As my eyes moved in that straight line, tracing a meridional incision through the mountains, I saw, at the far end of a chain of hills like breasts, the famous half-ruined house of Don Julián Acosta,61 a tormented oral poet who, having achieved a certain renown in the city, had opted for a life of asceticism (and later, alcoholism) in the mountains; famous because his door was open to every weary walker, every lost hiker. Until one night he emerged from that very door like a soul possessed by the devil and disappeared into the mountains beneath a raging moon. The house remained uninhabited (it’s said) because people were afraid of it. I thought, just to be contrary, that we might ‘have ourselves a little climb’ if the day was going to be as long as the tardy position of the sun implied. It should be noted that Don Julián’s house was perched on what was known as ‘Ninth Hill’, the last step: a lone breast, and flat besides.
In the valley, dominated by the largest bush, almost unmoving in their contented rumination, were fourteen black-and-white cows. Cowpats were abundant, fresh and flourishing. And around the beasts, following an obsessive circular route, never taking their eyes off the ground, crouching from time to time to pick speckled mushrooms, was a pair of gringos.
And so there we headed.
What had happened? Why, why this sudden fear? The body of a tiny woman as young as I, but naked, ravaged and clinging to my body. And I was running. I was fleeing through this wretched land and she, though weaker, fled, climbing up my body. What had happened? A knife sheathed in blood. Was there a body lying next to the bush, a body already dead and rotting in the sun? And on what did they walk, my bare feet?62 Human teeth, ivory-looking teeth.63 Why did she not stop weeping over me; when would Bárbaro stop? Why did the sun not ascend the heavens, why was time suspended? Why were we not running better?
‘Clock, don’t mark the hours.’ I thought just now as I was writing: ‘I have no reason to hide anything. My conscience is a suspended veil.’
‘Hola!’ we called in chorus, offering our sweetest, our most dazzling smiles.
The gringo guy turned out to be exactly as Bárbaro had hoped and his girlfriend was pretty, a babe, from the moment I set eyes on her. Not exactly a gringa, as she explained: ‘Puerto Rican.’ She lived in Miami, spoke perfect Spanish, and so we redoubled, retripled our smiles like crazed crows. They showed no fear because, as she put it, ‘we had appeared as one more extension of space’, and she gave me a thin, bold smile that said, ‘Sorry if I ramble when we’re talking, I’m pretty much off my face,’ and I stared intently, fondly, into her eyes and after a while, as a joke, I swung my head in a circle to watch as her pupils gradually dilated – oh, the poor little green of your eyes.
And now she was running over my body. Escaping from herself into me? I was running too, I wanted to lose myself, but we were both running in vain. To truly escape would mean ripping our heads off.
Faced with such a harvest, ‘bonanza’, Bárbaro felt ready for a ‘onefellswoop’ and he started talking about ’shrooms, which made him angry. Had they eaten many? ‘Seven each.’
‘That’s the base,’ said Bárbaro. ‘The masterly, magical number.’ And he was thinking, ‘Too bad, gringos, I’m going to fuck up your trip, you’re in for a bad ride.’ And he said, ‘Cool, isn’t it? Feeling like you’ve got no bones, no legs, everything falling away, constantly peaking.’ And he was thinking, ‘Shouldn’t have strayed so far past the bridge and the woods. But right here we’re going to be bosom buddies. Ah, the memories of my attacks. Aaargh, but I don’t want to go back to the city to the same comedown. I’d rather take a one-way trip. No one will hear them if they scream for help.’ And he said, ‘Best thing about it is they’re free, am I right? I’ll bet you’ve only spent about twenty of our paltry pesos to get here and now here you are, stuffing your faces, out of your heads in the middle of paradise.’ And he thought, ‘Paradise lost, as far as it goes,’ and then said so.
The gringo caught on, but didn’t know how to react. Bárbaro’s eyes had misted over. Knowing the kicking and punching was about to start, I reached out to the girl, and I smiled – a pretty smile, I think – running my fingers through two beads of sweat, one at the root of her hair, the other just above the swell of her small breasts. She felt the transfiguration of pleasurable feelings and brazenly reached out and clutched my hand; she looked as though she were trying to flay her lips (which were chapped) the way she bit them, the slut. I hoped that Bárbaro wouldn’t launch into the violence just yet.
