Olja Savicevic - Adios, Cowboy

My sister and I sometimes pretended not to hear her, I remember, but Daniel was something else, it didn’t bore him.

There’s a song from those days that Ma often sang around the house:

You’re a heavenly flower

Beloved by all each hour

You are the one I love

All others far above

And she went out alone, not a word to her mother

To pluck roses for her dearest lover…

Later I sang that song to Daniel, and Daniel sang it to our great-grandmother while she lay with her open, watery eyes in eternal darkness.

“Hey, Gran, do you see everything in black and white, like hell?” he asked her.

“Hell’s no black, hell’s green, and shiny with plankton. Inside me too’s all green, like a Martian’s ass.”

Daniel used to press his eyes deep into his skull, I recall.

“Then your eyes turn over and you see inside, into yourself,” he said.

He pressed his eyes until he began to feel sick, yet he didn’t, as far as I know, see a yellowy-green light. He didn’t see that until later, one summer when the sea blossomed with seaweed full of phosphorus. During the day it looked like a puddle of dung, mare sporco , but at night every movement we made would scatter into fluorescent bubbles.

“And heaven?”

“Heaven? There be no heaven. Aah. Just hell, right here, on the black earth!” the old lady moaned in pain. Then she added: “O, santo dio Benedetto , holy shit. Come, come, my little dove, sing that Not a word to her mother. ”

A few days before our great-grandmother’s death, a little monkey that lived at the time in our neighbor the vet’s garden slipped into our house. People said some rich tourists had grown bored with it and left it behind. It caused havoc all over the house, that monkey. We spent ages looking for it, I recall. It had crept in under the old lady’s oversize nightdress. Sneaky beast, we said. And soon it escaped the vet altogether, first into the park, and then who knows where.

“D’you love Great-Granny?” asked my sister.

Daniel and I nodded. The old lady was our wooden reptile — she touched our cheeks with her dry, odorless antennae. Our underground doll from the attic.

“Then we’ve got to help her,” said my sister, her green eyes looking at us straight from hell.

“Great-Granny’s suffering,” she said, “and we’ve got to help her fly up to heaven.”

I believe she really thought that. That we’d put a pillow over her head. A child playing with weapons is a terrible thing, and everything is a weapon, I recall. It’s really amazing that so many of us have survived our own and other people’s childhoods.

“Heaven doesn’t exist,” said Daniel quickly. “Go ask her.”

Things were easier with Daniel. That was the end of it.

“Don’t let Ma hear you,” I whispered.

“I never said God doesn’t exist.”

“You’re idiots! Pathetic! And craven,” said my sister. Her contempt was terrible, I recall. Still is, for that matter.

Craven , where’d she got that word from? Some film, I imagine.

And the old lady—“poor thing, poor thing” everyone said — really did cry out for help and blaspheme against God and the devil.

I think my sister loved Great-Granny, though you never know with her.

She prayed fervently to the saints for the old lady to die, even at mealtimes, which earned her a smack.

In the end her passionate spiritual euthanasia worked.

Great-Granny died like a fish, her mouth open.

That was the first time we’d seen death — it didn’t look that terrible.

She was lying on her bed, with her eyes finally closed, and Daniel lifted up her wide nightdress dating from the time when she was the insatiable one . We were looking for the tourists’ monkey, but there was nothing under her nightdress. Everything about Great-Granny had been dead for years already, her blue-and-brown shanks covered in scabs, hairless. The only thing alive was the muff between her legs, shaggy, shiny fur, bright black, that climbed from halfway up her thighs to her groin and then in a narrow spindle up to her belly button.

“Is that the monkey?” I asked.

“A cat,” said Daniel, surprised, covering her up with the nightdress.

That evening I discovered a hair under my panties. One single hair, but I couldn’t pull it out. I was almost a boy, just like my brother, who was “like a little girl,” my aunts used to say.

That wasn’t right, though, because Daniel was a boy the way boys are like those carved wooden angels that are supposed to guard your house or those Gothic ones with cheery expressions. They are free from either male or female sins, the only sunny, full-blooded creatures in church frescoes or in free flight above anorexic saints, hysterics, and virgins in the side aisles. Perhaps that’s because they have interesting jobs to do, dealing with the profane interactions between demigods and people.

The chubby little gilded angel above the Pietà behind the altar in St. Fjoko’s Church still chuckles at me today, sucking his thumb or picking his nose. All the devout ladies dream of nibbling his cheeks.

A neglected angel, perhaps, but not from a porcelain cup and not a little girl — that was our Daniel.

My room is a box in a house of boxes. Above the room there’s a bathroom, so damp stains come through the fresh paint on the ceiling. The bed behind the low cupboard is a still smaller box. The next box is me. The smallest box, a boxlet, is my cunt.

Before I go to sleep, I put each little box into the next, and then in the last one I put everything it’s agreeable to think about, everything that soothes me. Such as going into a clean empty kitchen, in which the fridge is purring; the sound of an airplane landing or taking off; something warm with a neutral smell like a dry child’s or cat’s head; sniffing the tips of one’s fingers, the chance touch of strangers, unexpected, with no ulterior motive; a hallucination while perfectly rational — that I am the white contents of a capsule or yogurt being poured out in a single dollop.

But if I spend too long awake, with insomnia that becomes like delirium and a torment, images appear, bursting rapidly into leaf.

The images I see most frequently are shots from an amateur porn video taken off the Internet, which I came across at a party two or three years ago. The images have rooted in my consciousness, draining and annoying me, because particularly nauseating images have a way of coming back and not fading. It was a custom at certain gatherings to show such amateur little films in one of the rooms, in the small hours, films that had been allegedly taken from certain sites, nothing illegal, allegedly, although I wouldn’t swear to it. The party guests would try to make fun of the two, three, or five people sporting lively genitals on the screen. I would most often wander out of the room at the very beginning of the projection, but this time I stayed to the end, because the main actor’s face caught my attention.

The film was poor quality and too dark; it had evidently been dark in the room where it was made. It was probably shot with a phone, I thought at the time.

It begins with the expression on the face of a man rearing up over a thin, white body. The man doing the fucking has very large hands and his face, which I can’t make out clearly, is blurred, but it seems to be on the verge of tears. The person under him occasionally moves an arm or leg and emits a barely audible moaning sound. Then there’s a cut and the next image is of the narrow thighs of that second person, boy or girl, it’s hard to tell: the thighs are bare and pressed together, with a thin barb between them, the big man’s snout. The third scene shows a boyish nape, with short hair and a huge fat hand on it: the face of the person being fucked by the big man is hidden by a pillow and can’t be seen. The fourth scene moves, but barely: with one hand the fucker holds the object of his lust by the shoulder or neck, probably too tightly, and slowly pushes it downward, grabs it lower down, thrusting in and ramming slowly and powerfully and crying increasingly loudly, then coming with a roar and a wail. His crying is the thing it’s impossible to forget, particularly if you want to.