Because I couldn’t find a food which I enjoyed.
Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist”
With one foot propped on the bench and her leg falling slightly to the side, she looks like a sex addict. Maybe a porn star. She watches the people watching her; she assesses her audience’s reaction. This is what she wants and at the same time doesn’t want: to be seen as a titillating image. Disposable. She is here to raise her voice without saying a word. She wants to be seen as a body and as something more than a body. She’s naked. But that doesn’t matter. She could be wrapped in skintight armor and she’d feel exactly the same: as if she were dying, little by little. Cameras are rolling; flash bulbs are going off. In this place she prefers to be the nameless girl, and the women’s art collective agreed she could come when she can, when she has the time. They know she works a lot; they know she’s suffered.
She raises her chin a little, breathes, observes the crowd. People have come, but fewer than used to, years ago. Things have changed. Is doing all this worthwhile? She chose the background music, by a Hindustani tabla duo. It calms her spirit. A little. She drops her leg a bit more, wanting the cameras to capture everything: her labia, pierced by needles; her vagina, now a receptacle filled with wire barbs; the names of missing women tattooed on her inner thighs; her shaved pubic area, marked with five X-shaped scars.
On the floor beneath her feet lies a photo of the Interior Minister. At one point it was suggested that her performance could include a sequence in which she’d squat and defecate on his face, but she rejected the idea; her work goes beyond the obvious.
The tempo of the percussion speeds up, but she barely moves. In the crowd, the government plants stick out like a sore thumb, those two-faced creeps. They’re watching her, studying her. In their minds they’re penetrating her, spikes and all. The music gets louder. She knows the audience is waiting for something, for some change in the performance. She doesn’t move.
***
Inside her, worlds are living and dying. Every second. By the hundreds of millions.
In her apartment, the nameless girl brings the wine glass to her lips and drinks slowly. She notices the bitterness at the back of her tongue, the flame of pleasure in her throat. And then she can hear some faint music, like a band of tiny singers in the distance. She throws her head back and exhales.
In the bed beside her, a child sleeps: her five-year-old son, Ismael. Her little penguin. In the mornings she transforms into an orca, chomps on his feet, gnaws on his belly. His laughter is like a hemorrhage of joy. She couldn’t live without those nibbles, those moments of incandescence.
The penguin has cerebral palsy. His arms, his little legs, everything seizes up. He suffers from spasms, especially at night. She has gone to incredible lengths, done the impossible, to get him to doctors. She has written to specialists in Spain and the United States and pinched her pennies so her cousin across the border can buy the medications she requests. In the dim light of her bedside lamp, she sees her son’s face. Who does he look like? You, obviously. Who else would he look like? That’s what they all say: her neighbors, her mom, her cousins. But she keeps on asking. She watches him. His mouth is slightly open, with one of his fingers nearly grazing his lips. He’s breathing peacefully, like an angel. For tonight, at least. When the child has attacks in the wee hours, and the nameless girl crashes into the walls because her brain isn’t working, she thinks of Abraham. She curses him; she apologizes to him. Why did you leave so soon? Even before the child was born, they’d agreed on an open relationship because it mattered to her, because it was an essential condition. “It’s the only way I can be with you,” she’d warned him, “the only way I can be in a relationship.” And like the taciturn composer he was, Abraham had accepted it: “If you promise to be with me when it matters and when I’m horny for you, I’ve got no problem.” But neither of them could foresee that a pandemic virus would infect her one February night during a fleeting, forgettable encounter. Nothing worth warning Abraham about. No signs, no symptoms—and then one day, Abraham couldn’t get out of bed.
The brain is very complicated, ma’am. That’s what the doctors have told her. They have to perform exams, keep monitoring him. At least the medication has reduced the frequency of the attacks a bit, right? In the doctor’s office, she watches them, gives them just a slight nod. She wants to tell them what it takes for her to pay for this appointment: how many hours working the reception desk in an office tower, waiting tables at night in a casino, washing dishes at the barbecue place on Sundays. She wants to tell them what she has to do every time La Nazarena calls her cell phone.
