Two Chronicles
Pedro Lemebel

   
   

ANACONDAS IN THE PARK

Despite the modernistic flash that tears into the intimacy of parks like a halogen informer and converts the chlorophyll of the grass into swells of plush shaved by the municipal blade. Meters and meters of an orderly Forestal Park "how I love you green," simulating a criollo Versailles as a backdrop for democratic leisure. Or as a showcase for the park as Japanese landscape, where the underbrush has been subjected to the bonsai shearing of the military cut. Where video cameras that the mayor dreamed up squeeze dry the saliva of kisses in the prejudiced chemistry of urban control. Surveillance cameras that idealize a beautiful oil-painting park, where blond children's locks rock in the breeze of the swings. Floodlights and lenses camouflaged in the flower of the municipal lapel to control the senile dementia that drools down the seats of the House. Old men with bluish gaze and poodle dogs cut by the same hand that scissors the cypresses.

Even so, with all this apparatus of vigilance, beyond the sunset bronzed by the urban smog. When the shadow falls far from the radius outlined by the streetlamps. Barely touching the damp quilt of the thicket, the tip of a foot comes into view stiffly driving its toenails into the earth. A foot that lost its sneaker in the straddle of hurried sex, in the paranoia of public space. Entwined extremities of arched legs and blotter-paper lips that whisper, "Not so hard, it hurts, slowly, careful someone's coming."

Down the path come couples hand in hand stringing orange blossoms as they walk along the well-lit road of legality. Nuptial prospects who pretend not to see the frottage of snakes coupling in the grass. Who say under their breath, "It was two men, did you see?" And walk on thinking that they'll warn their future manchildren off the parks and off those lone men who walk the night and watch the couples in the bushes. Like that voyeur who was watching them not long before, Watching them make love in the sweetness of the park because they didn't have money for a motel, but it was better than ever in the green outdoors, with that spectator who could not applaud because his hands were otherwise occupied, beating off, full steam ahead, sobbing out an, "Ay, I'm coming, please wait just a minute." Then she said to him, "You know I can't do it if someone's watching." But by that time, "I can't" was a whimper silenced by the heat and "someone's watching" the spice of Egyptian eyes swimming among the leaves. A dizzying abyss that engendered bronze pupils, that pair of eyes that sprouted from her at birth. And when the little bugger turned fifteen, she didn't try to warn him off the parks because she knew that those golden eyes were leaves thirsting for the park. So she stifled the warning. Her "watch out for the parks" would be like a synopsis of green gauze, like a hasty drawing of the curtain of his young foreskin. Like driving him to slip through the pebbles like an asp in heat, pretending not to, lighting a cigarette so that the man following him can ask for a light and ask him what's up. And push him softly into the bushes without waiting for a response. And there, in full dampness, set fire to the curly forest of his pubis, sucking those peppermint balls with his lizard's tongue. Raising that kiss of fire to the pinnacle of his selenite petiole. And as the ribbon of cars and buses slips by on the slope, the boy gives in to the lassitude of his fifteen paper years that sink like boats in the drenched sheet of the lawn. And if the creaking of the branches tips him off that someone is watching, so what. He knows how hard it is to see a porno film in this country; he, too, has watched and learned the technique of parting the branches to join in the incestuous trinity of the parks.

Perhaps watching is being the accomplice in a murder, strangling the victim in the voodoo doll that spills its rattlesnake poison between your fingers. The scene being watched is reflected by the glassy iris in the replica of the glans, like a generous helping for the hunger of the observer. That's why the moisture of the park unites the kid in a perverse anonymity. That's why every night he crosses the canopy of its feathers and doesn't mind coagulating with other men who slither down the paths like lost anacondas, like red- tipped serpents who recognize each other in the urgent semaphore of their rubies.

