The following is from a work-in-progress, and not an excerpt from a finished work.
When I upbraided the Chilean for going hot and cold on me, and demanded he meet me in person, he told me that it had always been implicit that our thing was like a game of hide and seek, and that I was being ridiculous to imagine anything else. Enraged, I told him that whoever had accused him online must have been right. But what would I have accused him of? His hysteria laid a charge that could not be imputed: he didn’t lay a finger on me. He didn’t seek me out any more than I did him. Could I accuse him of abusing of my expectations? Does such a charge exist? Would it be fraud, theft?
Meanwhile – for a part of me – it was convenient to cling to the #MeToo rumour and use it as a reason to flee; I have a good measure of paranoia that needs feeding. There was a period when I was young that I thought I’d been born with a handicap and that no one had told me nor intended to do so. I had the idea that they cunningly made me believe I went to a school for normal girls. Perhaps my mother and father were handicapped too and the deceit came from my grandparents. What would the normal people be like? How many things would they think about that I never would?
Sometimes I suspected that the Chilean’s wife knew the plot or was a part of it; that he showed her our conversations and they laughed together or mocked me. Then I discarded this suspicion and believed him when he told me: ‘She doesn’t know about you. All she knows is that I’m an admirer.’ I reckoned she pretended not to know. I’ve also thought that she does know, but not because he tells her, and I’ve been wracked by jealousy and guilt picturing the punishments she deals out on her man for his infidelities, and the praise with which, when she sees him defeated, she butters him up. I’ve imagined that he tells her everything backwards. I’ve imagined that he tells her everything that I don’t know straight.
If she knew more than me, then I’ve lived in China, between the two of them, like in the dreams I don’t remember. There, I’m lost. The invisible and extreme violence of becoming a dream of myself. That other life.
I imagined him telling his wife, my unknown reader, as he showed her our dialogues and left my spoils at her feet: ‘Take this flower, these long fingers of my ardour. Enjoy, for I submit to you the madness of such ignoble lady, from the far side of the Earth.’
I have conceived this scene: he rises early, dresses and lies back down on the bed, on top of the duvet, his shoes on, one ankle crossed over the other, looking at his phone. She hasn’t got up yet. He wakes her because the show has just begun: me, lying down in bed in Bogotá to masturbate to our conversation. She’s half-asleep, but as he reads her my answers, she begins to get excited. I arouse her. I’m her arouser. Does she dictate or write some of the phrases I read as if they were written by him? I serve for her excitement.
I have also thought that when he wrote to me that he was touching himself reading my words, he was actually ironing a shirt. Later he’d reread the messages and get aroused on his own, or reread them and feel the desire to have sex with his wife. Or in reality, he didn’t get aroused at all by what I wrote, but was stirred up – even enraged – by the power of telling me things that drove me crazy.
I have felt the fear that, at the same time as our affair, he was writing to other women; that he copy-pasted the fantasies I wrote into other chats, and copied for me the ideas he stole from another.
The game, in any case, was reading.
I imagine myself telling one of the girlfriends I don’t have: ‘Perhaps we only do things we know we can regret. So that we can have the option of choosing not to regret. To have the illusion of that power, and time and again be reminded of our impotence in the face of time.’
I imagine her asking me: ‘Isn’t it also a form of violence what you are doing to him by imagining things about him and writing them down, turning him into someone in a book? Isn’t it an extreme form of possession? Do you mean to be his author?’
I tell her that he was my author, and that I mean to be my author too. That this drama is a rainstorm of reflections.
My beloved told me: ‘I can’t believe that you love me.’
And he told me: ‘I don’t fit inside myself.’
Yet he didn’t want to be beside me outside of dreams. He didn’t want to leave himself. He didn’t want us to meet in the world of the four elements. I’m not complaining because he killed me, I’m complaining because he killed me without having felt me live.
She taught her mid-morning class on Romeo and Juliet again and went back to bed for the invocation of the flesh, like someone goes to an altar to invoke the spirit. She wrote: ‘I’m lying down. Give me an instruction.’ He ordered her: ‘Run your finger around your lips with your index finger; with your other hand run your finger around your other lips.’ She wrote: ‘I’m wet.’ He: ‘You’re soaking.’ She: ‘I’m making the bed wet.’ He told her to caress her face ‘the way I would’ and to put the other hand between her legs. ‘Rub yourself with your whole hand, but don’t put your fingers inside. Now, feel how I’m entering, slowly.’ She said ‘You’re so hard.’ He asked her to climb on top. She said she was going to lower her hips for him to get further inside. He wrote ‘I’m all in the way in.’ She told him she was putting a finger in his mouth. Two fingers. He: ‘Your whole hand. It’s your cock I’m sucking.’ She: ‘Eat it up.’ He: ‘Now I need your mouth,’ and asked her not to swallow all the imaginary semen. ‘I want to taste myself in your mouth. I want a drop of it on my tongue.’ Then he told her he was carrying her in his arms. ‘I love you so much.’ He didn’t say where he was taking her. He asked her not to stop touching herself as he carried her. He wrote that she should open wide her eyes and look at him while she came, but since they weren’t looking at each other on the screen she wondered whether what she was supposed to do as she came was open wide her eyes and look at the phrase ‘Open wide your eyes’.
When I told him that if we weren’t going to see each other we shouldn’t write any longer, he wrote: ‘I greatly regret that what began as a literary crush has turned out this way.’
