………………YOU ARE THE WE OF ME………………

How lovely!
Through the torn paper screen
the Milky Way

(by Issa)

Out to kill myself,
a dead woman’s spirit
was following me closely behind,
ready to take this body as soon
as I left.

Her warmth reached me
and my body went numb.
Her name was Caroline.
She came from under a garden
she used to water for a living.
“Leave” she said, aggressively,
trying to force me out.

Prayers gave me little comfort,
she squeezed the air out of my lungs.
Poor Caroline, I thought,
she needs me.
“I will help you” I said,
feeling her forcefulness was grief.

Later that day I regretted my offer.
“that’s not the way,” I wrote,
and with that piece of paper
I lit the oven’s flame.

I
A young girl helps her aunt in her small cafeteria as carefully and attentively as she would in any fairy tale. The cafeteria is in a forest. Somebody has called the aunt asking for home delivery service. “Take this shrimp salad to number forty twenty,” says the aunt. “It’s the only home down the road,” she adds, and the girl understands that she cannot get lost.
II
She walks amongst the eucalyptus trees for hours. She realizes that the noon sun is gradually moving in the sky and that lunch time is well past. She decides she will lie to her aunt. She will throw the salad somewhere and tell the aunt she did deliver it, nobody will ever know.
III
She sees a house at last. She knocks and knocks and the door opens. Inside there is an old lady sitting in a dark living room. She seems blind, and barely hears the girl’s story. “Oh,” the old lady says finally, “wolves do steal things from young children, it happens all the time,” and invites the girl inside. She instructs her to open a metallic cabinet door, the one that is closest to the sink.
IV
When the girl opens it a bunch of dry, corn-like hairs fall down. “What am I looking for?” asks the girl, as she kneels going into the compartment. She hears the old lady answer the phone. “What happened with my order?” she says. “No sight of my salad or your employee.” The girl wants to come down and remind the lady she is there, but the compartment door closes behind her and then she hears the click of a telephone’s button and the lighting of matches.

At four I unlock my door. Across the hall, John’s is already open. We take our clothes off in front of one another, and when we are naked, John jumps from his room to mine. But today I tell him, softly, so as not to wake the others, that I want to go out earlier, to catch the sun coming out.
Outside we are not alone. We cannot see the horizon; we are in the middle of a pine forest and light is beginning to filter through the trunks of the trees. I look at the wet dirt underneath my feet and vomit a yellow substance, like jelly about to lose its consistency. One of the elder Buddhist teachers kneels down to pick it up on a plate.
The teacher returns with two yellow balls as big as his hands. They seem to be made of candle-wax rests that look like my vomit. In one of them there is a bone, a shrunk femur. Another teacher joins and observes the spheres. “What is it?” I ask. “Your evil,” I hear. One of them says it. “Evil?” I squeeze John’s hand. I want to kiss him but don’t, because we are not supposed to touch one another until we leave.

I sing with the radio:
“I’ll jump so high
angels will catch my fall”
I wish I wasn’t.
What angels, what God?
What kind of optimism is this?
I wait for the twinge on my side
to come but it doesn’t
I used to say it was God, still in me

seven years of prayer in the Franciscan school dad sent me to
In fifth grade, wanting to become a nun
because what else could I aspire to be
other than good?
And my mom saying she was worst than us sinners
because she had not been baptized
and her repentance wouldn’t be heard.
Though sometimes she said that doing what she pleased
would be understood.

Saying it was God didn’t mean I believed.
It was a smaller act.
The acknowledgement
that when dad left, mom
and I climbed to the roof of our house
and stayed silent all afternoon,
looking at the sky, the eroded mountains
and a lonesome parachutist
that landed on a dusty hill.

It’s a hot night.
I’m sitting waiting for a train,
while a part of me hits another
against the walls of my body.

Evil—I feel it rising in my mind.
All my thoughts are about to be overcome
by an enormous meanness,
a meanness that will take my body and throw it
in front of a train or a car.

I try to remember good things.
Nothing comes
the church I attended when I was in third grade
and my conversations with God return.

The skinny nun who used to listen
to my stories with her eyes closed
also comes back. And my friend Lore.
What about her? Only her face.

I hold them three strongly
I tell myself this is it.

Lulu called me Little Match Girl. I had never read that story. At the time, I was allowing myself to ask all sorts of questions and to get lost looking for the answer. Lulu knew that. I asked the hardest questions so I could dwell on them longer and wouldn’t need to be in the real world all the time. The hardest one: why not to die. Who convinced me, where did I get the idea that I’m supposed to be alive.
I looked for the Match Girl story later and found out it was about a girl who is cold, but lights matches and tries to go far into her own imagination, trying to pretend things are good. Of course there’s nothing she can really do, nobody buys her matches, and she is sitting in the snow on the sidewalk of a lonely street. I didn’t think it was my case. We were about to film our first short film together. We had been working on the script, visiting the homes of Cris’s relatives looking for a living room that would have two big windows and a hall, the way I had imagined it to be in the story I wrote.
I had never written anything before that. I had kept a diary, but the writing always addressed God. Those pages were full of commitments to improve myself, and love letters—it had been very easy for me to fall in love since I was five. But when the time came for me to write a story for a class, I didn’t do it until three in the morning of the day it was due. I awoke and lay on my bed, thinking of how humiliating it would be not to show up to class that day, when it was my turn. In my head, always kind of there but in the background, I had the image of a woman who cuts her wrists in her bathtub. She is dying, but then her little niece enters and sees her, and gets in the tub as well. I wrote that, and took it to class in the morning.
There was a band I liked, La Vitriola, that played a mix of rock and jazz and traditional music, but I had never seen any of the members before. Years later I found out that two of them had taken that same class with me, that they had been my classmates. When I met them, I only knew that what they wrote was always good, and that Romero was freelancing for Rolling Stone. I still remember them because that day, when Romero read my story out loud—the whole class sitting near the school’s lake—I heard his voice breaking as he reached the end, and I knew there was something good in that story. They didn’t believe I had written it that same morning. I didn’t know why. I was seventeen then, and never thought anything I did was very good.
I told Cris about it and he wanted to read it immediately. He had been told in a dream that he was supposed to do eight movies about nonviolent violence. He said the phrase made sense. They would be a series about passive acts of violence, like this story of mine, which he wanted to be the first of the sequence. After I was persuaded, Cris pulled Lulu in, and for weeks we read the story over and over, working on the script.

That was three years ago. I am not a writer, I haven’t produced anything besides that piece of luck and I am taking meds now, which has helped me forget about the whole death thing. I barely think about it. I work in a store three blocks down from my house, a little office-supply store near an elementary school.
Yesterday, after I closed the store at six, I walked down the street to the gas station. I don’t know the people who live in that block, the houses are white and have gardens without flowers, but I noticed that two of them have a dog chained to a little red house. I sometimes compare both dogs; they are brown haired and fat, very much alike. Perhaps they are father and son, or mother and daughter, the young puppy having been adopted by the neighbor. Yesterday, there was a girl placing a dirty pot near one of the dog’s houses.
“What do you feed him?” I asked.
“Chicken bones,” she said.
“Some dogs are delicate; they may die if they eat bones,” I said. “Does he always eat that?”
The girl looked at me as if I were an idiot. Of course she always gives the dog her dinner’s leftovers, I thought.
“No,” she answered, and took the pot in her hands again, entering the house.
I kept walking. The smaller dog lived in the next white house, and I stopped near his little red home, but didn’t see him. The lights were all off in the house, and the door was open. From the sidewalk I could see that the house was empty. There were also many shoe marks on the ground. They had moved, and taken the dog with them, I thought.
I opened the small fence-door and looked around, trying to see if anyone was there. It seemed empty, but I feared someone could have been inside still, and decided I wouldn’t enter. I sat in the entrance’s stairs, and looked to the other side of the street. Everyone’s porche lights were lit. Nobody else had dogs in that block. I might have saved the life of that girl’s dog, I thought. I looked over my shoulder, into the empty house, and saw that there was a light bulb left in the hall’s ceiling. I wanted to turn it on, but it didn’t light up when I tried. The house was empty, but it still felt like it was somebody’s home. The chicken-bones girl appeared at the door. She seemed suspicious to see me there, a little afraid too. I walked out.
“My aunt doesn’t live here anymore,” she said.
“She took her dog with her?”
“No,” the girl answered. “I came to close the door.”
She got a key from her dress pocket and locked the house.
“I like dogs very much. Where is your aunt’s dog?”
“The moving van hit him. He’s dead.”
Her hands were in fists inside her dress’s pockets.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you go to Einstein? I work in the bookstore across the street.”
“No,” she said. “I thought you were friends with my aunt.”
“I didn’t know her.”
“They found my cousin’s baby dead in his crib. That is why they left.”
It seemed she was expecting that I’d tell her that I was sad, or sorry.
“I’m sorry. I need to go now. Take care of your dog. What is his name?”
“Daisy,” she said.
I walked back to my house; I forgot I was going to the gas station. I felt barren, like every day after I started taking the medication. Everything seemed calm and normal except that all of the questions that I had so eagerly followed when I was younger were still alive in me, though hidden in some part of my head where I couldn’t reach them. I slipped into bed, thinking of the dead dog and the dead baby. Why don’t I have a dog? I thought, right before I fell asleep.
In the middle of the night I awoke feeling a force over my body. It was not a dream, I was awake and there was a big shadow over me, and it wanted to take me to hell. I couldn’t scream, I was voiceless, so I started to pray: Holy Mary, Mother of God. But I forgot whatever came after and the shadow felt heavier, and I was afraid of going to hell. It seemed that my prayer had been strong enough though, because then the force left me, and I fell asleep again.
I wonder if it was a dream, even though it felt quite real. I feel very afraid of dying. I wish I didn’t have to go to the store today, that I didn’t need to walk down the empty house’s road and see its roof from the window of the store. But I know that if I don’t go no one is going to open it.

The street is quiet. When the children are in their classrooms there are no sounds at all, only the bird that sporadically comes near the store’s sidewalk because he knows I sometimes feed him bread. Today I wait for the bird. When he comes, I observe his feathers very carefully, trying to remember the exact color of his head, the shape of his beak, his maroon legs. There are plenty of details to reflect on when that gray bird comes by, plenty of things going on for me to care about. When he doesn’t come, I don’t have anything to think of. But today I keep remembering the fists in the girl’s dress, her trying to hold the tears inside. I see her holding the dirty pot in her arms, taking the key out, and telling me she doesn’t go to Einstein. And the dead baby.
I haven’t thought about death, about anything really, since we filmed the movie. I insisted on playing the woman’s part. I would be naked in Cris’s grandmother’s tub and that shot would be long, but the only one of that scene. We had bought a pound of red food coloring and mixed it with water, trying to make it seem like blood. When we poured it over the tub full of water it looked pink, like powder cherry juice dissolved. It was not going to work. Cris was very uncomfortable seeing me there naked. He left the bathroom and asked his brother, who was waiting with everyone else outside, to get real blood.
“Get a live chicken in the market,” he said.
Lulu and I talked with the girl we had cast. She was wearing a swimsuit, unlike me, who only had my panties on and was sitting on the tub’s edge, covered by a towel. I had to put my clothes back on because Cris’s brother was taking very long in coming. Cris’s grandma had prepared a meal of soup and fried plantains, and we chatted about college and how the old lady had only finished high school, because when she was our age that was enough. Then her other grandson, Cris’s brother, showed up.
He was in a hurry and Cris jumped off his seat, because if the blood got cold it would coagulate. We run back to the bathroom, I got in the tub and Cris poured a bowl full of animal’s blood on me. I couldn’t think of anything. Cris saw me—my naked little breasts—and pursed his lips, disgusted. His hands were trembling. I was trembling too, not thinking of anything. I felt a little cotton ball in my throat and looked outside for Lulu. The water in the tub was warm, I could see the vapor going up, to the ceiling, and Cris, who had been adjusting the camera for a ten-minute scene of me mute and lifeless, left the bathroom and called Lulu in. He couldn’t stand it. Lulu sat there, behind the camera, and tried not to look at me, or I at her. I felt like I was really dying, without the pain in my wrists though. I was afraid, but not of dying.

“Hello,” says the chicken-bones’ girl, followed by a woman. The girl is wearing the town’s Catholic school uniform, the same school I attended, where they made me plait my hair and wear white ribbons. This girl wears her hair in a bob, a hair-clip near her right temple. I smile at her.
“I’m Ana,” says the woman introducing herself. “My daughter says you were asking for my sister’s dog yesterday.”
“Yes. She told me about the moving van. I’m sorry.”
“We are moving too,” the woman says. “Annie said you like dogs a lot.”
“I do,” I say, and look at the girl, Annie, who is staring at the crayons and colored pencils organized according to their price on the shop’s window. I think this woman wants to leave her dog with me, and the idea doesn’t bother me. I picture myself walking at night with Daisy, painting her little house in my yard blue, cooking a corn flour meal for her every night.
“Are you taking Daisy with you?”
“No,” says the woman. “We have been trying to find someone who would keep her.”
Annie looks back at me, quite serious.
“If you take her, I would like to come to visit,” she says. “Think about that too.”
I nod.
“I’d be glad to keep Daisy. Thanks for thinking of me.”
“Your parents, would they want to take the dog too?” Asks Ana.
“I live by myself.”
The woman looks at my breasts, so small. I know I still look like a teenager.
“I know Ms. Valii,” she says. “She used to take care of this store when she opened it.”
“Ms. Valii opened another store near the high school. I help her here.”
“We leave on Saturday,” the woman says. “We can pass by your house and leave Daisy and her things in the morning.”
I draw a little map for Ana, explaining to her how to get to my house. She knows my neighbors, but it seems she has never heard of my family’s name. She doesn’t insist on finding out, though. Before they leave, Annie comes to the counter and extends her arm to shake my hand. I think she is serious about coming to visit the dog. “Thank you,” she says.

When I was little, perhaps around Annie’s age, I used to go swim in a pond near a river. Once I found a bird’s leg, it was pink and had its muscles still intact. I could pull one of the hair-like nerves and make its toes move as they would if the leg was still attached to a living bird. The kids are going out to play now, they are laughing out loud, and I can see them through the mesh, eating on their wooden tables, pigeons landing by their side, looking for crumbs. My own little bird is chirping outside the store, and two other brown ones accompany him this time. A man passes by on his bike and scares them away from the door. They come back, but I don’t feel like feeding them now.
I am still thinking of Annie. She looks eight, the age the girl we cast for the movie probably is now. I never saw her again, we paid her mother for the yellow dress the girl wore for her scenes, but that was it. Once we finished, I told the girl she was very talented, even though she actually was a mediocre actress. She believed me, and gave me a look that made me think that I had just created a future theatre student. I couldn’t think of anything else to say to her. She seemed happy the whole time, she was five and already acting and she had been told she was good.
“Do you ever think of death?” I asked Lulu when we got to my house that night.
She didn’t say anything, but hugged me very strongly. My skin was still red that night, even after I showered, it turns out that blood doesn’t wash away so easily. I would like to remember, exactly, the way I felt then, the things I had in my mind, so I can catch the same train of thought again and follow it as far as I can. I sometimes think that the evil-force dream that I have is really that voice in my head calling me back, telling me to go inside and decide by myself whether I want to be alive.
My fear is that I still may want to die. The day after shooting that scene, Cris came to my house. I was in my pajamas, but tried to look awake. He told me that his brother had bought two chickens but that their blood didn’t seem enough, so that he had had to go to the old town and chase one of the street dogs that live around garbage cans, famished. I almost vomited. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It is not true. We could never do anything like that to you. I thought you’d laugh.” I must have looked very upset, because Cris apologized all day, and from then on acted as if he owed me something, as if he was in debt to me. I felt naked. It was as if he had understood that the story was something other than just a tale, and he knew it before I myself admitted it.

It is noon, and the parents are now arriving at the school to pick up their kids. I see some mothers talking to each other, laughing, and now the school’s siren goes off as if there were an ambulance fleet about to exit from the classrooms. A man enters and asks me to photocopy a notebook. “From ‘The Noun’ to ‘Adverbs’,” he explains, showing me the yellow phosphorescent titles in child’s hand-writing that mark the beginning and the end. Sometimes parents do that; ask for other children’s notes for their own kids to catch up. I don’t sell anything else after he leaves.
At three, I go for lunch down the street to the gas station. I usually eat in the little café they have for the customers. I don’t want to pass by the empty house. I walk on the opposite sidewalk, but Annie sees me and beckons me with her hand. She is still wearing her uniform, a brown and white pleated skirt and a white blouse that has a brown mark on the collar, Annie’s sweat.
“Daisy is pregnant,” she says. “My mom didn’t tell you that, but I think you should know.”
“Is that why you want to come to visit, to see the puppies?”
“Yes.”
“I might have to give them away.”
“I know,” Annie says. “As long as you don’t kill them.”

There was an evening parade on Fifth Avenue in Cristina’s poem. Women walked naked, and somewhere—perhaps painted on their bodies, perhaps spoken through a megaphone—there were three words, in French; their statement.
There was a bar on 58th and Fifth. One girl sang for another, and one of them wrote down the first half of the lyrics, but didn’t get the last part, which she heard others say was the most touching. The music was faster than her handwriting, and besides, she was in a bar and everybody was loud.
There was a poem that Cristina wrote for Alejandra after they met. Alejandra thought she was in other poems of Cristina. She was, for instance, in the song Cristina was singing in the bar—drunk and just fifteen and dancing in the dirty garage-like room amongst other drunkards, sticky beer stains on the floor and chairs scattered—until Alejandra’s aunt entered looking for her and forced her into her car.
But Cristina didn’t move a finger. Instead she kept on singing, I’ve heard. As I have already said, Alejandra could only write down the first half of her song.

Teresa said: “Let’s close it.”
I looked at the cut along my chest.
“What will you use?
Thread? Needle?
Perhaps you want a zipper
to open and close it as you need it.”

“I’m afraid of the evil in me,” I said.
“I sometimes don’t want to seal it.”
“Then is there something good?” she questioned.
“The evil in me hides from your sight.”

When she asked for the source of my strength
I thought of my bone marrow,
red, thickly coiled in my spine.
It said “I am here,
I am here.”

Three weeks ago I went to Central Park. It was very sunny and I took the bus in order to watch the neighborhood instead of the dark subway tunnel. This neighborhood isn’t pretty, the buildings are mostly grey and there are no trees, but the idea of the sun and the wind blowing on my face through the bus windows while crossing the Queens Borough bridge was a good fantasy to hold in my head. So I took the bus. When I got down, still a few blocks away from the park, I was thinking of Wendy. Wendy is a blond, small woman whom I met when I was in Oregon. Maybe she was over forty. When she spoke, her mouth filled with saliva that people could see accumulating in the corners of her lips. I was thinking of what she told me once, that she had felt like a violet in a forest, so completely strange, but free. I crossed the streets and then got to one of the park entrances. I read the signs announcing Romeo and Juliet’s performance. I watched the pink flowers ahead of me, promising. I was holding my stomach all the time, holding my wound with my two arms, and thought that Wendy had given me back my life, really. I hold the scar, an old cut across my stomach, and felt the same pain I felt when I was stabbed for the first time.

I found a small mound, behind a statue, and sat there. In front of me there was a couple fixing a mat on the floor for their baby, they were about to photograph him sitting. When I heard a saxophone I realized that I hadn’t looked around, that my view was so narrow. On my right there was a lake, small boats floating over, and the music came somewhere near. I walked to the lake and knelt down over the water, to watch the fish. A boy approached with her father; he threw orange pieces to them, and the fish that at first were swimming tranquilly went mad following the orange, hungry. The wound was beating.

