Los Muertos by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595343130
Publisher: Trinity University Press
Published: 2024-12-10T07:00:00+00:00

PETALS

Guadalupe Nettel

Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine

I could never figure out the right way to get close to La Flor. Nor was I able to walk away from her in time, while it was still possible to trade her story out for another, one that would have taken me far from the neighborhood she frequented—those streets where the university came up against Tiber Avenue, scattered with cafés, smoke, and idle chatter. Years ago, they say, the avenue was small, but even in my childhood its name had become irritating—poorly suited to the long, noisy vulgarity that divides the area in two. According to the locals, there was nothing riverlike about it, except for the flow of cars and the tall concrete bridges that freight trucks would cross to get on the highway.

As you go deeper in, the streets begin to change; they have the same desolate small-town atmosphere as the outskirts of the city where I was born. In earlier years, I’d spend hours getting lost there, turning corners hung with ivy, scanning the cozy restaurants with wrought-iron balconies and geraniums in their windows, sometimes joining the drifters who even today make their way from the east in May, when the heat becomes unbearable, and raid the dumpsters when the kitchen workers come out to empty the last vestiges of the night. Though we never spoke, I felt a kind of affectionate complicity toward them. I admired their way of turning any place in the neighborhood into an intimate space, into a home that was dirty but always open for any business.

The best time to go to the restaurants was when they were at their busiest, when nobody noticed my presence and I could acquaint myself with the area’s public restrooms, which, at my twenty-odd years, were still as novel as the proximity of women. It wasn’t strange, then, that I liked to go to the ladies’ room and immerse myself in their traces. The other bathrooms, those intended for my sex, seemed less promising. In the trails left in the urinals, I encountered arrogance, sometimes rivalry, but nothing worth remembering after arriving back at my studio, where the only way I could survive the stench of solitude and confinement was to take refuge in the smells I’d gathered during the day. “The Rathole,” I called it, so proud back then of the squalor I affected.

The women’s bathrooms had the charm of something new, always filled with little conversations left behind on the mirrors, in the smears of lipstick. Perhaps out of shyness or due to the olfactory calling that from then on would govern my life, instead of spending my evenings looking for a party or unzipping skirts in the uncomfortable seats of some movie theater, I chose to discover women in the only place where they don’t feel observed: bathroom stalls. There, when one learns to read the signs, the merest trickle of liquid running down a white wall can reveal a nervous breakdown or recent upset. There was

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