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Being bored during la clase de literatura argentina is no excuse. Or is it?
Title: Modernity Towering in Front of the Sky
Author:![[info]](https://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
pouletinbondage, baby
Fandom: I have no fandom. My OTP drifts alone in a sea of Obama/Rahm Emanuel slashfic :(
Pairing: Los K
Word Count: 3,473
Rating: Umm? Soft R, cause I couldn't bring myself to make it super-explicit?
Disclaimer: This is fiction! Duh!
Summary: On an important night, power disturbs, disgust and love become the same. Bonus: adults sad about aging & flagrant abuse of a very antique chair! The ex president does weird things with tights! READ ON
Notes: Guys I am MORTIFIED. Also, I have nowhere at all to post this; I have proven to be weirder than the internet! Don't be thrown off by my peculiar indications of dialogue & occasional usages of castellano!
--Stand there,-- he said.
She stood.
--Uy, you look even better behind that desk than I thought you would.-- He shuffled to the right, to the left, squinted. –Yup. You should be in a painting.-- He squinted again. –I think you should start wearing your hair like that every day.
--I already do,-- she said, still standing. With half the lights turned off, shadows had appeared in unexpected places throughout the room. She felt as though she stood backstage, like the last person to leave the theater at night, or the first to enter. Somewhere around her there ought to be scenery half-constructed or sweaty costumes discarded in a pile. She turned her back to him deliberately, walked to the window and thrust open the heavy blue curtains.
--I was still looking at you,-- came a protesting voice from behind her.
--Leave me alone, you’ve had years to look at me.-- She said this with her face pressed so close to the windowpane she sounded underwater. The glass was cold. She recalled the headline on one of this morning’s papers. It was expected to go below 0° tonight.
--And so?
She sighed, pressed further into the glass. –Just shut your mouth. This city is mine now. I want to look at it.
His presence behind her, then his side against hers and his arm around her waist. –It’s beautiful, isn’t it.
--I’ve looked out this window almost every day.
--And you don’t think it looks different now that it’s yours?
She turned, tilted her head upward to look at him. His shoulders, the ski-slope of his nose, his eyes that seemed disconcertingly full of mirth: His entire body was an enormous campaign ad patronizingly proclaiming, ¡Amorcita! Together we can do nothing wrong! on the side of every colectivo in the country.
--No,-- she said. Two guards met in the middle of the plaza outside. They looked up at the lighted window and gestured wildly at her figure. One of them waved. –The city is the same as always, except I can’t see the river anymore because they’ve built all those fucking condos.-- Now the other guard was waving. –Would you turn off the lights?
He refused to move. –But do you feel different looking at it?
--Yes.
--How?
Being infuriated with him always seemed to raise her body temperature. The window, the cold, were consoling. –Well…It’s mine now, more than ever?
--And?
She pulled away from him, stomped the foot she’d hurt stepping out of the helicopter earlier. –Uy, what kind of husband are you…?
--One who thinks you look beautiful like this, standing in front of your city.
She turned her head so that their faces nearly touched. She wanted both to kiss him while running her fingers through his thinning grey hair and to spit her frustration at him in the most eloquent way possible. However, she had been eloquent all day and it was tiring, the way mornings after mornings with her foundation and eyeliner were tiring, the way her excitement at their mutual love for her growing power was tiring.
--Stop fucking with me and turn off the lights.
Little spots of red crept up his cheekbones. He reached out and pulled the blue curtains closed.
--Oh, that’s how you’re going to be?-- She opened the curtains again.
He sighed. –Well, you’re in charge now.-- He turned, kicked his shoes off. –Mind if I sit in your chair?
Once he’d plopped himself down in the grand chair and propped his feet on the desk (his socks were mismatched again—this was something the starved newspapers would kill to know), she turned back to the window, to the plaza that was, thankfully, momentarily free of guards, and to the offending buildings piled with cranes that blinked red lights brighter than stars. She was aware that he was studying her carefully. Years and years of marriage had trained her to feel his stares.
Sure enough. –I love that skirt on you.
--I hate it.
--Why?
--It’s too tight.
--Well, I don't mind.
She knew his eyes were following along the outline of her body, down to the fabric straining vaguely at the back of her skirt. She focused intensely on the plaza; it was so cold outside, though, that there was nothing to see except modernity towering in front of the sky. No ambulances careened by, no late-night high-heels clacked skittishly across the distant sidewalk. No sound at all, really, except--In the midst of all this she (God help me, I'll kill him) heard the exclamation of something unzipping.
--Oh, please,--she said, refusing to turn around. –Not now.
--But you’ve never minded before.
--This was your office then.-- Buildings so high it was no longer possible to see the river from the room. Boats could be slogging through the river and she would never know.
--And so?
She turned again, always turning back and forth tonight, and rolled her eyes to find him sitting with a hand out of sight and his eyes bulging hugely like a perverted marionette.
--You're disgusting me right now.
He smirked at her, one-handedly.
She sighed. --Okay. Okay. I’m done with you. Do whatever you want to yourself.-- She walked over to the desk and began rearranging things. The family pictures, the paperweights. The things that belonged to them both.
She felt him fumbling behind her—then, suddenly, he began to slowly pull her down, hands wrapped tightly around her waist. She acquiesced and nestled into his lap.
--I’m going to miss this chair.-- He reached around to stroke the top of her head and clumsily tuck some of her hair back from her forehead. His elbow encircled her face; this made her feel like she was a participant in a wrestling match, a wrestling match with spectators that made no sound, and she was losing. She pushed his arm away roughly, shifted on his lap to watch his eyes flutter a little. He was always so unabashedly aroused by her and tonight this felt incongruously patronizing.
