Armonía Somers - The Naked Woman

“If I’d seen you earlier, I’d have known that you were Grisalba,” said the woman, still stroking the dog. “But better late than never, don’t you agree? And you would end up forgetting everything that came before, even the name they gave you with the same lack of imagination with which they name their houses… Have you noticed? Yes, of course you have. The whole family puts their heads together for weeks trying to come up with a name, and then they settle on one seen a hundred times before: something like ‘The Refuge.’ But the promised rest is just a mirage: they have to prune the trees, rake the leaves, and argue from dawn till dusk like every other boring couple…”

The abandoned milk pail was close by, and the animal watched as the woman stretched out an arm to pick it up and bring it to her lips. As she drank, the milk cascaded down the sides of her face. She stopped every now and again to inspect the contents of the pail, as though to make certain of her find, before raising it again with a smile that was becoming increasingly human in spite of all her wounds.

“Grisalba,” she said eventually, holding the pail to her chest. “I know. Believe it or not, I can see it in here. Suddenly, as often happens with such magical waters, the scene appeared before my eyes, in great detail. You will betray me, that is how I interpret the images, but they’re fading now. In spite of our sudden love and the fact that you have allowed me to stroke your teats, you’ll bark as soon as I try to leave the house, won’t you? Won’t you? Isn’t that what you’re thinking? But listen: stay with me at least until the haystack. I want a little shade before I’m killed.”

She put down the pail and stood up. The dog got up too and walked along with her a little way.

“What if I try to escape? What if I do escape?” she said optimistically.

But as soon as the woman made a move, the animal’s generosity disappeared. She started to bark as passionately as she could, putting all her effort into it. For a second of suspense, her gaze stayed fixed on the stranger, whose outline and sorry physical state stood out starkly against the yellow hay. The woman lost herself in the depths of ageless eyes, which were violet and narrowed into a teary, reddish corner. They were different and yet reminiscent of those of the horse, she thought. Within them you could see the origins of all free animals, distorted by many years of subservience.

Another slight shift of her foot and the dog barked some more. This time the woman was reminded of the many different forms of hysteria. When silence fell again, she noticed that something had changed. She could no longer hear the monotonous sound of a milk churner in a nearby shed. It was during this pause that a man appeared in the doorway. The afternoon sun shone a rectangle onto the wood behind him. It was a poorly proportioned frame, he barely fit inside it, but his naked, bread-crust torso gleamed under his reddish hair. At first, he didn’t seem to notice the barking. He calmly went back inside and the rumbling of the machine resumed. Then he came back out into the open air and headed toward the haystack. The dog, covering the distance in little leaps, ran around him in perfect circles, careful not to trip him up, and then loped off to where she had left her living prey, who was standing still, as if hypnotized. The woman stood in front of the cone-shaped haystack with one arm across her chest, holding her shoulder in a fragile, defensive pose that accentuated her wounded appearance.

The man was entirely unprepared for the shock. He swayed in the air as though he had tripped on something. Then he felt his face freeze into a mask of stupidity. It seemed that the slightest gust of air would send him tipping over next to his dog.

“You… here… in my house…” he stammered eventually. “You… completely…”

They didn’t take their eyes off one another. Apparently they were finding it hard to express their situation in words.

“Yes, it’s me,” the woman said finally in a dark, sweet voice that was just as velvety as her gaze.

She understood everything. He seemed to be endeavoring to provide a clumsy account of recent events, of which she had apparently been the cause, but he couldn’t quite get his head around it.

“But is it really you? I can’t believe it.”

“They’ve been looking for me, haven’t they?” she asked in turn, as if speaking to an idiot, which is what the circumstances seemed to require.

“Yes,” he said. “Me too, I was with them.”

“Why is that? Tell me.”

The man looked resentful. He closed his eyes, striving to erase all memory of his pernicious thoughts. Then he gawped at her stupidly again. Any but the most basic vocabulary was beyond him.

“Well,” he said, “we all went out with everything we had on hand, shovels, hoes, clubs… I don’t know why… It must have been because one of us had one and we followed his lead. But then today, or sometime, I can’t remember when it was, the priest said in church…”

But his speech had gone on too long. His mouth was dry and he had run out of breath, like a prisoner under intense interrogation.

“What did he say?” she asked with a smug smile on her lips. It was the first time she had smiled.

“He screamed that you weren’t real, but a shadow of sin, then something about our sins… that then became real. Then he said a lot more, some of it was so awful that a woman collapsed right there in the church.”

She narrowed her eyes and took a deep breath. She was giving herself time to think over what the man had told her. It was only then that the man was able to look her over, his first opportunity to inspect his find against a plain backdrop, like a collector of rare insects. But it didn’t tell him much. It was like staring up at the sky when lightning is about to strike. He recognized it from the night before, when she had been a mere wispy ghost from his wife’s past and he had demanded to see the adolescent girl with the small breasts and wayward heart.

“So, where are you from? What should I call you?” he asked eventually, trying to shake her out of her daze.

The woman seemed surprised by his question, as if suffering from amnesia. Then, after thinking back in vain, she eventually said, “Me? I don’t know. Look at me, look at where I am. Phryne, I think that’s it, use that from now on, just like I named Grisalba. Yes, I’ve named her Grisalba. You see? She looked up at me when I said it.”

He was speechless, having never heard names like these, neither for women nor dogs. But he knew now that from then on, nothing would ever be the same; everything would be mysterious and different.

“And you?” she asked in turn.

“Juan,” he said, a little shamefaced.

“Juan,” she repeated, her voice lending full body to the word.

For a moment his name sounded special to him, invested with an importance and solidity that it never had before. But it was more than that: there was a remote echo of his mother in the woman’s voice.

“Juan,” she began, “I once…”

She stopped. She seemed stuck in a world without memory. There is, in fact, nothing about her past that could possibly interest me , thought the man. She was so much in the present, a blossom of the moment—may lightning strike him down for not knowing how to put this—and maybe a little of the future, but there was no going back. Back into the night where everything you once had is lost. Also—he thought further, still unsure of how to put it—there was this other thing, the nakedness of the woman so completely, passively visible, like a window open to the countryside. But that was as far as his thoughts could go; they didn’t seem to be getting him anywhere. When he had imagined her in those feverish nocturnal hours, he hadn’t wasted a second. His eyes had been shut tight so he would never lose sight of her, not even when he was asleep. Now, however, he seemed to be missing all the important details. He was caught in the bewildering trance of having her without touching her, like a melancholy eunuch, an image he’d never have associated with himself. He regarded her whole body as though she were a hallucination, barely noticing the dark triangle at her center that contrasted so sharply with the rest of her.