Issue 20

Luisa Valenzuela
Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz

Breakfast

Marseilles. A seal’s mouth oozing salt
water between rotten yellow teeth.

      —Walter Benjamin,
Denkbilder, travel
epiphanies                 

 

The hotel in Marseilles has a Moroccan motif. An interesting and creative way to renovate a big old house with two rooms on every floor and a steep staircase. Luckily a young man carried my suitcase up the steep stairs. In my spacious room the Moorish arches, replicated in the huge bathroom, as well as the colorful lanterns and Berber rugs, surprised and charmed me. Taking full advantage of these pleasures the following morning, I luxuriated in bed. And by the time I went downstairs for breakfast, almost all the other guests had already left. I was surprised that the dining room was so long, narrow, and dim. It must once have been the wine cellar, giving onto a sunken interior patio, with a blue fountain at its far end. The two side-walls, of exposed brick, supported a long unbroken banquette facing little tables, each with its own individual chair. On the right, toward the back, a single taciturn diner sat before the glass door that led to the patio. He responded to my greeting with an all but imperceptible nod.

I had no choice but to sit at the far end of the same banquette, against the same wall, at the table that had been set and was waiting for me, with a thermal carafe of coffee, a basket of bread and croissants covered with a cloth napkin, a glass of juice. I forgot the presence of the taciturn man until the arrival of his wife, who was much younger than he, and who was beautiful and elegant, and who smiled at me as she walked by. She sat in the chair across from him, they talked in whispers while I focused on sweetening my croissants with delicious homemade jams.

Suddenly the man barked out a correction to his young wife. “Le beurre,” he practically yelled. “One says le beurre, like le sang, it’s masculine.”

He’d dressed her down in French, but of course I didn’t associate it with Last Tango in Paris or to anything remotely connected to butter. I quickly went through my own register of foreign languages, which made me feel close to the wife with the taciturn husband. In how many languages is blood feminine, as it should be? Not in French, no, nor in Italian, because I remembered that play by Giovaninetti Il sangre verde. And in English all nouns are neutral. In German, it seems the nouns are reversed, the sun is feminine and the moon masculine, and maybe in German butter and blood are also feminine, but at the moment I had no way of checking. I felt hispanically complicit with the woman. Which is why, from the far end of the room, I mean from my own distant point on the long banquette, and without even thinking, I raised my voice and asked her, “What is your native tongue?” I was all but sliced through by their indignant sepulchral silence.

Unsettled, I grabbed for the newspaper within reach, buried myself in a report on the big national strike, trying to erase myself from the situation in the dining room, totally separate myself from the faraway couple sitting near the damp sunken patio. I did almost manage to forget them. Until a sudden movement in the dining room made the fine pages of Le Monde tremble in my hands and without thinking I looked up.

The man had just passed by me on his way from the exit or more probably the kitchen, because in his hand he was carrying a big knife. The man had the look of a butcher, although a sidelong glance told me the knife was, yes, huge and pointed but possibly serrated, like a bread knife. I went back to my own business. The newspaper was a real refuge. Every so often the man raised his voice. None of my business.

I poured myself another cup of coffee, and salvaged my calm Sunday breakfast until I heard a gulping sound from the woman: she seemed to be sobbing. Or maybe laughing. Pure fiction, I told myself, the only reality is here in Le Monde. I forbade myself to look in her direction, my world was not their world at the far end of the long line of little individual tables and the long communal banquette. My world was at this end, in the breadbasket, the little bit of butter that was left, the little pots of jam, the now empty carafe, these things were real. A Moroccan lantern winked at me from the dim center of the room. Or it didn’t. I was buried in the newspaper to which I’d been exiled by the couple at the far end of our banquette. Their business was none of mine, nor was the gender of their nouns.

Until another breeze shook the pages I was holding in my hands like a screen and,

looking up once more, I could see the woman disappearing through the arch that led to the stairs.

On the white floor tiles, she trailed a fine filament of red.

Tomato juice, I told myself.