I looked for a green space to lie down. I found a garden with yellow flowers. I asked myself over and over again to dig deeper, to answer to myself honestly and from very deep, as if I was expecting that a soothing truth would be revealed from my unconscious and help me understand the coming back of the pain. But that day I couldn’t find anything. In fact, the deeper I asked the less I found, the more I told myself to look further for truth the less thoughts were left, until I reached a point when there was nothing really, nothing but myself asking and willing to be honest, and the only thing that popped out, from that depth, was that I wanted to live and I wanted to be happy. Nothing else. No revelation of how such life must be lived, no understanding of why I felt my life had been dripping from the scar for such a long time.

Then there was a remembrance of the girl I had been. The memory of that first story I wrote when I was nineteen, about that girl who finds her aunt dying into a tub, but doesn’t want to recognize that the woman is dying and pretends that the red water isn’t really blood, and enters the tub. Right now, while I write, I think about it and try to understand the significance of that story, what does it mean really, is it like a premonition of what is about to come? Is it a portrait of the woman I am inescapably? After the story, there came the time of destruction. First, against God. Then, everything else. Each phrase deconstructed, each thought followed and scrutinized–an essential mistrust and disbelief. Utter uncertainty. I reached a point where I thought there was always an argument against everything. My own thinking was a paradox, and there were no answers. I tried not to think, or else I would run into my desperation and restlessness and be reminded of how pointless life was. So I stopped. Avoid all sort of conversations, don’t say anything in class, only feel, feel, feel. And write as you feel–always running away from the desperate thought. Feel others, feel the sun penetrating the pores, burning the skin, feel the water, how sinking the feet into a bathtub is different of burying them in sand. Answer only this sort of questions–the immediate ones. Look for beauty: if you think that everything is possible, then everything might as well be beautiful. Ask what you like about the things you encounter, why the mushrooms on their plate are so gorgeous, why the sound of their voices makes you quiver. Laugh immediately if anything amuses you, respond fast, don’t think, avoid books and homework, there is no point to do anything after all, no point.

The only things that kept me alive were my sensory experiences. Every time it was necessary that I thought, I run away. I jumped over thinking as if over a tomb; I didn’t want to do it to avoid the fundamental question. Why don’t we all just die?

Then I studied the Enlightenment with Wendy. I tried to play the apathetic student’s part. Still, what we discussed in that class seemed to address my deepest questions. First it was Descartes. This is now a very distant memory; I can vaguely recall that he invented a system based on something he could not prove, God. But still I thought there was no explanation to why I should accept anything if, at the core of any thought, there lay a mere belief. It seemed so illogical, why didn’t everybody else see they were living such a lie. And, of course, I couldn’t say anything: all that I thought was also coming from a certain belief that I had.

There came Wendy, asking me to solve an addition.

This is what I knew is true for sure: that one plus one is two.

This is what I finally understood: to believe in something is inescapable. One plus one is two because we all decide it will be, it’s an arbitrary idea, and yet we decide it is true, and go on from there.

That’s what life takes. If I decide I will live, I am accepting that the way I make sense of the world is all that I have. There is no way not to start from some place. Dying is the alternative, but then again, the basic drive for life is so strong that I can’t deny it is here, bumping. There is a bigger truth in this desire, a truth that I can’t understand but that I feel.

That is how I accepted life again. It was not an immediate realization. I held this idea for months, slowly letting it illuminate everything else in my head. I started to feel regret. Regret for never having read Descartes or Bacon or any those guys before. Regret for having let myself wonder around alone, articulating thoughts that were flawed in some level, instead of reading the writing of people who went through the same thinking and did it more successfully. Or maybe they didn’t. But my regret was there nevertheless, the feeling that I had been alone and in pain for too long, and that there was really no need.

I went to see Wendy before I left, to say goodbye at the end of the semester. I told her how I was feeling, how I had felt for years, like I was a naked woman in the sidewalk, completely alone, but that now I felt as if I was waking up, a little late, covered by the heat of the 12pm sun. Then she said that she had felt alike–the violet image. That having gone through all of that was for her liberating.

The memory of Wendy turned sad that day in the park. I still held my wound, but I thought that maybe my experience wasn’t like Wendy’s. I thought that what I had been through was a psychological problem, not really an awakening, a sickness, not an enlightening experience. I still didn’t know how the wound had started to hurt so bad again. I tried to sleep for a while, near the yellow flowers, but my sleep was heavy and tiring. I remembered a part of an Anne Sexton’s poem, about the hope that one could row toward that island inside of oneself and look for God. An imperfect island, flawed, but one could row toward that place nevertheless and ask that the God in there embrace one’s inner gnawing rat.

Then I stood up and walked looking for a bus stop, many blocks down. I told myself I was still able to walk and take myself across the streets. Again, I imagined the sun and the wind through the bus window, over my face. How is this pretty? I asked, and made an effort to look for the beauty of Seventy Four Street. A bus stopped two blocks ahead, but left soon.

Take the cat and punish her, show her she shouldn’t have taken the meat out of the hot pot, punish her because she doesn’t respect us and we end up eating her leftovers, that sick cat, I tell you we should give her away but you don’t want to, you say you love her, now you take her and see what you do with her. So I take Chip, I hold her under the armpits, I feel embarrassed, I don’t answer anything to my mother, I don’t, she’s right, what if a scab fell in the food and we get sick, what if we get your sickness Chip, it will be my fault. My mom has to hear you, where should I take you, I hold your feet, let’s spin, I spin holding your feet, circles, circles, circles and you get scared, you look at me with your blue eyes and I think what else should I do to punish you, maybe touch your ears, so sore, disgusting my mom says, I spin and now I feel lousy, I’ll take you to that room, the one that will be my room when dad has got the money to finish building our house. This will be my room, dad said, and we will put a door here so we can enter directly from the living room, how do you like that Lili? I like it, I think of how this room will look when the bricks have been painted and the rocks on the ground are paved, how pretty my room will be when the wooden ceiling is ready and these wild plants are removed. I will buy a basket for you Chip, you will sleep under my bed and when we have enough money I will take you to the vet, I will ask my mom to find a vet, and your ears will be better, but now I should punish you, mom should hear you, I spin, my red skirt opens like an umbrella and I like that, people could see my underwear, people could see but nobody is passing in the street right now, I spin with you and we get closer to the wall, very close so your body hits the bricks and you cry Chip, yes, scream louder, louder, so my mom hears you and when she puts the soup on the table and we eat it and she makes that face that she makes when you steal the chicken or the meat I can tell her how loud you screamed, I will say mom, do you know what I did to Chip, I hit her very hard, and my mom will not say anything but I will eat, and she will eat.

After dinner I brush my teeth. The lights in the kitchen are lit. There are two bulbs, one for the inside of the room and another for the sidewalk of the house. I step near the border of the sidewalk, grab a cup with one hand and with the other I brush my teeth. I brush them, I sip water and mix it in my mouth with the toothpaste, I spit the white dirty water and think my mother could say that spitting it on the yard is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, evil, evil, devil. The devil is red, wears a white suit and has a red tail escaping the right leg of his pants, a fluffy red tail, so I know that he’s the devil but is trying to hide it. What if the devil was whispering in my left ear that I should throw the toothpaste over the ground. I should spit it, pretend that I’ve washed my teeth but not really do it, so after many years, when my teeth all get holes and hurt, I die and people will know that I died. I rinse my mouth, sipping from the cup, and afterwards I sit on the border of the sidewalk and look to the other side of the yard, to my future room. With my toes I draw circles on the watery mud on the ground. I tell the devil that I have understood his instructions, and make him answer me that god has told him that I cannot go to hell unless i do throw the toothpaste. I feel a tension, the tension of knowing that my soul is at risk, that I may go to a red and yellow place like the painting I saw in the museum they took us in third grade, I may go to hell but I can still go to heaven, and then I stand up and enter the kitchen and think that I should write this, I should write in case I die and nobody knows that the devil has tricked me.
The next day, after dinner, I imagine the devil coming again and I brush my teeth again and sit on the border again, but now I can feel that the devil is a sad thing to have near. I know I’m just imagining him, but then I stand up and think what if the devil really is here making me think that I’m just imagining him, what if I’m actually going to hell. Then I remember that I should write what I’m doing, and go back into the kitchen. But I never write. Instead, I sit on my bed and call Chip. Chipy Chipy Chipy Chipy. I caress Chip, my mouth feels with saliva when I see her ears, Chipy Chipy, you poor thing, you need to behave. Chip closes her eyes, her fur crisps feels crispy as I caress her white back. I curl my body around hers, Chip, I have seen the devil, sometimes I think that I am just imagining him with his long tail but then he comes and tells me, softly, that I am mean, that I have sinned. I hug Chip hard, so hard that she meows in pain, cry Chip, cry. Before my mom opens the door I sit immediately and take Chip on my lap, I hit her on the head with my fist and tell my mom that I was just sending Chip away. My mom asks me why I am crying but at first I don’t want to answer, I don’t want to tell her that I made a pact with the devil and that now I should give him my soul. Don’t cry, you are a child, the devil is not going to take you, says my mom almost laughing and I cry harder, my mom doesn’t know anything, she doesn’t realize that the devil becomes more real each day, that yesterday I lost the gamble, that the tooth paste fell accidentally from my toothbrush and that now the devil has god’s permission to take me. Don’t you cry. But I know I will go to hell, and I don’t really want to die.

I eat breakfast, a cup of coffee poured over a soup plate so it gets cold sooner, and a piece of bread. The bread I don’t like, I hand a piece to Chip but she doesn’t touch it. That cat is sweet toothed, she’d rather starve and wait until she can steal food from us, my mom says, and she walks out the kitchen, her apron tight around her waist. I can see her walking down the yard, wearing sandals, she is piling a dry eucalyptus trunk, a cylinder, over two bricks, near the wall that divides our yard from my aunt’s. She steps on it holding the gray blocks, only her head is visible above the wall. Aileen, my mom yells, and my aunt’s maid yells back and says that my aunt left to the doctor, that she took the baby with her, that they will be back in the afternoon. I throw what is left of my piece of bread to the floor and Chip comes to it, running, she must have forgotten I am still eating the same bread. I leave the door open and say out loud that I’m leaving for school but my mom doesn’t hear me. I walk down the road alone. My white socks are stripped by brown long marks of dust, the sun is so hot that I feel that my skull is sweating and the tight braids in my head are breaking my skin, all that heat and the tightness of the hair bands make me dizzy, maybe my head is going to explode, I could die. I don’t want to think of the devil. Even if I clean my shoes in the back of my legs they are still dusty and don’t shine, I don’t want to think of the devil. I am going to visit my aunt after school today, I am going to meet my cousin. The baby is blond blond and had her ears pierced already, so she doesn’t have to suffer when she is older, my mom said. The baby is blond but she will lose her yellow hair and will have it dark as we all have, the baby doesn’t have a name yet, and the wind blows brown fine dust over my face and I feel the devil walking behind me, his hands on is back, I hear him laughing. He is following me, he can listen to what I think, I don’t want to think, don’t think, don’t think. Then silence, a silence and then the devil laughing but there is no devil in the road, nobody is in the road, only electricity poles and eucalyptus trees. The devil doesn’t come for the children, my cousin is blond and doesn’t have a name and I will tell my aunt that her baby should have my name, Lili, her baby should have my name in case that I die.
In school, during lunch, I tell my friend Vanessa that I had a dream. She has a boiled egg and orange juice that her mother packed for her, and I got an egg sandwich and sip her juice. I dreamt that the devil follows me, I tell Vanessa, the devil is red but is dressed in white. I don’t tell her that it is not a dream, that I can see him in the day when I’m awake and also when it’s time to brush my teeth. Vanessa says that she has never dreamt of the devil, but that she once dreamt that she was in a room, a purple and orange room that was not a church but that had a pedestal, a tall pedestal were Saint Mary was standing. Vanessa looked at the porcelain Saint through the purple blur, and Saint Mary was still and pretty, with her glassy eyes and her thin lips opened as if she was going to speak. Then the teeth of the virgin started to grow out of her mouth. The teeth were long, like dog’s, and Saint Mary seemed to have flesh eyes instead of the glass ones, and Vanessa didn’t want to look anymore but her dream lasted very long and nothing else happened, only the teeth of the Saint had grown and Vanessa watched, she watched until she woke up.
I don’t want to tell Vanessa that the devil is here with me, laughing and looking at us eat. I am going to visit my cousin this afternoon, she is going to have my name, Vanessa, she is going to be named Lili because that is how my family is, my aunt likes me so much that she told me her daughter is going to have my name. You are a liar, says Vanessa, and I feel that my face is red, red, but I know that if I tell her that I am not a liar then it is going to be worst. I tell her that I forgive her, Vanessa, you don’t know what you are saying. The devil laughs in my ear, and I laugh too, Vanessa is such a fool. She says that she thinks the devil does take children with him, the children that lie, that sin, Yes, I tell her, I wonder what you have done that the Saint Mary wants to bite you. Vanessa gets so angry and I get angry too. The devil laughs a little and I feel bad, but I am laughing inside, I am laughing inside too.

I lie in my bed before I go see my aunt. Chip jumps over, her ears are bleeding, she should have grazed her scabs on something, the fur in her head is wet with drops of her blood. She passes her little paw over her sore ear and meows each time, it should hurt her. Poor Chip, I press her nose with my finger as if it was a button, her nose is humid and soft, I press softly and now I caress her. My mom is speaking on the phone, this girl is crazy to see your daughter, I’m sending her now, and so I sit immediately, as if the resort that attached me to the bed has just been cut. Lili, calls my mom, come here. Your aunt is back. I run down the yard, pile many orange bricks and on top I put the eucalyptus trunk and then I climb onto the verge of the wall. I close my eyes and jump down, fall over my aunt’s green lawn, and run to the front door. My aunt sees me through her windowpane, and now she lets me in, Aunt, I say, good afternoon, I want to see your baby. My aunt wears a gown and sleepers, she has a little make up left on her face from the morning but now she’s back to bed. The baby just awoke, she tells me, and she points towards a crib covered with white long sheets bordered with lace, I n her room. Have you washed your hands? my aunt asks and I say yes, I am clean, and I feel I little bad but when she’s not seeing me I will lick the dirty spots so she won’t notice. My aunt does not believe me, she hands me a moisturized tissue and we walk out the living room to her bedroom. She needs to bend over the crib to grab the baby, her back hurts, having a baby is a lot of pain. She holds the baby and I stand on my toes because I cannot see her, but then my aunt tells me that I am old enough, that I can carry her daughter, and leans onto me and lets me hold her. This is so important, the baby is so warm and one needs to know how to hold a baby. I put her head on my forearm so it doesn’t hang down or break amd my hand down her legs so if she moves I can grab her faster and not let her fall. Clara, my aunt tells me, we named her Clara. The baby looks like a doll, only that she moves and her body feels so warm and I am so tight, thinking that I may fail to hold her and that Clara may fall from my arms and die.
My aunt asks me to sit, she helps me accommodate the baby on her bed. You want to see these feet, she asks, she is so happy even with that pain in her back that makes her frown when she sits. She pulls off the baby’s pink socks and shows me the tiny toes, her toe nails, isn’t that pretty my aunt says and I smile, she is, the baby is so pretty, and is alive. The baby doesn’t cry. I don’t think she can see me, her eyes are only black, her pupils are all what there is in her eyes. Do you want a glass of milk? my aunt asks, ok I say, and she stands up and leaves me there, in her room, looking at Clara and touching her. I pass my hands over her nose, so little, so little and Clara doesn’t even move away, she only blinks and opens her mouth. I pull the little mitten that covers her hand. Such little fingers, such small nails, I kiss her palm, so warm. If Clara cries it will be all the more natural, all babies cry, nobody will know that I made her. I press my teeth in her palm, I press them harder and I feel so angry, I want to bite Clara, I want her dead, but all of this is so wrong, so wrong, and now Clara cries and cries and I think what else can I do to her that my aunt won’t notice, what else can I do but then I see that my teeth are marked in her skin and she cries more, more, because I’m squeezing her wrist with my fingers. Here comes my aunt, I can hear her, and I put back Clara’s mitten and caress her blond hair. Does your back hurt a lot I ask my aunt when she sits to grab the baby, and she says that just a little, that each day it hurts less.

That we are lost, Anlage, that I’m running out of a first breath and that when I get up, sometimes, I forget about you. That we have lost each other, Anlage, and that it is so true that in order to live I need to see you making love to me, and to give you two kisses on your back, while I let that this pain that I don’t understand produce me cramps in my legs and paralyze me. Our bed is narrow, fresh; the balcony has a view to the top of a tree that accommodates three black birds. That when I kiss you, Anlage, I give myself permission to feel your pain and mine, that the taste of this soured saliva puts my feet on the earth and faces me to a flavor unknown to me. Look at this, Anlage, now I am not able to write anything but streams of consciousness. I don’t know how to write, Anlage, I have lost the metaphors. I only know how to feel you breathing through the hair of my breasts, I can only imagine that the two of us love each other in a space where you are in peace with my love and I with yours, where I can love you and all the men in the world under the bridge where Telma died. That she was all that I wanted; that I lost her, that she is present only as a painting hanged on my wall, over my bed, the painting of the bird that wants to swallow the butterfly of my right eye. That I am getting out of breath, Anlage, and that in order to know if am virgin, Her, this new girl, asks me if acting feels like an orgasm, that She tells me that I have beautiful-eyes-and-earrings, and that because of that I wanted to give her one kiss and two. She outlandish, bizarre. Is she a woman? We could have almost lost Her, Anlage; I am getting out of breath. The birds are looking, I am ashamed. I have invited Her up. But first, I embrace you and see you caressing my eyelids. First I kiss you in my room. First, I embrace you. In my bed, Anlage, in my bed there is you, omnipresent in my inner room. The birds observe you, only they do. When She, the girl—is she a woman?—open this door, I would want her to find us caressing each other over my fiberglass table. When She open the door I will be out of breath. Kissing the pillow. Moaning backwards attempting a silence that hurts the throat, with you in my inner room. When She open the door She will find me lost in a kiss. And outside, fluttering, a few black feathers.

