August

by Romina Paula

  “What did you say?”

  “What?”

  “Did you say, Or it’s a cat with dreads?” I ask.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s not how it goes! It’s, Or it’s a cat with harsh and leprosy.”

  “You’re insane, what the fuck would that even mean?”

  “What would a cat with dreads mean? You’re totally out of it.”

  “You’re the one who’s totally out of it, what the fuck would a cat with harsh be?”

  “I don’t know, I always sang it that way, I never saw the lyrics . . . Are you sure it says dreads?”

  “I mean, I think so, now you’re making me question, but I think so, it’s more logical.”

  “I guess so.”

  I tell him I’m cold, he tells me he’ll run up ahead and get the truck and come back for me, that I can keep walking in the meantime, and that we’ll meet in the middle. He runs off, I wonder if he’ll actually come back, if he’ll remember that he left me back here, or if he’ll just go back to the hotel and pass out. I sing to myself, to warm myself up as I walk: The tree measures time in its trunk. / I look alienated around. / I’m in the middle of a palm tree / between green leaves I think I am . . . Or was it of you, between green leaves I think of you? And then the thing is that I think of you, suddenly, like a kick in the ass, you come back to me, you. It’s the nineties, and it’s you. Teenagers in the nineties, the twenty-first century now finds us ridiculous, already discards us. So the nineties with a little of the eighties, that comeback, maybe, is what makes us who we are. And twenty-whatever or two thousand, I never really knew what you were supposed to say, I guess two thousand, in any case two-thousand you is essentially nothing, you barely got in there. Fuck, now here, in this euphoria, with Juli, with the south, with the cold, with the alcohol, with the decade, the last decade, the one that made us, I think of you. You come to me, you appear to me in the night, the fact that you’re not here appears to me, that I can’t tell you this even though I pretend like I can, not being able to ever tell you is still something I can’t understand. That you could have taken so long to decompose, too, that, too, I can’t believe there’s still so much left of you, down there, buried, hair and things like that, skin. I don’t want to take anything, I never wanted to, and I would give (I don’t know what, not everything because then you wouldn’t be there, but I’d give a lot) so much to be able to tell you, for real, to see you, to sing a song with you, shout it out hugging each other, have you over to my apartment, for you to get to know my house and my boyfriend, the one I have now, and have him get to know you and have you tell me which one’s better, which one you like better, if it’s Juli, if it’s him, even though obviously you would like Manuel better, and in reality you wouldn’t care about either of them, because the two of us is enough, there’s nothing else, we never needed anything else, although we did.

  You can’t imagine how much I’d give to dance with you, leaping around, just one more time, hugging each other or not, in a crowd, see you move away, come back in the middle of a mosh, so far away, so close, get back closer by elbowing everyone, crash into everyone, bursting out laughing, see your gestures, your distorted laughter, close, far, coming, going, set up among all those people, and me, too, and we shouted and shouted amidst those people, all the lyrics, songs. Or we swore to one another declarations of eternal love, undying friendship, the purest form of love over tables at bars, wood carvings on tables with other kinds of inscriptions, from other romances, other declarations, eternal promises, unconditional eternal promises over wooden tables at dirty bars with peanut shells and rotten peanuts and the halo of beer losing its chill and having that excess, that overflow of beer go onto the sleeve of your sweater, of your jacket, maybe even of this jacket that I’m wearing now. And hugging you over that table, with beer and peanuts and little pet names and inscriptions, hugging each other and swearing things for all time and having people look at us, and us just promising each other all those things, forever.

  34.

  He honks. I must look sad. I’m sitting on the curb with my head between my legs, my hair hanging off of my head, your hood on, all crying. What are you doing, dummy, get in. I get in. What are you doing crying? he asks. I just remembered you, I say. That I miss you. Well, yeah, stupid, he says. I say, but no, that it’s been ages since I felt this way. That “Palm Tree” killed me, I say, that the nineties kill me. He brushes back the hair off my face and in the same movement he kisses me, comes completely over me. I don’t get what’s happening, of course I reciprocate the kiss, I mean, I don’t reciprocate it so much as just be very there to receive it, so there. It’s really warm, his mouth is really warm on the inside. That’s good, and it’s soft. I can’t help but get a little dizzy when I close my eyes, it’s that I’m drunk, and that I miss you. We kiss very deeply, you know what that’s like, when you kiss when you love each other. That’s what I mean, those kisses that are everything, the ones where you can barely tell yourself apart from the other person, the ones where you get inside the other person, where you put the other person inside yourself, and your tongues come and go, getting so big and so alive while your eyes are shut, like wet vermin, slippery, searching. After a long while the kiss ends, we hold each other, I bury myself in his sheepskin, in the little bits of wool, and I wipe off the spit he left on me, we left on me. He holds me, tight, and I cry. And I know I won’t be able to stop crying at this point, something broke/let loose. All the times I didn’t cry in Esquel come up now, want to come out, turn into tears. Now I can’t stop crying, Juli asks me if I want to talk about it, I say no, I keep crying, and every once in a while I dive into his mouth. I cry and I kiss him, it’s the only thing I can do right now. I don’t want to talk, there’s nothing to say, it’s just a question of letting go. So kissing, crying, and hugging, hugging as rest, generating fluid, a lot of it. Crying and saliva. From all this crying the dizziness of drunkenness gradually starts to transform into tiredness, exhaustion: as I regain my calm, I begin to fall asleep. Something about the heating in the car, too, a kind of stupor. As I’m falling asleep I’m still able to perceive that Juli is talking to me, whispering sweet things, loving things, petting my face, I will always love you, baby, always, and I want to reciprocate, respond, answer, but I can’t, I’m numbed, by sadness, by kissing, just about gone. I know, because my body knows, that Juli has started the truck. I don’t know where we’re going, I let myself be taken, I’m gone.

