Armonía Somers - The Naked Woman

“Phryne,” he blurted. “Why are you naked? Why aren’t you like other women?”

“Oh yes,” she answered, looking down at herself in surprise. “It’s because of the story of my life, which I haven’t told you because every time I try to remember it one or another of the details escapes me. I think it began like this: On my thirtieth birthday, I started to see the others as they would be in thirty years’ time, their voices crusting over, their skin drooping off them in spite of all their vain efforts to keep it taut, treating sex as an abstract concept and living in fear of dying in their beds every night. So I made an excuse, went to my room, and undressed to inspect myself and see what was still in working order. But that order was meaningless: it hurt me just the same. Life hurts, in and of itself. And yet, suffering gives us no more rights than those without a trouble in the world, or any of the others for that matter…”

“Who are they? The others?”

“I’ve been calling them that since you joined me. They are the others. I don’t yet know if I think about them so much out of hatred or love, no one has been able to help me with that…”

“So, then what?”

“So I put my clothes on a chair, like I was gifting them my former skin. Then I put on a coat and left for the train station, where I caught the last train that evening. The moon helped me reach that lonely house. I took off my coat and lay down on the bed. I didn’t know where the light switch was, but I could see from what light filtered through the blinds that there was a book on the nightstand. It had a small dagger for a bookmark. That was when it must have happened. Because in the end my head was cut off, you see, and I was bleeding into my hands. I put it back on as best I could and went out into the countryside. I didn’t have time to get dressed. After that clothes were of little use to me, and now I must be too dirty…”

“Woman, little woman,” said the man, recovering his composure. “You’re sick; you’re imagining crazy things. You’re not making any sense. And I can’t take you home even though it’s just a few feet away. As much as I would like to.”

“Why not?” she asked bluntly. “Yesterday, I learned that anything is possible…”

“My God,” he went on, tormented by his marital commitments. “How awful it is not to be able to do what we want. Even if it’s the one thing you want to do before you die. But I have to try. I’ll take you in my arms like it’s our wedding night, kick open the door, make my way past the prying eyes of the house. Let’s give it a try. But why do you cover up your shoulder, what are you hiding?”

She took her hand away to reveal a gash, like a claw wound. The flesh had been opened into two lips and the dried blood was furry with earth and blades of grass.

“Don’t worry, Juan, it was just the claws of a tree. It hurts less if I don’t let the air get to it. But it’s not important.”

“Yes it is, Phryne,” he shouted agitatedly. “I need to carry you, I can do it. I need to tend to this and everything else…” He grunted to himself through gritted teeth, “She’s a woman, a wounded woman.”

“Juan, how will you tend to it?”

“I have a yellow paste,” he said naively. “I use it when the children hurt themselves.”

He realized that he had fallen into a trap; his clumsy words had blown up in his face. But the warmth of his proximity to the other being was too compelling to pay any attention to minor inconveniences. He watched her eyelids flicker, her delicate nostrils flare, the artery in her neck throb.

“No, Juan, don’t pick me up,” she said. “Your house is your home, which means it is no longer yours. I know that you don’t understand, but I can’t explain it to you. It’s too difficult; it would take too long. Such things do not tempt me.”

“Long and difficult,” he mumbled, looking back over a story that had been his for so long that, like an old shirt, he couldn’t remember where it had come from.

“Yes, but not long enough to forget certain facts along the way. If there are children to whom one must apply yellow paste, those children will be crying out for their mother. Also,” she added, her voice taking on a more mischievous tone, “it doesn’t hurt. I lied about the fresh air making it worse.”

She’d turned her body a few degrees, and the wound was just below the man’s chin. The feel of her touch rippled across his skin as she brushed against him. His lips fell on the injured area, wholeheartedly reenacting an ancient, violent, savage ritual. The iron tang of the blood sent him over the edge. It was like stepping out of his own, familiar climate into a gust of wind that would sweep him away like a seed on a strange summer breeze. And though his mouth, which now tended to a wound shaped like a woman’s sex, longed desperately to enter through her true lips—what a gentle feeling it was, what a sweet, compassionate act. When he raised his eyes again, he saw that the woman’s were shut, her mouth half-open. But this only lasted for a moment. She looked at him again. Her dark hair brushed against him, glowing with an inner light.

“Juan,” she said. He was surprised by how her voice sounded. She took him by the waist. “What purity emanates from you, what unexpected peace I feel with you. Tell me, would you really have taken me home, the real me, without trying to give me another name like Antonia?”

Now he put his arms around her. Though he felt confident enough to be so entwined, the right words still eluded him. This woman made him feel stupider than ever: a useless fool. He tried to get out of his predicament by saying something, something silly about how much she must suffer as a lonely, neglected woman.

“No, Juan, I don’t suffer,” she said with a hint of a smile. “But I would have enjoyed being taken with you, being with you.”

The situation had started to become embarrassing for the both of them. They felt like old friends who had spent an enormous amount of time together. The woman still squeezed the man’s waist, pressing against the top of his pants, which were kept up by a thin leather belt. How soft and feminine he felt; his hips weren’t nearly as virile as his shoulders, voice, or chest, but they gave off their own sweetness, a kind of fruit that was too easily obtainable, available to anyone who wanted it, with no shell or rind to protect it. But she didn’t share this with him. It was too intimate and perhaps offensive to the man’s self-image.

“So,” she asked, tilting back her head, still strewn with small leaves. “What would you have done with me?”

He roughly shoved her away, his jaws and eyes squeezed shut.

“So brazen! Women here don’t ask questions like that. You end up making no promises and then not doing anything either. But, if you want to know,” he went on, “I’d spend my days bringing you many, many things. You would ask me for whatever you wanted and I would obey. I would never forget and never tire. I’d bring you things you didn’t even ask me for, things I didn’t even know I could give you, and whatever is left of me, even though I’ve already given some of it away, as if I’d become a virgin again. But only to someone like you, someone like you and no one else.”

“That sounds so lovely, Juan. I would only ever ask you for one thing over and over again. Even when you brought me water, I’d ask only for you, all of you, your pure mouth.”

More than a desire to kiss her, the man was possessed by a kind of fatalistic death wish. He stood at the edge of a sky-blue pit that had suddenly opened up before him. He had no idea where it might end. He tried to step back, his dull everyday life, as embodied by the rumbling of the milk churner, tugging at the back of his mind. But regardless of his attempts to restrain himself, an autonomous, indomitable force drove him onward. His sex began to slither in its dark, warm nest beneath his rough clothing. It was so familiar, yet also strange, like being a child again but with a wealth of experience in your breast.