Whence It Is Deduced That There Are Other Beings Equally Happenful
Luisa Valenzuela
(translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Tittler)
THE WOLVES
They always hunt in packs and the full
moon helps by showing them the tracks of a good prey. When it snows,
or still better when it’s
cold out, they sit in their solitary unconfinement in front of macrobiotic
eateries from which issues the delicious odor of sesame oil and whole-wheat
bread, which form the staple of their victims’ diets. They love
them like that, wrapped in furs and without a gram of impurity, not
even under their fingernails. They love them and they unlove them,
of course, that’s why they rip them apart with their kisses and
then sire in them children who will be wolf cubs as blond as the sesame
oil and whole grain of their dietary rituals.
The females have a child and another and another, until they come upon the
right one; the one who will tear out their guts, leaving them empty and finally
halting the assembly line, the ceaseless production of ferocious and fertile
wolf-men.
To hunt they have to join the pack, to be supported by the others so as to
conquer those females who are the earth itself, with oil wells and unfathomable
mines and given riches that the man on the street doesn’t even suspect.
And the females, moaning slightly, let themselves be had, let their depths
be plumbed, believing it’s love, aid from foreign powers.
The males prod with pleasure in their deep depressions and extract the heavy
oils from their breasts. Then they depart like wolves, satiated and shadowy,
leaving the females prostrate, at the mercy of parasitic worms that are their
inhabitants—the stable population of the winter months, the white of
the snow packed corrosively into their entrails. With snowflake worms that
have two little eyes to see what’s happening inside.
It’s the eighteenth hexagram of the I’ Ching, a bowl that enriches
the California soils when summer comes and the blacks wake up and in whose
contents worms breed. The blacks haven’t a clue about the worms, they
live a larval life that caresses the backs of their flanks and keeps them docile.
Sometimes the caress becomes a punch and the blacks jump up with a start, forgetting
the sage principles of peace. I don’t know how to treat them, what an
enigmatic gaze they deserve. I do know how to go out and meet them, however,
to grope the great big hands with which they strike and to channel their hate
so it doesn’t disperse.
On a windowless train we are traveling across the vast continent, absorbing
hatred. It’s good to feel that there are still vibrant passions, just
like in the old days. We travel on the train during the day and at night we
tote the furnaces with the hatred of the people who have been adhering to our
sides. Hatred and resentment are a good fuel, we’re moving along at a
brisk pace and very few obstacles slow us down—an occasional hungry child,
a dog that howls without knowing why they’ve put out its eyes.
Inside the train is black in order to confuse the roofs with the floors, and
lights that are also black cast glints of the few colors we sport. Each of
us has a painted face: orange and green, white that is purple, or yellow. We
call each other by the name of those very colors. Purple, I say to the white
one knowing that white is a word that ought not be pronounced. Purple, are
we there yet?
On the train he’s in charge: holding a whip in his fist he answers: there
yet or not, none of your business, we are staying our course, executing the
plan to go everywhere.
Our train runs along rails that disappear behind us. Our wheels grind, they’re
made of a metal that cools with friction. We are traveling blind on this train,
frozen. We don’t know the number of passengers. I suspect that more and
more are getting on all the time, below there are very few left to tolerate
us. At times there is some contact among us: a frozen hand rubs my cheek, an
inquisitorial finger probes within me. I would like to roll around and rock
to the rhythm of our movement, but nothing of that sort is permitted. I lose
all autonomy on this train of hate, which does not displease me: at times you
have to let yourslef go with the flow, to sail the sweet seas of the unwilled.
I’d like to be a slave some time and not have to make decisions. So I
gallop along on this dark train headed toward night, toward the exact place
where the wolves are hunting and ardently waiting for me.
* * *
THE MASKABLE ONE
The expanding wave reaches my territory,
wrapped in a bandage of moans. The laments leave an impression on
my blood and I put cotton
in my ears so as not to run to aid the needy. It’s never easy
to side with the sweet indifference of the hourglass, some obligation
always blocks our way, some shudder of remorse.