Because he was saying, ‘A pure, uncultivated product, vegetal even, and worst of all, it’s free. You know, you were right to get here early. Later in the day the whole area is crawling with witless hordes of mushroom-eaters. They get here at four in the morning so they can lick the sap from the tree bark, all dressed in white and wearing faggoty shit. What really fucks me off about these people is their gutless laziness.’
The pretty pelada, María Iata Bayó her name was, slipped a hand into her ethnic bag (exactly the same as mine, we’d already commented on the coincidence) and said to me, ‘I bet you can’t guess what we’ve got here,’ with an accent like she was from Bogotá, and she showed me a couple of mushrooms, their stalks entwined – they looked so sweet, so tender. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘a male and a female’; the male clearly had a little prick, while the bell-shaped female was the colour of flesh, and Bárbaro became angrier and his eyes began to quiver and he said, ‘They come in couples so they can be gobbled up, united together against the Swinish Amoeba.’
And the girl said, ‘Why don’t we eat the two of them?’
And I laughed, picturing the scene: the two of us hurling ourselves on Bárbaro and the fat gringo under the sex-transmuting effects of the brutal 45rpm, teeth bared, sinking into the rich, sweet, thick fat beneath the sun.
To justify my laughter, I accepted: we separated male from female. I wrung the neck of the male. The mushroom tasted of clammy, fragrant earth and I felt the painful furrow it left as I swallowed. She must have realized this was my first time (can you believe that, gentle reader?) and took a flask of ice-cold lemon juice from her bag. So I went on chewing little ’shrooms, washing them down with this intense juicy freshness. I ate more than a dozen, I lost count, and all this time Bárbaro was looking at me reproachfully. Finally I shrugged in a gesture of independence, a ‘So what?’ Then, brusquely, he turned his back on me and took maybe three steps towards the large bush, crouched down over some fresh cow dung and came back all smiles, with another little couple in his hand. He looked at me greedily, cleaned the root of the mushrooms and swallowed the female whole. He offered me the male and I ate it very slowly, carefully observing the black stripe, the strange pulp, the speckled gills and the spaces between them, my focus and gaze increasingly microscopic. I felt the girl’s hand alight on my shoulder then fall away. Thinking about it objectively, her warm hand had emerged from my mane of hair. And my skin does not baulk at a challenge.
‘Sexy little pelada,’ said Bárbaro crudely. ‘Not something you could say about the fat tub of lard she came mushroom hunting with.’ And he licked his fingers, black with pure psilocybin.
I flashed the fat guy a look. I enjoyed seeing him as the words rolled and collided in his head; the penny finally dropped and his eyes grew wide like a fish on scorching sands. His girl didn’t look at him and, weirdly, she gave a soft laugh. Was she on our side? And what side was that? I had no time to find an answer and she had no time to give one, because Bárbaro whipped out his knife and tossed it to me. And right then, María Iata threw a punch that hit me right in the face. I found myself on the ground and I happily dropped the knife and hurled myself at her like a she-wolf, gave her a swift elbow to the jaw, played a military tattoo with my feet on her shins and her belly. Bárbaro passed me the knife, and I hadn’t finished with the girl yet, but I heard: ‘Let’s get her to strip for our degenerate pleasure
. Like in Man of the West.’64
So many lines of sight meeting. The fat guy opened his eyes wide and that earned him a headbutt right between those vacant eyeballs. ‘Don’t you open your eyes at me, fuckhead,’ said Bárbaro, now a ball of fury, pounding him into the ground until I began to think it was high time I said, ‘Stop it now.’ Then he turned towards us. The gringo managed to shield himself, throwing himself face down on the ground where he huddled, a quivering mass of melancholy staring at the infinite green stretching out before him, at every jagged, ragged blade of grass in the vastness of the valley: would he be searching in the distance for something he had mislaid, for some new magic mushroom?
