The Ally, page 4
“The framework is more subtle than before, but just as efficient,” she says to me.
And I feel that she’s right, that everything she’s saying is true, but—for that same reason—I don’t want to keep listening to it, it’s irritating me, making me feel bad about myself. And not just about myself but about my family, my friends, my colleagues at work. Her words weigh on me like judgments, and annoy me, because I just want to look at her ass and squeeze it and give it a few little slaps, leave a small pink stretch mark on each cheek and not think, not think about any of this, keep being as blind as I was before, not question myself, live in peace, be a happy, shortsighted, cynical man; a clown; a faithful dog; a domesticated cock; a semen syringe; maybe take a couple of dirty pics for my personal consumption. But I don’t want to belong to her pack, not that, not ever; the structural dissatisfaction seems unbearable. I don’t want to pay attention, I want to keep ignoring the existence of the culture of silence, of rape, of disdain. I want to know I’m in the right, not have to choose sides. What a drag to have to think about these things. What a drag to have to reexamine my privilege.
But I have to do something, I know it. I have no choice.
6
MY MOTHER SMOKES like she’s on death row, and that’s one of the only reasons I go visit her every once in a while. Her house is the last bar where you can smoke, which is great, but her emotional intensity and her Olympic ability to jump from one subject to the next sets me off-balance, which is less great.
One comes here to listen and pray in silence, like in church.
“Have you spoken to your sister lately? I don’t know what she’s expecting out of life, honestly. Every week she’s got a new boyfriend. Well, “boyfriends” is what I end up calling them, because not even she can remember their names. She’s thirty years old! I’ve lost all hope that you’ll give me grandchildren, but I’m still holding out with her…What do I have to do to get her to make me a grandmother? I’d take care of everything, the diapers, the food, everything. Of course, when she makes up her mind it’ll be too late, and then I’ll have to put up with her regrets. Because one day she’ll want to be a mother, I’m sure of it, and then I’ll wash my hands of the whole thing, she better not dare come crying to me, because Lord knows I’ve told her every way I know how: find a man, have kids soon, because later life gets more complicated…And she pays me no mind. She never listens to me. Not that you do. But I’m twice her age, and a woman and a mother, I must know something about how these things work. And don’t go asking the fisherman about it, it seems like he doesn’t care about anything, but that’s not the case. He doesn’t talk much, but I can tell. He’s worried too.”
“The fisherman” is my father. Ever since he retired, he spends his weekends on the river, with a couple of his buddies, fishing. Or that’s what he claims. Amen.
“You can’t imagine how much your cousin’s driving me up a tree. Turns out she and her wiseass husband have signed up for dance classes right nearby, three nights a week. I don’t know if it’s ballroom dance or jazz or some other stupid thing. And, of course, since I’m close by and have nothing better to do, because everyone assumes I have nothing better to do, they asked me to take care of their kid those evenings. Three evenings a week. And I love the kid, but since he’s started walking he’s a real pain in the ass, running all over the house, moving everything, breaking everything. When it’s not raining, I take him down to the park so he can burn off some energy, and then he’s calm, but still, he never stops, he’s like that Tasmanian Devil. He hits other kids, and then I’m the one who has to apologize to the parents. And I’m not even his grandmother. I’m sick of it. Any day now I’ll tell them to stick that boy where the sun don’t shine.”
I know my cousin’s son, and he’s just a normal kid. From what I’ve been told, at his age I was hell on wheels, the kinda kid who’s discovered the secret pleasure of kicking adults in their shins under the table and on elevators. A “handful,” as they say. But I suppose my mother doesn’t remember that, or doesn’t want to remember it. Amen.
