translation: eu, tu, ele
Apr. 28th, 2023 02:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliedricoCW for sex and animal death.
(also: I feel like I must warn I'm neither a translator nor a fluent english speaker so there might probably be some mistakes in here somewhere— if you notice any, please tell me, so I can fix it!)
For Raquel Salgado
I touch, you touch, he touches in the dark. Or are just the two of us groping around in the dark, you and I, while he moves effortlessly between things? I know little of you, only made suspect of your existence once I realized there were words none of us owned. As if suddenly noticing a blank space between him and I and, just like that, (by exclusion, intuition, invention) guessed it was you the owner of this space between his light and my dark. Do you grope around, too? About you, I barely know. But you balance out what between him and me is pure shadow.
I am distancing myself, I am moving away, and I need you to understand me before I go, crucified on the outside of a high speed train. I try it slower, clearer: he doesn’t go away. Day after day, I notice him becoming nicer, more efficient, more solicitous, if I am to use words I don't quite know the meaning — I always imagine it as somoene smiling wide, bending his head down, constantly bowing like a Geisha. Him, like a Geisha, the grand whore, with that silence of tiny steps and bound feet. I need to try to make sense of what I'm saying here, put things in order and say them again, see if you can understand me: he's not going away, but it's inside him that I do. From inside him, I take a peek of our outside. And I do not dare.
What I see in other people, with their big open pores, are faces much too lively. The faces on the outside lean over him and I feel afraid; I could never face all those eyes, floating on those white-gelatinous surfaces, striped by thin red veins, and I feel disgusted. Not by the eyes, but the insides of the faces showing through their veins. Disgusted not by the mouths, but the red viscousness from when they open too wide. The countless little dots of the noses, sometimes all the way up to the forehead, between the eyebrows, the pinkish interior of the noses, the open throats full of their moving wetness, their little spasms, tiny convulsions. When the faces lean forward I feel myself showing through their tiny veins, and fear that a blink of the eye will be all it takes to push me out, thrown into the sharp things. And when he opens his moving mouth to spit out words, droplets of saliva and bad breath, I fear him being this word, this droplet, this breath. Like when he rubs his palms into each other and releases the streams of energy into the air, like he's not a being but simply vibration.
I can always stop, look beyond the window. But, from inside the train, the view is never still. The colorful ipê trees blending into the concrete walls and the concrete walls into the narrow streets full of paled houses and the narrow streets full of paled houses into the faces of the washerwomen at the riverside, and from this distance the faces are neither moving nor lively, but expressionless, carved clay over the white bundle of dirty clothes, and once again the yellow and purple of the ipê trees and the brown of the soil and the burgundy of the bougainvillea and the green of a military uniform, passing through the tracks. There are too many colors and shapes in the world, all of them vibrating in pulses, trembling.
From that last afternoon of light, I remember the cold and sticky sweat on the palms of my hands, the countless shiny dots from the automobiles, my head cracking from the noise. The automobiles were sparkles, colorful and metallic, flying over the cement. With wet hands, I held tightly to my dizziness, not knowing whether to go forward or to turn back or to stay still between those delirious points of light swirling around me. I must have started to scream because of how he clenched his mouth shut, firmly, without letting me out of his closed throat.
But was it you, or him, or me, who the man sometimes visited? Whose disgustless tongue was it that explored the deepest of all the holes in his body? From the window, I watched hands hurriedly unzipping pants, skilled fingers pushing aside the fabric, nostrils sucking in the secret smell of the groin. The man’s big and lively moving body — from behind the bars, I wished those hands that touched him to be mine and those fingers, too, to be mine and even those nostrils and that tongue licking on his rigid member until it was hard enough to carefully enter him, ripping him in pleasure and pain. Was it you, was it I or was it he whose body slowly twisted until collapsing, back against the bed, clasping the man’s waist and butt with open thighs and feeling him inside me, you or him, like a female must feel her male, face to face, never like a man receives another man, face against neck, in this love made of hair and sperm, sweat and shit? From behind his window, I watched without allowing myself. But our orgasm was just the same, and then we were just one, the three of us, ridden by this man we exhausted with the thirst of our tongues. In those moments, I knew your face as thoroughly as I knew his and mine. And I didn’t fear the big open pores, nor did I feel disgusted by the viscousness from inside the holes.