‘Listen up,’ said Bárbaro. Because María was waiting, breathing very slowly. Faced with such dazzling beauty lying helpless now before me, my smile twisted and became pitiless and I made little jabs with the knife where earlier I’d run my finger through two identical beads of sweat. They might have been sweeter that the first, I did not taste them. But the point of the blade was hot against my fingers and I flushed away her pearl of sweat with razor-sharp gentleness and, with an artless movement of her shoulders, she welcomed this caress.
She was about to take off her striped ‘Lady Manhattan’ blouse. Knowing she intended to unbutton it in a slow, sexy fashion, I became impatient and slashed off the row of buttons to speed things up a bit. The blouse fell open – and how! – revealing a beautiful expanse of cinnamon skin, perfect ribs and a chest like a boy’s.
My mouth must have fallen open because she smiled mockingly, justifiably, proudly. Then Bárbaro, for no reason, without even looking down, very aahhh – ictus interruptus – lashed out with his heel at the coccyx, at the neck of the lump of lard who, by my reckoning, probably thought he’d been safely forgotten. The crack! echoed around the valley but the fat gringo accepted the heel embedded in his flesh without a whimper.
Bárbaro looked at us lewdly. Thinking this was funny, I made a gesture that said ‘slowly, slowly’: María Bayó had lost and that frightened her. She ran one hand over her face and then the other, and closed her eyes as though to hold back tears.
‘No, don’t do that,’ I said, moved, filled with joyful tenderness, and rushing over to her, I stroked her pretty head.
‘Do I have to get undressed?’ she whispered in my ear like a naughty girl.
‘Yes,’ said Bárbaro, taking the knife from me.
At this she cracked, took her arms from around me, unbuttoned her jeans and let them fall so I could see. She seemed almost relieved as she slipped off her pants.
I stepped away from her and rejoined my friend in the deep silence of her beauty. A silence Bárbaro broke with a sudden whack! that made the body sprawled on the grass shudder.
In that moment I felt weary as I realized that violence blooms when led on by beauty. The pure exhilaration of brute violence, the kind that nothing can satisfy. I felt a fleeting terror at this thought, but prepared myself to accept whatever happened. Let’s teeter over hell itself. If you fall it’s because you’ve filled yourself to bursting with remorse.
In that moment, we kick-started our destiny again. If I moved closer to this naked body and stroked it, if I kissed and sucked this skin, these mounds and hollows, the convexities and concavities, wouldn’t every action produce a mirror image, an equal and horrifying reaction in the other body that lay sprawled, ugly, incapable of fighting, at our feet? But could that body even think? Could it feel pain? It was as though already it could not.
‘Turn him over, yeah?’ I said to Bárbaro and he did so with his feet. All right, the gringo’s face was covered in grass and itch mites65 and foul earth, his features were flushed purple with effort like those of any mute, but as Bárbaro turned him over, he suddenly opened his eyes and they moved blankly over our bodies (I felt unappreciated), then up towards the mountain, before his gaze finally settled on the beak of the condor.
Bárbaro enjoyed the sight of this body. He licked his lips, brought his hands to his face, rubbing it, stimulating it, took a deep breath and simply waited for the two of us to perform the deadly ritual of beauty.
I asked for permission to take María Iata a few metres away: we did not want to have to listen to the whimpering of that mess of bones swathed in bruised and battered flesh. Bárbaro agreed, smiling but a little wary. ‘But don’t go hiding behind a bush,’ he warned. ‘I need to be able to see you, otherwise what’s the point.’
So we chose a patch of waste ground within the vast immensity of wasteland in which we found ourselves. María Iata Bayó wrapped her arms around me gently, without complaining, without crying, making a soft sound like a brzzzzzzzz which alarmed me because at first I thought it came from inside my head. But it was simply that I was breathing the same air and could inhabit that same skin, the furious fricative sound of possible and imminent communion. We stared at each other, separated only by a millimetre: the tiny points of red in her eyes so green, the moistness of my lips, the twigs of strawberry tree in my hair and our dilated pores like dried-up swimming pools and licking, ouuuuuuuf, in a wild deranged desire that made everything around us a reason for our lust, for ourselves, summoning lifeboats as we drowned in every pore, sucking ruin from the maelstrom of our veins, drunk on the scent of downy hair, robbed of words, all perception of the world reduced to this single act, everything is mine, every fold of flesh and every languid frizzy hair, the cheekbones flushed with pleasure, knowing, perhaps, that faced with another barrage of phosphorus, the brain would have to look away from you and think of something else, the mind fleeing because it cannot resist, the fingernails buried in every fold of flesh, the tip of the tongue exploring places that neither she nor I knew existed, both of us so pink and so whorled inside, but I was the more powerful: I pinned her to the ground, stroked her, opened her, penetrated her and cursed her: ‘You’ll never be a good girl now, because you’ll forever be haunted by the memory of this playful swallow, this seven-phallused snail, this bitter, coclí66 feather I’ve got inside you.’
