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Like a desert, a woman departed this afternoon from the jungle, a jungle that drowned each
afternoon as the wind set over the sand, a jungle forever sunken in time; a jungle, a woman,
guarded in the depths of a blind old woman’s memory. A blind old woman who sees the world
with her hands, moving them like radars, and who now lives with her visions in an asylum,
telling tales of insects and panthers, and of doors that give birth like flowers.
The jungle passed every afternoon for a year spreading lichens coined into shape by water.
She dampened the dry mud never once stopping to breathe the fertile morning breezes. She
brought with her the torments of dreams, the terror of green flies, and the black murmur of the
plague. Fevers celebrated in twisting bodies throughout that year. They came dressed in colorful
garments, playing loud musical instruments, accompanied by an entourage of ghosts.
The woman went from door to door mincing fear into delirious visions. She came, the jungle,
plowing roofs, scratching walls, her nails filled with salt. Every house, every creature in the red
town had succumbed to her lethal embrace; everything buried, perforated, gutted, buckled by
swirls of ivies, snakes and worms—fruit trees on fire, flickering. The woman, house by house,
lighted the hearths of desire, and brought the memory of fateful images: this event had been
prophesized centuries ago by a foreign clairvoyant as he walked along the narrow main street.
His head moving rapidly, steadily, unabated, like windshield wipers, he had said, “A woman, like
a jungle, shall set these trees ablaze. And this place be no more.”
By New Year’s eve, the jungle had finally reached the last house, a humble dwelling with a
single door and a single window, but with neither door nor window, just two squared holes
through which rays of sunlight traveled in unexpected angles, a ghostly light filled with smoke—
the poorest house in the red town, the town’s idiot’s house. Both holes, however, are framed
with wood, in a mute testimony as to the former presence of a window and door in each. There
is a sill under the window and two hinges hanging on the left doorjamb, the third hinge is
missing (the one that should be in the middle) and so are one screw on each of the remaining
hinges, one on the top screw hole of the top hinge and one on the bottom screw hole of the
bottom hinge: each hinge has three screw holes.
The jungle arrived in the house that morning, that day, the last of that year, dressed in black,
to attend the delivery of twins conceived in the brush by the town’s idiot. She was wearing a six-
legged dress and alabaster face, glowing—hot coals and crimson smeared on her teeth. She
came early, at first light, sporting tiger-stripes on her womb and a sticky queue wrapped in
frayed tulle.
The town’s idiot’s house crumbled, rapidly disappearing through the cracks on its walls. But
as one room vanished, another grew anew in its place. The house had become a living thing that
regenerated itself in measure equal to its destruction. When the jungle arrived in the house, a year
after that afternoon in which as a woman she had arrived in the red town, a giant ball of green
smoke came flying out the door, reeking of medicinal herbs. On the stove there had been a large
pot boiling over, the lid clattering under the pressure of green steam: a stinky mixture of
eucalyptus, rosemary and chamomile. Once the green smoke cleared behind the eyes of the
jungle, she entered the house. The back wall began to move forward, pushing the idiot in labor
toward the doorway; her legs wide open forming a V. However, the doorjambs wouldn’t give
way, and the idiot’s knees stayed apart, each on each side of the doorway, her vagina
comfortable at its center, and her back resting on the back wall which was now moving
upward, slowly and patiently, under the thrust of an uprooted mango tree. The jungle, six-legged
midwife, withdrew to the front porch, climbed to the top of the awning directly above the door,
and dropped pulling a silver thread; without ever losing sight of the idiot’s distended genitalia.
A head sprouted out the door, seeking lost his mother’s screams. The spider (six-legged
midwife) listened to the cries of the newborn, his head emerging like the skin of a bee from the
calyx of a flower. The doorway grew wider as the cracks on the walls swallowed the last
remains of the former house. It stretched toward the sides as the roof sank in. Immediately after
the second head in bee skin came out of the great flower between her legs, the house collapsed
and buried the idiot. The flower expelled her bees. Both of which, flying from cornice to cornice
toward the spider’s cadaverous crimson, and tricked by the mirror of her eyes, couldn’t help
sticking to her obscure, yet invisible, mantle. Drawing arabesques, the spider sculpted oriental
figures and designed the most complicated forms with perfect and tense lines, and forever
curtained from sight the newly born twins. She ate with feline mouth and hyena foot her own
eggs (holographic stones tattooed with the barbaric signs of the earth) filled with the sweet
children of the flower.
