"Horse Screw" by Tamara Tenenbaum
translated by Susannah Greenblatt
I ’ve never showered in my life. It’s not my fault. Mamá only took baths. She had busted eardrums, she could hardly hear any sound at all, and she couldn’t submerge her ears, so she would get in the bath and keep her head above the surface of the water. She washed her hair by making a cup with her hands and gathering water in little pools, which she poured on her head slowly with a little shampoo, no suds. She washed her face with her fingers and cold water, no soap. Mamá spent hours and hours in the bath. She also shaved there. Her armpits, her legs, and her crotch. Mamá told me that she’d never wax. That she couldn’t take that kind of pain.
The cold seeps into my bones. This is how those rockstars must feel— the ones who turn up dead in bathtubs. I understand why they go into the tub. What I don’t understand is why they die there. Do they fall asleep and drown? No, they don’t all drown. Some drown, but others just die from overdoses in the bathtub. I take off my clothes. I walk toward the bathtub. I sit down on the toilet. If I just get my feet wet, that won’t happen to me. I will wet my feet like I used to do in the pool as a kid, like I did in the ocean on days when the water was choppy and I was afraid I’d get caught for sneaking in, but really I was afraid that I’d die. I said it was just that I was afraid I’d get caught, because you know how it is when you’re a kid: being afraid of your parents is fine, but then being afraid of other things makes you a sucker. Taking what your parents or babysitters say seriously: that’s for suckers. One night, I must have been ten years old, I heard my mom on the phone telling a story about a girl who drowned in the ocean. They rescued her, but the girl was a bit strange for the rest of the day. She went to sleep. At 8 in the morning the next day, she woke up and told her mom, Ma, my head hurts. At 10 she was hospitalized, and at 12 she was dead. That story—I don’t know whose story it is, even, but—it’s a mantra that stayed etched in my head: at 10 she was hospitalized, and at 12 she was dead; at 10 she was hospitalized, and at 12 she was dead; at 10 she was hospitalized, and at 12 she was dead. Ma, my head hurts.
Now that I’m no longer living in the light of anyone’s love, I see it differently, like walking by a building you once lived in and not remembering which floor was yours. I don’t believe in other people’s love. I was eating with my sister yesterday, or the day before yesterday, she was telling me about her boyfriend, she’s living with him. I’ve never felt this way with anyone else, she said. She speared the things she liked on her fork and left the rest—the arugula, the corn kernels. I think she ate only the tomato and pancetta. I love to know that he is part of my home—that I arrive and he’s there, that he’s always there. I nodded my head, but I didn’t buy it. I don’t know what she’s talking about. In my most unhinged moments, like right now—sitting on the toilet, where everything’s sticky from some mouthwash that exploded at some point, I don’t know when—in these moments I think women can’t know anything about love. Then the thought passes. Deep down Demián was kind of a woman. And I don’t know if he loved me in the end, but I maintain my origin myth—I maintain that, at first, he did. I carry this story like a flag, like a torch, like the tattoo of a Holocaust survivor in an old folks home in California. Are there any of those left? There must be only a few at this point.
I turn on the hot water tap, but it comes out cold. I stay there a moment with my hand below the faucet. If I put my feet in before the hot water starts, some horrific disease could take hold. But then it occurs to me that maybe the water will sober me up. I feel in myself all the bodies that ever had that thought. They died in bathtubs just like this one, surely, trying to come down, running their head under the water and filling their noses with hydrogen. I feel that it’s starting to come out warm and I decide to put my feet in. Is human skin impermeable? Does it count as impermeable? The water runs, it seems like it’s avoiding me, but it warms me up from inside like a bain-marie, or like a letter that arrives from faraway. I am overcome by a desire to shave like my mom. I laugh and my nose runs: transparent snot. The razor in the bathroom is Demián’s, it’s what remains from the last time he showered here. I shave with an electric razor. He likes the foam. I don’t have shaving cream, but I have soap. I soap up a leg, and begin to shave it. My knee starts bleeding. The knees are difficult because the blood runs so close to the skin there. I know that the knee is one of those places, just like the wrist—that’s why you put perfume there—blood activates perfume, opens it up, and expands it.
