Bread and Love (Part 1)

Update: The below is the first of a two-part story. You can read the second part here.

I

10 am is when you come to me with red, thawed, blurry hands, stretched over the paper or the sheets and the flesh transparent in bed.

You come to me with tense fingers unable — so red — to hold the world or a cup of coffee or my hands.

10 am is when you come to me to leave me.

II

What’s inside me must be a mole that eats by chewing the fresh flesh of my throat in disguise. It slurps and sucks the clotted blood from my gums.

He eats. The mole eats and if I imagine that it’s a mole what’s eating me from the inside, a mole clumsy and blind, if I imagine his eyes his teeth his legs, his nails dirty from scratching my chest from the inside, shrinking in on himself, lost inside my body, detached from my body, if I imagine his shape and smell and heart and loneliness, I shall endure this fear that my organs are being corroded, darkening and bleeding out under a hurried beat. I will endure and overcome fear, because I shall think that at least it will be nourishing him, my mole.

III

A dining table is a family corpse.

Orange peels, crushed segments on a plate of fried chickpeas.

A half-drunk bottle of sweet wine by the bread basket, and a silence that grows as stomachs fill up.

IV

What was that which Tolstoy once said?

That all empty tables resemble one another, but each full table is full in its own way?

V

I was young once, before the hunger.

I used to go with my grandad every morning to pick up figs. It was always very early. My grandad said “shush, one does not scream in the countryside”. We picked up fruits in silence. Buckets and buckets of figs. I saw them drying in the sun.

I opened language like a fig. I held it in my hand and wanted to remove its skin. “Can I eat one?”

Everything was quiet until desire came along.

Hunger makes you old.

VI

Hunger and tears are impossible for me if nobody is around.

VII

When Mum existed it was easier. I would say “Mum, I’m hungry” and also “Mum, I’m hungry and sad” and also “Mum, I’m hungry and sad and I think I’m going to die”.

And she would go inside my stomach and tap around my tummy with a spoon and stick her head out to listen and shout at the mole inside my body and she would say “lunch is almost ready” and then “you’re not going to die” and then she said something about griefs and bread.

VIII

I am Parsifal’s sin.

In my hometown, I left my mum locked up in a house of stone, watching how the roses we once planted together die of thirst.

I replaced her embrace with an empty flat and nameless mugs and an everlasting coffee stain on the kitchen counter which the weight of the day and of my own absence inside a hollow room prevent me from getting up and cleaning.

Due to an — I can’t even remember what now — setting of my boundaries, I keep my mum at a distance, on the other end of the telephone line, as she says, “darling you sound so thin, I can feel your rib cage, are you eating well?

Are you feeling well?”

IX

Now the dining table is my exclusive single family corpse.

An apple core and nobody to blame for an undercooked potato.

X

She tells me: “you, my darling, you will be a mum because it is in your spirit, to create just like when you write, and that cannot be stopped; it always wants more and more, and a child is the greatest, the greatest thing one can ever create and one never ceases to create”.

Another night in the countryside, and we have pulled out some chairs to get some fresh air after long hours, long hours of sweating by the fan in the living room, sweating even more in the kitchen, taking out water bottles from the fridge, cold very cold, sighing then sweating some more, expecting the night.

We always expect the night.

We close the blinds, hold still, put up with the day, then slither out from our caves. We stick out our head, our dry tongue, our feet into the dark evening when the cicadas can no longer be heard.

Now mum tells me that I will be a mother, and I want to reply “but mum how could I when I’m scared of everything I’m scared of the white and empty house that sinks into my chest and the dead word that hangs from my lips and I’m scared of him my future child who you imagine. He will pull out my hair and tangle around my legs.

Mum, I will have a child if you leave, Mum, if you leave, I will have a child because I’m scared of that future child and his eyes and his crying in this empty house and the songs that I will not sing to nourish him, but I am much, much more scared of loneliness.”

XI

Learning to feel abandonment and hunger takes time. One has to stretch out on the rooftop terrace with her hot belly pressed to the earth. To keep her index finger inside her belly button and watch soap drip and drip and drip from the sheets, watching soap drip is easy.

XII

The belly button through which I once sucked food out of my mum’s body is now the grave in which my mum rots.

XIII

At 3 pm, 10 am is a dead hour in which someone came to me.

XIV

At 3 pm, I eat the absence of my mum in a plate of vegetable soup.

XV

At 3 pm, I find comfort in the stoicism of the skin of a potato rotting calmly on the wooden board.

And words that simmer slowly in the pot with the pumpkin, leek and courgette.

Time Stops During Table Talk

Essay on the Skin of a Potato and the Sun

If we are talking about the skin of a potato that is about the flesh of the potato that is about the soft and twisted bone which we have torn off the skin which has been slid across by our knife the knife which we chose over a peeler because the peeler gets stuck and is old and makes a very unpleasant crack crack and sharply pulls out bits of the skin of the potato whereas the knife is easier to handle it glides across the potato like a tongue it slides carefully so as not to break the skin so as not to pull it apart from the body of the potato so that it inevitably falls on the table with no resistance so that it inevitably

falls on the table.

The sun is grateful for the skin of a potato. The sun expands and stretches out, searching for shapes on which to linger. The sun is like water. The sun, like water, takes the shape of a glass or a dam or my skin or the skin of a potato. The sun rises by the window in the kitchen and sets by the window in the living room. When the sun is at its peak, and I collapse into the sofa with a hand in my tummy, the hand in my stomach that allows me to live one more day, the sun is grateful for the skin of a potato.

Between my skin — the skin that complains while lying on the sofa — and the skin of a potato — the skin that endures silence on a wooden board — the sun prefers the skin of a potato.

The picture

There is a picture of the two of us, taken in my backyard.

It is not very different to that which my parents had taken twenty years earlier, in that very same backyard, the very same blue tiles that have not been changed after all this time.

I must finish writing this quickly before you make dinner, before summer arrives.

The picture is very beautiful. It was taken right before the Three Kings Parade in my hometown. We ate roscón the following day.

I must finish writing this quickly before other people arrive, sneaking in our time and space like those annoying wasps during our days by the pool, to remind us of the many other ways of desire that you and I choose to reject.

It must be comforting to know, when we go out into the world and are far, far away from my hometown and the blue tiles and all those little and stable things that discourage bodies from ever again searching for anything other than that which maintains us in the moment; it must be comforting to know then, when you and I have to look for each other over and through so many things, how much we loved each other in the winter.

NOTES

Passage I was inspired by Louise Bourgeois’ collection 10 am is When You Come to Me.

Passage V refers to Roland Barthes’ essay A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.