I wait sitting in a corner, it is the first time that I have come here, close to this lamp, and I bend my body so my cervix is comfortable and the light is sufficiently near to The Life of the Hanged Man. I pull the lamp closer. My feet over the chess table, I try to read, … my friend writes Palacio and I can hear you in mind saying that your favorite movie is Brave Heart. And Pulp Fiction. And the Lion King. The book, heavy, an anthology, hurts my wrist and I turn the page. Ana, first instant of the yellowiest morning, Ana and her bike and you again, you and your second hand bicycle and I and my desire to learn to ride one. My premeditated plan of asking you, in about four weeks, to come with me to the same store where you got yours, a date without declaring it is a date. The students commit suicide, bum, bum (cabum?), the teacher kneels to pick up the words and your legs approach, I see you dressed in red as always and I smile. I am not me. Keep on reading, you tell me, keep on reading please, and you sit on another sofa near the same lamp, now you and I form an L. Fine, I tell you, I am going to ignore you, and you answer as always. What do you mean, I ask, as if I didn’t know well that you mean just that, and you repeat with courage that I ignore you, and I put my eyes back on Palacio and pretend that I read a page that I had already finished. I have already said that I have disappeared.
Down there, the familiar scream concludes in ay! followed by the evening prayer, and I close the book and tell you that I have finished. I ask you for the case of the movie we are going to see and read the cover, boring. I wonder where you get such stuff from, but after all I don’t care because if I am here it is because I want to see you, to have you near. You are reading the newspaper and say that you dislike it, that the pages are actually long and very narrow. Once outside we raise our heads to the moon and see that the clouds form a circle around it. How strange, you say, you had never seen anything like that, and I make an effort to tell you what I am really not interested in saying, that I want to take a picture of it. I also tell you about the movie of the chicken that announces that the sky is falling. We flutter around the idea, you speak about the times when you questioned if you were real and my inner alarm comes on, yes, I want to tell you, yes, I could tell you every painful detail of the last five years of my life, but I only assent and say that that sounds very strange. Your movie, as I foresaw, is incomprehensible, an attempt to ridicule comedy. I sit next to you, two fingers away, and you try to get closer, to rest over my chest, my breasts, and I smile and make an effort once again: your hand is looking for mine, my hand that, now you notice, is on my lap. The movie is a nightmare that I don’t understand, sharks approach the shore and you laugh and I yawn, the pregnant woman on the screen assays a silence that I find amusing but that doesn’t pull you out of the shark scene. Move to the other side, I ask you, and I lean back on the sofa and you stay far away, unattainable. My arm paralyses, the weight of my neck causes it to yield.
Outside, you want to think of the jokes you learned in the film, and I don’t think of jokes but about the game attempted by the scriptwriter and about why people try to tell stories that want to appear intelligent. I question the idea, I take it to pieces, has this been an smart movie or did it just pretend to be, and you remember a joke and repeat it, and I don’t know what to say, as always.

Hermosa Ana
levanto mi brazo
me despido
Antes que nada, mis pies sobre las tablas, el agua golpeando,
desde abajo, este piso
Después alzo la vista:
El tramo de agua crece, se afianza
mientras
tu bote se mueve, primero
Entonces, eres tú la que
me deja
Tu traje rojo te envuelve, calientita,
El viento te escarcha las pestañas,
el viento que congela mi lengua, cuando respiro
He puesto mi cuerpo
en este bote
Con el peso de mis brazos,
que por encima de mi cabeza
se despiden de ti,
arreglo mi cabello,
se lo lleva el viento,
el viento que mueve también mi bote
Y el agua
que desde abajo
sostiene tu piso es
Distancia entre estos pies y tu ombligo
Te vas Ana mía
Con la palma de
mi mano
quiero inventarme distancia
separarme bastante de ti
hermosa Ana.

Te voy a enviar una postal
Te voy a mostrar
que yo me acuerdo
De tu abrigo y de mi pelo, necio,
que se movía con el viento,
que se movía en la cabeza de mi cuerpo,
en la popa
Mi pelo que me distrajo
Absurdamente
De mi deseo primordial
Saltar del barco,
atravesar a nado el tramo,
mojar tu piso
con mi cuerpo, tu abrigo
Y escarcharme contigo
Hasta secarnos

Lili has put her feet into the big tank of water. Lili paints with pencils in a book. She’s four and excited about going to school on the fall, mom Lili says, what color should the clouds be? She already knows they are white, though she paints them in blue. Not white mom, white you can not see. Her mother wears rubber gloves and has the water tap running, the tank reaches her waist and she has to bend down a little in order to fill her bowl to rinse the clothes she’s washing by hand, over a squared plank of cement annexed to the tank. Lili waits for her mother to leave, carrying the wet clothes into a plastic bucket, to the other side of the big yard, to hang them from the wires to dry. Lili waits to be left alone, she is in her underclothes sitting in the border of the grey, squared cement tank and has her feet into the water, and when her mother is gone, she sinks her knees, her thighs, and almost reaches the bottom of the tank with her toes. The sun feels so hot on her clear skin: her face is redder; she already has her nose covered by freckles. I don’t like hats, I don’t like caps either, I don’t want to have braids mom, I want my hair shorter, shorter. The book she’s coloring has a blue line that bites its own tail, it’s a rectangle that encages a drawing of some mountains and two people. Mom, Lili shouts, can I jump into the water? My blue pencil fell in. Lili doesn’t really want to ask her mother for permission, but she knows that she might notice her wet hair later and scold her. Her mom does not answer. Lili takes her white shirt off, puts her book by the side, on a dry border of the tank, and then jumps into. She does not know how to swim, but she can stand into the tank. Her blue pencil is safe, inside her book on the dry surface outside. The water from the tap is still falling, thick drops that all together sound like hundreds of potatoes falling over plastic bags, and now that Lili puts her head under it, falling on her skull. Lili closes her eyes. She is on her knees; she squeezes her nose with her left hand, her pinky separated from the other fingers the way her mother holds a cup. Lili holds her breath; she remembers a woman that’s goes to college with her mother and who taught her how to open her eyes under the water, in a pool, but Lili also remembers her eyes hurt that day. Now she needs air, now Lili knows she should loosen her fingers and take air, but she wonders for half a second, maybe less, how would it be to be found with her eyes closed, in the tank, how would her mother scream, how much would she regret not having answered to Lili’s loud asking for permission. When Lili is nine, she is going to remember this day while she is waiting in a hospital, with her mother, for news on her five-year-old cousin’s condition. This girl will be found unconscious, her face down onto a green abandoned pond in the middle of a forgotten garden of her farm. Nobody will hear anything; they will start looking for her only after several hours without seeing her. Lili will wonder whether her cousin jumped on purpose and then couldn’t get out, or if she was also holding her breath under the water, but never wanted out.

Ana soy yo. No voy a definir aún el significado de yo, yo es la palabra que utilizo para completar la ecuación, para darle un sinónimo a Ana. Pero Ana no es mi sinónimo, la que escribe ahora no es sólo Ana, soy Ana y otras partes, Ana en el primer instante de todas las mañanas y también cuando desnuda feliz bajo el sol, desnuda y cubierta de vello, el sol por supuesto radiante. Ana no existe porque Ana no es una separada. Ana es la manera que encontré para observar. Ana no es Ana, no otra en sí misma. Ana soy yo hace un año buscando los labios de Ana, oculta en una pared blanca de ladrillos; Ana quiero ser yo cuando yo soy Iliana, alienada y más intensa. Ana es mi semilla, la que escribe, Ana se viste de azul y de flores y rayas, Ana es la que escribe cuando yo escribo, Ana es un estado, esa forma de ser que dura un rato porque aún no me dejo completa a ella.
Y Ana, yo te digo, yo te cuento mis proyectos. Ana es Frankie despierta, ya sacudida en su caja del letargo, Ana es la pelusa que pica la garganta y yo escribo; vida más amplia en el mismo espacio: incomprensible. Hace un año escribí los primeros textos de mi vida; escribir, mi manera de estar. Entonces empecé esta página y la llené de todo lo que salía, textos fallidos la mayoría, intentos que podrían pulirse, pedazos de vida vivida afuera. Era la desesperación de salir de mí y ser afuera, Iliana que en realidad no sólo es Iliana sino Marcos y Valii y no quiere ser sólo observadora sino Ana. He quitado algunos textos de este blog, los mal escritos, los que me duelen demasiado, los que no llegan a ninguna parte porque no profundicé el corte. Hace dos meses que no escribo nada, ni en el diario ni aquí, sólo en la mente. Porque escribir y andar con mi mano hurgando mis vísceras me ha parecido demasiado doloroso, parecía que el dolor no me dejaría ver lo que he vivido, sí, todavía tengo la sombra de McCullers y la noción de que la escritura ha de ser fría y no tomar partido, para abarcar más, para mostrar más. Otra vez, vida aparentemente más rica y abundante en el mismo espacio: incomprensible.
Ya no postearé. Este blog empezó porque era mi forma de aceptar esta parte de mí, de darle una base y un espacio, de escuchar a Ana. Ana está aquí. Yo en Ana, y andamos las dos juntas y también las otras, a diario, ya he perdido la cuenta, me digo que somos cinco, parecen ocho, no sé. En Ana me muevo cuando escribo y ahora voy de otro modo, yo rebotando con Ana, en Ana, debajo y encima de ella, Ana te amo, Ana amarilla, blanca, negra y azul, Ana de tenis y camisa celestes usados a diario, Ana que experimentas con el formato de las obras de teatro en el cuento más cursi que has escrito, Ana mi vida, Ana que me miras y me tocas y me buscas y que vistes como hombre y de negro y quieres lucir punkera y después te pones minifalda azul y muestras tus senos en una fiesta, Ana lesbiana, Ana pequeña migrante mexicana y Ana albina, Ran, de ojos azules y vestidos y abrigos y medias de nylon negras, Ana mi amor, Ana te busco porque Ana eres yo, Ana soy yo que te busco y en el silencio de la oficina de Teresa te escucho y te encuentro en el centro de mi pecho y después te siento subir hasta mi garganta en mi cuello y canto o hago que canto oh Ana tengo el presentimiento que este sol de papel se romperá pronto y veremos la verdadera mañana oculta detrás
Ana no existe afuera sólo aquí adentro en mi cuarto interior para siempre y los pájaros negros observando el intento fallido de aceptarte es que Ana yo te amo pero no te acepto estoy llena de peros Ana Ana Ana yo vengo me vengo a ti sobre ti para ti Ana te veo de lejos sentada en la banqueta húmeda y te veo en el viejo solitario y en el chico vestido de blanco y en la colita de rizos sucios que nunca le vi a la Ana que me escribió un día con la esperanza de que yo fuera su propia Ana y después yo confundí contigo Ana mía y se lo dije y él acabó aclarando que no lo era no era ni Ana ni la mía ni la suya todavía
Ana furiosa
Yo escribo yo soy la que escribe si quieres escribir entonces me tocas a mí yo Ana yo el caos yo la ira y el desorden y la confusión y el sólo conseguir dormir en la tranquilidad del caos cuando reina y boto la lógica y me dejo quieta mendicante en la banqueta bajo el sol Ana tranquila no te conozco un rato te calmaste ese día cuando te oí y me disculpé perdóname Ana pobrecita reprimida en la cárcel en donde la niña de la masa encefálica a medio podrirse fuera del cráneo estuvo encerrada antes Ana mi vida te quiero me gustas quiero ser tú un día muy pronto seremos las dos o las cinco o las ocho juntas a todo momento y la otra voz que no es Ana saldrá menos a menudo quiero ser sólo Ana por un rato ser Ana de pie en medio de la calle Ana sin furia Ana te digo te escribo para ti por ti contigo
en Ana yo estoy quiero estar para siempre amarilla con Ana en Ana temprano semilla envueltas las dos en un beso conmigo en mi
cuarto
interior
para siempre

(Ana: tampoco hay nosotros sin mí)

Al Antonio le he visto muchísimas veces. Camina con la camisa azul y sus adorados all-stars viejos, con el bolso de tela cruzado sobre el hombro, con el pelo grueso y cortado como estaba de moda cuando teníamos catorce o quince años, con la barba medio creciéndole en la quijada, con la sonrisa larga y los ojos en el suelo, pensado en que va a vender los libros que escriba, pensando en que se puede vivir de la escritura. Y al mismo tiempo acercándose más y más rápidamente al edificio de Matemáticas, porque no sólo de la literatura va a vivir, sino de su título en Economía y Finanzas. Antonio. No se cómo es que luego de tantos meses, cuando le veo aquí todavía creo que es él. Todavía me demoro en notar que no es posible, que Antonio está en Quito, que aquí a lo mucho estoy viendo a muchachos que se le parecen pero que no son él. Y encima, lo curioso, es que el Antonio nunca me despertó nada. Será que su olor no me era atractivo, que vibraba con tanta fuerza pero en absolutamente otra onda, que por más que me cayó bien, nunca me gustó. Y sin embargo creo que le veo aquí, y cuando descubro la cara de otro me da pena que no sea él. Antonio.
Todo esto porque sigo reflexionado sobre las imágenes. Me he equivocado tantas veces por eso, porque la idea en mi cabeza es diferente de la cosa real. La realidad me asombra, me absorbe. Lin no sabe si es tímida o sólo antisocial. Yo creo que es ambas, yo pienso en ella y la construyo flaquita y morena, llorando por el mejor amigo que rompió con la novia y le dijo por unos días que la quería a ella, a Lin, y luego no pudo vivir sin la exnovia y se hizo de a buenas, viaje de dos semanas a la playa a ese hotel que provee de sábanas nuevas a cada cliente. Lin. Ahora tiene un novio de quien ella dice que no se quiere enamorar, y resulta que el muchacho aquel con quien ella hizo el amor por primera vez en un auto –tan cliché, y encima después de beber— regresó de su exilio a anunciar que se casa con su también exnovia, y Lin dice que a ella no le importa tanto. No le creo. Pero no se lo digo, porque cuando la escucho la encuentro, y esa sensación, la de estar en presencia de otro, de estar casi segura de que ella es otra, no yo, me fascina y me aliena por eso. La realidad me impresiona tanto que esa profunda impresión me lleva bien al fondo de mí misma, me separa de los otros. Más. Y después deambulo por mis textos buscando pedazos de vida vivida afuera, y deambulo por el césped tratando de entender de dónde salió Ana, mi Ana, por qué el césped y la metáfora de la babosa, por qué en mi mente las algas y esos líquidos son tan bellos, por qué los escribo, por qué los pienso al mismo tiempo que pienso la resequedad, el polvo y las pelusas y las hago textos. O sea imágenes.
Ahora que se me ha agotado la neurosis, ahora que ya no estoy enamorada, ahora que estoy así, vacía de nuevo, me paro un rato en medio de la calle y volteo.
(continuará)

Ya sabes, lo de siempre. Yo me acuesto por un ratito, les oigo a esas personas que no conozco, y me quedo dormida. Ya sabes que eso me pasa a menudo. Entonces me despierto y saz, que es la una de la mañana, que me acuerdo de ti en seguida, que me alegro, que de inmediato recuerdo por qué no debo alegrarme. Ahora me duele la cabeza. Una copa de vino, que lo detesto, que no me gusta porque es la bebida de los esnobs que he conocido en este pueblo, de los que usan gafas aunque sea de imitación y beben vino porque creen que la cerveza no es bien vista. Bebí vino, acordándome de esos detalles, diciéndome que casi los entiendo, que los perdono, diciéndome a mí misma que soy súper compasiva. Ahora me duele la cabeza un poco, me mareo. Me acuerdo de Roberto, de que supe tan poco, casi nada de su existencia, sólo sus malas bromas y su voz por el teléfono. Casi ni me acuerdo de su cara. Casi ni me acuerdo de que algún rato me dolió tanto que estuviera tan lejos, tan lejos su vida y sus malos hábitos de los míos. Ahora me acuerdo y no me pasa nada. Ni siquiera iras, ni pena, ni se abre ninguna herida, es como si el hoyo hubiera desaparecido absorto en mi carne. Nada. Mientras camino de vuelta, después de beber el vino, me dan ganas de llorar. O sea que en mi espalda se juntan unas cosquillitas y sólo pienso en un par de cosas tristes. Pienso en que no te quiero. Pienso en qué mismo voy a hacer con esta mente inquieta que según esa profe es un don, que según ella es lo que me pone al mismo nivel que los otros profes de filosofía y de esos otros tantos raros que se sienten solos, que no se conectan, que son tan distintos de lo que yo veo. Mi rareza celebrada. Casi. Y seguro ya lo sabes, lo adivinas, si he empezado a escribir esto, mareada, adolorida, apenada, es por el recuerdo de tus brazos y tu voz. Qué raro. Que estoy enojada contigo, eso te lo he podido decir de muchas formas. Que me da pena verte, que no puedo verte. Pero que en cuanto te veo, yo cambio. Que eres otra cosa, no la de mi mente, que yo te veo y cuando te veo, te descubro, y no me afliges. Me asombras, por aquello de que las cosas nuevas me llaman la atención. Nada más. Pero cuando camino de vuelta y me duele la cabeza y no hay nadie en las calles, nadie, y Roberto no me duele y me acuerdo de él sólo porque fue el que estuvo antes de ti, me dan ganas de llorar porque imagino, porque me acuerdo, porque estás en mi cabeza desconectada y me haces cosquillas, y solo quedan unos días y después no habrá otro chance, no habrá otra forma, entonces lo que haya en mi cabeza será lo único. Y también te irás al fondo, y despuecito te convertirás en un hoyo sellado. Ahora, sólo sentir el mareo.

Carson lies over the sand, the algae is alive, is dragging along towards her as the sun burns her. Reeves, you will see Carson dead, bouncing on your spine. Reeves, Carson is bisexual, yes she knows it, yes you know it, yes you both want her to be like that. You just don’t have any courage, Reeves. You just want to fool around with her, you are a grey entity, and the algae is greener and moves slowly in a straight line towards Carson, her belly and vulva wet under the sun. Carson thinks of you, she writes near to the shore, and she will want to drawn herself for you not to find her. Carson will never let you in. You have no courage, and you, Hey, wait right there. Don’t move: You are not Reeves. You are just a coward. Yes she writes you; the things she’s composing, ignorant of the green creamy algae approaching her, are meant to be read by you some day and at the same time are meant to represent you. Carson is a girl, her soul is that of a child that feels the same with everyone. Carson shimmers like a fairy under the sun, near to the shore, while she writes thinking of you. Carson will be reached by the algae and you will sit next to her, you will take her sheets of written paper away and then lie on your own belly next to her quiet body. She will not feel anything.
She will not let you in.
Rather, she will jump over you, her legs wrapping your back, and then she will ride you, the algae penetrating her through her mouth and the holes of her ears and her eyes. You will not be able to get in, you are not even Reeves. You will be sleeping, I mean, you’ll still be because you have been since the beggining, you are not Reeves, and while you sleep, Carson will attempt to ride you and then the algae will reach her stomach, burning, and she won’t move. You will be sleeping, dreaming of that who is not Carson, for you have never known she is Carson. You will be sleeping, your left thumb in your mouth. Your left thumb in your mouth and me mourning. Your left thumb on your tongue and me crying, for her. You sleeping and she trying to show you her rottenness, and me there, witnessing the death. Me unable to explain anything to none of you. Your thumb in your mouth, Carson longing for Reeves, and me writing.

1
Me running over the yellow grass until I get tired. Ana, Ana, small white pea entombed in the center of a wall of orange bricks painted of white, not bright. Ana! Ana! Open your mouth, break the transparent skin that wraps your body and scream. Ana! This is me, the sun does not move nor do its five rays, the sun is a drawing on a white piece of paper, perpendicular to your wall. The grass is real, that I can tell, yellow soft grass, about to rot. Ana! Ana! Open yourself and Ana! let the brick in which you are inlaid crack wider, let the crumbs fall down, wait for me Ana, wait with your eye wide open, that here I come, running, tired, I know that there is a real sunset behind the white paper of the yellow sun delineated with yellow ink, Ana, because in the box where you live and where I am running, there has never been a morning. You are a seed.

2
Ana
rolled over the surface of the wall but did not fall down. Ana was green inside. My tongue was dry and pasty, ana-green, and my hands felt hot and swollen, delicately being eaten by fungi.
Ana conducted herself to the ground and moved slowly, her body tightly attached to her wall. She came, bouncing, and saw me. Oh, and the grass was still green, like she was.

