Beautiful by Massimo Cuomo

Author:Massimo Cuomo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions (UK) Ltd.
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

1 All quotations from One Hundred Years of Solitude are translated by Gregory Rabassa (Harper & Row, 1970).

Almas robadas

STOLEN SOULS

In the dark, without food. It was difficult to keep time. Miguel woke up not knowing whether he was alive or dead. A solitude he hadn’t known before made him ill, accustomed as he was to having someone around at all times, and he grew despondent. He sat thinking. He thought about how’d he gotten there, about the meaning of his action, about his flight from Mérida, which suddenly seemed to him like the one safe place in the world. He no longer harbored doubts about Rosita Romero. If he lived through this he’d return for good. Maybe she had been the one he was looking for in that photograph. Then those thoughts fused with the dark, dissolved into a black, shapeless amalgam in which even the memory of Santiago handing him the Polaroid felt ill-starred. He discovered despicable versions of himself, dark sides that frightened him as he caved to them, succumbing to physical agony.

At dawn on the sixth day they set him free. Opened the door and threw him out. Miguel shielded his eyes with his arm to adjust to the light, the life in his veins no more than a trickle. But then, in the landscape slowly coming into focus, the first figure he saw was her. There was the girl, alone. There was Yaxté, waiting for him.

So it had happened—he’d stolen her soul. They didn’t speak the same language, but they had nothing important to say. She stared at him nervously, holding the Polaroid that she had managed to rescue. She pointed the camera and through the lens Miguel looked depleted yet alive, no air in his lungs nor spit in his throat yet gilded with a hardened beauty. She took aim, pressed the shutter button, and stole his soul. Then she led him to the jungle, where she’d hidden some food. She plied him with milk, bread, and fruit, and stayed by his side until Miguel recovered his strength. As she watched him eat in silence, she was already, unwittingly, conquered, prone on the bare ground, already begging, already pure emotion and nothing else, nothing but nails digging into Miguel’s back. Before sundown that body—born, raised, and suckled for years hundreds of miles from Mérida—found her sense of purpose in the stretch of grass on which she lay under Miguel’s firm pressure. It was a kind of waiting, the preparation she’d needed before dying in the arms of this Mexican boy. Or so it seemed now, while what had to happen, what was destined to happen ever since she’d entered the church of Chamula, ever since he’d entered the church in Mérida where Rosita Romero was getting married alone, happened. It occurred naturally: they made love impatiently, shielded in the dark heart of the forest, to hell with Miguel’s ties, to hell with Yaxté’s traditions, to hell with San Juan Bautista and the flora and fauna that silently looked on while their beautiful bodies were joined, while their moans broke the silence.

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