Freeman's

by John Freeman

  Mariana Enríquez is a writer and editor based in Buenos Aires. She is the author of two novels, two short-story collections, a biography of Silvina Ocampo, a chronicle on cemeteries, and a novella. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her English-language debut The Things We Lost in the Fire has been translated into twenty languages.

  Joel Streicker is a writer, poet, and literary translator based in San Francisco. He is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, and has translated works by Samanta Schweblin, Tomás González, and Guillermo Fadanelli, among other Latin American authors.

  Where Are You, Sweetheart

  MARIANA ENRÍQUEZ

  TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY JOEL STREICKER

  I have three memories of him, but one might be false. The order is arbitrary. In the first, he’s sitting on a sofa, completely naked, on a towel, watching TV. He doesn’t pay any attention to me: I think I’m spying on him. His penis rests in a bush of black pubic hair and the scar that runs through the hair on his chest is a dark pink.

  In the second, his wife leads him into the bedroom by the hand. He’s also naked. He looks at me from the corner of his eye. His hair is pretty long, even for the times—the 1970s—and I can’t see his scar.

  In the third he’s smiling at me from close up, his face almost glued to mine. In the memory I feel myself naked and shy. But I don’t know if it’s real; it doesn’t have the same naturalness as the others. I may have invented it, although I recognize the sensation of shyness and vulnerability that is often repeated in my dreams. I don’t know if he touched me. The feeling that accompanies this memory resembles desire although, if my suspicions are correct, it should be more akin to horror. I’m not afraid of him. His face doesn’t torment me, even though I try to make myself feel something like childhood trauma and its effects on my adult life. I was five when I met him. He was very sick. They had operated on his heart and the surgery had gone wrong. I found that out later, when I stopped visiting his house—really, the house of my friends, his daughters. I found it out when he died. I don’t remember what his name was and I never dared to ask my parents.

  A while after his death, I began to use my fingernails to score my chest, right in the middle, imitating his scar. I would do it before going to sleep, naked, and I would lift my head to see the line of irritated skin, until it faded and my neck hurt.

  When it was really hot, I liked to go into the coolest room in the house. No one occupied it, because my mom used it to store books and old furniture. I adored that room: I liked to throw myself, naked, on the imitation leather couch, which was always cold, set up a little electric fan, and read all afternoon. My friends from the neighborhood and school would be at the pool, but I didn’t care: in that room I had fallen head over heels in love, for the first time, when I ran across Helen Burns in a beat-up illustrated edition of Jane Eyre.

  I hated those drawings. Because they showed Helen much older than what the book said, and because for some reason they had imagined her blond, although the book never mentioned the color of her hair. She wasn’t like that, and I knew it, because during that whole summer I imagined her lying on the couch that became the bed in the orphanage, the bed where Helen, consumptive and moribund, so beautiful, was dying while I held her hand.

  Helen was a minor character in the book. Jane, the protagonist, arrived at the frightful Lowood School for girls, and couldn’t make any friends because the director, the villainous Brocklehurst, had shamed her in front of all her classmates. But it didn’t matter to Helen: Helen became Jane’s friend. She was beyond everything because she was close to death. I had a premonition that I was going to fall in love with her when Jane saw her the first time in the school yard, reading that book with such a strange name, Rasselas. One chapter later and Helen was dead. An epidemic of typhus had been unleashed on the school, Helen suffered a relapse of her tuberculosis, and they transferred her to a room on the first floor. Jane would visit her at night. That last night, Helen and Jane slept together. Today, when I recall that chapter (because I don’t have to reread it; I know it by heart), I am aware of everything: when Jane gets into the dying girl’s bed and Helen says to her, “Are you warm, darling?” Darling. Darling. It was a love scene. When Jane woke up, her friend, Helen, was dead. That chapter—every night, every single one, I would go to bed and hug my pillow, pretending it was Helen, but I didn’t go to sleep like that idiot Jane, no, I watched her die, I took her hand and she, who was dying with her gray eyes staring into mine (and her breath faltering), allowed me to see something of that other place, where she was going forever.