3
I
have watched Ana. Systematically. She usually lits a match for three seconds or four inside her niche in the center of the wall. I can only see the dot of light through the white curtain she has hung to cover the crack in the brick she inhabits, the crack through which she entered the wall. She didn’t posses anything, Ana moved with no belongings. Where did she find the tissue that hangs covering the hole in the wall? Ana, I have spied on you from the ground, where I am, far from you, through a telescope. Maybe it was an old, almost transparent leaf that you managed to carry up. But who am I trying to fool, I haven’t stopped observing you, I know you didn’t take anything with you, I know you could not have found it inside the brick, I know it is your white pea skin, I know it because the curtain is an empty bubble suspended from a spiky salience of the clay where you want to entomb yourself, where you are lighting a, a match? Inside the brick, your round soft body, raw, and your skin covering the entrance to your room.
Into the brick, Ana naked. Where did she get the matches from?

4
Ana, I
want to bounce with you. I want to be on you, over you, bouncing up and down with you, feeling you bounce under me, you looking at me with your eye and me healing.
Ana.
The paper horizon glares. It is a fake brightness, it is a liter of vegetable oil boiling, burning; looking at it tires me as would eating a bunch of leaves fried in rancid oil with no salt. The salt, the heat –the leaves getting warmer– would kill me. The horizon gleams and I can’t move. I can only follow Ana into her room with my mind. I can see her inside.
Inside Ana’s brick, she opens her chest, still green, and chants. Ha. There is enough space for Ana and for me in her brick. Her skin is elastic and clean, I want to try to fit in it. Fresh vegetable skin. When Ana chants, it is a different heat; it burns at another degree, measurable on a scale different from that of the painted sun. It is a heat that can burn, can hurt. But then, when a new sort of pain appears, it is possible to forget the previous one. When Ana chants, the wound of the burning from the fake paper sun is still there, but is not the focus anymore. Ana’s song becomes the primordial fire, and it also burns the skin, but as if water.

5
Ana is removing
the curtain from the entrance to her room and goes outside. She rolls over the wall but does not fall. How is that possible? She is solid; she should fall because of the same principle that makes her bounce. But she doesn’t.
Ana, I have been watching you through my telescope. A thread of hair, of somebody’s hair, coiled like a snail shell, is the tube through which I look at you moving into and out of your wall. You are not a prisoner, you come down to the earth and pick pieces of wood from underneath the roots of the grass and take it up to your brick. You bounce Ana, your eye open, and with my mind I follow you and with my telescope I make you the center of my images, and yet I haven’t reached you, Ana.
You are going back to your wall. It is starting to rain.

6
I haven’t wanted to take my mind to Ana’s room again. My hands feel duller, I scratch the fungi on them, I could bleed. I could.
The grass is wet, is getting rotten, it smells like old algae pushed away to the shore, dark green the algae, sickly yellow the grass. This horizontal rain is washing away the rays of the sun. The rays are not straight lines anymore: they are bent arms. Oh Ana, I have the feeling that the paper horizon is going to rip soon and we will see the real morning behind it. I don’t have a brick to seal myself in. The water inflates my body, I become fatter and the fungus on my body strengthens.
The light in Ana’s brick shimmers two seconds before her seven hours of rest. After that, I don’t know what she is doing anymore. She has not been out. It is raining still, and she hasn’t hung the curtain.

7
There remains the mystery of Ana’s ability to bounce and yet move as if flying very close to her wall. How can she move along a wall, a vertical surface, and not fall, being round as she is, being solid, having weight?
The paper sun is gone now, I see only a yellow stain in front of me and on my right the white brick wall. I don’t see Ana.
To run.
Me running over the yellow grass, the leaves growing taller and sharper, they are like arrows cutting my skin and blurring my sight. The drops fall as if sprayed. Ana, I’m coming.

8
To leave the leaves dry hanging from the back of your chairs. You sit by my side and fix your eye on the dry pieces of wood that make your room and your house. There is barely enough space inside the brick. You live in a cave, Ana, and the surfaces that surround you are prickly and hurt me. You have taken the pieces of leaf that attached themselves to my body as I ran, and you have put them to dry. They are nutritious, you say. Maybe I pulled myself along the wall, or maybe you are able to fly and took me here, cracking wider the crevice in your brick-and-house so I could get in.
I look at you, you and your skin. I am here with you and you don’t look at me, and there is no space for you to bounce or for me to make use of my telescope. I want to hear you chant, you say that you don’t chant anymore. But you did chant. You are round and with your eye you recognize my fungus, my reddish body, and light a fire with two pieces of wood.
You don’t chant anymore.
I will not ask you where you got the matches that light this fire.
You used to chant, you say.

“Frankie Fluffy,” Dr. Miller writes down on a white piece of paper. Frankie reads the words. He is a doctor. He is good, Frankie thinks, but she does not know what to do. She bends her head down a little and blushes. That is what to do. Years later Frankie will understand, or think she understands, that she chose to blush and bend down her chin because that was what she had seen her mother doing when interacting with strangers.
Frankie blushes, but she reaches out for the piece of paper. “Frankie Fluffy,” she writes under the sentence Doctor Miller wrote for her to copy and entertain herself with while waiting for her mother. Or maybe she was waiting for him to speak with her mother. When Frankie is older, she will think she has forgotten what she was writing that sentence for.

Frankie’s mom takes her to Daisy’s house. Daisy’s birthday was two days before, but her parents decided to make the party on Saturday. Frankie has not seen Daisy in a long while. As she walks into the house, she notices Daisy standing in the middle of her living room wearing a pink paper hat. This is the second birthday party Frankie attends in her life. The previous one was Pablito’s, to which Frankie went dressed in some shirt and pants that her mom had convinced her to wear. Frankie hated pants because they made her inner thighs feel itchy and hot and she always felt like putting a hand in between her skin and the cloth in order to relieve the burning, which she did, but not in public. For this party, though, her mom bought one meter of blue shiny fabric that Frankie thinks is silk, and made a little dress that reaches down to her knees in spite of Frankie’s specific instructions to make the dress as long as Snow White’s. The dress does have blue puffy sleeves that cover only her shoulders and show her arms, though. Frankie wears white socks with ample sewing lace on its border and a black velvet coat that belonged to her aunt Frances, dead even before her sister, Frankie’s mom, was born.
Daisy doesn’t move from the center of her living room; she is wearing a pink paper hat and probably a dress too, Frankie will suppose years later. There will not be recollections of many details in Frankie’s memory; she will only remember the parts that she didn’t expect to happen, and from those, only the parts that she likes the best. Frankie gets a stapled red paper cup. Inside there should be candy, like at Pablito’s, but she doesn’t open it. She takes off her coat and hands it to Daisy’s mom. She wants to tell the lady not to lose it because it was her aunt’s. In Frankie’s mind, things with a past become more recurrent because she links them to other ideas –so she thinks about those things more often– and she feels they are more important because she has them in her head longer. But Frankie doesn’t say anything, nor does she approach Daisy. Instead, she keeps on going over the possibility of not seeing her velvet coat again, and thinks that after the party she will ask her mom to show her pictures of Frances; she will ask her why she was named Frances too.
Frankie’s body is changing; soon the black velvet coat will not fit her anymore, but she has gotten a white polyester pajama torn in the chest and sewed back with white cotton thread which also belonged to her aunt. Frankie was named after her aunt because her mother wanted to remember, she was told. Frances died at eighteen, Frankie learned, and the picture she is to recall is one in which young Frances wore loose pants and a yellow shirt and was standing next to a horse, holding the reins, her other arm around the shoulders of a person that Frankie could not identify as a girl nor a boy. The gown is beautiful, like a bride’s, Frankie thinks. She wishes she could wear it every night, but very often her mom takes it away to wash, and Frankie sleeps wearing something else, maybe a pants-and-shirt pajamas.
Frankie sees Daisy again at school as she walks down the stone stairs towards the play yard. She passes by without saying hi. Daisy shouts loudly Frankie, do you want to play? Frankie turns her head and looks at Daisy and other girls wearing blue aprons, just like she does. Daisy is standing two or three meters from her cousin Laurena, and both girls’ legs are tied together by a long piece of spring that creates a four-sided figure. Another three girls form a line perpendicular to the larger sides of the rectangle, waiting for their turn to jump in. Frankie knows this game. She learned to play it at the beginning of the school year, before she started missing classes. First it was the chicken pox, then her breaking her wrist, then Christmas, and then some other things like her not feeling like going to school and her mom’s not forcing her. No, she says, I don’t want to. Frankie does want to but she imagines that if she says no Laurena or Daisy might stop playing and approach her to ask why not. Laurena does. Frankie, why don’t you want to play? Frankie, looking downwards and doing her best not to move her face, says with a grave tone that isn’t normally hers that she just doesn’t want to. Frankie wants Laurena to keep on asking, to hold her arm and go back with her to the classroom hall, to a corner where the sun can’t reach them, and tell her that she wants to play and that she is not very sad, just a little, sad just in a part of herself. Laurena insists, Frankie, please, please come. Frankie feels a little better. But she says no again. She doesn’t say anything else and Laurena doesn’t touch her. She goes back to Daisy and the other girls, and Frankie walks a little farther, maybe two or three steps retaking her original path towards the kiosk with the packed chips and the cups of red jelly. In the pocket of her apron, she plays with the money to buy her lunch and turns back, not looking at Laurena or Daisy. Is she angry asks Daisy to her cousin and she answers no, I don’t know, and they both look at each other and then at Frankie, who walks up the stairs, back to the hall, knowing she is being seen, and liking it.
Frankie’s mom picks her up after school. On the way home, sitting on the bus, Frankie thinks of something. Her mother tells her not to think so much, sweetie, tell me have you seen Daisy? What did you girls talk about today? But Frankie does her best to freeze her face and decides that she will not speak, though she thinks she might if her mom insists so much that she feels that delicious thing in her chest that feels just like a caress in her ears and a kiss.
She doesn’t look at anybody in the bus. She looks through the window; they are passing by the park near to the jail, and Frankie notices there are no animals or people there. Nor even benches. She sees some blue birds going up and down the branches of two trees with no flowers. Mom, why don’t they put benches? Remember that park near to grandma’s house where there were that font and that church and that bunch of old people sitting on benches? Remember? Why don’t they put benches here? Frankie’s mom looks at her daughter. An old mark of a chicken pox pimple under Frankie’s lip is getting reddish, she keeps on scratching it even after she has wounded the small circle of skin on it. Frankie needs to take a bath: she has been refusing to wash her hands and even her face, she has been throwing the toothpaste without making use of it, she hasn’t looked at herself in the mirror ever since her mom broke the big one on the door by hitting it with the broom. Four weeks ago, Frankie would have invited her two cousins over if only her mother had suggested it, and along with Daisy, they would have filled with purple bubbles the tub in the bathroom and taken a long, long hot bath. Her mother would have had all of them look for new costumes in her drawers. Frankie would have been looking for pieces she could wear as skirts or dresses, and after finding something she would ask her mom where the thing came from, why she bought it, why didn’t she throw it away if she didn’t use it anymore. But that morning came when Frankie didn’t go to school because her mom wanted to leave her to rest. While Frankie slept her mom cleaned up the house as usual: she took the mats out to the back yard, turned on the radio and started sweeping the entrance starting from the wall opposite to the door, walking backwards, until she hit the big crystal with the wooden handle of the broom and crackled the mirror in the bottom, with such a force that there were not big pieces of glass to clean up later but mostly crumbs. Frankie woke up, feeling a buzzing vibration resonate in her whole body, and couldn’t think of anything. She had been sleeping profoundly, not even dreaming, when the loud crash of the mirror called her back to the morning but didn’t give her space to have that necessary second of consciousness, between sleep and awakening, when all memories come back to the mind and one remembers who one is and what one should feel in the day. Frankie walked to the living room and saw her mother carefully picking up the pieces of glass that were big enough as to grab them with her hands, and felt afraid she would see one of those sharp triangles of mirror cutting her mother’s skin and making her bleed. That didn’t happen, her mom was very cautious not to hurt herself, but Frankie saw a square of broken crystal invading her mother’s hand, wounding the lines in her palm, and started to cry even though she immediately realized it was occurring only in her mind. She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles and felt that her left cheek was swollen and raw, as if someone had punched her with fury. She remembered this feeling when she was older, but couldn’t really tell what had happened.
I remember, sweetheart, says her mother looking at her. They say that this park doesn’t need any benches. She caresses her daughter’s leg with her left hand and with the other holds Frankie’s backpack so it won’t get dirty by the contact with the bus’ floor. Frankie doesn’t look back at her mom, but holds her hand over her blue apron. She has forgotten completely what she was thinking of before noticing the desolate park. Frances Francine, Frankie suckling pig, you smell like a piglet, her mom sings with a lowering tone and a big smile, trying to make a rhyme, softly caressing Frankie’s thigh. Frankie has followed the words and likes them. She thinks of the baby pigs she has seen in the past, only on TV, only cartoons. She laughs, her eyes quickly looking for her mom’s, and her little body quivers, relaxing. Frankie looks at the man in the sky-blue shirt who drives the bus, she looks at the woman with the supermarket’s bag sitting in front of her and at her own legs and arms, and wants to remember a song of her own to sing to her mom, but her thoughts are only about the things that she sees immediately.
In her house she eats broccoli and tuna and drinks chocolate milk, and doesn’t even turn on the TV for the cartoons, she wants to sleep.

Frankie, wake up. Let’s go to Doctor Miller’s. Wake up, you need to take a bath before we go. Frankie opens her eyes and remains still, pushing her head against the pillow, as if she was expecting that it would swallow her. Her mom lifts her under the armpits and tries to make her sit, but Frankie loosens her body and for a second she seems lifeless in her mother’s hands. Her mom doesn’t like the game, she lets Frankie fall back on the bed and asks her to get up, take those clothes off, hurry up. But Frankie doesn’t move, and her mom sits by her side and runs her fingers through her dirty hair. Frankie baby, you need to get up, let’s go get you clean and pretty, and as she says this, her voice lowers more and more, almost becomes a whisper. Frankie thinks of the TV pigs and wants to enter the screen and beat their noses, make them bleed, see them twisting their pink fleshy bodies on the floor of the house the three of them share. Frankie is furious, she wants to kill the pigs and kill the wolf and break down their house, and then she wants to cry a little and stay living inside the TV, but doesn’t want anyone to turn it on.
Her mom has the purple and pink soap bars that Frankie likes the best, a grape smelling crocodile and a strawberry. There are no bubbles in the tub, Frankie didn’t want them. She sits on the empty tub, trembling, because she didn’t want her mom to fill it either, and her mother passes the soap along her body very quickly, we are almost finished baby, are you sure you don’t want the tub filled? You are cold. Frankie doesn’t speak. She thinks of the pigs, the part in which she smashed her fists against their noses, and now feels regret. She goes back, over and over again, to that mental scene where she saw them, naked, dying, and then returns to the part where she entered the TV. She smiles, because she likes being able to make the pigs come alive again, to change things.
On the way to and back the Doctor’s office, Frankie sleeps in the bus. Frankie will not be able to remember Doctor Miller’s face with detail; he will simply become a man wearing black glasses and dressed in white; smiley, safe. She will only remember the phrases he used to write for her, maybe to help relieve her uneasiness. He used to write half a sentence and then ask Frankie to tell him how to finish it. “I like rope games, apples,” “I don’t like it when my mom is angry.” The last time she saw him, he asked Frankie what were her favorite things to touch, to smell, to see, and then he sat in the floor next to Frankie and told her the things that he liked to touch and smell and eat. Then he started to make up strange funny words to call himself after the things he liked, and asked Frankie to do the same with her name. He wrote down the things they both liked the most. “Doctor Tomato”, “Frankie Flowery.” But from those sentences, Frankie will only remember one in which her name was attached to a fluff, as if a thread was being tied to a bright balloon just before it was released in the middle of a morning, free to go up to the sky and get lost, or pricked.

When Frankie goes to bed that night, she takes off her under pants. Her inner thighs feel itchy and burn, as if she had worn pants all day. She puts on her aunt’s white gown and throws herself over the bed. Frankie wants to go to school the next day. She has planned to accept Laurena’s and Daisy’s invitation to play, and after they are done playing, she is going to ask Daisy to walk with her to the restrooms. Once in the big room where the flushing toilets are all always taken, she is going to tell her friend to wait until everybody is gone back to classes, she is going to lock the door and take off her apron and sit over it, on the floor near to the sinks. Then she is going to wait for Daisy to say something.
She looks at the ceiling and feels the steps of her mother approaching her room. She closes her eyes, pretending she’s asleep. Frankie doesn’t move; her teeth are tightly closed. Her mom turns off the light and covers her by rolling the bedspread over her so Frankie is the stuffing of a blue fabric canister. When she leaves, Frankie opens her eyes again and sits on the border of her bed. She can smell the fruity aroma of her body. She likes it. What is Daisy doing right now? Daisy is skinny, so pretty, she always knows new games that her older sister teaches her. Frankie didn’t like having her hair braided until Daisy had hers plaited in two long pieces of black hair, like mouse’s tails tied with yellow ribbons. Daisy doesn’t like much to talk with other people, but she is always moving. In school Daisy and she were always together, sitting in the same bench when possible. Daisy’s mom used to get her coloring books in the school’s store, and Daisy would let Frankie paint and glue noodles and dry grains on a few pages, always. In the afternoons Frankie repeated with precision each word of her conversations with Daisy to her mom. Daisy’s sister is in second grade and Pablito is her boyfriend, mom, and Daisy says she doesn’t like that because her sister is older than him, and Pablito is our age, and he should be with a girl of our age, and I felt angry, mom, so angry, I don’t know why. Daisy also showed Frankie her collection of Disney cards, each with a princess imprinted in color on one side. At first Frankie liked The Sleeping Beauty a lot, but she didn’t like the idea of the princess sleeping so many years and the castle getting old and full of thorny ivy. So she changed her for Snow White, and had liked her until that time came when she didn’t want to remember or feel certain things anymore. Her taste had not moved further from the black haired princess since, her mind occupied in trying to think about other things.
For Christmas, Frankie’s mom took her to visit her grandmother. They stayed there two weeks, the two of them sleeping in the same bed, Frankie’s legs tangled around her mother’s until late in the morning. There were no children in that house; her cousins had not come to visit that year. There were only her grandmother, her big cat, so big it looked like two mingled together instead of one, and her mother’s body. Frankie missed Daisy. She thought of her maybe twice a day, first at breakfast and then in the afternoons when the cat jumped over her lap making her entire body shake, so heavy a cat and so fluffy. There was something about the smell in her grandmother’s pans that reminded her of the odor of Daisy’s mouth, and there was something about the softness of the fat in the belly of the blue eyed cat that made her long for her friend’s touch, her hand in hers walking towards the school’s kiosk to get themselves some apple chips.
she and her mom had long walks in the park across from her grandmother’s house. It was full of older people, there were no kids there, at least not when she and her mom walked along its paths. White and yellow flowers bloomed, men and women sat together on rocks and benches. Most of them were parents, Frankie thought. Her mom used to sit too whilst Frankie selected special leaves and clovers, and after a while she called Frankie back, let’s go get you some food, give me your hand.
The first thing Frankie did after returning was invite Daisy over. They didn’t scream with excitement when they saw each other, they just started talking about Pablito’s party, which Daisy didn’t attend but wanted to know everything about so she could tell her mom and ask her to do something better when her birthday come in a month. They talked and watched TV and ate scrambled eggs with rice and ketchup, and after that Frankie got her red candy cup from Pablito’s birthday and they both finished the candy and the chocolates. You girls need to take a bath, Daisy, what is your mother going to say when she sees your clothes tomorrow? Frankie’s mom took them to the bathroom and taught them how to release the water into the tub and where to put the shampoo and the soap afterwards, and let them both alone, naked, in the bathroom. When they yelled announcing they were done, one hour or so later, Frankie’s mom handed them towels and took them to her room, not Frankie’s, so they could see the TV if they wanted. The girls put green polyester gowns on as pajamas. They looked alike, the water of their hair still dropping on their backs and making them tremble. They jumped over the big white bed, higher and higher, playing a game in which one tried to make the other fall to the floor, laughing out loud, louder each time. Daisy fell first. Then Frankie jumped down. She gave her a strong hug and Daisy embraced her too, and they laughed more and kissed each other in the ears, suckling their lobes and laughing. Daisy’s hands ran down Frankie’s back, and Frankie didn’t know what to do next, but she wanted to act as if she knew. She kissed Daisy’s shoulder, but doing this made her think of her mother, and she looked at Daisy and they both stopped, maybe she was thinking of her mom as well. Daisy fixed the green stripe of her shoulder with one hand and with the other held Frankie’s neck, and kissed her in her lips. Frankie’s mom was watching.

