I grew uneasy as I drove, feeling false, like a prop in a play, and I reached over to touch the red dress I’d draped over the back of the passenger seat. Dry and slick, it slid down easily to pool in the seat. I knew then that I could never escape the city on the shore of this river just by crossing to its other side, that I’d never reach the northern tropics.
Riding in the enclosed body of the taxi, I remembered how my hair had streamed in the wind beneath the midday sun as I’d ridden with you in the red sportscar, and my lungs began to constrict. No doubt you drove now too, cold wind whipping your expressionless face, a blurred purple mass hurtling fast as a flying swallow, sure only of yourself and the steering wheel you gripped, my scarlet dress pooling in the seat beside you, deflated and empty; no doubt it seemed as if it had never been worn by anyone at all, that it had always been lifeless, vacant all along. I suddenly loved you again, intensely. It made me angry, but I couldn’t stop. My teeth ground with loneliness.
The moon tumbled into the river. I followed suit, tumbling too. I was committing love suicide with the moon. The clock in the car read exactly midnight.
The crowds had largely left the main streets of the town. But as I stopped my car and ventured into the smaller ones, I found them again, twitching like dying insects amid a milky mist that hung in the air, neither smoke nor steam, parted by a neon flow of liquid fire, pink and red. The women leaned against the buildings conversing as the men languished drunkenly on the ground like soft stones.
This arrangement remained consistent even inside the café decorated all in crimson neon save the letters spelling La Esquina Rosada in white. The languishing men in their stupors slid toward sleep, tossing and turning intermittently and muttering. Everyone wore the same shirt I did, stripes of white and pale blue around a laughing sun, or at least carried a little flag bearing this design. Except you: you were wearing a glittering, deep green dress as you gazed levelly from your barstool at the door as I came in. You hopped to your feet as lightly as hopping on the surface of the moon, your expression studiously blank, and a cry arose from the regulars who’d been waiting for you to dance: “Viva!” You held a bouquet of blue eyes in your right hand; you kissed one then held them aloft, grinning at me all the while. I advanced a few steps toward you.
I walked slowly toward you too: three steps. You twined your fingers into those extended sharply from my hand. You stalked around me like a cat, never letting go. A sound arose, a slow stomping on heavy wood. I turned suddenly, a moment before you thought I would. A long, deep sigh like a squeezed bandoneón trailed through the air. I caught your eyes with mine; I tried to crush them. You resisted, tried to pry mine open. At some point you’d gotten hold of both my hands, and now you spread my arms like eagle’s wings. My chest, exposed, was crushed against yours. I continued to murmur my bandoneón sigh, like velvet ripping. I deceived you again and slipped from your grasp, turning my back to you as I walked unblinkingly away.
I hurried to look you in the face again, but you studiously turned your eyes from mine and kept walking. You reached the counter and ordered a whiskey. Blending my footsteps into the bass line of the music, I slunk stealthily to the back wall of the café and picked out one of the wide-brimmed felt fedoras hanging there, tipping it to shadow my eyes as I returned to the counter to present you with a pale blue rose I’d plucked from a glass on the counter’s edge. You downed your whiskey in one gulp and looked up, sighing with a soulful expression on your face, and then turned swiftly toward me, your shoulders hunched and neck extended, gazing into my eyes as if able to see through me to my very bones. I looked down, hiding my eyes with the fedora’s brim. You merely hunched your body even lower, searching out my eyes from below.
And that’s when I saw your eyes glitter like knives, and suddenly I was in your arms as you leaned against your stool, arms that crushed my lower body hard against you as you leaned me over to press your lips to mine. My head nearly touching the ground, my arms clutched your head as if suctioned there, and the tip of your nose slipped down my body, tracing a line from my lips between my breasts to reach my navel. All at once, a scream rang out from beneath the stool, not the squeak of grinding teeth nor the squeal of twisting metal but the cry of a stringed instrument, and you brought me with you as we stood back up and, still locked in embrace, began to spin. We spun, you and I, together.
No, it wasn’t us that spun. It was this whiskey-soaked café, this entire town. We were the center, everyone’s eyes turned toward us.
You brought one of your legs between mine, forcing me to raise one to accommodate it and let myself be overcome, to fall before you. You cradled me in your arms as I descended, only to bring me back up to split my legs with yours once more. I let them tangle with yours, let them move as if independent from the knees down, let them leap and twirl. We spun once more. And that was when, finding my moment, I slipped your knife from the sheath that hung at your hip.
The blade was soundless, slicing through the light that fell upon it, suffusing the air with bloodlust. The illomened atmosphere raised goosebumps across your skin, but I knew what was to happen even as I watched them cast tiny shadows all along the white of your arms. I made no move to take the knife from your grasp. You feinted as if to stab me, but at the last moment it was your lips and skin that reached me, not the blade. We were fused, you and I, our skin just shy of dissolving to transform us into a single, heated mass as we embraced, as we gave in to the spinning of the city. Our legs twisted together, tangled, meshed, made a dry sound against the wooden floor as we collapsed.
