Ambientes_New Queer Latino Writing Read online

  “I just thought we could, you know, do something … different. Don’t you wanna just do something different now and again? I mean … if there’s something you wanted to do, I’d consider it.”

  As soon as she said it, I knew: “I wanna do a threesome with a guy.”

  “With … with a guy?”

  “Why not?”

  Kimberle was so taken back, she momentarily lost control. The car slid on the shoulder then skidded back onto the road.

  “But … wha … I mean, what would I do?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Look, I’m not gonna … and he’d want us to …” She kept looking from me to the road, each curve back to town now a little slicker, less certain.

  I nodded at her, exasperated, as if she were some dumb puppy. “Well, exactly.”

  “Exactly? But …”

  “Kimberle, don’t you ever think about what we’re doing—about us?”

  “Us? There is no us.”

  She fell on the brake just as we hurled beyond the asphalt, but the resistance was catalytic: the car twirled a double ocho as the rear tires hit the road again. My life, such as it was—my widowed mother, my useless Cuban passport, the smoke in my lungs, the ache in my chest that seemed impossible to contain—burned through me. Then we flipped twice and landed in a labyrinth of pointy corn stalks peppered by a sooty snow. There was a moment of silence, a stillness, then the tape ripped and the Toyota’s front end collapsed, shaking us one more time.

  “Are you … are you okay … ?” I asked breathlessly. I was hanging upside down.

  The car was on its back. In a second, Native Son, Orlando, and American Dreams slipped from under the seats, which were now above our heads, and tumbled to the ceiling, which was below us. They were in Saran Wrap, encased in blue and copper like Monarch chrysalides.

  “Oh God … Kimberle …” I started to sob softly.

  Kimberle shook her head, sprinkling a bloody constellation on the windshield. I reached over and undid her seat belt, which caused her body to drop with a thud. She tried to help me with mine but it was stuck.

  “Let me crawl out and come around,” she said, her mouth a mess of red. Her fingers felt around for teeth, for pieces of her tongue.

  I watched as she kicked out the glass on her window, picked each shard from the frame, and slowly pulled herself through. My head throbbed and I closed my eyes. I could hear the crunch of Kimberle’s steps on the snow, the exertion in her breathing. I heard her gasp and choke and then a rustling by my window.

  “Don’t look,” she said, her voice cracking as she reached in to cover my eyes with her ensanguined hands. “Don’t look.”

  But it was too late: there, above her shoulder, was this year’s seasonal kill, waxy and white but for the purple areolas and the meat of her sex. She was ordinary, familiar, and the glass of her eyes captured a portrait of Kimberle and me.

  Pandora’s Box

  ARTURO ARIAS

  I didn’t know Walker before this new life of mine. I only knew that he lived upstairs from my apartment in San Francisco. The city was not far from Redwood City, where I had been raised. However, for me to move there was like a Brazilian moving to China as far as cultural differences were concerned. And I had only lived in San Francisco for a few months, so I still acted more like a typical Latino immigrant of the peninsula than a “real” San Franciscan. I was still learning the foreign mannerisms and lifestyles of people living in the most special of American cities, the only one that could be mentioned in the same breath as Madrid, Paris, Rio, Rome. Walker seemed to be what others liked to call, for lack of a more poetic term, “a cool city person,” always busy, always with a sense of purpose, always in control. I often heard his dazzling, raw music, like freshly made ceviche with a scalding bite of poblano peppers, blasting through my high, peeling Victorian ceiling like a sudden tropical thunderstorm. He favored Latin house, for the most part, artful rearrangements of tunes I had known since childhood but in an infinitely slower rhythm than that of my grandmother’s mellifluous tongue.

  Then, on a foggy weekday night a casual acquaintance of mine, Pandora, knocked at his door.

  “I’ve missed you. Couldn’t wait to see you again.”