She turns over in her bed and lies with her back to him. Music flows like liquid from her earbuds, dripping down her neck and absorbing into her skin. The volume increases. The sound radiates through her skull and spreads to her chest. It’s like a second heartbeat. She feels a shiver and pulls the bedspread over her body. She lowers her arm and gently places two fingers on the front of her panties. The whole area is sensitive. Even through the cotton, she can feel how hot it is. Could she have an infection? The artists warned her of the risks. The needles, the spikes, everything had to be sterilized, and it was. She drinks a little more of the wine. She’ll get over it; her body will take care of things.
She looks at the screen on her phone. There’s the hashtag again, growing, multiplying, every tweet another hook tearing into the skin: #SiMeMatan.
The wine slowly glides down her esophagus. She knows there will be another protest soon; La Nazarena will be calling her at dawn, if not sooner. How much longer can she go on doing what that woman asks of her?
The arrangement with La Nazarena began when, at one of the feminist marches, she met a girl from Argentina who’d been living in Mexico for a while. The Argentinean girl said her roommate had been missing for thirty-seven days. She talked about how hard it was to swallow her frustration every time she went to the police. The nameless girl listened to her and asked how she could help. At the end of the march, they talked about the government’s shameless refusal to listen and the indifference of so many Mexicans, men and women alike. They talked, too, about the nameless girl: her life, her troubles, her exhaustion. “I know some awesome folks who are always willing to help folks like you,” the Argentinean girl said. “I’ll have them give you a call.”
She’s never laid eyes on La Nazarena, not even in a photo. She knew the woman only as a voice on the phone. And maybe that made it easier to accept the check every month to pay for doctors and medications. Breaking windows, painting on walls and monuments—it wasn’t that big a deal. With her mask on, she could be the nameless girl. Or not.
Time passed. She didn’t care that some of the newspapers called them criminals, destroyers of the nation, feminazis. La Nazarena never gave a rationale, only orders: which human targets to injure, which building façades to damage. But the day La Nazarena asked her to throw a Molotov cocktail at a group of reporters, the nameless girl realized what the plan was: to discredit the movement.
She reaches for the bottle on the nightstand and empties out the rest of the wine. Why did she agree to do it?
At the last session with the collective, the issue came to a head.
“Did you all see the blowup?” said Comrade A.
“A man tried to join the march and they beat the shit out of him for nothing,” someone else said. “Wish I’d been there.”
“Well, look, he shouldn’t have stuck his nose where it didn’t belong.”
“I don’t think it’s right that they roughed him up.”
“That’s your opinion.”
The nameless girl said nothing. She just observed.
“And then the masked women showed up,” A said, “with their pipes and their sticks. They were carrying paint cans and hammers. They were carrying bombs.”
“Bought and paid for by the government.”
“Everybody knows that.” Comrade A shook her head.
The nameless girl sputtered, “What kind of woman does that?”
They all turned to look at her.
“Wretches,” she said. “The kind that deserve to get the shit beat out of them.”
Lying on the bed, she drinks the last of the wine. The heat between her legs radiates out toward her thighs, her pelvis; the shivers are coming faster. She leans her head against the wall and closes her eyes.
She wakes up at dawn. In the kitchen, she drinks from what used to be Abraham’s cup. They always shared everything—or at least, she shared everything that was his. Sometimes she can hear the humming, the strange tunes he always had on his lips, the ones she would hear every morning when he got up to urinate and didn’t close the door. One day he even wrote her a song: “My girlfriend sensible fresh breath dances and snores I belong to her she dances and snores my sweet girlfriend I’d never want to change.” She brings the cup to her lips but doesn’t drink. The music is still going in her head; once again she can hear the stream hitting the toilet. Her corneas are stinging. She rubs her eyes with the back of her hand.