Sometimes I forget about the pain. Sometimes I try to revive it with disdain. Sometimes it reemerges as jealousy and impatience, when I touch myself between my legs. With my eyes closed I touch the centre in an anticlockwise direction, that is, in the direction taken by the sun. More than circles, the movements of my hand are the ratification of a point. I touch myself the way I write this repetitive book, which folds up and unfolds itself; which wants to reach the well-placed caress and with that caress touch somewhere else: this book that takes the shape of a woman masturbating.
Take this image: he decides to come to Bogotá. One day he tells his wife he’s fallen prey to his feelings, etc., or makes up a story about an invitation to a book fair, or that he has to go to Chile to settle some real estate, and why should they both go, if they’ll be back soon on holiday, what with Chile being in such a mess, and so he turns up at your place, suitcase in hand. From then on, every morning, his face on your pillow: that unhappiness of constancy, which is another form of unhappiness of absence, since you are spending time with him yet don’t know where he is. For no one can see the routes of another’s heart.
Visualise it, as they say. Look at this entry of the other world into this one; the entry of this world of words into this one, that of cows and of explosions. It feels insufficient, like the tears, the laughter, or the orgasms we remember from dreams. It feels like that inspired phrase that came to you in the dream, the one that in the transition to wakefulness seems to be nothing less than the key to your book, yet when you open your eyes you realise it is nothing but cold ashes.
You’re going to pick him up from the airport, and right away the smell of him is too much for you. His material existence makes you feverish. His being beside you. You’re nauseous at his corporeality. You walk together through your garden in the mountains, and you see the garden turn to dust behind him. Where should you walk, then? He has acquaintances in your country: men of letters. He wants you to meet them. He invites you to a cocktail party at the Chilean embassy. He finds your city detestable. For you too, Bogotá is a disgrace. But you don’t need him to tell you that. Should you stroll along Carrera Trece, to breathe in the smog? You take him to the Gold Museum, for him to see those magnificent gestures of the Sun at the very centre of this ill-starred life. So now you’ve taken him to the Gold Museum. Your friends thought he was a piece of shit. They couldn’t bear how condescending he was towards you. Now what. A Chinese restaurant? Take your dog for a walk on the lawns of the National University. Eight times round the lawns of the National University. He doesn’t like dogs and can’t hide it. The fact he doesn’t like dogs makes you wary. Wariness isn’t enough to love someone. You’ve already talked about Huidobro. You’ve already exhausted the exchange of information and the sharing of illustrations. You ask him about China and he says: ‘Where do I start?’ So you get him to talk about his wife. You tell him that she’s the one he really loves. That he doesn’t really want to be in Bogotá with you. You’re weeping as you say it. He swears it’s not true, that he’s with you. And so the rot begins. You set in motion your machine for being alone.
The suitcase he turned up at your house with is horribly twee: super-expensive, made from the skin of a slaughtered cow or bull, festooned with the monogram of the brand. And sometimes he puts in dark contact lenses, an eccentric gesture to conceal his blue eyes. He explains (as if this were explicable) that his grandmother’s eyes were as black as coal, but he didn’t inherit them, and you already know this because one day he sent a picture of his grandparents on their honeymoon, which you took as a sign of his adoration. So he strolled his black lying eyes around your bit and spat on your imagination.
I told him: ‘You’re my good luck charm.’
And he: ‘That’s what I want to be.’
And me: ‘My talisman.’
And he: ‘What joy.’
They never met.
In reality, the cause of your suffering doesn’t exist.
Nothing happened.
Why out of all the relationships you’ve had – passion and friendship and love and solidarity – are you choosing this mess for your book? Precisely because of the absence and the distance. Because we never looked at each other without a screen between us, this was the relationship that pointed me to a book. He was like the angel of the Annunciation, the allegory of all inspirations. For me to engender this book, this muddled fruit that does not aspire to be the tree of knowledge, I made it matter to me until it reached boiling point.
Or possibly I made it matter to me so much so that I could teach my course on Shakespeare with more love.
Carolina Sanín was born in Bogotá. She is author of the novels Todo en otra parte (2005), Los niños (2014, translated by Nick Caistor as The Children) and Tu cruz en el cielo desierto (2020, forthcoming from Charco Press as Your Cross in the Desert Sky, translated by Fionn Petch), the book of short stories Ponqué y otros cuentos (2010), the books of humour Yosoyu (2013) and Alto rendimiento (2016), and the children’s books Dalia (2010) and La gata sola (2018), among others. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Literature from the University of Yale. She has taught literature at SUNY Purchase, the Universidad de Los Andes and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She has written for El Espectador, semana.com, Semana Sostenible, Credencial, Vice and Arcadia. In 2019 she staged the performance Actos de la ignorancia (Acts of Ignorance) at the Salón Nacional de Artistas in Colombia, and played the lead role in the film Litigante, by Franco Lolli, which opened the Semaine de la Critique at Cannes.
Fionn Petch is a Scottish-born translator from Spanish, French and Italian. He lived in Mexico City for 12 years, where he completed a PhD in Philosophy at the UNAM, and now lives in Berlin. His translations of Latin American literature for Charco Press have been widely acclaimed. Fireflies by Luis Sagasti was shortlisted for the Translators’ Association First Translation Award 2018. The Distance Between Us by Renato Cisneros received an English PEN Award in 2018. A Musical Offering, also by Luis Sagasti, was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2021 and won the Society of Authors Premio Valle Inclán 2021 for best translation from Spanish.
minor literature[s] 