We arrived at the shop. Before I even learned my new host’s name, S began to explain the series of objects on display. There was something peculiar smack in the center of them all, at the room’s axis, a strange-looking object that stood out imposingly like some sort of a belly button: the exact reproduction of a dildo found in Hungary that archaeologists date from the Mesolithic period, some 9,000 years before Christ. There was a little card stuck to the pedestal with the name of the site where it was found, the date, the materials, and measurements, making the dildo a proper ornament for any salon. But its decorative quality by no means reduced its functional use, thanks to the detachable base, which meant it could easily be set to task. Later I found that this smoothly polished stone, almost eight inches long, became the object of desire of certain historians who wished to plumb the enigmas of the Stone Age in passionate paroxysms. As I said, as an element of this testimony and my life’s story, the object is more the weapon of my crime than anything else, and though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was so drawn to it that I asked S for a silicone replica. Finding out what weapon has been used to commit a murder is of vital importance in finding the murderer. Well, here you have it, confirmed in writing that it existed, because the real one, the one I employed, can no longer be recovered.
I imagine what called my attention to that Mesolithic dildo was the idea that some prehistoric woman or man, with only rudimentary language and something like a hundred and ten centuries before the so-called feminist revolution, had decided to think about her or his sexuality as being outside of the other. How could I not help identifying with that prehistoric act of resistance—I, who have spent my life being defined by the names other people have used to categorize me? But I saw other things in that place S brought me to once I pulled my glance and my thoughts away from that object. For example, something that is now familiar, but there I saw it for the first time. There they were. Life-sized dolls that felt and looked so real I had to check for pores; they seemed so human that even their motionlessness wasn’t enough of a contradiction. S told me a close friend of hers, a manufacturer of automata, made them, and she went on to explain that unlike other versions, these ones didn’t move because they were made to be passive women, receivers of anything anyone wanted to do to them. The exact price hadn’t been listed yet, but they’ll be expensive, she said. What’s more, they came with the manufacturer’s promise that if the owner died within the first two years of cohabitation, the doll would attend the funeral the same as any other mortal unless the deceased left a widow behind, and even in that situation if he had it on record that his wife should recognize the inflatable woman as being a part of the family.
I can’t help but go back to the Mesolithic penis. It gives me pleasure, you know? I mean it pleases me to think what I did with it, stick a wick up the urethra to do you know what. Look at that—now you have proof that I am unrepentant. As I’m writing this, all these feelings of love that I’ve always thought define my character dissolve before the pleasure of that violent scene in my memory. If I had to write my last sentence right this instant, it would be the following: let peace rot. I’ve got some life yet to live, just enough to go calmly, to reconcile myself with the love that has abounded in me, bar a few exceptions.
S showed me other gadgets that now are relatively easy to find but back then only flabbergasted me. Anal lanterns for lovers of the black hole; stethoscopes that allow you to listen to the friction produced by any object entering the body; vibrating panties designed to go off at random, even at the least expected moments in a twenty-four-hour cycle. S designed sexual objects, so for someone like me who had never seen one before, the revelation was colossal. But this was only a means to an end, financing her main project and what she considered her greatest accomplishment, which was the design and later manufacture of a sweet little object that was an exact replica of her genitalia, a duplicate of her interior landscape, from the lips to the uterus, as true to life as two drops of the same water. It might look like a conventional dildo, but it worked in a different way: to find someone else whose intimate hole was the same size and complexion as her own. She called the mold, the intermediary, the dildo, Solitude. Solitude represented S’s longing to find her double, her sexual soulmate, someone who would fondle S as she fondled herself. It goes without saying the solace it provided me to find that S was obviously as lonely as I was. Maybe like me, she too needed to believe in fairy tales every once in a while, in stories of princes and princesses, to find her Cinderella by way of something much more intimate than a magical glass slipper.
S designed many gadgets that today can be found in any sex shop around the world. Vaginal pumps, erectile rings, and a genital enlarger based on the principles of traction lengthwise for men, breadthwise for women, and backdoor orifices for both; double vibrators for simultaneous applications, and others with cone-like ends for anal use, called plugs; prostheses; a wing or a trapeze for aerial postures, with a security belt and instructions manual included; an enema bullet resistant to any type of liquid or any temperature, depending on the moment’s sexual mood. Have you tried any of these things, sir? An anal plug, perhaps? A penis enlarger? Did you know the idea that Japanese men have little dicks is just a myth? Personally, penis size isn’t an issue for me, but I want to give testimony here that not only do Japanese men not have small dicks, but from what I’ve been able to gather, theirs are bigger than those of the Americans. Well, you just let me know when you see me whether you’ve ever tried one of these toys, hey? All of them, sir, I would have used them all simultaneously on those unspeakable louts. Why does hatred suddenly sweep over me again? Well, as I said, if I’d had any one of these objects on hand, along with the Mesolithic dildo, I wouldn’t have flinched, I’d have used all of them at once.
