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Fiction

To Troy, Helen

By Fernando Iwasaki
Translated from Spanish by Jeremy Osner

                         The two lay down together on the bed.

Atreus’s son paced through the crowd, like a wild beast,
searching for some glimpse of godlike Alexander. 

 Iliad, book 3: 284ff.

 

I parked the car four blocks beyond the house. Felt like I was following a plan that I had rehearsed a hundred times. What sense did it make? Helen would not know I had come, did not even know I was on my way. I felt like a visitor in my own house, I thought more about my students and my department than about Helen or the children. Perhaps my life had been going by too quickly. I found myself turning thirty now, nothing beautiful in my life or really engaging, I had come to know love and death so young – it had taken more than ten years for the speed and intensity of events around me to fall off a bit. I found myself suddenly and prematurely aged, in my role as a professor, fed up with all the drinking and dancing of my younger days, my wife finding her own way into her thirties, full of drives and desires of her own whose sensuous velocity I could never really match.

I stole in, careful not to make a sound, though as it turns out she would not have heard me anyway, what with the clamor of her own battle. Helen was beautiful, but above all she was a good wife, diligent; before seeing the kids off to school in the morning she had already prepared our repast, had cleaned the floors, ironed the clothing, even dusted off the old rock collection I’d gathered in the hills of Santa Eulalia on my first ever camping trip, back in third grade. She never got bored with my stupid archeological sentimentality—my baptismal brushes, soda bottles from the five continents, even the little spinning top made of bronze, the one that I won off that Chinese guy Alejos in three memorable games. Each of these knickknacks received its indifferent once–over as regular as clockwork. Helen was orderly, meticulous. And for this very reason when I saw the whisky glasses lying on the floor, the clothing strewn hurriedly across the furniture, I understood: she was exorcising our domestic routines—my custom was to fold up my shirt and trousers before making love.

The truth is Helen had tried too hard, had tried harder than you could expect from a girl who got married at twenty to a professional bum, and one who was not doing too well in his profession. She started out by straightening up the little dump we rent—“You’ll see, I’ll make it look like Barranco,” she said—then came the pregnancy with Martita and, no way around it, the loss of a year at the university. And then the conflicts between childcare and exams, lectures and diapers. Still it seemed like she was going to end up with a career; then her gynecologist told her the test was positive, congratulations, all that crap. It was the only time I ever saw her cry, she wept that she was ending up like every other housewife who studies psychology and then raises a family. Now, at the very least, I was getting a chance to hear her laughing, roaring even, moaning, again and again, beside herself.

The university became her obsession. Although we had enrolled together, she never drew the obvious, odious comparison; but I always felt like it got under her skin, to see the girls who had started as freshmen graduating before she did, and on top of that with me overseeing their theses. They were young, were not loaded down with kids, had time to sort out a path in life and a professional degree besides—“She’ll make whatever conquests she likes, right?” she would always say, and the double-entendre may have been intentional. Was she thinking about how all this was already out of range for her? For better or worse this was a constant thorn in her side; when Marta and the twins were older she went to work at the gym, she got her license, she discovered the aphrodisiac spell which her ankles cast over males of every persuasion.

I walked down the hall toward the door standing ajar; the mirror on the dresser excused me from having to get any closer. Helen was turned away from the mirror, mounted on the belly of her inflamed lover, going up and down, going in and out. It seems strange, but what most grabbed my attention then was my wife’s get-up—I thought back to one day when she had come into our room in a sheer negligee, and under that the same black lingerie she was wearing now, stockings, garters and all. She had undressed me then as if she were peeling a piece of fruit, had thrown me down on the bed with lecherous force, not listening to what I was saying about my clean white shorts and the waxed floor. Clumsy, coarsely, I had stripped off her lace panties and in five minutes hurried through the routine which her ambush had called for. Then for all her desperate efforts to revive my withered cartilage, it lay there sleeping, crushed, sated.

How many times had it happened, my drive and endurance vanishing midway through? This man, by contrast, knew how to give her pleasure without even needing to unravel the gauzy blackness which enveloped her, as if he knew by heart where to find her turgid vulva among this web of openings.

