Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [97]
just smell the acid of our tattooed skin
just taste the rust of our navels
just put your finger in the mudhole of our assholes
just suck the curdled cum of our pricks
just sink into the red butter of our mouths
just twist around in the black jungle of our armpits
we are the gang
we save salvatruchas everything all of you nice and clean and neat in your sunday best hid shaved cleaned deodorized
and on top of that tattooed skin
and the warnings on our skin
tears and teardrops painted on our
faces by death
while all of you read advertisements in the press on television
peripherals
we announce ourselves with our bitter stinking rancorous tattooed
skin
read the news on our skin
The Secret Marriage
Every time I want to tell you the truth, something interrupts us.
Don’t worry, Lavinia. We’re alone, my love. I’ve given orders not to be interrupted. What do you want to tell me?
I’m very unhappy. No, don’t interrupt me. I want your love, not your sympathy.
You have both. You know that. Tell me.
Can I begin at the beginning?
I’m all yours. So to speak.
Leo, you know about my life, and you know I never lie to you. I want to talk to you about him. As you say in your discussions, I want to recapitulate. I only hope I can be brief. After all, we’ve been together nine years. I want you to be aware of my relationship to Cristóbal. I won’t hide anything from you. You know almost everything, but only in pieces. I want you to put yourself in my place and understand why my relationship with him has lasted so long. You have to imagine what it meant to me at the age of twenty-nine, when you begin to feel the terror of turning thirty, to renew my life thanks to a passion that was fresh, new, and above all, dangerous.
I swear to you, Lavinia—
Don’t interrupt, please. I was at an age, nine years ago, when you still believe you can begin your life over again, throw the old baggage over the side, and remake yourself from head to toe. I confess I already carried that inside me. Restlessness, the little worm, whatever you want to call it. My career had given me successes, compensations. Being a top publicist is something. It’s enough for a lot of women. They marry their careers.
They say a professionally successful woman always has a lover in her bed: her career.
Agreed. A career is very erotic. And yet I was dissatisfied. My career was just my dish of mole. But the sauce needed spice. Well, I was fertile ground, as they say . . . The fact is that on the afternoon he came into the office, our eyes met, and we both said in silence what we repeated to each other afterward in a quiet voice, you understand, both of us in half-light. Love at first sight. An infatuation. I’m telling you this with no shame at all. Cristóbal came into the office, and I undressed him with my eyes. I guessed what he looked like naked, and he did the same to me. We found out that night. Do you care if I tell you about it just the way it happened?
No. I like it. If you kept anything secret from me, you’d be an egotist.
You’re a savage. In the bedroom, he took off my panties, picked me up still dressed, with tremendous strength he picked me up and took me with my legs wrapped around his waist . . . I’ve never felt pleasure like that. Except with you.
Thanks.
But not the first time. With you, I had to get used to you. With him, I was afraid so much pleasure right away could only produce a kind of backlash of reduced sensations as time passed and we became accustomed to being together.
The law of diminishing returns.
But no. The truth was that the initial excitement lasted a long time. Danger helps, of course. Trysts, places that are nice but of necessity secret, fear of being discovered.
One’s companion always viewed as a temptation, not as a habit.
Exactly. Heaven on earth, isn’t it? Everything’s so unpredictable, so risky, so destructive to everyone if you’re discovered, that . . . Well, I admit it all feeds the vanity of a woman who feels herself needed, admired, without the humiliating sensation of just being there like a piece