250
PARTISAN REVIEW
familiar . She yearns for this. She whimpers with her love for this, cries
with hope for its erotic end.
But he turns from her. He leaves .
Jenny pretends sleep. She plays that she is sleeping. She is fas–
cinated with her sleep where everything takes place as though it were
not so. Nothing is concealed . On stationery from the
Hotel Principal
there is written:
Nobody to blame . Call 228
She sits at a small desk, drinking beer and reading. She is read–
ing about the Aztecs. She notes the goddess, TLAZOLTEOTI, the
goddess of filth and fecundity, of human moods, sexual love, and
confession . Jenny sits very straight in the chair. Her neck is long, full,
graceful. But she feels out of breath. The high, clear air here makes
her pant . The man pants too while he climbs the steep, stone steps of
the town. He smokes too much . At night, when they return from
drinking, he coughs flecks of blood onto the bathroom mirror. The
blood is on the tiles, in the basin. Jenny closes her own mouth tightly
as she hears him gag. Breath is outside her, expelled, not doing her
any good . She stands beside the man as he coughs. There is not much
blood, but it seems to be everywhere, late at night, after they have
been drinking, everywhere except on the man's clothes. He is impec–
cable about his clothes. He always wears a grey lightweight suit and a
white shirt . He has two suits and they are both grey , and he has
several shirts and they are all white. He is always the same. Even in his
nakedness, his force, he is smooth, furled, closed. He is simple to her.
There is no other way offered. He offers her the death of his sterility.
His sexuality is the source of life, and his curse is death. He offers her
nothing except his dying.
She wets her hands and wipes off the mirror. He doesn ' t
mention the blood . When he kisses her, his tongue in her mouth
tastes only of whiskey . She cannot imagine him dead really. She is
just a child embracing the crisis of a woman . The death she sees is that
of herself in his emptiness. And he fills her with it. He floods her with
emptiness . She grasps his thick, longish hair . She feels as if she is
floating through his hair, falling miraculously away from danger into
death . Safe at last.