Quickly, fluidly, they moved on to new games, new positions, rolled, twisted together, buttocks and caresses, fingers stroking hair, tongues licking, eyes delirious and dark. It had been a good long time now since I had seen Helen’s face like this, her mouth open, lips swollen, jaw set, transfixed by pleasure. Our intimacy had become a monotonous affair, bureaucratic, frustrated. Here everything was audacity, spontaneity, fun.

But who was this person, this intruder, thrusting himself at one blow into my bed, into my life? Was he a neighbor? An instructor at the gym? Across the mirror I realized I knew those childish features: it was a student of mine from the past term, Alexander Parissi, son of a candymaker, expelled from the university after having flunked out of World History I for the third time. Was this some settling of scores on his part? Or was Parissi the unwitting instrument of Helen’s erotic vengeance? I took offense at my own role as a lover, at having been displaced by a kid like this; but I understood that Parissi was standing in as my opposite in every way, with his torrential twenty-one years—exactly what Helen, ten years older, needed.

In the end the boy was not to blame; at that age you don’t beg anybody’s pardon. Hadn’t I done the same thing with my old man’s secretary, with the cougars who sat around in cafés trying to score with younger guys? Back then I saw the world through the glasses of incontinent adolescence, I could give a shit what the thirty-year-old woman was thinking. They must have felt lonely, ignored, unsatisfied—at that age where they’re still going out, trying to look good, to complement their husbands. They were following their own paths and I was following my own path, just like Alexander Parissi was now, focusing his attention on prolonging Helen’s last orgasm as far as she would let him.

The two of them were lying limp now, relaxing from their climax, sleepwalking fingers still exploring each other’s pliant, moist bodies. Helen was trying to get him up again, sucking kisses all down his legs to his feet, where she began to stroke with her rigid nipples those lower digits where the last reserves of one’s energy are stored. Shaken by his devastating, unspeakable discharge, Parissi grabbed his odalisque’s waist and squeezed it against his body and said in his husky, tremulous voice, “To Troy, Helen. Let’s go to Troy.”

I thought of how often I had tried to get behind Helen that way, to no avail; on the other side of the mirror, I stifled the murderous impulse welling up in me. Reviewed in my memory the hungry lusts of older women I’d been with, reviewed how I could justify to myself what I had done with them twice a month, three times a week, four times daily. Back then Helen was a typical teenager in love, her head in the clouds; now she was a cougar, an insatiable Melusina. I thought about the children, about the hardship that would be theirs if I were to kill her. About the irreparable absence of their mother, about the nightmares, their sharp screams. And here, here, see how Helen screams, her face scrunched up, her contented smile, debauched, on all fours. And I say to myself here that it’s not worth doing… this enervating mirror reflecting back to me memories of my own lascivious behavior—a mirage rooted, too, in my impossible desire to be once more Parissi, abducting my own Helen, her arms like the snow, my Trojan Horse.

I went back downstairs and drove to the campus to teach. I never after that dared step outside my tedious routine, that I might not once more have to confront that ineffable mirror on the dresser. Helen has gone on being lovely, being beyond that a good and diligent wife: a warm kiss every morning, the same fleeting encounters as always, an indifferent once-over now and again. Over the years I have forgotten the sinful scene which was reflected back from that room. At times my ears are full again, though, of the sordid noise two bodies make in love.


© Fernando Iwasaki. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2012 by Jeremy Osner. All rights reserved.

English Spanish (Original)

                         The two lay down together on the bed.

Atreus’s son paced through the crowd, like a wild beast,
searching for some glimpse of godlike Alexander. 

 Iliad, book 3: 284ff.

 

I parked the car four blocks beyond the house. Felt like I was following a plan that I had rehearsed a hundred times. What sense did it make? Helen would not know I had come, did not even know I was on my way. I felt like a visitor in my own house, I thought more about my students and my department than about Helen or the children. Perhaps my life had been going by too quickly. I found myself turning thirty now, nothing beautiful in my life or really engaging, I had come to know love and death so young – it had taken more than ten years for the speed and intensity of events around me to fall off a bit. I found myself suddenly and prematurely aged, in my role as a professor, fed up with all the drinking and dancing of my younger days, my wife finding her own way into her thirties, full of drives and desires of her own whose sensuous velocity I could never really match.

