Introduction: about Blood Red
In a torrent of stream-of-consciousness fragments, the unnamed narrator of Blood Red recounts the aftermath of her failed marriage in explicit, sensual detail. As she falls in and out of new relationships, her internal monologue is punctuated by bouts of trypophobia, an obsessive cataloging of holes that empty, fill, widen, and threaten to swallow her entirely. Blood courses through her every encounter from periods, fights, accidents, wounds, sex, streaming to and from her holey fixation. Blood is a vibrant reminder of her physicality, a manifestation of her interiority, a link to memories and sensations — until its abrupt absence changes everything.
from Blood Red
Thinking about my husband kept making me heave; sweet, soft retches. I managed the bouts of nausea with lemon rind or by peeling the skin from my lips. It took us time, orphaned little souls that we were, to leave one other. And the decision took days, and the trees growing in my chest were losing their leaves, I pulled them off while saying something, but it was just gurgling mud. One night I stopped waiting with my nose glued to the glass, I didn’t take a Xanax, I didn’t check my phone, I just went to sleep and in my dream my eyes looked down the barrel of a revolver, and when it was about to shoot, I stood up and said I was able to sleep, this is over. But it wasn’t over, it had become a cowering body at rest. The decision would be delayed so much and made so gradually. We slowly went about pulling the plug, gradually pulling out the hunk of flesh so the blood would shoot out like pumpkin seeds, like whispers or firecrackers. The pain was easier that way. At first, he didn’t come home; later, I’d disappear. Sometimes he’d pick up a book and stay. Or mutual friends would come over, and we’d make a little exception. Or he’d stay the weekend to water the plants if I was away. Or anything. My husband hadn’t yet left, he was still my husband, and his clothes there, in the closet, his shirts, one next to the other, were the backs of a corpse. And even though the solitude sometimes drove me crazy, I entertained myself with the simplest activities. That was the secret. Back then, I didn’t have children. I don’t have any now, either. That isn’t totally true. But I had friends, and friendship frees, saves, lifts you up. Moreover, I wrote letters. I’ve named two men so far; with a third I maintained a regular romantic correspondence that threatened to disappear at any moment but didn’t. It grew increasingly intimate, denser, realer, an unusual correspondence at the time because it was material: paper, fist, and handwriting, none of these emails. Sometimes, only sometimes, a postcard or a book was delivered to my office. Of course, the whole matter of the marriage had ended long before, but I come back to it because it was one of those obsessions that nourished the trivial activities with which I kept myself on the edge of sanity. The marriage had gone up in smoke, even though my husband’s name was etched in my ID. It had ended not because the fights wouldn’t end, not because we had lovers or secret correspondences, not because we had silently discovered each and every one of each other’s lies, it would have had to survive with the damned betrayal like a stone in my pupil, growing hard within our bodies. It wasn’t because our pets had died, we’d survived the death of the dog and plants; not because we didn’t have anything in common, there were so many things in common that we no longer knew who was who. Not because money was short. Of course, it was short and of course it was a problem, but in the shortage, we were, happy? Not because any of the filth, clutter, sweat stains, and all that mess mattered at all; not because of my iron will to change him that failed over and over, or because the waiting became a sick lump in my stomach; not because of the way I locked myself up to cry feeling miserable and like that misery redeemed me of everything so that I wasn’t just a martyr, I was also the only woman with the ability to put up with all his bullshit: that I rejoiced in all of it, found in it my reason for being, the little triumph of my victimhood. Not because we had broken every promise and every agreement and by doing so had felt like wrung-out rags, our bodies wrinkled on the floor; not because we’d hit each other, we’d drawn blood a few times, we’d thrown things at each other, I’d gotten on my knees saying never again, he’d groveled saying never again. Not because we’d lost everything, including children, animals, books, suitcases, and passports; not because we’d gotten bored of the sex, the sex bored us, but the desire always permutated and returned, we’d find perverse ways for it to return. No, it wasn’t because of any of that. The marriage had crumbled because I sensed that I had the strength to survive the natural disintegration or because of the naive idea of a better life or because I ignored the fatal pain of that loss. There was nothing to do about it: that which was the bond and the sum of everything enumerated, accumulated, lost, disappeared (it became a tuft of grass growing from the crack). We stopped sleeping together, we stopped living together, and one fine day I got a message that said I just stopped by the little square where we met twelve years ago. I have a flower in my hand and a pack of a hundred thousand dogs licking me while they rip me open. I knew then that it had ended, but that there was so much to do before it would really end. He’d have to get his things and meet another woman. Or have a child. Or we’d both have to have a child. There’d be a few more years, or four, which is how many are needed, experts say, for nothing to be left, not even the maddening nostalgia that in those days made me go from love to hatred with a cursed speed. But what I just said isn’t so simple because memory is impregnated with images that at the slightest touch appear with the devastating reality of the absence, what will always be missing. That nostalgia assaults you the rest of your life and the tuft of grass is a footprint the forest hides beneath your feet. There’s no peace that can be enough; the element that activates the memory can be anything, the slightest trace. The body beaten by the blows of those traces becoming a sore. That wound is the one that corresponds to you. There isn’t anything you can do about it. That consoled me. That idea still consoles me: that pain that would never abandon me was, in the end, mine, something I’d accomplished. Meeting the man from the cave neither alleviated nor erased the pain. It was proof of the possibilities of loss, heartbreak, desire.