I ask myself now, just how high a temperature can those enema bullets withstand? The package states “any temperature,” but what exactly does that mean? Any temperature! Would it endure the temperature of the sun? Could it be that the wholesalers who supplied materials to S didn’t realize that since Hiroshima, one has to be a little more careful when talking about temperature? I would have tested it on the flesh of those oafs—exactly how many degrees Fahrenheit can the bullet withstand?—and then I’d have written to the factory asking them to be just a little more precise. You do know that they do these sorts of things in these parts, right? Of course all they use are humble plastic bottles, and it’s not the woman who introduces them into the body of the man, but the other way around. Later I’ll tell you about Jeanette. No, you’re not going to be shocked by reading this. What you must find strange, though, is that it’s me, a woman, who thinks this way, as the doer of the deeds. So are you going to add malice to my murder now? Why don’t you just go right ahead then, tack it on: add malice, because lack of malice had nothing to do with not having the objects at hand to use them as instruments of pain. Instead it was related to the fact that I was clever enough not to allow hatred to cloud my strategic ability: I’m a woman and I acted alone; they were men and there were more of them; I knew I had to act quickly and surreptitiously. But yes, let’s not forget then, add malice to that list of degrees, because you can be perfectly sure that the instant I grabbed the prehistoric phallus, my whole body trembled with the third and final orgasm I had yet to experience. You see, one thing you can’t ever call me is frigid. Not only have I had an orgasm as a man and as a woman, but also the primeval orgasm of the human race: the pleasure of the kill.
S SPENT LONG HOURS focused on her genital self-portrait, her vaginal clone, experimenting with different materials to make a mold that would fit the contours of her body and someone else’s, something that would identify someone else just like her, following the same system in which DNA announces its carrier. Her table was chock-full of all sorts of materials to this end: fabrics, cardboards, drawings, maps, mirrors . . . everything her own hands needed to set the machine in motion that would find the form—her own and the double’s—that S was tryin
g to find, her sexual twin, and after six weeks of studio time and elaboration it would finally come to fruition.
Here you are, sir. Thanks to the research and to S’s creativity, I found the perfect weapon without even realizing it, one I hoarded away for many years, the instrument to perform the crime. It was one of the few objects that came with me on every one of my trips. Jim always complained, saying it took up what he considered unnecessary space in our suitcase, and when he asked me why I felt the need to bring it, I never really knew what answer to give him, largely because there really wasn’t one. How many trips must I have taken with that thing in my luggage? How many scanners must have detected it to the amusement of airport security agents? Had they known my age these more recent years, they would have had an even better laugh. A young woman with a dildo is a slut, but an older woman with one is a batty slut. Now I have the last laugh, because they failed to grasp the fact that every object has multiple uses. I passed the object through security dozens of times right under their noses. You see, who needs to go to some supermarket to buy a firearm? I was against the possession of firearms, and when I actually needed one, I didn’t have to go to some North American supermarket for it, because S had already taught me how to respect the potential inherent in any object—its versatility, how it could be employed for both love and war, like the Mesolithic phallus. Who’s to say whether that woman who lived nine thousand years ago used the dildo as a dildo? Maybe she used it to open a wolf’s stomach.
I already mentioned how as a teenager, I found the architectural shape that corresponded with my sexual quest to be that of the arched bridge, not the flat kind, because again, the flat surface merely allows the pedestrian to go from one place to another, while the arched bridge goes beyond this primary function by allowing the eyes to glance around at different altitudes, taking in the surrounding environment from multiple levels. I always found the straight line the most complicated idea for a well-defined sexuality. Yet when I met S, I understood that my bridge simile lacked sophistication. And anyway, does a well-defined sexuality even exist? Just as the sun rises and sets in transformation, between two states, changing the light around us, the shapes of things, the intensity of its shine, so the walk across the bridge doesn’t depend only on the form of it, but also on the time we’re crossing. My sexuality was ambiguous before I met S; my gender, feminine; my sexual orientation had only ever manifested itself toward men. But for some reason meeting S was like an epiphany, because she revealed how ductile sexuality could be. I had thought that changing sexual orientations throughout our lives was the only logical thing; what sense did it make that I, precisely me, who from the anatomical point of view seemed conceived for ambiguity, stayed on the straight and narrow of heterosexuality? S’s personality seduced me entirely. If I hadn’t met Jim a little while later, S would have become my best sexual partner, if she had wanted it. I never sensed that she was attracted to me, though I was certainly drawn to her, and she could have kept her desire hidden behind what we often call friendship, as I did. As if a friend couldn’t also be your best lover.
* * *
I don’t want to take too long discussing the time Jim and I spent in New York waiting for the next trip. I don’t really remember how we prepared for the next trip, which took us to a town just north of Borneo. The guide brought us there and left. He said they’d come for us in three days.