I stole in, careful not to make a sound, though as it turns out she would not have heard me anyway, what with the clamor of her own battle. Helen was beautiful, but above all she was a good wife, diligent; before seeing the kids off to school in the morning she had already prepared our repast, had cleaned the floors, ironed the clothing, even dusted off the old rock collection I’d gathered in the hills of Santa Eulalia on my first ever camping trip, back in third grade. She never got bored with my stupid archeological sentimentality—my baptismal brushes, soda bottles from the five continents, even the little spinning top made of bronze, the one that I won off that Chinese guy Alejos in three memorable games. Each of these knickknacks received its indifferent once–over as regular as clockwork. Helen was orderly, meticulous. And for this very reason when I saw the whisky glasses lying on the floor, the clothing strewn hurriedly across the furniture, I understood: she was exorcising our domestic routines—my custom was to fold up my shirt and trousers before making love.

The truth is Helen had tried too hard, had tried harder than you could expect from a girl who got married at twenty to a professional bum, and one who was not doing too well in his profession. She started out by straightening up the little dump we rent—“You’ll see, I’ll make it look like Barranco,” she said—then came the pregnancy with Martita and, no way around it, the loss of a year at the university. And then the conflicts between childcare and exams, lectures and diapers. Still it seemed like she was going to end up with a career; then her gynecologist told her the test was positive, congratulations, all that crap. It was the only time I ever saw her cry, she wept that she was ending up like every other housewife who studies psychology and then raises a family. Now, at the very least, I was getting a chance to hear her laughing, roaring even, moaning, again and again, beside herself.

The university became her obsession. Although we had enrolled together, she never drew the obvious, odious comparison; but I always felt like it got under her skin, to see the girls who had started as freshmen graduating before she did, and on top of that with me overseeing their theses. They were young, were not loaded down with kids, had time to sort out a path in life and a professional degree besides—“She’ll make whatever conquests she likes, right?” she would always say, and the double-entendre may have been intentional. Was she thinking about how all this was already out of range for her? For better or worse this was a constant thorn in her side; when Marta and the twins were older she went to work at the gym, she got her license, she discovered the aphrodisiac spell which her ankles cast over males of every persuasion.

I walked down the hall toward the door standing ajar; the mirror on the dresser excused me from having to get any closer. Helen was turned away from the mirror, mounted on the belly of her inflamed lover, going up and down, going in and out. It seems strange, but what most grabbed my attention then was my wife’s get-up—I thought back to one day when she had come into our room in a sheer negligee, and under that the same black lingerie she was wearing now, stockings, garters and all. She had undressed me then as if she were peeling a piece of fruit, had thrown me down on the bed with lecherous force, not listening to what I was saying about my clean white shorts and the waxed floor. Clumsy, coarsely, I had stripped off her lace panties and in five minutes hurried through the routine which her ambush had called for. Then for all her desperate efforts to revive my withered cartilage, it lay there sleeping, crushed, sated.

How many times had it happened, my drive and endurance vanishing midway through? This man, by contrast, knew how to give her pleasure without even needing to unravel the gauzy blackness which enveloped her, as if he knew by heart where to find her turgid vulva among this web of openings.

Quickly, fluidly, they moved on to new games, new positions, rolled, twisted together, buttocks and caresses, fingers stroking hair, tongues licking, eyes delirious and dark. It had been a good long time now since I had seen Helen’s face like this, her mouth open, lips swollen, jaw set, transfixed by pleasure. Our intimacy had become a monotonous affair, bureaucratic, frustrated. Here everything was audacity, spontaneity, fun.