“And now your sister tells me that she’s thinking of going to Canada for a year. Canada, I swear! What’s in Canada? She already knows how to speak English…And French! She still acts like she’s fifteen years old, and everything is all just going out with her friends and coming home in a sorry state. You know what I was doing at fifteen? Working. Working to help out my family, and if there was anything left over, sure, I’d go out. But only on Saturdays, and only until ten, and if I was any later, you know your grandfather, he’d be waiting for me with the belt. You know how he was. A diamond in the rough. When I wanted to study nursing the guidance counselor said it was a tough road, that hardly anyone made it through, and your grandfather agreed with him, and between the two of them, I gave up on that dream. But he did that for me. I probably wouldn’t have been good at being a nurse, and he was the one who got me the job at the hardware store.”
I’ve always wondered what would have happened if my mother had gone to a school with a competent guidance counselor, instead of a mentally deficient one. Amen.
“But thank goodness your father showed up when he did, because your grandfather had a very short fuse, and he didn’t like the skirts I wore. It was like a rescue. What does your sister need to go to Canada for? Doesn’t she have friends here? Aren’t there handsome men here? Doesn’t she have a job here? Sure, I went to a new city at nineteen, but that was because I got married, and at twenty I already had you, and at twenty-four your sister, and while your father worked I took care of the house and you kids, and that’s it, the house and you guys and coffee with my friends, until you left home and your sister left home, ay, that was so hard on me, and then what? If it weren’t for your father, even though sometimes I wished he wasn’t around, then what? Because I’ve never wanted for anything, let the record state. Your father made me feel safe. And what is your sister expecting from life? Does she want to be single at my age? Because now it’s easy for her to meet someone, go to bed with him, enjoy. She’s young and pretty. She’s smart. But that doesn’t last forever. She’s nearly too old to have kids! When is she finally going to make me a grandmother? When?”
My mother’s homily awakens my desire to grab her by her jacket lapels and shake her until she wakes up. It used to be, years ago, that I found her a bit sad, a woman tormented by a lack of ambition, bored of looking at herself in the mirror. Now she seems like an angry woman. Cranky. A woman whose indignation is one step away from anarchy. And she doesn’t seem to know why, even after some soul-searching. Although she probably has her suspicions. She suspects that her life has been a disaster from start to finish; that she never had a real opportunity to do something, anything, on her own merits; that she went from daughter to wife to mother at a shockingly terrible speed, as did so many of her generation. She suspects that. What she perhaps doesn’t know is that she was tricked. That they made her believe that being a mother and a wife and a homeowner was her dream, that my father was her Prince Charming, that having us was her purpose in life. That that was it, and that she had no further aspirations throbbing in her veins. They tricked her by mythologizing a life that would always leave her on the margins, like a pariah. Because the important things are never on the margins, are they? Amen.
“Sorry, Son. I’m getting worked up. Go on, tell me about you. What’s new in your life? How’s work going?”
I wonder what to do. Should I tell her what I’m thinking? I have no right. Do I tell her that I feel she’s been scammed? Do I tell her that maybe it’s too late for her, but that she shouldn’t wish on her daughter, my sister, the same sermon they sold her almost sixty years ago? Or should I keep my mouth shut? And be a coward, a complicit coward. Maybe it’s better to let her sleepwalk through life, unaware, unconscious, asleep. To maintain the inertia of six decades rolling in the same direction. Maybe it’s better to keep the wool over her eyes, in case the truth is too much to bear. The red pill or the blue pill.
“Have you seen The Matrix, Mom?” I ask her.
“No, never. Your father likes that kind of movie. You know my favorite is Young Bess, about the Virgin Queen. It’s so beautiful, so romantic.”
The fucking Virgin Queen, seriously? My head is about to explode.
What would a good feminist do?
7
TEN COMMANDMENTS OF A GOOD FEMINIST
A good feminist does not need to say he is a feminist.
A good feminist does not consume cultural products that denigrate women.
A good feminist does not participate in activities that invisibilize women.
A good feminist does not tell a woman what she must do.
A good feminist does not interrupt a woman when she is speaking.
A good feminist does not pity a woman for her historical burdens.
A good feminist has no prejudices against menstrual blood.