The man who seemed to be the town’s ringleader welcomed us. Jim exchanged money for information. We’re not sure if for lack of any real information or out of fear, but the man offered Jim other services for the money. In broken English, he asked Jim to follow him. I wanted to accompany them, but the head honcho made me understand in gestures—hitting his chest like a gorilla—that it was a gift only for men. I must admit that these chest poundings meant to marginalize me as a woman struck me as a compliment. You see, sir, I’ve spent so many years living in the guise of a man, that when I’m finally recognized as a woman, I happily throw the advances women have made in social rights to the wind. Later I found out why the man didn’t let me go with them to the tiny house. From what I could see through the window when they went in, it was no more than a dark room. The sun was so bright my eyes had trouble adjusting. But as soon as they did, I could make out the presence of a female orangutan in a bed. I knew she was a female because her lips were painted and she was wearing a blond wig and a pink semitransparent top. She was shaved completely hairless. At first I couldn’t figure it out, but when I heard Jim shouting, I understood the nature of the invitation. That’s when I strode into the room for a closer look. They had chained her to a steel bed. Her genitalia were inflamed. I’d never seen anyone so mournful in my life. And I deliberately use the word anyone because the differences between that animal and a person were completely indiscernible. Her eyes moved to see us without raising her head. I started crying. I wanted to touch her. But I was afraid. I was overwhelmed by panic, a fear of everything. I just couldn’t grasp it. Jim embraced me and tried to pull me away. I resisted, but finally allowed myself to be led. The man stayed behind, I imagine to wrangle about the price with his first client. A line of men waited their turn outside the hut.
That night I thought about how different it is to destroy someone little by little or to take them in one fell swoop not to death but to nothingness. Not even a sudden bullet eliminates one’s existence entirely because it remains in one’s dead body or in the memory of one’s loved ones, or in the retinas of strangers who might have crossed one’s path only a single time. Only once have I been witness to an act that eradicated life not through death but through a sort of restoration of nothingness. Of course I’m talking about what happened in my hometown. Hiroshima was wiped out in a matter of a few seconds. And you know what? We had been in a state of alertness, we were expecting a brutal attack, and yet the power of the weapon was so new, so colossal, that the survivors’ testimonies differ wildly from the testimonies of any survivor of any other attack over the course of history, and the hibakushas, the survivors of Hiroshima, we all coincide on one very particular point: we all thought that day, without exception, that it wasn’t only Hiroshima being pulverized but the entire planet, and the majority didn’t associate the devastation with an attack—even though we were expecting it—but with the end of the world, the causes of which we couldn’t identify. The only thing capable of explaining such an abrupt and radical transformation of everything around us, the landscape utterly decimated, was an apocalypse. You see? Weapons are self-referential bellicose processes in which death is revealed by dying, and survival is revealed by surviving, but there was nothing self-referential about the weapon that destroyed my city, because its power to annihilate achieved something unheard of: self-annihilation. It peeled us away from the idea that someone was attacking us, killing us in the worst possible way, in a fashion that was until then totally unimaginable: they bombarded us as they erased from our brains the idea that we were being bombarded.
After we saw Sandy, we spent the next day going door-to-door, trying to uncover some piece of information that might bring us closer to Yoro. Nothing. That horrific vision, that corner of hell, didn’t add a single piece of useful data to our search. Our experience in Los Alamos—where the woman who welcomed us didn’t offer any new clues, but at least our mutual distress over Yoro was relieved with her photos and memories—had been the exception. The guide showed up on the third morning to fetch us. We told him to give us until that evening to prepare, and under cover of darkness, we broke into the house and removed Sandy’s chains. At first she didn’t move. She kept the same position as when she was chained. We didn’t dare move her; she was huge, after all, and deep down we were afraid she might lash out at the whole species by pummeling us. A few anxious minutes passed, but then she looked at her wrists and licked the wounds left by the chains, still without looking up. She didn’t raise her eyes even when she threw her arms around my neck, which I shuffled off onto Jim because I couldn’t support their bulk, and Jim
had to sit down on that filthy, humid bed under the weight of them. A few seconds passed by without us knowing quite what to do. We remained silent. I grabbed Sandy’s hand, which was soft and very cold; we made as little noise as possible leaving the cabin, and all three of us jumped into the guide’s jeep.
As we sped off, we could hear shouting and a random shot was fired. But we were already too far away; no vehicle in the village had the horsepower ours did and nobody came in pursuit. Once the adrenaline’s effects had subsided, I rubbed Sandy’s lipstick off with a handkerchief and removed the wig and top. She was trembling. Both of us were trembling. I felt fear again. Her body was so massive. What could have happened had she decided to take revenge against humanity by attacking me? An understandable impulse. But Sandy just stared out the window as we distanced ourselves from that horror. She didn’t move an inch. Her breath misted the glass and screened out the world. Then she closed her eyes and seemed to fall into such a deep sleep that anyone could have suspected she’d withstood all the torture, the mistreatment, the prostitution, with the sole aim of being able to die free. I bent close to her nose gingerly. She was still breathing. She was only asleep, and I was overcome with joy.
The Story of H Page 11
