Now I know what happened.
If the palm of your hand is as big as mine, clench your fist, then wipe your sticky brow with it.
It’s the first, second, and third drop to fall on my face. I look up to the top of the building; I hear the snoring sound of the air conditioning and read “Union Air” in green and blue.
I waited for her to announce to me, “Stars F.M.”
She exits from the door of the building. His soft voice vibrates across the radio receiver, across my car, to say, “A woman is with you, she’s a woman who is being unfaithful to another person.”
She approaches with her two buttocks and a smile. When there’s less than my arm’s length between us, her face changes. “What’s this?” she asks.
“What?”
She stretches out her fingers to feel my face, like a girl in an advertisement. She rubs her thumb between the middle and the ring finger. She draws near with her nose and frowns.
They are the fourth, fifth, and sixth drops.
“Blood?”
I look to the top of the building and the seventh drop comes down right in the middle of my left eye, and then the body plunges down.
He moves, he whose name we won’t know, toward her right away, and we, upright, do likewise. She gives me her hand. She buries her face in my shoulder, then screams, “No. Nooooo!”
If the palm of your hand is as big as mine, clench your fist, go downward, and press gently.
“For God’s sake, O Lord.”
He whose name we don’t know says this, then pulls out the newspaper from under his armpit and spreads out the symbol of the three pyramids with a slow upward movement.
The directives of the president go down and the bilateral relations between two countries go to the bottom. They come to rest on the shuddering body so that the viscid red can drink up the efforts expended on containing the crisis.
He folds over the edge of the paper rectangle, stealing a glance with his tilted head.
“For heaven’s sake . . .”
“Her name was Sylvia . . . she’s been murdered.”
Across my ear the gentle voice whispers, “Imagine her as she was when she was with you, but instead in the arms of another about whom you know neither name nor origin.”
“Are you sure?”
Sylvia doesn’t say that she shivers when having a moaning crash with her spinal column. Sylvia doesn’t mention my fingers passing behind her ears. Sylvia looks for someone who won’t mind shoving her intoxicated into bed, without her wiping away his dried cum from her thigh in the morning . . . someone, just anyone.
I open my left eye. The narrow field of vision grows red, and a thread of dirty water flows along my cheek.
If the palm of your hand is as big as mine, clench your fist, then rub harder.
The “buttocks” girl says that the distance between the middle of a sword and its hilt is the best area to use for amputation, and that it has a name she can’t remember. She takes out the Japanese sword from its scabbard. She displays it to the neon light and the whiteness fuses along the expanse of the sharp blade, while I run through an album of photos of the two of them together in different poses.
“What do you think?” she asks.
“And who are you?”
“Her mum.”
I obstruct “her daughter’s” path with my foot.
“What’s your name, sweetheart?” I ask the girl.
She looks toward me for an instant then continues on her leisurely way.
Her “Mum” follows up with, “She doesn’t hear and she doesn’t speak.” Then she concludes hastily, “But she understands through signs.”
She makes a snapping noise with her thumb and the middle one toward her, as though asking for the bill, and calls out, “Sylvia.”
Sylvia is alerted. She paces along the red velvet “cat walk” with her slim backside. She turns round, to retrace her steps with the same feminine nimbleness, while the buttocks girl leans toward me to say, “Where are you spending the night?”
“Here.” I say. pointing to her suspended bed.
“She’s still on her diet. Yes, and something else . . . You must put a nip of brandy in her warm milk.”
“Brandy?”
“So she can sleep . . . she suffers from insomnia.”
If the palm of your hand is as big as mine, clench your fist, then touch the wall. We have come to the end of the photography test. I pour the rest of the brandy into the white cube fixed at the bottom of the camera.
I light the cigar while giving her her mixture. I administer it to her and after seven minutes she’d drunk it and was in the suspended bed. This is the permitted range. The cigar ash falls on her back.
“Good heavens. I’m sorry.”
I say the words while my fingers go after the ash, behind her ears. She shivers at my breath making contact with her spine. Sylvia. The best performance in town.
I kiss her forehead, then wish her goodnight, like anybody, just anybody.
Her mum says she needs to pee. I point to the bathroom. The cell phone in my pocket rings: “I want to do one ... I want to do one . . . one. one tea . . .”
I answer the call at the moment when there comes from inside it a stupid laugh. I call out to the one with the buttocks, “Get going and close the door after you, I’m down below,” and into the mobile, “All right? Yes? Oh, at work. Who am I talking to?”
I move outside.
“I’m talking to the maid? Really? No, not at all.”
I take the stairs three at a time.
“Are we on the air?!”
I put the radio receiver in my other ear with my free hand. I move the dial to a hundred-point-six, while moving out of the door of the building.
“‘By the Prophet, peace is integral to the program, and by this flimsy link.”
Now I know what happened.
“You’re divorced. I divorce you.”
The girl with the buttocks puts Sylvia on top of the hanging bed. She returns the sword to the wooden holder clamp without a scabbard. She leaves the window—above the air-conditioning-—open.
She slams the door closed and. when doing so, the special light switch shakes the bolt of the door, thus making shapes move on the ceiling. Sylvia notices.
If the palm of your hand is as big as mine, clench your fist. This is the range it has.
Sylvia walks the “cat walk” dizzily on her suspended bed up to the edge. She falls from its height above the sharp blade. Perhaps in the area whose name I don’t know between the middle of the sword and its hilt. The tap of blood in her neck is opened. It strikes the open window, again and again and again. It becomes dizzy for my advertisement “Staaars F.M.” It crashes for the fifth, sixth, and seventh time. Quivering, she turns over onto her side to pass across the window, above the snoring of the air-conditioner, and she falls, across the earpiece, across my car; weeping, weeping, weeping.
I imagine her twisting between my arms. Another one I call a son of a bitch despite the fact that I don’t know his name or where he’s from. You won’t understand that there’s a woman with you, she’s a woman who is being unfaithful to another person who doesn’t know my name or where I’m from and who calls me a son of a bitch. You can imagine her twisting and turning under you just as she was with me.