Oh, Camilo José Cela, who freed himself from his shackles at the age of fifty.67
I got to my feet, still bathed in her – tremendously proud, obviously, because of the powers that welled in me – and I walked back recklessly towards Bárbaro. Barely had I taken three steps when I heard her whimpering from behind me, begging me not to leave her. But I wasn’t prepared for what was I was about to see.
The gringo was bolt upright, but for his head, which was slumped on one shoulder. Sitting in a pool of his own blood. The knife had been planted in his navel. And I didn’t miss a thing: I noticed that all around his shoes were various small white things, freakish shapes and bloody roots. Probably while I was counting María’s eyelashes one by one, my friend had pulled out every tooth in his head.
I didn’t try to understand. I simply thought I had to get her away from here so she wouldn’t see this. But even as I turned, her howl hit me full in the face. Terrified, I answered with a howl of my own and a ‘Fuck!’ And I shook her by the shoulders and, after a long while (during which the sun didn’t move a millimetre in the sky), she seemed to become calm and detached. But as soon as I let her go, she screamed again, without form, without purpose, without thought of duration. I grabbed her forcefully by the hand and dragged her away. Feeling herself being led, she became calm again. And so we walked, with great courage, to where Bárbaro sat.
He was sitting in the perfect position of a mystic, focusing all his powers on the largest bush.
What was he trying to do? There was no point wondering: he began to grind his teeth, covered his ears as though he didn’t want to hear the murmur of the whirring going on in his brain. Except that as he shielded himself from all sound, he set two parallel lines buzzing in my head, one much shriller than the other. María must have felt it too because she broke away from me and collapsed on the g
round. I turned my head and rolled my eyes, but hell itself had taken up residence in my entrails. I tried to move closer to Bárbaro, but it was worse. When I retreated, the storm and the intestinal inferno began to subside. Bárbaro’s skin was cracked like an ancient clay jug, like the skin of Monsieur Valdemar,68 and still he didn’t take his eyes from the bush. And it seemed to me that the bush began to quiver (there was not a breath of wind), the leaves began to rustle, the branches to move.
Was it possible? Whatever was happening, Bárbaro’s hair stood on end (who has ever seen a long Indian mane stand completely on end?), and as his face began to suck in the hollows of his cheeks, his hair grew tauter and, with the noise of a sharpened knife, flew off into the arid air and rained down, curling again, likes ashes from some distant volcano.
Again the bush quivered. Do you understand me when I say that Bárbaro was wasting all the vital energy of his seventeen years on a simple attempt to move this bush by force of will? Could it be that he was confronting something so small? Deep inside me, the flesh and the mud of this valley crackled; María Iata had already buried her face in the ground. Bárbaro sent up a curse to the heavens but clung fast to the earth as though before and behind him a hurricane was struggling to unseat him. The bush veered from pale red to flame black, shook its branches wildly and moved forward several centimetres. Another tremor and it folded in on itself the better to draw itself up and charge like a enraged boar straight at Bárbaro. I did not baulk. Bárbaro managed to give a yell of triumph before realizing the plant was not going to stop at his feet – in fact it was already upon him, it knocked him over and, with a bound, planted itself in his belly. My friend threw his arms and his legs wide and went completely limp, rivers of pleasure murmuring as his entrails gave up their sap to feed the plant, causing it to bring forth heavy, pink moonflowers that (many years later, people would say) brought intoxication and illumination.
Liveforever Page 17
