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Valued Poster
Join Date: Jan 21, 2010
Location: Houston
Posts: 2,586
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An example of his work.
IN THE WINTER of 1992, Silvia visited New York for three months and stayed in her cousin’s apartment on West 94th Street, along one side of Central Park.
One evening, ten minutes before dusk, she is walking briskly and carefully along a path in the park. She is concentrating on her next step because there’s a gusty wind. The ground is icy, and she might fall.
It is a completely desolate spot. Just the trees, the benches and the cold wind. A little further away are some tennis courts. Empty. Silvia puts her hands in the pockets of her long black coat. She fingers a packet of postcards which have, on one side, a reproduction of one of her paintings. On the other side is the invitation to the opening of her first solo exhibition in NY. In three days’ time. She’d managed to get a good gallery. Not the best, but certainly not the worst.
Silvia thinks about how she is going to organize the vernissage and tries to map out the future. Her most cherished dream is to marry a millionaire who will keep her, so that she can dedicate herself full-time to her art. The wind is very cold. Her face and ears are frozen. Suddenly, a tall strong black man appears, grabs her by the arm and says something to her in English. Silvia is horrified and thinks, ‘Oh no, this can’t be happening to me. It can’t be.’ The man’s prick is stiff in his trousers and his fly is open. She tries to escape but is caught in a iron grip, She is so afraid that an intense cold runs through her whole body and she begins to tremble. She thinks of telling him: ‘Oh please, please.’ But she doesn’t. It seems ridiculous to say just that. She’s forgotten all her English. It’s as if her mind has gone blank. She tries once again to get free and run away. The man then grabs both her arms and pulls her towards him. He tries to kiss her. She smells the tobacco and alcohol on his breath and feels nauseous. She moves her face quickly to one side and pulls back. The man kisses her neck and licks her. She struggles some more. The man pushes her. Silvia loses her balance and stumbles. He holds her up to prevent her falling. He’s a giant playing with a little bird. Silvia is very slender and frail. She’s still trembling. The man throws her against a bench and forces her to sit down. He remains standing. With his left hand, he holds her by the shoulder. With his right hand he fishes inside his trousers and pulls out a long black stiff thick prick. Shit. Silvia looks at it. She has to look at it few inches from her eyes and she thinks, ‘Christ almighty, I’m really fucked now. Look at the size of it, dammit. If he puts it in me, he’ll split me in half, he’ll kill me, the motherfucker!’ She breathes deeply and bites her lips hard. ‘Why me?’ She hasn’t prayed since she was a girl at the Sacred Heart of Jesus convent in Havana. Everything flashes through her mind in a fraction of a second. She sees herself kneeling behind the chapel bench, praying and looking at the crucified Christ. She likes him. He was the first man she’d liked. He was very beautiful, with his sweet, serene face. And the small white cloth hanging from his waist and covering him. The most erotic and sensual thing that she could find in those surroundings.
The black man says something in English. He’s muttering. Too much slang. Silvia doesn’t understand. There is nothing to understand. It is all obvious. The guy is masturbating with his right hand and with his left is reaching under Silvia’s coat and groping her thighs. She’s wearing old, comfortable jeans. The man tries to pull off the button, ripping the material. Silvia remembers in a flash an Argentine film set in Tierra del Fuego. Federico Luppi has to go to Buenos Aires and is saying goodbye to his wife. Just as he’s leaving, he gives a final word of advice: ‘If you’re going be raped, relax and enjoy it.’
‘Relax and enjoy it, Silvia, relax and enjoy it’, she tells herself a couple of times. Then she rallies her strength and looks at the man’s prick. It’s six inches from her face. She can’t. It disgusts her. The man smiles contentedly. It’s all going well for him. He masturbates quickly and keeps trying to rip her trousers off. He wants to stick it in her in any event. Suddenly Silvia finds her voice and, without thinking, shouts at him:
‘Fuck you, man! Use condón, son of a bitch, hijo de puta! Use one condón. Fucking black fag bully son of a bitch, if I had a gun, you fucking bully. Fuck you. Use one condón!’
