The Vintage Book of International Lesbian Fiction

by Naomi Holoch

  I said good-bye to Margherita who has become miserable and silent. She wished me a good holiday. She made me promise to write to her and in return she will write to me about Damiano. Then she told me the latest about his double and triple love affairs. She kissed me demurely on the cheek and went off tapping her high heels on the pavement.

  As it’s my last evening Basilia has asked me to go out with her. She seemed anxious about it.

  “Aren’t you afraid of your husband?”

  “He’s on night shift.”

  “And the children?”

  “Once they’re asleep they don’t wake up not even for an earthquake.”

  Sparkling lights … red tablecloths … flowers … candles. It was a good restaurant I took her to. She hadn’t been to a restaurant since her wedding day. She was thrilled and delighted and kept running her hands over her dress.

  “Do I look all right?”

  “You look lovely.”

  “You’re joking. I’m old.”

  “Old at thirty-six? You must be crazy! Now—what would you like to eat?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “What takes your fancy?”

  “What I’d really like is cannelloni with cream.”

  “And after that?”

  “A cocktail of scampi with a spicy sauce.”

  “And then?”

  “What about duck with orange? I’ve never had it. It’s on the menu and I’d like to try it.”

  We both gorged ourselves. Waiters with white gloves bending over us discreet and sly … music from the little orchestra mawkish and sentimental … wine on ice that had to be taken out of a little silver bucket each time … flambé bananas … ice cream with brandy. In a moment of euphoria Basilia confessed that it reminded her of the latest photo-comic with Fabio Testi. And just like the people in the comic we were playing our parts—eating and drinking and behaving like ladies. We even danced in the sugary darkness on a floor of blue and yellow glass. Only the dashing young engineer or the elegant gray-haired air pilot was missing and this gave a slightly bitter flavor to our comic strip.

  Basilia was dreamy and entranced for a while even forgetting her sons back at home. She half closed her eyes and drank her wine gracefully without getting drunk. By the end of the evening she was laughing like a woman who feels beautiful and confident of herself. And in some way she really had become beautiful: her eyes were shining her cheeks flushed and she moved with slow languorous gestures.

  We went home just before midnight. Her husband was due back at two o’clock in the morning. She went into the flat softly carrying her shoes so as not to make a noise. She hugged me dramatically in an anguished farewell in which tears were mixed with suppressed laughter. I breathed in the scent of her hair that was usually impregnated with frying oil but tonight smelled of Parma violets. I promised her I would come and see her from time to time.

  I went and had a shower. I slipped into bed. But I’d eaten and drunk too much. I couldn’t get to sleep. I decided to go for a walk. I got dressed and went out. The town was deserted. Without exactly meaning to I went straight to the Neptune Bar. I sat on the edge of a big tub of oleanders in front of the closed shutters.

  Then I went down to the sea. It looked dark and peaceful and emanated a sickly smell of oil. I walked along the beach my feet sinking into the dry seaweed stumbling over the rinds of watermelons and empty plastic cans. A broken bottle cut my heel. I turned up the Via Garibaldi and stopped in front of the closed newspaper kiosk. The black outline of a woman with high heels and a skirt split up to her thighs confronted me from a poster: “Femininity is fashionable again.”

  Farther on I came across a cat with five newborn kittens. They were suckling her hairy stomach. I bent down to look at them. The mother showed me her teeth but without much conviction. She returned to licking her kittens still watching me but without moving. The kittens sucked greedily pushing their paws against their mother’s swollen belly and waggling their deaf heads.

  In Sicily I shall be even farther away from you Marina. What difference will it make though? A hundred kilometers or five hundred are the same distance when we are not seeing each other anymore. Yet it seems as if I am distancing myself dangerously from the zone of your love.

  Back in the flat I read part of the novel. It seems awful. I drank some wine. I thought, I’m drinking to a colossal failure. I sat down to write this last letter to you before leaving. Then I shall read them all on the train.