But who was this person, this intruder, thrusting himself at one blow into my bed, into my life? Was he a neighbor? An instructor at the gym? Across the mirror I realized I knew those childish features: it was a student of mine from the past term, Alexander Parissi, son of a candymaker, expelled from the university after having flunked out of World History I for the third time. Was this some settling of scores on his part? Or was Parissi the unwitting instrument of Helen’s erotic vengeance? I took offense at my own role as a lover, at having been displaced by a kid like this; but I understood that Parissi was standing in as my opposite in every way, with his torrential twenty-one years—exactly what Helen, ten years older, needed.

In the end the boy was not to blame; at that age you don’t beg anybody’s pardon. Hadn’t I done the same thing with my old man’s secretary, with the cougars who sat around in cafés trying to score with younger guys? Back then I saw the world through the glasses of incontinent adolescence, I could give a shit what the thirty-year-old woman was thinking. They must have felt lonely, ignored, unsatisfied—at that age where they’re still going out, trying to look good, to complement their husbands. They were following their own paths and I was following my own path, just like Alexander Parissi was now, focusing his attention on prolonging Helen’s last orgasm as far as she would let him.

The two of them were lying limp now, relaxing from their climax, sleepwalking fingers still exploring each other’s pliant, moist bodies. Helen was trying to get him up again, sucking kisses all down his legs to his feet, where she began to stroke with her rigid nipples those lower digits where the last reserves of one’s energy are stored. Shaken by his devastating, unspeakable discharge, Parissi grabbed his odalisque’s waist and squeezed it against his body and said in his husky, tremulous voice, “To Troy, Helen. Let’s go to Troy.”

I thought of how often I had tried to get behind Helen that way, to no avail; on the other side of the mirror, I stifled the murderous impulse welling up in me. Reviewed in my memory the hungry lusts of older women I’d been with, reviewed how I could justify to myself what I had done with them twice a month, three times a week, four times daily. Back then Helen was a typical teenager in love, her head in the clouds; now she was a cougar, an insatiable Melusina. I thought about the children, about the hardship that would be theirs if I were to kill her. About the irreparable absence of their mother, about the nightmares, their sharp screams. And here, here, see how Helen screams, her face scrunched up, her contented smile, debauched, on all fours. And I say to myself here that it’s not worth doing… this enervating mirror reflecting back to me memories of my own lascivious behavior—a mirage rooted, too, in my impossible desire to be once more Parissi, abducting my own Helen, her arms like the snow, my Trojan Horse.

I went back downstairs and drove to the campus to teach. I never after that dared step outside my tedious routine, that I might not once more have to confront that ineffable mirror on the dresser. Helen has gone on being lovely, being beyond that a good and diligent wife: a warm kiss every morning, the same fleeting encounters as always, an indifferent once-over now and again. Over the years I have forgotten the sinful scene which was reflected back from that room. At times my ears are full again, though, of the sordid noise two bodies make in love.


© Fernando Iwasaki. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2012 by Jeremy Osner. All rights reserved.

A Troya, Helena

Acostáronse ambos en el torneado lecho, mientras el Atrida se revolvía entre la muchedumbre, buscando    al deiforme Alejandro… 
HOMERO, Ilíada III, 448ss. 

 

Aparqué el coche a cuatro manzanas de la calle como si hubiera ensayado esa estrategia cientos de veces. ¿Qué sentido tenía que Helena no me sintiera llegar si nunca sabía cuándo me iba? Yo era una suerte de extraño visitante en mi propia casa, más concentrado en mis alumnos y en la facultad que en atender a Helena o a los niños. Tal vez porque había vivido demasiado rápido y me encontraba ahora cerca de los treinta sin algo verdaderamente atractivo que me estimulara, pues había conocido el amor y la muerte tan temprano que tardé más de una década en aminorar la velocidad e intensidad de mis experiencias. De pronto me hallé prematuramente envejecido en una cátedra universitaria, empachado por todo lo bebido y lo bailado y con una mujer que también llegaba a los treinta en su momento, llena de apetitos y curiosidades y con ese ímpetu sensual que nunca colmé completamente. 