A good feminist does not defend the idea that there are essential differences between men and women.
A good feminist is always a feminist, on every occasion.
A good feminist does not back down.
8
I DON’T CALL first when I go over to Najwa’s house anymore. I did it for a while, even after she gave me a set of keys, because I didn’t want to abuse her trust. It’s not “our” house, it’s hers: with her rules, her layout, her routines, and her habits. But after a while she asked me to stop acting like a guest, told me there was no need for me to announce my visits since I was already a part of her life and had the right to come and go as I pleased—just so long as I always respected three conditions:
1. Cohabitation doesn’t mean being together all the time. She needs her space, not only to work, but also to exist. It goes without saying that I do too. Standard greetings are permitted, but a closed door is one that should not be opened without the consent of the person inside.
2. The bathroom, kitchen, and living room are common spaces. Since there is only one television, if someone wants to use it they have veto rights over and above whoever is occupying the same space for other activities, such as reading.
3. Cleaning chores should be handled according to common sense, and not some strict administrative calendar, except for in the bedroom, where she maintains the prerogative to control the chaos levels.
I enter the house and hear moaning.
Actually it’s not just moaning. I also hear screaming and hitting.
All the lights are out, except in the bedroom. According to the first rule, if the bedroom door is open I can go in without asking permission. I am an intruder with unlimited access. I approach slowly, without making noise. She didn’t hear me come in, I don’t think, but I understand that she knows I could come in at any point.
I peek inside the room. I want to surprise her, give her a start. I behave like the stealthiest ghost in the neighborhood. My cock stirs.
Najwa is lying on the bed, on her back, with her legs open and her hands inside her panties. She is masturbating while watching lesbian porn. On the screen, a gagged woman with her arms tied to a post and her legs separated by a wooden rectangle, maybe a bench, is being whipped by another girl, both in their very early twenties. The ass of the girl on the receiving end is covered with red-and-purple marks. I see Najwa squirming and closing her eyes, and I decide to wait to show myself until after she’s climaxed. She stretches. She pulls her hands out of her panties but keeps watching the video.
“Hello, gorgeous,” I say.
She barely bats an eyelash. She turns her head toward me, with a placid smile, and gestures for me to come over and kiss her.
“Hellooooo,” she says.
She seems high, but she isn’t. She’s always like that after an intense orgasm. The scene arouses me, and as I kiss her I undo my belt and pants. I don’t think any foreplay is needed, and she isn’t usually interested in that sort of heavy petting before sex anyway. I take off my shirt and stroke my cock through my underwear. I carefully move aside the laptop computer, despite how bad I want to tear off her clothes. It’s a Mac. Then I focus on her pussy.
After a few well-studied positions and a couple of clitoral orgasms, she asks me to hit her. It’s not the first time we’ve done that. She turns over, buries her head in the pillow and lifts her ass slightly.
“With the paddle or my hands?”
“Your hands,” she exhales.
The paddle leaves terrible marks, and I’m sure the pain is commensurate with its signature. It’s not a toy to be used regularly. She chooses. So I’ll use my hands.
I take off my three rings: two on my left, one on my right.
And I begin.
The intensity and duration of the beating is not negotiated, it unfolds intuitively. I have to remain attentive to her breathing, her screams, the movement of her body. She generally can handle two or three blows on each side, but it’s not an exact science. Sometimes she wants me to stop; sometimes she wants me to keep going. In either case, she tells me.
I usually end up with swollen, aching hands. I’ve even taken it so far that I couldn’t put back on some of my rings, because my fingers were so inflamed. I execute each smack like a scientific procedure: I lift my hand, I calculate the angle, I fix on the site of impact, feint, and determine the strength of the blow. It’s not the same to use your palm as the back of your hand. It’s not the same near the tailbone as on the fleshier, softer area. My erection grows the more she screams and the more I see her convulse on the bed. I don’t always last until the end: certain gestures spur me on, and I stop hitting her, open her legs and sink my cock suddenly as deep inside her as I can. I normally don’t go back to wrecking her ass after penetrating her, unless she asks me to. We both tacitly assume that I will always get excited, and so the type of sex we have depends on what she desires.
