Anne Garreta: Sphinx

What did I get out of spending all my time with someone with whom I shared no social, intellectual, or racial community? That was precisely the question troubling them. Black skin, white skin: our looks were against us. Our intimacy went against the mandate dictating that birds of a feather flock together. And this impossible clash of colors produced the general opinion that this was an unnatural union.

In order to stop the scandal, we diluted our dissimilarity by always hanging out in a group. But the people in this crowd tried to detach me from A*** by attempting to convince me that we were fundamentally incompatible. I couldn’t care less that my attachment to my seemingly perfect antithesis was provoking worry and alarm. They complained of A***’s numerous affairs, highlighted A***’s notorious fickleness and capriciousness that would make any real attachment impossible. They charitably forewarned me that I wasn’t A***’s “type,” that we weren’t even of the same species. That if my intention was to turn this friendship into something more, it was best to give up now, and that if, by some misfortune, it had already become something more, it was just as well to break it off now before it dissolved into unpleasantries and pain.

I thoroughly did not care about their opinions, their advice and warnings, their slanders and denigrations. I was well aware of A***’s fickleness, capriciousness, and quickly changing tastes, for I had witnessed all of these traits myself. As for this concert of well-intentioned deceit and charitable denunciations aimed at discouraging me, I was deaf to it all.

One morning at the Kormoran, that final stopover for night owls, an old mobster whom I knew and liked rather more than his congeners saw me enter with A***, called me over to his usual spot at the bar, and, after the customary ceremonious greetings, imparted this strange speech, interspersed with knowing winks:

“You know me. I like you. So listen up. All those idiots, they don’t know anything. Because they see us chatting fairly often and because I seem to know you pretty well, for a week now they’ve been coming to me to complain that you’re mucking around, that you’re out of your mind. That you’re foolishly running after that attractive animal there [gesturing toward A***]. You know what they say to me? That it could never work between whites and blacks…And that, furthermore, you two aren’t compatible…That one’s always dancing, you’re always hitting the books. They come to me desperately seeking an explanation…[He paused to finish his whiskey] But they’ve got it all wrong, I’m telling you…I’ve been observing your conquest for two weeks now…And I know what blacks are like…For ten years I’ve been watching them pass through here…Listen to me: if you keep at it, you will succeed…All those assholes are talking bullshit…Saying that you’re lowering yourself! That’s what they’ve been saying to you, right? When you talk to them, they don’t absorb anything, and so they can’t understand what you see in A***…[He ordered another drink and relit his cigar] But I get what you see…Come back to me in a month and we’ll discuss it again. Because it’s not at all a lost cause, it just takes a bit of time. Yeah? Turn on the charm! Bring out the violins and tutti quanti …It takes time, but you can handle it…Have patience, and by God, you will succeed! And they’ll have to eat their words.”

He firmly grasped my hand after finishing his speech, pronounced in his eternally hoarse voice, rolling the gravel of an accent that rendered him incomprehensible to any ear unaccustomed to the deformations he inflicted on his syllables. The high-end escort keeping him company winked while watching me with a slightly alarmed air. Ruggero, as he called himself, was studying me paternally, a cigar wedged between his teeth, gauging my surprise. “Persevere or you’ll have me to deal with…When you achieve your victory, the champagne is on me. Don’t let yourself be intimidated by the blathering, the scandals, and the bullshit…Now go tend to your love affair.”

I went and found A***, who had no clue about the sermon I had just endured. No doubt others had taken advantage of those ten minutes I had spent with Ruggero to make remarks about how I seemed to want to capture A***’s attention, and more still, at any price. They saw us everywhere together, but no act or gesture allowed them to definitively conclude it had turned into an affair. They didn’t know what to believe, and for them that was insufferable. They would have excused a brisk adventure, without consequence and without tomorrow — what was called in this milieu “getting some ass.” But an attachment that appeared to stem from something other than sex was intolerable.

Ruggero had, however, clumsily formulated what I had been struggling to express myself, without it being, on my part, a conscious project or concerted maneuver. His soliloquy had clarified and simplified the ideas floating around in my head. Indeed, I’m sure that had been his aim. What I was feeling for A*** needed its own embodiment; the pleasure I took in A***’s company demanded its own fulfillment. I wanted A***, it was true, and all my other desires, needs, and plans paled in comparison. Suddenly, the obsessive clamor for amorous possession took hold of me.

I was surprised to find myself desiring, painfully. In a sudden rush of vertigo, I was tantalized by the idea of contact with A***’s skin. I wanted to dismiss, destroy all those who were thronging around A***, keeping this presence from me. I wanted to wrest A*** from their company, from the intrusive glances clinging to us there, and hide us both away. With an unknowingly crazed look, I was always watching this irresistible body. But my gaze was narrowing and stiffening under the tension of carnal desire. That night, A*** was wearing a black silk shirt and white pleated leather pants that showed off a firm behind. A***’s hair, shaved not long ago for the show, was beginning to grow back, materializing as a light shadow. That face, thus restored to its pure nudity, appeared without interference, without anything that could deceptively modify its proportions or veil its imperfections. Its features had retained nothing of A***’s African origins, except for a barely perceptible, sensual heaviness of the mouth.

I don’t know what more to say about this body, although I spent hours contemplating it. But that night, my contemplation was exorbitant, quickly twisting into a desire to take possession…A*** noticed my unusual comportment. I made excuses; I didn’t dare reveal the reason for my turmoil and so I was restraining myself from clearly expressing my feelings. I spent the end of that night in a state of incredible confusion: daggers of desire, scattered snippets of conversation, a fragmented vision of A*** dancing were all assailing me in a blur.

We separated on a street corner with the light kiss on the lips that wasn’t reserved for me alone. Once home, I was unable to fall asleep, although the night had been, per usual, long and draining. But the exhaustion, which, in the stages of desire, typically follows confused excitation, emptied me of all energy, of even that energy required to sleep. I was turning over in my bed as one might collapse onto a body in the heat of a furious embrace. I was tortured by the memory of A***’s scent, by the residual imprint, barely there, of a shoulder resting against my own this morning as we spoke. The ghost of A***’s presence against mine; a hand poised for a moment on my face, our thighs pressed together in a cramped space. I had the sensation in my flesh of contact with those limbs, no longer there; the effect lingered long after its source had disappeared, retaining the same intensity. A hallucinatory sensation, as if my body had suffered an amputation. This sensation that, even after the split, the separation of our two bodies kept scalding me, kept me awake. I oscillated the entire morning between the rage of embracing only a void, and the memory, the bliss of an instant, of the past night that I was trying so hard mentally to recompose.