I have an obsession. I won't lie.
There was a period in my life when I used to deny my desires. It lasted six months, cuando todavia era chismoso. Tenia un amante autista. I didn't have the right to touch myself. We split like a hair. This was right before I left Mexico City for Santiago. The two events are related.
I scrunch in D.F. My apartment on Calle Bucareli. Days pace past the anterior window of Café La Habana. Antecedent lovers set no precedent to this fizzle. I breathe dark coffee. July girls in full blossom beauty. Sigo pensando en sus ojos bizcos, o cómo los brasileños lo dicen, vesga. A plaque of glial cells named Chile. I thought about going back in March when I wasn't alone.
First reaction is to breach myself from everything that's a reminder. I understand the problem with that now. Everything I was before is fractured by cross-glare. The rupture isn't with her so much as my capability as an individual to exist autonomously. My penis, though rude (of her) as it may seem, plugged her mouth and no longer belongs to me. I don't masturbate. I don't experience myself in a sexual way. I'm a second by second afterthought.
First to return is my taste for salted meat. I smell charque in my dreams. My mind travels home to Chile. It draws back when I think of cueca. Great fear of ridicule, typical of a Chilean, subsides. I am a Mexican. A revolution is like a fever, my desire the sting of a pimple that is past-ready to be popped. April May and June pass and intense pressure is building behind my sockets. July brings back just socialisme. Bad news for Allende. I brood for giant pinenuts.
She met a truck driver in March, a little more than a month before my birthday. I'm twenty years old. I feel an intense pyrexia. Thirty days pass. Eight weeks. Three months.
I sit in Café La Habana. I watch Rosario serve the customers. Tabletop is crotch height. I rub against it gripping porcelain. I close my eyes. Heat rises to my head. My fever is delirium. I rub furiously. I call Rosario. The fever is reaching it's peak. I rub furiously. Allende has locked himself in the palace. He has given his last speech. I am thinking of a cross-eyed lover for the last time. I stop rubbing against the tabletop. I bid Rosario for a coffee. Pinochet orders the strike. I place my hand in my pants. The troops move in. It is exactly twenty-eight years before airplanes demolish the world trade center. Allende places his hand on the revolver. Rosario places her hand on my shoulder.
The revolution is over. The pimple pops. My desire denial comes to an end. Allende is dead. Pinochet dealt a hard-blow. I must return to Chile immediately.
I have a penchant for letters
in the same way I have an obsession with love. I do not believe that love is restricted to eroticism. I believe one can love an ideal much more passionately than a pair of butt cheeks (not really). I believe this fanmail letter is the product of love. I thank you, the loyal writer, and hope you don't mind me sharing your spirit:
Manifesto
after Roberto Bolaño
You will grow sick. In the rooms
where you have loved, you will remain alone.
Stay in bed. Let there be no light
but the light of the poem
reflected in the eyes of the beloved.
Who is absent. Who is always absent,
if you’re thinking ahead. If you’re not
thinking far enough ahead now,
you’re still alive, and poetry
wants nothing of you. Just as you want nothing
of yourself. You will think of objects
as you would in a dream, their multiplicity
of lives. You will attend dinner parties
but leave in the middle of the main course. You won’t
say anything, not even to your friends,
and from the window in the bathroom
you will exit into your new life
as a visceral realist. You’ll be given a uniform,
though no one will see you wearing it.
But you’ve got to, in order to write.
You will consider publishing under pseudonyms
of the opposite sex, but what’s the point? No one
knows you anymore, not even your own
mother. Which is what she says on the answering machine.
You will stand outside time and own
only worthless things, like answering machines.
It’s not monasticism, this solitude…
You can still go out to bars.
Your life has simply gotten smaller.
It’s the size of a crocodile’s eye,
the tie on the waist-apron
of the woman from Ukraine
who brings you coffee, the scent
of her perfume. It might be enough.
But in the evenings, from the window
of your apartment, your bare shoulders
will catch a sliver of light
from the full moon and in this way
you will be recuperated by poetic clichés.
But don’t cry. Visceral realists don’t cry.
- Gregory Solano
