They take the stairs to reach his studio. He leads the way and she follows close behind, as if she is afraid he will vanish into the sky just beyond the next step. He opens the door to his narrow hallway and let’s her enter. He soon follows closing the door behind him. Dark, dusty, windows light up by streetlights, a dog barking in the night. He grabs her waist, pawing her heavy breasts, kissing her roughly. Smell of alcohol on both their lips. The whole evening was leading up to this – this struggle of flesh. However this was not the first time with its almost illicit surprises – the feel of his skin against hers like sandpaper, a large birthmark just below her right breast.

She pushes him away, disentangling his hands from her waist. But he leans over her, hands now on the wall, watching her face, for some message he had missed in his sexual frenzy. She says, no not now. I am not ready. He says fine but let us still lay down. He pushes off the books on his bed and like two spoons or two slaves chained in the holds of a slaver, they lay down.

She says you don’t love me do you? Which is just about right, not at this moment, he says to himself. She says tell me something; make my heart light again as it was it the bar when we were drinking, it feels very heavy now. What do you want to hear? Anything. He begins to recite a poem of Lorca. She says is this yours? No. Lorca. She demands a poem of his. He says words be damned. And that he is tired of grappling with himself, with her, with the world, using their blunt hooks. She looks at him and he knows that has wounded her. When he met her, he used to make up lines, for her, by butchering all that he had read from books, sitting up late nights.

She says forget poetry then; tell me one of your memories. From when? From your childhood she says turning to his side, facing him. Picking up the faint rhythm of her heart he says there were drums late nights when he was growing up, at the edge of a city, playing in nearby villages set among stony hillocks. He used to run out to the porch and listen to them, to imagine he was dancing in that shadow of fires, with those drunken drummers, usually laborers and construction workers trying to forget their day’s weariness with cheap stinking liquor and some music. He says Dante must have had such music on his mind when he wrote about hell.

No heaven, no hell, she says. Just hold me. How does the mute body know what these are? It is the mind that is the site of such battles. How old were you she asks. Ten or eleven. The time of innocence she says. What innocence, man loses innocence when he knows that he is a battlefield for desires, and desires have no specific age to arise. What kind of desires she says? To take away that water pistol from his best friend. To get that pencil sharpener shaped like a helmet, made in Switzerland it said on the back, from that rich girl in his class who came to school in a car. To wish for a disastrous road accident to finish off his family, so as to feel this dull sadness pierce his heart like a dagger.

That is terrible, you couldn’t have possibly wished for that, she objects. Didn’t you wish for anyone to be killed when you were a child? You are lying. You must have wanted for your father or mother die sometime, maybe when they hit you, or were ashamed by your school grade card. She says yes I know, I have had murder in my heart too but more than that it is myself whom I wanted to destroy. Annihilation which you sought through fucking he says. Yes that beating of another body against mine, eyes opened, eyes closed in lust, with strangers whom I had just met, in bars, at cinemas, against a park bench, in an elevator, on the stairs of a fire escape, chained, slapped around, giving pain and receiving pain with semen and saliva, with that aftertaste of wanton pleasure.

He says your body tonight however is still, like a boat, made of white balsam, delicate. It is hard to imagine the journey it has gone through. I don’t want to remember this now, she says, tell me another of your memories. What will you do with all these memories, which I am not sure are what had really transpired in my life he says.