Read Online Mona and Other Tales by Reinaldo Arenas - Free Book Online Page B

understand a word,” I blurted out in all sincerity.
    â€œWell, I want you to understand. I have never killed anybody without first telling him why.”
    â€œWho are you going to kill?” I asked her with a smile, to let her know I was not taking her words seriously.
    â€œListen to me, you fool,” she said, stepping away from me while I, pretending not to understand, tried to embrace her. “I know everything you did. Your trips to the museum, your incessant surveillance, your detective work. Your pretended snoring did not fool me either. Of course, until now your stupidity and your cowardice have prevented you from seeing things as they are. Let me help you. There is no difference between what you saw in the painting at the museum and me. We are one and the same thing.”
    I must confess that it was impossible for me then to assimilate Elisa’s words. I asked her to explain in simpler language, still hoping it was all a joke or the effect of the two bottles of wine.
    After she repeated the same explanation several times, I finally got an idea of what she meant. The woman in the painting and Elisa were one and the same. As long as the painting existed, she, Elisa, would exist too. But for the picture to exist, she had, of course, to be there. That is, whenever the museum was open, she had to remain there inside the picture—“smiling, impassive, and radiant,” as she put it, with a tinge of irony. Once the museum was closed, she could get out and have her amorous escapades like the ones I had participated in. “Encounters with men, the handsomest men I can find,” she explained, looking at me, and in spite of my dangerous situation, I could not help but experience some feelings of vanity. . . . “But all those men,” continued Elisa, “cannot simply
enjoy;
they want to
know,
and they end up like you, with a vague idea of my peculiar condition. Then the persecution begins. They want to know who I am, no matter what the cost; they want to know everything. And in the end, I have to eliminate them. . . .” Elisa paused for a moment and, glaring at me, continued: “Yes, I like men, and very much, because I am also a man, as well as a genius!” She said this looking at me, and I could see that her anger was mounting; realizing I was facing a dangerous madwoman, I decided it was best to “go with her flow” (as we used to say in Havana), and, begging her to control herself, I asked her to tell me about her sex change. “After all,” I tried to console her, “New York is full of transvestites, and they don’t look so unhappy. . . .” Completely ignoring my words, she explained to me: Not only was Elisa the woman in the painting, but the woman in the painting was also the painter, who had done his self-portrait as he wished to be (the way he was in his mind): a lusty, fascinating woman. But his real triumph was not that he portrayed himself as an alluring woman. “That,” she said with scorn, “had already been done by most painters.” His true achievement was that through a mustering of energy, genius, and mental concentration—which, she claimed, were unknown in our century—the woman he painted had the ability to become the painter himself and to outlive him. This person (she? he?) would then exist as long as the painting existed, and had the power, when nobody was present, to step out of the painting and escape into the crowds. And in this way she was able to find sexual gratification with the kind of men that the painter, as a man not graced by beauty, had never been able to get.
“But
the power of concentration I must muster to achieve all that does
not come easily. And now, after almost five hundred years, I sometimes lose the perfection of my physical attributes or even one of my
parts, as you on several occasions were astonished to see but could
not believe.”
    In brief, I was facing a man over