I don’t know, but I keep asking myself, don’t we need to see Narciso and me together more? To feel the passion we had? To believe in it? Don’t you think? Just a little love scene? Something sweet would be nice. Come on, don’t be bad.
Ay, qué fregona. All right. All! Right! Just one scene, but you’ve got to promise to quit interrupting. After this, no more noise from you! I can’t work like this. Not another word until I’m finished no matter how the story turns out.
Not even if God commanded it! You won’t even know I’m here. Te lo juro.
A dream is a poem the body writes. Even if we lie to ourselves in the day, the body is compelled to speak its truth at night. And so it was with Narciso, who cluttered his daytime hours with so much noise and distractions he didn’t know his own heart, but was plagued with listening to its babbling all night.
—Ábrazame, he’d say to his wife when she climbed into bed with him. —Hug me.
And hug him she would. That’s how he was accustomed to falling asleep.
One night he dreamt this dream. They were asleep the way they always slept, his body nested inside hers, her arms around him. This is why the dream frightened him, because he wasn’t aware he was dreaming. He was asleep with her holding him. At first it was a pretty feeling to be asleep inside the circle of someone’s arms. But here is when he realized there was a third arm wrapped around him, and that’s when he began to scream. On his side of the dream he was hollering and screeching, flailing and yelling, but on the other side, the body simply wheezed and whimpered as if it wanted to sneeze.
—There, there, it’s only a dream. I’m here. Then Soledad snuggled closer and wrapped her arms around him tighter. A knot of frustration and fear, like a woolen sweater neither on nor off but tangled on one’s head. She tugged him toward her, heat of her words in his ear. —There, there, there, I’m here.
It made him miserable, cranky, and mean toward her. Long after the stint in Oaxaca was over, and he had a family and was living in the capital, suddenly he dreamt a dream that surprised him. A dream of the other one, the sweetheart from the hotlands.
—You betray me every night, he heard himself tell her.
—Betray you? she said laughing. —You’re married! Who are you to hold the word betrayal to my throat?
Then he tried to strangle her, but when he reached for her she turned into a fish and slipped through his fingers. When he woke he found himself filled with sadness.
He’d fallen in love with a mermaid. With her scent of the sea. The sweaty, gritty stew of lovemaking he loved. Her silver laugh. The purple orchid of her sex. That heat he remembered, even the sand flies, because they reminded him of her, the woman who did not care for him, unlike his mother and wife, who adored him. Men take women’s love for granted. All his life he’d been cooed and coddled. It startled him to find this mighty, huge, and holy woman who didn’t care for his approval. Of course, because of this, he loved her even more.
He could not forgive her. To forgive her for sex is bad enough, but it was not the sex that he could not let go. It was the love. After how many moons and suns had waxed and waned, plunged and plummeted into blackness, worn themselves bony and empty, and fattened themselves full again, yet the pain was still there, leaving him sharp-mouthed and cross and thin-eyed. The horn of a Guadalupe moon, the whalebone of the word lodged itself in the soft, fleshy part of his heart. Love.
Day sleeping or night sleeping, he lived his life like this, plagued by some annoyance he couldn’t name, like a hair on his tongue. One day walking the streets of the capital he found himself suddenly with a craving for sweets. He couldn’t explain why he felt an urge for chuchulucos. He was like a man sleepwalking until he came upon the candy shop Dulcería Celaya on Cinco de Mayo Street. He bought pumpkin-seed-studded obleas—transparent pastel wafers, pink, white, yellow, pale green, Ave María blue. He bought marzipan hens, cajeta from Celaya, guayaba paste, sesame seed candy, burnt-milk bars, candied limes filled with coconut, candied sweet potato with cinnamon and cloves, glazed orange rinds, candied pumpkin, tamarind balls, coconut bars, those cone-shaped suckers called pirulís, lassos of membrillo, almond nougats, Mexican delicacies dubbed Fatties, Harlequins, Queens, Joys, Alleluias, Glories, and those sublime meringue drops named Farts of a Nun. He bought everything he pointed to, and stumbled out of the shop with his sugary purchases, toward where?
It was an extraordinary day, sun-dappled, tepid, as clean and soft as a cotton dish towel used to wrap the fresh tortillas. He wished he had a room alone he could go to to wash his face. Perhaps he should rent a hotel room? But the thought of a hotel room. Hotel rooms depressed him. They were filled with memories of other bodies, of sadnesses, of joys no amount of copal or pine-scented disinfectant could flush out. No, he could not bring himself to rent a room filled with someone else’s emotions.
Narciso meandered toward the green of the Alameda and in the curly flutes and spirals of an iron bench he finally found refuge. The ashes and willows never seemed so transparent and cool as at that moment, as if the world were underwater and everything set in motion by distant whirlpools and currents.
A street dog with rusty fur sniffed at his left shoe, and instead of kicking it away, he watched himself feed it a yellow marzipan chicken. Membrillo, burnt milk, pink-edged coconut bars, Narciso and the rusty dog ate it all. He filled himself up with sugar, oblivious to the splendors of pork rind vendors, indecent lovers, and the exuberance of clouds.
Narciso ate the chuchulucos, but they tasted like the food in dreams, of air, of nothing. He wasn’t even aware he was eating in just the same way he was not aware the light was dimming, clouds tearing into gauzy shreds across the sky, the dog trotting away satisfied.
Sadness was gathering where it always gathered, first in the tip of the nose, and then in the eyes and throat, and in the twilight sky running like a ruined cloth, not all the sugared sweets in the world could stop it. He chewed slowly the last bit of caramelo, carefully, the molars grinding, the jaw working, great gobs of saliva washing down his throat. His teeth hurt, but, no, that wasn’t it. His heart hurt. And something else. Exaltación Henestrosa. He said her name. A deep root of pain. The little wall he had built against her memory crumbling like sugar.