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 aeroplane 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 yoghurt 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 keep 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 mobile, 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 downwards, 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.
I wouldn’t be able to say that these scenes excite me; rather they disturb me. There are some images that bruise me like slaps on the face: such as those of that huge ejaculating, crying man whose face I can't put together.
In my box of boxes, droplets of sweat travel down my ribs, I stop them with the tips of my fingers and rub them over my belly. I turn the pillow onto its dry side, push my hands down inside my panties between my thighs and try to curl up towards the aroma between my legs. That used to send me to sleep when I was a child.
Finally, I give up on my efforts to fall asleep, I take off my damp t-shirt and light a cigarette sitting by the low window of the summer kitchen, looking up into the blue cleft above the street from where, instead of the freshness of nocturnal dew, a moist, lukewarm blancmange is sliding over the town.
All that can be heard in the Settlement is snoring – interrupted by curses and squeaking springs, the irritated thrashing of limbs coming through holes in the neighbouring houses – and a cat exhaling air through its tiny nostrils. Someone’s left a player on and it’s emitting a thin repetitive squeak. The fat town is sleeping in a fever, the guttersnipe.
It’s almost six, but the air outside is already warmer than inside.
Looking back, I can see clearly that everything had changed faster and more fundamentally than I had. I must have spent the last few years standing still on a conveyor belt, while everything else was rushing and growing. I rarely came home, caught off-guard every time I went to the centre, to the west end of the town, where my sister lives, into that scintillating showroom, that garish shop-window of a broken and robbed world. Going into town is a digital adventure in which I’m met round familiar corners by ever newer and more unrestrained silicon hordes. The adrenalin scattered through the air is an aerosol that fills and pierces my lungs.
I go to the big beaches with their concrete plateaux, recliners and cocktail bars, to the marinas, where there are Russian yachts larger than our houses and to hotel complexes with ramps and a caretaker; a mass of rubble and broken glass, diggers and trucks, steel scaffolding, and smooth prisms of black opaque glass whose metal glare assaults your vision. But I pity only the birds, the dolphins and flying fish. I believe that these things must horrify them when they leap out of the water or fly down from the sky.
In the east is the industrial zone. The east is a great stranded wreck. The shipyard with its tall green cranes, hangars, cement factories and abandoned railway tracks, and behind that vast garbage heap, on the edge of a peninsula, is the shabby Old Settlement, with a post office and church and dark runny mud in the polluted port, a comical little place under the distant skyscrapers, which blink at night at us beneath them...At me and Ma sitting on the balcony, sipping tepid beer out of plastic bottles or eating melon, while a fan on the railing pretends to be a breeze. Our neighbours who don’t have air-conditioning sleep on settees dragged out onto the terrace; whole families. Around the evening news time they sit round and watch TV. Here, nothing has changed; it hasn’t budged. Perhaps this is the only corner of the world I know, my haven, my salvation, my place of greater safety. Despair and refuge, a shred of happiness in a lukewarm bitter liquid.
The oleanders, capers and bougainvilleas have come into flower in the courtyards. And our cat, ginger Jill, has a street light like a star in each eye.
On such evenings the world and the town are not divided into east and west, but, as in an animal’s head, simply into north and south. Because that, urbi et orbi, is the language of moss, compasses and wind roses, migrating birds, the rhythms by which people rise and dance, the kinetic language that divides into hemispheres; eels and smelts that mate ecstatically in the shallows, so that you can tread among them, through that lively seething and flickering, migrating birds, mapa mundi, Luna and the North Star and the place up on the hill up to where the broom bushes grow.
Ah,