I tell her I want to ejaculate in her mouth. She nods.
When we’re finished, I’m exhausted. I lie on my back, looking up at the ceiling, trying to catch my breath and lower my heart rate. I can feel my left hand throbbing and I imagine her ass tomorrow, bruised, deformed, something she’d have to hide at the beach. It’s not an image that makes me happy, even though I know that everything’s fine between us. I feel confused.
Later, smoking a cigarette in the kitchen, because we don’t like to smoke where we sleep, I tell her about my visit to my mother’s, and I explain my doubts. She thinks it over, she isn’t sure. I take advantage of the fact that her guard’s down to question her about a few contradictions I’ve noticed.
“You like high heels, which are a historical symbol of control over the female body. You like sadomasochistic lesbian porn; in fact, you even like me to hit you. You like wedding rings, a vintage vestige of romantic love that could even be interpreted as a sign of enslavement. You like rancheras and tangos, which are filled with crimes against women and female betrayals and gloomy spinsters. You like to show serious cleavage. I like it too, but I’m starting to feel disgusted, and ashamed, about all those things, and I’m just a rookie at all this. I can’t stand how hard it makes me to hit you with the paddle, but I can’t stop thinking about the comic books I used to read, with tied-up women, spanking…Can you help me? My cock is at odds with my ideology.”
She takes a long drag. Exhales slowly.
“I’m not in control of my desires,” she says.
Now I’m the one who smokes. Her eyeglasses rest on the table. She continues.
“I don’t freely choose the things I choose. I’ve been taught to love high heels, and tangos, and rings. I’ve discovered that the paddling makes me feel alive, and that watching other women get whipped turns me on. The first thing you have to remember is that I am aware of it all. I know that I’m a product of my generation and of the patterns that shape my desire. I know I’m not free.”
I try to fit her reasoning into the complex architectural system I’ve spent months constructing.
“And what about the other part?”
“There’s a difference between the public sphere and the private one. It’s not the same thing to be in front of a microphone as it is to be talking to my friends, or writing an article versus my personal, private experiences. I’m infected with it, but I’ve been lucky enough, or capable enough, to realize that. I can’t renounce my desire. But I can denounce the ideology that allows people like me to exist. Or people like you, who get hard when you hit my ass and see it get red. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe it goes beyond the erotic comics you read as a kid? Ask yourself where it all comes from, instead of asking me, asshole. You didn’t jerk off to Wonder Woman: you were turned on by the idea of control, even before you knew what control was. It doesn’t excite you to hit me. What excites you is imagining that you’re the one who gets to decide when to stop hitting me.”
I don’t even feel like smoking anymore. I wonder if I’d have been able to realize all these things if I hadn’t met her. And if the answer is no, what does that say about me?
“I love high heels, but if I have a daughter I’ll never tell her that they make her look more beautiful,” she says.
I look at her glasses. They are right in the middle of the room.
9
SEEING THE WORLD from this new perspective is overwhelming.
I detect male microaggressions everywhere, all the time: in movies, in how all the world leaders are men and their wives are eternally supportive; in the offhand comments my friends make about “helping”—that verb!—around the house and with their own kids; on the radio, online, in editorials written by journalists I respect; in the way people sit on the benches in the square, in the relationships between clerks and customers, in the way telephone salesmen treat me. It’s even worse at work: a couple of conversations around the coffee machine and a series of articles about the glass ceiling female journalists face are the last straw. I start to look at my boss as a tyrant, and I decide to take a leave before I lose my head and make a mistake. Since I’ve always been an optimist, and good-natured, the classic pro-torevolutionary who dreams of a better, more just world, I am surprised to now be constantly pissed off.
