The Dying Animal Read Free

allowed in my room. Ever. Otherwise, when I got to be sixteen, I was treated the way my friends were being treated, in terms of curfews and stuff." "And your mother and father, when did they come here?" "In 1960. Fidel was still letting people go then. They were married in Cuba. They came to Mexico first. Then to here. I was born here, of course." "Do you think of yourself as American?" "I was born here, but, no, I'm Cuban. Very much so." "I'm surprised, Consuela. Your voice, your manner, the way you say 'stuff' and 'guy.' You're totally American to me. Why do you think of yourself as a Cuban?" "I come from a Cuban family. That's it. That's the whole story. My family has this extraordinary pride. They just love their country. It's in their hearts. It's in their blood. They were like that in Cuba." "What do they love about Cuba?" "Oh, it was so much fun. It was a society of people that had the best of all the world. Entirely cosmopolitan, especially if you lived in Havana. And it was beautiful. And they had all these great parties. It was a really good time." "Parties? Tell me about the parties." "I have these pictures of my mother at these costume balls. From the time she came out. Pictures of her at her coming-out ball." "What did her family do?" "Well, that's a long story." "Tell me." "Well, the first Spanish on my grandmother's side was sent there as a general. There was always a lot of old Spanish money. My grandmother had tutors at home, she went to Paris at eighteen to buy dresses. In my family, on both sides, there are Spanish titles. Some of them are very, very old titles. Like my grandmother is a duchess—in Spain." "And are you a duchess as well, Consuela?" "No," she said, smiling, "just a lucky Cuban girl." "Well, you could pass for a duchess. There must a duchess looking like you on the walls of the Prado. Do you know the famous painting of Velázquez,
The Maids of Honor?
Though there the little princess is fair, is blond." "I don't think I do." "It's in Madrid. In the Prado. I'll show it to you."
    We went down the spiral steel staircase to my library stacks, and I found a large book of Velázquez reproductions, and we sat side by side and turned the pages for fifteen minutes, a stirring quarter hour in which we both learned something—she, for the first time, about Velázquez, and I, anew, about the delightful imbecility of lust. All this talk! I show her Kafka, Velázquez ... why does one do this? Well, you have to do something. These are the veils of the dance. Don't confuse it with seduction. This is not seduction. What you're disguising is the thing that got you there, the pure lust. The veils veil the blind drive. Talking this talk, you have a misguided sense, as does she, that you know what you're dealing with. But it's not as though you're interviewing a lawyer or hiring a doctor and that whatever's said along the way is going to change your course of action. You know you want it and you know you're going to do it and nothing is going to stop you. Nothing is going to be said here that's going to change anything.
    The great biological joke on people is that you are intimate before you know anything about the other person. In the initial moment you understand everything. You are drawn to each other's surface initially, but you also intuit the fullest dimension. And the attraction doesn't have to be equivalent: she's attracted to one thing, you to the other. It's surface, it's curiosity, but then, boom, the dimension. It's nice that she's from Cuba, it's nice that her grandmother was this and her grandfather was that, it's nice that I play the piano and own a Kafka manuscript, but all this is merely a detour on the way to getting where we're going. It's part of the enchantment, I suppose, but it's the part that if I could have none of, I'd feel much better. Sex is all the enchantment required. Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out? Does anyone find anyone of any sex that