that's why I like you so much.
"I couldn't remember your name. Anyway, it
doesn't seem pejorative to call you that. I thought you were a dancer."
It didn't matter that he was a homosexual, in fact it
made him more interesting. Did he know the Kinsey scale? That's right, the scale for
registering sexual preferences. Great, a stroke of luck that he was well-informed because
it made it easier to ask him delicate things. What? His number on the scale. Six,
exclusively homosexual and a smile of such complicity that I took it for a joke. It
doesn't matter, say I, I'll see to it you change your number by only by one degree. I'll
settle for a five.
They laugh. Five, if he remembers right, is
predominantly homosexual, rarely hetero... She agrees. Could she settle for a single
contact, almost accidental and leave it be, as if life were nothing more? Because the
expression "rarely" implies something casual, accidental, by mistake.
No, it would never be a mistake, she was convinced
that he'd move from one number to another as soon as he discovered her. He might roll from
six all the way to zero, exclusively heterosexual. No, no way he would not devalue himself
to that extent. They laughed. I admired his ability to manipulate words, locate them in
just the right place. I wanted to go on provoking him.
He didn't think that a zero was truly degraded, did
he? Was that her situation, then? Not even a little higher up, not even a
"rarely" homosexual? Too bad, him so high on the scale and her so low. Two
extremes always meet, I say and then he's the one who's impressed. They smile, and he
continues provoking her.
She should be more careful what she says. If someone
heard her they might think she was admitting the equal possibility of her being a zero or
a six.... In fact, he too was convinced she'd change from one number to another as soon as
she found out about him.
Then with him at zero and her at six, they'd be the
two extremes again. Everything would be switched. Isn't it beautiful that someone can
stand you on your head and suddenly you 're surprised to find that you are what you're
not?
"I thought you were a dyke but I never
insulted you."
The day before going to live in the cubicle, he
managed to sneak her into the dorm. It was the turning point. As soon as the door shuts
behind them, both still on their feet, he asks whether I’ve seen Bertolucci's film Last
Tango in Paris. He always surprises me, in a unique and unrepeatable way.
Yes. He has his back to her. She is disposed to do
anything he asks. She loved him so much. She cuts the fingernails of her right hand, or
left, I don't remember, and slides her fingers into his anus, just like that, standing up,
in cold blood.
That scene is one she'll never forget It's stuck in
her memory as if in some way she had lived it. She would have to live it She lived it, I
am living it. When he mentioned the title, I suddenly felt that the scene was dominating
me. Just that one scene.
It was a premonitory scene that had possessed her in
secret for the past two years. When the movie ended, she walked and walked and walked,
somnambulant, without being able to let go of that image. She had the frightening
impression that now she could never go back. Caught in a design that transcended me, for
which I was no longer responsible.
That must be what bothers him. That I had guessed his
intentions. But he was wrong. Those intentions, really were not his; they only belonged to
me.
She had waited ever since seeing Last Tango in
Paris, for months she waited impatiently to meet him and then seduce him.
She invited them to the House of Tea and gave them the
address of her apartment -both of them, to dispel suspicions. She was afraid he would see
the obsession in her fingers, and she kept them hidden beneath the table. Until at last we
got up, and there were no more hiding places, and he said, "What pretty hands you've
got!" Probably he was talking about her fingers. Can the hand be anything else?
Or maybe I’m the one mistaken, and my intentions
were not the same as his.
His intentions perhaps were different, and I let
myself be caught. I got lost
Was it a parody? I'm cutting my nails with my teeth
because we don't have any scissors. He's sitting on the cot and he's watching me: He's
anxious. I need to file them, I'll hurt him if I don'. It's just by chance that today I
brought the emery board along. It was a trick, everything was prepared in advance.
I wash my hands, I want them to be clean. I propose we
take a shower, there's water, I need to breathe him in without extraneous odors, absorb
the white as part of the smell --a need that sharpens her senses to the extreme and then
leaves them paralyzed and her exhausted, slack. I'm nothing but a narcissistic lung that
breathes itself in and falls asleep, oblivious to the air around me. I'm a woman
fulfilled. I was a woman fulfilled.
