by Lazaro Lima
We had all our clothes on, todavía. They were more or less loose-fitting (como esos olive green pantalones de hombre, from the GAP, pseudo army-navy, que uso; I think I was wearing those). I remember I ran my arm, my hand, up under your shirt. Con la mano derecha te tocaba el flanco, te abrazaba. With my fingertips I could feel your skin, the definiteness of you, warm, present. Con las yemas de los dedos te rocé la piel, sentí el pulso en tu cuello, my fingers skimmed over and paused at your nipple. Taut. Sentí la respiración; it was yours and mine. You drew me toward you, con la mano derecha.
The sun is up now. Frangipani, sun-released, wafts in through these open shutters. Una pequeña mariposa amarilla drifts, pauses near the shockingly purple row of crotons. The fish kite and the hammock stir on the porch, languidly, invitingly.
Esa mano derecha tuya baja. Almost imperceptibly. Slowly, se mueve. Me acaricia la espalda, hace pequeños movimientos circulares hacia las nalgas. You hold my butt, pulling me toward you, onto you. Siento eso, your hand cupping my butt; a la vez mi atención se bifurca, hacia mis dedos, que te acarician el hombro, el antebrazo. Te juro que I feel everywhere: where your hand is moving underneath me, holding me, hacia mi sexo; donde mis dedos se mueven en minúsculo vaivén y te acarician el brazo; donde ahora, my lips replace my fingers and contact your upper arm and I taste you. Sutil. Neutral. Un poco salado.
I am poised, just slightly above you. Soft moans escape your half-open mouth. Siento el calor de tu ingle, pressing into me. Our clothes are on, still. No estorba la ropa. Ni nos fijamos. As your hand circles toward, me escucho gemir. I move toward you.
Hay una extraña, oximorónica sensación. Expectant yet satisfied a la vez. There is no idea of reaching, de progreso. Of getting there. Anywhere. We are there. Here. Your skin. Cálida, densa. Your hand on me. Humedad. La otra rozándome los labios like you do, drawing my face toward yours. Tus labios reconociéndome los contornos. No hay noción de urgencia. El tiempo es nuestro. Tiemblo de placer, de anticipación, de presencia. I feel you here with me. Somos, es ahora.
I Leave Tomorrow, I Come Back Yesterday
URIEL QUESADA
A gente preenchia. Menos eu;
isto é-eu resguardava meu talvez
João Guimãraes Rosa
Grande Sertão:Veredas
If you come from Uptown by streetcar you get off at the last stop, just at Canal Street, near where people who have taken a bus named Desire transfer and go on to Cemeteries or Elysian Fields. But stay alert, because this area is full of scoundrels and souvenir shops, and you can easily get lost. Better if you go directly to the other end of the French Quarter by Bourbon Street or Decatur, although I recommend Royal to you, the street with the galleries, cute apartments, and old neglected houses where the vampire tours stop. You’ll pass right by where William Faulkner lived, and where surely you’ll bump into some guy resting carelessly on a corner, posing as a leisurely artist. He will seek you out with his eyes, although he doesn’t know you, with the hopes that this first contact defines and clarifies, and that you enter easily into a conversation, as if you had been separated only a short time in all your life. He attracts you to his corner with a look that portrays the reflection of all of the water in the world. Despite the fact that at this hour it’s impossible to see from a distance the color of eyes, you respond to his command, you try to guess the origin of this vibration that gives you goose bumps until you find its owner leaning on the railing of the cathedral’s garden, where a marble Jesus opens his arms to receive everyone, although no one has access to him or to the delicacies of the garden. There’s something fragile and false about the young man that doesn’t come from his feet, just protected by sandals, or from his extremely white, Indian linen suit embroidered with little red figures, or from his ringlets of carefully disheveled hair. You think of him as an apparition, an ethereal danger that speaks almost in whispers. For you, he will breathe fire, he’ll sing his original works, he’ll dance with silk veils, he’ll try to read your hand to discover that he’s in your future, naked with you on a hard old bed of a shotgun house located just a few streets from where your palm began to tremble at the possibility of enjoying the next hours, until the sun returns, rising over the Mississippi, and you both gather your clothes and part in opposite directions. He caresses your life line, inventing hard times that you have survived thanks to your courage and persistence. He predicts travels for you but not riches. Softly he affirms that your rational side is very strong, so much so that it blocks your love line, and makes you doubt and suffer like all those who fear giving themselves over to this simple act of exploring the skin’s secrets to the limit.
