TWIN SISTERS
to Julio Cortazar
Darkness. Georgina:
We lie calmly in this room, thousands of kilometers from
Buenos Aires, we lie withdrawn into our own bodies, we lie next to the
other, adorning each other in touches. We lie the same way, completely the
same: twin sisters. An early childhood memory often passes through my head.
Alexandra and myself standing in front of the mirror, and we are looking
not at doubleness, but at quarterness, numberless combinations of
reflection: I melt into the Alexandra next to me, I melt into the Alexandra
in the mirror, I melt into my own reflection in the mirror. Looking at her
face on the smooth surface, then for the first time (and we weren’t older
than five) I felt the need for complete closeness to her. (Or was it maybe
a need for complete closeness to myself?)
Our mother would leave us to bathe in the tin basin, and I
called her every Sunday morning to come as fast as possible so that my
fingers could slide along her skin and hers along mine.
At night, in the dark room--where the snoring of our
grandmother, the occasional farts of our stepfather, and the mumbled
prayers of our mother mixed up in her dreams--my lips searched for her
lips, her fingers groped between my legs, searching for the pulse that
throbbed like my heart under her touch.
We lie restless in this room, thousand of kilometers from
Buenos Aires, while her tongue, like the hands of a clock, encircles my
right nipple, we lie carrying in ourselves the memories of the darkness of
the room thousands of kilometers away, while the tongue of my sister goes
lower and lower, the darkness of the night in which we saw our mother’s
death, the tongue of my sister touches my belly button, licks it, while we
feel the weight of the memory of the night when our stepfather tied us to
our beds and for the first and last time showed us what the male body can
do with a female, he showed us just several paces from our mother’s dead
body, he hit my sister, and I felt the pain of the blows, he raped her, and
I lost my virginity together with her, and the darkness of that room and
everything that happened that night returns to me while my sister’s tongue
goes down on me, licks my clitoris, and I touch her hair and keep quiet, if
you can call sweet moaning quiet.
Water. Alexandra:
These shores are not La Plata, nor is the Seine the
Atlantic Ocean, but it is still water. It can grab and take away, and I
know it, I know it as I approach the Seine in a flash now, while I fall
from the Neife Bridge. There is no other way out but this hushed departure,
there is no other way out of the tunnel we entered when we left Buenos
Aires five years ago, running from ourselves, from our past, from our
unwanted future, from the crowds in the streets that yelled the name of
Juan Peron, from the fear of what the regime of Juan Peron could do to us
if they discovered our love. This too is an escape, an escape that will be
successful, unlike the pervious one, for in running away from Buenos Aires
we took our past with us, and émigré reality pressed upon us here (Paris is
not the city of lights). Now I’m just a foot away from the water of the
Seine, and I see my face in the Seine, and I don’t feel that this is the
reflection of my face, but I see Georgina’s face, and I plunge into the
water, into that face, into Georgina, I fall into her and into myself and
into the water at the same time, I sink into the water and into death this
cold morning of nineteen fifty-three, I sink after leaving on the very
surface of the water everything I have carried in myself for the last
fourteen years.
Bridge. Georgina:
It is spring, the twenty-second spring after her death. I
walk on the Neife Bridge, I walk with the cancer that I carry in my right
breast, the nipple of which Alexandra nibbled before she left forever, I
walk expecting to encounter death, for the doctor was direct: "You have
just a few more days to live." He told me last Friday. I walk on the bridge
alone, I look at the water running under me, under the bridge, I look at
the different, and still the same, water into which she jumped without
telling me she would do it. I try to see her face in the water, and all I
can see is a feeling that envelops me all the time, circles around me, and
I feel as if the feeling falls into the water, it falls into the Seine, I
see how the feeling that pierced me to the very marrow of my bones every
time I thought of the ultimate entanglement of destinies that builds
constellations in the Earth, constellations that can be seen only from a
star, sinks.