Entré con sigilosa cautela para que no escuchara, pero el fragor de su propia batalla lo habría impedido de todas maneras. Helena era preciosa, mas sobre todo buena y diligente: antes de mandar a los chicos al colegio ya había preparado el almuerzo, barrido los suelos, planchado la ropa y hasta desempolvado mi vieja colección de piedras, reunida en los cerros de Santa Eulalia cuando fui a mi primer campamento en tercero de primaria. Nunca se quejó de mi estúpida arqueología sentimental: los cepillos de mi bautizo, chapitas de gaseosas de los cinco continentes e incluso la peonza de bronce que le gané al chinito Alejos en tres jugadas memorables. Todos esos cachivaches recibían puntuales su franelazo indiferente porque Helena era ordenada y meticulosa. Por eso mismo, cuando vi los vasos de whisky en la alfombra y la ropa arrojada con urgencia sobre los muebles, comprendí que estaba exorcizando la rutina doméstica, mi costumbre de doblar camisa y pantalón antes de hacer el amor. 

La verdad es que Helena había resistido demasiado, más de lo que se le podía pedir a una chica que se casa a los veinte años con un huevón de oficio pero sin beneficio. Primero empezó organizando el decrépito chalecito que alquilamos (‘vas a ver cómo Barranco se pone de moda’, decía), luego fue el embarazo de Martita y el inevitable año de universidad perdido. Más tarde vino la desesperación por la coincidencia de biberones y exámenes, de monografías y pañales. Parecía que al fin acabaría la carrera cuando el ginecólogo le dijo que su análisis daba positivo, que felicitaciones y toda la matraca. Fue la única vez que la vi llorar, lamentándose de cómo al final estaba como todas las marujas que estudian psicología para educar a sus hijitos. Por lo menos ahora la escuchaba reír y hasta ronronear, gemir una y otra vez como si estuviera fuera de sí. 

La universidad fue su obsesión. A pesar de haber ingresado juntos nunca estableció comparaciones odiosas, mas siempre sospeché que le repateaba que esas chicas a quienes había visto crecer en mi oficina desde que estaban en primero se graduaran antes que ella, y que encima yo les dirigiera sus tesis. Ellas eran jóvenes, no estaban cargadas de niños, tenían tiempo de arreglarse y además un título profesional (‘pueden conquistar a quien les dé la gana, ¿no?’, repetía a cada rato, quizá con doble intención) ¿Pensaría acaso que alguna de esas cosas estaba ya fuera de su alcance? Para bien o para mal ello debió de ser un acicate constante, pues cuando Marta y los mellizos crecieron se metió al gimnasio, sacó la licenciatura y descubrió el afrodisíaco hechizo que sus tobillos infligían sobre los machos de toda condición. 

Desde el corredor me aproximé hacia la puerta entreabierta y el espejo del ropero me exoneró de seguir acercándome. Helena estaba de espaldas, sentada sobre la barriga de un amante enardecido que la hacía subir y bajar, entrar y salir. Parecerá extraño, mas lo que llamó poderosamente mi atención fue el exótico aderezo de mi esposa. Recordé que un día se apareció en nuestro cuarto con una bata transparente bajo la cual resaltaba esa misma ropa interior negra, con sus medias, ligueros y todo. Me desvistió como si pelara una fruta y me tumbó encima de la cama con lujuria y violencia, sin importarle mis quejas acerca del suelo encerado y mis calzoncillos blancos. Con torpe rudeza la despojé de sus encajes y en cinco minutos apuré el trámite que su emboscada exigía, a pesar de los desesperados movimientos de sus caderas por reavivar el cartílago marchito que saciado se dejaba aplastar completamente adormecido. 

¿Cuántas veces se habrá quedado con el deseo y el sostén a medio quitar? En cambio ese hombre sabía hacerla disfrutar sin destejer las nigrescentes gasas que la envolvían, como si conociera de memoria dónde estaban sus vulvas y turgencias en medio de ese laberinto de redes y orificios. 