The everyday bursts upon us with overwhelming
force, concludes the professor, and she fans herself with her legs held apart. Maria
Isabel has recovered the bottle of shampoo that another girl, a fellow student, has
reached to her through the barely opened classroom door, in the middle of a passionate
speech about the tragic vision of human existence in the works of Racine.
I don't know why I remember that now and smile; I
should get furious and demand that he leave, insist I won't accept insults in my own
house.
"I see you're not afraid. I thought you were the
frustrated type."
That was the max. Him lying down with his back and the
soles of his feet on the bed, his knees bent. I can still close my eyes and see him there,
with his eyes closed too --so as not to look at me-- open to the possible, perhaps the
impossible. No, it was to feel her. If at least she had that certainty, it would mitigate,
somewhat, the sense of devaluation that's eating away at her now. With her own saliva she
moistened two fingers: first one, then the other.
I, seated between his legs, which were resting on my
shoulders. Not a single kiss and, nonetheless, she got goose bumps, she trembled, she lost
herself in his depths and sank too into herself. She loved him so much. He, on edge,
panting, in paroxysm. I in paroxysm, panting, on edge. Without a single kiss, it was
enough to watch him gyrate, contort himself move with apart of me, an appendage of mine,
inside of him. At last I closed my eyes. I didn't see him. That was my last blindness.
Was it a parody? he asks, but she can't answer. She
was mute.
Today she doesn't want to rethink the actions but
relive them. It was revolting. A mockery an allusion of subtle but supreme cruelty Now
distant from that fullness, I feel an ancestral emptiness and insufficiency. Useless
before a man who needs more than I can offer. I'm awash in sick desires to cut off my
fingers, to beat them to a pulp. I pity myself. I feel ridiculous.
"I'm not a lesbian, if that's what concerns
you. And please, tell me concretely what you came for, don't go on offending me, you don't
have any right. You don't know me and, anyway, you're in my house, where I don't have to
allow you to..."
"You knew I existed."
"Look, there's no sense in arguing about that,
now that my thing with him is done."
"Then why did you send the letter?"
"The letter wasn't for you."
"It was for him, that's almost the same. And he
gave it to me. Between us two, everything is the same again as before you interfered. You
have no right to say, 'Enter the dancer.' I was never lost, never disappeared from his
life."
"He told me you had broken up."
"You never knew anything. He used you."
We drank so as to wipe out all pacts and all goals, so
as to avoid having to suffer the horrors of our intersection. His eyes were red, yes,
before crying. They were red from the soap that got in them when the water ran out. After
crying he didn't have eyes, not then, not later, never --so as not to look at me? She too
was growing blind, inoculated by the darkness, a virus. Always at night, always at the
mercy of the elements, except the day of the dehoneying.
I can never get to sleep after trying it and him not
being able to. The bulb turned out and the four walls of the cubicle talking among
themselves, in growing whispers. The eternal closing in of one wall toward another, the
other to the other, the other to the
Other, the other to the first. Like a mouth pressed to
an ear and that one's mouth incrusted in the next one's ear and so... Crushing us and
crushing us until we're reduced to two points on the mattress, on the floor.
They cried. They looked at each other tenderly you
could almost say they were aroused. They were going to embrace. Now she would love him,
illuminated by the lamp, hallucinated by his skin which roused her with the barest touch.
Every hair of his body the color of honey in the light shining from behind, would grow
firm and erect.
They cried, they were about to embrace. Everything
goes dark. The electricity went out in the hotel. I don't even want to remember. I heard
him vomiting, he was complaining from the edge of the bed. We ended up masturbating, each
one with their back to the other.
"It doesn't matter now. I was happy, and I
think he was too. That's what matters."
