7

–I love your photographs.

Kamtchowsky leaned in close over the laptop that Mara was holding on her knees. Mara gave her friend’s little brown claw an affectionate squeeze.

–You mean it, you really like them?

Neither of them wanted to come right out and say it, but the rumors sparkled and glowed: Kamtchowsky had become quite the little diva of amateur porn. At first, her notoriety was limited to a few online chat groups and blog communities, but when the video showing her getting reamed in a bathroom by two pale guys with moronic expressions was uploaded by a certain bigtool4U, it went positively viral, and once somegirl.avi had infested all the big torrent sites, an additional novelty caught the eyes of thousands: the sequel, in which a kid with Down syndrome in a McDonald’s uniform spilled semen brimming with flawed chromosomes into the hands of the very same tubby. The footage came from a McDonald’s security camera; one of the keys to its popularity was that it had been filmed with a fisheye lens, and in the background stood Ronald McDonald himself, patron saint of hamburgers.

Every porn star creates his or her precursors. Kamtchowsky’s sexual behavior had little in common with the canonical performances of Jenna Jameson, epitome of nymphomania; it had an uncontrolled, irresistible quality that was perhaps slightly closer in spirit to the coitus more ferarum (coitus in the manner of beasts) of Devon in Island Fever 2. Subtle, involuntary details gave the impression of a chubster who’d gone looking for trouble and was getting what she deserved. And as opposed to the case of Briana Banks, the talented and deserving German actress whose anal penetration scenes had brought her a number of awards, one factor that may have contributed to Kamtchowsky’s popularity was a perceived difficulty in rolling her over. It wasn’t that she was overly headstrong; if she didn’t roll over, it was because she couldn’t, though it seemed that she wanted to. She didn’t shriek with pleasure or purposefully caterwaul, and it couldn’t really be said that it looked like she was enjoying herself. She panted and puffed in deep concentration, trembling like flan with each thrust; her little cries seemed to be genuine expressions of fear, the sounds of a terrified little animal deep in the woods. The ketamine had caused her eyes to roll back as if she were on the verge of losing consciousness. K had participated in the creation of a film genre whose true precursors were the very things that made the world such a dangerous, hostile place, and which, precisely because of this, impelled the I to withdraw, to fold in on itself; in direct opposition to pornographic orthodoxy, both moral and aesthetic elements were brought into play.

–It’s not that I like them, it’s that I love them, Kamtchowsky was quick to clarify. Whenever I go by Retiro and see the Kavanagh Building standing there all spotless . . . I don’t know, it actually kind of makes me sad.

Mara shot her a look that was both admonishing and seductive. It was hard for her to sort out her own opinion about this public obsession with Kamtchowsky’s eroticism. She understood society’s current taste for misogyny, and its morbid relationship to it, but not the stridency involved. She had just finished altering a set of digital photographs, coloring in the successive visual planes of devastation; in front of her now was Libertador Avenue, its sidewalk drenched in blood. The world must have changed in some absolute sense, must have escaped the reach of both rationality and instinct.

–For real? You’re telling the truth? I love you so much I could crush your skull and eat your frontal lobes.

Kamtchowsky snuggled up against her, as if she could simply avert her eyes from all evil.

–And I’d eat your fingers and ribs, she answered.

A few months earlier, Kamtchowsky had decided to grow her market share by focusing on a specific sector of the population. She would release a new video, an autobiographical one, playing herself at the age of seven. The first showing had taken place at the second annual FU, Festival Urbano, which brought together cinema, video, theater, performance art, and multimedia—its interdisciplinary nature helped to stimulate dialogue. The theme was “Otros y Otras: Lives, Flows and Voices,” and Kamtchowsky’s video was preceded by a panel discussion called “Daughter, from the Man to the Name.” Her film was the only audiovisual element scheduled for discussion. The day of the premiere, she and Pabst wiped a few boogers on the “o” of the Welcome sign and took seats off to the side of the auditorium; they were very excited, but contented themselves with watching from a distance as the viewing public arrived. Kamtchowsky pinched Pabst’s thigh, and he writhed with happiness.

The discount Parnassus before them consisted of a wooden dais, a formica-covered table, and a microphone. Two of the panelists had just arrived: a fat guy with long gray Susan Sontag hair, and a woman with sharply filed features, short mahogany-colored hair, and pointy eyeglasses, who was introduced as a member of AOL, the Asociación de Orientación Lacaniana. The long-haired dude set down a rumpled pack of cigarettes, and squared it to the table; when his status within the cultural bureaucracy was mentioned by the moderator, his eyes fell half-closed as if to acknowledge his own prestige and gravitas. Pabst swore he’d once come across an interview where the guy had declared, “Back then I was very Sartrean, and that was hardly a conga line, believe you me,” but couldn’t remember exactly where he’d read it.