  In the end I’ve decided not to go back to bed. I can’t stand the smell of the old matrimonial bed and I can’t endure yet again the thought of the quarreling voices of the neighbors. And the prospect of being enveloped by that scorching trail of coffee at dawn turns my stomach. I shall take the train to Sicily at five in the morning.

  Translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood

  Rosamaría Roffiel

  Born in Veracruz in 1945, Rosamaría Roffiel, author of “Forever Lasts Only a Full Moon” (1996), is a pioneer lesbian voice in the literary world of modern Mexico. This story, one of Roffiel’s most recent, shows her interest in blending Mexican folklore and history with lesbian romance. Lesbian literature in Mexico may be said to have had its beginnings in the poetry of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century nun writing to her patroness. After almost four hundred years of silence, Roffiel published Amora, (1989), the first lesbian novel to appear in her country. In “Forever Lasts Only a Full Moon,” translated here for the first time, Roffiel gives lesbian desire an otherworldly dimension, rooted in Mexican imagery.

  FOREVER LASTS ONLY A FULL MOON

  THE first time that Juliana approached me was at the Museum of Anthropology. The Mexican hall was almost deserted. Outside, a light rain transformed the afternoon into a startling scenario with a ground made of mirrors and inhabited by silences. I was standing in front of the Coatlicue. The monument’s magnitude and the ferocity of its attire, full of symbols, made me feel insignificant. Pointing at the monolith, Juliana exclaimed:

  “There was a time in the world in which women were goddesses, priestesses, and sorcerers, not these prudish and frivolous beings of today.”

  I froze in awe and stood with my magazine rolled under my arm and my morral from Oaxaca hanging from my shoulder. Juliana went on:

  “A time in which only women knew the secrets of plants, of the stars, of life. A time in which the wisest men consulted us even to decide matters of war and state.”

  She was a thin woman. Her eyes were shifting shades of green, gray, and tawny brown. Her voice was strong and deep. When she spoke, she waved her fine hands, making her reddish hair fly, while a vein pulsed in her forehead. The first time she stared at me, I could have sworn that flames were shooting from her pupils.

  “What is your name?” she asked.

  “Eleonora.”

  “Did you know Eleonora is a sorcerer’s name?”

  “Nnno …,” I replied.

  “Eleonora, would you care to have some tea with me?”

  With a certain amount of fear and a great deal of curiosity, I accepted. We had a chamomile tea at the cafeteria, next to Chapultepec Lake. I told her about my life as if I had always known her, about my unfilled desire to study, my unsatisfying work as a secretary, my hidden vocation as a poet, my lack of self-esteem as a woman.

  “You, Eleonora? You, who carry the blue sign of the goddesses between your eyebrows?”

  Instinctively, I touched my forehead but didn’t feel anything. Juliana smiled:

  “In this world, we, the women who search, the women who dare and don’t accept life as it comes are descendants of the goddesses, and as such, we are misunderstood and rejected.”

  She took my face with both hands, remained silent for a moment, and, in a low voice said:

  “Eleonora, you didn’t choose. Let this be engraved in your memory, because once you discover your origins you will also find your answers. But I must be honest: the pain is no less because of this.”<
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  On my way back home, in the subway, my head was still buzzing. What a peculiar woman! When she spoke with such vehemence she seemed to be in her twenties, like me, but suddenly, she became forty, sixty, or even a hundred years old.

  We kept on seeing each other. Juliana waited for me on forgotten benches of parks completely unknown to me, or in cafeterias where they didn’t play loud music and where they served exotic teas.

  Sometimes, at night, we would go through the city in her wine-colored car. Downtown streets, empty at that hour, were all ours. The main plaza received us with opened arms, on one side its cathedral, on the other the Government Palace. Juliana told familiar stories: the eagle and the nopal, Tenochtitlan, the screaming maidens, the prayers, the copal’s smoke, the bleeding hearts. Like a good student would, I listened very attentively. The priests’ penachos seemed to graze my nose with their colored feathers. Juliana would laugh at what she described as my unlimited capacity for wonder.