Whatever Daisy is doing right now Frankie cannot guess. She is listening to a song in her head. She cannot remember where she has heard it before. It sounds calm and powerful, at times it feels like a heavy rock falling down to the earth, almost angrily, over and over again. Frankie listens to the tune and shuts up all the remaining words in her head. She is listening carefully. She thinks it is a new song, something she has never heard before anywhere else. She repeats it in her head many times, and then she sings it out loud, sitting on her bed, barely moving. Frankie doesn’t want to fall asleep now. Frankie wants to repeat the song so she can easily recall it tomorrow and the days after, she wants to sing the song to people so they can help her to remember if she forgets. Frankie sings louder. She will remember. She uses two syllables to describe the song, “la” and “ra,” and now she decides that she cannot wait until tomorrow, she wants everyone to listen to her right now, the melody bursting out of her body in long strings of sound. Frankie sweetheart, says her mom from her room, I want to sleep. Please don’t sing. Frankie stands up and stops singing, but is still repeating the song in her head. She walks out of her room, trying not to think of anything but her melody, trying to have it mingle with everything else she recalls. She walks down the stairs, towards the entrance door where the mirror used to be, and walks outside the house. In the yard Frankie starts singing again, trying to overcome the intensity of the crickets’ tune and with her eyes she’s looking for the hose, she wants to prepare some mud.

When she was thirteen, she was scared she would never know enough. She studied. She went to school and smiled to the boys she met; to all of them, because she was teaching herself to be nice. Nice meant to be liked, to show others that she was able to like them too, to be a person who loved and was loved by her equals because that she had learned in her catholic elementary school in the religion classes. Not that she had a reason to distrust the nuns who taught her. Once, she remembered, she had questioned why God did or did not do a certain thing in a certain part of a story in the Bible –what this story was she could not recall- , and the nun who was lecturing had regretted having let her speak, and had told her with the anger that being confused might cause to the tone of one’s voice that God was mysterious and that there was not an answer for that question. When she received that answer she was eight and wore the brown squared dress that was the uniform of her school, and she told to herself that “mysterious” was strong enough a reason, and she sat back on her wooden bench, her brown dress wrinkled on her buttock’s area.
Now that she was thirteen she still wore a uniform, a purple sweater over a gray skirt and purple stockings, and was determined to become a good girl. In her mind the priority was finding a group of girls who would make jokes and have boyfriends, and she pictured herself being one of those smiley and quick-witted creatures who confidently folded their skirts so their knees were visible and who always knew what to say, and were happy, even if they were not good students.
She watched her classmates in their way to their houses, sometimes walking along with them, sometimes from a distance. But she didn’t understand them. She did not think she was a smart student. She was bigger than the other four girls in her classroom; she was the tallest and her hair was longer and blacker and her teeth were more salient, much like those of a horse, she knew. She was now in ninth grade, and she had found two girls to go to lunch with, until a day when she waited for them outside her classroom’s door and a third girl came and gave her a little piece of notebook paper that said that she was not fun nor a good company, and that those two girls wouldn’t go out with her that day. Or ever. So that kept her questioning what it meant to be good, whether it had the same meaning for girls than for parents, whether big mouths were included into that definition, whether she could change that meaning and make herself fit into it. She did not have answers for those questions, so she kept on asking teachers and the people with whom she did not feel guilty for asking what it meant to be a good person. But the answers they provide didn’t make her feel as if she finally knew what to do in order to become who she wanted, and only seemed to persuade her to move farther away from her goal. She was thirteen, and every time she smiled to a boy, to any boy, maintaining the look so her eyes could recognize the color of his, she felt as if she was at last the brash pretty girl she had built in her mind. The only difference, she noticed immediately after she had established eye contact with the boy, was that the girl in her head had perfectly small teeth and was shorter than men. This realization made her blush immediately, and she moved her sight towards the floor, ashamed for knowing what she knew about herself and for not being able to believe her own picture, not for longer than three seconds.

Crisantemos y dos elefantes, tres litros de agua y media onza de condimento verde, del picante. Todos se revuelven en mi cuerpo, sobre él, dentro de él, a mitad del camino entre su interior y lo que hay afuera. Como un espectro con cabeza gris, orejas largas que sobresalen de mi propia cabellera. Y el pimiento verde que me curte el estómago: mi chacra del poder (libros esotéricos punto com tiene una serie sobre las luces y apagones internos, todos excusas que intentan explicar la falta de determinación e inteligencia. No es uno –una—quien tiene poder sobre el propio cuerpo, son las fuerzas inexplicables del universo que deben permanecer así mismo, insondables, por el bien del resto de los días de los lectores de esos mismos libros) está encendido, es casi el inicio de una gastritis, gastritis a los 20, ahora 21, calambres que me despiertan en la noche, premoniciones del futuro de mi cuerpo que amenaza con paralizarse, con morir rígido, dolor profundo que nace en la coyunturas de sus partes más largas. Los elefantes son por aquello de la comida tailandesa y el hombre de piel marrón y gris, el hombre de larga trompa y manos fuertes, hábiles, y las flores son porque ayer leí a Alice Walker y se me ha quedado en la mente la imagen de la rosa en medio del nudo de la soga que ahorcó al esqueleto cuando aún era persona.
Media onza del pimiento que incendia la lengua para el hombre cabeza de elefante y su compañera idéntica –que han perdido su humanidad y prefiero llamarlos solamente elefantes— y tres litros de agua para ellos y las flores, también sedientas. Tres crisantemos blancos con pétalos marrones, que han empezado a podrirse, como carroña.

Espero sentada en la esquina, es la primera vez que vengo aquí, junto a esta lámpara, y doblo mi cuerpo de modo que mi cerviz esta cómoda y la luz está lo suficientemente cerca de la vida del ahorcado. Acerco más la lámpara. Mis pies sobre la mesa de ajedrez, intento leer, …camarada dice Palacio y tú dices que tu película favorita es corazón valiente. Y pulp fiction. Y el rey león. Y tu amigo se ríe y yo también, fingiendo que soy como él, que no escucho que lo que nos dices no sólo es el título de una película, sino una marca en un mapa. El libro pesado, antología, lastima mi muñeca y yo volteo la página. Ana, primer instante de la mañana más amarilla, Ana y su bicicleta y tú y tu bici y yo y mi deseo de aprender a montar una. Mi plan premeditado de pedirte en cuatro semanas que me acompañes a la misma tienda donde tú conseguiste la tuya, una cita sin declarar que es cita. Los estudiantes se suicidan, bum bum (¿cabum?), el profesor se agacha a buscar las palabras y tus piernas se aproximan, te veo vestido de rojo como siempre y sonrío. No soy yo. Sigue leyendo, me dices, sigue leyendo por favor, y te sientas en el otro sofá junto a la misma lámpara, ahora tú y yo somos una L. Está bien, te digo, te voy a ignorar, te digo, y tú contestas como siempre. Que quieres decir, pregunto, como si no supiera bien que significas justo eso, y tú repites con valor que yo te ignoro, y yo vuelvo los ojos a Palacio y finjo que leo una página que ya había terminado, y te digo que sé que eso es cierto, y sigo leyendo. Ya he dicho que yo he desaparecido.
Abajo, el grito familiar concluye en ay, seguido por la oración vespertina, y cierro el libro y te digo que he terminado, sonrío, te pido la caja de la película que veremos y leo la portada, aburrida. De dónde la abrás sacado, pero al fin y al cabo no me importa porque si estoy aquí es porque quiero verte a ti, tenerte cerca. Tú lees el periódico y dices que te desagrada, que es más bien largo y muy angosto, y ya afuera alzamos la vista a la Luna y vemos las nubes que son un círculo que la rodea, qué extraño, me dices, nunca habías visto nada así, me dices, y yo hago otra vez el esfuerzo y digo lo que en realidad no me interesa, que quisiera tomarle una foto. Te hablo de la película del pollito que dice que el cielo se está cayendo. Revoloteamos sobre la idea, tú hablas sobre las veces en que te cuestionaste si tú mismo eras real, y mi alarma interna se enciende, sí, quiero decirte, sí, podría contarte cada doloroso detalle de los últimos tres años de mi vida, pero asiento y digo que eso suena bastante raro. Tu película, como lo preví, incomprensible, una burla de la comedia del ridículo. Yo me siento a tu lado y tú intentas acercarte, descansar sobre mi pecho, mis senos, y yo sonrío y hago una vez más el esfuerzo y tú te sientas a dos dedos de distancia, tu mano buscando la mía, la mía que, ahora lo notas, está en mi regazo. La película es una pesadilla que no entiendo, los tiburones se acercan y tú te ríes y yo bostezo, la embarazada en la pantalla ensaya un silencio que a mí me hace gracia y a ti no te aparta de la escena de los peces. Que te hagas a un lado, te pido, y me recuesto en el sofá y tú quedas lejos, inasible, y mi brazo se paraliza, el peso de mi cuello lo doblega. Afuera quieres pensar en las bromas que aprendiste de la cinta, y yo no pienso en bromas sino en el juego ensayado por el guionista y en por qué Holliwood ahora intenta contar historias que quieren ser inteligentes, cuestiono la idea, la desarmo, es esta en realidad una cinta inteligente o solo pretende serlo, y tú recuerdas un chiste y lo repites, y yo no sé que decir, como siempre.

Joe me dijo el día de nuestra primera y última cita que todos estamos conectados. Y lo dijo sin ganas de impresionarme, como juzgando el estado del clima o el calor del medio día.
Lo detesté ese día, pensé que era un cretino de la nueva era, convencido de absurdos que nadie , ni él mismo, podía probar. En realidad estaba asustada, me negaba a mí misma que yo, igual que él, había estado convencida toda la vida de lo mismo, pero que luego de haber leído un par de libros acerca del desencanto (o existencialismo, como le dicen), me sentía en el deber de proteger mi inteligencia repitiendo las ideas de otros.

Mala idea.

Tres años antes de conocer a Joe, intenté escribir el primer guión de mi primera historia video-grabada. No película, sino una historia corta, que significase algo para alguien; no un corto, sólo una oración bien construida, dicha con acciones. Pero no estaba sola en el experimento, también estaba este muchacho de chompa de negra y botas de cuero, larga trenza de cabello seboso atada con un chunchi en su espalda, que olía a nada y hablaba de nada. El quería contar un cliché de telenovela venezolana, pero con los actores vestidos con trajes de conejitos rosados.

-¿Te imaginas? Todos entrando a la casa con el bulto, todos como si estuvieran vestidos normalmente. Pero si los vestimos de conejos y les damos una zanahoria a cada uno, ¡los que lo vean se van a quedar locos!

No grabé nunca ni un pedazo de esa idea ni de la mía. Nadie iba a prestarme su cámara para contar la historia de un perro atropellado en la Naciones Unidas. Abandoné el proyecto cuando mi perro y la gente de la avenida se convirtieron en un tipo abaleado por un narcotraficante embarcado en un carro negro.

Volví a las clases de física del colegio.

Cuando conocí a Joe, yo estaba bien jodida. Convencida que todos en este mundo eran unos imbéciles por no suicidarse, siendo que ni el mundo, ni la vida, ni ellos mismos tenían sentido.
La frontera entre mi yo y lo demás empezó a borrarse. No supe más qué era real y qué no. Todo era cierto, todo era posible, y todo me dolía como una paliza en las costillas. Todo se hizo verosímil, indiscutible, incuestionable. Todos tenían razón pero seguían siendo tan pendejos como para separarse los unos de los otros por no expresar lo que pensaban de la misma forma. Yo me separé por que no entendía y todavía me dolía la actitud de los otros cuando me hallaban rara. Bipolar neurótica maniaco depresiva necesitada de prozac: según la sicóloga de la universidad, mi incapacidad de distinguir entre los sueños y la vida, entre las mentiras y las verdades, entre lo cierto y lo falso, era solo una forma de escapar de lo que en verdad dolía.
Mientras tanto, yo estaba llena de energía . Furiosa, lloraba en todas partes y por todo, incapaz de gritar o romper o golpear, la única salida eran las lágrimas, palabra horrenda y cursi que tanto criticaba mi profesor de escritura en mis textos.
Y cuando Joe conoció a mis amigos, que resultaron ser sus vecinos, me podrí de la rabia porque él ya no me servía con esas ideas en la cabeza. ¿Cómo podría yo convertirme en una perfecta nihilista a su lado? ¿cómo podría yo comprender la dureza del vacío en mi vida con alguien llenando mi mente? Un par de meses luego de Joe, descubrí el hueco. Su hueca.

(continuará)

Ana, primer instante de la mañana más amarilla
¿Ana? No existe
Ana no es Ana

(Vida del Ahorcado - Pablo Palacio)

Tema.- m. Trozo pequeño de una composición, con arreglo al cual se desarrolla el resto de ella y, a veces, la composición entera.
Idea fija que suelen tener los dementes.

Ya estaban acostumbrados a verlo con los ojos enrojecidos y el cabello desordenado, deambulando con gesto de estupor, siempre como si fuese la primera vez que se encontraba con cada una de las cosas. Caminó desde la puerta, doce pasos cortos según contó Ili-Ana, hasta el ventanal de la pared del otro extremo. Ocho cristales limpios se encuadraban en el armazón nuevo de madera, y del otro lado se veía la pared humedecida del edificio de enfrente. “¿Cómo definir las características que diferencian un objeto fractal de otro que no lo es? ¿Qué objetos pueden ser entendidos como un ensamblaje de fractales más simples?”, preguntó. Silencio. “Las lecturas son obligatorias. A propósito, todavía no hemos escogido a nuestro ayudante esta semana”, sonrió.
Marcos, luego de descruzar los brazos para contener un bostezo, balbuceó algo en el oído de
Ili-Ana, sentada a su izquierda. Ella se comportó como si no lo hubiera escuchado.
El Dr. Valii se colocó los lentes que tenía en uno de los bolsillos del suéter y sacó un libro de la gaveta de su escritorio, emplazado en medio de la sala. “Los fractales son auto semejantes
-comenzó, con la mirada sobre el papel-, es decir, tienen la propiedad de que una pequeña sección puede ser vista como una reproducción a menor escala de todo el fractal”. Observó a sus alumnos intentando reconocerlos, uno por uno, por pares, en filas, en grupo. “¿De qué clase de fractales estoy hablando…?” Marcos intentó acercarse de nuevo a Ili-Ana para hacer uno de sus comentarios, pero esta vez, la silla chirrió. Valii buscó con la vista el origen del molesto ruido y, al ubicarlo, encontró una réplica de sí mismo treinta y un años más joven. Marcos, con la sonrisa interrumpida por la sospecha de estar siendo observado, levantó la vista y se sintió descubierto. Supo que esa semana, le tocaba el turno a él.
El Dr. Valii acostumbraba elegir un asistente detector de mentiras cada siete días. Su labor consistía en evitar que sus compañeros acabasen tomando por cierta alguna de las afirmaciones que Valii endilgaba en broma, pero que bien podía ser tomada en serio por un auditorio ignorante de las vidas amorosas de Arquímedes o Diofante, de los libros que Fibonacci leyó en su infancia o de los extraños cultos que casualmente surgieron después de la muerte de Fermat. Encontraba divertido tomarles el pelo a sus jóvenes estudiantes, pero mucho más le entretenía elegir a un despistado cualquiera y obligarlo a cargar sobre sus hombros el peso de las bajas calificaciones de sus pares: al término de la semana, una evaluación sobre cada uno de los puntos tratados los días anteriores sería la medida final de su eficiencia inquisidora. La clase de Historia de la Matemática era por ello singularmente atractiva para los estudiantes más ambiciosos; aprobar una clase del Dr. Valii bastaba para adjudicarles la reputación de futuros hombres de ciencia y líderes intelectuales del lado oeste. Y también lo era para Marcos Valii, no precisamente uno de los más esforzados, quien hasta ese instante había creído que su padre haría una excepción con él y le ahorraría la vergüenza de ser detector de la semana. Quizá también el Dr. Valii hubiera querido aplazar hasta el último momento la designación de Marcos, tal vez porque sabía que no daría la talla ni siquiera de asistente medianamente bueno, y porque él tampoco quería ver a su hijo vencido sin remedio en los debates que propiciaba entre sus pupilos. Aunque, eran precisamente sus alumnos quienes esperaban con paciencia el día en que Marquitos tuviera que organizar las discusiones y enfrentarse a las afirmaciones del Dr. Valii, sin otra arma que la materia gris con la que la naturaleza le había dotado pero de la cual le habían visto hacer uso muy pocas veces. Acabar con Marcos sería probablemente su única oportunidad de vengarse de las tomaduras de pelo de Valii.
Y allí estaba Marcos, encogido sobre su silla, con los ojos fijos en los de su padre y con otros dieciséis pares de ojos posados sobre él al mismo tiempo. “¿Qué clase de fractales?”, repitió el Dr. Valii, acercándose a la esquina diagonalmente opuesta a la puerta del salón, dónde desde el primer día su primogénito había planeado refundirse para no ser tomado en cuenta. Marcos estaba perdido. Había oído la lectura, pero no había entendido nada, y sabía que si se equivocaba, su fama de muchacho no muy brillante no sólo iba a acentuarse, sino que se extendería en tales dimensiones que posiblemente alcanzaría a su propio padre y ensombrecería su buen nombre. Quiso pensar en alguna excusa que le ayudara a salir bien librado de la situación, pero su habilidad inventiva se había atascado en uno de los engranajes de su cerebro unos minutos antes, cuando comprobó que Ili-Ana ya no le hablaba.