—for Birgitte Torres Pizetta

 

 

Lunch

It was all the result of ruthless chance. There’s no respect anymore for older women like us. That Thursday, when we arrived at our usual steak place, we were met with a sign that said For Sale. Just like that, no explanation whatsoever. Refusing to admit defeat, we continued half a block and found an appealing Japanese restaurant. Rib eye or sushi, what difference would it make. They offered us a table that looked out on the street, but the dining room was full of loudly chattering and boisterous families, so we opted for a room in the back that was all but empty, and there we installed ourselves, to enjoy the little garden that called up lovely memories of Asia. A wall of high bamboo, planters of papyrus, floor of gray gravel. Pure tranquility. We couldn’t ask for anything better, the afternoon was cool and fresh, sunlight filtered through the papyrus and bamboo, it felt so much like Japan, we could imagine carp swimming in a small sequestered pool, like in the engravings of Hiroshige. We could even hear the sound of falling water.

A glass of champagne on the house was obligatory, but who would resist? Although I would have preferred sake. Extra brut? asked my friend Marcela, who really wanted white wine. Extra brut, the waitress confirmed, so we had no way out. Champagne would change our mood, so we immediately ordered sushi, sashimi, a few of the Chef’s Special makis, and let ourselves relax, chat, and celebrate a little. For Marcela, it was the end of the university semester, and she planned to devote herself single-mindedly to the novel she’d been postponing for way too long. My intentions were pretty much the same, we were hoping to re-invigorate ourselves, break through our respective writing blocks. That very morning Marcela had invited me to talk with her students about the art of fiction. And so we’d talked, did we ever, as though it all happened without effort, as though words flowed as easily as water, like the water falling from the fountain to the pool hidden in this very garden. We told the poor innocents about the magic of creative work, how it ties together unexpected ends, how, through the sheer power of language, we’re led to realms we’d never before been aware of, how we must give all our characters the freedom they need to tell the story in their own words. We also talked about Wittgenstein and his notion that there are no objects (or things) but only facts: forms of seeing the world in order to draw a comprehensible map of what, for lack of precision, we call reality.

We recalled our own words in that dining room in the back of the Japanese restaurant in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Belgrano, staring out at the peaceful patio of bamboo. Everything seemed simple, feasible, and even if there were no things but only facts, well, we could let ourselves be lulled by the fact that they’d plied us with Extra Brut, which we kept leisurely drinking. The atmosphere was so soothing we felt transported to a different spatial dimension, to a Zen world perhaps, where we were unaware of the paradox of knowing there were a pair of half-written novels waiting for us, but there was still the fact that lately, when we sat ourselves down to work, we were stalled by some form of paralysis or inspirational crisis. Minor details in comparison to the unquestionable fact of putting that thing called wasabi in the rectangular little dish and mixing it with the soy sauce in which we dipped mouthfuls of sushi and sashimi.

I already felt like I was in Japan. Transported to Ise Jingu, to a restaurant shaped like an enormous wooden box, once upon a time it was a fish depot, I started to say, it was there I discovered authentic red tuna. The color of beets. Incredible.

Other memories from that not so distant trip stole up on me, seemed actually to occupy our table. In Japan, a westerner is at the far antipode of him- or herself, at the far antipode of everything, from the simplest gesture to whole belief systems. But in the here and now of the restaurant in the neighborhood of Belgrano, nothing that went on around us was the least bit foreign. Nor indifferent. And not only because of the beautiful white cat that had just jumped over the bamboo garden wall. No. We also noticed the extraordinary tranquility of the new diners who’d been arriving gradually and occupying the empty tables.

“A herd of young buffalo,” I remembered, smiling at this phrase of my youth.

A herd of young buffalo, as we used to say; good hunting.

Just a saying. In the Japanese restaurant, we were not at all on the prowl, we were contemplative. Receptive perhaps, but you could blame that on the champagne. Extra brut, of course.

