You’re violently confusing words, you’re appropriating them as though they were sugar cubes you were placing on your tongue and waiting for them to take effect. Forgive me if I’ve been unable to teach you. I believed that I had. Despite your refusal to talk, your constant running away. I thought my affection was enough, that my voice somewhere inside you could reach the hard knot you have for a soul.
– What becomes knotted in the heart is knotted with the silence of others. You know, your voice, your beautiful voice never really spoke to me. Your voice just superimposed itself on the mediocrity which in this Motel precludes all hope. I’m leaving but you know I’ll be back. I’ll come back because I know you’ll be expecting me. You see, our eyes are dry. That’s a good thing. Never cry for me. Never do that because then your tears would join with mine and we would be carried away, yes, I believe we’d both be carried away by a single wave.
II
Two hours were all it took for dailiness to become a small dark spot in the consciousness. Kathy Kerouac and Lorna Myher parked the jeep. Vertical section on the horizon, their bodies form a certain presence in the mauve.
– Hurrying up, slowing down. It seems we’re either too heavy or light, or does the desert create this impression of confounding the body’s real weight?
– By your side I keep my balance. You are this high-density water which keeps the body afloat and keeps it from sinking deep into the whirlpool.
– Do I deserve to be so valorized and celebrated? I’m just an ordinary woman.
– And I’m a great dyke fulfilled with joy by your side. You see, all we need is to get away from that Motel for a while to come alive again.
– We need to leave that damned television set alone.
– You are …
– Don’t tell me who I am, even if what I am I can only discover with you.
– Because I’m like you or because we’re different?
– Because you’re lively and afraid of nothing. Yet [discomfort in her voice] you really should learn to read.
– You still can’t accept me as I really am. I’m a body. A body happy when in water. Have you never thought that my body would disintegrate if ever it entered the twisted stuff of words? If you only knew how much I prefer my own nimble fingers a thousand times over all those fragile lines a thousand times twisted which men write, which your daughter writes.
– But everyone around us knows how to read and write.
– Everyone around us doesn’t do, doesn’t think, doesn’t bite their shelove’s ear like we do. No one around us does what we do. No one feels what we feel.
– I’m an ordinary woman and I feel like others feel.
– Others, who? Poor Kathy, my love. Poor me, your shelove. What will we become if you don’t love me as I am, if I want you as you are not? How many caresses, how many times hands over our mouths, how many times the belly’s fire before we become exactly what we are? Or is that irrelevant?
– But reading is something necessary. Reading is food.
– Yes! ‘What are we eating? What are we eating?’ Your daughter often says that. And she runs away, your daughter. As for me, I devour. I take. I don’t wait for the twisted lines to make my body breathless and unfit to the point where it can’t tolerate good tastes and beautiful images. Your daughter talks about eternity too much.
– My daughter is subtle. She understands things.
– And I’m gross, I suppose! Tell me what you’re doing with me then.
– With you I do what’s essential. My life. I invent my reality. I outline certainty and weave my faith.
– That’s all very abstract. [Silence] Do you think it possible to love around the body? To love without smells, without taste, without tongues seeking their salt on the beloved’s skin, without the rustling of hands on thighs, without needing to refine our senses? Do you think you could have loved me without considering my body, if I had been just an image at the back of your eyes, if you had had to leave out my body to choose me?
– Yes, I think I would have loved you even never having found your body. Yes, I could have loved you and left out your body.
– But leaving out my body, who would you have loved?
– I would have loved the impossible in myself, even till it bruised me.
– And you would have done it anyway?
– Anyway.
– You disconcert me. I find it unbearable, even for a second, to think of loving without bodies coming in to free or to sustain desire.
– Who said anything about desire? I’m talking about a specific emotion that creates presence way beyond the real body.
– Emotions, we have more than we need to elude reality. Desire is what prompts every encounter, every life impulse.
– I don’t desire you. I’m moved by you. I’m keenly touched by everything in you that signifies. That is infinitely more precious than desiring you. I’m vitally touched by you.
– As for me, I say desire and quickly, bodies one on one. Bodies of abundance, caresses, embraces, excitation. I want traces, marks, blood streaming in our veins. Love needs evidence. Carnal evidence otherwise the body languishes, dissolves into the twisted stuff of words, the chaos of emotion.
– Emotion is what pacifies.
– So you don’t desire me? In that case what are we doing together? How am I different from what stirs your emotion?
– You are unique.
– No I’m not, and you know it. Nobody is that free. No one woman is that alone in the world.
– Well then I guess there’s no explanation and that it’s pointless to seek a reason for the love I feel for you. Perhaps it’s easier to choose from among the suite of mirrors, costumes, and roles, words that are simpler, softer, less crude, ordinary.
– When it comes to love, one mustn’t be ordinary. It offends me to hear you say that you’re an ordinary woman.
– You mean it humiliates you to love an ordinary woman.
– I don’t think you’re ordinary. But yes, it humiliates me to hear you say it. I spent my whole childhood, my adolescence refusing to become an ordinary woman. We were poor but to my eyes that was no excuse for being confined to the ordinary. Look at your daughter, she isn’t ordinary either. And you may be sure that that has nothing to do with knowing how to read or not.
– You’re giving words quite a turn.
– Can one exist without turning words into sentences!
– You see, you’re more twisted than you care