***
They cover the wall of her stomach and nest in the intestinal folds. They both know and don’t know what they’re doing. Some contain gifts for their host and some bore into her; others play possum. For better or for worse, this is where they live, all of them. In this of all universes, some days are less bad than others. How’re you holding up, sweetie? Better today than tomorrow.
At breakfast she spoke with La Nazarena. The young kidnappee hadn’t turned up; plans for a protest march were coming along quick as a whistle.
“Triple what we’ve agreed,” said the voice. “Times are tough. Times like these, we’ve got to show we care about people like you. Loyal people.”
Ismael was sitting in his playpen in the living room. His right leg was moving, his right arm was moving, his head was going into small spasms, and even so, he was smiling at her.
“We’re counting on you,” La Nazarena said. Then she waited for the nameless girl to say something back. That was her MO: questions that sounded like assertions.
After she hung up, she went over to the window. Ismael was calling to her, but she didn’t want to turn around. She couldn’t. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and dried her nose. La Nazarena hadn’t even mentioned the young woman who was missing. Ismael kept calling, and suddenly she couldn’t take it anymore. She went and picked him up. She hugged him so tight he let out a whimper.
***
At the doctor’s office, she swallows her saliva and rests her hands on her lap. Her doctor is out of the country, at a conference in Miami. She’s being seen instead by an older man with light-colored eyes and hair so thin you could almost see through it. He asks her to take off her skirt and underwear and lie back on the exam table. He says all this without looking at her, as he opens a drawer and puts gloves on, his voice giving an order that isn’t supposed to be heard as an order.
There’s a thread hanging from her checkered skirt. She doesn’t want to tug at it; it’s always better to use scissors. Her clothes lie on the floor. She couldn’t even be bothered to fold them and put them on the chair. She puts her hands on the exam table but hesitates before climbing onto it. What will he think when he sees the tattoos?
She stares at the ceiling and breathes deeply, preparing for what comes next. She hears the stool rolling toward her. She feels two, three fingers between her legs. They explore her. What does he see beyond her tissues, beyond her private places? Can he see that this is where she conceived Ismael?
“It’s an infection,” the doctor says as he springs up off the stool and removes his gloves. “You can get dressed.”
She does as he instructs and sits back down in front of the desk. Beside a cup filled with pens she sees a plastic model of a woman’s body with the abdomen cut open, showing the cavities inside.
“You need an antibiotic,” he says. “Urgently.”
“Is that necessary?”
“Ten days. Don’t even think about stopping any sooner. It’s for your own good.”
“I’d like to understand.”
“Ten days. That’s the dosage.”
“I know there’s good bacteria and bad bacteria. I read about it. I don’t like using antibiotics blindly.”
Silence.
The nameless girl hears the sheet being torn violently off the prescription pad. Now the sheet is alone, far from the others. It is folded in half by a practiced pair of hands. Then a second crease, then a third. She thinks of a letter, a last message from a young woman to her mother, the words she’ll never be able to say again, #SiMeMatan.
The deep voice groans.
“Almost forgot,” he says. “Take these pills too. Just for three days.”
Another sheet is forcefully ripped from the pad, and the doctor’s arm knocks the model of the female body to the ground. No reaction from the doctor; he doesn’t move. The nameless girl feels something inside her, something making noise in her belly, in her throat: the howling of a puppy being taken from its mother, being dragged away.
“This’ll clean you right out,” the voice adds. “You’ll feel like new.”
She lowers her hand and feels around for the loose thread on her skirt. She starts tugging at it.
Not a flicker of doubt in the doctor’s words. Nothing but authority. Confidence to spare.
“I’ll need your full name, please.”
She fixes her gaze on a spot beyond the doctor’s head, on a photo of the Angel of Independence. She mutters something: a little moan—a lamentation, almost—meant for La Nazarena.
The question is repeated. She doesn’t respond. She keeps pulling at the thread.
Translated by Laura Nagle
