Let’s say his name was J, just to give him a name. And that I remember him for the south of his body. Of mine. Our souths, like mountain ranges swaying from tectonic plates. Tellurian spasms. Sweat, fluids. The south of the south. Every story has a happy beginning and a tragedy that precedes it.
We used to joke around with clichés, stereotypes, insults. The insult, a diatribe that, if well used and whispered at the right moment, will take you to unimagined carnal heights. A bomb. Acceleration of the senses. The more vulgar, the better. What underlies that contempt that can inflame everything in its path? What motivates it, what does it hide from reason? What did we tell each other without words? And so on, for several years. Our seismic selves.
But something always happens in the south, too much of everything: drought, fifty-degree highs, pieces of breaded chicken that fall into the sand and can’t be eaten, though the beach will make you so hungry. Warm beer, wet towel, cold ocean. Expensive beach bars. Inequality. Nobody as unequal as the one who doesn’t know it. As one who is born, grows up, and breakfasts every day on more of the same and never finds out that anything else exists. Nothing so unequal as dreaming what the TV tells you to dream. The absence of originality. Everyone desigual, not like the clothing brand, but like those who have to leave in order to come back with the passing of years and watch the slow death of parents whom public healthcare will no longer care for. All kinds of things happen. Sure as hell. And there’s not a Richter scale that can measure them.
First it was the lack of money. Of course it was. Three temporary jobs, sometimes one after another and other times simultaneous. And it’s not like I don’t want to work; it’s just that working so much will take away your desire. Sure, you want to. You also want to stop. These days it’s all the rage to complain. Oh, our parents had it so much better. But better than what? That’s where the inequality is, but not the kind you hear about on TV or in the politicians’ little speeches—I’m talking true inequality. What was better for them, that I’m not seeing? Expectations, he said. You have to have expectations, for an apartment, family, vacations. Even worse, real vacations, not the kind where you sneak off to Huelva and come back at the end of the day. Vacation vacations. Eat well, rest for real. Let other people do things for you. But who does something for you if there’s no cash on the table? That’s the thing. Expectations of being able to sit down in a place that will charge you seven-fifty a glass? Expectations of not mending the clothes your friend gave you because she can actually go to that outlet on the city’s outskirts? Expectations of what? I asked him. Of being happy. And the peal of laughter. My laughter. Because if you’re getting fucked in bed or on the sofa or wherever, you say, yeah, harder, give it to me. That bit about the search for happiness while you’re washing the dishes or the floor or the clothes, it’s an instantaneous wet blanket, and you feel like shouting at him to go for beers and the wine that at that moment, if you put it between your legs, you can refrigerate. Happiness, my ass. What happiness are you talking about? You’ve been all kinds of fucked up by the happiness discourse. Man, don’t touch me, I’m colder than the fridge. What a letdown. How little desire to fuck a person once they’ve talked to you about happiness. Expectations and happiness. As if the mountain ranges we’d been at the start of our relationship had been invaded by a corporation that wanted to profit from the natural landscape and put up a bridge, hotels, and a ski resort. And you no longer tremble from desire, you tremble because you’re being fracked and they’re going to suck out your core, your floor. Not your pelvic floor—if only. But rather the floor of inequality that’s been invaded by the expectation of happiness. Oh motherfucking please. The hors d’oeuvres destroying us from the inside in the name of progress. You’ve already bought into it, right? They’ve sold you on the story that if you’re with the company, then one day you will be the company. They made you believe that the ultimate goal is not to tremble, but to cause a quake. With the little office, the long-sleeved shirts and the suit bought online and made in China. What a load of shit, seriously. You’ve already bought the idea that you’re really going to have a pension, that you’ll be just like your parents. But how much is your father’s pension? You think those men who can barely move from the sofa to eat a nice, cool gazpacho were ever happy? What is it that we’re going to do now? Pay to watch our friends get married? Aspire to fuck in order to have kids and then find out you can’t and the treatment and the neurosis and the exhaustion, and all because you bought into the idea that you were going to turn into a company? J—so to speak—Inc. That because you got yourself a payroll account, done, you’re a little company now. Not like me, of course. One month freelance and the next one the same. And do what you want while you’re paid two months late. Oh, it’s hilarious and devastating, because when they talk to you about money and investing your time and your life to achieve glory it’s like gangrene, a matter of time before it all rots away. All of it. And you’re lucky if you can even shower, they’re saying that water outages are coming, like in the nineties. Like when you went running to the beach and jumped in the water and they shouted not to take too long, because everyone had to shower before eight since the water in all the houses was going to be shut off. Mutilation of routine. How could we know, really know and not just speculate, that there were people who not only didn’t run out of water, but who didn’t even have our sort of worries.
Happiness was invented for poor people, but it only exists in books. Or have you ever seen the people on TV happy, have you seen kings or the president happy? Powerful, sure, but not happy. Now, listen here. I told him, sure. Listen here, you want something more? Think about power. Not about strength, not about the ability to do something you want to do. No, think about power, accumulating power, about walking down the street and having people say to themselves, that one there, he’s got power. And someone with power can make, can do. I’m talking about real power here. About people saying, that guy’s got power, and fearing you. Because more than being loved, you should be feared. Because if we can’t even have happiness, just imagine power. Power is for the few. A handful, no more. If you’re going to aspire to something different, something out of your hands, a situation that no one expects for you, then seek power, because it’s not happiness but oh, it sure is a lot like it, and if anyone says otherwise, it’s because they’ve only been making do.
And so that summer went. And what was power? We didn’t know. What could power be when we’d never had it? If our only wild moments were when our souths touched and caressed and melded together? And there was no power there, no struggle, just coupling, consensus, agreement. Yeah, tell me something dirty. Move like that. Yeah. Now this and then that and then peace in between. Dreams. Calmed bodies embracing and losing their youth. And he’d say, okay, sure, whatever I said, and he started to look for power. And we stopped touching, because if that’s not going to teach you what power is, don’t waste your time. Or if boxing, running like crazy for forty-five minutes a day in the park. Or if soccer and going out with those guys who haven’t been your friends since you graduated high school, but maybe there, maybe as a herd, as a group, as men. Then he started going out every night. And we stopped seeing each other. We were two mountain ranges from the same land, made of the same matter. Crude, simple, transparent, and nearly noble. I say this with the certainty that we never hurt ourselves or each other. Not even when we met as children because our mothers were kneading the season’s marzipan and we went to play with the other kids. Hurt, never. Not even when his mother got sick and I started to help her. Staying at his house was so simple that my mom didn’t even ask for an explanation. Help, you’ve got to help out, and to the very end. Then his mother died and the hunger for happiness started, the dissatisfaction of summer, of stillness, of the burning sun. And of course, the search for happiness leads you to power. Goddamned power. The summer ended. We ended. He was no longer south, my south, and he went north, where everything is industrialized and nothing trembles. 
Brenda Navarro participated in the Iowa International Writing Program. Her first novel, Casas vacías (2018; Empty Houses, 2021), won the Tigre Juan Award and the English PEN translation award. Her second novel, Ceniza en la boca (2022) won the Cálamo Prize, the Madrid Booksellers Association Prize, a TodosTusLibros Prize, and the San Clemente Literary Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Vargas Llosa Biennial Prize. She is from Mexico City and lives in Madrid.
Megan McDowell’s translations have won the National Book Award, the English PEN translation award, the Premio Valle-Inclán, the Shirley Jackson Prize, and two O. Henry Prizes, and have been short- or long-listed four times for the International Booker Prize. In 2020 she won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is from Richmond, Kentucky, and lives in Santiago, Chile.
Illustration: Claire Whitehurst.