The guy says something unintelligible to her in an angry voice and slaps her face a couple of times, which makes Silvia’s head ring. The man is probably high on drugs. He hits very hard. Better not make him furious. He doesn’t have any condoms. They’re not his concern. He keeps masturbating with his right hand. With his left, he gropes into her trousers. He puts his hand under her sweater and woollen vest. He touches her smooth skin. The guy doesn’t have any gloves and his hands are freezing. He grabs her tits. Her little tits. Silvia is very thin and has a diminutive chest. She feels that big rough hand pawing and squeezing her nipples. Silvia thinks quickly: ‘I’ll toss him off and run away. This black bastard might have AIDS. If he sticks that pole in me, he’ll split me in two and leave me bleeding to death. He can stick it up his mother’s cunt!’ She quickly grabs the prick with her right hand and strokes it. It’s very thick and very long. It’s got even bigger now. It’s enormous.’ It’s the struggle that excites this motherfucker,’ Silvia thinks. She squeezes it tight as she rubs him. She needs to get him worked up so that he comes quickly. Silvia knows perfectly well how to do it. In Havana she’d fucked quite a few black men. But she’d always had the advantage of being white, young and pretty. The black men used to sniff around her for a long time before she finally decided to direct the operation and take them to bed. She always called the shots. Now she feels humiliated. For the first time in her life. She spits on the head of the prick, but she has almost no saliva. Fear has left her mouth dry. She moves her tongue around to gather up saliva because, if not, this guy is going to put his prick in her mouth and make her suck it. The masturbating is doing the trick because the guy is grunting with pleasure. She’s trembling. She feels the frozen hand pawing her nipples and pinching them. She uses both hands, pulling it backwards and forwards. She looks around as she wanks him. No one. No one in sight. It’s a half-frozen desert. ‘Oh, if only a policeman would appear and beat the shit out of this black bastard.’ She keeps on masturbating with both hands and looking around. The prick is still pointing at her like a cannon, a few inches from her face. Suddenly it spurts semen, bathing her whole face. And another spurt. ‘Shit, he had two pints of come in his balls, the fucker,’ Silvia thinks. It has taken her by surprise. She hadn’t expected it so quickly and it’s too late. She tastes the acid sweetness of the semen on her tongue, in hit, throat, on her lips. The acrid smell of come. It has even gut up her nose. She lets go of the prick. She wipes herself with her hands. She has tissues in her bag. The guy is masturbating himself, frantically, and panning. He keeps spurting semen over Silvia, soiling her coat. She turns her head. She spits once, then twice. Revolted. The guy is hall slumped. She pushes him and begins walking quickly, wiping herself with the paper tissues and spitting. She slips several times on frozen puddles and nearly falls. She still has the acrid taste of semen in her mouth. And she has swallowed a bit. She feels it at the back of her throat ‘Why did I have my mouth open? How could I? Am I that stupid? I got him with a full load, the filthy pig. He hadn’t come forth a month. He spilled two pints of come over me. Fuck him, the motherfucker. It had to be me. There was no one else in the park. If I had a gun, I’d blow his brains out.’ She keeps on raging, almost running, despite the slippery ground. She swears and trembles with cold, with nerves, with rage, with impotence.
