December 10, 2024
Magali Lara at Walden Gallery, Zona Maco
These are things I only tell myself
Yes, these are things that I only tell myself.
How, for instance, when we first met to see whether you’d take me as a patient and I you as my therapist, I liked your resonant laughter from the outset, your frankness attracted me. How, afterward, I noticed your apricot-peel skin, your sturdy hands with gnawed, red fingernails, your brown hair that doesn’t know how to keep still.
Our communication surged instantly. I opened windows before you. Too much life slowly defoliates me, I confessed. From my innermost drawers, I pulled out my acute inability to deal with the firebreathers on street corners, my prolonged sorrow over everyday violence, my chronic helplessness because the world isn’t as I’d have wished it to be. Right, of course I’m a narcissist, I admitted. That was my first discovery.
We often went past fifty minutes, sacrosanct in other offices. Knowing I was a lesbian surprised you, above all because it wasn’t the reason behind my therapy visits. It was a revelation to you, to confirm that I was so comfortable being a woman capable of loving other women. Soon after, my nettled feminism raised its head. We argued, I lent you books, saved newspaper clippings for you. What about our unpaid labor, what if our bodies do belong to us, what if the personal is political, what if we’re sexual beings? In all, the ground beneath you started to shift, as you’ve iterated numerous times. I joked: “Seems to me that the one who should be paying here is you.”
Fresh out of the provinces, you uncovered the cruelty of big cities. Someone pinched you from behind at work. No one came to your defense. “It’s a conspiracy of silences,” you murmured sadly one Monday as you walked me to the door.
You almost never talked about your personal life. You only mentioned little details, snickering in amusement at my curiosity to know more about you. Accustomed, despite your bravado, to losing in love, you began to understand that you too could be the winner. Being a woman took on new meaning. Without knowing it, you recovered lost self-worth. You broke off your affair with that married man who treated you so terribly, who hid you from the world like a filthy secret. “And there you were, I swear, it was like I was listening to your discourse on dignity,” you told me.
On many afternoons I had the distinct sense that we both were growing, both resplendent, each with our own process. Thanks to you I learned the secret to keeping guilt from manipulating the threads of my existence. My fingers bled and I cut my legs until I managed to escape the snare of judeochristian benevolence. You led me through my inner labyrinths, until I came face to face with my right to say no.
*
After seven months of seeing each other once a week, I learned from you that we lesbians hadn’t made up any part of your past, that it’d been just a year since you’d integrated us into your present, first, by way of an introductory psychology course you gave at university; later, in therapy with several of us. “You’re not womanizers, or perverts, as I’d been told.” You laughed while you said it.
Regardless, I sensed your fear of possible physical contact with me. Hellos and goodbyes were said with several feet of distance between the two of us. I examined you. Soon, I knew that it wasn’t a fear of me but of yourself. Something you’d begun to feel but didn’t want to. “This deal with lesbians has served to prove that I’m absolutely hetero. I really do love men!” you repeated almost obsessively, even when the remark wasn’t relevant sometimes.
I smiled inwardly while on the outside, very seriously, I agreed.
One morning we accidentally bumped into one another in Coyoacán and sat to drink a cappuccino. It was the first time you talked about yourself. Amid the steam rising from the mug your girl-self appeared: sad girl, lonely girl, girl with a dead mother, a stepmother, a wimp for a father. You retched your history, rabid, with flaming cheeks and flailing hands. I tucked away every one of your sentences. I took possession of your past. I felt the urge to squeeze your shoulder, take your hand, plant a kiss on the young girl who was narrating the long story of her short life. But I didn’t do a thing, I remained immobile in my seat.
You went on about your divorce. Your five years of matrimony. Your daughter. Your solitude. You grew old, within seconds, in front of me. Suddenly you fell silent, pinned your gaze on the sugar bowl and began to anxiously play with your spoon, still humid from the milk foam.
That day, I remember, you hugged me as we parted, kissed my face without realizing it. Then you hurriedly got inside your car and lost yourself on Francisco Sosa Street. I was left staked in the middle of the road.
*
Walls between us collapsed, trust swaddling us. In the winter, the sky darkened earlier. Your office was a secluded harbor, a propitious stretch of land where we chatted, lulled by our own voices, until you’d notice it and run to turn on the light. If it rained, the sound of raindrops on the ceiling reverberated our words, filling the silences that lingered for seconds. I began to look forward to our Monday session as I would Sunday mass when I was a little girl, convinced that Baby Jesus would appear in the sacramental wafer at the eucharist.
I had to confess to myself: I’d fallen in love with my own psychotherapist. I was a sinner. I’d bitten into the apple one Monday, unaware. The only thing left for me was to revel in my sin.
There were afternoons when, in the middle of a session, we’d hold each other’s gaze for a few seconds, and I’d feel what you felt because your eyes would light up or a smile would overtake you, or simply because you were blushing. On those afternoons my imagination would run wild. I’d relive the moment in my head like someone who’s left a turntable on automatic mode to listen to the same song for hours. In my car, with the radio on XEB and love songs in the background, I’d imagine us very close, without touching, basking in the appeal of our flesh. You, slowly drawing near, with eyes closed and lips parted, resolute, toward my mouth that waited for you like Sleeping Beauty for her Prince. At night, in bed, I dared to take it further. There and then we danced barefoot across a floor of cool mosaic, we strolled hand in hand through a park cut off from traffic, or we talked until sunrise, always to wind up naked, loving each other without clocks or taboos.
At our following session, I’d worry you’d notice something and so I’d try to act as though nothing happened, as though I hadn’t imagined your breasts in my mouth and your sex between my fingers, as though we’d never said to each other all those things we said in my zany dreams.
But no, you never noticed a thing, or at least you never said you did. And today you discharged me. We had our last session. We’ll stop seeing each other every Monday. Your ritual opening of the door for me at the start and end is over. The glances, the words, my fantasy. And believe it or not, I thought about telling you, but I decided it’s best not to, that these are things I only tell myself.
Rosamaría Roffiel (b. 1945, Veracruz) is a Mexican writer, poet, and journalist. She is the author of seven books, including the story collection El para siempre dura una noche (1999) and the poetry collection Corramos libres ahora (1986). Her novel, Amora (1989), is considered Mexico’s first lesbian-feminist novel and garnered a cultlike following upon publication. In 2019, Rosamaría was invited to present her work at Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts, where she was honored as a “Protagonist of Mexican Literature.” She serves on the editorial board of LeSVOZ, a lesbian-feminist press established in 1994.
Tricia Viveros translates from Spanish and Portuguese. Her work has appeared in Asymptote and the Yale Journal of Literary Translation.