  I soon realized that my fantasy was not feasible. When I was fourteen years old, a girlfriend told me, sadly:

  “You know what I heard? Do you remember Mara’s brother?”

  Mara was a former schoolmate who had changed schools.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, they found he has a tumor between his heart and his lungs, and they can’t operate on it and he’s going to die.”

  A week later I was suggesting to my friend that we visit Mara. I wanted to meet her dying brother because I suspected that, well, I might fall in love with him. But when I met him . . . the boy seemed adequately sick, but I didn’t like him. During that time I was confused and arrived at a conclusion that left me with a clear conscience: I didn’t like real sick people, so I wasn’t a pervert. Thinking like that didn’t save me from obsession. For a whole year I spent the money my mom gave me on really expensive medical books, while my friends spent theirs on drugs. Nothing brought me greater happiness than those books. All those euphemisms for death. All those beautiful medical words that meant nothing, all that difficult jargon—that was pornography. By then I was pretty clear about what turned me on and what didn’t, and therefore I had become increasingly bored with Victorian novels, where some sick people always appeared, but you didn’t know very clearly what they were dying from. I was tired of consumptives once I overcame a brutal infatuation with Hippolyte, the tubercular teenager in The Idiot, which lasted more than a year. I wanted pornography: sick people like Helen, Tadzio, and Hippolyte were eroticism, suggestive. And they were always secondary characters. Hippolyte was ideal: beautiful (Dostoevsky made sure to put in Prince Myshkin’s mouth the words “He has a very beautiful face,” which made me quiver), teenage, definitely dying and stubborn and vulnerable and evil. But he talked much and fainted little: I was tired of the descriptions of paleness and sweats and coughs. I wanted more facts, I wanted explicit sex. Books were ideal and, besides, they helped me specify fetishes. I skipped over the neurological illnesses: I didn’t like convulsions or mental retardation or paralysis and, truthfully, the nervous system bored me. I couldn’t care less, curiously enough, about anything oncological: cancer seemed dirty to me, overrated socially, a little vulgar (the poor lady has a tumor, the old women would say), and there were too many movies about heroic people with cancer (I liked heroic sick people, but not those who were an example). And nephrology had no charm: it was clear that people died if their kidneys stopped functioning, but I didn’t care, because the word “kidney” itself seemed hideous. Not to mention gastrointestinal matters—so dirty.

  It was clear what I liked, what I lingered on; and, once my specialty was discovered, I devoted myself exclusively to it: I liked people sick with pulmonary ailments (reminiscent of Helen, Hippolyte, and all the other consumptives, certainly) and cardiac diseases. This had its vulgar side, but only if they were old (or after age fifty, when frightful things like cholesterol began to appear). If they were young . . . how elegant! If they were beautiful, it was a type of ruined, but secret, beauty. All the other illnesses had their fixed terms, but this was different: one could die at any moment. Once I bought a CD in a medical bookstore (where all the clerks thought I was a student—I had prudently taken it upon myself to create that impression) that was called Cardiac Noises. Nothing before had brought me such happ
iness. I suppose that listening to the beating of those ruined hearts caused in me what listening to moans of sexual pleasure causes in normal men and women. Such variety! So many different beats, each one meaning something distinct, all of them beautiful! The other diseases couldn’t be heard. What’s more, a lot of them could be smelled, which disgusted me. If I went out to ride my bike with Cardiac Noises on my MP3 player, I had to stop because I would get too aroused. So I would listen to it at home at night, and during that time I worried because real sex didn’t interest me. The audio tracks with beating hearts supplied everything. I could masturbate for hours with the earphones on, streaming between my legs, my arm spasming from all the rubbing and my clitoris inflamed to the size of a big grape.

  I decided to get rid of the recorded heartbeats after a while. I was going to go crazy. From then on, one of the first things I did with a man was rest my head on his chest to discover whether he had some unusual beat, or a murmur, irregularity, third noise, gallop, or something else. I always asked myself when someone who was an unbeatable combination of elements would appear. Now I remember that yearning, and I smile bitterly.

