Armonía Somers - The Naked Woman

“And did you see them together, pink eye, or is that just what he told you?”

“Both. My brother told me when he came to visit us for Christmas. He brought me a toy, one with a sticker and everything.”

“Mine!” the freckled boy screamed, pouncing on the apple that had just been thrown to the ground.

The pale boy sprang on top of him.

“Boys, in the name of God, be careful! I didn’t mean to throw it to you!”

The boy was losing his baby teeth, but this didn’t prevent him from taking a hearty bite. The risk of a spanking was nothing compared to his determination to lose his innocence.

“They won’t eat them at home,” said his mother, looking miserably at the fruit. “They must have heard about the marks. But why?”

The boy’s naïveté only enhanced the strange atmosphere. Suddenly, people began to burst out laughing, the wave of hilarity spreading through each family in turn. Everyone laughed in their own way: some grabbed their bellies, others showered their neighbors in saliva, while others almost wet themselves.

“See?” the freckled boy said with the last seed still in his mouth, resuming their argument. “She still has the branch she touched me with. Now she’s tickling the soles of my feet, but no one can see her. Last night my mom and dad spent hours giggling under the sheets. They started up after she left my room. Did you hear anything?”

The pale boy had nothing to compare with his adversary’s account. In addition to having to hear about his romance with the transparent woman, now he had to put up with the sight of him wolfing down the apple without sharing.

“Nothing to say?” the freckled boy taunted, picking pieces of fruit from between his teeth.

Humiliation and impotence were eating away at the albino boy in the usual way, but now they were exacerbated by other, more subtle factors. Not only was he different from the others in that he was vulnerable to sunlight, but he had been dim-witted enough to sleep through an electric night like the one just past, when an incandescent fairy had been on the loose. His image of her was shaped by his own fantasies, with all the freedoms afforded by such an existence.

“No, nothing!” he said, like a little milk-fed demon. “But take this, and this, and this…” He bit into the other boy’s earlobe, buried his knee in his stomach, and scratched wherever he could: each “this” diligently inflicted by a white tomcat with no hope of finding love on this green earth.

They had to be separated in the same way as the twins: with a bucket of water over their heads. Then the women began to gather their things. They needed to get back: they had left their men alone in their vulnerable homes.

The Naked Woman finally arrived at the edge of the thicket. Now she could see the village beyond the milking sheds and backyards. Her hair got tangled in the last defensive line of thorns: a bush that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. “They don’t want me to leave just yet,” she reassured herself. “After all the trouble they’ve gone to in revealing their secrets to me, they’d suckle me for the rest of their lives on their tart, bitter juices. Two or three more days and I’d become one of them, a degree of intimacy that it would take me years to achieve in a normal relationship. But why remember when it’s always better to forget…”

She shook herself free, leaving several parts of herself behind in the branches and taking some of the bushes with her. She walked on, but the grass in the clearing burned her feet. It had been basking in the sun and although it had looked soft from afar, it turned out to be rough and full of sharp little spines that pricked her already tender skin.

Yet again, she ignored her physical discomfort. She had come to find something, something hard to describe, she mentally explained to the little monsters digging into her flesh—stones, thorns, and stingers—something that didn’t appear to have an entry in the well-ordered columns of the dictionary. She would never be able to say that she had found it, or at least not, “I have it, its name is…” But she sensed inside of her that it was alive and would release a power sufficient for escape, for rupture. To get away, it didn’t matter where, to break the chains that others brandish like a beggar exhibiting his wounds. No small matter, don’t you think? I’m like someone searching for a bird that never existed even though they can hear it singing every day. On their day off, they pick up their cage and sun hat and say goodbye to the domestic world for a few hours. But then they don’t come back. “Why don’t they return?” everything they have left behind asks for a while. But the solitary person knows. They know their worth because they have experienced many things they had never known before, each with its own banner, showing its true colors rather than the faded standards of the dead.

It was thus significant that in exchange for her adventure, all she felt was pain in her feet, tangles in her hair, and her stomach rumbling with its infuriating hunger. The bonds of emotion dig far deeper, tying you in knots until the very last: the moment when you would give anything for a little more air in your nostrils, only now the oxygen doesn’t deign to enter, passing you by like a friend it no longer has any use for.

So she continued to drop breadcrumbs to mark her path, like in the fairy tale, and these tidbits wouldn’t be gobbled up by the birds. She was a little worried, however, that the hunger of her empty belly would ruin everything. Her freedom, as everyone who has had to fight tooth and nail to achieve it knows, was bread enough for her teeth. Teeth that had so often been met with only iron or air but that were now sunk into an indivisible dough, a batch that had risen to smother its creators.

Eventually she realized that she was sneaking up to the rear of one of the houses. She crossed the path that ran behind it and placed her hand on a pinwheel standing by the entrance. Suddenly the world was in her hands. The spell that had come over the village had arranged for a pail of milk to be left unattended as compensation for her return from the forest.

“Milk… so this is how I am met on my return. A substance that man has never fully understood,” she said in a quiet voice, looking around warily. “A blood-like substance with a deceptive color…”

She was about to pick up the milk pail when she was distracted by an unexpected new revelation in the form of short, sharp barks; these minor epiphanies appeared to be occurring in a preestablished order.

“No… no…” she said in a soothing tone, trying to muffle the sound with both hands.

She was facing an enormous gray animal with bluish-white spots spread across its cloudy belly. A stormy morning sky, wavering between sun and rain, she ventured poetically. But the situation called for submission. The animal showed that it knew its role: it sat on its hind legs, its back to the door, facing the enemy, in full control of its territory. Of course, she couldn’t conceal her soft underbelly, studded with pink teats.

“Oh,” exclaimed the woman, who crouched down when she saw them. “So that’s your secret?”

She started to stroke the dog’s head, ears, and neck, then her mammary glands as the soft underbelly was left exposed to indicate surrender. The dog instinctively forgot her mistrust. This unspoken communication with the female wanderer accelerated the process. Used to having to choose between fight or flight, the woman’s peaceful approach, which seemed entirely genuine, had caught the animal off guard, and now she allowed herself to enjoy the sensation, reveling in the sensuous rubbing. Every now and again she whined in pleasure.