The jungle continued her way, feeding from her own vice, dwelling in creeks, in houses, in
carrion.
The woman grew gyrating underground, weaving the hopes of molecules with the yarn of her
liquids, netting fishes at the base of headstones in an ancient maritime cemetery now under the
sea.
The jungle’s body bares itself nude as it advances. There is naïve happiness in her face.
The woman’s body undresses itself, leaving its stockings in the demolished houses left
behind, growing its hair in the shade of leaves and flowers, roasting its skin with the sound of
coffee beans rattled by the wind.
This afternoon the town is green: a jungle lives in the houses without roofs, or walls, or
doors, or windows. Time has stopped, imprisoned between ivy and cobweb, between the scent
of whores and the macaw’s gullet. The red town has ceased to be.
But in the wake of the jungle’s violence new marvels have arisen: fabulous columns of
eroding lunar rock; impeccable mosaics crafted with feathers on bone-white cupolas; and vases
painted with lightning and thunder, spun in the rain, around flying precious stones, spherical.
The woman, careless jungle, dances barefoot, lending her chaotic harmony to the totality of the
forest; burying hallways and groomed gardens; growing branches and roots and animal tongues,
animal tongues polishing marbles—all repeating the colorless, soundless movement of her feet.
The jungle danced until she covered it all. The woman danced until she vanished in the jungle,
sheltered by dreams of planets and imaginary beings.
Her black back shone under the morning sun like a puddle of motor oil under a sky at noon.
She stood up sinking her claws in the grass, in the sweaty breast of the earth. Her yellow eyes
struggled with the objects disfigured by sleep; their lights outlined the liquid, misty silhouettes.
She walked, bouncing lightly, her perfumes appeasing the vegetal horizon with the dark hope of
her hungry fangs. She estimated the weight of the vultures by feeling the freshness of their
unsteady shadows on her back and the smell from their coward feet, without once looking up at
their beaks defeated by the rust of carcasses. The panther had her eyes fixed like gems on the
imaginary horizon straight ahead, on the green line filled with the screech of monkeys and the
shrieks of magpies, repeating in an echo of millions. She carried her body with the elegance of
the sea when in waves it greets the sand, with the infallible sensuality of a breeze that surprises
us in bed; safe under the aroma of her skin, confident in both her cunning and the strength of
her diamantine teeth. Suddenly, she climbed on a tree with the stealth of a serpent. And leaping
straightway from tree to tree with simian agility, she closed in on her prey. Observant. From
above, her target seemed rather small: a sort of antelope or deer. Judging by its incipient antlers,
it could be said that it was young. A brown animal, dirt brown, and from the panther’s position
undistinguishable from the soil on which it stood. The predator slid silently downward, her eyes
on her prey, getting closer, her body tightly enveloping the trunk of the tree—a stingray
groveling on the seafloor. She was now at a striking distance, close enough to smell the
nervous hide of her meal. It was definitively a deer, a very young, light-brown, white-bellied
deer. Unaware, it stood, motionless, head bowed, ruminating: alert but off guard. And then, as
suddenly as she had climbed the first tree, it happened! The panther jumped, as if propelled by
pain, shoving her body forward with her hind legs. Her claws whistled in the air. Her back
bristled. A deafening roar followed, spooking a myriad of birds of all colors, a myriad of colors,
away from the trees, into the forest. And the deer fell, dazed, knocked over, in pain. Everything
happened so fast, so cleanly! A flawless attack, faster than the eye: precise and fluent like a
habit—a pumping heart. Together both animals rolled on the grass, mired in a mixture of shit
and urine, howl and roar; each creature feeling the deadly embrace, salt in open flesh, the slow
heat of dripping blood…and every bite. The panther, her sharp and sanguinary claws ready to
tear the skin, and her rival, presented their bleeding bodies, defiantly. Thrusting forward, the
panther lifted her left paw and tracing a semicircular motion let the whole weight of her body fall
with it in one vertiginous stroke, too fast for the already-tired victim to dodge. The unerring,
heavy, keen paw landed on the head of its prey, severing half its nose. The animal howled in
pain, springing to its hind legs. It was too late! The panther, in a motion not entirely
disconnected from the lethal blow to the head (only a millisecond passed between the two),
jumped as the deer (twice its height on only two legs) reacted to the taste of its own blood, and
grabbed it by the throat, her jaws opened their widest, gripping tight on the muscles of the
animal. The deer came down with a shrill, urinating and defecating. The panther’s every teeth
were inside the deer’s flesh as she lay under it, belly up, turning her head violently from left to
right, blood sprinkling right to left, both animals jerking their heads, pulling away. The prey’s
legs were now shaking uncontrollably, the knees bending forward. The panther seized the
opportunity, and sunk her teeth deeper into the throat of the animal, and twisted her body,
pulling all of her weight behind her, on a sideways motion, from left to right, without letting go
with the deer’s throat. Thus she brought it to the ground, on its side, coiling under her. She now
stood atop, on all fours. The deer lay under its attacker with a broken neck, belly up; its dead
eyes fixed in terror on its own throat dangling from the panther’s mouth.
