The Coming Flood

The idea has a life of its own. She closes her eyes, overcome, feeling something sweet, sharp, finally full of harmony: the safety of the bone. Operations in the past: lips once, breasts four times, ribs removed, cheekbones done, and in her diary, sometimes, between one operation and the next, she’d write: ‘I’m a monster.’ Other times she’d write: ‘For my next operation . . .’ Her writing now is perky, vibrant. She doesn’t sleep that night either. Little by little the unrest subsides, but come dawn, it’s back. Now the house, a dank place, befits her large body. Because the body secretes feelings, but you’ve got to be close enough to perceive them. And one day she leaves home and lets out a low moan she’d have liked to make last. Who could say why she walks there when what she wants is to avoid the place? But she holds onto the railing at the entrance and then, as if thrust forcefully, takes one step and then another with the trusty tick-tock of a clock. ‘My face with a horn, my smile with a horn, my arms and legs and tits and cunt with a horn.’ She needs the vulgarity of those words, but there’s no more money. There are no more calls, no more film shoots.

Recklessly, she places a personal ad. ‘Mónica. 37. UNBELIEVABLE porn star. Waiting naked. BJs, no rubber. €100, the works.’ She attaches a photo from when she was twenty-three and had just started, blocks out her face, and adds in minuscule font: ‘real photo’.

The horn will cost €2,000 in an illegal clinic – she had to explain what she wanted three times before they got it. Then, scandalized, they told her it would be impossible for under two thousand. So there she sits, calm, clad in a robe, one hand resting on top of the other, waiting for people to come about the ad. Calls start to come in. Men come. Little men, almost always friendly, fast, sometimes ashamed, other times brutal. One time it’s a kid, and when he sees her he backs up.

‘You just don’t do it for me, sorry.’

Someone slips her two phoney bills. Someone else slaps her. Mónica is surprised how little it hurts and she stares at the man, unblinking, taking in his fatigue and his fear, his smell, his skin, until she feels she’s penetrated him. For the first time, she senses the trembling of his lower lip, and not only notices the trembling but deciphers it, sees how each muscle fibre criss-crosses, how it tugs his frail gelatinous lip upward, how one by one the fibres retract into infrared body cavities through tangled masses of nerves, and then slip inside his brain to the man’s eye socket and then she sees his eye from behind, the thick optic nerve covered in tiny blue and red veins, and she discovers that the man is afraid because she’s inside of him.

The park is where she most often sleeps, off in a secluded spot, watching the tree trunks’ nervous volutes. One day, while she’s asleep, she accidentally wets herself, and feels the warmth of her urine, and then the cold, and then the smell. When she gets home, she showers, and goes back to her diary, writes in it, again: ‘My face with a horn.’ With each passing day the image becomes clearer, more concrete. At first it was just an abstract horn, on her forehead, sometimes striated, other times smooth, an enormous horn, the size of her face, jutting upward; other times a diminutive, docile horn, almost just a bump, a protuberance. Now with increasing frequency she pictures it three centimetres long, conical, emerging from the middle of her forehead. And when that image comes to her, Mónica embraces it, and feels it’s close, getting closer.