However, like so many other nights, you close your hand to novel experiences, to the vertigo of uncertainty. You keep your fist clenched, deforming your luck lines. You try to leave the young man without noticing that his hand has followed the movement of yours, trying to envelop it, to create a knot of fingers that moves closer to his lips for him to kiss. You avoid looking him in the eye so as not to be swept away by that torrent that interrogates and disarms you. You prefer to see the confusion of fingers that you can’t undo, because each attempt to separate them rouses a new caress, a fresh thread among your desperate life line and that of the young man. But at some point you jump, say something like “I can’t do this,” and you leave the young man, who takes a couple steps toward you, stops, and shouts to you not to forget that corner where he always feigns to pose carelessly, although really he dedicates himself to waiting to be consumed by the chance imprint on the skin of those unknown.
You walk very quickly, dazed, mingling with the people. You hear when someone says to you, “Hey, mista, listen!” You turn in case the young man has followed you, but it’s a very dark black man who calls for your attention, painted like a cemetery’s angel, a statue of flesh and bones that has been witness to the conversation between you and the fortune-teller. He’s abandoned his pedestal to follow you, carrying unlikely instruments made with old pots and ice-cream containers, making a disturbance as if to announce to the multitudes what has taken place. “I can take you to a place where the most beautiful boys in town …”
“I don’t want any problems,” you repeat, fleeing from life toward the other side of the French Quarter, scared by the constant interference of temptation upon that night of planned and sure goodbyes. The black angel painted white shouts a curse at you and returns to his pedestal, making a commotion. In a few seconds he transforms himself into a statue so that the tourists pose with him and leave him a few dollars in a bucket at his feet. When he returns to the ground, he quits being an angel and is hungry; he’ll enter to buy a beer and he’ll comment on the latest news with his friends, but we’ll never know if you and your story will remain in his memory after this moment. Meanwhile, you move on against the current of people. Your feet wish to disobey you, to go in the same direction as the strangers, to return to the corner before someone else takes the young man. You stop in the middle of the sidewalk, asking yourself which is the right course, if you should pay attention to your heart or to your head. You look for the answer in your hands; you see them so mute, so ineffective when dealing with decisions. Groups of passersby continue running into you, a human statue with neither the makeup nor the act, anchored to that point of the earth as if you had just grown roots. Most of those who pass by grant you a look of curiosity, go around you, and continue on their way. Under his breath, someone encourages you: “Go for it.” But you don’t want to understand. Even so, you turn your head in search of the corner that has turned into a blurry scene. The cathedral’s garden continues casting its shadow upon the street; the railing is reduced to a stroke of Chinese ink. The black-and-white angel stands out underneath the damp glow of the streetlight. Where’s the young man? Why doesn’t he have a name?