/ / /
One of those mornings I woke up in his bed, the man from the cave told me things. He, who didn’t say much, spoke. It was a holiday and the only time I’d spent more than two days in the cave. My vagina ached a little like it does right before I get my period, and the feeling that I had to get out of there wouldn’t leave me alone. It was my third day there and I no longer had clean clothes or the desire to bathe in cold water. He was sitting in a chair, his white feet playing in the dirt. An insect was buzzing around an apple we’d left half-eaten. He told me about some ideas for movies he wanted to make and showed me clips of one he’d already made. He pulled out his computer and said I’ll show you. I sat on his lap as an image shot out and started to pulse. It’s like my vagina right now, I thought. The thud of something falling. Of something that expects to be caught and falls with the anguish of what doesn’t come. The ovum. He stroked my shoulder while I watched the image of silver light disintegrating. Something always happened when he stroked me. He did so gently, stimulating the skin not being touched. The part he wasn’t stroking started prickling and the sensation extended throughout the rest of my body. He stroked my forearm and my whole arm anticipated the arrival of his fingers, but his fingers never arrived. And that altered the image. A barely recognizable image of a wing. A flutter or thousands of flutters absorbed by the light. The image was powerful, not because it was a metaphor. He’d soon ask what do you think? And I’d want to say it wasn’t a metaphor. It would’ve been easy to read it as a metaphor and say it’s life that when we answer its call, scorches us. It’s everything that illuminates us only to blind us. It’s the passion or perhaps the power, it’s the public that attacks everything private. Who are the moths: they’re the uncontacted peoples. They’re the poets on the rail trail. It’s the ovum that aches, about to be released. It’s the two of us in that moment (I’d return to his house every Friday, I’d ring, he’d come out, he’d press the garage button, squeeze it, I’d watch his figure grow as I approached, I’d get out of the car, kiss him on the cheek, we’d enter his house, I’d smell cat piss, feel the cold beneath my feet, see in the darkness clumps of moss sprouting from the wall, and I’d always be surprised by a warm humidity, a disconnected beauty, we’d do whatever like talk about the music playing or drink cinnamon water, and then, finally, for hours, we’d make love and then eat, and I’d say I’m leaving, but really I’d stay one, two, or, in this case, three days, and every one of those days was the same, or almost the same, minor variations, as if we’d kept up this silent routine for years, never leaving the cave, never talking about anything that had to do with us in that moment, never going to the other rooms, feeling in the midst of everything unsaid that something definitively was happening). No. It wasn’t a metaphor for any of that. The moth answering the call of the light in its mistaken surrounding world (a network of perceptions with greater or lesser importance). The light so hoped for putting an end to its fragile body. A state of unbearable scarcity. It’s suspended fluttering, touching the heat, over and over again. If the moth survives, it returns for its death. Moths go to the light to die, disappearing in the luminosity. That’s what I see: something that doesn’t stop radiating. The moth gets confused, he tells me, it thinks any light is the moon, that the moon will make it fly in a straight line, that it will reach a safe place. How do you remember an image? The matte, reddish color returns before it becomes somewhat transparent. In one moment, the image shifted to abstraction, moved away from the insect, and no longer looked like the night air with the moths moving toward the lamp but the sea, the depth of the sea pierced by the sun and there below, in that infinite solitude, a countless number of organisms falling. They were falling even though they never reached anything, any surface (they very well could have been rising, but I saw them as falling and that certain sensation was possibly due to the way his fingertip felt as it softly slid across my forearm or because of the ovum in descent, about to land in my underwear). It was no longer his finger circling a part he wasn’t going to touch but the imminence of the end of the caress on my forearm that started to distress me. I had to leave. What is an image prepared to be: the air or the ocean or the intermittence? They’re moths inhabiting the world made up of what they desire and what they repel, which is the same light. And it wasn’t just the sea now that compelled me to remember everything the image evoked when the camera moved away from the insect, they could be red flames, sand kicked up by a foot, the sun peeling, dust suspended in our environments, in what we breathe when a ray of light pierces it, or restless birds bewildered by the dew, dots for tracing a line or completing a drawing, buzzing under the skin of my arm, or it could be the deep hole that attracts everything. At some point I said I need to go. And I gathered my strength, moved as I was by the tactfulness of that image, to return to my freezing bed and the landscape of my husband’s shirts, one next to the other, abandoned in my room. Every night, I had to open the door to that closet and look at those shirts from my bed; looking at them cloaked in total darkness was the only way to sleep somewhat peace.
/ / /
From Blood Red by Gabriela Ponce, translated by Sarah Booker. Used with permission of the publisher, Restless Books. Copyright 2020 by Gabriela Ponce. Translation copyright 2022 by Sarah Booker. To acquire a copy of Blood Red from Restless Books, click here.