In this short story collection, Arnaud uncovers the moving, complex, and often mystifying workings of the human heart as her characters grapple with desire, jealousy, betrayal, loss, and longing in nine stories ranging from the tender to the violent. The exploration of these varied themes and affects expands and intensifies through Arnaud’s use of alternating points of view: male and female, adult and child.
Açucena
At first, we were happy—almost happy. Actually, from the beginning it bothered me that Açucena didn’t know, or even hold any suspicion, of the secret sewers running through me, the dark labyrinth of my fantasies, my wolves and vultures, the obsessions that little by little destroyed our dream. Sometimes she would ask why I rarely talked about myself, and I would tell her there was nothing to talk about, that my life had always been so sterile, that only she and everything that came from her would interest and enrich me, that my life had started with my love for her.
She wanted to know, she kept asking, and I tried to hide my discomfort, laughing and telling her of spontaneous generations. She would smile too and nod, as if it were possible to believe me. I didn’t want to tell her about a father I knew nothing about, of a woman whom I could have called mother if I so wished, who had vanished without a trace. Yes, I went to school, played ball, made a few friends, met women, but I never told Açucena about my difficulties with all this or about the millions of phantoms that had inhabited me since childhood. I feared if she knew as much, she would love me less. Or even stop loving me.
I gave her a little or a lot, I don’t know, of my own internal reservoir of light, if there was any left in the hell I had always lived in. From morning when we awoke to night, we had so much—the sea, the streets, people, words, life brimming with sunshine and pleasure, and knowledge and consecration, everything so new and spontaneous it was hard to believe it was happening to me.
She came and gave of herself, eyes, lips, hands, skin, hair, fluids, as whole as her poetry, a miraculous tenderness. And for quite a while my demons withdrew, cornered by the magnitude of that devotion, exorcized by the goodness of that feeling.
Açucena loved me in her own way. At first, boundless, luminous. As the years went by, light-hearted and easygoing. Fervor and dedication, I know now, she only had for her poetry. Late into the night, struggling with the words, laboring over her verse, a treasure she would entrust to me the next morning. There they were, innocence and sin, sweetness and fierceness, abandon, madness, condemnation, poems that spoke of life and death but didn’t reveal her. A word then, more than a word, I knew that well, was a shelter from pain. She had that. She was safe. I, on the other hand, only had my love for her, a whirlpool of hidden forces, missteps, temporary answers.
Jealousy. I don’t know exactly when it took over me. I was jealous of something I couldn’t define but was deeply ingrained in Açucena, a larger feeling, something I felt hopelessly excluded from. And it wasn’t enough to hear her whisper I love you so much with a smile, her hands gently messing up my hair, her nose touching the tip of mine. She might as well have said, I’m going to the movies with a friend or don’t wait for me for dinner, I will be out late.
One night, after we had made love, I told her how much I missed the excesses of our first times together, the care she used to lavish on me, the fantasy of that love as my sole certainty, the embrace in the middle of the night and the confirmation that her body was there, tethered to mine, sufficient in its warmth and welcome. She heard me without a word, her gaze fixed somewhere undefined. At that very moment, I divined something cruel and final was building up inside her.
There was no denying it. Every day, Açucena’s eyes pronounced our union irreparably broken. I had the urge to beat her up until she bled, chew her up slowly, chain her to the foot of our bed until her poetry was composed once again only of her love for me.
What love? I was starting to question whether she had ever truly loved me. And yet, she herself had showed me love was like the moon, full, then waning, then crescent again, one side lit, one side dark, and even in sadness and boredom, it matures and reinvents itself, always translating its destiny of love.
I spent my nights watching her sleep, anxious with a desire that took my breath away and grew into a death wish. Something sharp and dark scraped my chest inside, and I wanted to scream, but I didn’t so I wouldn’t wake her up. A cold, sticky sweat covered my body. I struggled to breathe. I feared I would die, and she would be free of me. Picturing her having sex with another man terrified me. And so I found myself worse off than I was before I met her. Weaker, pettier, crazier.
What to do if redemption came with the comfort of her arms, the sight of pleasure floating in her eyes? I started to doubt even that. The words and gestures that celebrated her love for me. Were truly hers the salt of her sweat, the madness of her tongue, the scent of the sea in her sex, the breath of her life? And as soon as her body detached from mine, I would again be consumed by suspicion.
Did her coming back home at the end of each day mean she still wanted me? I knew couples who stayed together for many reasons, noble or trivial, but not for love. What if there was someone else? Açucena’s unfocused gaze, her limp kiss, her body no longer hungry for mine, wasn’t her whole body tattooed with that third presence between us?