  I can pinpoint the moment when I lost control. After years of fruitless searching, I found an Internet site where others who had a fetish for heartbeats shared their own. They did it live, in chats, but they also had a large sound archive, downloadable, deliciously classified into normal and abnormal beats, beats during exercise, heart murmurs, stressed beats . . . I never took part in the chats. I just copied those sounds and lay down to listen to them. An accelerated but regular rhythm; suddenly a premature beat, another delayed (extrasystoles or ventricular contractions). I had thought my previous bouts of masturbation were awesome! I had had no idea, I knew nothing about the limits of horniness. I rubbed my middle finger between my right inner labia and clitoris until I touched bone, until the bone hurt, sometimes until I bled, and the orgasms came one after the other, implacable, enormous, for hours. The sheets damp, sweat pouring from between my breasts, my skin always goose pimpled, the feeling of my clitoris swollen, glorious, the contractions of my vagina and uterus. Supraventricular tachycardia, the beautiful murmur of the aortic stenosis, the unruly beats provoked by hyperventilation or Valsalva maneuvers, things that only the brave dared do. Sometimes a hidden heart, barely audible and crazed behind the ribs, a sound achieved by holding one’s breath; and when oxygen finally returned, that heart would shake as if it lived inside a tomato can, bewildered, sometimes too slow, as if it were about to stop altogether.

  I didn’t answer the telephone. I arrived late everywhere. I would stop only when the pain in my irritated—sometimes injured—vulva took away my pleasure. In the darkness with my headphones and the hearts, that was my life, no more sex with people. What for!

  Until I was able to isolate one of the hearts. Its beat never faltered. I could distinguish it perfectly even without knowing its author, whose handle was HCM1. The recordings were always very clear, and the beats always distinct, and dangerous: in auricular fibrillations, in very long tachycardia, in galloping rhythm. It was a man’s heart. You could sometimes hear his breathing, and vestiges of his voice. When I discovered a file in which he was moaning because—according to the text accompanying the track—he had felt a chest pain during the session, I decided to enter the chat room to meet him.

  He was evasive for a time. Too long a time for me, but I suppose it was, objectively, short. A month after the first contact, he agreed to visit me. Strange: we lived in the same city. Statistically improbable, if not impossible, because our meeting had been through an international community of fetishists. We decided to ignore it, not to think of it as a message from fate or anything like that. We threw ourselves solely into pleasure. He liked to have his heart listened to. He was very sick, and that was why he was usually shunned in chat rooms and online communities. They thought he was too extreme, to them it seemed that he was going too far, he was dismantling the idea of play and pleasure. Soon we both abandoned virtual life, and shut ourselves up in my room, with a tape recorder, a stethoscope, medicines, and substances that helped change his cardiac rhythm. We both knew what the outcome might be, and we didn’t care.

  His hair was as dark as that of the man I had known in my childhood, and he had the same smile. But he had three scars, not one. They had slit open his sternum: a casual observer might have seen only one scar, but I could make them all out: the first one transparent, thin, almost completely hidden by the second, which was an opaline pink that shone, as if glazed; the last one, wider, awesome, was darker than his skin. The scar that crossed his back (he had given me a detailed account of this painful procedure) was enormous, clumsy. The small, unobtrusive scars on his stomach were randomly distributed. The skin on the inside of his elbow was scored like that of an addict. There was a short scar, a dark depression on the right side of his neck. So many marks. And the labored breathing, and the enormous lips that sometimes took on a color as blue as his eyes.