Marcos tenía el hábito de escribir. La noche anterior le mostró a Ili-Ana su más reciente relato. Lo había redactado hacía unas semanas, durante el día de su encierro con los libros de su padre. Había sentido un angustioso interés por aprender y llenar su cabeza de cuanto conocimiento poseía el Dr. Valii, pero después de leer un par de capítulos del primer y único libro que abrió, no consiguió sino dejarse llevar por sus pensamientos. Las ideas atravesaron su cabeza en zig zag y las apuntó tal como llegaban, y mientras escribía pensaba en que tenía mucho más por decir, acelerando el movimiento de sus dedos, y el rostro relajado pero impresionante del Dr. Valii aparecía acompañando las palabras.
Por lo general, Marcos veía el futuro como un tiempo sin duda más triste, en el cual perdía todas las cosas buenas que encontraba en el presente. Solía imaginarse a sí mismo muchos años después, solo, sentado sobre un tronco en medio de la nieve de un país nórdico. Llevaría un abrigo marrón y frotaría sus manos para calentarse, y por su memoria atravesaría Ili-Ana con sus ojos devoradores de papel. La perdería por un malentendido, y nunca podría recobrar su amistad ni tampoco volver a su casa. Copos de nieve enfriaban su cabello, y él se encogía apoyando la frente sobre las rodillas y le pedía a la Ili-Ana de sus recuerdos que no lo dejara. Inmediatamente después, abandonaba este pensamiento casi sin darse cuenta de que lo había pensado, y se dedicaba a seguir haciendo lo que fuera que hubiera tenido que hacer, más ansioso y sombrío.
Al final del día, terminados unos párrafos de su historia, tuvo la certeza de que el personaje que había creado durante esas horas necesitaba crecer, y entendió que aquello que había escrito era un borrador incompleto. Decidió que no volvería a tocar ese texto hasta que pudiera olvidarse de él, pero antes de abandonarlo le puso un título. “Ana”:

Yo quería abrirme a mí mismo y ver qué había dentro, desgarrarme y observar finalmente la sangre latiendo debajo de mi piel, que crujiría como una manzana que es mordida cuando con mis dedos y los suyos la abriéramos para ver la vida adentro de mí. La vida descubierta con ella. Su cuerpo pálido y suave estaría abrigado con telas rayadas y ella me hablaría como siempre de las historias que querría montar conmigo, yo el protagonista, yo corriendo hasta ella y cayendo a su lado casi muerto sobre el pasto amarillo. Y después me sentaría junto a ella para contarle mi pena, la de esos libros, y haría un agujero en la pared para escondernos ahí, solos, con la luz de los fósforos que ella secretamente habría guardado en sus bolsillos, y entonces yo desdoblaría mis papeles del centro de mi pecho, abriría las hojas de líneas, blancas, y pondría aquel gesto que a ella tanto le gustaba y le leería lo que escribí, y Ana abriría su boca rojísima y yo la mía.

Ili-Ana leyó hasta esa línea y se detuvo un momento, sosteniendo el relato en sus manos. Las dos ocasiones anteriores en que Marcos le había dado sus cuentos, ella se había asegurado de sacar cuatro fotocopias y guardarlas debajo de su colchón. En cuanto se quedaba dormida, envuelta en las mantas se deslizaba diagonalmente hasta alcanzar el piso, incapaz, en su inconciencia, de echar a perder el texto con el peso de su cuerpo durante toda la noche. Pero esta vez no conservaría copias.
Ili-Ana creía firmemente que lo único absolutamente real era ella. Todos los demás, todo lo que leía y olía y quería, podía o no ser producto de su propio infinito ser. Todo podía haber nacido de ella, nada podría existir fuera de ella y todo lo que veía y oía y sentía bien podía ser sólo un trozo de sí misma. El comportamiento de los otros seres parecidos a ella, podría ser explicado si se los tomaba como personajes de una gran puesta en escena que su inagotable imaginación creara sólo para su propio placer. Estaba sola desde la primera vez que había abierto los ojos y, aunque había vivido momentos de verdadera felicidad en la aparente compañía de otros, casi había llegado a concluir que esos seres que se le asemejaban eran sólo inventos que ella misma iba construyendo en el presente, o recuerdos de creaciones pasadas que despertaban en su memoria.
Dudando de que fuera suyo el todopoderoso índice que señalaba el destino de los que aparentemente existían, Ili-Ana atravesó un periodo que llamó su “concienciación de lo irreal”. En ese lapso, puso a prueba la verosimilitud de las acciones de los hombres y mujeres a su alrededor, de las definiciones que todos daban por sentadas e inclusive de sus propios pensamientos. Las palabras de los otros, que no podía prever y que a veces le sorprendían, las clasificó como manifestaciones de su inconciente, es decir, revelaciones de su propia verdad interior en forma de personas que se le parecían pero que no eran ella. En este punto, empezó a cuestionarse si acaso los otros realmente existían como entes separados de sí misma, cada uno con su propia realidad indescifrable, y si no era posible que de algún modo estuvieran unidos entre sí por un cordel invisible que los compactaba en un único y sólido ser. Descartó esta teoría porque, se dijo, nunca podría probar que compartía con esos otros algo más que la apariencia y ciertos códigos. Códigos que, de cualquier modo, también podían haber sido creados por su mente y haberse replicado en los otros que se le parecían pero que no eran ella.
En cuanto a las leyes y los acuerdos tácitos que parecían facilitar su coexistencia con los otros, concluyó que provenían de su misma inagotable fuente interna. Enseguida notó que le faltaban argumentos para respaldar esta teoría de la sabiduría interior, y se dio cuenta de que le era imposible no rebatir sus propias conclusiones.
Empezó a entrenar la facultad de seguir sus propios pensamientos, desarrollando una técnica mental que –aunque reconocía como restrictiva en tanto jamás le permitiría darse cuenta de que se estaba dando cuenta– le ayudaba a cazar las pequeñas incoherencias de su pensamiento, y a ordenarlo en una secuencia rígida que tenía que repetir siempre cuatro veces para no olvidar. Fueron difíciles las primeras semanas de implementación de este método, pues estaba tan concentrada en aprender la lógica de esta nueva manera de pensar, que dejó de observar a los otros seres que se le asemejaban pero que no eran ella. Cuando volvió a prestarles atención, le pareció que se estaban comportando como si tuvieran vida propia, que actuaban con libertad y que parecían no necesitar que ella planeara cada una de sus actividades. Decidió observarlos con mayor cuidado: aún creía que ella misma era lo único de cuya existencia podía estar totalmente segura, y se figuró que la aparente emancipación de los otros se originaba en alguna parte oscura de su mente que había quedado fuera de su autoanálisis. Mirar a los otros dejó se ser un espectáculo, y se convirtió en su manera de encontrar esa parte olvidada de sí misma.

Se encontraba en ese periodo cuando Marcos le dio por primera vez uno de sus escritos. No habían sido muy amigos, y aunque la falta de confianza hizo que Marcos dudara de contarle de la existencia de sus cuentos, al final fue esa misma distancia la que le convenció de mostrárselos. Desde entonces hablaron mucho todo los días, especialmente ella, que deseaba conocer con profundidad las motivaciones del otro. Le hacía toda clase de preguntas que él respondía con frases fácilmente predecibles, pero no le contaba casi nada sobre sí misma ni sobre las cosas que realmente pensaba. Después de leer los primeros dos textos, Ili-Ana catalogó a Marcos como otra de sus creaciones, una caricatura en construcción que poseía la rara virtud de reconocer su naturaleza ficticia: él escribía siempre en primera persona, contando acciones y sentimientos que lo revelaban como un ser inventado, alguien que necesariamente tenía que surgir de alguien más. Ili-Ana se sintió orgullosa de haberlo creado, no había otra explicación para un personaje que le recordaba tanto a sí misma. Estaba convencida de que Marcos le pertenecía hasta el momento en que leyó el nuevo relato y sus dudas acerca de su dominio sobre él empezaron a desbordarse:

Y nuestros labios se apartarían entre sí un montón, casi como una claqueta de las que usan en el cine para separar las escenas y permitir el ingreso de nuevos personajes -esos que ella tanto ama- y nuestros labios estarían en realidad ocupando el espacio que le correspondería a los del otro, bocas abiertas y gigantes como las fauces de los lobos, del lobo de mi cuento segundo. Y al fin lograríamos juntar solo las puntas de nuestros labios, doloridos de tanto moverse sin encontrarse, y sería un roce casi imperceptible. Y yo, que querría más y más con ella, entonces pasearía mi lengua sobre sus dientes superiores, tan caliente mi cuerpo y sudoroso, y sus ojos seguirían cerrados, y yo le diría Ana, despacio, los dos metidos en el agujero de la pared de ladrillos, ella con su mano cubriendo el orificio para que la luz no penetrara y yo sosteniendo el fósforo prendido en su mano, junto a mi pecho todo el tiempo, sin quemarnos.

Ili-Ana devolvió las hojas y se rascó cuatro veces la quijada con la punta de su dedo índice.
Habían transcurrido ocho semanas desde que decidió observar a los demás de nuevo, y todavía no encontraba el punto en que su mente había dejado de comandar el mundo y las acciones de los otros. Llegó a pensar que quizá su técnica había empezado a resquebrajarse por haberla concebido restrictiva, pero creyó que podía revertir sus efectos e inclusive bosquejar una nueva. Pero la nueva historia de Marcos le hizo reconsiderarlo.

El Dr. Valii observó con los ojos secos a su hijo. –“¿Pueden abrir el libro y darle una mano?”, inquirió a sus otros alumnos. Iliana buscó con rapidez en la sección de Matemáticas Modernas.

La idea de fractal, concebida por B.M. Mandelbrot en 1975, ha permitido importantes progresos en el estudio de fenómenos irregulares.
Los fractales lineales son estrictamente similares a sí mismos, es decir, un pequeño fragmento de cualquiera de ellos contiene una figura que, con la ampliación adecuada, es idéntica al objeto completo

Guardó silencio. El día anterior, se había sentido aludida por “Ana”, y pensó que Marcos la había convertido a ella en la protagonista de su ficción. Apenas terminó de leer el relato, le invadieron terribles dudas sobre la verdadera naturaleza de Marcos. Si antes había pensado que la autonomía creativa de Marcos era un signo más de su poder sobre los otros, había algo en el nuevo texto que la hizo cuestionar esta idea. Parecía que Marcos había conseguido pensar por sí mismo asuntos que a ella nunca se le hubieran ocurrido, que poseía un poder similar al suyo, creador de vidas. Creador de Ana. Espectador de Ana. Todopoderoso conocedor de sensaciones, dueño de deseos que Iliana estaba interesada en sentir y suscitar.
La plausibilidad aterradora de esa nueva perspectiva la mareó. Después de esforzarse tanto por perfeccionar su técnica mental, no podía quedar espacio en su cabeza para admitir que quizá había que dar vuelta atrás y repensar no sólo el método sino el proceso con el cual se formulaba el método. Ya no tenía fuerzas para establecer una nueva técnica. El miedo a la incertidumbre la estremeció. Olvidar. Dolor de cabeza. Retornar al punto en que Marcos no era más que una cáscara indudablemente conducida por una inteligencia superior. Volver al momento en que concibió a Marcos sólo como un personaje mal dibujado, un boceto prometedor cuya complejidad la enorgullecía. Volver a pensar en ello para olvidar el miedo, repensar sólo esa parte para no tener que rediseñar el método ya conocido, la técnica infalible, la vida ya organizada. Repensarlo de este modo: Marcos escribía como si hubiera sabido lo que ella quería que él escribiera. Aquella historia reflejaba sus anhelos ocultos. Ella era Ana, y cada pedazo de letra resonaba en perfecta armonía con los deseos de Iliana porque su mundo interior se repetía en cada uno de sus personajes, Marcos incluido. Él conocía sus deseos porque, definitivamente, Iliana lo había creado. Era claro que Marcos -y todos los demás- dependían de ella. El mundo dependía de ella. Iliana se vio como la creadora del universo y de todo lo que existía en él. Marcos era la prueba, Marcos, que pensaba sólo lo que ella quería que él pensara. Tranquilidad.
Consiguió olvidar que por un momento temió ser igual a los otros, que casi tuvo que admitir que no podía controlar a los demás y que todos andaban a la deriva y desconectados, ella una pequeña parte del caos fundamental. El dolor de cabeza se acentuó -pertinente- y la creadora de todas las cosas decidió, en un momento de impulsividad divina, que ya no necesitaba del rígido método lógico que había empleado hasta entonces para comprobar que ella era lo único absolutamente real. Descartándolo, podría finalmente disfrutar del espectáculo desplegado por sus creaciones, segura de que todo lo que ocurriese sería justo lo que ella deseaba conciente o inconcientemente. Se concedió la licencia de dejar de hablar con aquellos seres que se le parecían tanto porque –según ella comprendía- eran ella misma. Entendió, antes de perderse en el éxtasis de la pura observación del momento presente, que ya no le hacía falta volver a hablar. Y, absorta en su razonamiento, cerró la boca.

Marcos quería que Iliana demostrara interés en ayudarlo. Que no permitiera que fuera tan notoria su falta de inteligencia y su escasa concentración, ya no por sus compañeros sino por Valii, quien comprobaría una vez más que su hijo carecía de talento. Aunque podía prever que ella no lo haría, porque la noche anterior le devolvió su manuscrito sin pedirle una copia y permaneció en silencio, impenetrable como casi siempre, sin siquiera decirle adiós cuando se bajó del taxi. Durante las horas que siguieron, en la madrugada, había estado pensando en la silenciosa compañía de Iliana y en las razones que pudieron molestarla tanto que su lengua se había detenido de pronto. Marcos consideraba a Iliana su mejor amiga, pero había decidido no escribir nunca sobre ella para no enredarla en las sensaciones que encontraba cuando escribía. Una vez pensó que la concentración con que Iliana lo escuchaba y veía señalaba los verdaderos sentimientos que ella tenía hacia él en su interior, aunque enseguida se dijo que el intenso interés de su amiga por conocerlo era un rasgo más de su personalidad obsesiva. Era difícil conversar con Iliana, difícil hablarle de sí mismo al principio, hasta que dejó de evadir el tema del Dr. Valii. Entonces le contó de la meta sobreentendida de convertirse en experto de alguna lengua muerta, de Física Aplicada a cualquier otra ciencia o de Historia de las Matemáticas -como su padre- que se le había inculcado con paciencia a la par que se le enseñaba a leer y escribir. Y le contó de su hermana Iris, que estudiaba Latín en Oslo, y que siempre le invitaba a visitarla en las vacaciones porque ella no planeaba volver. Marcos sentía que la presencia de su padre era como una gran bola de pelusa que lo aplastaba a él y a su hermana, con suavidad, como una pelota de piel humana que los envolvía cada vez que pasaba por encima de ellos y que poco a poco los estaba absorbiendo. Iliana escuchó. Con los ojos abiertos y la expresión rígida, parecía comprender su mediocridad como resultado del no saber manejar sus propias habilidades, paralizado por la presencia del Dr. Valii. Iliana parecía comprender que él había sido una víctima de las expectativas y presiones de su familia, Iliana era egocéntrica a veces, pero sí que se podía hablar con ella, Iliana era temática pero cada día parecía serlo un poco menos, Iliana se fue pareciendo en su mente cada día más a otra que no era Iliana, y pensarla de este modo nuevo le hizo sentir complacido e impaciente.

Y de inmediato sintió en él la angustia de estar perdiendo a Iliana -tal como en su fantasía- por un malentendido. Entonces, casi sin darse cuenta, algo en su mente se encendió y razonó independientemente de él de la siguiente manera: si iba a perder a Iliana y a lamentarlo algún día sentado sobre un tronco en el patio de la casa de Iris, lo que correspondía ahora era empezar a crear los motivos por los cuales extrañar a Iliana, y tratar de estar lo más cerca de ella para memorizar el aspecto exacto de los ojos que había programado evocar.
Intentó explicar el silencio de Iliana en el taxi aduciendo que eran celos lo que ella había sentido después de leer la historia de Ana. Ella, la heroína de su cuento, era la cajera de la papelería donde hacía algunas semanas compraba papel blanco y lápices de grafito. Marcos confiaba en Iliana, pero había decidido no hablarle de Ana hasta que lograra empezar algo con ella. Luego de que Ana rechazara sus invitaciones un par de veces, se sintió frustrado y compuso aquella historia. Ahora que entendía que no había lugar para guardar más esperanzas, pensó que había llegado el momento de compartirlo con Iliana. Pero ella había cerrado su boca inmediatamente después de leerlo, y él confundió el silencio conclusivo de Iliana con su habitual gesto de fascinación, y lo interpretó definitivamente como la demostración de un amor que él no había querido ver. Esa era la Iliana de su mente.
Se le ocurrió que en cuanto saliera de la clase la llevaría a los jardines y le contaría toda la historia de Ana, cuidando que su relato tuviera un principio claro y un final circular, tal como a Iliana le gustaba, y luego le diría que él también estaba fascinado por ella, por su silencio y su fijación con ciertos temas, y que le gustaba mucho saber que ella gustaba de él, no, eso quizá no se lo diría. Y sabía que a medida que él fuese contándole a Iliana estos nuevos sentimientos, seguramente podría ver en ella lo mismo que había hallado en Ana. Le diría a Iliana que Ana no era más que una proyección de su mente. Y después de decírselo, Iliana seguramente volvería a hablarle con aquella ansiedad habitual en su voz, y le confirmaría que él había leído su mente. Y ambos se reirían, y Ana sería posible al fin.

Aunque en ese momento, todavía en el salón de clases, Iliana no hacía ningún esfuerzo por ayudarlo a salir del atolladero. Marcos sabía que todos tenían la respuesta, incluida ella, pero nadie intentó acabar con la tensión del momento diciéndosela a su padre. “Parece que esta semana te toca a ti”, dijo sonriente el Dr. Valii. Caminó de espaldas hasta su escritorio y guardó el libro. Con los lentes apretándole el tabique y los ojos sobre su auditorio, empezó a hablar acerca de la infancia retraída de Mandelbrot y sus posteriores dificultades reproductivas, intercalando datos vergonzantes sobre su vida conyugal, junto con algunas de las ideas que influenciaron sus estudios de geometría y su posterior teoría de los fractales.
Fue evidente para todos que Marcos nunca lograría corregirle. Faltaban casi cuarenta minutos para que la clase terminara. Y la semana apenas comenzaba.

Que estamos perdidas, Anla, que se me va acabando el aliento primero y que al levantarme, a veces, me olvido de ti. Que nos hemos perdido, Anla, y que es tan cierto que para vivir necesito verte haciendo el amor conmigo y darte dos besos en la espalda, mientras dejo que el dolor que no entiendo me produzca calambres en las piernas y me paralice. Nuestra cama es angosta, fresca, el balcón tiene vista a la copa de un árbol que acoge a tres pájaros negros. Que cuando te beso, Anla, me doy permiso de sentir mi dolor y el tuyo, que el gusto de esta saliva acedada pone mis pies en la tierra y me enfrenta a un sabor desconocido en mí. Mira esto, Anla, ahora no soy capaz de escribir otra cosa que streams of conciousness, he perdido las metáforas. No sé escribir, Anla. Solo sé sentir tu respiración a través del pelo de mis senos, sólo puedo imaginar que las dos nos queremos en un espacio donde tú estas en paz con mi amor y yo con el tuyo, donde yo puedo amarte a ti y a todos los hombres del mundo debajo del puente donde al fin murió Telma. Que ella era todo lo que yo quería; que la perdí, que está presente sólo como un cuadro encima de mi cama, el del dibujo del pájaro que quiere tragarse la mariposa de mi ojo derecho. Que se me va acabando el aliento, Anla, que para saber si soy virgen Ella, esa chica, me pregunta si actuar se siente como un orgasmo, que Ella me dice que tengo lindos-ojos-y-aretes, y que por eso a Ella quise darle un beso y dos. Ella estrambótica. ¿Mujer? Casi la hemos perdido, Anla, se me va acabando el aliento. Los pájaros miran, tengo vergüenza. Primero te abrazo y luego tú me acaricias los párpados. Primero te beso en mi cuarto. Primero abrazarte. En mi cama, Anla, en mi cama estás tú, omnipresente en mi cuarto interior. Los pájaros te observan, sólo ellos.
Cuando Ella, la chica ¿mujer?, abra esta puerta, quisiera que nos encontrara a ti y a mi acariciándonos sobre mi mesa de fibra de vidrio. Cuando Ella abra la puerta se me acabará el aliento. Besar la almohada. Gritar al revés intentando un silencio que lastima la garganta, contigo en mi cuarto interior para siempre. Cuando Ella abra la puerta me encontrará perdida en un beso. Y afuera, revoloteando, unas cuantas plumas negras.

