The Foreigners (15 page)

Then, all at once, he was down on his knees on the floor, licking her with his very large tongue. She was at the edge of the bed. “It's like a flower,” he murmured and went on licking. The men she'd been with recently had hardly even touched her, a few jerks with two fingers, and here he was licking. He seemed to like doing this very much. First lifting her head to watch, she then dropped it and let him.

At one point, he pulled her feet over her head, as if she were a child, a baby, and licked her asshole. She was startled. No one had ever done this to her before. Although the rest of the encounter was nice as well—he was tentative at first, only gradually letting her touch him—this became the part she went over and over in her head. For a long time after that, at random moments throughout the day, she would feel the touch of his tongue there. It was like an imprint, something primitive. He had touched deep inside her. She would do anything to be touched like that by him again.

When they came back downstairs, there was a sea of people waiting, a long line leading up to the glass booth, which spread out through the lobby, couples of all ages, some holding hands, some standing separate, more like strangers, their faces all registering divergent motives, the bleary-eyed, the frightened, the pros—for the young couple holding hands, it would be their first time. The vision veered between that of a group of individuals, each with a heart throbbing, a particular way of doing his or her hair, to a collection of types—there was something didactic in the bright light—representing the various ages, walks, intentions of humanity. The line spilled out onto the sidewalk, trailing down it to one side.

Isolde and Diego walked up the street. Except for a few places here and there, a bar, a restaurant, probably a brothel, the downtown streets were deserted. They came upon a kiosk, lit up, and bought bottled water, then arrived at the Plaza San Martín. The trees were towering, the figures below looking minuscule.

They crossed the street and entered the park. He held out his arm and she took it.

“Hey, look at this. This is my favorite statue.” It was called
Doubt
, a present from the French, and featured two figures. One, a young man, was sitting on the ground with a worried expression. An older, toothless man was leaning in, whispering in the young man's ear and smiling. Diego snickered. “Just look at the slimy, older guy,” he said.

Behind them in the park, people shuffled on the benches, either homeless people sleeping or couples making out, it was too dark to see. They passed a monumental statue, military figures with their chests flung out.

“It's like I feel like Alexander the Great,” he said. “But I don't see the Empire.”

Isolde laughed. “Maybe you have to build the Empire.”

“Yeah, well, I'm too lazy for that.”

They headed down the hill, on one side ghostly downtown buildings, on the other, the dark, cool grass of the park.

“According to quantum physics,” Diego said, “you can't locate an object in space. All you can do is point at a cloud of probable places where it could be. An electron is not in a certain spot, but a little bit smeared everywhere.”

“I don't get it.”

“Okay, take this example. You're walking down a crowded street, like Florida, you know it, the pedestrian street right back there, people turn, dodge, shift position, so they won't hit you. They accommodate themselves so as not to run into one another. In every next moment, a person will be somewhere different, on a different part of the street, walking, or stepping into a car. This is similar to the way the Greeks talked about potentiality. The next few steps could take you to different places. Or, if you're running, the whole time you're running, you're realizing possibilities. We ourselves are like projections into the future, not certainties, but waves of probabilities. Beings in a potential state, a little bit everywhere. At any moment, we could do this or that.”

Unlike animals, plants are immobile and can't seek out sexual partners for reproduction, so they must devise other ways. In his book
The Intelligence of Flowers
, Maeterlinck writes beautifully about the plight of plants, condemned by their roots to stay fixed in one place. Consequently, among all living beings, flowers or the reproductive structures of plants are the most varied physically and possess the greatest diversity of reproductive strategies. Over eighty-five percent of flowering plants are hermaphroditic. Some have both male and female flowers, while others, like the
Echinopsis spachiana
, have bisexual flowers, otherwise known as perfect or complete flowers, possessing both male and female sexual organs, the pollen-producing stamen, or male part, and the seed-producing carpels, or female part. Many of these plants are self-fertile, the male parts pollinating the female parts of the same flower. Others have self-incompatibility clauses that make this impossible and promote outcrossing. Some plants undergo what is called sex-switching, expressing sexual difference at different stages of growth. In the case of the
Arisaema triphyllum
, the plant expresses a multitude of sexual conditions in the course of its lifetime, from nonsexual juvenile plants to young all-male plants, to plants with a mix of male and female flowers to large plants with mostly female flowers.