Soaping up hairy legs is like bathing horses. With my fingers on the foamy plush of my calf, I remember my grandfather Alberto’s horses. I see one in particular: White Glove. He was an Arab horse, the most expensive of the ten or twelve my grandfather had. The horses that my grandfather ran were racehorses, but it’s like with athletes: they have short careers. I was fourteen years old and White Glove was five when they retired him. My grandfather was about to sell him, but a friend told him that it would be more profitable to rent him out for breeding: to sell him for screwing, for foals. I don’t remember the exact amount, but it was a shitload of money. I didn’t have any special love for White Glove, I remember him as elegant and good, but in that moment it didn’t matter much: I just wanted to go see the screwing. I went with my grandfather. The mare, also thoroughbred—a tremendous animal, her owner said—they gave her a hormone injection so she’d get hot and bothered and would let him mount her. It was an enormous syringe. There we stood—my grandfather, his friend, the owner of the mare, and me—waiting to see what would happen. And the truth is, it was impressive when White Glove, weighing a thousand kilos—a thousand kilos? I don’t know, but a lot—mounted the mare. We heard first the tremendous sound of their hides hitting each other, his chest falling against her back. The horses didn’t whinny. You could only hear their hooves sliding and something almost imperceptible like the brush of their fur. My grandfather, his friend, and the other owner laughed, spit, and celebrated. Don’t look, the owner of the mare told me. Is this going to scar the little fellow? he asked my grandfather. My grandfather shrugged his shoulders. What do I know? He’s Porteño, he answered, and they kept laughing, but it didn’t seem scarring to me; it seemed spectacular. I was a virgin and it’s not that I was aroused, or maybe I was, but that’s not what was important. I was a virgin and I thought that sex was monumental. The way I’d imagined it, I hadn’t imagined there would be anything small about sex. She, the mare, had a nothing expression on her face: not of pleasure, not of pain, nothing. But on her enormous rump you could see the infiltrator. That—being part of an avalanche, a seething river, an endless avenue— I remembered it so well in my body, in my asshole, the first night I was with Demián; I must have had that same nothing face as the mare: that idiot face, those dopey eyes. When my grandfather and I went home my mom was burning with rage and she confronted him, he laughed but she let him have it, she was almost crying, Mamá, she was in her underwear, her crotch stubbly and her face burning because they had taken me to see the horses screw. The last night I slept with Demián—the night after we broke up, which felt somehow stolen from the recent past—I fell asleep on top of him, and I dreamed of White Glove and his lover. And of that time I saw my grandfather, and of a part of the story I’d forgotten: my grandfather Alberto counting the bills with his tiny lorgnette, checking that it was all there. And then in the dream the images switched on me, and now it was Demián and I there, fucking as giants in the middle of the stable. And Mamá cried in her underwear, and my grandfather counted dollars, with his tiny specs, laughing.
A shiver runs up my spine, and I open my eyes. It’s as if I’ve gotten lost, as if I lost myself. I am inside the bathroom, but I’m dressed, drenched, my T-shirt’s glued to my body, and the shower’s on, I don’t know why, I don’t understand, since I didn’t shower, since I didn’t even turn on the shower. The water never got hot, it’s cold, it’s freezing water raining down on me. And I’m all soaked with blood and I don’t know if it’s the knee I shaved badly, if maybe I didn’t shave anything, I have my jeans on. Or I shaved and then put on my jeans? I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s my knee that I cut with the razor or if it’s my nose that’s streaming blood. I bring the palm of my hand to my nose, I look at myself, I bring it up again, I look again, and I still don’t manage to put it all together.
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Tamara Tenenbaum was born in Buenos Aires in 1989. She has a BA in philosophy and works as a journalist for La Nación, La Agenda, Infobae, and other media. She teaches at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Universidad Nacional de las Artes. In 2017, she published Reconocimiento de terreno (Pánico el pánico), an autobiographical poetry collection. In that same year, she cocreated (with friends and colleagues Marina Yuszczuk and Emilia Erbetta) Rosa Iceberg, a publishing house devoted to books by women. In April 2019, she published El fin del amor (Ariel), a collection of essays on love and sexuality in the twenty-first century. Her first book of short stories, Nadie vive tan cerca de nadie, was awarded the Concurso Ficciones and will be published by Emecé in October 2019. Find her on Twitter @tamtenenbaum.
Susannah Greenblatt is a writer, filmmaker, and translator from the Spanish based in Brooklyn. She graduated with high honors and a BA in history from Wesleyan University, where she was awarded the White Fellowship for Excellence in History to conduct research on early modern mystics in Madrid. She currently works as Digital Marketing and Communications Coordinator at Words Without Borders, where she is also a contributing writer for WWB Daily. In addition to Words Without Borders, her work has appeared in Literary Hub and Ramona: revista de artes visuales. Her short film, La Ciega, has screened in festivals in the US and Canada.