Workers, clerks, students, or seminarians, they are transformed into ophidians who shed the dry skin of their uniforms to tribalize desire in an opaque rattling event. Something abject in their staring eyes seems to accumulate a Sahara, an Atacama, a saltpetrous salt marsh of dust that hisses in the parched trident of their tongues. A single silvery thread fringes their lips in a seminal drizzle, drool that leads to the central den of the nest garlanded in toilet paper that absorbs the teardrops. Nests for hatching condoms that gather in the meadows, like children wrapped in polyethylene, to ferment in the sun in the saffron fertilizer of the magnolias.

Parks at night blossom in the dew of solitary pearls, in rice rains spilled by circles of handjobs, like an ecology of passion surrounding the couple. Collective masturbations recycle childhood games in desperate maneuvers; the slide, the swing, the rocking chair, the twilight hiding place for brotherhoods of grown men, who bond, rudder erect, in the summation of their cartilage. So, hand to penis, hand to hand and to another's penis, they form a circle that collectivizes the denied gesture in a carousel of handling, in a "tag, you're it" of touching and pulling. A tribal dance in which everyone hitches his wagon to the midnight express, tracking the caterpillar that takes form in penetrating and being penetrated under the blurry foliage of the locust trees. A milky ancestral rite in the round mirrors the full moon, bouncing it off more timid centrifugal voyeurs, who palpitate in the tachycardia of the hand among the weeds. Night on the prowl doing moonlit rounds cut off like a lactic necklace by the police whistle. By the purple flashing of the siren that fragments buttocks and scrota, bloodying the party with its stroboscopic blink. The law drums its lightning blows on hollow backs to the safari rhythm of its powerful phallo-charge. In the thrashing, they try to run but fall to the ground cuffed by their pants, cupping the sexual gladioli still warm and unpetaled by surprise. But the flashlights rummage in the brush and whip the spines camouflaged in the cold velvet of the violets. The little novice trembling under the hydrangea bush pulls up the blue-jean zipper that bites into his pelvis (when he gets home he'll change his briefs). In a desperate flight someone zigzags between the cars on the slope and, pursued by bullets, reaches the bridge. With one suicidal leap, he flies over the railing and falls into the river to be swallowed up by the water. The cadaver appears days later balled up in filth on the shore of the Parque de los Reyes. The picture in the paper makes him look like a snakeskin abandoned among the rocks.

Even so, the parks of Santiago continue to ferment like amusement districts zoned off by the pruning back of citizen desire. The parks are places where it becomes harder and harder to slip in a squeeze in a coupling of subjects subjected to the public eye who seek out the licking of darkness to regenerate human contact.

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STEEL LACE FOR A PENITENTIAL PILLOW

A spiral shiver twists through morality when the topic of rape in men's prisons flashes on the impact of the news. The common cause of rejection completes the golden fecal spectrum of the report. And it is on tape that the act itself is repeated in the filming of the testimony that photocopies the secret. The smutty scene is reconstructed in the close-up of the mouth being interrogated on screen. As if the real penetration never came to an end in its variegated forms of expertise. The untiring search for seminal gems and vestiges through the medical speculum that acts as a legalized penis, opening with the spark of its forensic eye the dilation of the anal grotto of the body lying prone on the stretcher.

It seems as if collective subjectivity has recoiled, as in the Middle Ages, at the profanation of these holy places; the last stronghold of the intestine to safeguard the relics of manhood. A warm cavern that jealously protects the secret of the Templars in the damp felt of its sheath. The phallocratic mystery tattooed on its inverse wall, in a hermetic algebra continually retouched with gold by the backwash of its waste.

Unlike the rape of a woman, which takes place in the porno narrative of the dailies and is allowed to drain away like a natural outlet in the face of Eve's provocation of fragile male erotics. A certain patriarchal fraternity underwrites and promotes these practices, like poses and postcards less discomfiting to the Christian vision than the outrageous offense to the male tabernacle.

This is why defilement in men's prisons seems to be the most traumatic kind, with repercussions that could lead to suicide. But appearances are deceiving, "the boys of old used Vaseline too," and the fathers of the country no longer have any backyard to defend. So they risk it all on games of leisure won and lost, mounting one another, set free by their confinement. On the inside nothing is so terrible; you just clench your teeth, bite down on the lace of the prison sheets, relax your sphincter, and forget ideology. "Take down the barbed wire" and die in the saddle, because the hemorrhage of propaganda stigmatizes those who squeal on their brother's kiss. If Abel had looked the other way, Cain would have been his fag.

