no time to…” he started to say in a threatening voice. “I’m not joking,” Doña Lucrecia interrupted him, closing his mouth with her lips. “That’s who I am and I don’t know why you haven’t realized it before.” “Help me, my love,” he said, perking up, coming to life again, moving. “Explain to me. I want to understand.” She explained and he understood.
Much later, as, after talking and laughing together, they prepared to take their rest, exhausted and happy, Don Rigoberto kissed his wife’s hand with deep emotion:
“How much you’ve changed, Lucrecia. Not only do I love you with all my heart and soul now. I also admire you. I’m certain I have a great deal to learn from you still.”
“At forty, people learn lots of things,” she said tersely, caressing him. “Sometimes, Rigoberto, now for instance, it seems to me that I’m being born again. And that I’ll never die.”
Was that what sovereignty was?
Twelve.
Labyrinth of Love
At first, you will not see me or hear me, but you must be patient and keep looking. With perseverance and without preconceptions, freely and with desire, look. With your imagination unleashed and your penis ready and willing—preferably erect—look. One enters there as the novice nun enters the cloister or the lover the cavern of his beloved: resolutely, without petty calculations, giving everything, demanding nothing, and in one’s soul the certainty that it is forever. Only on that condition, very gradually, the surface of dark purples and violets will begin to move, to become iridescent, to take on meaning and reveal itself to be what it in truth is, a labyrinth of love.
The geometrical figure in the middle band, at the exact center of the painting, that flat silhouette of a three-legged pachyderm, is an altar, a tabernacle, or if your mind is allergic to religious symbolism, a stage set. An exciting ceremony, with delightful and cruel reverberations, has just taken place, and what you see are its vestiges and its consequences. I know this because I have been the fortunate victim; the inspiration, the actress as well. Those reddish patches on the feet of the diluvial form are my blood and your sperm flowing forth and coagulating. Yes, my treasure, what is lying on the ceremonial stone (or, if you prefer, the pre-Hispanic stage prop), that viscous creature with mauve wounds and delicate membranes, black hollows and glands that discharge gray pus, is myself. Understand me: myself, seen from inside and from below, when you calcine me and express me. Myself, erupting and overflowing beneath your attentive libertine gaze of a male who has officiated with competence and is now contemplating and philosophizing.
Fernando de Szyszlo. Road to Mendieta 10 (1977), acrylic on canvas, private collection
Because you are there too, dearest. Looking at me as though autopsying me, eyes that look in order to see and the alert mind of an alchemist who exhaustively studies the phosphorescent formulas of pleasure. The one on the left, standing erect in the compartment with the dark brown glints, the one with the Saracen crescents on his head, draped in a mantle of live quills transmuted into a totem, the one with the spurs and the bright red feathers, the one with his back to me who is observing me: who could it be but you? You have just sat up and turned yourself into a curious onlooker. An instant ago you were blind and on your knees between my thighs, kindling my fires like a groveling, diligent servant. Now you are taking your pleasure watching me take mine and reflecting. Now you know me for what I am. Now you would like to dissolve me in a theory.
Are we without shame? We are whole and free, rather, and as earthly as we can possibly be. They have removed our epidermises and melted our bones, bared our viscera and our cartilage, exposed to the light everything that during Mass or during amorous rites we celebrated together, grew, sweated, and excreted. They have
Much later, as, after talking and laughing together, they prepared to take their rest, exhausted and happy, Don Rigoberto kissed his wife’s hand with deep emotion:
“How much you’ve changed, Lucrecia. Not only do I love you with all my heart and soul now. I also admire you. I’m certain I have a great deal to learn from you still.”
“At forty, people learn lots of things,” she said tersely, caressing him. “Sometimes, Rigoberto, now for instance, it seems to me that I’m being born again. And that I’ll never die.”
Was that what sovereignty was?
Twelve.
Labyrinth of Love
At first, you will not see me or hear me, but you must be patient and keep looking. With perseverance and without preconceptions, freely and with desire, look. With your imagination unleashed and your penis ready and willing—preferably erect—look. One enters there as the novice nun enters the cloister or the lover the cavern of his beloved: resolutely, without petty calculations, giving everything, demanding nothing, and in one’s soul the certainty that it is forever. Only on that condition, very gradually, the surface of dark purples and violets will begin to move, to become iridescent, to take on meaning and reveal itself to be what it in truth is, a labyrinth of love.
The geometrical figure in the middle band, at the exact center of the painting, that flat silhouette of a three-legged pachyderm, is an altar, a tabernacle, or if your mind is allergic to religious symbolism, a stage set. An exciting ceremony, with delightful and cruel reverberations, has just taken place, and what you see are its vestiges and its consequences. I know this because I have been the fortunate victim; the inspiration, the actress as well. Those reddish patches on the feet of the diluvial form are my blood and your sperm flowing forth and coagulating. Yes, my treasure, what is lying on the ceremonial stone (or, if you prefer, the pre-Hispanic stage prop), that viscous creature with mauve wounds and delicate membranes, black hollows and glands that discharge gray pus, is myself. Understand me: myself, seen from inside and from below, when you calcine me and express me. Myself, erupting and overflowing beneath your attentive libertine gaze of a male who has officiated with competence and is now contemplating and philosophizing.
Fernando de Szyszlo. Road to Mendieta 10 (1977), acrylic on canvas, private collection
Because you are there too, dearest. Looking at me as though autopsying me, eyes that look in order to see and the alert mind of an alchemist who exhaustively studies the phosphorescent formulas of pleasure. The one on the left, standing erect in the compartment with the dark brown glints, the one with the Saracen crescents on his head, draped in a mantle of live quills transmuted into a totem, the one with the spurs and the bright red feathers, the one with his back to me who is observing me: who could it be but you? You have just sat up and turned yourself into a curious onlooker. An instant ago you were blind and on your knees between my thighs, kindling my fires like a groveling, diligent servant. Now you are taking your pleasure watching me take mine and reflecting. Now you know me for what I am. Now you would like to dissolve me in a theory.
Are we without shame? We are whole and free, rather, and as earthly as we can possibly be. They have removed our epidermises and melted our bones, bared our viscera and our cartilage, exposed to the light everything that during Mass or during amorous rites we celebrated together, grew, sweated, and excreted. They have
Similar Books