Still we began to take notice. And we kept noticing, without uttering a word, something like a reverberation in the ambient energy, as though the temperature had risen by a couple of degrees. Even though the men weren’t looking at us and we weren’t looking at them. We registered their presence through our pores, at a level that was subatomic. I don’t know which of us said it first. A testosterone bath, we said. Total immersion. It wasn’t because we’d never experienced anything like it before, we had both been the only women in groups of men, of course we had, but this was different, the fact seemed unconnected to the thing (or object) in itself, that is to say, from those very men eating their lunch.

Outside, the white cat that had jumped the bamboo was playing with a black cat. Yin and yang, we said, delighted. Same inside as outside. But which of the two cats would be yin and which would be yang? Is white the color of yin, is yang black?

Good question. Useless question—the answers are interchangeable. In Japan, of course, where nothing is what it appears to be, where in the Santa Sanctorum of Shintoist temples the deity is a permanently covered mirror that has perhaps already disintegrated in the course of centuries, before which one venerates the kami, natural spirits whose aura and essence are everywhere and nowhere. Like an enveloping, subsuming bath of testosterone.

One of us mentioned the virtual, and added, by way of comparison, that the virtual is the defining quality of virgins. The other one corrected her: Don’t be fooled, it’s not about the virtual, the defining quality of virgins is virtue. Nothing to do with us.

We cooled the air with a good laugh. A whispered laugh so as not to disturb the dance of pheromones.

Outside, on top of the bamboo wall, the black cat looked like he was about to leap down onto the patio.

“Poor carp,” I said. “They’re in danger.

“What are you talking about, what carp, where?”

“I’m talking about the fat little fish you see everywhere in Japan and that doubtless are calmly swimming in the little pond doubtless hidden behind the papyrus.”

Pure speculation, of course. But the black cat decided not to leap and soon disappeared on the other side of the wall. Was that black cat yang, and the white one yin? What color are we? It doesn’t matter, there’s always a white spot in black and a black spot in white. We’re the yin spot in a yang field, the very banner of gender, of pure drive. We don’t know if we’re white or black. It’s said that the white spot on the head or chest of a black dog is the mark of an angel. Would a black spot on a white dog be the devil’s own mark? Would it be the same with cats? With human beings?

One of us carelessly threw out the idea of pregnancy. I feel pregnant, she said. You mean you’re gestating, corrected the other, who was feeling the same sensation. Like being pregnant but not with a child or with anything tangible, we agreed. We were gestating possibilities, passions, ideas, desires to write. As though a curtain had lifted.

That, we felt, was the real leap. The real danger and adventure. A metaphor, of course, like everything else.

Virtual testosterone.

Like Japan.

When it came time for dessert, we asked for ginger ice cream. They didn’t have any. Then green tea. They didn’t have any. What kind of Japanese restaurant is this, we asked without a trace of irony.

“It isn’t Japanese,” replied the very thin waitress.

Don’t fool yourself. The waitress didn’t say it, but that’s what we heard. The false Nippon vanished. May the kami—those spirits that are neither false nor nothing but nevertheless are—want us always to be pregnant. And may we leap into that pond that isn’t there and that, with or without swimming carp, awaits us.

 

 

Supper

“What a drag, Gaby, I’ve had it! They all keep looking for Arnold, the office, his worried family, all his friends, they all keep calling, wanting to know where he is. So what am I supposed to say, you tell me! I have no reason to tell them that on our anniversary, days ago already, he asked me to meet him—surprisingly—at a fancy restaurant. And as per usual he keeps me waiting, for hours, so I go and order a Chicken Tarragon, which was delicious. I was sucking on those little bones when Arnold finally arrives, laughing, merry as hell, and offering no apology whatsoever. Not even Hello. But he does say, ‘For a moment there, I saw you imagining that those were my bones you were sucking on, that you were eating me alive.’ So funny that Arnold, and then I too was laughing at this utterly bland marriage of ours, nothing like my aromatic and succulent little chicken. But most of all I was laughing out of sheer delight because I’d just discovered a fold in the flat personality of my miserable husband.”

“But how lucky you are, Elmira, a surprise after all these years. You finally discovered that your miserable husband has a sense of humor? Imagination? The gift of fantasy?”

“Nothing of the kind. I discovered he had the very rare gift of clairvoyance …”