Freeman's: Love - John Freeman Freeman's

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don’t hate it,’ I backtracked to soften the blow. ‘I don’t understand it, I don’t like it.’ ‘I’m going to explain it to you,’ he said, and I replied no, no need, I’m leaving in a week, and he sighed and his enormous, thin hand took mine and rested it on his skinny chest, and he let me look at him. I’ll never have another man like that, his weak, moribund youth, a puppy who cannot live and doesn’t want to, but who ran away from the mother who should have eaten him and is now a walking suicide, a master in phantasmagoria. ‘I know it’s not healthy,’ he told me one night, after taking a pull of wine straight from the bottle, ‘but if you stay maybe I’ll feel like living.’ That’s how he talked: no shame, no fear, in the intimacy of the toxic night. I never mocked his intensity. I wasn’t cynical yet. I’m no longer fascinated by being near someone who wants to die; I want to be old, I’m no longer attracted to those fierce invalids, I imagine I’m domesticated, I don’t think the best thing is a good drunken sleep on the sand.

      Maybe he changed. Or maybe he’s dead, just as he wanted. I was never naked with anyone so beautiful: his sunken belly, protruding hip bones, his back without a single freckle, smooth and soft like a newborn’s, his eyes that shone in the dark, his delicious neck with its little rings of dirt.

      I forgot to mention how I met him. It was in Norman #1’s apartment. There was an impromptu party because we had music and alcohol. Guillaume kissed me after I asked him to pass the whiskey. We started a conversation that lasted seven days. At that party he danced naked at the request of a gay neighbor who crowned him the most beautiful man in the city. Then he put on his pants and led me to a corner and pressed me against the wall, I pulled up my skirt, opened my legs, and we had sex right there, in front of everyone. I don’t know if anyone noticed, they were all shouting and I think they were dancing flamenco. I felt tender and sad when, before penetrating me, he wet his fingers with saliva and asked me to help with the condom—best sex practices in the years of plague—and I saw the needle tracks on his arm when he brushed the blond hair from his mouth to kiss me, and we appraised with clear heads the extent of my innocence.

      —Mariana Enriquez

      Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

      Ididn’t know the old woman’s name. I hadn’t asked her. We’d only spoken once during the two years I lived in Shanghai. I passed by her every morning—she’d be seated on a chair outside her shop, and I’d be racing to catch the subway. Her shop didn’t have a name, only a sign that said: “Beijing Style Cotton Shoes for Sale,” which reminded me of home. The space was no larger than a bed, and inside was so crammed with shoes and boxes that customers had to stand on the street and point to the ones they wanted to try on, whereupon the old woman would take a long bamboo hook and retrieve them. Apart from attending to the occasional customer, she was always sewing layers of cloth together to make soles. When she sat, her back arched like an old flower.

      The one time I spoke to her, or to put it more accurately, she spoke to me, I was drunkenly stumbling home in the middle of a summer night. I turned the corner onto my street, and there was her shop glowing with fluorescent light. She was perched in front, knees squeezed together, clutching a pair of black shoes. Her left shoulder was lower than her right, like a jacket that had been hung up clumsily.

      “Girl,” she called to me, “can you help me up?”

      I still remember her voice. It was like my grandma’s: flat and unbreakable. It seemed to me that those from their generation often sounded like that. If the war lived in anything now, I thought, it was in their voices. She spoke with a Beijing accent, much thicker than mine. Years in the south hadn’t weakened it one bit.

      I steadied myself first before walking over. Then I bent down and pulled her up from under the arm while she pushed with her legs. Both our bodies were damp with sweat, and she was heavier than I had imagined. Perhaps it was the way she forced her entire weight on me, as though she was trying to say, Look, I’m more than just skin and bones.

      “It’s my legs,” she explained. “The weather’s been too humid.”

      She dusted off her linen pants.

      “I have a granddaughter about the same age as you,” she said. “She’s working in Singapore.”

      I told her I’d never been.

      “My son’s family immigrated there when my granddaughter was in high school,” she said as she began organizing the shoeboxes.

      “They didn’t take you?”

      “I’m not going anywhere.” Those words came out of her mouth so swiftly that it seemed like she had said them countless times before. I imagined it was what she had told her son, when he asked her to leave this place with them.

      She checked each box and carefully made sure the sizes were in order. The skin on her hands was warped like water-soaked paper left to dry. I set my purse down on the ground to help her.

      “Do they visit you often?” I asked.

      Without answering, she clasped the black shoes under her armpit and reached for the light switch. Then, she pointed to a white brick building down the street.

      “That’s my home. On the fourth floor,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

      We closed her shop together that night. She directed me as I arranged the shoes, adjusted the price tags, and finally, once she let out a pleased sigh, I pulled down the door. After she locked it, she straightened her back as much as she could.

      “Closed for the night. Not a single customer since five,” she said. “Looks like I really need to stay here to take care of this big business of mine!”

      She let loose a bright, playful laugh, which had the purity of a church bell. She had a wide mouth and her smile made her look like a bullfrog. Briefly, it seemed as though she had become a child, waiting to be guided home. She picked up her folded chair and handed me the shoes.

      “Here, these should fit you,” she said, looking at my feet. “They’re very comfortable.”

      I thanked her, and then she waved at me and walked down the street to her building. As she moved away from the streetlight, she was old again, the shape of her body like a passing cloud in the night.

      Weeks later, when the leaves had just started turning golden, she disappeared. Just like that. One morning she was there, the next she was gone. After our brief encounter, we didn’t talk again, apart from the occasional greeting. I never found out what happened to her. A few times, I heard neighbors speculating, but to most, her departure seemed as natural as the changing seasons. I went on with my days without much thought until the evening two men came and removed the sign at her shop. They didn’t take long—perhaps five minutes—and they were adept at their work, not showing any hesitation as they knocked down the sign with a hammer. I waited around that place for a while, the shop that was no longer a shop.

      I’m not going anywhere. I thought about how resolute those words sounded when she spoke them.

      Looking over at the white brick building, I found the fourth floor. Only some of the windows were lit.

      —An Yu

      The hooks in the nexus of my solar plexus rhyme with what remains when I remove them. All my loved ones who love me wrong float like comic ghost tails in my periphery. I don’t look like them, and don’t look at them directly like I don’t look at the sun but see its loose rays. I love my loved ones wrong too. Then like comic genie third wishes I wish for more wishes and for more of everything and am never fed. Hunger is not the word I would use for what I am, though I eat to it. The bridge over which we span is not as connective as we believe it to be. It is so wide as to not be a bridge at all. The expanse does not connect but makes vague our relation. There can be no water under a bridge that is not a bridge,

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