  After Walker opened and let her in, I panicked, breaking rule number one, and, feeling unrelenting distress as if I were a windowpane suddenly broken by a drunkard’s punch, I went into a jealous rage. Yes, I was jealous—of Pandora. Surprised? Perhaps you shouldn’t be. After all, no one who ever saw me before could possibly imagine that I could act like a girl. To tell you the truth, neither did I. After all, well, not only had I been a boy, but, most of all, I was a Latino boy from Redwood City, even if I was born in Central America and only moved to the U.S. as a teenager, and I looked very much like the tough macho I indeed was not. Dark hair, a curly beard, cinnamon-colored skin, hairy arms, legs, and chest. I was always embarrassed by my bulbous nose and less-than-straight teeth, but somehow or other, none of these parts ever seemed to make a difference when dating girlfriends since, as I was to find out later, women do not necessarily look for handsome men. I never quite figured out why in that early stage of my life, but girls were drawn to me despite the glaring faults in my squarish anatomy. My outrageous laughter might have overwhelmed them, bursting always in the middle of a spoken sentence like a broken water pipe in the middle of the street, or perhaps it was simply my clever irony and, as others whispered later in the night from the other end of the pillow, my good disposition.

  The point is, I was successful as a boy. I was popular, I did well in my work, I earned enough to get by, even in this most expensive of cities. Yet, somehow or other, it didn’t quite seem enough. It could very well have been my boredom of living in a country that lacked all concern for my two favorite sports, soccer and politics, and where people had the horrible habit of eating dinner before the sun had set, without salt and picante to boot. Or else my increasing intolerance for the histrionics of pro-lifers and pro-prayers, who, incidentally, were all milky white, when not hot pink, under their blow-dried hair. It was, without a doubt, a certain ennui with always repeating the same meaningless gestures—work hard Monday through Friday, party just as hard Friday and Saturday nights, recover Sunday from a dazzling hangover that left my brain bubbly but perforated as if left under the steady punch of a constant drip of water, and my cerebellum tense and swollen. I didn’t mind the partying. I was just getting bored with the repetition of the exact same motions: jostle with the cocky men with hairless chests and make silly smiles for the attention of the pretty women, make dumb conversation with them in the hope that a joke or two would filter through before inviting them out to dance, seductively squinting a little as I talked, then hoping they wouldn’t lose attention before those thick legs of mine warmed up and my daddy-longleg arms succeeded in spinning them around with an effortless, debonair attitude dosed with a certain intuition for aesthetic elegance. Feel their warmth, then smile a lot until I drowned them in the gulping gurgle of the gushing waters of my humor, displaying a good array of eye movements that spoke for me, then let my hands find their way down their bodies with boldness and self-assurance, but without any sign of coarseness or vulgarity, hoping for the best. Never insist on sleeping with them on the first night, but never see them again if I hadn’t by the third.

  I had always both desired and envied Alexandra, which was Pandora’s real name, though she went by the nickname her parents gave her when she was a shy, silent, mysterious child. She was naturally gorgeous, with dark hair flowing down to the middle of her back like silk, and a perfectly proportioned body, long legs, wasplike waist, the finest possible ankles and smallish breasts just erotic enough to make me blink as if struck by the first, red rays of the sun after a total eclipse. I had never gone out with her. She was too beautiful, too elegant, a body perfectly arranged for someone who fit her world as naturally as the avant-garde decor in the lobby of Davies Symphony Hall or the War Memorial Opera House. She was i
n that rarest of all categories: beautiful women I didn’t even dare approach, bold as I was, but for whom I saved vehement doses of dumb devotion without redemption. In real life I settled for the ones with slightly more visible defects, from a pimple here and there, to a voice too loud or hysterical, to a fanatical political correctness verging on the pathological. Pandora belonged to that dreamt-of category of “goddesses” that I only saw from afar, from a distance, as if we were forever separated by an invisible barrier that kept mere mortals forever at bay.

  Whenever I saw Pandora, my intestines would twist in knots not even a Boy Scout could untie. I’d tremble like a wet chicken, my IQ would drop eighty points in a free fall, and both my stare and tumescence would immediately betray a certain longing impertinence that could be neither hidden nor easily explained. But like a movie star used to being mobbed, showered with gifts, and given children to kiss, she remained entirely unaffected by whatever signs of unconscious bodily betrayal I unrolled before her divine feet like those rugs made with natural flowers used for Catholic processions in Antigua’s Holy Week.