  35.

  “Besides I have my period.”

  “Blood doesn’t bother me, I’ve witnessed childbirth. And it wouldn’t be the first or the last time.”

  “I can’t, you smell like baby, I don’t know, like baby vomit.”

  “What are you talking about, dummy, my clothes are clean.”

  “It’s not a smell that comes out in the wash, you’ve got the kid in your little sheepskin there.”

  “That’s not from the kid, it’s that shitty smell that stuck from the grill, you smell like that too. I’m in love with you.”

  “Stop, Juli.”

  “I mean it, I’ve always been in love with you.”

  “How would you know.”

  “How would you know, idiot, you’re always running away.”

  “I’m always running away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Besides, what good does it do me now that you’re in love with me? What do you expect to get out of it?”

  “I don’t want to get anything, I’m just telling you how it is.”

  “How it is is you’ve got a wife and two kids.”

  “What does that have to do with anything, sometimes it really surprises me how stupid you can be. What is this shit about cheap morality? You act like this sophisticated city girl who lives in Buenos Aires and yet, actually, you’re an idiot.”

  “You’re calling me an idiot, moron? I’m just trying to respect you and your family.”

  “What are you talking about, respect, you don’t even know them,
they’re nothing to you.”

  “They are something, plus I’m doing it for myself, too, to protect myself a little.”

  “What are you doing here, then?”

  “I don’t know, I wanted to talk with you, because I missed you, because in the end in Esquel we didn’t have a chance to talk at all.”

  “Are you attracted to me?”

  “Why would you ask me that? I don’t like the acid baby smell you’ve got on you.”

  “Come on, I’m not kidding.”

  “Well, don’t ask me that, you know I am, I told you yesterday already, you’re beautiful.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know, I can’t.”

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  “Fine, hit me.”

  “Don’t provoke me, you know that if you tell me to hit you it makes me want to fuck you.”

  “You turn me on so much.”

  “So stop screwing around, then, I’ve wanted to fuck you since I saw you.”

  “At the bar?”

  “I don’t know, was that where it was?”

  “Yeah, we saw each other at Vanina’s bar for the first time . . . This time, I mean.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say anything? You just took me home like it was no big deal.”

  “When?”

  “That night, after the bar, you dropped me at Andrea’s place like it was nothing, you didn’t even kiss me.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, do you want to have sex or not?”

  “You told me you were in love with me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t think so, I don’t think I want to have sex with you, in a little while I have to take a bus to Buenos Aires, go back to my boyfriend, forget about you, I don’t know if I feel like it, it was so hard last time.”

  “So you’d rather nothing happen then? You’d rather just go on home like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Turned on.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Come on, Emi, it isn’t like that, you’re mixing everything up in my mind, we won’t have sex if you don’t want to, it’s not about sex, my life doesn’t depend on having sex with you. I don’t feel like arguing anymore, if we keep arguing I’m going to get even more turned on, I feel like you’re talking in circles, I don’t know, just come here, let me hold you.”

  He holds me. The one who’s turned on now is me. I can’t take it anymore. Even though it’s not exactly being turned on, because I’m not, in general: I wouldn’t feel like touching myself or like being with anybody else. It’s him, it’s my hangover, it’s this moment, and it’s him. And it’s us. I rest my head on his shoulder, put my head in his neck, breathe there. He smells so good, as true as the acidity thing is, it doesn’t bother me, it coexists well with that smell that’s so familiar to me, his smell, his sweat, his person smell. I try not to exhale right on his neck because I’m confused, and I don’t want to keep driving him crazy. It would appear to all be vastly simpler for him. He thinks he’s in love with me but that he’s already given me up, meaning he can be in love with me in this passive way, think of me from that place, in parts, in fragments of me, of what I am or of what he wants me to be, he selects me, selects my portions, keeps me, preserves me in his memory in a very particular way, resurrecting me when he wants to, and it’s melancholy, a memory of that which could have been, and this would be the saddest fuck in the world, and the most beautiful all at once. Today we’ll say goodbye to each other, and he’ll think of me for three more days, as he goes back in his truck and every time he passes by the little picnic tree and everything will be so sad and so lovely and so definitive, and then he’ll get home where his son and his wife’s pregnancy and his new son are awaiting him, not to mention when that one is born, and by then everything will have become so relative, and I will gradually fade away, the memory of me will grow opaque, a few images in sepia, difficult to appreciate, so relative all in all, so relative. But not me, I, on the other hand, will cry the whole way back, and that is just the beginning of the end because at least I’m still in transit, the worst part comes later, when I have to get my life back, grab the bull by the horns, put my place back together, my relationship with Manuel, tell him I cheated on him with Julián or not that I cheated because it’s not like it was about or against Manuel, but that I was with Julián, and then have Manuel get bitter and rightfully so and have him feel bad thinking that part of my sadness over the next few days or weeks is going to be due to Julián, to that presence that isn’t that and that I brought on me, and me rocking, juggling, thinking that everything I have around me reeks and that I’m never going to completely know exactly what I want and that maybe I’m always wrong and then neither leaving nor staying, nor anything, neither being anywhere, nor being anywhere.

