She caresses him and desire erupts with a violence that, until that moment, had been unknown to him. He can feel the expansion of the explosion suddenly filling his lungs, momentarily preventing him from breathing. Yet he feels calm being with her and thinking: “if the moment of dying were to come now, I would have no more excuses to escape it.”
Then, sunk in the most sepulchral silence, he allows her to continue advancing in her task, caressing his face and slowly descending to the scorched skin of his neck; moving down to his chest and touching the limit of his flesh, which lies between his navel and the upper part of his pelvis.
Everything else has been taken by the war. Who he was is no more. He can still remember the suffering of those moments before they had to amputate his limbs; the paralyzing panic of that moment when they removed, one by one, the bullet fragments embedded in his flesh…
But now everything is calm and peace, and a feeling of pleasure foreign to him until that moment. Now he wants to live, but thanks to the war, even if he survives, that will be impossible.
Photography by Erick Flores Cuevas
Bookseller and bibliomaniac reader with fourteen years of experience, based in Mexico City.