  One day, an older woman saw me watching Pandora and walked over to my side. “And who are you, my boy, who seems bewitched by this lovely lady?”

  “My name is Juan, madam, but most American friends call me Gianni.”

  “Ah, a famous name indeed, most famous, and yet you long so much for this beautiful lady that you would be better off being Juana or Juanita, so as to know and feel as she does, to understand the power of that gaze of yours, to feel the burning eyes upon your skin as if you were being tattooed. Wait and see how it feels.”

  She then broke into an outrageous laugh that startled me and sent me trembling as if I were about to faint, shaking as if in an epileptic fit or the throes of an orgasm too intense to bear. My mouth felt sandy, or full of sawdust. I was suddenly dying of thirst. My eyes got blurry, my nose began to itch, and next thing I knew, my head was spinning out of control as if I had just fallen into a red and white vortex spinning faster and faster, and it seemed, don’t ask me why, as if mangoes were raining down from a purple sky.

  When I woke up, I felt like a tennis ball maliciously soaked for a long time under an open faucet. A big pain in the back of my head spread from that point like a tiara that ended on the power points just above my eyebrows. My muscles were cramped, and I had black and blue marks on my thighs, as if I’d been playing soccer and gotten kicked in the groin. To say that it was strange would be the understatement of the year, pardon the cliché. I placed the flat, caked palms of my hands against the bruises, and felt their soreness. It took me minutes longer, enough time for a grain of sand blown by the breeze to settle in my eyes, and for me to blink hard to rinse them with a tear, to figure out that my bruised skin was uncannily smooth. I touched my thighs again as if to reconfirm their newfound smoothness and fully realized that I no longer had any hair on my legs. No hair. My vision was still fuzzy, so it was hard to see clearly, but the skin felt like polished mahogany.

  Puzzled, I instinctively reached up to caress my beard. But then I was thrown for a loop, because when my hand reached my face, there was no beard to stroke, just very bare cheeks and jaw ending in a round chin that no longer felt like a goat’s. The shock was such that I instinctively put a hand on my chest, above my heart. And then, it all became more than clear, more than shocking, more than a little exhilarating, because as I put a hand above my heart, I ended up touching, caressing, feeling with the tips of my fingers a breast, solid and shaped just like the biggest of those mangoes I might have imagined were falling from the sky. I looked down and yes, there it was, and there was its mate, since I indeed had two of them, one on each side. Amazement? Shock? Words do no justice to this most singular situation. More than dreaming or comatose, I felt like I was dead and in heaven. I realized that I had become a woman. Juanita indeed. Ah, Juaaa-ni-tahhhh.

  I was still wearing the same summer clothes as before, which were fortunately gender-neutral: a white T-shirt, khaki shorts, and white tennis shoes. But I was definitely not the same; now, there was no hair on my legs, nor on my face, and my hair was longer than before. And then there were the breasts, which were quite pretty actually, and a little bouncy. Their unusual movement and weight threw me at first, as did my rounded ass, which swelled swishingly behind me. A girl indeed. In a sudden fit of panic, I immediately put my hands on my crotch. Oh no. I put one on top of the other, disturbed by the incommensurable space. Sure enough, there was nothing there, an unrecognized emptiness, a vacuum hard to account for in my still-dizzy mind. I didn’t have the courage to take a peek under my shorts, to pull them down and see. Any kind of glance would have been disconcerting enough in those circumstances. I simply looked around, as if embarrassed that someone would recognize me, but I saw nobody, not even a stranger, and I decided immediately to head home, to run like crazy for home, feeling the strangeness of running with bouncing weights on my chest and my behind, yet also feeling somehow lighter.

