In a shadowy tower lit only by flashes from the signage outside, the man slumped into the armchair in the corner. Looking at him in the intermittent light, one could tell that he’d come as though into exile, that he had no interest in going back. There was the sense that back there, wherever it was, the air was unbreathable.
“What do they use to clean the air in here? It smells of air,” he said with a deep sniff.
Each word brought with it a curdled drop of silence that fell to the floor, flickering between light and shadow.
“All I want to do right now is sit here and smoke myself to death, until this disgusting clean air stinks of it.”
Through the windows to the west and south one could see the buoys lined up in the sea. To the north were the epileptic wind, dark roofs, and bright ships.
“Because sometimes I’m afraid that something I don’t want is going to happen back there.”
The ship in 23 began to move away from its mooring, pulled by a tugboat. Meanwhile, the man’s wish was coming true: he was dirtying the air with smoke, which was his way of dying.
“It might not happen, of course. One doesn’t want bloodshed. But they were looking for it—they couldn’t seem to stand having it in their bodies.”
Underneath the winking signs, the woman in the tower looked at the clock, calculating how long it would take the vessel to make its way along the wall and enter the channel that led out of the port. No one had thrown a rope to the man, so he was still there, anchored to his story.
“At first, I went out to get drunk. It’s the only thing I still stay faithful to. I discovered it, and it’s mine now. My father threw himself under a bus, but he comes back sometimes. And there’s also some music. I always play it in the workshop to have something to cling on to—it’s what I’m whistling . . .”
His otherworldly whistling lasted long enough for the ship—hidden initially by the awful building opposite whose height violated planning ordnances—to reappear from behind the dome of the post office. Everything was still as it should be. It was like a prelude: a solitary man, a solitary but sparkling ship with its belly full of passenger worms. For a fraction of a second a suicide swept through the air of the room. The man, crushed by the bus, dangled from the anxious spirit with which he’d waited for the wheels that day. He left through the window to the north, which paused its banging for a moment to allow the interloper to leave before resuming the back and forth. The dead man soared over the roofs and eventually fell upon the boats.
“Then came the women,” the man continued, still alive, apparently. “I don’t know how—it’s as though they spring out of your glass; you don’t see them come through the door. But I turned away from them in disgust.”
The air, which was now thick with smoke and the passing gaze of the suicide as it rested on each object, began to fill with the backs, thighs, and breasts of the aforementioned women. It was hard to get a complete picture. A few feet slipped on viscous puddles of semen and so failed to locate their legs. On the other side of the west-facing window, the street the man had come down before crossing the plaza was empty, split through the middle by a dorsal fin of mercury lamps.
“The ship is turning to starboard, heading west.”
The woman’s voice dropped like a heavy sluice gate. She hadn’t said a word until now, with nothing more to offer or contribute than this useless snippet of information. Then the man, bleeding out on the chair in the corner, shared his own unexpected tidbit.
“I like milk most of all. But by the time I get back, the three children have always drunk it.”
No one got up to help. No one removed a breast from their bra to serve it up on the platter of their soul. And the sea the ship sailed over must still have been there, dotted with the buoys’ lights bobbing on the sinister velvet.
“One night I just hit the bottle; I drank so much I almost killed myself.”
Every object was stowed for good in its rightful place, each thing—be it a painting, plaster bust, cobweb, book, moth, embalmed owl, gilded angel, or barometer—drooped with bruises and strips of the dead man’s skin. But the empty forms of the suicide stayed firm. The ship remained. The vessel coming out now from behind the dome was different. It had a light at the stern, a light at the prow, and a star-shaped one above. Because nothing else was visible, it looked like a triangle that had lost its sides; only the idea of it remained.
“Why did they call them triangles for so long—what would have become of the angles without the sides?”
Seeing that she was lost in her geometry, the man didn’t say any more. The time it takes to traverse the tunnel, the stairs, the river, everything that comes before the river mouth, passed. And from each chapter sprung forth women-mothers, women-cockroaches, women-leaches, stomach ulcers, and other feminine horrors: empty glasses, milkless bottles, children heading toward a life bearing signs on whose backs the word destiny was inscribed. The silence of the plaza was the color of one in the morning. It was obvious that the ship had now gone around the curve. And so, the solitary man stood up from amid the rubble like a collapsed house that has decided to go for a walk, pulling itself up on a still-standing doorframe. He took his jacket and cap and walked through one patch of air, then another, down two hundred steps, cut across the road, and then the plaza. And it was there, when he got to the end, that the plaza decided to follow him like a dog, like a whore without a man heading back to her apartment. They could have shouted to him from up above to turn back. But it was too late now. When a plaza follows a man on his own at that time of night, no one calls out to him. What’s the point? he would have thought to himself, without stopping.
He put the key in the lock, went into the apartment, and turned on the light. The plaza stayed with him like a traveling stage. It had shrugged off the fountains, the equestrian statue, the benches, the famous thirty-three palm trees, and the pigeons. Clear now, it settled in, making room for itself, and soon had a refrigerator in the middle, three beds of sleeping children to one side and another larger one opposite containing a woman, also asleep. Like nothing had changed, the man opened the refrigerator and took out a milk bottle. Empty. He threw it to the floor. The broken glass gleamed like knives on the grooved paving stones brought by the plaza. In one of the pieces, the damned light grew iridescent and started to call his name. It was this piece, resplendent in its bullfighter outfit, that began to chant for an orgy of blood. There was no way to avoid it. The glass wanted what it wanted and it had all those sleeping necks at its mercy. If she at least could had given milk. But her breasts had been dry for some time; they were camouflage, a fleeting mirage of plenty in an eternal wasteland.
When he went back out onto the street, not knowing what to do with the blood dripping from his fingers (with the plaza behind, forever on his tail), the tower of the solitary woman taunted him. When he came to the place where the plaza was supposed to be, he leapt into the void. Then he climbed as best he could up the two hundred black steps. He went through the door no one had bothered to lock and back to the entrapped silence, the windows. The plaza didn’t fit inside at first, but it drew itself in and eventually managed it. Which was when he realized that it was now too late to do anything. Milk flowed out of the faucets, the woman’s breasts, the stupid smile of the gilded angel. The air had a few moments before been impregnated with the smell of a bedchamber, a nightshirt, loose hair, and a promising night. But he was a man with a hungry, jealous death on his back and a shard of bloody glass in his determined hand.
Before the deed was consummated on the woman’s taut neck, the plaza had gone back outside to resume its appearance of immobility—an excellent alibi if one wanted to avoid being called as a witness to the crime. 
Armonía Somers, the pen name of Armonía Liropeya Etchepare Locino, was born in Pando, Uruguay, in 1914 and died in Montevideo in 1994. Her first novel, La mujer desnuda, was published in 1950, followed by the short story collections El derrumbamiento (1953), De miedo en miedo (1967), and Un retrato para Dickens (1969). The Naked Woman was translated by Kit Maude and published in 2018.
Kit Maude is a translator based in Buenos Aires. He has translated dozens of Latin American writers for a wide array of publications.
Illustration: Kaila Rose Parrish
