Raduan Nassar - A Cup of Rage

always mentioning my confidence and boldness as I conducted the ritual, scarcely hiding her surprise at how I would repeatedly enlist God’s name in my obscenities, telling me above all how much I had taught her, especially about an awareness of the act through our eyes that often followed, stone by stone, each stretch of a convulsing road, and that was when I would mention her intelligence, which I always praised as the best thing about her in bed, an agile and active intelligence (even if only when I pricked her on), exceptionally open to all incursions, and that would lead to me talking about myself too, fascinating her with the intentional (and not so intentional) contradictions in my character, teaching her among other lies that I, the bastard, was pure and chaste, and, there with my eyes closed all this time, I was still thinking about many other things while she was out of the room, since the imagination is very quick, or its time is different, and it uses and simultaneously confuses separate and unexpected things, when I discerned her footsteps returning in the hall and only had time to open my eyes and check that my feet were positioned correctly, poking out of the bottom of the sheet, noticing as so many times before that the brown hairs that sprouted on my instep and longer toes gave them both grace and gravitas, but I made sure I quickly closed my eyes again, feeling that she was about to enter the room, and already sensing her fervent form nearby, and knowing how things would start, which is: she would softly, ever so softly, come up to my feet, which she had once compared to two white lilies.

It was already half past five when I said to her ‘I’m going to jump out of bed’ but she wound herself around me like a creeping vine, her claws closing where they could, and she had claws on her hands and claws on her feet, and a thick, strongly smelling birdlime over her whole body, and since we were almost grappling each other I said ‘let me go, little bindweed’, knowing that she liked it when I spoke that way, so in response she said, feigning solemnity, ‘I won’t let you go, my grave Cypressus erectus ’, her eyes beaming with pride at her impressive repartee (although there she wasn’t well versed in botanical matters, even less so in the geometry of conifers, and the little that she dared flaunt concerning plants she had learnt from me and nobody else), and in the knowledge that there are no branches or trunks, however strong the tree may be, that can resist the advances of a creeper, I tore myself away from her while there was time and slipped quickly over to the window, immediately raised the blind and felt on my still warm body the cold, damp air that started to get in the room, but even so I leant on the sill and, deep in thought, saw that outside the day was barely starting to stretch its limbs under the weight of a thick fog, and I also noticed that, no more than sketches, the zinnias in the garden below were struggling to push up through the smudges of smoke, and I was at the window like this, my eyes on the top of the hill opposite, on the spot where the Seminary stood dimly in the fog, when she came up behind me and again wound herself around me, slipping the rope of her arms brazenly around my neck, but with skill I, using my elbows gently, kneading her firm breasts a little, was soon sharing the prison I was in with her, and, side by side, entwined, the two of us gradually interlaced our feet and that was how we went straight to the shower.

Under the shower I let her hands slide over my body, and her hands were inexhaustible, and they ran searchingly through all the foam, and they came and went tirelessly, and our soaked bodies now and again pressed against each other so that her hands could reach my back in an embrace, and I enjoyed all this movement, sinuous and vague, that provoked sudden, hidden jolts, and seeing that those hands were already taking advantage of my darkest corners — even combing through the threads at the badly stitched seam of the groin (and secretly weighing the soapy packet of my member) — I said ‘wash my head, I’m in a hurry’, and then, pulling me out from under the stream of water, her hands immediately penetrated my hair, rubbing firmly with her fingers, massaging my scalp with her nails, scratching my nape in a way that sent me crazy, to my core, but I didn’t say anything and just carried on feeling the soft foam grow up there until it splashed down onto my face in a rush and stung my eyes, making me rub wildly at them with my knuckles, even though I knew that their burning clearly announced I was clean, and before long she pulled me under the shower again and her fingers in my hair started to tease out the most pleasurable thing in the world under the warm water, and then there was a splat splat as thick foam toppled down, flying apart on the tiles wet with water running noisily into the drain, and she laughed and laughed, and I stood there, so still and abandoned to her care, I didn’t raise so much as a finger, so that she would carry out this work on her own, and I was already well rinsed-off when she, straying from the task at hand, slid her wet mouth over my water-skin, but I, taking the reins from her, acted as if nothing had disturbed the ritual, and as soon as she turned the water off I let myself be led silently out of the shower cubicle, and under the light electric current of my shivers I waited there until she threw a large towel over my head, starting immediately to dry my hair with such lithe and precise motions that my memory was jogged, and with my eyes hidden I glimpsed, although small and naked, her feet enlarge in big sandals and I also felt her delicate hands transform themselves suddenly into rustic, heavy hands, though they were minute hands whose fingers entered my ears, heaping caresses on me, tickling me, making me snicker to myself under the towel, and it was so good, her looking after my body and leading me, wrapped up, to the bedroom and combing my hair in front of the mirror and giving me a pretend telling-off and offering me little bits of advice and helping me on with my trousers and shirt and making me lie on my back on the bed, before leaning over me to do up my buttons, and making me place my heavy shoes in her lap so that she, bending over me in her dedication, could tie up my laces, I only know that I delivered myself absolutely into her hands, so that the use she made of my body would be complete.

We smelled fresh when we went into the conservatory, where her shoulder bag was still open on the table, and as she sat down in one of the wicker chairs, I opened the curtains still needing to be opened, and half-hidden behind one of the pillars I pressed my nose to the glass and, in spite of the fog, could see Dona Mariana squatting in front of a flowerbed down in the garden, her hands in the earth, her watering can at her side, peeping now and then up towards the conservatory’s high windows, and that was when I went out onto the landing and, gripping the tiles of the low wall, shouted her name, asking for breakfast, but I immediately entered her field of vision again, her head thrown back on the chair cushion, her skin rosy and relaxed, a short intense sigh as if to say ‘it wasn’t enough, but it will do’ (which was what she always told me), and I without a word leant over the sucupira-wood table, pushed her leather bag and my heavy iron ashtrays aside, and it was at that moment that Dona Mariana came in, acting just like the Protestant mulatto woman she was, patches on her dark and blanched skin, thick-lensed glasses, always greeting us bashfully, but ignoring her embarrassment I immediately ordered ‘the breakfast’, and she knew very well, by my tone, what I wanted to say with this, and knew exactly on which days it had to be served like this in full (my wide bed almost always wide open), so that out of a sense of shame she ran to the kitchen, and in the conservatory I slid the central panes of the French doors to the side, pulled up a chair and sat near the open bit, my eyes hanging on the ill-defined landscape in front of me, and started to contemplate, almost making a real effort, what might be passing through her pure head, and as always I ended up concluding ‘who cares about your embarrassment, Dona Mariana! who cares about your lack of understanding, Dona Mariana! yes, the same wide open bed, but who cares what you think!’ and I stirred up the gravel here inside (in reality practising the black art of exorcism), and my maid had already laid the check cloth on the table, and on top of it the crockery, the honey pot, the bowl of fruit, the bread basket and the butter dish, as well as the earthenware jug full of daisies and sensitive fern, and Dona Mariana, still not looking at us, had already gone back, perhaps somewhat calmer now, into the kitchen and in the conservatory we only heard the cheerful clatter of the aluminium pans, and I was thinking how good it was that everything was just like this, when she asked me ‘what’s the matter?’, but I, smelling the strong aroma of coffee that was already wafting in great waves from the kitchen, I didn’t say anything, didn’t even turn my face towards her, but continued to stroke Bingo, my mongrel, and was thinking that the first cigarette of the morning, the one I’d soon be lighting after breakfast, was without the shadow of a doubt one of the seven wonders of the world.

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