Just as I tried to keep my ghosts from rising to the surface, so did she sink into the light-shadow of her poetry. She had become known and respected in the literary community. Many friends would show up at our home, and she would welcome them kindly while I hid in the bedroom, restless like a caged animal, a dart stuck in my chest. Occasionally she would be invited to artists’ gatherings too. I accompanied her a few times, impressed by the ease with which she moved in a world that wasn’t ours, where people behaved as if on a stage, performing lackluster roles ever more poorly.
Esteemed by many, for her person or for her poetry, Açucena seemed to enjoy our home and my company less and less. She was slipping, and I, terrified and now unashamed, would accuse her of inflicting those absences on me with the intent to crush me. She would shrug with indifference, still refusing my love.
At some point she started to lock herself in the bedroom on the pretext she was writing, and I would be left on my own, adrift, the night and I dragging along through the house bathed in the monotonous sound of the waves crashing on the shore and the strong smell of salt, as strong as my anger, frustration, and helplessness. My demons came back to life, and my world was again nourished by their voices. Whisky warmed me up, while the night wore away and the morning mist would find me exhausted, sprawled on the sofa, on the rug, or by the door outside the room where she hid from me, like a dog forgotten by his owner and left outside.
I don’t recall exactly when our bedroom hell-paradise started, but I know I was the one who dragged her into it. I and the load of insanity and fear I carried. I wanted to possess her beyond the tepid reality of her sex, beyond the essence of her poetry. What was Açucena thinking? That she could tease me and confuse me, sabotage what was best in me, my love for her, without consequence?
She didn’t protest when I started to insult her and hit her during sex. Açucena seemed to enjoy what I thought would tear her down. I didn’t recognize her. And I feared that game of dangerous words and physical abuse would end up casting us into the ultimate abyss. Afterwards, I lacked the courage to tell her how astounded I was at that other woman, the intruder, the mare I would ride and ride furiously, clinging to its sweaty mane, hypnotized by those eyes clouded with desire and pain.
I wanted to set us free from those deep nights of despair, but that could mean I would be left with empty arms. What to do? I felt like an insect allured by light, one of those that get blinded and singed by the heat and yet keep on spinning around the lightbulb until they die, incapable of flying away.
Out of bed, our gazes would collide. And my jealousy grew to enormous proportions, out of control. To the suspicion of a lover I added several. Açucena had turned into a lascivious woman, and from her insides came the warm, thick odor of sperm and blood. I could sense the violence of her desire. So, one lover was not enough, nor was she satisfied by my imagination, or the imagination of my insatiable demons, which laughed and spat in my face, look it, you wretch, look at the deplorable trail you leave wherever you go, look what you’ve done to the woman you love, you corrupted her with your madness and rottenness, you filled her with darkness and horror, and now, you bastard, you don’t know what to do with it.
I thought I would follow her, catch her in the company of some man, humiliate her, but I don’t know if out of cowardice or, improbably, a bit of dignity left in me, I merely waited, an hourglass of agony, for the truth to emerge and free me, as if I truly believed such sad confirmation could possibly set me free.
Reduced to my powerlessness and holding onto an obsession that made me sick to my stomach and nourished me at the same time, I started to gather, here and there, fragments of conversations on the phone, ambiguous phrases, contradictions, and even poems. Açucena wouldn’t spare me, was growing more and more inaccessible, and as if to say, here, take this pain, it is yours, take care of it, cry over it on your own and leave me alone, she was going, going, she had forgotten that her life had become mine, that there was so much of her in me that by destroying me, poor Açucena, she was destroying herself.
When I was finally able to sleep, I would wake up feeling as if I had been thrust into a sort of vacuum and would check that indeed she was there, she wasn’t gone yet, she still lay by my side, my anchor. I would whisper her name many times and beg her in a very small voice, like someone praying late at night to flee the horror of a recent nightmare, I would beg her not to leave, to allow me to be next to her, and in return I would promise not to touch her until she was ready again for my love. Açucena wouldn’t hear me even when she was awake. She wouldn’t see me. I had turned into something she knew was there, quotidian, at hand. Useful somehow.
That last night, I understood the pleasure torturers must feel. I planned the boat ride in the open sea on a full moon night. I chose the boat, the music, the wine. The sight of blood dulls my senses, and I wanted to be fully alert to register Açucena’s every gesture, word, and expression in my memory. That she agreed to come with me was the most surprising part. She was terrified of deep waters because she couldn’t swim. And we hadn’t said a word to each other in days. Perhaps fate was really greater than life.
Translated by Ilze Duarte
The Book of Affects by Marilia Arnaud, translated by Ilze Duarte, is out now from Sundial House.