  “Have you ever felt the rain in Tepoztlan, my dear?” she asked that Sunday. Before I could answer, she drove her car toward Cuernavaca. At the foot of the sacred mountain Tepozteco, we embraced trees to charge ourselves with energy. I learned to distinguish the pyramid among the stratum of rock, to calculate how many minutes a cloud covers the sun. We drank tequila and beer while the wind blew our hair; the heat and the alcohol made our cheeks turn red.

  I never read as much as in those first months after my encounter with Juliana. “Eleonora, did you understand the message behind the written words? Did you, Eleonora?” she would eagerly ask each time I finished a book. If she would notice any doubt on my part, she would settle her green gaze on me:

  “Guilt, Eleonora, guilt is the worst! You must learn to control it, because if it controls you, you will be at the mercy of any misfortune.”

  A film, the rain, a concert, a comment. Juliana would transform even the most insignificant events into a lesson. “Eleonora, tell me, what do you believe in?”

  “In friendship, honor, loyalty …”

  “Bullshit. These are all clichés, abstractions, ambiguities! Yourself, Eleonora, yourself! Everything is inside you. Nobody can hurt you if you don’t allow it. The greatest violence will be the one you inflict upon yourself. Next time, when I ask what do you believe in, you should answer: ‘In me.’”

  One night, just when I was about to get out of the car, Juliana took my face with both hands, as she did each time she was going to tell me something important.

  “Eleonora, you should learn to meditate, to be more in contact with your inner self, to get closer to your poetry.”

  I don’t know if it was mere suggestion, but weird things started to happen. I would menstruate with the full moon and ovulate with the new one. I had dreams in which I saw myself with plumbago-blue wings, flying to wonderful islands inhabited only by Amazons, or, protected by the leaves of a gigantic nest, I would give birth to a shining baby girl, also with blue wings.

  My body acquired a different dimension. I started to feel the blood running through my veins, the air filling my lungs, the food entering my stomach. I became extremely perceptive. I learned to read people’s emotions. A tense jaw, a veil of tears in the eyes, a different tone in the voice. Behind each face there were codes as clear now to me as the letters on the pages of a newspaper.

  “Eleonora, tell me, why do you think that some women condemn themselves to live with a dead heart in their chests?”

  “I don’t know, Juliana.”

  Because they have chosen to lead an incomplete life, because they have denied their millennial strength, because they were given imagination and waste it in stupidities, because they are stuck to the outside and don’t know how to listen to their inner voice.

  Getting closer, she asked:

  “Eleonora, are you really living what your essence requires?”

  After I met Juliana, I didn’t care anymore if men looked at me in the street, if they invited me out, if I was going to get married or not. I began treating them without considering each one as a possible relationship. I didn’t need their approval to exist.

  When I told Juliana about my unfortunate romances, she would insist:

  “Be aware, Eleonora, be aware! You must be alert and discover what things reappear constantly in your life, since that is your karmic lesson in this lifetime.”

  Through gazes, touches, and words that sometimes were whispers and sometimes cries, Juliana wove a net of magic around me. My weekends and some of my evenings were only for her. Her universe became my space, her space my universe. One afternoon, as we were listening to medieval music while lying on the carpet of her living room, illuminated only by the light of a porcelain oil lamp, she reminded me:

  “Eleonora, the full moon is near. That day we will both fast. If you want to reach another realm inside yourself, your body should know how to defeat hunger and thirst, among other things.”

  When I arrived, she was wearing a blue tunic. We took a crystal container full of water up to the roof of the building; there were several white signs painted on the floor. We burned some copal and sat facing each other.

  “Tonight, Eleonora, the moon will flow through your blood, you will not need to sleep for hours, and you will know the secrets of past lives. Now, drink this.”

