The Laboratory of Love, page 20
Part Five: The Laboratory of Love
Hay quien muere de amor y no lo sabe.
—Antonio Gala
Rorschach IV: Mutilation
Flies grow drowsy and drunk in Tanzanian sun, bumble against the mesh-screened window, burst with the promise of blood. Beside the sill, a small boy kneels on the floor of red tiles polished once a week by the silent houseboy; a scent of wax lingers like an eternal reprimand in the air. With a pin pinched between thumb and finger, the child contemplates the flies, discerns which is the fattest or biggest or most lazy. His left hand holds the chosen one in place and his right hand guides the pin into its body. Time holds breath while the insect’s thin hard encasing is penetrated, exhales in relief as a silver sliver eases into softness. The wings of the fly beat and buzz as red drools onto the window ledge, glues the body there. With one finger, the boy paints lines and shapes upon his blankly anonymous arm. He can draw numbers, letters of the alphabet, more elusive symbols. Recently, he has learned to spell his name.
The ants are always very quick. Before the blood can dry, they march toward the tantalizing aroma of an easy prey. Tiny, efficient jaws nibble the helpless fly; tear away choice morsels, tender meat. Some ants are overexcited by the bounty, can’t decide whether to eat on the spot or take food to a safer place to savour. Insane with greed, deluded by hunger, they pile more plunder on their backs than they can carry. The boy intently watches the scene he has created, scatters objectionably voracious ants away. Only once do his eyes look out the window. He is immediately overwhelmed by the sight of a world too much larger than the immediate kingdom under his control. At the edge of the yard, beside the frangipani, the houseboy and gardener each hold one end of a thick, long snake. Swahili twists and tangles across the air; like a branding iron, sun strikes flat and hard. The snake drops; the gardener’s machete slices; the boy blinks. He can’t remember the place they say is his real home, on the other side of the world, where a mother hisses and coils in a cold, white room.
He decides to save this fly, for no reason except that the choice lies within his power. He withdraws the pin, nudges the insect away. Surprisingly, it appears little worse for the impaling, barely more dazed than before. The other flies seem unalarmed by what has occurred nearby; disaster is always far away, deceptively drone sun and heat and dust. Perhaps the boy will sever the head of the next fly with one quick slice of pin. Will tear off only the wings, only the legs.
His bare knees have grown stiff and sore against the hard tiles. Shifting, he intuits a presence behind him. He turns to encounter the houseboy’s stare. Black eyes floating in pools of white; dark skin stretched tight across high cheekbones of a face as void of expression now as when the boy’s father whimpers in the back bedroom after dark. Without a word, on soundless soles, the houseboy turns out into the yard. There he will burn garbage in the barrel, surround the house with smoke, encircle it with scattered ash to keep death and demons away.
The boy reverts his eyes to the window ledge. He is suddenly sick of greedy ants, bored with flies that are fat and foolish and easy to kill. He looks out the window again, down the hill that slopes toward the west. At the end of the dry season, red dirt has been baked hard and cracked by heat. A secret earthquake might have broken the surface of the earth. From the mission above, where encroaching jungle looms and spreads, the bell tells pink priests it’s time to chant feeble prayers, to fumble through wishful sacraments.
There is no telephone in the apartment the boy occupies ten years later, when he learns the truth at seventeen. Mail declines to arrive; a knock refuses to sound; other residents of the building remain unseen and unheard. The days are silent; nights equally still. Several times a week, it is necessary to go out into the cold to buy food, to attend a nearby university. In classrooms his face is without expression. He stares at the instructor as if trying to read lips. The pages of his notebook remain blank, white, pure. They say he’s supposed to understand the words marching into his ears; they say this country is where he belongs. Such concepts are sliced in two as soon as they are spoken. Alone in the apartment, he forces sound through his throat to ensure his voice still works. Noise swells the space. Perhaps it is Swahili, perhaps some secret language. At night, cars glide along the street below, crawl their headlights like a phosphorescent snake across the wall. The boy prefers the rooms dark, when just a circle of red glows upon the stove. Rest the blade against the element, bend to feel burning heat. When the metal is ready, press it against skin. A subtle scent rises from one arm. The knife must be reheated several times to remain effective during repeated applications. Later, when a light has been switched on and the room jumps out from blackness, the boy will study a pattern of marks on his arms, as if trying to interpret hieroglyphics or to read a muddy map. The design seems to possess almost-remembered meaning; from beneath the skin of surrounding silence slivers a whisper that is faintly familiar, nearly understood. Years later, the marks will have faded into small pale scars. When the skin that bears them tans, they are almost invisible.
