“Besides I have my period.”
“Blood doesn’t bother me, I’ve witnessed childbirth. And it wouldn’t be the first or the last time.”
“I can’t, you smell like baby, I don’t know, like baby vomit.”
“What are you talking about, dummy, my clothes are clean.”
“It’s not a smell that comes out in the wash, you’ve got the kid in your little sheepskin there.”
“That’s not from the kid, it’s that shitty smell that stuck from the grill, you smell like that too. I’m in love with you.”
“Stop, Juli.”
“I mean it, I’ve always been in love with you.”
“How would you know.”
“How would you know, idiot, you’re always running away.”
“I’m always running away?”
“Yes.”
“Besides, what good does it do me now that you’re in love with me? What do you expect to get out of it?”
“I don’t want to get anything, I’m just telling you how it is.”
“How it is is you’ve got a wife and two kids.”
“What does that have to do with anything, sometimes it really surprises me how stupid you can be. What is this shit about cheap morality? You act like this sophisticated city girl who lives in Buenos Aires and yet, actually, you’re an idiot.”
“You’re calling me an idiot, moron? I’m just trying to respect you and your family.”
“What are you talking about, respect, you don’t even know them, they’re nothing to you.”
“They are something, plus I’m doing it for myself, too, to protect myself a little.”
“What are you doing here, then?”
“I don’t know, I wanted to talk with you, because I missed you, because in the end in Esquel we didn’t have a chance to talk at all.”
“Are you attracted to me?”
“Why would you ask me that? I don’t like the acid baby smell you’ve got on you.”
“Come on, I’m not kidding.”
“Well, don’t ask me that, you know I am, I told you yesterday already, you’re beautiful.”
“So?”
“I don’t know, I can’t.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Fine, hit me.”
“Don’t provoke me, you know that if you tell me to hit you it makes me want to fuck you.”
“You turn me on so much.”
“So stop screwing around, then, I’ve wanted to fuck you since I saw you.”
“At the bar?”
“I don’t know, was that where it was?”
“Yeah, we saw each other at Vanina’s bar for the first time . . . This time, I mean.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Well, why didn’t you say anything? You just took me home like it was no big deal.”
“When?”
“That night, after the bar, you dropped me at Andrea’s place like it was nothing, you didn’t even kiss me.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about, do you want to have sex or not?”
“You told me you were in love with me.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t think so, I don’t think I want to have sex with you, in a little while I have to take a bus to Buenos Aires, go back to my boyfriend, forget about you, I don’t know if I feel like it, it was so hard last time.”
“So you’d rather nothing happen then? You’d rather just go on home like this?”
“Like what?”
“Turned on.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Come on, Emi, it isn’t like that, you’re mixing everything up in my mind, we won’t have sex if you don’t want to, it’s not about sex, my life doesn’t depend on having sex with you. I don’t feel like arguing anymore, if we keep arguing I’m going to get even more turned on, I feel like you’re talking in circles, I don’t know, just come here, let me hold you.”
He holds me. The one who’s turned on now is me. I can’t take it anymore. Even though it’s not exactly being turned on, because I’m not, in general: I wouldn’t feel like touching myself or like being with anybody else. It’s him, it’s my hangover, it’s this moment, and it’s him. And it’s us. I rest my head on his shoulder, put my head in his neck, breathe there. He smells so good, as true as the acidity thing is, it doesn’t bother me, it coexists well with that smell that’s so familiar to me, his smell, his sweat, his person smell. I try not to exhale right on his neck because I’m confused, and I don’t want to keep driving him crazy. It would appear to all be vastly simpler for him. He thinks he’s in love with me but that he’s already given me up, meaning he can be in love with me in this passive way, think of me from that place, in parts, in fragments of me, of what I am or of what he wants me to be, he selects me, selects my portions, keeps me, preserves me in his memory in a very particular way, resurrecting me when he wants to, and it’s melancholy, a memory of that which could have been, and this would be the saddest fuck in the world, and the most beautiful all at once. Today we’ll say goodbye to each other, and he’ll think of me for three more days, as he goes back in his truck and every time he passes by the little picnic tree and everything will be so sad and so lovely and so definitive, and then he’ll get home where his son and his wife’s pregnancy and his new son are awaiting him, not to mention when that one is born, and by then everything will have become so relative, and I will gradually fade away, the memory of me will grow opaque, a few images in sepia, difficult to appreciate, so relative all in all, so relative. But not me, I, on the other hand, will cry the whole way back, and that is just the beginning of the end because at least I’m still in transit, the worst part comes later, when I have to get my life back, grab the bull by the horns, put my place back together, my relationship with Manuel, tell him I cheated on him with Julián or not that I cheated because it’s not like it was about or against Manuel, but that I was with Julián, and then have Manuel get bitter and rightfully so and have him feel bad thinking that part of my sadness over the next few days or weeks is going to be due to Julián, to that presence that isn’t that and that I brought on me, and me rocking, juggling, thinking that everything I have around me reeks and that I’m never going to completely know exactly what I want and that maybe I’m always wrong and then neither leaving nor staying, nor anything, neither being anywhere, nor being anywhere.