  36.

  Dead girlfriends, that’s the theme of it, dead young girlfriends. Dead girls who, meanwhile, at times seem to return from the dead. At times.

  Vincent Gallo covers a vast expanse, on the highway, listening to music and meeting girls. They all have names of flowers: Violet, Lily, Rose. But he’s looking for Daisy. En route he stops at Daisy’s childhood home. Her mother is there, and a grandmother in a vegetable state. And a brown rabbit that apparently belongs to this Daisy. The mother assures him it’s the same rabbit from before. Vincent asks her about Daisy, the mother says it’s been ages since she’s heard from her, and she asks the same things over and over again. Here we learn that Daisy and Vincent have known each other since they were kids. Vincent starts back on his journey, stops his truck at some salt flats and gets out to keep going on a motorcycle. He finally makes it to California. He goes to this house to look for Daisy, but she won’t open the door. He leaves her a note. He goes to a hotel to wait for her. And she comes, in the end she comes, and it’s Chloë Sevigny dressed up like a secretary, wearing a little suit. The encounter is highly disturbing, she goes to take drugs in the bathroom, he asks her to stop, tells her he loves her, she tells him she loves him, she wants to sit on his lap, he kind of doesn’t want her to but does, and you don’t really understand why, why all this suffering if they love each other so much, but you get that something terrible must have happened in the past, but you don’t know what, you just don’t know. The point is that indeed at some point Chloë sits down on his lap, then I think they make out, he takes off her blouse and I’m pretty sure her bra too, I can’t quite remember, and then she starts sucking his dick, just like that, for real, porn in the foreground, and Vincent Gallo’s dick is clearly going very well for them, it’s huge, you can see the veins, and she takes it all in her mouth, and he’s saying to her, like, as he brushes her hair from her face, he’s saying in this way with all this pathos in it, swear to me you’ll never suck another guy’s cock, swear to me you’ll never suck another guy’s cock, and she, with his dick down her throat, makes a few guttural sounds as though giving him to understand that yes, I mean, that no, that she will not suck any other guy’s cock, ever, and it’s all very sad and very awful. In the end he comes and lies down on the bed, desperately sad, and she lies down beside him and tries to console him, but he cannot be consoled, and they start talking about something, about a night when something happened, something terrible, something irrevocable, and then you finally get the flashback and find out.

  So apparently one night in the past they went to this concert together, and she was a little bit high and drunk and went to the bathroom by herself, and she was followed by some guys who gave her something or other to smoke, which she thought was marijuana, but actually she ended up unconscious, and they raped her, the three or four of them all raped her, and the tragic thing is that he, Vincent, at some point realizes that she hasn’t come back and it’s been forever and he goes to look for her, and he sees her, he sees her being fucked, but he doesn’t realize she’s passed out, and he leaves! He leaves! Here we have the tragic error, he
leaves because he is mistaken, because he reads the situation wrong, and he comes back hours later, and at that point there’s an ambulance there that’s taken her, taking Daisy away, and she—back in present day—is telling him how she was left there lying on the floor and that she threw up and that since she was unconscious she choked to death on her own vomit. And she asks him, Why did you leave, why didn’t you help me? And he says, What happened? What happened? And she says, Well, I died. And at first you don’t understand, and then you do; she tells him a few times that she died, and you see her on the stretcher with her face covered up by the white sheet, and you’re wondering if maybe they managed to revive her. But no, she just died, she actually died, and then you go back to the present in the hotel and realize he was alone in the bed and that Daisy isn’t there anymore and that she never was, like the brown rabbit.

  37.

  I don’t feel like having breakfast at this point. The orange juice doesn’t sound appealing, the yogurt even less so, the little croissants. I have a piece of dry toast, to see if it will maybe help with my hangover. I look out the window. Juli, to my left, eats a little bit of everything. He doesn’t say anything. I breathe in the steam from my tea. I look ahead, at the ocean, the sun. My head is killing me, the circles under my eyes are gigantic, and I’m carsick. I think about the long trip that awaits me, and on the one hand I feel like being alone, like being alone again, and on the other hand I’m afraid of being carsick, throwing up, feeling lousy, not seeing him again. He finishes his breakfast, looks at me, touches my hand. I look at him, I smile, weakly. He asks me if I feel any better, I tell him no, he says, screw you.