Carmen Boullosa - They're Cows, We're Pigs

Vertical, and not horizontal, as if Madame in the brothel of The House were not going through her room in the natural way, horizontally, but had found how to go through it in upward fashion. She would see, then, instead of the habitual air of elegance and sumptuousness, nothing but abandon and negligence: above the frame holding up the drapes, dead flies and little moths, dust, dereliction, and gloom are what one sees from up there.… If she were to describe the room in this way, the room she is writing about would be something else.…

And why should I share with the reader the filth that I must clean up all by myself, that must be thrown out because, although it belongs to the room, it is not part of the room? Because, without your closeness, reader, without the warmth and company of your body, I would not have been able to draw the story upward, in a vertical direction, because when your body moves close to mine, I succumb, I let myself go, and in that mode I remain in order to go through the story in a different direction, vertically.… That’s the way it is when two bodies draw close to each other. The flesh reveals what neither the eye nor the intelligence is able to see.… But despite your eroticism, so strong and vigorous, into which I have allowed myself to fall, as into a woman’s lap, moving back and forth as I feel you have asked me to do, I do know that the truthfulness of this tale is on the verge of tumbling over the cliff, I know I am capable of collapsing, coming apart, going head over heels — and with me everything that I have written here, that I swear, reader, is true, just as you are or I am when I hold back this pen with my hand before again setting down in ink this true story which we should not allow to be destroyed, or be turned into its own end. Therefore, I promise myself that throughout this book I will not move through the story in any other fashion and that I will direct myself along the horizontal axis so you will believe me, will trust me, will know that it is true, really true.… Because this story is the only thing I have for believing myself real.)

END OF PART ONE, which dealt with Smeeks’s voyage to Tortuga, his arrival on the island, and how and with whom he learned the office of physician and surgeon.

Roc the Brazilian runs through the streets of Port Royal, completely drunk and armed to the teeth, shooting here and there, occasionally wounding someone, waving his sword around without anyone daring to oppose him, either as a challenge or in self-defense. Why? Has everyone gone crazy? I wonder about this while waiting in The House for Isabelle because I need to speak with her, to find out if I can have a word with her.… The whole of Port Royal is celebrating. Roc has returned after taking a ship bound from New Spain to Maracaibo, carrying merchandise and a very considerable number of pieces of eight for the purchase of cacao, all of which are now being frittered away in Jamaica. In a single night some of them spend two and three thousand pesos, on which they would be able to live like lords for years, yet in the morning they wake up without even a decent shirt. While waiting for Isabelle I watch one of them promise a whore five hundred pieces of eight just to see her naked, once. She catches me by the hand and, with him stumbling along behind us, completely drunk and totally unaware that I am one of the party, takes me to her room. Pushing me onto a settee, she climbs on top of the bed and stands there, laughing all the while, as she unfastens her long hair and leisurely removes her clothing: never taking her eyes off mine. But I do withdraw my gaze from hers, fixing it on her lovely body, her breasts, her belly, her buttocks, while, at her client’s request, she turns slowly around to let us have a good look at all of her. Something I see there that I believe makes her seem very much like her , something strange, too, because this one, with her woman’s body, is naked, while she was always dressed like a man in her deceptive clothing. The moment I become aware of this odd similarity, I am overtaken by a violent erection which flags not one whit as I watch the drunken pirate possess her, fully dressed, with his stupid, repulsive member jutting out from his pants, heaving back and forth with a sullen rapidity that does not explain why he ends up exhausted on the bed, immediately asleep. He makes noises breathing, almost a snore, a whistling, rhythmic sound. Still naked, the whore comes over to me and removes my clothing, all of it. There on the settee we fondle each other lazily and then I possess her without a trace of distaste, not on my part (for the first time) nor on hers. I imagine that this is she and I tell her so and she does not understand what I am talking about, yet, putting herself wholly into it as if I were the whore, she participates with all her body along with me in my dark dream.

I do not realize exactly when I ejaculate because we begin again, and again, seemingly unable to free ourselves from one another. The drunken man snores on. I hear someone calling her—“Adèle!”—and we break off as if suddenly the whole thing mattered to us not at all.

“Isabelle isn’t going to have time to see you today, I don’t know how many are waiting but quite a few. Go take a walk, and come back and sleep with us. You’ll be able to talk with her in the morning.”

We seem like two gentlemen friends chatting on the settee as we dress hurriedly, freed of the curse of our bodies.

“Don’t say anything to anyone about what he gave me for seeing me naked — please, I ask you. I want to get out of here with that money. I’ve got some more put away. I’m going to go back to my aunt and my brothers. She had to sell me. I’m going back with a full purse, you’ll see. Don’t say anything to anyone, please don’t; not a word, don’t repeat this. He’s going to forget all about it, and he’ll have to pay Madame as if it were a normal service, plus a change of sheets, because for sure he’ll vomit. Be nice to me, won’t you?”

I promise to be nice even though she is not her , and that is what I tell her. And that she hardly seems at all like a woman, and that I appreciate this in her very much.

Out on the street, Roc can no longer be heard shouting around and firing his gun without rhyme or reason. A freebooter has purchased a pipe of wine and, setting it up on a busy street corner where everyone can see, he knocks a hole in the end of it, forcing all who pass by to drink and threatening that if they do not he will shoot them with his pistol; I am told that sometimes he has bought a keg of beer and done the same thing; and that on other occasions he would plunge his hands into the spirits and splash it all over anyone passing by, no matter how messed up their clothing got, men or women. A barrier ring now forms before the spurting jet of wine and around anyone who drinks. No one is standing in front of me. I hear the laughter and jokes of the barricaders. They push me to drink. I hear pistol shots rending the air. Have they all gone crazy? They dance around me as the wine reaches my mouth and runs down my throat. Faceup under the spouting wine I drink, gazing at the unusually blue sky, irritatingly blue, painfully blue, and I drink, and drink, and drink. I am aware of my whole body, unusually happy, irritatingly happy, painfully happy and complete: as if all those who had been using it up till now (or those I had used) had wrenched something from it that was now restored. My entry into the dark mystery of the flesh, I feel with the wine coursing down my throat, has put a new body in place of the other body that used to be me, and for the first time in days I am not angry, for the first time since Pineau’s death, and for the first time in my seventeen years I am for the first time drunk and for the first time whole, on my own two feet, reeling along the streets brimming with music, joining in with the celebration where everything is offered so freely, hearing stories here and there that to my inexperienced nostrils smack more of boastfulness than of the bloody business they claim to be so full of, even though they are closer to the truth than my own nostrils on this lovely night just beginning.