  The first thing I did, once in the privacy of my home, was take my clothes off frantically and explore my body. I felt like a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, breathing way too fast for my own good, afraid of the nothingness between my legs, the dark universe where previously the phallus had ruled. And if it wasn’t quite nothingness, it sure felt like it compared to the something that had been there only hours before, humbly offering me the best moments of my life. I touched myself with a shyness I had never had with any of my lovers. It felt strange. I couldn’t find a hand mirror, so I had to settle for a compact that one of my lovers had left behind and that I used for shaving in airplane bathrooms on business trips. I put it on the floor and squatted over it. I could clearly see female genitalia, a familiar sight, but the mirror was so small that I couldn’t see quite as clearly the connection between that erogenous zone and the rest of me, just two-dimensional images, pink and dark close-ups. I moved to the full-length mirror in the bedroom, leaned over, and peeked between my legs. What I saw made me tremble with fear, apprehension, and, why not admit it, some degree of excitement as well. A woman.

  I began to explore my new body, testing all the possible tingling sensations, the vulnerability of the nape of the neck, the peculiar feeling when pressing the nipples of … my breasts (whew, it was even hard to name them as my own), the singularity of sliding my own finger up my, my, what should I call it? My vagina? Way too formal. My cunt? Way too vulgar. Pussy? Conventional, but it would have to do for the time being. The important thing was not the naming after all, but rather the exploring of a new reality, an unexpected, surprising new reality that left me wordless, as sensations familiar from provoking reactions in others now evoked singular emotions in a body I could call my own. I was wordless, yes, inarticulate without question, but very much a woman.

  My next thought was, of course, that I had no clothes suitable for this new body. Spaced out as I was, I did my best to remember what the balance might be on my ill-treated credit card, and, assuming that it would all work itself out, I jumped back into my T-shirt and shorts and headed for the mall. How girlish of me indeed, how conventional and ordinary, but I literally had no choice.

  As I drove to the mall, I began to think of how I could fulfill on my new voluptuous frame my fantasies of the perfect companion, a model I used to impose on my girlfriends. I thought of short, tight dresses, red of course, of modish high-heeled sandals that left all the toes exposed, with the toenails just as fiery red, a vision of vicious vermillion. Phantom mirages and hallucinatory apparitions of gorgeous women, of multiple Pandoras in various fatuous outfits and extravagant hairdos, paraded through my porous head, suddenly more like a colander or a Swiss cheese quietly melting on a hot summer afternoon than razor-sharp or logical, and that had nothing to do with being a woman, but a lot with still being in shock. It was all too pretty, a brilliant flash of excitement punctuated by the boredom of actually trying on a zillion dresses, none of which fit, all of which looked God awful because they either made m
e look too fat, or too slutty, or else I simply could not move inside of them, since it was impossible to lean forward without showing my ass, which, I might add, didn’t look half bad, or exposing my breasts, which were bursting out like jack-in-the-boxes. It would be simply impossible to pass anonymously when I wore them. I did enjoy the sensation of standing tall in my black high-heeled shoes with my ass protruding even more than usual. It excited my back in more ways than one. I felt—it’s still a sensation hard to name for me—sexy and desirable. I also bought new pants, blouses, and—dare I say it?—even a bra. Strange, now that I had my own breasts to show off, I was infinitely shyer than when I virtually required my girlfriends to go braless in my presence, and I was embarrassed of my nipples swelling like bursting grapes and drawing like magnets the eyes of every passerby to their very tips. Yes, I was as embarrassed now as I had been excited by the same effect when the object of desire was not myself but the woman walking by my side. Anyway, I went home. Or tried to. On the way there, I realized I had forgotten to buy a handbag and I suddenly discovered that women’s clothes had no pockets in which to keep your wallet, your pen, your change, or your lipstick, the bare necessities of everyday life. So I had to go back, and buy whichever purse didn’t look too ugly since by then I was exhausted from shopping. I finally made it home and tried on my new clothes. Afterward, I went into a deep, bottomless sleep, dreaming that it was all a dream and I’d wake up as Juan again, plain Juan, the familiar shapes and hairs outlining my body. But no, even after I woke up, I was still Juanita.

  As time went by, small changes began to be perceptible. My vague, rather obscure thoughts at the time overlapped and intertwined to the point of erasing all possible sense, generating a sort of hallucinatory virulence in my mind, which felt virile at times, if you can forgive the use of such a silly word under my new condition.