Frankie is a fluff who wants to explode my house. To explode my house. To explode it. She bends and, under my table, she grabs the fabrics that wrap my body and laughs. And she floats, Frankie wants to be a boy, she shrugs, she skips. Frankie does not belong to me. Carson put her in her box and I borrowed Frankie from her. If she finds out, if she knows that I poked her box, then maybe she will want to beat me up. Furious Frankie, furious Carson, she posted her best drawings in the walls of her house. It happens that when the day ends, Carson sits down to listen to the trumpet lessons of her friends outside her box-and-house, and leaves Frankie to rest in the hammock that the grains of dust make for her among their bodies. And Frankie stays, very still, lethargic in the space that the particles make for her, and she does not ever move, but the clock that she has lost into her fibers keeps running, and it tells her
that Carson has closed her eyes and is only looking for sounds
that the grains of dust are old, dead carcasses, spectrums
And Frankie lets her clock accelerate, and she vibes, and like Carson, she only cares about the beating of her inner musical clock hands. Her clock is no longer a clock, it is the drawing of a bomb that Carson posted in the wall to signal the north of her box-and-house. And Frankie gets up, the bones of the spectrum-dead-carcass dust disintegrate. Frankie has a bomb in her chest, and I uncover Carson’s box-and-house and Frankie jumps and laughs and hides between my legs. Fluff. Carson disintegrates in the dust of the little squares of sound of the trumpet, a trumpet she did not see for she was very still: particles of a girl who deep inside wanted to be a boy. Now Frankie explodes my house.
And I tell

Yo quería abrirme a mí mismo y ver qué había dentro, desgarrarme y observar finalmente la sangre latiendo debajo de mi piel, que crujiría como una manzana que es mordida, cuando con mis dedos y los suyos la abriéramos para ver la vida adentro de mí. La vida descubierta con ella. Su cuerpo pálido y suave estaría abrigado por telas rayadas y ella me hablaría como siempre de las historias que querría montar conmigo, yo el protagonista, yo corriendo hasta ella y cayendo a su lado casi muerto sobre el pasto amarillo. Y después, me sentaría a su lado para contarle mi pena, la de esos libros, y haría un agujero en la pared para escondernos ahí, los dos solos con la luz de los fósforos que ella secretamente habría guardado en sus bolsillos. Yo desdoblaría los papeles guardados en el centro de mi pecho, abriría las hojas de líneas, blancas, y pondría aquel gesto que a ella tanto le gustaba y le leería lo que escribí, y Ana abriría su boca rojísima y yo la mía.
Y nuestros labios se abrirían un montón, cada boca como una claqueta de las que usan en el cine para separar las escenas y permitir el ingreso de nuevos personajes -esos que ella tanto ama. Nuestros labios estarían enfrentándose, los unos ocupando el espacio que le correspondería a los del otro, bocas abiertas y gigantes como las fauces de los lobos, del lobo de mi cuento segundo. Y al fin, en un roce casi imperceptible, lograríamos juntar nuestros labios doloridos de tanto moverse sin encontrarse. Y yo, que querría más y más con ella, pasearía mi lengua sobre sus dientes superiores, tan caliente mi cuerpo y sudoroso, y sus ojos seguirían cerrados. Y yo, yo le diría “Ana”, despacio, los dos metidos en el agujero de la pared de ladrillos, ella con su mano cubriendo el orificio para que la luz no penetrara y yo sosteniendo el fósforo prendido en su mano, junto a mi pecho todo el tiempo, sin quemarnos.

Carson sentía con todas sus partes la trompeta de Reeves. Los árboles no movían sus troncos ni su hojarasca, pero la música, potente, atravesaba a Carson y refulgía. Se colaba por las ventanas, llenaba la sala de Reeves y salía nuevamente por las mismas rendijas: ramas brillantes de música querían sacudir los árboles que, sobre la cabeza de Carson, se negaban a batir sus flores. Carson violentada por la música saltó al río y caminó sobre el lecho verdoso. Katy mordía su pierna y se aferraba. Gangrena en la pierna de Carson, pie inútil, carne muerta. Pero Carson continuó hasta el fondo, las hojas de música afiladas como saetas perforaban su cuerpo y la atravesaban completa.
-Carson -dijo Reeves por primera vez, dejando de tocar su instrumento- Si quieres, puedes venir a mi casa. Y mientras yo esté, puedes tocar esta trompeta.
La música no murió mientras Reeves hablaba. La música golpeaba suave los cabellos de Carson y los separaba como si fuesen cortinas negras que cubrían el espacio en donde ella sabía cómo tocar la trompeta.
Carson se hizo a la orilla, como una pluma verde náufraga de pato, y con sus ojos acuosos buscó a Reeves entre los espirales de sonido de la trompeta.
Carson quería salir y volver a caminar sobre la tierra. Pero Katy era de esponja y, llena de agua, pesaba como una mole pegada a la pierna muerta.

Frankie camina sobre el puente. Una fila de niños en patineta la escolta en su trayecto. No se conocen; Frankie avanza pero el chirrido la desconcentra. Frankie se eriza, las ruedas sobre el pavimento la perturban, cada átomo de cemento desprendiéndose de la plancha sobre la cual camina le hace temer por su vida. El puente que le lleva al otro lado podría estar en peligro. Podría fracturarse, espalda de espina muy frágil que Frankie besa con sus pies y –ahora que uno de los chicos en patineta la impacta- con sus labios.

Llegará el día en que Carson duerma con Reeves y su trompeta. Será el día que ella golpee a Katy y la deje muerta.
Katy Faroles se llama su muñeca verde, casi podrida. A Katy la sentaron junto al piano, entre las cortinas, para que se enfriara y muriera, tiesa. Carson la encontró y cerró la ventana, y el agua de lluvia y el viento sin música se quedaron afuera.

-Vamos- le dijo a Katy. Aún me falta una muñeca duquesa

Katy obediente abrazó a Carson y se resbaló hasta su pierna.

-Carson- le dijo Katy-, estoy hambrienta.

Carson buscó frijoles, buscó tomates, buscó unas peras. Pero no encontró nada para saciar a la nueva duquesa. Katy se aguantó el hambre y apretó a Carson y volvió su piel negra.

-Carson- dijo de nuevo Katy-, de ti nunca me iré. Ni muerta.

A Carson no le quedaron ganas de presentarle a sus otras muñecas. En adelante engañó a Katy y le hizo creer que sí era duquesa. Y vistió faldas más cortas para que Katy no tuviera de donde aferrarse las veces en que ella se sentaba a la orilla del río a mirar los patos. Y a remojarse las piernas.

Carson sentadita come pasas, come arvejas. Carson tiene una falda que no le cubre bien las piernas. Su camisa es la misma blanca que Reeves usará cuando se suicide -después de un concierto, su cuerpo destazado sobre unas piedras . Ella parece un niño, tiene cara de muchacho. Reeves empieza a tocar su trompeta. Carson quisiera saber leer música para escribirle cartas. Y quisiera subirle más el dobladillo a su falda y quizá cortarse un poco el pelo y dejarle en el bolsillo cuatro arvejas verdes a Reeves egoísta, el que no toca para ella.
Bajo los pies de Carson los patos nadan, son diez contentos. Ella les lanza pasas y cierra los ojos y se concentra. Adentro halla a Reeves sin su trompeta. Solo su cabello peinado, y el torso desnudo, sin camiseta. En la cabeza de Carson, Reeves vomita las arvejas.
-Te quiero Carson, pero sé que tú amas las trompetas.

Frankie es una pelusa que quiere explotar mi casa. Explotar mi casa. Explotarla. Se agacha, y justo debajo de mi mesa, se aferra a las telas que envuelven mi cuerpo y se ríe. Y flota, Frankie quiere ser un chico, se encoge, da brincos. Frankie no me pertenece. Carson la puso en su caja y yo la tomé prestada. Si ella lo descubre, si sabe que yo hurgué en su caja, entonces quizá quiera darme una paliza. Frankie furiosa, Carson furiosa, ella pegó sus mejores dibujos en las paredes de su casa. Ocurre que cuando el día acaba, Carson se sienta a escuchar las lecciones de trompeta de sus amigos de fuera de la caja y casa, y deja que Frankie descanse en la hamaca que los granos de polvo le procuran entre sus cuerpos. Y Frankie suele quedarse, quietecita, aletargada en el espacio que las partículas le hacen, y no se mueve nunca, pero el reloj que tiene perdido en sus fibras sigue corriendo, y le cuenta
que Carson ha cerrado los ojos y sólo busca sonidos
que los granos de polvo son viejos, cadáveres, espectros
Y Frankie deja que el reloj se acelere, y ella vibra, y como a Carson, sólo le importa sentir el latido de sus manecillas-canciones internas. Su reloj ya no es reloj, es el dibujo de una bomba que Carson pegó en la pared para señalar el norte de su caja y casa. Y Frankie se levanta, los huesos del polvo muerto cadáver espectro se desintegran, Frankie tiene una bomba en el pecho, y yo destapo la caja y casa de Carson, y Frankie salta y se ríe y se oculta entre mis piernas. Pelusa. Carson se desintegra en el polvo de los cuadritos de sonido de la trompeta, que no vio, quietecita, partículas de chica que en el fondo quería ser chico. Ahora Frankie explota mi casa.
Y yo cuento

Sentada. Las piernas abiertas sobre el suelo. El voladito del vestido sucio, los dedos manchados de fango seco. Me abres los brazos pero no me miras. Pequeña. Te vi en el monstruo que Anaïs escribió, pero ahora que he vuelto a leerla reconozco que el suyo no es tan bello… ya no te reconozco a ti en él. El óvalo que arde en medio de mis senos se pregunta por qué el calor me asfixia pero no me mueve. Por qué le siento hervir pero no busco extinguirlo.

Deshacer la pintura en mis dedos, tomar a la chiquita en mis brazos y golpearla hasta que su cabeza, como un plátano, se estrelle contra algún rincón y se quede pegada, adherida su pulpa a la superficie. Para, entonces, quitarle la faldita de tela transparente y abrirle las rodillas. (Yo te veo a ti en la literatura). Y pintar la pechera de su vestido con las puntas de mis índices, creando remolinos simétricos justo en el hueco donde está su diafragma. La niña, con los ojos cerrados y el cerebro expuesto, intentaría pensar por un momento en el color de los trazos que yo le dibujaría en las costillas. Pero su pensamiento quedaría inconcluso, sin lograr conectarse con la definición de amarillo, guardada en la fracción del hemisferio que, fuera del cráneo, habría empezado a descomponerse.
Todavía viva. (No me llames cruel. Cruel es lo que me obligas a hacer). Me acostaría sobre ella, reposando mi tórax sobre su pubis. Leyendo su aroma, tierno sudor de lodo y agua de río, de donde la saqué el primer día. Se rió, unos dedos bajo sus axilas, y aunque quiso no se quejó por los guijarros que le abrían los talones. Volvió todos los días usando la ropa que guardaba para los ratos de felicidad. El vestido blanco de la tía Lila le quedó bien después de fruncirle la cintura. Lo vestía por las mañanas, para sumergirse en las aguas poco profundas. Yo aparecí el día en que su deseo de quedarse allí toda la vida, empapada los cabellos y los calzones, creció tanto que pudo rememorarlo. Primer recuerdo, pero la obligaron a salir de todas formas. Conservó las ganas de volver todos los días, aunque las escuchó menos seguido. Yo/ella la/me llevé/llevó conmigo. Era el tiempo de nuestro amor como iguales. Vivimos juntas.

Y oler su ombligo. Inconexo. Su fragancia, mezcla de leche y heces, me recordaría las páginas que ella me sugirió escribir cuando éramos niñas las dos. (¿Vas a quererme cuando yo no sea yo misma?). Que dirían “te quiero Anaïs, te amo porque tú eres como nosotras, porque eres una nosotras crecida”
Y estirar los brazos para alcanzar sus cabellos, salpicados de trocitos gelatinosos y escarlatas, pedazos de su masa encefálica recién expuesta. Que vibrarían en las palmas de mis manos, como luces de neón que encendiéndose tratarían de decir algo, de escribir con destellos fluorescentes su verdad en las falanges de mis dedos.

Hundo el pincel en el tarro de pintura roja. Saco una gota y la mezclo con otras dos de color blanco. No bastan para lograr el rosado de tu piel. Quiero encontrar el tono de tus brazos dorados, escondidos en las sombras. Los pinceles a un lado; caen al piso. Son mis manos las que se embadurnan de tinturas color durazno, las que arden queriendo sacarte de ese rincón y mostrar-me a ti, ahora que ya no soy contigo… Pero no me miras a los ojos. Mis senos ya están marchitos, los pezones casi rozan el suelo, y ésta es la primera oportunidad que tengo de verte desde que te encerré. He vivido sin ti porque quise ser sin tu compañía. Y traté de ser lo que solo las dos juntas, tu y yo, podíamos ser. Pero no fui. Y te extrañé, pero temí que vieras que no me he convertido en Anaïs y que mi viaje diario a la cárcel exterior no valió la pena. (Espérame mientras soy alguien más). Vergüenza. Yo traté, sola, pero supe que no sería como ella después de leer su Monstruo, que nunca se igualará a ti, porque tú me perteneces. La dejé irse a ella y a su engendro, y para que tú no lo supieras, te encerré en mi guarida.

Siento tu abrazo, en mi espalda los libros que escribiste en tu encierro. Tu voz en mi cuello me explica las historias que quieres que cuente. Pequeña, no me miras a los ojos porque has perdido los tuyos. Mojado tu traje blanco, húmedos los dedos de tus pies. No dibujaré un círculo arremolinado en medio de tu pecho. Ni te golpearé hasta matarte. Confía en mí… Te recuesto. Te quito la faldita de tela transparente y cierro tus rodillas. Reposo mi tórax sobre el tuyo. No eres el monstruo que pintó Anaïs, ni yo quiero dibujarlo. Mi dedo en tu ombligo se enciende, te parte, nos afianza. Puedes salir cuando quieras.

Don’t you call me cruel
Cruel is what you are making me do

I’m at odds with me now
Would you want me when I’m not myself?
Wait it out while I’m someone else?
-John Mayer

Si quieres a Marissa, no la encontrarás en mí.
Huelo a pastel de chocolate. El aroma sube hasta mi nariz, cierro los ojos y me acuerdo de ti. ¿Estabas nervioso? Yo intentaba no estarlo, intentaba improvisar en la marcha y construir el personaje que creía que tú deseabas que fuera.
Café en la mesa. Me contaste la historia de Marissa descubriendo a Dios (¿por ti, contigo, en ti?). Era el cuento más cursi que habías escrito pero era el que más te gustaba, me dijiste. En esa historia todas tus fantasías se materializaron: encontrabas a Marissa en la calle de una aldea remota, mientras los Stone Temple Pilots tocaban tu canción favorita y ella te miraba de frente a través de un cristal. De allí, saltabas a tus salvajes relaciones sexuales con ella; hacías que enfermara de apatía y que -teniéndote a ti como figura masculina- decidiera que creer en Dios iba a ayudarla a sentirse menos vacía.
Yo me reía por dentro. Bebía café y atacaba un empalagoso brownie con prontitud, para que las carcajadas no salieran a borbotones y arruinaran nuestra primera salida. No sé si te diste cuenta, o creíste que eran los nervios los que me hicieron cubrir la boca como si estuviera tosiendo justo cuando tú tratabas de describirme con máxima precisión a la Marissa que inventaste en tu texto: la piel de medusa, escuálida y sin sonrisa. Ofreciste mandármelo por e-mail para que lo leyera con más calma y te dijera lo que pensaba. Te dije que por supuesto, que era lo mejor porque se me había hecho tarde, que seguro iba a disfrutar mucho leyéndote.
Aunque en verdad quería quedarme y conocer más a Marissa. Así hubiera podido decirte que iba un rato al baño, utilizar ese momento para reflexionar a solas sobre sus motivaciones y regresar sintiéndome como ella. Entonces me habría sentado junto a ti para seguir atendiendo a tu historia, ya sin celos. Halagada.

Caminamos. Supongo que no teníamos más que decir. Me mirabas, ¿era tu cara de aturdimiento señal de que intuías la metamorfosis dentro de mi cabeza? Mis ideas se volvieron maleables como la gelatina, y mis ganas de reír se apagaron.
Quería pedirte tomarnos de la mano y justificar de ese modo tu silencio en la calle. Quería que Marissa fuese real, que tuvieras una foto suya en la billetera.
- Creo que sí la he visto, fue todo lo que dijiste.

En la mañana descubrí este olor en mí. Quiero hablar contigo, todavía quiero pedirte tomar tu mano, que me prestes tu cd de los Pilots y que me acompañes en este día raro en que no tengo ganas de hacer el amor.
Encuentro tu “Marissa o el origen de la fe” en mi correo. La Marissa que leo en tu texto se reúne contigo en una cafetería de la ciudad, come con deleite un pastelito negro y se burla de tu ideal femenino, sin más música de fondo que la voz destemplada de unos niños vendedores de dulces.

Quiero hablar contigo, todavía quiero decirte lo que no te dije ayer: que olvides a Marissa, que sólo existe en tu mente. Que no podrás encontrarla en mí.