The murmuring quickly died down. The flies kindly withdrew out into the hallway with the drinks and canapés. The Lacanian woman spoke first:

–When an interstice is filled, a sistance is chosen.

The sentence took its typical vestibular voyage, brushing up against the ear drums of the audience members, embedding itself in their earwax.

–K’s film, the woman continued. She rested her elbows on the formica tabletop, confirmed that her machete was in place beneath her nails. She bent her avian, Lacan–o-maniacal neck forward and intoned:

–Let us say that K—’kay?—is likewise a Process, the name and protagonist of some other enclosing. What is it that occurs in the course of her unveiling, her demonstration—a word whose very etymology brings the monster into play? For monster comes from demonstration. The monster who menstruates, and here too the question of feminine desire in the postmodern age, the desire to make herself known to herself, face to face with herself, desous and de soi, her I am. How to think—and how to stop thinking—of a writing that comes into existence at the intersection of orality and genitality: in the orar of the daughter, in the genito of the father. An oral progenitor—and here is the paradox—it fills the mouth entirely. In effect it is the boundary itself that dissolves in one’s mouth. In the mouth: the father finishes, and yet does not.

The horrendous old bird paused to take a sip of water; she had detected Kamtchowsky’s presence.

–How to bind that sexuality—how to fix it to one’s mouth—to that organ of speaking, and of saying? Your text, your documentary, it is likewise affected by the game present within the act of assisting oneself. Assist: the A-shaped cystitis, the beginning, the letter that opens one’s mouth. Cystitis negates genitality: it forecloses upon it in that place where pleasure ungiven expires—it substitutes a place of pain for squat down and just let it hurt. It is the impossibility of allowing this organ trapped in a desire marked by the Urethra of the Other to function even as a means of escape. At the same time it is a cure, in the sense of care (Sorge), for that which orders you around in your own name. Your father has given you a name, and with the same mouth that pronounces it he forces upon you the knowledge of the truth in (fitting into, beneath, against, of) the very prohibition of the father. Now I lift my gaze and move from my text to the audience: the Law of the Father enters and exits the speaking, the saying of the Daughter—daughter with her silent h, the exhalation, the hollow core—she is emptied out, and symbolically she encloses the h once again inside her through the affirmation-negation of genitality, through that mouth-filling-wholly of the Father’s Daughter.

The necks of the audience members all craned distinguishedly toward Kamtchowsky. Pabst sunk down into his seat, repressing his vital impulse to run screaming from the auditorium.

Next, the Kamtchowskyan documentary was shown. She had shot it in digital: carpentry tools in a wood shop, and then a closet full of Papa’s shoes. Blue bathtub, electric razor, an antique shaving brush; a few bottles of expensive cologne, perhaps empty. Papa in front of a refrigerator, the background consisting of a puzzle made of magnets—the human body, black and white, a few words scattered in. Papa pulling a stubborn cork from a bottle of wine; half drunk and telling the same joke twice; Papa stirring the ice cubes in his whisky with his finger, looking up at the fat white moon—but he isn’t alone. A fixed camera filming the bed, the curtains ruffling in the violet light, Father taking his little girl in his arms before lowering her slowly, slowly to his hip, her little pink arms hugging him tightly, she breathes deeply, stretches out her neck, opens her mouth, et cetera. The digital image, given a faint sepia tone, had been transferred to Super 8 to strengthen its evocation of the past. Its main competitor in the Independent Film Festival’s YouthEye-Cinema Level 0 category was thought to be the eclectic color-by-numbers piece TransFormDimensional Gazes; in the end they both lost to Doc[u]mental: Unique Mental Documents.

During the following debate, Kamtchowsky gritted her teeth and shook out her hair several times; there was talk of “the new sensibility,” of art as social function and of social function as art. A while later those in attendance wandered out to the hallway to score a few mediocre tea sandwiches and inebriate themselves with Fernet Branca Menta, none of which would be likely to survive in the commercial market beyond art films and government-subsidized events. Pabst and Kamtchowsky gathered provisions at the bar that was sponsoring the event; then they wandered around for a bit, recalling for each other’s pleasure every detail of the atavistic dress and behavior of the panel’s participants. It was the high point of the day’s entertainment.