This is the law of those who live in the shadows where the sky is parceled out by bars. Shadows plow the soccer field in an eternal zigzag of comings and goings over the same footsteps, over the same hated cement they scrape night after night in a dream of flight. Thousands of eyes clawed by the bars await the buzzer announcing visiting hour. Or, in the worst case, the howl of the siren that startles the breast, the racing, shouting, and stampeding of the enclosure accelerated by an escape. Afterward the roll call and the searches do away with the sugar, the maté, and the snapshots of a woman turned sepia by the sporadic trickle of her visits. A woman swallowed up forever by the fatigue of procedures and files in the tedious archives of the courts. A woman as a Sunday promise, when the retention other image could still be evacuated onto her portrait. Later the shadow other breasts creeping along the wall would be made flesh by the snowy gluteus of the newcomers.

And so, day by day, many men cross the penitential portico that shuts with a creaking of iron behind their backs. Some birdmen, mute with Alcatraz fear, will have to pay for their apprenticeship, crossing a dark alleyway face down and dripping tears of whey into their crotches. Especially those who are brought in for rape; they pay for their crime with the same coin that falls perforated into the broken piggy bank of their own assholes. To the beat of the cueca drummed out on the brass of the cells that masks the shouting from the ears of the gendarmes who say "partying again in gallery four." A simulacrum of a huasa feast, a peasant rodeo of mounting and bucking. A din of push-and-pull, pants split and at half-mast, showing off the open-cut Andean ravine through which pass both cattle rustlers and those who fled at a gallop down the rocky road of freedom.

It might seem as if certain children's games of strength and violence were repeated in these jailhouse bacchanals. As if the bronze horse spread its wings, trapped between the thighs that are pinning it, in order to fly up and break the celibacy of the bars. A Trojan horse to enter, to find a Helen in the labyrinth of its innards and escape far away, investing the walled city of that body that is filling up with fecund pollen with the libertarian overflow of the desire for the outside.

Thus it is, then, that these ejaculative rituals lose their drama in the childhood evocation of hide-and-seek, piggy-in-the-middle, or an in- cold-blood slapping game, where he who resists must prove himself, the wounded intitiate of the gang. The rape of men in prisons would be a card game with a marked card for the novice. A tacit accord of anophagy where he pays the rent the first time around and then gets his with the next one to arrive. A system of carnal excavations that duplicate the network of escape tunnels. As if the technique of drilling were first exercised on the body, then in the up-and-down plowing of the belly of the drains to reach the filthy but free sky of the city. A topology of desperation that drills its libidinal emancipation in the mud. Ready to penetrate the brick with the ramming of passion, scraping, and sanding on the furrows of the back. With nails broken by the flailings of asphyxiation and strangulation caused by the lack of air in the narrowness of the subterranean tube. To gain centimeters on the earth's flesh with blows to the groin, with the pulse of broken spoons, with pelvic thrusts on the bruised tips and heads of worms that soften in the silk of their foreskins the painful vertigo of impalement.

A friendly practice in which the urgencies of the body lead to a brotherhood of miners. Extranational expropriations annexed in the shared hole. As if the thirst for freedom were spread by seminal irrigation in the conduits of the body. A pact of sperm rusted by feces, like the wilting jasmine of a black honeymoon that smudges the barbs of enclosure. Nuptials that turn fatal if they are discovered by the penal eye, whether in the tunnel or in the cell. Both crimes receive their punishment in solitary cells, in years and months added to the sentence, in new escape routes like love letters drawn in the shadows. Other velvet strategies to give the slip to the dog, the reflecting lights, and the guards at the wall. The future projection of an underground as a clandestine marriage. Unions of sex and death not domesticated by the cloister, tearing their way out of the waxy tulles of their confinement.

Translated from the Spanish by Mary Ann Newman