I crashed to the floor like a cresting wave.
I fell atop you.
I turned the blade of the knife toward you as you fell, sure of myself again. You’d left me no choice from the moment you’d shown up at my café. We could never share the same space again. I thought about the knives that slept beneath the café’s floorboards. I was a professional dancer, after all.
I never took my eyes off the point of the blade even as we fell. I knew all too well what the knife desired. I twisted slightly to the side, and the blade sliced harmlessly through the empty space to the right of my torso. I rolled immediately to pin your wrist and the knife it held between my side and elbow. I used my weight to trying to loosen your grip, grinding against your hand, but it was all in vain. For the knife had already been snatched from your fingers by an enormous man.
This rough-looking character had been sitting at the counter since I’d returned to my café, glaring at a stuffed mermaid he’d set in on the counter in front of him as he downed grappa after grappa without even removing his hat. He was wrapped in curious clothes that seemed made of endless layers of thin black cloth, and his unidentifiable face was obscured by a wide-brimmed leather hat. He rose for the first time when your body fell on mine to pluck the knife from my hand as easily as picking a flower. You rose to your feet and looked into the man’s face. As you did, the skin of your own face convulsed, paling blue as the rose you’d given me. The man just stood there as you gazed upon him. Then, slapping the blade absently against the palm of one hand, he returned to his seat. A drunkard bumped into him along the way, but he fell to the ground with an ostentatious clatter seemingly of his own accord, gaping at the other customers as if asking them what happened. Silence spread throughout the café, and soon the only sound to be heard was the music filtering in from the streets outside. You followed after the man involuntarily, as did I.
As soon as he’d sat down on his stool, he looked you up and down and slapped the handle of the knife into your palm. He fixed his eyes on mine and spoke.
“My name is Réal. Of the northern Réals.” He smiled a little then, looking back and forth between us. Seen close up, his high cheekbones and narrow, knife-slit eyes made his face look aboriginal or East Asian. But his kinky hair and rounded nose indicated that he might instead be black. I felt as if I knew this man with dark brown skin. You started to say something, but he stopped you. “You don’t have to give me your
name. I already know it. I’ve followed every move you’ve made,” he said, his voice both clear and hoarse.
I looked him up and down, this man who grew like an enormous tree from the counter. There was something different about him. This town was filled with black-clad men in wide-brimmed leather hats with faces that seemed both Asian and black. Yet this one seemed somehow strange.
“I have a message from Mister T. Ango: ‘You did your job well yesterday,’” he said, nodding toward you, and then he turned to me. “He also said to give you this,” he continued, indicating the stuffed mermaid on the counter.
Hearing the name, I remembered something from long ago. A man of that name had been my lover, and at some point he’d gone overseas, or was put in jail, or at any rate left, and I’d taken up with another man. But I couldn’t put together how my T. Ango could be related to the man in black sitting before me now.
“If you wish, I can lend you any blade you like for this final job. What do you say?”
“This one will be fine,” I said, stroking the knife in the sheath at my side. I felt noble light envelope my body. A cold, blue-white flame rose behind me to the back of my head, and I could see it engulf her as well.
“That knife has already been dirtied, hasn’t it?” The man indicated her with a flick of his eyes. “A dirtied knife brings bad fortune.”
You looked at me. I felt a chasm open in my chest.
“It was a splendid item, don’t get me wrong. Hard, pure, with a top-notch shine.” The man spoke these words in a respectful tone. You nodded deeply. Before you kill me, you’ll exclude me. I felt my wandering, homeless hatred finally find its center, felt it prepare to explode.
The man stroked a knife that hung from a sheath at his own side.
“We cannot brook betrayal. But this is not the time for punishment. A knife risks its light to fight. It depends on purity. You know I’m right.” You nodded deeply once again. I watched the two of you. But you and he just watched each other. It occurred to me that neither I, nor the city, nor the river would ever be satisfied until both of you were destroyed.
I turned my back wordlessly and walked toward the door. I heard the shrill, false timbre of her voice as she called out, “Are you going to walk away from my challenge?” I ignored her, just kept walking. A sound rang out, high heels running across the wooden floor. Carefully judging the timing, I turned around quickly as she bent forward to slip the knife from my possession again. I struck her between her shoulder blades, near her spine. She fell, moaning, and the knife remained in its sheath.
“I don’t think that man is a stranger. If I don’t kill him, I think I might disappear.”
The wooden door closed tight. You were gone. I’d been betrayed. Not by you but by some unknowable entity. The floorboards reverberated with heavy footfalls as the man followed after you. As he passed by my prone body, he said, “You could never kill him. You can never kill anyone, and you can never leave this city. And neither can he.”
“We both have killed countless times before.”
“It only seemed that way. It’s all been nothing more than woven light. I’m the only one who can truly kill.”
The wooden door closed tight again. My body filled with smoke that stank like char and blocked my breath, and I rose to my feet to follow after as well. Even though as I did, I imagined my own death, pierced fore and aft simultaneously, inserting myself into the space between you as you dueled.