While everyone is afraid for their lives he knows that death doesn’t
settle anything, it’s crucial to be at the ready and always to land the
first blow. He takes to the street when he needs space, when he needs time
he swallows the clocks; he doesn’t have the slightest metaphysical angst
and he is, in his own way, happy.
He has two beady little quail-like eyes, the pointy ears of a wolf pup, javelina
fangs, all well stored in their little flasks in the refrigerator. The smell
of formaldehyde runs through his veins and he pays scientific attention to
the most archaic methods of embalming.
To make a mask for himself he has not taken a single human feature. Neither
the blonde’s watery, near-sighted eyes nor the tongue of Abel, that whip-lashing
scourge. Despite the fact that he cared for them both: he could have identified
deeply with her eyes and with Abel’s tongue.
This is a simple little story
Of jealousy, almost devoid of perversions. |
He read an ad in the paper: Pleasant young couple seeks handsome
young man to form threesome.
First of all he looked at himself in the mirror. He calculated his
golden proportions, he trimmed his beard: he knew it wasn’t a
matter of deceiving others. At last he felt certain of his good looks
and posted the letter. As we have
already said, he had no metaphysical problems. Neither moral nor of any other
sort, once the aesthetic ones were settled.
It was that night when he began his transformation, and tonight he is to finish
it.
He thinks of nothing while he turns into a mask, although he did try on for
size the most daring theories before getting to know her and Abel lying in
bed on top of a synthetic fur. A bed that gave off sparks, a living bed that
reacted to stimuli. He finally fell in love with the bed, not with the blonde
or with Abel as would have been expected, but with that bed that was as round
and soft as a hen. It wasn’t easy for a man like him to confess his love
for a bed. To be sure, it is important to take into account his lack of principles,
his total absence of moral values.
At first he thought the bed was responding to his advances. And he feigned
being stuck on some uncooperative button in order to listen to whether it was
groaning under the weight of the blonde or of Abel, as it would do later, when
he penetrated her. Later he tried by all manner and means to distance them
from the bed in order to hear the grunts dedicated to him alone. What fascinated
him the most were the sparks, and he ran to switch off the light, despite how
much he liked to see the blonde from the front and Abel from the rear. And
they were so affectionate with him, but he only dodged their kisses in order
to get down to the bed.
This is why we now find him awash in contrition, taking recourse to miserable
subterfuge in order to cease being a man and to turn into an entity that is
respected by the deaf dignity of a beloved bed. And doing everything possible
to quash his anger: the bed, always white with its tense synthetic fur, had
learned to grunt with more solemnity under Abel’s weight than under his
own. And the blonde managed to tease remote vibrations out of the elastic that
seemed to issue from its entrails.
And so Abel and the blonde—who were only interested in rolling in the
hay—came little by little to acquire the dull hue of the enemy.
Murder bears within itself its own detriment:
He choked the blonde with Abel’s member, he wrung Abel’s neck to
smother his screams, and he eventualy left in utter anonymity as he had entered,
without arousing suspicion—after burning the letter—, for a man
so correct as he would never answer the call of an underground newspaper.
And in the reproachless silence of his house he surrenders to frightful
concoctions in order to cement his mask and thus, disintegrated, to
be able to free her again from the burden of the other two submerged
in death.
That is what is so terrible, so upsetting: repentance now comes without advance
warning. All he wants to hear is the song of the bed when it squeaks with joy,
and he knows that by a tactical error he has left it flattened, overwhelmed
beneath the weight of two beings who lost their lightness in losing their lives.
He will have to learn levitation in order to save his bed. He’ll have
to turn himself into a lascivious little bug to hover over it, to lose himself
forever in the visceral folds of its mattress or in the intimate loft of its
pillows.
* * *
1970 — Iowa City, NY, Mex. D.F., Buenos Aires — 1971
1998 — Auckland — 1999
* * *
(From the novel Deathcats)
© Luisa Valenzuela
© Jonathan Tittler, English translation
