Read Talking to Ourselves: A Novel for Free Online

round in circles, without ever getting to the point.

    Good. Okay. The point.
    Ezequiel doesn’t fit any of the categories catered by the porn industry. His tastes are different. He likes zits. Dirty heels. Rippling flab. Hairs sprouting everywhere. Like the ones that resemble pinheads embedded in the groin. He even likes farts. It’s quite extraordinary. Anything that can be smelled, sucked, squeezed or bitten hard, he considers worthy of the greatest admiration. He chews my armpits. He licks my unshaven legs. He sucks my feet where my sandals have rubbed the skin raw. He smells my anus. He rubs his cock against the roughness onmy elbows. He comes on my stretch marks. He says that all this, my wealth of imperfections, comes from health itself.
    Today, at his place, he explained that every day he sees so many bodies shrivelling up, losing their glow, degenerating pore by pore, that he has started to be excited by what is most alive, everything that flows with eagerness out of the body. To him, beauty is exactly that.
    While we were talking I stood up, naked, in front of the wardrobe mirror. Still sweating slightly, Ezequiel, remained lying down, hands clasped behind his head. His feet were crossed, and he was looking at me looking at myself. I examined everything I most hate about my body. My lopsided nipples. The scar from my caesarean. That sagging flesh on my inner thigh. That loathsome puffiness above my knees. My too-broad calves. The perennial corns on my little toes. Then I observed myself from the side. I focused on the folds of my stomach. On my diminished buttocks, which look as if the muscles have been absorbed to the sides. On the dwindling roundness of my breasts as they become more elongated and hollow. Sock boobs, my sister and I used to call them when we made fun of old women. I thought I looked rather repulsive. And for once I didn’t care.
    I confessed to Ezequiel that for a couple of years now, I have had a penchant for looking at myself in the mirror too much. I spend the same amount of time looking in it as when I was a teenager. I often find myself scrutinizing my naked body, reflecting on whether it might still be considered desirable. I asked him whether he thought that was wrong. On the contrary, he said. We ought to look at ourselves every day. See how we are in decline, losing our shape, how our skin is starting to grow rougher. And that only in this way can we understand and accept the passage of time.
    His response seemed to me a little too unpleasant. And not very seductive. And that what he was actually saying, playing the scientist, was that I am old. I was offended. I insulted him. I became aroused. Then he insulted me. Then he penetrated me up against the wardrobe mirror. Then I wept. Then I thanked him.

    I spent the entire day fretting because Mario didn’t answer the phone. Finally he got back to me. They stopped at Comala de la Vega and are now on their way to Región. Lito told me he knows how to guess the number of inhabitants. And that he misses me. And that he wants a Valentino something-or-other wristwatch. Mario says he feels fine, just a little tired. He spoke to me in that tone of forced calm he adopts when he doesn’t want me to interrogate him. I wanted to know if he had vomited and he feigned surprise. I’m not Lito, I reminded him, and I’m not stupid either. Then he admitted he had, twice. And changed the subject. It drives me crazy when Mario assumes that controlling attitude of his. As though illness depended on our level of composure. Mario is brave, his brothers keep repeating like parrots . If he were as brave as all that, he would weep with me each time we speak.
    At one point during the call, Mario asked me how I was. And, he added and I quote, what I was getting up to. It was an innocent question. I think. I had a mental block. I felt a lump in my throat. And I had to pretend I was losing coverage.

    “There’s a lot of horribleness she refuses to