  You could hear his illness in those sudden inhalations when he was left breathless while speaking, in the nocturnal coughing attacks that left him pale and trembling. All the while he let me rest my head on his chest so that I could listen. A normal beat is two sounds, opening and closing. But his beats had four sounds, a gallop, a desperate effort, different, unnatural. It got worse after a cup of coffee. It was scary after a little cocaine. He would often faint, and I kept listening with the stethoscope, terrified and excited, until he recovered a kind of normality and woke up. I could spend hours on his chest and afterward, excited, I would kiss and hug him almost violently, and his laughter and recklessness worried me because, sometimes, and more often as time passed and our intimacy deepened, I was certain that if I listened a second longer I was going to destroy him. To beat him, to open him up with my fingernails, more marks, a way of getting closer to him, of making him more mine. I had to contain that desire, those yearnings to satiate myself, to open him up, to play with his organs as if they were hidden trophies. To the point where I imposed on myself small punishments: not eating all day, not sleeping for seventy-two hours, walking until my legs cramped . . . small rituals, as if I were a girl who wished for her mother’s death because her mother wouldn’t buy her something, and then the remorse and the little sacrifices, “I’m not going to say any more bad words, God, I promise—don’t let my mom die,” and the bad word comes out and then the running in the night to see if her mom is still breathing in her bed while she sleeps.

  But I think I wound up hating him. Maybe I hated him from the start. The way I hated the man who had made me abnormal, who had made me a sicko, with his tired penis in front of the TV, and that beautiful scar. The man who had ruined me. I hated my lover. If that wasn’t the case, then some of our games would be inexplicable. I would make him breathe rapidly into a plastic bag, until I saw his forehead sweat and his arms tremble. His heart galloped over the stethoscope and he would beg, “Enough,” but I asked for more, and he never said no. I had to take him to the hospital once, and when they regulated his tachycardia with cardioversion—an electric charge on his chest, as in resuscitations—I locked myself in a nearby bathroom and fell onto the toilet, howling, as my orgasm came. I bought him poppers, cocaine, tranquilizers, alcohol. Each substance caused a different effect and he acquiesced, he never complained, he barely spoke. He even paid my rent with his savings when they threatened to evict me from my apartment; I never paid him back, I no longer had a telephone, I worried only about the electricity so that the recorder would work and I could listen to my experiments again when he was too exhausted, almost unconscious.

  He didn’t even protest when I told him I was bored. That I wanted to see him. To rest my hand on his heart stripped of ribs, of cages, hold it in my hand, beating, until it stopped, to feel its desperate valves open and close out in the open. He only said that he was tired, too.

  And that we were going to need a saw.

  Sayaka Murata was born in Chiba Prefecture in 1979 and grad
uated from the Department of Literature at Saitama University. Her debut work, Junyū (Breastfeeding), won the Gunzō Prize for New Writers in 2003. In 2009 she won the Noma Prize for New Writers with Gin iro no uta (Silver Song); in 2013, the Yukio Mishima Prize for Shiro-iro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, of Body Heat, of Whitening City); in 2014, the Sense of Gender Prize and Measures to Counter the Falling Birthrate Special Prize for Satsujin shussan (Breeders and Killers); and in 2016, the Akutagawa Prize for Konbini ningen (Convenience Store Woman). Other works include Tadaima tobira (A Welcoming Door) and Shōmetsu sekai (Dwindling World).

  Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated fiction by more than a dozen early modern and contemporary Japanese writers, from best sellers Ryū Murakami and Kyōtarō Nishimura to literary greats Izumi Kyōka and Okamoto Kidō. Her most recent translations are of Miyuki Miyabe’s Puppet Master and Tomiko Inui’s The Secret of the Blue Glass, short-listed for the Marsh Award. Previously she was an editor at Kodansha International and a foreign rights agent based in Spain.

  A First-Rate Material

  SAYAKA MURATA

  TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE

  BY GINNY TAPLEY TAKEMORI

  It was a holiday, and I was enjoying chatting with two girlfriends from university days over afternoon tea. Through the window, the gray office buildings of the business district sat beneath a cloudless sky. Reservations at this hotel lobby tearoom were hard to come by, and it was thronged with a female clientele. An elegant, white-haired lady with a deep purple stole across her shoulders daintily carried a piece of tart to her mouth. At the table next to us, some girls with colorful painted nails were taking photos of their cakes. One of them spilled apricot jam on her white cardigan and hastily started wiping it off with a pink handkerchief.