Carmen Boullosa - Cleopatra Dismounts

Her harsh words grated through the air. As if to protect themselves from them, the Amazons huddled closer together.

Once again the queen began to sing:

“O Hestia, patron of the family hearth ,

Daughter of Cronos, shield us from life’s storms ,

Refuge of blessed gods and mortal kind ,

Welcoming fire that burns in shifting forms!

With Hestia’s blessings round our warm hearth shed ,

Let’s love the day that’s here, the day ahead ,

But fear cold death less than a husband’s bed.”

The songs and words of Hippolyta, the lamentations of the Amazon in love with the god, the soft grass, and the presence of night had left the Amazons in an amatory mood. The majority were masturbating, some working on others, some on themselves. The stink they were giving off was intolerable. Their aroused vulvas smelled abominably. There were hundred of vulvas emitting odors, and thousands of fingers repeating it.

A woman’s smell is a woman’s smell. Imagine the effect of hundreds of them all in panting masturbation. Their mild caresses had now become rapid rubbings. Hit by the repugnant odor, I thought: “This smell is what gives these warriors their indomitable spirit. It’s stronger than iron! And it lasts longer!”

The assembled bodies stretched on the soft grass were raising a limb or two here and there to facilitate their pleasures of this ceremony of the flesh. The period of their lassitude had been brief. The caresses, daring and intimate, had given way to kisses. The mouth that was not kissing another mouth was kissing a breast, a thigh, a back.

The queen ceased her singing. She grabbed me in her arms, but without rubbing against me like the others. She planted a kiss on my mouth. A quick kiss, a surprise that I must admit disconcerted me. “I want you to see,” she said, and to satisfy her will, she laid me down, my back against her chest, her two hands placed on my two naked breasts. This also disconcerted me but she imposed her will on mine. All the Amazons were having excited fun, groaning or kissing, kissing or groaning. Maybe some had taken on male shape or male gods had appeared among the interlocked bodies, but the fact is that hard phalluses were penetrating female bodies. The phalluses gleamed in the night, glistening from the vulvas. “Here nobody’s scared of getting pregnant,” Hippolyta whispered to me.

Orthea, who had been shrilling her complaints to the god with breath of ice and skin of fire, now arrived among us, running agitatedly. Only embers remained of the blazing fire. Only starlight picked out the uncertain silhouettes of bodies against the sky. Orthea got onto our collective bed where all varieties of the carnal act were in heated progress. Here there were twosomes, here a solo act, there a threesome. As the groups that made up the interlocking texture on the crowded living carpet shifted unpredictably, Orthea, the weeping lover of the unattainable god, had to watch her step, while she looked for a place to lie down.

“Look, Cleopatra,” said Hippolyta, “it’s Orthea. Even though she loves a handsome deity, she can’t say no to a bit of pleasure. That’s why they say that some of us give the cold shoulder to anybody who isn’t prepared to indulge our appetites. There’s some truth in that.”

The new arrival found a place to throw herself down on the grass, already as excited as the other women. Hardly was she down, when she started to feel herself, shutting her eyes. Out of all those I could see from my royal position, she was the only one who shut her eyes. All the rest were experiencing pleasure with their eyes wide open or at least half open, their eyes glinting like sparks, burning.

Now the intense odor no longer irritated me. I don’t know if I’d stopped smelling it or if I had started to enjoy being wrapped up in it, when the queen lowered one hand to my vulva and touched me. An explosion raced through my body, an electric charge from head to toes. Now I was just one among all the others, another living nerve on the carpet of flesh. Though I did not shut my eyes, I ceased to see, lost track of who was who and how and where, of who came and who went. The undetermined presences were like sharp needles deliciously piercing my skin and we were one body, pleasured flesh united in the communal bowl that fed the long, long night. But there must have been some crack in our bowl, a weakness at some point, because imperceptibly the hours crept by until we all lay fast asleep.

Dreams came. Have you any idea what it is like to dream among Amazons? Among them, the delicate net that contains dreams so that they do not invade territories not proper to them has been torn to shreds. If not one single corner of their night-visions remained empty, if the visions lacked proportion and were all truncated, incomplete, if vibrant with intense colors, they flooded the mind with enigmatic fragments that defied any attempt to build coherence, they went further, overflowing into consciousness and rationality. These were dreams that refused to hover on the edge of wakefulness. Dreaming occurred but not like that of one who abandons himself to Morpheus, but who conquers him, knowing full well that these indomitable dreams would invade the whole of life with their mighty insanity. Wake-fulness would strike here and there with its axe and brandish its shield and once again restore its network. But only so that the dreams would return to rip holes in it, gnawing at it with their teeth. The axe would be dented against the hard bodies of the dreams, the shield would be reduced to a mockery, and the dreams would creep back to gnaw again at sanity’s net.

Headless dreams, running around like beheaded chickens. Thieving dreams, with their hands cut off. Dreams where limbs multiplied and bodies sprouted two heads. Dreams where everything was cruelty in motion. Dreams all woman where no man gained entrance. Dreams with placenta drenched in menstrual blood, where life itself was menace. Fertility was incarnate in them. It was flesh on the point of doubling itself. Bodies half-alive. Bodies on the verge of death. Women’s bodies.

These dreams were woman. The indefinable essence of woman. Impervious to language, for language contains a masculine element beside the feminine. None of the nonsense that men impose on women to render them innocuous, isolated from their generative powers, dressing them in provocative curves to take advantage of them later, draping their souls in gold, if women have souls. Women stripped of the immunity that belongs to them as the center of being! Not needed by anyone for anything! Here, instead, was the conception that knows how to found cities and bring beings into the world! The fertility that rules. No sentimental twaddle, no chatting with the servants, no cosmetics as the sole theme of conversation. But an unflinching stare at the central power: the mystery of life.

One vision I was able to retain from the kingdom of Amazonian dreams. A female dragon, swishing its tail with nine spinal projections, was menacing an Amazon with its deadly venom. The hooves of her horse, quick to obey the tugging reins, saved her from a blow of the dragon’s horns. She raised a strange weapon to its jaws. Though it gleamed with gold like other weapons of the Amazons, it was kitchen tongs. With it she nipped the snorting lips and then she smacked the creature on the back of its neck with a soup spoon. The dragon that no hero could slay collapsed at the Amazon’s feet, lifeless by the hooves of her panicky mount.

This vision was visual, as the word implies. But it was also auditory. Words thundered out while it was happening. It achieved more completeness in words than it did in images, because at times the images got blurry and shrank to miniature size, as if abruptly forced into the far distance.