As for you, have you ever noticed how the world seems entirely made of corners and edges? Have I ever called your attention to the scarcity of soft outlines to things? Everything is hard and cutting. I watch, you watch how he moves without clashing between edges. Does he look meek, sinuous like this, avert to every touch that could hurt him? To me it just looks fake — I know his plots very well and I know of all the times he conceded so that the outside wouldn’t hurt him. Watch, listen and notice: he is sinuous not in the way of birds, but of snakes.
Only sometimes I think I understand. Then I feel like opening every window in the house so the sun can come inside. That’s what happens to me during the mornings, always at the same hour, right after listening to all the noises he makes before going out. I pay close attention to the water dripping from the faucet, the scrape of brush against teeth, the water from the toilet taking away the waste rejected by the intestines, the water washing off the remainders of sleep from the corners of his eyes, the cold water from the shower waking up his muscles, the water made hot for coffee, I pay attention to it all. And water, water, water and water, I repeat each morning, and even if I spend the whole day in the sheets, my hand inventing hidden pleasures between legs, there’s always a part of me that follows him through the streets, his dirty path between the metallic sparkles of the cars, giving out his first fake smiles of the day, confidently following his well-written script throughout the day. He knows what he wants — he, that grand pig. And he knows exactly how to get it. Throughout the day, from the inside, this part of me that goes with him tries to spill out from his eyes, from his mouth, to warn the moving faces that watch him with sympathy. Each time I try, he senses and repulses me, pushes me deeper within himself so that I won’t expose him. And he steals my voice, takes away my gesture, making me mute and imobile, powerless between the hard edges he dodges, the dancing pig, capable of the lowest of things if it means taking the big solo. Each morning I expose him to no witness, listening to the water that he believes to wash away all his filth. But I probe you, I look for you, I suspect you to be my accomplice, not his, because your help is the only help I can expect, so I always insist on asking if you understand me, and then ask again, do you understand? Like this, do you understand me? right now, do you understand me? have you ever?
It was nice when that woman would come with her charts, her graphs and compasses, and talk about the movement of the stars above our heads, wise and distracted, drawing pyramids, triangles, spheres and rhombuses on the squared papers. It was during one of her first times that he tried to push her away, laughing coldly, like people usually laugh at this sort of thing, always picking pigs over birds. Was it you who helped me then to close his mouth, so violently that his teeth clenched together until it started to break? Because it wasn’t my doing alone, I was sure, and maybe that was the first time I noticed your existence parallel to mine and his. Or maybe chronologies don’t matter, if we coexisted even before I was aware of you. As for the woman, she continued to come back, always saying that when the Moon was in Aquarius… But I never understood constellations: I did no more than welcome her, and she seemed like a girl so full of faith in everything she suspected was real, even if invisible.
All my days feel like the eve of a departure. I move between the edges like someone who knows he won’t be here for long. My things are packed, the farewells already bid. Walking from one side to the other on the railway platform, all there’s left for me to do is to look around, slow and grimly, dull and with no desire to stay. The windows open, the seats look like seats and the vases made to hold flowers on their depths. Everything looks as it should. Nothing will change the presence of the things in the world, and me departing yesterday, or today, or tomorrow, won’t change a single thing. Each thing looks like the thing they’re supposed to be. And so do I, looking like myself, walking from one side to the other, between flavorless cigarettes, bloody newspapers and the knowledge that the only fact that could stop me from leaving is you accepting my call: won’t you help me kill him?
Once came a day when the man stopped coming over. And, not knowing if it had been me, you or he who had pushed him away, on that same day I wrote something like a prayer, which at the time sounded ridiculous. But reading these old papers now, I feel it pulsing as if it had been stabbed and, I notice, like it's a prayer written for you too, and for him, and for me.
i am not waiting for this man who is not only this man but all and no men like a thirst for what i’ve never drunk shaped not like waters only the narrowness of the here-now i wait for him since i was born and i’ve always known that at the time of my death mixing up memories and delusions and previsions just before it comes the last thing i’ll ask would be but where are you where have you been all this time i was hurting without you and to cheer me up afterwards who knows maybe you end up giving up or smiling beautifully without your teeth smiling bright in the darkness of my mouth smiling wide like it had never been possible and spit anything out like so you’ve always been there a life of searching without finding you and silence so i can die of natural causes with no coming back with a life wasted away marked by many scars with a life shredded by many wounds but never deadly to the point of stopping this ridiculousness from happening even at the hour of my death amen.