But there turned out to be no room for that. The thick, intimate space between you repelled me. You’d both shed your shirts and wrapped them around your left hands to use as shields as you faced each other, every nerve on your bodies bristling. From time to time, a knife would slice through the space between you at the speed of light. There was no one else around. Sourceless, blue-white light cut through the mist. You and the man were bathed in flickering light that illuminated in flashes your faces, your glittering blades. The knives gathered the light to them and made it dance, shining sliver like fish swimming through water, cutting through the air in all directions. Both you and the man had disappeared. The knives were all that remained, two masses formed from light. When they crossed, sparks flew, reaching even to where I stood watching. The only sounds I heard were the squeak of shoes against asphalt, the metallic scrape of knives clashing, the heavy breath of two men rendered invisible by the blinding brightness of their blades.
The duel lasted for hours, evolving finally into less an exchange of slashes than of glares, but still dawn refused to break. Dizzy, I lost track of how long the duel had lasted. I lost track of who it was I’d known first, who it was I loved, you or he. But then, the man lunged at you, his entire body suffused with power and the smell of sweat that ebbed and flowed around him like a tide, bringing his left hand within striking distance of your nose, and that was when I noticed the pitch black shadow at his feet and realized that he was a different sort of being than you and I; I lunged to stop you, to embrace you even as you stabbed at the man’s left hand with all the strength left in your body, but his right arm had already unswervingly extended like a column of sun-burnished flesh to reach its destination: your right eye. So the one who cried out like a northern rain forest bird was you. Bringing both hands to your face, you ran, catlike, to press yourself into a gap between two buildings. The man’s left hand flapped from his wrist, nearly severed by your blade and connected only by a thin strip of skin, and he brought the knife in his right hand to cut it off completely, muttering, “That does it,” as he ground it into the dirt with his heel before chasing after you, yelling, “This isn’t over!” in a shattered voice as he did.
But he didn’t have to chase you far. You collapsed, falling from the shadowed alcove where you tried to hide, exposing yourself to the blue-white light once more. Your entire body was covered in the thick, syrup-like liquid that ran from your eye, not quite silver and not quite clear, filled with semicircles like scales that refracted the light with
a sound like glass orbs colliding. I ran to where you lay, murmuring the words, “Mano a mano,” again and again. The man walked over to stand beside us. “He was a strong one,” said the man in a voice that trembled as if overcome with emotion. I looked up at him. The end of his right arm glittered like a jewel. The knife it held was engraved from handle to blade-tip with fine patterns like hairline fractures or tiny hairs, like skin completely covered with tattoos. The delicacy of its patterning exceeded your knife immeasurably, splitting the light into a complex array that gathered at your feet, creating a lacquer-shiny, jet black shadow to oppose it. Gazing upon this, my first shadow, I was captivated. It had a gloss to it, and a heft; it looked as if a pleasant dampness would greet my finger if I touched it, and I wanted to, desperately. As I watched light cut across the edge of its velvety darkness, I heard music, a scale playing softly that pressed me to the ground, felling me through my ears.
“Just go to sleep,” said the man as he bent down toward me, his voice strained. “I did not emerge unscathed either.”
He pulled his left sleeve back to show me the stump at the end of his arm. Blood, redder than lips, gushed from the cleanly shorn surface as if from a pump. I stared at it blankly for a while, then shook off my stupor and ripped a sleeve from my dress to wrap the wound. But he pulled away, tearing off a piece of black cloth from his own clothes to staunch the flow. Absorbing the blood, the cloth turned the same rich, glossy black as the shadow at his feet. Looking at it, I realized that I was witnessing something impossible, that this man was made of different stuff than you and I, denser, more intense, and I understood at last that unlike him we could never escape this city or this river, a realization that filled me with loneliness, drained the strength from my spine. You were my loneliness incarnate, and as I felt it coalesce once more to block the breath in my throat like a pit in a peach, I knew the only one able to dissolve it now was gone. Looking down at where you lay, I saw the silver fluid within you had almost drained completely, flowing back into the river in a
little stream.
“I won’t forget you or your knife. I promise you that,” said the man, addressing you.
“And neither will I,” I said. There was no mistake; I’d loved you today. I’d touched you and you’d touched me. I’d heard your voice like music, tasted happiness great enough to take the fear from dying.
“It’s too bad. Now that he’s dead, it’s the end for you as well.” The man looked at me sorrowfully.
“I know. I’ll leave the city alone.”
“Don’t you understand? When he dies, so does the light inside you. Once I block his light, there’s no more reflection, no more of anything. When I kill, it’s the end for real.”
The man stood before me. The shadow thrown by his enormous, treelike body engulfed me completely. Ecstasy coursed through my core, making my spine tingle. I was feeling my first shadow: hot in the center, its surface cool, pleasant, like being submerged in water. No, that wasn’t it—it didn’t feel like the river had the first time I’d jumped in. The shadow was exactly as warm and exactly as cool as I was myself. We were connected, the shadow and I. I was a part of it.
We, the Children of Cats (Found in Translation) Page 24
