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

It was not difficult to find out how well she kept herself from confessing to anyone else that she was a woman, because from no one else did she try to keep herself apart, as she did me; while all the while Smeeks was wishing, it is true, to feel again the softness of her breast in the palm of his hand, the first breast of a woman he had ever touched, but also, or more especially, to be close to her, to be her friend and confidant once again, to be part of her, to hear her sweet voice, and — why not? — to find out what more there might be underneath her shabby, cheap, deceptive clothing, to ask her why she walked that way, so hesitant and uncertain, and if she did not want me to touch her I wouldn’t do it, I would be just the way she wanted, but I would be hers … I imagined conversations I might have, or wished I could, with her, in one of which I heard myself saying, “I realize you are not a man, but that is not so important; I realize that, in spite of being a woman, you are just like everyone else, looking for a way to live far from cruelty and poverty,” because I wanted to show my understanding in order to remain close to her. This imaginary conversation is one I recall very well because — oh, how the joke was on me, as time went on! Smeeks had no idea what awaited him! First the voyage: neither she nor the majority of the rest of us had ever set foot on the high seas, much less considered what it meant for both feet to spend more than thirty days constantly lurching and staggering beneath us! Moreover, the nausea of someone who never touches solid ground for six hundred hours is not conceivable within the word nausea , and no one knew what to call it when it took so long to finally put us down on dry land. And later on, that awful boredom into which the passengers were plunged, shut up in the cabin that smelled ten times as bad when the squalls were unleashed, as we will relate below …

But not for me; for throughout the entire voyage after this encounter, not a single moment of boredom touched me. Every one of those seconds, as if they were nooks and crannies in a desiccated body, was filled with the hope of having her nearby, her body, her eyes, her voice, infusing the time with the artful reality of my love through which she belonged exclusively to Smeeks, and thus avoiding the viscosity of that boredom into which everyone else seemed to be immersed. What was there about her that disturbed me so? My eyes saw nothing, my ears heard nothing that jumped out at them. The substance with which I charged every hour with another truth by using it to bombard every single one of its seconds spewed forth in a torrent from its center on the palm of this hand that I had touched her breast with, and at night, hopeless with love, I would knot my fists so forcefully that my fingernails bloodied my palms as I tried to stifle the flow of emotion that so tortured me and which I trusted had its cure in the possibility of satiety.

So many years now have I done nothing but make fun of that little boy so moved by the woman’s flesh hidden in the darkness of the blouse of coarse fabric worn by the impoverished youth. It does not need saying that my heart was prodigal in spinning out the bizarre fabric of days shot through with the desire to touch again and again and again that small bit of flesh that I imagined as white, that I knew was infinitely sweet and impregnated with a fragrance unfamiliar to me, a woman’s fragrance. And how did I know it was so gravid with that fragrance? Because in the palm of my enamored hand I had read that smell of her! Forty years would bring forth the laughter of ridicule over that boy so thrilled by a bit of flesh during an entire voyage, flesh that was for him alone, revealed and modestly held back in the same gesture — because there came a day on which I could have covered the sea encircling the globe with the skin of the flesh yielded to us in the brothels of Jamaica and Tortuga; and could have covered it twice over with the skin of the women who were taken by force, without my attaching any more value to it than that of a few coins (that always turned into nothing in our hands) and of my being a counterpart of the dream of violence that I was immersed in for thirty-seven years. And even now, something that resembles tenderness, when I see him in my mind’s eye, moves me to laughter.…

The moment she made me the accomplice/enemy of her secret, the voyage changed for me, in the midst of my uncertain fears, the stench of the vomiting, and the invincible nausea that seemed to envelop all of us like a blanket of air and water, and it turned into the frame surrounding the stimulation embodied in that tiny patch of skin, soft and firm, miraculously arrested almost horizontally, which sometimes was my delight and sometimes a feverish torture. I was unable to contain myself and found myself forced to share my confinement with dozens of drowsing youths bewildered by this confinement and battered by disillusionment; who among them had imagined this voyage would be so tedious? None at all, and even less so the fact that the dangerous storm would represent nothing but the obligation for them to remain locked up, no matter what happened, in the hold/cabin; or that when we actually did run into a pirate ship it would take flight the moment we measured off against each other.

I wanted to touch her once more, even if it were only once.… And for what purpose was I so eager to touch that piece of flesh belonging to a woman who could not be mine, since I did not know how to make any woman mine? And moreover, the crowded conditions endured by us indentured servants of the Company, bundled together like carrots in a sack in the ship’s hold close beside the supplies I already mentioned, beside the cow that never stopped moaning, made us seem more like things than persons in that place, more like ship’s stores than true believers. Despite the morning prayer, and that every time the watch changed they had our voices join in more prayer, we were as faithless as fava beans, huddled in that gloomy hold which in no way resembled the aspirations, dreams, and desires that made this unbearable voyage bearable; nor did the awful storms and the slavery that awaited us in the new lands without our being aware of it then. And under those conditions, what could a fava bean do — that is exactly what I was — with a woman? Why weren’t our prayers enough to make us more human? What else was there to say when, at daybreak, the cabin boy who announced the dawn, sang out,

Blessed be the light

And the Holy Cross

And the Lord of Truth

And the Holy Trinity;

Blessed be the soul

And the Lord who leads us .

Blessed be the day,

And the Lord who sends it .

God give us good day,

May the ship have safe passage,

A good master, and worthy crew, AMEN!

May they make this voyage safe.

God give you good morrow,

Lords of stern and prow .

Was it necessary that we repeat or add something more as we joined in his song?

When I would see her pass by with that unusual step of hers and holding her dish — which was the time when she had the greatest leeway to move around — or when she would slyly brush against me as if not realizing that this body she was touching belonged to me , her confidant, the only one who knew her secret and hence for her the only man on the whole ship, since I was the only one who knew that she was a woman and the only one who, for her, would throw himself into the ocean headfirst and let it devour me in my despair over not being able to put my two palms (I was no longer content with one) on every part of her body, the only one who would throw himself headfirst and in vain, just for her, into the deep, endless, silent sea … In vain, because if I was the only man on the whole ship for her, then I was also the only being of whom she wished to know nothing at all (“That’s all over and done with,” she had said); her confiding had erased me completely from the map. On the other hand, the others did have some interest for her, or at least for the “him” they thought she was. Those who told her the sea stories in which we all dressed the silly, childish fears that awaken in the dark of night on the high seas made her open her eyes wide as if they might want to jump out of their accustomed place and leap completely away from her. And the ones who refused to show her the rudiments of even the simplest tasks necessary for the ship’s navigation exerted still more attraction over her, from the cabin boys who pushed her away so she was unable to see how they handled the sheets that kept the sails in trim or how they bailed out the water taken on by the ship, to the old salts who moved their thick bodies into her line of vision so she could not watch them keeping the fire alive on the sand where they warmed the grim meals with which they tortured our palates at midday.… Every one of the crew or the novice cabin boys, all those who were going in search of adventure or in hopes of making a living, those who did not yet know why they were going, those who were sorry they had come, those who had more than once crossed the ocean sea as well as those who had never voyaged before, the ones who had begged on the streets or been sold by their families — every single one of them was more interesting to her than I was because I was the repository of a secret that bound me ardently to her.…