Miguel was gone, traveling. He had lent Leonarda his house. She invited me over.

I entered the lobby, passing by the doorman, the sleek wood floors, the interior pillars, a quiet view of the back garden. I rang the bell. I heard something and felt that she'd been waiting for me behind the door.

She opened the door. She was dressed in men's pants and a button-down shirt. She had a mustache on. Then she was hiding behind the door.

“Wait, wait, let me see,” I said. She had turned her face to the wall. When I stepped nearer, she ran, still hiding her face. She went into the bathroom and closed the door.

“I'm taking it off,” she said.

“No, no, don't take it off. I want to see you.”

I waited in the hall. I barely breathed. I thought I could hear her breathing too, on the other side of the bathroom door.

“Please, Leo,” I said, “I want to see you.”

But I didn't want to insist too much. She was quiet. A few minutes passed. Then I heard her opening the bathroom door. She came out again with the mustache still on. She looked different. In her proud mode, boyish, standing straight. In those minutes in the bathroom, she had allowed the transformation to occur. Knowing her, I was afraid that something else would happen. She would change again. I didn't want to move, to do anything that would make her change again. She stepped near and pressed me against the wall. She kissed me. I could feel her breasts, full and round. But I could also feel as she pressed against me that she had a dick in her pants.

She led me through the living room past the leather furniture and the operating lamp to the bed. She took off my clothes and had me lie down. I had imagined this moment many times and finally it was occurring. She licked me, delicately at first, like a cat. Then she pulled the mustache off and began to really lick, applying pressure with her teeth and tongue.

I was so thrilled I couldn't think.

“See,” she said afterward, lifting her head, “I don't need a dick.” Her face was flushed with triumph. “What can I bring you?”

She brought me some juice, then went into the bathroom and changed her clothes, putting on makeup and perfume, coming out in a little pink T-shirt dress that reached mid-thigh. I was sitting up on the edge of the bed. She was girly, flirty. “Now I'm going to cook,” she said.

These visits made me dizzy. The thrill was that she combined everything, girl, boy, youth. The one thing she was not was mature.

The next visit, I asked if I could lick her this time.

“Okay,” she said. She seemed nervous. She went to wash first, then came out and sat under the lamp. She had shaved. I could see the line of shaved hair going down from her belly button, on her pussy that glistening veil of snail trail substance. She tasted bitter, not in an unpleasant way. Her breasts were heavy, strong and nervous, pressing against her T-shirt.

I would go back to my house to sleep and wake in the night, feeling disoriented. Not so much about where I was, which city, though that would happen too, than a deeper confusion inside my brain. It was as if my conception of the human adventure had changed. The things I had held to be important, at the center of my life, suddenly seemed insignificant, bits of stray matter swirling around. I felt that I needed to find new ideas, new ways of conceiving of a life, any life, including my own. I would find these ideas not within myself, but outside. And I would have to look beyond the systems I was used to, to seek out, insist on, disruption.

Leonarda showed me what she'd been doing, acts of private vandalism throughout his house. She had mixed the colognes in the bathroom, opened a bottle of what she assured me was very good wine and half filled it with a bottle that was mediocre. She had been shifting paintings, objects, furniture slightly to the left, placing everything, however slightly, awry.

Certain figures in Buenos Aires are known to have important libraries. If you need a book, you can find a friend who has a friend who knows this guy who probably has it. Then you can hope to arrange an introduction. These figures with the marvelous libraries are often happy to lend books—it is, after all, part of their prestige. They rarely ever ask for a book back directly, too gross a gesture. Rather, if the book is not returned, they find ways of securing it, sending envoys who insinuate themselves into your house and slip the book off your shelf when your back is turned.