The panther stepped aside, in a perpendicular position with respect of the body of the deer,
her head directly above the stomach, and ripped the whiter, softer fur of the belly with her
claws, sticking her whole head through the fresh gash from which the intestines were beginning
to spill out. She devoured her victim after anointing the incisions made by her teeth with the
perfumes of her tongue. She tore away the flesh after licking the bristled hairs to a silky fur. The
panther, the jungle’s scream, the scent of woman, abandoned her hunt satiated by the sweet
waters from its mouth, the nacreous liqueurs from its eyes, the bronzy sweat from its axillae,
and the warm honey from its entrails. The panther abandoned the deer’s body after robbing it of
its smells. She left the body under the shadows of the vultures, inviting them to feast on its
waste, on the grim sight of its rigor mortis.
All through the night the jungle mimed herself in the water mirrors. All through the night the
jungle copied herself in the eyes of cats. All through that night the jungle sprawled on the
hypnotized skins like moonlight. All through that night the jungle stretched in infernal mimicry on
the glossy tongues of iguanas, chameleons, and frogs. That night, the jungle was a kaleidoscope.
That jungle, the night was a kaleidoscope.
A typhoon of climbing plants placed a shade upon the woman as she walked into the night.
So dark was this night that her solar orbits would outline the awns of tiger-striped leaves making
them appear as enormous insects copulating with wild beasts, or as the lidless eyes of owls
pecking on the bleeding noses of big cats feeding on the visceral mass of their preys, simulating
monstrous hybrids pierced by the light of two candles and their tremor; bodies from fantastic
beings palpitating in the wind, shaken by two yellow lamps. The secret hurricane of ivy spun in
silence, from ear to ear, around another house in a loving, tender embrace: unhurriedly; making
the whole jungle rotate, forcing the black brush to serve as veil for its maneuvers. Soon the
house was totally covered, without a breath, drowning the screams of three children and their
mother. The windows didn’t oppose the furious penetration by the titanic and inopportune lover.
The house convulsed. The woman, her eyes laid on the perfect ritual of a passion without laws
between her hair and the mud, felt the beat of her own skin, the buzz in her ears, and the purl in
her bones, as if a child had turned inside her body the pots and pans from an ancient kitchen:
maniacally crashing pots against plates and wooden spoons against immense cauldrons. The
house went up in flames, in a fire started by the woman’s hairs that now burned like torches on
the roof. It twisted foundations and melted tiles. Each hair wriggled freely, undulating like a
snake, becoming snake—crawling sunburst. The woman locked her legs around the trunk of a
tree as every one of her hairs, transformed into snake, pulled her toward the house. The tree,
tightly squeezed, expelled volcanic gas, a fiery vapor, and boiling lava over the woman’s striped
legs—the tiger and the jungle. The tree of molten wax halted its flight landing a million lights in
every pore of her skin. She sought with her disfigured mouth the path her hair had taken, the
lustful bodies of the ophidians, and swallowed them mercilessly, inventing and reinventing
beings in a protean orgy of forms. Each snake tortured muscles and bones inside her body. Each
snake sunk its ivory and stone in each her veins, drawing blood, making it gush upward, toward
the sky, toward the tree, thick like hot wax, growing louder in contact with the earth—humus,
sap, and sperm. Every snake advanced to its death by way of the woman’s bones, fracturing
them, breaking and shredding the iridescent light of her eyes with the foul gases in their breath.