De pronto decidieron ensayar nuevos juegos y posturas y rodaron retorciéndose entre nalgas y caricias, los dedos hurgando bajo los vellos, las lenguas avezadas en su sitio, los ojos delirando casi a oscuras. Hacía tiempo que no veía así el rostro de Helena, la boca abierta con los labios sugerentes y la mandíbula en un espasmo, transfigurada por el placer. Nuestra intimidad era más bien monótona, burocrática y sin duda a veces frustrante. Allí todo era osadía, evasión y espontaneidad. 

¿Quién era esa persona que de golpe y porrazo se había metido en mi cama y en mi vida? ¿Sería algún vecino o quizá un instructor del famoso gimnasio? A través del espejo creí reconocer sus facciones aniñadas, andróginas, y reparé en que había sido alumno mío el ciclo pasado: Alejandro Parissi, hijo de un fabricante de panetones, expulsado de la universidad por haber sido cateado tres veces en Historia Universal I. ¿Se trataba de un ajuste de cuentas a la italiana o Parissi era el ignorante instrumento de la revancha erótica de Helena? Me sentí ofendido en mi amor propio al ser desplazado por un tipo así, mas comprendí que Parissi era todo lo opuesto a mí con sus torrenciales veintiún años y a la vez todo lo que Helena necesitaba con sus diez años más. 

Al fin y al cabo el chico no tenía la culpa porque a esa edad no se perdona. ¿Yo no había hecho lo mismo con la secretaria de mi viejo y con las lagartonas pijas que se sentaban a ligar con jovencitos en cafeterías de lujo? En aquella época lo veía desde el prisma de una adolescencia incontinente y me importaba un huevo lo que pensara la treintañera de turno. Debían de sentirse solas, desdeñadas e insatisfechas en esa edad en la que siempre estás salida, y hacían bien en adornar la cabeza de sus maridos. Ellas iban a lo suyo y yo iba a lo mío, así como Parissi se esmeraba en prolongar el último orgasmo de Helena hasta el límite de las gunfias. 

Los dos se quedaron laxos y relajados después del clímax, pero las manos sonámbulas seguían buscando las partes blandas, húmedas, acalambradas. Entonces Helena intentó reanimarlo con delicadas felaciones que fueron descendiendo lentamente por las piernas hasta llegar a los pies, donde empezó a rozar sus rígidos pezones sobre esos dedos sensibles que atesoran la energía final. Sacudido por una descarga indescifrable y fulminante, Parissi aferró enhiesto la odalisca cintura que se apretaba contra su cuerpo y ordenó con voz ronca y temblorosa: ‘A Troya, Helena. Ahora vamos a Troya’. 

Recordé cuántas veces intenté penetrar infructuosamente en los insondables dominios traseros de Helena y reprimí un instinto homicida desde el otro lado del espejo. Mi memoria repasó la hambrienta concupiscencia de las mujeres maduras que conocí y cómo me justificaba a mí mismo por hacer lo que hacía con ellas dos veces al mes, tres veces por semana, cuatro veces al día. Por esos años Helena era la típica enamorada adolescente que vivía en las nubes, pero ahora se había convertido en una lagartona, en una Melusina insaciable. Pensé en los niños y en la soledad en que quedarían si la mataba, en la ausencia irreparable de su madre y en las pesadillas que les harían dar gritos destemplados. Así, así como Helena gritaba ahora con la cara congestionada, la sonrisa contenida, el desenfreno en cuatro patas. Me dije entonces que no valía la pena y que ese enervante reflejo me devolvía en realidad mis lascivos quehaceres de otra época, espejismo al mismo tiempo urdido en el deseo imposible de haber sido una vez Parissi y raptado a mi propia Helena, sus níveos brazos, mi Caballo de Troya. 

Bajé las escaleras y volví a dictar mis clases. Nunca me atreví a transgredir mi aburrida rutina para no enfrentarme otra vez al inefable espejo del ropero. Helena seguía siendo hermosa, pero sobre todo buena y diligente: un beso entrañable todas las mañanas, los mismos encuentros fugaces de siempre y hasta un franelazo indiferente de vez en cuando. Con el tiempo olvidé la escena pecaminosa que reverberó en el armario, mas a veces resuena en mis oídos ese ruido tan sórdido que hacen dos cuerpos cuando se aman.

 

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