So you continue on your way toward Marigny. You’re so agitated that you don’t see me, although I wait for you at the place we agreed upon, just under the Pardieu Antiques sign. You dry your hands
on the fabric of your shorts; you quicken your step as if you were going to arrive late, and I lovingly think, “You’ll try to be on time even in death.” I look at my watch and wash my hands of the matter: 11:34 at night. You’re late by just four minutes. I’ll take about fifteen more prowling around here, only so as to not leave you waiting at the place where Candide Pardieu will pick us up to go to his goodbye party. You walk so quickly that I detect certain restlessness. You turn toward me, but you can’t see me; you look for something else, something beyond these shop windows, the people, what’s right in front of you. I also turn around, trying to find what your eyes seek. It’s not a gallery or an antique store, I’d bet. Nor is there anyone acting suspiciously, although perhaps a few streets down some delinquent has tried to take advantage of you. I take a few steps, and the air, hot, wraps me up without even the hint of a breeze. There’s a stillness that’s almost visible despite the noisy, drunken, and falsely uninhibited tourists. I try to see that mysterious object of your interest, but I only find a human statue and a little further away a young man that flirts with some lonely passersby. He flashes them an incredibly white smile, walks a few feet with them, and finally returns to his corner.
I try to find you again, but you’re already lost somewhere toward Marigny. We should have met up in Antiques, gone to a certain cafe, and waited for Pardieu, to accompany him on his last night of freedom. But it occurs to me that you prefer to walk with no precise destination in mind. My inner voice tells me it’s better that I let you wander, and when they ask for you and you’re not there, I will lie, something like: “He never arrived; I was waiting next to the antique store and I didn’t see him.” Of course it was you that didn’t see me, although honestly I let you pass by, fascinated that you had forgotten me and that you were looking for something that didn’t include me. But until that moment of explanation arrives, I wait here to contemplate the delicate knickknacks of my friend Candide Pardieu’s store. That crazy man has the great ability to turn everything into sugar, including certain tragedies, and, of course, his many mistakes. However, I ask myself how he will feel in prison, where he will be obliged to dress in an orange uniform instead of in his suits made of fresh fabric, delicately tailored and of the highest price, and in his New York shoes and Panama hat. I look at the store windows full of furniture, decorations, lamps, statues, and treasures that run the risk of being neglected if Pardieu’s partner doesn’t know how to protect them. You can’t even imagine how many afternoons I spent sitting in those priceless chairs, shooting the shit with Pardieu, who was a millionaire and a dandy when he was younger, professional trout fisherman in Montana, amateur Spanish mountain-goat hunter, and expert taster of French wines and young Arabian men. Later, when his family’s wealth started to run dry and the need for a conventional job threatened his horizon, Pardieu sat down with pencil and paper to find a way out. He wrote in one column his various abilities, in the other his needs, in the third where he should reside in order to achieve the logical sequence: from ability to work to income to satisfied needs. Like he himself admitted, a decadent dandy can’t find money just like that. Nor was he able to part with his family’s possessions. Yet, like a good adventurer, he always ended up reporting them, were it in order to write memoirs of his travels, or, more pragmatically, to obtain economic or legal assistance. He recognized that it was very late to start working. So he thought of the bustle of the streets, of the swells of visitors, and he had the idea of opening an antique store on the most prestigious street of the French Quarter. He displayed some personal objects that no longer touched his heart or memory, and he made a lot of money, sitting at the doorway of his business in a velvet armchair that looked more like a throne.
After a few years, Candide had cleaned out all of the Pardieu mansions, without even a few dollars left over as savings. Some internal mechanism awakened a certain obsession with financial security. To us, his friends, he spoke only of that, and when we chatted about him we would say that the solution was easier said than done. Candide would have to work for the first time in his life.
And in some ways he did it because he went to the working-class neighborhoods in search of merchandise, swindling both the ancient owners and the potential clients. Pardieu knew about antiques, and so negotiating with him was like having coffee with one of the local vampires: he would draw you in with his accent slightly affected by his French, he would seduce you patiently, painstakingly, and then when you were at the point of an aesthetic orgasm, he would sink his teeth into your wallet.
