Self-Portrait with Friends

Abstract

ending with her unbridled passion for that pederast. Every night. For two hours. With me tied to those filthy rags and the thing going on. Until their passion reaches its cUmax. Then she kills me. Yes, I am assassinated. Just before, there's the final monologue in which she says, among other things, that she is cutting my life short as an act of mercy. And also to add impetus to nature, to help it along, she coolly claims. Some critics mentioned historical determinism, added to man's freedom to accelerate the process. But there is a lot of rationaUzation on Tania's part, I beUeve. What she really wants is to enjoy without hind rance the pleasures of the flesh. She mixes poison into my medicine. The poison slowly annihilates my forces, while Tania continues her monologue. And I move my Ups, without uttering a sound. There were some attempts to interpret my silent words in this scene. Including a theory that transfers to the audience the responsi bility of filUng that blank. Tania ends her monologue and I go on moving my lips. Some people stand on their chairs, trying to catch my words. And I die. Silence. Then the curtain falls and the applause starts up. There is a standing ova tion and shouts of "bravo," "bravo." Some days, especially on Saturdays, there are as many as five curtain calls. And they do not stop applauding. This has been going on for more than two years already. The show is terrible: grotesque, vulgar, and obvious; at some moments even lapsing into semi-literacy. The show is, mostly, pathological. But the public likes it. It's on every night, except Mondays. Translated by Marilia Yoshimasu and John Batki GUSTAVO SAINZ / MEXICO Self-Portrait with Friends I, for example, misanthropic, sullen, hunchbacked, prone to rot, innocuous exhibitionist, immodest, always disagreeable or discourteous or gray or tim id according to the dullness of the metaphor, a sometime erotomaniac, and as if that weren't enough, a Mexican to boot, sleep badly and very little for the past few months, in fetal positions, under heavy covers, white or striped sheets, an electric blanket or in the open air, 128 University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review www.jstor.org ® according to the weather, but of course, always embracing my wife, afloat on the river of dreams. Up at six in the morning, soaping myself. Rosita soaping herself under the hot unrepeatable water of the shower. Done with breakfast and dressing by seven. In a taxi by twenty past seven. In the cinema by seven-thirty: super visory work, singular, compromised, mysterious, seemingly not so. And go ing on out, one hundred minutes later, buying the papers, returning to the apartment by taxi or on foot, and reading the newspaper, answering the telephone while Rosita prepares lunch or comes and goes to and from her ballet class. Or wasting my time in front of the typewriter, dying a little beside Claudius the God, Count Belisarius, Jvlian, Pedro Martinez or M.