Ha pasado una semana desde que estamos sin ti.
Ese sábado abriste la puerta principal a las seis de la mañana, lo sé porque escuché su chirrido mezclándose con las voces de mis sueños, y enseguida, el despertador que había olvidado desconectar. Veía el cuadro que pinté cuando amaba a Telma, pero ya no tenía las mariposas ni la lluvia ni la marea dentro del ojo ni los edificios en forma de T a su alrededor. Sólo quedaba el colibrí, finalmente incrustado en la pupila, y la mariposa que antes la habitaba había desaparecido seguramente digerida en el estómago del pájaro.
Abrí los ojos y encontré la pintura colgando de la pared, intacta, todavía saturada de agua e insectos. Me levanté y me acerqué a la ventana para ver si alcanzaba a saludarte a ti o a tus papás mientras salían de tu casa, pero la puerta estaba cerrada. Pensé que tal vez el chirrido era parte del sueño del colibrí repleto de mariposa, y cerré las cortinas para desvestirme.
No te llamé ese día ni el siguiente. Cuando papá, extrañado, preguntó por qué, le respondí que quería darte espacio y dejar que vivieras sin mí unas horas, porque comprendía que verme todos los días podría abrumarte. Cuando papá preguntó, no le dije que ya me estaba cansando de tus visitas inesperadas y de la bocina de tu carro taladrando el aire cada día junto a mi portón, ni le hablé de mi disgusto conmigo misma por haberme programado para correr a la ventana cada vez que escuchaba abrirse la puerta de tu casa, aún cuando quería empezar a dejarte. Papá me creyó.
El domingo por la noche sonó el teléfono. Era tu mamá. Me preguntó si sabía dónde estabas. Dijo que te había visto por última vez el viernes por la noche, vistiendo una camiseta blanca y los boxers de gnomos que te regalé el día de los inocentes. Me acuerdo que te los di en homenaje a tu confianza, porque pensé que debía ser difícil para cualquiera de tu edad admitir que, hasta que cumplió trece años, creía que esos duendes vivían en las raíces de los árboles. Aunque reconozco que siempre te fluyeron con naturalidad las historias de una infancia de la que ya empezabas a desprenderte.
Esa noche, dijo tu mamá, te quedaste enfrascado mirando un documental. No tenías ningún plan en particular, aparte de la película que posiblemente verías el sábado conmigo durante nuestra acostumbrada tarde de videos.
Le dije que no te había visto desde el viernes por la mañana, cuando me preguntaste qué película quería ver. No le conté que yo te respondí que nada, que dejáramos descansar la pantalla de tu tele por ese fin de semana. Ni le conté que fingiste que mi comentario no te ofendió, y me preguntaste qué era lo que yo proponía hacer.
- Démonos un poco de espacio, respondí, y tú, con la sonrisa despintándose de tu cara y las cejas cada vez más juntas, me dijiste que así no era como estas cosas funcionaban, que tenía que explicarte qué iba a hacer sola, que tenía que aclararte si es que iba a estar sola, que no me moviera de ese asiento, que a dónde creía yo que iba, que no te dejara con la palabra en la boca, que esperara, que esperara, mientras yo azotaba la puerta del auto que tu papá te había prestado y me largaba feliz, sintiendo que empezaba a librarme de ti.
Tus padres despertaron el sábado temprano. A las siete, según me dijo tu mamá, tu padre salió a pasear en bicicleta, y ella se quedó en la casa hasta el medio día cuando entró a tu cuarto a pedirte que la acompañaras al supermercado y no te encontró. Hizo las compras de la semana sola, sin preocuparse demasiado por ti. Asumió que estarías en casa de alguno de tus amigos, porque de vez en cuando desaparecías del vecindario y te alejabas de todos durante un día o dos. Pero nunca habías dejado pasar más de una noche sin dar señales de vida.
Le prometí a tu mamá que la llamaría si llegaba a saber algo. Me preocupé porque mi voz sonaba indiferente. Por suerte, esa preocupación creció hasta convertirse en angustia, y entonces sí sentí que estaba convenciendo a tu madre de que a mí también me carcomía la incertidumbre de no saber dónde estabas.
Cuando me despedí de ella me aseguré de desconectar el teléfono. No quería que interrumpiera la quietud de la primera noche en que me acostaba casi totalmente segura de que no aparecerías en mi casa de improviso. Corrí las cortinas antes de acostarme y, después de descolgarlo, me dormí con mi dibujo de insectos alados y edificaciones en forma de T sobre el pecho.
Soñé contigo de trece años, metido en un río de agua sucia que te llegaba hasta las pantorrillas. Acompañabas a una mujer parecida a Telma que sorbía el jugo de una flor de taxo y que se burlaba de ti cuando le hablabas de los gnomos que vivían bajo el agua y la arena de la orilla del río, en las raíces de las plantas.
- Los gnomos no existen, te decía, acentuando la g.

Tus papás enloquecieron. Ni tus amigos ni tu familia ni los vecinos sabían nada de ti. El lunes temprano llamaron a la policía para denunciar tu desaparición. Una oficial llegó a mi casa por la tarde, escoltada por varios de tus familiares, y nos interrogó en privado a mi padre y a mí durante dos horas sin conseguir ninguna pista. Cuando terminó, tu familia -que estuvo todo el tiempo en el recibidor- entró de inmediato a la sala con tu mamá a la cabeza. Propuso que varios helicópteros te buscaran por la ciudad; seguramente aún vestías la misma camiseta y los mismos boxers porque no faltaba nada en tu armario. Cualquier cosa podía haberte ocurrido. Tal vez habías sido secuestrado y los raptores llamarían en cualquier momento para pedir una suma que, por muy astronómica que resultase, tus papás y tus tíos ya estaban preparándose para reunir. Tal vez huiste de la casa llevando el equipaje que te proveyó alguno de tus amigos. Aunque ninguno de ellos admitía haberte visto después del viernes en la tarde, también cabía considerar que inclusive un muchacho como tú llevara una doble vida de indecencias y rebeldías ocultas, y tu familia estaba dispuesta a hacerse a la idea de que te hubieras unido a una pandilla o a un ejército subversivo. Tal vez aquella vida secreta no suponía precisamente tu afiliación a algún grupo juvenil guerrillero o religioso, sino la paternidad de alguna criatura concebida con una muchacha que no era yo, y con quien habrías fugado lejos de tu dulce dulce hogar. Tal vez la criatura en cuestión sí era mía, y tú, atolondrado por el miedo a la responsabilidad y a la presión que mi padre seguramente ejercería para que te casaras conmigo, decidiste escapar después de enterarte ese viernes por la mañana de mi embarazo. Es que de las niñas como yo se podía esperar cualquier cosa, empezaron a mascullar las miembros de tu familia, y por un momento olvidaron el pánico de creerte secuestrado o alienado por alguna ideología de moda y se complacieron en arruinar mi reputación, justificándose con lo que se dieron por llamar su genuino interés por tu futuro.
Tu madre, perturbada, finalmente me acusó de ser la principal sospechosa de tu desaparición, entre otras cosas porque mi débil apoyo a su proyecto de búsqueda aérea y mi conducta apática correspondían en su juicio a la de una culpable. Mi papá, que no decía nada porque quería hacerse pasar por comprensivo, le pasó una caja de pañuelos desechables, y mientras ella se enjugaba las mejillas tu padre se levantó de su lugar y se sentó a mi lado.
- Es que estamos desesperados mijita.

Lo mío no era apatía, aunque sí anduve bastante callada y escondiendo mis ojos tras un par de gafas oscuras que compré a los dos días. Siempre odiaste las gafas porque, me decías, no permiten ver los ojos de las personas. Ya que tú no estabas, consideré que el momento era propicio para usar lo que me diera la gana y, de paso, ocultar mi mirada de la gente por si acaso resultaba cierto ese tu cliché favorito sobre los ojos que revelan las verdades.
Los vecinos creyeron que estaba deprimida. Papá asumió que mi silencio era una mezcla de tristeza con sentimiento de culpa, y le pareció oportuno decirme que yo había sido una novia comprensiva y afortunada al darte ese tiempo aquel fin de semana y haberme salvado de ser la última en verte.
- Agradece que no tienes nada que ver.

Pero tampoco estaba triste. Me dije a mí misma que si no hablaba era porque necesitaba pensar, pero en el fondo sé que decidí callarme para guardar las apariencias. Presentí que si abría la boca iba a ser evidente que no tenía ganas de averiguar dónde estabas.
El jueves, la policía intervino mi teléfono. Afirmaron que, de haber sido secuestrado, los raptores querrían comunicarse con tu familia o conmigo, aunque creo que tu mamá tuvo bastante que ver con eso. Ella todavía sospechaba que algo había pasado entre nosotros aquel viernes además de tu pregunta sobre la película que veríamos, y tal vez pensaba que mi parsimonia se debía a que tú y yo seguíamos en contacto. Quizá también sospechaba del ofrecimiento de papá de prestarle el auto para que ella y tu padre pudieran movilizarse independientemente. Sospechaba de todos, y eso que yo no había mencionado que escuché la puerta de tu casa abriéndose el sábado a las seis de la mañana.

No me quitó el sueño saber que las llamadas que entraban y salían de mi teléfono eran escuchadas por unos cuantos policías. De hecho, luego de colgar en su sitio mi dibujo de las mariposas, he dormido bien. He soñado durante los últimos cinco días con la mujer parecida a Telma, y también contigo, que crecías cada noche unos dos años. Recién ayer alcanzaste tu edad actual, en una pesadilla en la que la mujer parecida a Telma se comportaba como tu niñera y te llevaba al mismo río, prometiéndote que encontrarían larvas de mariposas rosadas dentro de las flores de la planta de taxo de la orilla. Tú la mirabas, ansioso por quitarle una flor de los labios y probarla tú también. Ella la dejó caer al agua y te dijo que había que volver a casa antes de que los desechos hirvientes de una fábrica -de cuyo nombre sólo recuerdo la H inicial- se mezclaran con la corriente. Caminabas detrás de la mujer, siguiendo sus pasos, cuando la viste agacharse y despegar de la planta de su pie el cadáver de un gnomo que acababa de pisar. Ella continuó su camino, con el cuerpecito en la mano y contigo detrás de ella, aunque esta vez un enjambre de avecillas brillantes te perseguía sin que lo notaras. La mujer parecida a Telma cavó un hoyo en el patio de una casa y enterró al gnomo, y luego de quitárselo del cuello, puso su crucifijo de metal sobre la tumba. Los pájaros, que formaron una aureola sobre tu cabeza, te susurraron que
quitaras la cruz, que el gnomo no había muerto. Que la mujer parecida a Telma iba a ahogarte en las aguas calientes del río cuando tuviera oportunidad, y que debías desenterrar al gnomo para que la asesinara. Tú, que estabas seducido por el resplandor de las aves parlantes, desenterraste al gnomo cuando ella se fue. Lo siguiente que vi en mi sueño fue el vientre hinchado de la mujer parecida a Telma -quien ahora que lo recuerdo bien, sí era Telma- que estaba tendida en la orilla de aquel río de aguas podridas y humeantes.
Hace unos minutos, ¿tal vez horas?, estuve observándote en un sueño. Suena el teléfono una vez, dos veces, tres. Me levanto, abro las cortinas y veo el cielo nublado. La mayoría de las casas del vecindario tienen encendida la luz de alguna habitación, pero tu casa está apagada. Escucho timbrar el teléfono en tu sala.
Bajo las gradas de dos en dos, mis pies desnudos, el cuerpo frío. Cruzo la calle y golpeo tu puerta. Tampoco estás hoy, pero tu casa está abierta como todos los días esperando que regreses en cualquier momento. El teléfono ha dejado de sonar. Entro a la sala, giro hacia la izquierda y llego a tu cuarto, junto al de tus padres. Adentro está aquella plataforma de madera sostenida por las vigas de caoba roída que me dijiste que querías cambiar, y con la misma escalera al pie que sube a tu cama. Es decir, al colchón que acomodaste sobre las duelas.
Encima de las colchas están tus almohadas verdes. Un medio metro más arriba está la ventana, el pequeño canal a través del cual te conocí, un cristal por donde la luz de un mundo que no es el tuyo se filtra. Mi casa está enmarcada en ese vidrio; me apego a él y pretendo ser tú esperando mi aparición en la azotea de enfrente.
La ventana se abre. Las luces, también la del cielo, se apagan. Te oigo golpeando mi puerta a las dos de la mañana del sábado pasado y te abro despacio para no despertar a papá. Que me quieres contigo, dices, que no quieres un espacio entre los dos. Que es necesario, te digo, que te vayas, que no vuelvas, que no te quiero… Parpadeo. Debe ser el viento el que aguijonea con potencia mis oídos. No sé cuánto tiempo he estado en tu cuarto, me voy ahora porque no quiero dejar rastro de mi visita en tu ausencia. Siento tus manos cubriéndome los ojos. ¿Has estado esperando que la casa esté vacía para regresar? Me alegra sentirte presente. Te he extrañado tanto.
Suena el teléfono una vez, dos veces, tres. Abro los ojos, cubiertos sólo por mis propias sábanas, y despierto con el dibujo del pájaro colgado en la pared frente a mí. Suena el teléfono cuatro veces, cinco veces, seis.

- Aló ¡Pablo! ¿Dónde estás?

A Divided I

—Aunt Lila, what is the horizon?
Aunt Lila replied first with a sigh. She pulled a bucket full of water from a large tin tank and bent over it to scrub her face as if it had been very dirty. Then she said:
—It’s the border of things.
She took off her soaked blouse and her brassiere, and entered the house looking for dry clothes. Sometimes she didn’t put anything on for hours, and walked around with her white tits swaying as if they wanted to unstuck themselves from her chest. I entered behind her. I sat on the living room’s rug, just on the square illuminated by the sunlight that came through the window panes. I saw her moving away in the hall until I couldn’t distinguish her silhouette from the shadows of the furniture at the end. Her picture became one with everything else in my head.
—Why do you have breasts, aunt Lila?
—Say tits, m’hijita.
It didn’t matter that she didn’t answer my question. Hearing her voice was enough for me to know it was still her in the middle of the darkness–her voice, which one day would be mine and which, from the end of the hallway, began singing a raspy lullaby: “Sleep, sleep little dark one…”

—Your grandmother has died— announced aunt Lila that afternoon, while she helped me get up from the living room floor where I had been sleeping. She sat me next to her on the big sofa, and hugged me while I still dreamed. And in my dream, I was in the house’s hall and was already a fat and parsimonious adult just like aunt Lila, but when I looked at my chest I couldn’t find my breasts. I cried, and the darkness and shadows turned incomprehensibly sepia. I went to aunt Lila’s room; she was sitting with her back turned away from her wardrobe’s mirror and wore a green skirt that burned the eyes. I told her:
—Aunt Lila, to be like you I only need tits!
She laughed, pulling and enormous butcher knife from between her yellow teeth, and gave it to me so I could trace her silhouette on the mirror.
—That line is my horizon, m’hijita— she said while she stood up and began looking for a bra in the drawers of her wardrobe.

—And where is grandma now?—I asked when I felt aunt Lila’s embrace grow stronger, and woke up completely in the middle of the semi-darkness of 6 pm.
Aunt began sobbing. She covered her face with her hands and told me to go to her room. With my arms extended in front of me so I wouldn’t trip, I walked looking for her room, but before I could find it I felt her steps echoing on the floorboards. She held a lit candle that was menaced by her agitated breathing. She unlocked the door and placed the candelabra on her chest of drawers, then pulled me up in her arms and tucked me in her bed without taking my shoes off.
—I’m going to see mother now. Sleep a lot, tomorrow you’re coming to the cemetery too.
She looked in her wardrobe for her black shawl and threw it on before leaving. I heard her shaking drawers in another room, but I could only sleep when I remembered aunt Lila never wore green.
I opened my eyes with the light of the following day. I knew grandma was dead and I thought aunt had been to her wake. I lied on bed for a long while, feeling that a nest of spiders was being knit on my throat and that my coughing wasn’t enough to expel them out, until I heard a splash of water spurting out on the bathroom. It made me glad to think it was aunt Lila taking a bath, and I jumped from the bed taking off my golden flowers dress on my way to meet her.
When I entered the room where we stored soap and towels, I saw aunt Lila submerged up to her neck in a red liquid. Her eyes looked at me without saying anything. I took off my shoes and white socks to jump with her into the water. Because it had to be water, just fun-colored water that aunt Lila had prepared to alleviate her pain, water, not blood, not her blood. Water.
I approached the tub and put in my feet one at a time. My aunt followed my movements with her eyes. I plunged by her side and leaned my head on her shoulder.
Her breathing was soft, almost imperceptible, almost null. I embraced her and wanted to ask if grandma was already buried, but my voice, now raspy, got tangled up in the cobwebs in my throat and I couldn’t say anything. I thought it wasn’t necessary to bother aunt Lila with questions, and held her naked body harder, understanding that the horizon that separated me from her was disappearing as I sank into the salty water in the tub.
Underwater, contours didn’t exist and nothing could prevent me from becoming aunt Lila and owning her memories and her pain and her big breasts. Underwater, I resolved I would stay on the bottom until aunt decided that it was time to come out and dry our body.
Until aunt Lila decided.

Hoy falté a todas las clases. Al fin y al cabo, no vine aquí a estudiar, sino a .
He terminado un texto pendiente. El mundo cada vez me parece más redondo, más viscoso. No un sólo mundo, las burbujas de cada esfera brillan verdosas entre mis manos y chorrean, se resbala el material, líquido derramado en mi cerebro y yo canto, o hago que canto. Nunca mis historias están terminadas. Es verdad que después de un cierto tiempo se me olvida que las escribí y entonces ya no soy la persona apropiada para corregirlas, y se quedan así, muñecas a medio rellenar en mi casa de escombros sin luces donde, hace un tiempo ya, nunca es de noche. Muñecas, juguetes, palabras que ya no son yo. Que en primer lugar nunca fueron yo, ni siquiera un pedazo, solo una foto tomada desde cierta distancia. La imagen la capturo desde el interior. Para definirla, me convierto en una neblina transparente que se apropia de los cuerpos inventados que viven en las fotos que tomo, y que cuento en forma de historias. Mis ojos son los de ellos, y cuento con su propia voz y su propio conocimiento. Yo soy ellos cuando los cuento. No Maccullers. Ella se queda a la mitad, observando, sin embeberse en la burbuja verde viscosa que rodea a cada muñeca. Ella no se embadurna, aunque procura que los ojos de quien lee se humedezcan con la mucosa vital de los seres que lee. Pero Carson ya esta muerta y yo no soy ella. Ni Anais. Mi Anais esta viva pero me rompió el corazón. Ella está lejos, vive en las honduras a las que yo tanto les temo, vive en soledad y sale a veces, tristísima, y se mezcla con los otros y hace que la amen, pero nunca se queda. El fondo del abismo es su lugar preferido, y yo la entiendo. La envidio. Por supuesto no se llama Anais. Por supuesto es una mujer de carne y hueso que amo profundamente pero que nunca estará conmigo. Porque nació mucho antes, porque es más sabia y más bella y más triste. Pero es su soledad lo que yo amo, y eso es algo que yo aún conservo en mí pero que aún no aprendo a manejar. Así, la soledad es eso que me acerca a Anais y sus ojos verdes distantes, que viven en la oscuridad y la luz de sus textos. Lejana. La llamo Anais porque el nombre me recuerda a la otra, a la de Miller, y a veces, leyendo los diarios de esa otra, he encontrado mis propios temas.”Anais”, el nombre, es entonces un nexo que yo he inventado para acercar a la Anais de carne y hueso a mí misma un poco más. Que no se llama Anais, no no no, pero que yo la llamo Anais porque es sencillamente muy vergonzoso amar a alguien que nunca volteara la mirada para reconocerle a uno. Anais. Y aún aquí hay un poco de vergüenza en el aire. Flotando. Amor sublimado. Que no es amor. Solo la certeza de querer alcanzarla allí donde ella vive, descalza. De conocer la burbuja de sus ojos. La que ven sus ojos. De crear la mía propia. Y la pena. El dolor de saberme cada vez más lejos, estoy en busca del fondo de un abismo nuevo, mi vida en la que me he empecinado en llegar hasta el fondo de innumerables agujeros. Hasta el fondo. Hurgar y sacar la tierra y trabajar con mi pala cabeza de muñeca hasta llegar al núcleo, al centro que arde, y comprobar que la burbuja ha sido en realidad solo el vestido de un mundo real, palpable. Estoy cavando un nuevo nicho. Profundo. Solo el recuerdo de Anais me sostiene en este esfuerzo, Anais Monstruo y Carson Frankie Mick y mi alma magullada pero viva. Mis dolores son menos pero mi curiosidad es más grande. Nada me duele, pero haber empezado a escarbar en esta nueva tierra, suavecita, pantanosa, es una especie de premonición de otro hueco en el que me voy a enterrar por algún tiempo. La superficie me es accesoria. Me gusta a veces, para tomar fuerzas. Cuando estoy allí afuera busco compañía, alguien que me acompañe en el viaje. Aun no lo encuentro. Cuando estoy afuera, buscar el alma de la gente. Ahora he vuelto aquí adentro. Sigo escarbando, el sol nunca se pone. Sigo escarbando y a veces, después de leer a Anais, siento que este también fue su camino, reconozco los senderos en sus páginas, me leo a mí misma en sus textos y entonces me doy cuenta de que quizá ella es el mapa y por eso no la olvido. Marca profunda.