the head of the group. The other two silhouettes appeared. A young, thin man and not so tall, with an adolescent complexion, wore a skull mask. He said You can't pass, and the sound of his voice confirmed his youth. The tall individual was covered by the mask of a goat. His voice was thick as his stomach and he also chided me by ordering me not to scream.
My body felt the paleness of fear. My thoughts as well as my body were paralyzed. My hair stood on end when feeling the forced contact with those three beasts. As if that fat goat had been a witch and his threat had been a spell, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't scream.
LETTER TWO
The morning I woke up with that kind of revelation that told me that I was really in love with you, I found myself startled. Perhaps I do not have the precise image and I am unable to describe the exact sensation, but the memory emerges almost clear, like a déjà vu waiting to be captured. At that moment she was just a friend to you, a circumstantial mate who you visited in your free time as the more adequate distraction to any teenager.
The other revealing morning, in which I suffered your epiphany, was when you gave me that innocent kiss. When I came home I fell down in the hammock and while the short wind touched my happy face, the memory of your touch evoked my almost epileptic feelings, in internal shocks like insects flitting my chest or candy worms poking my bowels.
Mornings... Maybe they are foreboding, or something like signs. The mornings at the institute were not pleasant if I did not find your presence at recess, even if it had only been for the occasional babble that emerged from your mouth, because I had to (as I once told you) take out your words with a scoop. Adequate metaphor to define your reality at that time when you were a pale boy and very quiet. The important thing was to perceive our figures sitting on the sidewalk, with my legs together and my hands on my lap, and capture the lifting of my hairs interacting with the rhythm of your movements, as two magnetos strangers, who wanting to attract, only rub each other in a sway of tension. Those days I began to fall in love with you, with your long pauses of silence, with your gaze projected to the horizon in search of ideas and that encouraged me to explore the enigma of your prudence.
It was one morning when you waited for me in the pouring rain. You insisted on going to the meeting, without realizing that it was better to escape the flood and postpone our meeting until the rainbow exit. It was the morning which gathered us in the park of the village, in the corner christened with a fancy name and we'd use as a key on subsequent occasions, having always kept in mind that each couple has dubbed it with a name according to their relationship. It was one morning when you brushed my breasts with the impudence of your hormones. It was one morning (I want to dream it like this) when you caressed my buttocks over the fabric of my hateful denim pants.
It was one morning the first time we made love, although our love had already been made long before. Perhaps because at that time we only had those spaces in the early hours of the day, when the dawn was breaking and we woke up eager for the moment of meeting again. And then the afternoons would come, which may not be so premonitory, but very special. When noon was approaching and I was jubilantly getting ready for meetings in the city.
Our love was maturing, and we matured together with it, these sad lives and remorseful for the distance, but happy because despite everything we felt close.
I remember the time when we did not have a phone and we sent messages thanks to a notebook and a momentary accomplice. And after all this happy remembrance, our contemporary situations come to my mind, these ones which we are building and destroying. A Russian man says that even the great reformers of the society have been criminals, because when they enacted new laws, they abolished the old ones preserved as sacred. For this I say that to keep on building, we demolish some things, exorcising our shortcomings, practicing a debugging in our relation to not let her die.
Maybe I can't fully understand you, it's most likely. But here I am, trying to tell you that I want to interpret the codes of your brokenness and take a path holding our hands. Perhaps not a radical, immediate solution, but one that serves to adjust the balance of this relationship that is teetering like a castle of cards on the seat of a full-fledged locomotive.
This letter is a symbol of my engagement. I feel bewildered because I warn that I have demanded too much to you and in your circumstances you have not been able to satisfy my whims, not because you did not want it but because the nature of your sadness has absorbed you and I have not been able to warn you until now when the day is breaking, after this dawn of anguish.
Maybe the mornings are foreboding. Because just now the image of a hypothetical future arrives, with your warm body resting next to mine in a morning hug, in an awakening that is very dreamy, when the dew has distilled the sweat on the nearby herbs and the first twilight of the day bring out the warmth of the sun that is not from the sun but from our awakening.
Yours today, tomorrow and forever.
CHAPTER THREE
Our story started in high school. An exalted girl with her thunderous voice who complained to the rector. It was the graceful Eloisa. Thin, with her waist made of porcelain and her angelic face, his bow at rear and her charisma embroidered by the youthful energy. When we met, little by little, a closeness disguised of friendship brought us together. The most important moment of the breaks was being able to see her and greet her with my glance. The mornings insisted on turning me next to her. Gradually my illusions flickered; sometimes, exalted, it did not fit me, because she chose me to talk at break; other times I was sad, because she spent her minutes in the hubbub of her group of friends.
One morning, after leaving the institute and after having participated in some games of a fair that had been installed in the town, I walked through an alley not so common in my tours with the intention of heading home. I heard shouts behind me. In the distance, a gang of girls in scruffy uniforms were beckoning me to approach them. A park smudged with sand offered us its ground as the only seat. The comments full of puerilities (of which I was oblivious) of those nymphets prevented me from participating in the chat. I shone in my silence and they directed their glances at me. Tell her, a freckled girl told me, looking at Eloisa. Nerves took over my skin. I remembered that a week ago I had awakened with the clairvoyance of being in love. I pretended to repeat a lovely speech that I had prepared some days ago, but the words flew to a dimension impossible to cross. I laughed demurely. It was when I heard the expression: Talk to her now. Eloisa’s closest friend had said it and this stimulated me to speak. I looked at her. She sat cross-legged on the position of a lotus.
I did not have to spend more than a minute for a short kiss (short in terms of body but substancious within us) to be present under the expectant eyes of the girls. The youth crying of the companions who had been suspended in front of my declaration of love rumbled rhythmically, mysteriously unanimous, as prepared with priority, unvealing the consummation of the ritual when touching her mouth with mine and extinguish finally the lip virginity of her dear friend.
I was once a virgin. I always thought that he would be the first man I would give my purity. That tingling sensation came to me every time I finished reading his love letters, smart, passionate and ridiculous, as all love letters should be. After all we’ve had a relation for few years.
But I have strayed from the subject, dear friend, and since you insist on knowing my story I will proceed to try to finish it.
If there's anything it does not erase from my memory, rather than the visual record, it is the smell of his body. If someday they asked me to identify any of them for the nature of their build, I am sure that I would be wrong in my exploration than if I did because of their smells.
The silent man, who with the passage of time I preferred to give the name of dumb, had a particular smell of machine oil, as if his work had been to lubricate all day
