The train’s progress accompanies our movements, our sighs creating a light and liquid countermelody with sudden surges of emotion, our lips brushing, a race to kiss each other’s bodies, tongues darting disturbingly, imperiously, the night’s darkness, broken here and there by street lamps scattered along country roads, reconciling troubled fantasies and provocative imaginings, my thighs gripping his body, pressing him tightly, as I cried out to him, “You’ll never want to go! Why are you getting away? Why won’t you come back? Why won’t you suck my breath?”
My palms against his warm, maternal body, my neck thrown back, my eyes holding back their tears, perhaps tears of blood.
The echo has started whispering in my head again, too faint to be properly understood, but loud enough for me to perceive a breath of wind, the north wind. All of a sudden I came, giving off so much energy that he too felt an electric shock in his belly. Blood, blood everywhere. Blood in my head, blood in my eyes. Empty, my veins.
Then I trace a line with the fountain pen my father gave me, the one I use to write with; I want to work out whether I’ve still got any blood inside me. Empty, completely empty.
I just remember him going back to his cabin and shouting. I remember his dirty fingers and his forlorn and distant eyes.
Distance, one day, will take him to the very rim of the segment of our life; he will go far from me and end up in her arms. When he is with her, mists will rise up and thicken, and keep him from remembering. While he is with her, I will die slowly, allowing myself to be dragged along with those mists. That way at least I’ll see him from close-up.
A poisonous tapeworm nests in our bellies; the slides of our life are printed on its body. Each time the tapeworm moves, a slide settles underneath our navel, and the light projected outside enchants us. We stand and stare at it; then we burst into tears.
At first I couldn’t work out what it was that stirred in my belly. I thought it was a child that didn’t want to grow and didn’t want to be born, a child that wanted to stay immersed and suspended in my amniotic fluid. But then I saw images in my head, and those images were born of pain.
That pain was born of the movements of my entrails, my guts, my flesh.
A pain with its own roots in my past, which I can’t cough away: I have to live it and I have to watch it.
The tapeworm helps me do that, the tapeworm loves me.