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Quevera’s Variations I
She said she liked to make love in desolate, out-of-the-way places. Like the desert, for instance, in the middle of the day when the sun is hottest and everything is bone-dry and dead. But the desert isn’t desolate, he told her. The desert is full of reptile life and ancient, rugged plants. For desolation you have to go somewhere besides the desert. They started thinking about it. What is the most desolate place you can think of? The rubble-strewn ruins of a knocked-down building? A roadside marsh filled with litter? She said making love in desolation made her feel more womanly, more fertile. It made her feel a part of nature, as if by the act of making love she was giving life back to the earth and helping the earth rejuvenate its desolate places. It became a sort of running question for them. Whenever they went anywhere together, they would point to places that looked desolate—scrubland, an abandoned factory—and ask themselves, “There?” One evening they went to the center of the city to see a play. They parked in an underground garage and got lost trying to find the way out. In a stairwell, in a dead-end place where homeless people probably slept at night, (old newspapers lay scattered on the stairs), she suddenly wanted to fuck. They copulated like rats in the darkness. After that they started searching in earnest for desolate places. What is the most desolate place on earth? On the way to work one morning, she glimpsed it from the freeway. It was a no-man’s land where three or four freeways intertwined. The freeways looped around each other like a sailor’s knot, and in the center was a weed-covered place filled with rotting tires and other refuse. They had a hard time getting there. They had to crawl under freeway overpasses and climb chain-link fences. When they got inside the place, it was like being in a m�lstrom, the way the cars whirled around on all sides. They could see the faces of the rush-hour drivers, but the drivers were too intent on negotiating treacherous freeway curves to notice them with their clothes off. In the twilight glow, in all that noise, with people being hurled past in their cars, it seemed perfectly clear to them why it is so necessary to make love in desolation. In all that concrete and metal, the couple’s lovemaking confirmed the earth. Surely trees will grow on the spot where they made love. He told her proudly that his body had been pierced twelve times. She saw the three in each ear, the two in his lips, his pierced eyelid, and, when he raised his shirt, his pierced nipple. Later, when she knew him better, she saw and touched the other two piercings as well. He looked fierce with all that metal stuck to his body, not to mention the tattoos. It looked as if he could mete out or withstand a lot of pain. He had, in fact, withstood a lot of pain in his short life—his brutal father, his indifferent mother, all the bad luck that had been dealt him. She knew that each piercing, each metal ring or stud attached to his flesh, was the emblem of a wound he had received. One night they drank a lot of wine and she bade him lie down on her bed. She lit candles. One by one, while he lay inert and perfectly still, she removed each metal ring and each stud from his body. Then, slowly and deliberately, she tenderly kissed each pink and red place where the metal had mutilated him. He whimpered. One or two times, when she kissed him in places where the piercings had been especially sharp or emblematic, he started crying. When it was over, tears streamed down his cheeks and he lay there sniffling, completely spent, and she said: “There now, I have un-crucified you.” |
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