Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing

I Leave Tomorrow, I Come Back Yesterday

165 I Leave Tomorrow, I Come Back Yesterday   A gente preenchia. Menos eu; isto é-eu resguardava meu talvez João Guimãraes Rosa Grande Sertão: Veredas If you come from Uptown by streetcar you get off at the last stop, just at Canal Street, near where people who have taken a bus named Desire transfer and go on to Cemeteries or Elysian Fields. But stay alert, because this area is full of scoundrels and souvenir shops, and you can easily get lost. Better if you go directly to the other end of the French Quarter by Bourbon Street or Decatur, although I recommend Royal to you, the street with the galleries, cute apartments, and old neglected houses where the vampire tours stop. You’ll pass right by where William Faulkner lived, and where surely you’ll bump into some guy resting carelessly on a corner, posing as a leisurely artist. He will seek you out with his eyes, although he doesn’t know you, with the hopes that this 166 first contact defines and clarifies, and that you enter easily into a conversation , as if you had been separated only a short time in all your life. He attracts you to his corner with a look that portrays the reflection of all of the water in the world. Despite the fact that at this hour it’s impossible to see from a distance the color of eyes, you respond to his command, you try to guess the origin of this vibration that gives you goose bumps until you find its owner leaning on the railing of the cathedral’s garden, where a marble Jesus opens his arms to receive everyone, although no one has access to him or to the delicacies of the garden. There’s something fragile and false about the young man that doesn’t come from his feet, just protected by sandals, or from his extremely white, Indian linen suit embroidered with little red figures, or from his ringlets of carefully disheveled hair. You think of him as an apparition, an ethereal danger that speaks almost in whispers. For you, he will breathe fire, he’ll sing his original works, he’ll dance with silk veils, he’ll try to read your hand to discover that he’s in your future, naked with you on a hard old bed of a shotgun house located just a few streets from where your palm began to tremble at the possibility of enjoying the next hours, until the sun returns, rising over the Mississippi, and you both gather your clothes and part in opposite directions. He caresses your life line, inventing hard times that you have survived thanks to your courage and persistence. He predicts travels for you but not riches. Softly he affirms that your rational side is very strong, so much so that it blocks your love line, and makes you doubt and suffer like all those who fear giving themselves over to this simple act of exploring the skin’s secrets to the limit. However, like so many other nights, you close your hand to novel experiences, to the vertigo of uncertainty. You keep your fist clenched, deforming your luck lines. You try to leave the young man without noticing that his hand has followed the movement of yours, trying to envelop it, to create a knot of fingers that moves closer to his lips for him to kiss. You avoid looking him in the eye so as not to be swept away by that torrent that interrogates and disarms you. You prefer to see the confusion of fingers that you can’t undo, because each attempt to separate them rouses a new caress, a fresh thread among your desperate life line and that of the young man. But at some point you jump, say something like “I can’t do this,” and you leave the young man, who takes a couple steps toward you, stops, and shouts to you not to forget that corner where he always feigns to pose carelessly, although really he dedicates himself to waiting to be consumed by the chance imprint on the skin of those unknown.   167 You walk very quickly, dazed, mingling with the people. You hear when someone says to you, “Hey, mista, listen!” You turn in case the young man has followed you, but it’s a very dark black man...