Oh, Candide! You’ve taken good trips down the wrong road. You laugh so much at the world, but you don’t realize that someday what goes around comes around. You always wanted to be the same old Candide—generous and extravagant. And you would scold me for my bad-humored, grandfatherly admonitions: “You open the store when you feel like it, you lie to the customers, you owe money to your providers, you continue wasting everything. Candide, think of old age.” He did it, but in his own way. A few weeks after my last sermon, they began to loot the cemeteries. I never connected Pardieu Antiques’ new offers, discreetly exhibited in a closed-off room in the back, with a reportage in the Times Picayune’s Metro section about the desecration of distinguished mausoleums, until one afternoon when I stopped by for a drink. Pardieu was dressed especially elegantly, with a silk tie, very discreet brown suit, and his lucky hat, as if he were traveling. He served me a drink; I sat on a little iron chair and he confirmed that he was expecting visitors. “The police,” he explained, smiling. Before allowing me to let a string of questions fly, he said: “Now, for example, you are seated on a beautiful chair attributed to Lafitte, a disciple of Auguste Rodin, who lived in New Orleans from 1885 to 1889. The chair was left in the Debernardi’s chapel in 1887, upon the death of Sandra, the great matron. Not too long ago, I rescued the forgotten thing and now it’s for sale.” I didn’t jump from the chair immediately—the truth was I didn’t understand—and I obliged Pardieu to be more direct. “You are very naïve, my friend. Realize that more than half of my pieces come from the cemetery.”
The arrest was discreet enough. The police, aware that they should protect the prestige of such a distinguished family, took back all the stolen objects at night. The news just took up space in the local news and papers. A few days before his imprisonment, a stranger opened the store. As soon as I knew, I went to visit him and found out that he was one of the many lovers that Pardieu supported with his antique sales. “We should be united in a time of misfortune,” he said to me cunningly. I asked him how he was going to continue the business, where he would get the capital. “This is absurd,” I said. He explained to me that nothing would be sold. Pardieu wanted to preserve the store as he left it when two policemen arrived, greeted him, and with great pity asked him to accompany them. “The objects are for sale!” I protested, blind as always. “Yes, but no one is going to buy them.” And in effect, that’s how it was. Every one of the pieces that survived the police record now had a price several times greater than its original. Clients would leave disconcerted, or would demand to negotiate directly with Pardieu, but he, ladies and gentlemen, was getting ready for a long trip to various continents to stock the store with marvelous things never before seen, and in this moment, while you lose yourself in the multitudes, I take another look at the store window and affirm that time has stopped inside there, as if that afternoon Pardieu had left to have a beer with the policemen and was about to return.
Yes, he returned, as justice is served—though slowly—and he had, he has had, he has, some days of freedom. He wanted to convert his store into a museum, to leave it intact for when he completed the inevitable sentence. “It’s all I have left after paying the lawyers,” he said to us. Two weeks ago, they told him that tomorrow, at eight sharp, he should report to serve his sentence of three years in a minimum security prison. Tonight, we, his friends, will get together to have a huge farewell celebration for Candide. Let him drink the last glasses of champagne, let him smoke
his Cuban cigars and his joints, let him have his preferred young men.
“Remember that tomorrow I leave public life,” he has confessed to me a few hours ago on the phone, “but I’ll return very soon to this sweet moment, to yesterday.”
“Yes, Candide,” I answered with a lump in my throat. But at this moment I am happy. Surely the limousine has picked him up, after waiting for an hour while Pardieu finishes making up his face. He has put on a white foundation, elongated his eye lines to make them look almond shaped, and accentuated the red of his lips with his favorite liner. With help from some of his lovers, he has put on his dainty shoes and he has gotten into his Mandarin suit. He has his hair pulled back in a little ponytail, and he covers it with some kind of hat that he swears is an original piece.
I calculate that he must be arriving at the meeting spot in a few minutes, to pick up you and me to go together to the Country Club, that old house with discreet salons, billiards, and an enormous pool where the rest of the guests should be bathing in the moonlight. He will make his triumphant entrance a little after midnight to announce again, “I leave tomorrow, I return yesterday,” and to cause everyone to think that the water in the pool has been replaced with champagne.
