Aphorisms While Imagining Durango, CO

1. A man is capable of dying for an idea. A woman can only die in childbirth.

2. Think of Galileo and ask yourself what woman would choose to sacrifice her life, to be utterly alone, for the rightness of an idea?

3. Chrysippus is said to have died of laughter while watching a woman feed figs to a donkey.

A Tiny Opening

There had been a murder at the Eclipse and she wanted to go to a different love hotel. I said there was nothing to worry about. A man had simply strangled his girlfriend after a quarrel. No one had burst into a room and shot someone. There was nothing irrational or dangerous about the strangulation of a lover. I liked the Eclipse and wanted to return.

I liked the clean rooms and hard white beds, the porn that looped on the television, the modern elevators, and how the first floor reception area was also a garage where taxis and cars and scooters pulled in and out, allowing visitors to not be seen entering and exiting the hotel. It was a fine sex hotel and if it had been located nearer to Granada instead of the poor, far south of the city I would have considered getting a membership card to take advantage of the weekly discounts and specials.

_________________________

I felt of the outside edges and then I pulled her thigh open to take a closer look. She realized what I was doing and squeezed her legs together but I had seen it. It was the smallest vagina I had ever seen. With my hand trapped between her thighs I prodded it a bit, searching for the clitoris. I wasn’t sure I found it either. Everything was in miniature. It was as if the rest of her had grown up but her vagina had remained that of a little girl. Her being cleanly shaven only added to the effect. The tiny vagina explained her pain during sex and my aching cock after returning from the love hotel. It wasn’t deep enough or wide enough. Still, she insisted on seeing me. She wanted me to return to Cali in two years, when she was 24, to implant inside her the sperm to make her first baby.

Rape

1. Just as the human is born fearing the darkness of night and the snake, a woman is born with a deep understanding of rape. It colors her expectations of sex, only partly visible in the background, and often expresses itself in her most dangerous fantasies. In their genes men and women carry the history of the world, its tragedies and traumas and greatest fears.

Sobre el Techo

I lie awake in my sleeping bag on the hostel rooftop.
I look out across the city.
Cali is aglow.
The tiny lizards make a squeaking sound before they feed.
Tomorrow I shall learn to climb the mountain ahead of the rain.

Back in Cali

“I am sure that’s a man,” said Andreas as he sat down. “She has the hands of a bricklayer.”

“Why are you touching her?”

“Sylvana keeps making her dance with me. That ladyboy keeps grinding her ass into my dick.”

I laughed. I was very sick and weak and while everyone danced I sat at the table coughing and spitting mucus into napkins. I shouldn’t have been out in Menga but I was enjoying this. Andreas was a very serious Austrian and I very much enjoyed listening to his Austrian accent.

“Her hair stinks. It stinks horribly.” Andreas was disgusted. “Only black people are able to smell in this way.”

Sandra was rubbing the back of my neck and kissing me as we talked. Like Sylvana, the ladyboy and the gay cousin, Sandra didn’t understand English. The rum was cheap and it was starting to work and I was feeling a little better.

“I want to leave right now,” Andreas announced.

“Just wait,” I said. If he ran out I figured to get stuck paying for Sylvana’s taxi, and maybe the gay cousin and the ladyboy. Sylvana had pulled the old caleña trick of bringing her friends out on Andreas' tab. My girl Sandra knew better than to try that shit.

“You’re gonna get laid tonight, man. Just be cool. She knows we’re going to the sex hotel afterwards.”

Andreas and the gay cousin took Sylvana and Sandra to the dancefloor and I was now sitting alone with the ladyboy. The ladyboy leaned across the table and asked me something. I asked the ladyboy to repeat it.

“Do you think I am ugly?” she said. Her voice was very feminine.

I looked at her and smirked. She couldn’t have been more than 17 years old. She had done alright with her face but her body and chest was clearly that of a boy. I said she wasn’t ugly and made a point of using the masculine form. She must have figured my Spanish was bad and she took it as a compliment. I poured out the rum and the ladyboy and I did a shot together.

Four hours later at Motel Deseos I was ramming away at Sandra from behind. Reggaeton was blasting on the radio, porn on the flat screen, and I was watching us in the mirrors above the bed and on the wall, her big tight black ass smacking back against me. But like last week it became too painful for her and though she didn’t bleed, we had to stop. I was too big and she was too small. I told her we were incompatible and there was nothing to do about it and she began to cry. I pulled the condom off and rolled over and went to sleep. I could jerk off tomorrow if I needed to.

As Happiness Pursues Him

The Story of Failure

They feel entitled to a life of pleasure and security, and to be distracted from boredom. They consider each other as equals, working desk jobs and going to restaurants and lounges on the weekends. Sometimes, when feeling especially risky, they go out late on a weeknight to consume alcohol with another couple despite having to report for work the following day. To each other they are one half of a whole and have no interest in creating children. Sex is simply another act of many that has been stripped of its consequences. It is one more pleasure to be consumed, one more distraction from boredom.

During the week they cuddle on a couch before a television and he watches the fashion designer reality show she likes and then a cooking show and sometimes a sitcom. She likes to discuss these shows and he will discuss them with her. It pleases him to see her enthused over the characters and contestants. She has a point of view that he values. Of course, she is tolerant when he asks to watch important sporting contests on the weekends and sometimes to go away from her to see them. They are partners in life and it feels good to both of them and they believe they are building something. They share pleasures and security and consume things together and it feels to them that everything has been solved; that they have discovered something the others are still looking for.

La Felicidad