The Woman from Uruguay by Pedro Mairal

Author:Pedro Mairal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

SEVEN

But the final round wasn’t the final round. There were a couple more. It was my treat, I paid a ton of money without any idea of the exact amount, since with my undulating math I found it impossible to calculate the exchange rate with that currency. Bills featuring the face of the poet Juana de Ibarbourou. Another with a portrait of the painter Figari, one of his paintings of a dance on the flip side. Artists on banknotes, rather than war heroes. Will there ever be a bill with Borges on it?

We walked with Mr. Cuco (I started calling him that because I started getting along with him better). Guerra asked if I would walk her to her friend’s place, where she’d be leaving him. Something eased between us as we walked together, shoulder to shoulder, now that we weren’t facing each other down, across the table. It was a relief to move along, taking in the day, the two of us. I remember that on the corner I saw her back, in that short t-shirt that opened up behind her.

“Is this a bikini?” I said, tugging slightly on the horizontal elastic of her light green bra.

“Fft!” she swatted me away. “It’s a sports bra.” Walking next to her, I put my arm around her waist and squeezed.

“That’s how I grabbed you in Valizas that night.”

“Oh, I remember. Pretty bold.”

We had a somewhat restricted personal mythology. Just a few anecdotes together. But we made them count. I don’t know what street we took. Even looking at the map now I can’t find it, but it must have been one that ran parallel to the promenade. We sang “Sweetness in the Distance,” badly, forgetting parts. In tune enough, though, the both of us, especially in the last verse of, “My destiny has flown away. My life has gone by in just instants, a crossroads at the end of a day. And your sweetness in the distance.” Although sometimes we’d get the last line mixed up with “crickets’ songs were constants,” from the previous verse. At some point I stuck my hand in my jacket pocket and found the flyer from the tattoo parlor.

“Wow,” I said. “Genital perforations!”

Guerra looked at the paper.

“What is this?”

“Somebody gave it to me when I was walking down the 18 de Julio.”

“Just 18,” she says. “Nobody says ‘the 18.’ ”

“Sorry, sorry. I had no intention of breaking the rules of the Montevidean sociolect! I’m going to get a genital perforation. That way my cock can communicate with your piercing, through telepathy.”

Guerra started laughing.

“I’d like to see it again.”

“What would you like to see again?”

“Your esteemed piercing.”

“You didn’t see it before.”

“Well …”

“No, you didn’t see it.”

“Right, I guess I didn’t meet it face to face. But I felt it. I had it sizzling against my fingers.”

The most beautiful smile in the world. A dirty smile, surreptitious and complicit.

“There’s a room waiting for us,” I told her. “How far is your friend’s house? Let’s let this dog loose right here and just go.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.