At evening, in one of a cluster of white houses on an Andalucían hill, a young man lights the kind of candles old women dressed in black burn beneath miniatures of the Holy Virgin or the Saviour. A skin of red plastic encases wax; translucent tubes offer a roseate glow. A trio of flames barely waver in air drifting inland from the Mediterranean, carrying the scent of spice all the way from Africa.
On his narrow bed, the young man lies suspended by the voices of the family living below. After three months, they have given up inviting him downstairs to sit with them around the heater on chilly evenings; the kindly señora has stopped asking why he never goes out, whether he is sick, if anything is wrong. Two fingers of his left hand pinch a burning cigarette; continually, unconsciously, the other hand explores the flesh of his face. From this prone position, it is possible to look through the window, across the terrace, toward the faro of the next town along the coast. Its light sweeps a circle, performs a ceaseless search through darkness. Gaze at the orbiting beam, as if it will extinguish without attention; glance away only to strike another match. It hisses like a snake at the cold, white room. After twelve, when his last cigarette of the night has been stubbed out, Spanish still carries from the street below. Although this is a language the listener can understood as well as any other, a lifetime spent in scattered landscapes have taught him how to flick a mental switch and transform immediate idiom into mere sound. Now three candles burn vigil through the night; now three pink planets float in a dark room as its inhabitant drifts into dreams of fireflies leading the way through jungle on the Ngondo hills, flickering a path through another thick Morogoro night. At morning, it is time to look into the truthful mirror at a forehead marked by a dozen small wounds inflicted by fingers in search of something hidden, something concealed. The scent of wax hangs heavily; the injured forehead creases with puzzlement. Three candles still burn. Three candles are carefully blown out.
On the terrace, the light is very clear. Mountains to one side and sea to the other are sharply focused. January sun feels almost hot. The young man leans back in a chair, tilts his face toward the sky, closes his eyes. When he opens them an hour later, his vision is darkened until light pricks painfully back into the retinas. It is time to look again into the mirror. The marks on his forehead resemble tattoos of some primitive tribe. Already they are vanishing into an expanse of darkened skin. In a few days or a week, their last traces will be gone, and the mirror will reflect no information regarding name or age or place of birth.
The Beauty Secrets of a Belly Dancer
“Don’t ask me about love,” warns the belly dancer, though she’s a survivor of as many affairs as there are grains of sand upon the Gobi, when I mourn the latest lover who’s left. “I still don’t know the first thing about the subject.” At three a.m., she returns from a corner tapas bar in my Sevilla neighbourhood, where a wealthy American has bought her drinks. “Older,” Reyna describes the man without enthusiasm, sautéing garlic in olive oil. (Garlic is good for the scalp and relieves menstrual discomfort.) “The guy’s taking me to the bullfights. He has season tickets for the shade. We’ll watch Curro Romero try to do his thing.” Reyna kicks off her heels, wriggles out of her tight red skirt, sighs into a sheer Egyptian robe that floats and flutters around her thinness. (In dressing rooms for cattle-call auditions, she can change beneath the garment to guard her secrets from other dancers’ knowing eyes.) Reyna lights candles and incense, puts on a salsa CD, settles down to eat garlic over bread in my living room, where she sleeps during the annual visits she makes from New York. From my bed in the curtained alcove, I hear Luis Enrique sing the same song over and over. San Juan sin ti, he laments endlessly above a throbbing beat. I know my houseguest is rocking rapidly back and forth in her chair, like a camel’s passenger who bobs for hours on a humped back, dazed by hallucinogenic heat, surrounded always by the same parched expanse of sand, apparently not moving at all. Cuerpo a cuerpo, de sexo a sexo, sings the lonely boy too far from Puerto Rico, needing a body he can hold onto like it’s home. Reyna expertly rolls high-grade grass that she smuggled through Spanish customs, deeply inhales something more essential than oxygen. (She has long ceased trying to weigh the narcotic relief gained against the physical damage done: ice cubes beneath her eyes will be the only answer on yet another morning after.) Sweet smoke insinuates out into the Sevilla night; travels toward the south, the east.