Lack of satisfaction, is that the cause? She asks
within the four walls of that cubicle, with the incandescent bulb lit at last. Doesn't he
know that no one will ever understand his sexual behavior, so unpredictable and
unbalanced? No, not the homosexuality that she understood. She spoke of his periods of
impotence, of his growing introspection that spoiled the tenderness of the beginning. She
spoke of the passivity with which he'd started taking the relationship. And didn't she
like that any more? She had always seemed very happy making love to him; it was her,
practically who was always possessing him. Did it never occur to her that he could feel an
inferiority complex and imagine her unsatisfied?
She didn't defend herself. He left, forever.
I feel sorry for him. I love him so much. Everything
started to go wrong once the mattress appeared there on the floor. I contradict myself. I
don't know if it was then, or before, or always. His parents, as soon as they learned he
had a girlfriend, right away they gave him money to rent the room. I think I was the only
woman they knew about; he didn't tell me whether I was the first. He never talked
seriously. I think I was, I was the first, because he didn't know how to act, he was
trembling.
She was on top. That became our position. We had been
talking for hours, and the night had grown so dark, with no moon. The moon is tragic, he
said. Impossible for me to resist the excitement that every word or gesture of his
provoked. That delicacy and defenselessness were so unique, just his presence made me
captive to a maternal instinct I hadn't known I had.
We're seated on moist, sticky ground. The sharpness of
the coral bothers him and instead we've picked a spot higher up, between the wall and the
slope.
She begins, kisses him, feels him. She continues, she
shows him, she rumples his hair she mounts him. She loves him so much.
He has put a kerchief on the ground so as not to soil
his pants. When they get up he stretches the strip of cloth before his eyes, examines it
carefully, confirms the stain. He's nervous. She holds him by the waist. He puts the cloth
away and wraps his arms around her shoulders.
Enter the dancer. Till now I'd been able to keep
him in the wings, root him out in order to preserve at least the fantasy that what
happened to me was not as trivial and common as the histories of others. But the everyday
bursts upon us with irresistible force...
I could recite to the point of exhaustion what I never
should have written, the letter that should not have been a letter, a text for others, but
rather for me, to understand myself and then love myself or be appalled.
"The letter wasn't for you."
"It was for him, that's almost the same. And he
gave it to me. Between us two, everything is the same again as before you interfered. You
have no right to say, 'Enter the dancer.' I was never lost, never disappeared from his
life."
I felt happy I'd finally gotten hold of the
videotape of Last Tango in Paris, now I only needed to find someone with a VCR. Was
I getting obsessive?
Since everything ended, it's as if it hadn't
happened. I don't know him, everything is ready to begin.
I walked and walked and walked, somnambulant,
without being able to let go of that image. I had the frightful impression that now I
could never go back. Caught in a design that transcended me, for which I was no longer
responsible.
I could recite to the point of exhaustion...
I saw them, the two of them, in that darkened park --an ordinary place--kissing. No, it
wasn't the two of them. She was mistaken. She walked and walked, somnambulant, without
being able to let go of that image.
I could recite to the point of exhaustion.
"He told me you two had broken up."
"You never knew anything. He used you."
"It doesn't matter now. I was happy and I think
he was too. That's what matters."
"He never loved you. He wouldn't have given me
the letter to return to you."
I'm awash in sick desires to cut off my fingers, to
beat them to a pulp. I pity myself. I feel ridiculous.
"No, go away. Tear it up."
"You do it, that would be the best way to accept
that it's all over."
He gets up, leaves the letter there, on the couch.
He's at the door, he's going to open it, he opens it and turns: "Oh, I forgot the
most important thing. I'm supposed to tell you to find out for sure your number on the
Kinsey scale."
He closes the door slowly.
Enter the dancer. Till now I'd been able to keep him
in the wings, root him out in order to preserve at least the fantasy that what happened to
me was not as trivial and common as the histories of others. But the everyday bursts upon
us with irresistible force...
"I could recite to the point of
exhaustion..."
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