The woman’s tail swung violently, tracing the death of half the house. Medusa’s head,
without serpents, joined the tail guided by the amorous titillation of insects sacrificed so that
infinite repetition may persist. She had become a snake. A boa. Pressed by hunger, she pierced
her tail with her teeth and forced her body into her mouth with the same vigor a stomach vomits
poisoned food, thus erasing the perfect form of the house, the sturdiness of its walls, the hole of
its windows. The woman swallowed herself until her head rolled on the ground like a giant
cantaloupe, an onion contemplating the night, a starry onion glowing in the mud. The constrictor
ate herself until only a dirty onion remained.
The woman is indeed a jungle. Like a jungle, she stretches her tongue out to capture unaware
bugs. She tramples everything on her way with her persistent and unstoppable image,
summoning the totality of amatory rituals among the living. She is both fire and fuel.
Sometimes jungles quiver like this woman, of pleasure under the rain, of fear before the
flames. And sometimes women are the water that runs between the rocks, the water drunk by
the earth.
The woman went in another house. A man stared at her while plucking a chicken. A child
spun around her like a top. A dog barked at her without moving. A blind old woman saw her
with her hands. And a donkey kicked on the back wall, outside—all at once. The onion peeled
off slowly, toward its center. It tangled in the hands of the blind old woman, creating shadows
that followed each other.
The man, fat, short and myopic, let the raw chicken’s cold skin fall from his hands onto the
feathers littering the floor without taking his eyes off the newcomer. The dead animal lay, its
wings spread, between the man’s slightly parted legs, right above his knees, belly up, its head
dangling, inert and twisted, almost touching the floor. The fat man was wearing a poorly sewn
bright-blue canvas suit frayed on the elbows, and had feathers stuck on his hair and on the
eyeglasses stuck on his forehead. The eyeglasses had a vampish mixture of sweat and dry
chicken blood on them. The fat man looked like a failed cabaret dancer who had become a cook
fifty years earlier and whose dress had lost among the pumpkins and the mud the spangles that
had given her in that town the reputation of a whore. The fat man smacked the top out of his
orbit with a cuff and continued to stare at the woman—who perhaps brought him memories of
his past as a dancer, or as a whore—but this time in a way wholly different than he had done
when she first entered the house; he was staring at her in the same way that he had stared at the
now naked and bloody chicken minutes before he wrung its neck, when it was still running
about pecking the earth. He ordered with the index finger the child to bring a chair (meanwhile
the blind old woman observed with her hands moving like radars) and with another finger
pointed toward the woman signaling the place for the chair. The jungle, the woman, stopped,
tired of giving body to the impossible. She bridled her hubris and spread a soft and moist moss
on the floor. Then she closed her heart, her legs, her yellow eyes, and sat down. The fat man
thought about her with the ideas of a rooster at daybreak—and again the donkey kicked on the
wall.
The afternoon fell liquid over the roofs. The jungle wetted her lips in every throbbing flower.
Orchids cheated insects. And the murmur of the river let the butterflies’ reminiscences flow,
butterflies that without reason hovered over a little girl’s innocence. The afternoon fell in chunks
and in chunks cut the objects, duplicating them. One thousand blue fat men entered and exited
through one thousand doors followed by one thousand failed cabaret dancers followed in turn by
one thousand whores excited by gossips—and all with the diabolical speed with which a cloud
of maggots creates a new being out of a dead dog. The afternoon centuplicated like a jungle and
the river water metamorphosed in relish and desire, in a confusion of lips, vaginas and orchids.
The waters of bodies and flowers transformed into oil, the indispensable enemy on a table
served with chicken.
The woman opened her eyes and set the room aflame; the blind old lady, spooked, hid her
hands in front of her dead eyes; and the magnetized top, spinning again, sought its precise orbit.
