The Coming Flood

The men come again. The fear of the horn, now that it’s close, makes her love them in an odd way, devoid of her usual perfunctoriness. Not all of them, just some. But when it happens, she gets the feeling that the men, for her, are a way to cling to life. For a moment, she forgets everything. For a moment, she runs her eyes over the bodies of some of the men who come and thinks, ‘I could fall in love with you.’ And she becomes gentler. She sees their white skin so close, sees each hair follicle, and how each hair plunges its root into their skin and how at the base of each hair the skin sinks down suddenly and their hair enters it like a tiny extraction needle. And she can see their mouths, like gaping wounds, open scars, and their teeth, and their tongues, blanketed with thousands of tiny taste buds, each with its own unique function. And she can see the miraculous mechanics of their joints: shoulders, elbows, knees, hips; she makes herself tiny enough to touch the membrane that joins the bone to the flesh and skin. She is awed by their erections and thinks, ‘How beautiful,’ as if her feelings could only be superficial. When they come, she concentrates on the slight slackening of their eyes, their mouths. Their cheekbones seem to sink slightly then, their skin to regain its flaccidity; she revels in their sweat, imagines the miracle of each pore like a little cup overflowing with salt water, and she makes herself as small as her fears and travels each pore as if she had to plant a flag in each one.

There’s even a man who inexplicably falls in love with her. His name is Antonio but everyone calls him Toño.

‘My name is Antonio but everyone calls me Toño,’ he says.

He sends her text messages, dirty messages, in the middle of the night, almost always monosyllabic: ‘Come.’ ‘Cock.’ Anxious messages. He himself is big and anxious, he sweats a lot, tells jokes Mónica doesn’t understand, laughs a lot. And after he tells them, he waits a second, distraught as a boy in his Sunday best, his arms restrained, sheer expectation, and then abruptly laughs a thunderous laugh. Mónica attaches herself to him for a few weeks, but the attachment seems a betrayal of the truth, the horn. She doesn’t say anything. She simply watches what happens.Then Toño stops paying. But he keeps coming. Mónica doesn’t know how to tell him to go; she finds it harder and harder to speak. As if she’s forgotten how to pronounce certain words, certain sentences. She opens her mouth, she wants to say, ‘Toño, I don’t want you to keep coming,’ but nothing comes out. With Toño her body expands one last time, like a rubber band that’s been stretched insufferably but doesn’t break and then suddenly is released, becomes flaccid. Toño talks and talks. He’s oafish and inoffensive, and at times even unexpectedly sweet.

One day he says: ‘It’s time to clean your house.’

And he cleans for half an hour before he gets bored. The effect, in the end, is doubly damning: the cleanliness of one half of the house makes the dirtiness of the other much more obvious. The same is true of her body. It’s falling apart but only in certain spots. The bags under her eyes are almost purple some days, her nails are filthy and need to be cleaned, one of her nipples has darkened more than the other, the corners of her mouth have drooped, sloping down slightly, her eyelids are swollen in the mornings, her left knee hurts, she’s got indigestion, as if somehow the missing ribs put unnatural pressure on her intestines. With no warning of any sort, everything takes on the thick stench of rotting flesh and Mónica thinks it’s coming off her own body but can’t get rid of it no matter how often she showers. Because for the past two days, ever since Toño started showing up at will, Mónica has felt constantly filthy. One day she simply doesn’t open the door. He pounds furiously, then seems to feel ashamed and leaves. His texts keep coming for over a week, until slowly they, too, stop. He’ll send a cheap shot, and then, two minutes later, an apology. Three hours later, another cheap shot. His final messages are simply sad. And yet, Mónica doesn’t want them to stop; she looks forward to them, as if the texts contained a final link to something, as if Toño’s body, a body she was never attracted to, the one she can only remember certain specific parts of, were a great loss.