Miguel was the possessor of one of these famous libraries. Leonarda had been scrutinizing his books. She showed me the way he made comments as he read, underlined things. For her part, she had been making comments on his comments, disparaging, mocking remarks or suggestions for further reading, there was something he hadn't understood. The next time, she showed me some love letters from a woman, where she'd done the same, put commentary in the margins, made grammatical corrections.

Must youth be bound up with evil? What was not clear to me was to what degree Leonarda's evilness was real and to what degree an affectation, a generative force to make something happen. And what about me? Was I drawn to this evilness, even thrilled by it? I had actually never considered being evil before. New terrains were opening all around me.

Little by little, I was becoming aware of the magnitude of her target. It seemed to have grown, and taken on all kinds of shadowy significance, like those deep water beasts on whose hides crustaceans accrue to the point where the actual animal disappears from view. Sometimes, it seemed that we were moving in this deep water light, luminous and murky at the same time, an occasional ray cutting through. Did she sense the same murkiness? She of the million synapses firing at once. Could I be aware of something she wasn't?

At other times, it seemed that the light was firmly on, maybe even too bright. She kept that clinical operating-table light on all the time. It was as if she were preparing for some awful surgery, laying out her shiny tools.

“Can we turn that off, please?” I asked one day.

She shrugged. “Sure”—flicking it off—“why?”

With it off, I felt better, as if he was less present, more gone. Even though, of course, he was everywhere.

One night when I came over, she was crying.

“What is it?” I asked.

She had her terribly exposed look. “Sometimes I just feel so alone.”

“Maybe you should leave here,” I said. “Do you want to come stay with me?”

“No, no, it's not that. It's that sometimes I feel that if I were arrested, accused of some terrible crime, no one around would defend me. No one would stand up for me, say to the cops: ‘You're fucking crazy, she didn't do it.'”

“Wouldn't your family?”

“No, they'd think I'd done it.” She looked miserable. She waited. “I was thinking maybe you might be the one, the only one, who would vouch for me. But I'm not even sure of that.”

She looked away, waiting.

I paused too long. Would I stand up for her? Of course I would want to defend her. But would I actually believe she hadn't done what she'd been accused of? Wouldn't I too have a doubt?

“I would, of course I would,” I said.

She turned on me fiercely. “No, you wouldn't.” Then firmly and more calmly, “Don't lie. The worst thing you could do is lie about it.”

The rest of the night she was quiet.

No matter what, in my mind, one thing was certain. I wanted to be with her. I dreamed I was in bed with a woman with full round breasts, who suddenly sat up, revealing her dick, which she put inside me. I understood then too that this was what I wanted. There was something here that expressed the pinnacle of my desire. I wanted both to be with that girl and to be that girl. She was both the thing I desired and the model.

The dream stayed in my mind as an image of fulfillment, but I was not fulfilled. I walked all over the city, restless, at all hours, to exhaust myself. The smell of the streets, still crowded with young people at three, four in the morning, excited and upset me. I remembered my earlier walks, the way a pall had hung over everything. Now, on the contrary, I felt that I was surrounded by endless combinations of unfamiliar ideas and forms, if only I could seize them.

The vine crept in the window. The water ran down the wall in a sheen. I lay on the floor. If I lay there quietly, I would feel something in my chest, a kind of pressure. At first it was painful. Then it gave way. The place was very quiet. I could hear the sounds of water running in the pipes. I pictured water being pumped up from the Río de la Plata, purified, running through all the pipes of the city. Next I pictured the complex of underground streams, the filthy dark water, having been reoriented, sloshing beneath the streets I knew. But I was tired. I wanted to rest. My mind, so excited, wanted to think about nothing, or to only see the same thing over and over again. I let it drift until I saw the water farther out, the empty gray sea, the monotonous lilt of waves, the beautiful regularity of their irregularity, lapping, endlessly, lap, lap, lap.