The Coming Flood

At moments when she least expects it, the world turns real again. She goes out one afternoon and, passing by the entrance to a school, a group of teenagers laughs at her. Or she walks into a shop to buy some food and a boy is scared of her. Then she feels cold. She shivers in her clothes. She runs back home and wolfs down food like a centaur, her head bent over the plate, her hair falling into the food, and then she feels so dizzy she almost faints. The sofa stinks, the house stinks. With her head in her hands she dozes off and then wakes up, the weight of her breasts smothering her. She thinks she has so much to do: she has to clean, she has to shower, she has to do something about that painting that got broken the other day, she has to buy toothpaste. But these obligations swirl around in a cloud of smoke that makes them onerous; she’s amazed she’s lived so long, all her life, doing those things so effortlessly. ‘How did I . . . ?’ Now everything is muffled, it’s intact but mysterious, and the house, like a body, slithers. And when she can’t think what to do, she counts the money she keeps hidden beneath the bottle with the picture, Hanging Houses of Cuenca.

How much time has passed? A year? The men keep coming, the money keeps piling up: she’s got almost enough now. And the closer she gets, the more exasperated she becomes. Sometimes she blanks out for long stretches. Then suddenly she becomes aware of herself again and she’s in the middle of the street, or in the bathroom. She wonders: ‘How did I get here?’ Then, like a memory: ‘The horn.’ And when she says that, the house seems like another house, the sun silhouettes each object as if it were a charcoal print on the table, on the wall, as if she herself were a natural distillation of this space.

She becomes hypnotized by an image she finds on the Internet: a Canadian man who’s had five silicone balls implanted under the skin on his face. She stares at him doggedly, for hours, as if from her fascination would spring meaning, and that would help her, would make the fear subside. Because she still feels fear. She doesn’t wonder: ‘What will become of me with the horn?’ She wonders something else, something more frightening: ‘What will I become with the horn?’ There are five photos of the Canadian man: lying in a hammock; in his kitchen; in a yard with a swing in the back; in a car; standing beside a roadside sign announcing the name of his town. With serious expressions, fierce, as if they’d been siblings for some time, they stare at each other. The man’s name is Jason Stone. Mónica learns his name the way you learn that of a lover. She writes it in her diary: ‘Jason Stone’. Then she slips into his skin: she feels the silicone dressing on his flesh, stares at his swollen face in the mirror, runs her fingers slowly over the bumps and feels their coarse, secret texture. And she thinks of a mysterious sentence: ‘I am the wound and the knife.’ When she writes it in her diary, under ‘Jason Stone’, it seems so clean and round she has no need to explain it. Two days later, she rereads it and finds it incomprehensible. ‘I am the wound and the knife.’ And yet she knows she wrote it consciously, in a lucid moment, and that after writing it, she felt no need to add anything more; so profound was the sense of having hit a nerve, a soft and fleshy form, a heart.