Just before I fall sleep, the belly dancer changes the CD. Now Middle Eastern music jangles my neighbours’ dreams. Reyna has switched into one of her working costumes, perhaps the silver halter with gold lamé harem pants beneath a bared midriff. While I dream her into a tent beside the mirage of an oasis, she kneels on hard tiles in the next room, hands resting on the floor before her for support. Her neck begins to pivot in frenzied circles, long black hair whips the air, candle flames shudder and shake. The head dance, this one’s called. (“Let’s give them a little head,” she jokes to her partner before they slink onto a Manhattan stage for their final set.) Somewhere in the distant desert, jarred by tambourines and drums, camels lift their necks from a pool of precious water; it drips like gems through heat that sucks the moisture from air, from skin. The dancer’s hair lashes more wildly at all the men who have failed to take her from this place: she would like to stripe their backs with blood. The slowing beat jerks the dancer from side to side. Although unable to escape the percussive blows, she smiles slyly beneath her veil, full of secret power. Jasmine and myrrh smudge the shadows; coils of controlled muscle twist beneath skin still smooth and soft. The men with money in her mind gaze intently, not missing a move. As flutes shrill toward a finale, the dancer’s face falls against the floor. She freezes into a posture of submission at the feet of her invisible audience, waits for bejewelled hands to clap her out of sight. (Always save your best moves for the end; leave them wanting more than you’d ever consider giving.)
Long after I’m far away in sleep, half-way to the home that waking never lets me reach, Reyna cleans makeup from her face, washes away the black kohl around her eyes. (In the end, blinding kohl saves dancers from witnessing the disappearance of their beauty and the growing indifference of lovers, the melting of water into only mirage.) Sallow skin emerges in the unkind bathroom light. Reyna’s head pounds after the unwitnessed exhibition she’s just completed. When the show is over, dancers don’t dare attempt escape across the sand: sun would singe their skin until it was without worth, or the moon would drive them mad. There’s no easy end to the desert; another dune rises beyond every one that’s climbed. (There is no simple way back there, either; that will be a further lesson learned too late.) Sighing, Reyna heats olive oil in a teaspoon over the stove’s gas flame, applies thick warm liquid to lines of fixed smiles around her eyes, her mouth. Gorgeous young girls are always elbowing their way onto Gotham stages; but can they work a rough room, transfix an inattentive audience, sidle smilingly through club owners’ tricks and traps? The belly dancer pins up the hair she will never blow dry, and washes only with a special shampoo found in a single East Village store. (“Imagine if I lost my hair,” she laughs on April afternoons when dark glasses conceal her eyes, though my living room is always dim. She fondly strokes the thick braid that’s slung over her shoulder like a favourite pet snake. “A bald belly dancer. Wigs never work. How would I pay the rent?”) In my dreams, members of a harem wait restlessly for fresh summons of clapped hands, for warm wet lips pressed upon a veiled mouth. They glance mistrustfully at each other and wonder who’ll be chosen this time to be bobbed into oblivion on the sea of love: the dance always leaves you needing arms that can hold you here if they can’t take you there. Reyna abandons the mirror, leaves her image to peer myopically from that window in the wall. Only opium permits us peace until the next performance—I am, in my fashion, a dancer too—some slumber in spiced shade. Beyond these canvas walls, no skyscrapers rise to break flat terrain or to interrupt empty vistas. Reyna, once we could see far through burning air, deep into our common destiny. Did heat refract the reality wavering before us into illusion? Twist the truth that one day we must add to the dust of all the dancers who believed beauty could lure a lover strong enough to carry them back to where they belong? Finally Reyna breathes drugged, disturbed sleep; I call out my departed lover’s name; garbage trucks groan through the dawn.