The fat man slid his hand along the leg and tore it off the chicken. The child began to cease to
exist, disappearing, in accordance with the law of mutations, and coiled, transformed into ivy,
between the fat legs of the blue, myopic whore. Another leg. The ivy climbed around the man,
penetrating the grotesque ruin of his orifices, while he slit the chicken’s breast with a large
kitchen knife, a firm grip on the broken plastic handle that he had mended the day before with
black electrical tape, blood dripping on the gleaming blade, shinning on his eyeglasses; big drops,
big red drops, redder than lipstick, redder than crying. Then he cracked the ribs and opened
wide the bird’s chest exposing its entrails: he extracted the viscera with a wooden spoon soaked
in olive oil. Finally, he set a garlic clove in each of the animal’s eye sockets and pulled away the
head in one motion toward the left, spraying the woman with coagulated blood, black blood,
black black blood, blacker than ink, blacker than black onyx. The woman opened her mouth and
opened her legs and opened a clearing, a body spread out like a landscape.
The ivy entering the anus of the fat man sprung violently out of his back, between his
vertebrae, in the form of a Mantis religiosa. The whore convulsed while staring into the yellow
eyes of the jungle hidden in the brush, in nigritude, enduring ever-increasing spasms: violent,
obscene. The half-plucked chicken jounced from side to side through the air; the fat man would
not let go with it: one hand would fight to grab the neck while the other attempted to hold on to
the leg. The mantis bit his head adorned with feathers, licked the gooey mess off his eyeglasses,
and carried to its eggs his mythomaniacal brain. The mantis avidly sucked the man’s inner
colors (scandalous light, clamoring eyes), drilling away his most prudent thoughts, and
displaying in the dark greenery the infinite horizon of possibilities for the monstrous to appear.
Like a jungle, a woman arrived this afternoon in the red town; a town that sets ablaze every
evening at sunset, and in which its eighty inhabitants live beneath the mud in forty houses. There
is no glass to scream in the light, and the wind has weakened people’s eyes. There were only
fruit trees outside, lined up in rows on each side of the main street, breathing the flavor of the
earth, when the jungle, the woman, unraveled under the sun. There wasn’t a soul outside. The
woman strolled through this path of flames with the pace of water, slow and steady, dripping
like animal blood, smelling of summer. From time to time, she stopped at a house’s threshold,
hesitatingly, as if waiting for her own shadow to reach her, as if desiring to pull these people’s
burning secrets out in the open, sprawling her body against the light.
The town’s eighty residents let their opaque eyes peek through small mud windows to see the
jungle pass multiplying herself like an army, faceless, reflecting all faces in the mirror of her
waters—torrential rain followed her. The jungle projected her image a thousand fold on every
drop of water, on every glossy leaf, on every polished fruit. Her steps remained behind her
abandoned, like men without destiny. And the shapes showing on her dress insinuated falling
shadows, shadows which would metamorphose into infinitely varied forms, which, in turn,
would insinuate their shadows and engender new forms…and again. Every new shape and its
shadow would advance in the red town ravaging the houses, sensually rubbing themselves
against the walls while sucking juice from fruits of fire. Every shape would stalk the next, their
shadows spitted to one another. And the sun would become ever so often an enormous eye
weakened by the wind. The jungle was growing in the red town.
The woman entered a two-storey house with the confidence of a jungle entering a town.
Large black spots crowded the roof tiles. The spots trembled, intermittently, transferring their
motion to the rotten wood that made the frame of the house, inside the walls. The whole house
vibrated. Agitated black creatures flew through the windows, across the ceilings, in a cloud,
drawing circles: bats, millions of them. They drifted crashing against invisible objects, against
walls and floors, against the woman’s chest, and toward the back of the house, to the upper
floor, toward a windowless, damped room in which it wasn’t possible to tell midnight from
midday. The jungle strode up the stairs, climbed the roofs, drowned her frogs in the cracks of
the earth, and sealed the hollow heavens with a display of infinitely varied shapes.
Night came early that day. In the dark only the woman’s eyes could be seen, eyes that had
swallowed the light: two suns repeating themselves from head to toe, like the persistent noise of
a thousand crickets under water. The jungle continued her march, shedding her skin, ignorant of
her origin and of her heart. As she moved forward, she would devour the footprints behind her.
As she moved forward, a deafening murmur preceded her, the sound of people tapping heels.
Her movement was rotational, concentric. The jungle would first walk slowly, then faster. She
would dance a tune, shaking her hips, the wind molding her figure round—becoming onion.