In a few minutes she has reached her cousin’s apartment. She goes up the stairs to the second floor. She takes out her keys and pauses before opening the door. She closes her eyes and thinks: ‘Calm down, Silvia, calm down.’ She runs her hands over her face and over her coat. Everything’s dry now. She straightens her hair and focuses again: ‘OK, nothing happened, I’m fine.’ She opens the door and goes in with a smile. There’s no one there. On the table is a message in red ink on a white sheet if paper: ‘We’ll be back late. Have dinner without us. There’s chicken in the fridge.’ She reads the message again and again. She goes to the music centre and turns it on. It’s a CD of The Tempest by Jean Sibelius. The music slowly begins to take hold of her. ‘The Occanides’. She goes to the bathroom. She leaves the door open. She undresses. She makes a large bundle of all her clothes. Afterwards she would throw them away, including her overcoat that has dried white stains of semen on it. She has a long shower and washes her hair thoroughly. She brushes her theeth twice. She dries herself and puts on a lot of eau de cologne. She is still feeling disgusted. The rooms are centrally heated, and she goes back into the living room, listening to the music. She slumps into an armchair, throws her head back, closes her eyes and forgets about everything. Only Sibelius exists. In crescendo.
A month later she returned to Havana. She’d been trevelling for nine months. Six months in Madrid and three in New York. She’d been looking for galleries that might be interested in her work. I went to meet her at the airport. She was surprised to see me. She didn’t tell me this, but I saw it in her eyes: she was no expecting to see me after so much time and after a few fights over the phone. Especially in the last three months. But I was really in love with her. That’s the worst thing that can happen to a man. Fall too much in love and become passionate over a beautiful woman. We went to her studio. We put the bags down without opening then and kissed. A kiss with a lot of tongue and sucking. We forgot the nine months’ separation and the rows the phone. We fucked like two lunatics. Same as always. We carried on like that for a few more days. One afternoon, we were resting in bed. I remember it perfectly. She said to me:
‘I have to tell you something.’
‘What?’
‘I might have caught something.’
‘Why? Did you fuck without protection?’
‘I was raped in Central Park, in front of my cousin’s apartment.’
‘You are joking, Silvia.’
‘I’m being serious.’
‘No, no.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you waited till now to tell me. You’ve got some balls.’
She watched me silently. She saw that I was getting worked up and she changed immediately.
‘Ha, ha, ha. It’s a joke. Don’t take it seriously.’
‘A joke?’
‘Yes, ha, ha, ha.’
‘A joke my arse. You were raped.’
‘Don’t get like that. It was a joke.’
We went silent, staring into space. I got out of bed. I went to the kitchen and made some coffee. I was furious. Rabid, like a dog. I wanted to hit the wall and smash everything. When I came back with the coffee, Silvia had though, it through and said:
‘Calm down. And don’t get so annoyed. l’ll tell you how it happened.’
She toId me everything. Without missing anything out. Even Sibelius. I got over my rage. But I couldn’t forget. A week later, we separared. Silvia kept on about leaving for good. Going to Miami or New York. That’s all she talked about. Obsessively. ‘I feel I’m trapped in a cage. This island is a cage’, she kept repeating to me. She wanted me to go as well. I didn’t want to and she couldn’t understand why. She accused me of being ‘irrational, mawkish, soft, cowardly’, and said, ‘You don’t have to put up with all this shit.’ I defended myself: ‘Fine, l’m sentimental, l’m not a computer.’ Anyway, I lost heart I couldn’t embrace her tenderly, I couldn’t get an erection. Nothing. One afternoon I took my bicycle. I put the few things I hed into a bag and I left.
I don’t know where she is Iiving or what she’s doing. I don’t know anything. Someone told me that she’d married a millionaire psychiatrist, lives around Cape Cod and had got very fat. I don’t know. I went into a depressive estate that lasted years. It was terrible and I don’t want to remember that time: depressed, angry, furious, nonplussed, drunk all the time, hungry, penniless, claustrophobic, with suicidal tendencies, fucking a different black woman every day. Sometimes they gave me crabs. I looked for the dullest and most vulgar women in my neighborhood. I liked to hit them when I’d given them a good shafting, and they got angry at my sadism: Perhaps that’s what saved me: the drunken bouts, the women, letting out my rage, throwing everything in the shit, not expecting anything from anyone. And writing. In the mornings, drunk, I wrote short stories about everything that was happening to me. And I kept going. And here I am.
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Pope