Why doesn’t Reyna save the ten-dollar tips tucked into her shiny costumes for vacations in Cairo or Beirut, rather than always here in Spain? I wonder but don’t ask, out of respect for secrets as fragile as my own and from knowledge that explanations for apparent incongruity are hidden for a reason. (“How did you end up here?” they incessantly want to know. “Why don’t you go there?”) After five Aprils spent in Sevilla, Reyna’s Spanish vocabulary remains restricted to words for dishes, drinks, and sexual positions. As long as she stays mute, she passes as a striking señorita, thanks to Mexican blood on one side of her family. Her grandfather was a professional gambler who robbed his bride from a Guadalajara convent and carried her north to California. The old woman mutters broken-English prayers in San Francisco, and sends rosaries and crucifixes to a granddaughter gone astray. “Reina?” they ask on these streets, confused by spelling and phonetics, not believing the name hasn’t been assumed for the stage, one more showgirl aspiring to royalty. “Queen of what?” they wonder.
“When I was little, I wanted to be a nun,” confesses the belly dancer over a salsa pulse, “but I realized that wasn’t my true calling.” In the weak, late-afternoon light, before candles can be lit, she appears tired and pale and almost old until her hips begin to sway. Then her fingers entwine in an intricate arrangement to produce a snapping as loud as a pistol. (This secret took her seven years to master; others remain to be discovered.) Arabs love the noise, but my upstairs neighbours bang their floor in irritation. “Some people wouldn’t know a free show if they heard one.” The belly dancer rolls eyes heavenward, cracking the air on the beat. Copper bracelets clink, scarves swim through space. “Customers have to pay a lot for this,” she says, then abruptly separates her hands to reach for the bottle of rough red wine. (Never drink before five, always swallow a glass of water for each one of less pure liquid.) We make them pay and pay and pay: they can never give us enough; they always leave us wanting more. (“Just once more,” I beg into the telephone, before he clicks a disconnection.) For consolation, Reyna and I will hire a carriage with bright yellow wheels to roll us through the park at dawn. While the gitano driver slaps reins against the horse’s back, we lap champagne and laugh along the leafy avenues, hear harness bells and hooves announce our approach as we draw nearer to the end of what we’ve chosen to be: entertainers who ignore that the tent has been emptied and taken down, leaving no trace of spectacle behind, abandoning us here in Western twilight to insist that once we were not only ghosts in the Kalaharis of your mind.
“There’s plenty where he came from,” the belly dancer reminds me again. She studies my skin. Radiant afternoons on the roof have turned me dark as an Arab boy. “Sun is the worst thing for you,” she chides, spreading the whipped white of an egg across my face. The mask hardens; if I smile, it will crack. (Don’t show them how you feel, let them read their own emotion in your eyes.) The Queen of What rushes to get ready for a date that was scheduled to start two hours ago. (Never show up on time unless cold cash is involved; anticipation will increase both their eagerness and your beauty.) Married men and impotent cab drivers and unemployed waiters come and go, while surely somewhere sheiks in billowing white robes race Arabians across the sand, dark eyes unsmiling above dunes of cheekbones, every one of them an elusive Valentino in the moonlight. In ten days, Reyna must squeeze back into two rooms in the least lucky letter of Alphabet City, negotiate a crack-heads’ neighbourhood anew, wait once more for the agency’s orders to appear exotic for fifty dollars at another bachelor party or bar mitzvah. (A good man also expects her return; she carefully conceals fleeting infidelities from him: he has his uses, she may need to resign herself to his sober steadiness in the end.) “Go out and find another,” my friend advises over her shoulder, clattering to the door. “Get it while you can.” Tonight I stay at home with my sentences instead: seduced by their punctuated rhythms, how they can sweep me breathlessly toward The End. Once upon a time, Scheherazade told tales to divert the master of her fate and to forestall her certain doom: this was her way of dancing; this is also mine. Outside, a sudden sirocco stirs the palms along the boulevard, then dies to make them droop once more. I touch my leathering skin. It will be sufficiently tough by the time mocking laughter swells around me like a dense sandstorm of sound through which I’ll stumble until enough grit has been swallowed to end my hunger for good. Thinly sliced cucumber placed on the face eases aridity. Beyond this secret lies another secret, just as above Saharan stars exist more stars, though we can’t see them. We must hang onto the belief that they are there, as we must keep searching for the lost oasis: this is our story, Scheherazade. Once upon a time, it always starts. You know the ending, but please don’t reveal it yet. There’s time for several more dances still.