But this face of mine, newly awakened, slowly and sighless refreshes itself, because there’s nothing to regret, and it thinks crudely, the barefaced face: so we have not separated ourselves, the three of us. When I believe I’m out, I’m in. And when I think myself in, I’m out. Of you or him, of me in me, embedded triplicity, and though it may seem confusing here I state it, and it’s almost clear to me as the city roars from afar and I lean this body of ours over the seven viaducts: embedded triplicity, entrailed triplicity, entwined triplicity. Triplicity forever undivided, the death of one is the death of three, I don’t want you to help me kill him because it would mean killing you and me. And I recompose myself, and I recompose you, and I recompose him, who is also me and also you.
The woman said the Moon was in Scorpio, and she said: toothless, ripped apart, with hardened chunks of vomit stuck in his chest hair, the man was after her. Before he could touch her, she found a small animal, a tiny white thing with a pink snout, and with a piece of wood she had found she beat and beat and beat it, until the animal became a mash of blood and broken bones and precious fur, where floated a pair of open eyes that just wouldn’t die. I told her: through the trunk of the tree, from one side of the cliff to the other, that’s where I walked through. That’s when I stopped, afraid of the abyss. I wouldn’t walk back, just as I wouldn’t go forward. Then I stared at the cliff's wall and saw green grapes and my fear started to vanish because I wouldn’t feel hunger nor would I die because soon it would be time for harvesting, for picking up ripe grapes. Oneiric, we exchanged dreams, the two, three, four of us. And the female entrapped inside the woman’s body called for me, for you, for him, not minding that we were three. The three of us: that’s what she knew and wanted. Before going away, she still wrote on the squared paper, looking at us, each one at a time, keep this: the other, too, searches for himself blind; the other, too, always is three.
Some time after — now, to be precise, I realize: it’s through the dark corridors of the labyrinth that we walk, groping its walls, the three of us, searching for the vertex. I know you don’t understand, I know he also does not. Of your day I barely know, but I know of your labyrinth in you, as I know of his labyrinth in me, or of my labyrinth in you. And I also don’t understand.
I need to stop. I’m tired. Through my head, there’s this light I can’t tell apart from awareness or insanity. Is it from me, from you or from him that comes this voice that tells of yesterday’s dream? As if it were you, you enter the theater and from the dream they call you and ask you to play the role of the dream of someone who didn’t come, and you say you have never watched this play and you have never read its script and you know nothing of directions acting scenery and they say it doesn’t matter because it’s just a dream and, being in a dream, there’s no need for rehearsing, and you don’t know whether you start laughing or screaming, so you run away to find the other, but the woman’s face has the eyes of the man and the mouth of the woman, her breasts are the woman’s breasts, yes, those ones, the hardened nipples that brushed against your badly shaved beard when you kissed them, but her sex is the man’s sex, that same one that filled you with its warm sperm, and though you don’t feel fear or disgust, you back away confused and walk and walk looking for the theater so you can take the stage and in the dream perform your role as someone else’s dream, then you search and search inside the theater, inside pyramids and their narrow hallways, and you keep searching for the stage, the vertex, the royal chamber, your cue, your mark, and before you wake up you don’t think, or you do think: yes, I don’t know, he doesn’t know, you don’t know and no one else knows either if you’re not suddenly lost not even knowing your lines by heart, because the stage is the search for the stage and your role is not knowing the role and it’s alright and the alleged disarray suddenly sorts itself out and the great order of all things is the chaos spinning around you, disordered like chaos is, and like this I dive in and you dive in and he dives in: the dizziness of our six steps balances itself unsteady and precise over the razor’s edge. But — I know, you know, we know — the grapes might take too long to ripen. And we’re close to running out of time.