  It was a bitter, hot tea that made the throat and the stomach burn. Juliana also drank. Immediately, she said: “Undress yourself, Eleonora.” I did so very quietly. Juliana rubbed my body with a sandalwood lotion and sprinkled my hair with wet herbs; then, she placed a crown of white flowers on my head and dressed me with a robe, also white. Surrounded by the clarity of the night, we danced with our bodies entwined. Then, we sat again in front of the bowl with the water. She was repeating phrases in another language; so was I, as if we knew them from before. I don’t know for how long we stayed like that. I was dizzy from the fast and that revolting brew. Suddenly, we were silent. The moon, round and white, was floating in the very center of the bowl. Juliana dipped in one of her thumbs and traced a half moon between my eyebrows.

  “Look, Eleonora, look! Tell me what you see on the water. Concentrate, keep the fear away, use your inner strength, Eleonora, use it!”

  On the mirror formed by the water were two faces. There were Juliana and myself, but we were other women as well. The images changed rapidly: two infants, two youths, two older women, two whites, two blacks, two queens, two peasants, two angels, two demons…. Juliana and Eleonora. Eleonora and Juliana.

  The air was spinning around me. I broke into a cold sweat, feeling very weak. The images of women on the water began to dissolve. I don’t know if I fainted. I only remember that I woke up covered with a blanket in Juliana’s arms. When I opened my eyes, she smiled. Very softly, I said:

  “Juliana, I want to be with you forever.”

  She placed a finger on my lips.

  “Eleonora, be careful with your wishes because they can be granted. Forever doesn’t exist … not even in the land of the goddesses.”

  I insisted.

  “I would like to know a magic formula, Juliana, a spell, an enchantment so you won’t ever leave me.”

  “Be careful with charms, Eleonora. The enchanter is in the same danger as the enchanted one. Besides, if passion for another human being dominates you, you will be lost and condemned to pay a price as high as your own life. From now on, your only passion must be creativity, Eleonora. Surrender to it.”

  “But, Juliana …”

  “Sssh … It’s enough for today.”

  In the middle of the night, lying alone on the couch in Juliana’s studio, still wandering as in a dream, with my chest full of strange sounds, I felt absurd. I ran through the corridor toward her bedroom and opened the door without calling. Juliana was waiting for me. She pulled the quilt away and embraced me with her body. Delighted, I received her mouth.

  Juliana’s skin was fair, her flesh was not very firm but quivered with the light touch of my fingers. Her breasts were small and her
nipples dark and voluminous. When I sucked them, my tongue filled with a sweet, pleasant taste. Her sex, warm and tender, was to me like a wood of basil and myrrh. I learned a different way of loving, a new language with its own rhythms, secret codes, breathing.

  Some nights, while I dozed next to Juliana, images—almost visions—would come to my mind: women raising swords with handles made out of precious stones, large cups full of luminous water, or spheres made of amber-like crystal. Women riding white horses, sailing antique boats with their arms up toward the sky, or walking amidst a fog coming from the earth itself.

  One night, I had a dream in which we were surrounded by that mist, each standing at opposite ends of a boat that suddenly broke in half. Juliana stared at me with a mixture of sadness and melancholy. Her lips were repeating my name, though no sound came from them. As we started to move apart from each other, we extended our arms, anxious, until we were completely covered by the fog.

  I woke up very disturbed. I tried to calm myself. I breathed deeply and looked around the room. I noticed that Juliana was crying in her sleep. In that moment, I knew: our time was fulfilled.

  I placed my face in the hollow of her neck, felt her tears on my own skin, and held her with all my strength. A rare sweetness penetrated me. I fell asleep protected by her embrace while around us, the mist slowly filled the room.

  Anna Blaman

  The Dutch novel Eenzaam avontuur (Lonely Adventure) by Anna Blaman, first published in 1948, explores the lives of four young women and an unhappily married couple as they try to relate to one another. Viewed as shocking at the time, the novel was nevertheless awarded a major literary prize and is sometimes referred to as the Dutch Well of Loneliness. Anna Blaman (1905–60), the pseudonym of Johanna Petronella Vrugt, lived in Rotterdam her whole life. Her sexual difference, though not often a main theme, is clearly evident in her work. Blaman used her perspective of “outsider” to explore the poverty behind the social façades of relationships.