--Can we turn off the lights now?
He unbuttoned the top button of her shirt in response. His large crablike hands skittered warm against her skin, which was still cool from her time at the window. Then the second button, then the third and fourth. Hands now pressing flat against her stomach. –It is still so strange to me that the kids came from in here.-- His sentimentality was discomfiting, hardly sentimental. The fifth button. –They’re old now.-- The sixth. –Uy, Cristina. I think I’m also old now.-- The sev-
-and she jumped up and off and hopped onto the tremendous desk, the damned skirt riding up her legs, her right shoe dangling off her foot. –If you are going to put me in a compromising position then— she slammed her fist hard upon the smooth wooden surface –I want the lights off. Look at me. If someone were to come in—no, look at me—to come in here, see in the window, you know who they would criticize. Of course you do.
Wide eyes staring up at her.
--You think I don’t get it, do you? Hmm? I know how you feel about your last day in here. That now you have to hand it all over to me. A bit sad it’s not going to be me bending over this desk for you anymore?
His face fell, eyes narrowed just a bit. –Not at all. Presidenta.
Her grin was big and wide, a relief to jaw muscles tired from talking into cameras all day. –-I don’t believe you.-- She leaned over, breathing into his face. --Mi ex-presidente.
At first she wasn’t sure what had happened. One second his unblinking brown eyes were all she could see, and then the next second, a flash of desk wood and then the opposite wall. Her stomach pressing hard into the flat surface, his weight shifting behind her. Suit-pants wool against her legs.
--But Cristina,-- he whispered, ignoring the discomfort that was whispering with the lights on, --this is the only way it works.
--Uy! You-- Her protest was half-hearted. Of course attraction pounded hot through her just as it had all those years ago when she noticed how passionately he wrote for the university socialist party’s newsletter. But tonight-the symbolism of it was-and with the lights still on.
She lifted her body up from the desk, turned her head back to look at him. Strands of her hair fell over her eyes in a cascade of brown, blocking her view in such a way that all she could really see was a jagged image of his blue jacket with the mismatched buttons being tugged off his body. –Turn off the-!
He grabbed her wrists from behind and tugged them forward, pushing her back down to the desktop. His wedding ring danced over her left arm, sparking by in a streak of gold. –Lights on or off, what does it matter to you? I want to look at you.-- He pushed her skirt up and over her hips, letting it pool around her waist in a grey puddle of fabric. She felt his hands between her legs for a moment, and then, as he liked to do, rip a wide, neat hole right where the legs of her tights met. How many pairs of these have died because of his strange little habit? she found herself wondering. And what if someone were watching through the window? Ha! they’d say. So this is where the presidential salary goes! One of his fingers hooked around her underwear, a shade of purple she had specifically picked because it went well with her blue shirt, to pull it aside, and she laughed aloud. Time to give the president a salary cut! Her laughter turned to coughing as the full weight of his body thrust her sharply against the desk. And again. And again. She stopped laughing.
--Here’s to four more years of this!-- he puffed merrily.
She combed her hair out of her eyes with one hand. Directly in her line of vision stood the door, shut but not locked. Even at this hour, there were people in the building, always people in the building. If someone were to walk in, they’d see her with her shirt seven-eighths unbuttoned and her hair flying around like straws from a broken broom, and they would—What would they do?
--Cristina, Cristina, he monologued from behind her. –Presidenta de mi corazón. You look the same from this angle as you always have.
--Fuck you, okay?—she gasped, finding it difficult to talk with her diaphragm squashed as it was against the desk. –Flip me around so I can at least see your face-
Instead, he placed his hand over her mouth. The sensation of his fingers against her lips distracted her. His hands had always been an intriguing combination of smooth and firm, the hands of someone who preferred to toil with pen and paper and schemes but had not forgotten that he was a country boy, from a brown city in the mining provinces, at heart. She remembered fondly the first time she realized this about his hands, years and years ago when they released him after a month spent in prison for leading protests against Videla's regime. They let him out of the dank cell and he ran his hands over her face for what seemed like a blissful eternity (Cristina, Cristina. I thought they were going to let me die in this shithole). She had been pregnant with their son at the time, the bulk of carrying a child beginning to look odd on her small frame. His hands had felt like clean cotton sheets against her skin. On this half-lamplit night, they still felt that way. She bit his palm in anger.
--I thought you liked when I did that,-- he puffed again. He had once been indefatigable, keeping her up for hour after exhaustingly satisfying hour, always wanting more the way she thought men couldn't. Maybe he is actually getting old, she thought. She bit him again, with no result. Of course, sometimes he liked when she became violent.
--I'd feel a little differently if we were at home.-- His hand made her sound idiotic, her muffled, dominated words a mockery of anything she'd ever said.
He had no response, but he removed his hand from her mouth. Outside the moon began to rise, an otherwordly orange that reached out from the hidden horizon like tentacles. He accelerated his rhythm, and her hands shot out from under her and flailed at things wildly to steady herself. Accidentally, her left hand sent a picture frame flying to the ground: Their son on his sixth birthday, already wide-eyed like his father, mystified by the candle in his cake. Her right hand displaced two more: A picture his sister had taken of the two of them right after he had spent the month in prison, his hands protectively on her stomach and his lips buried in her hair, her beaming at the camera, a rare smile in the paralyzing days of the last dictatorship. Their daughter and son and a cousin, laughing in a heap of snow outside their home in the country. She flung her hands into the vacated spaces and hung onto the edges of the desk, her body forming a shape like--she couldn't keep the thought from her head--a pornographic imitation of Jesus.
--You’re so quiet,-- he panted. –-Make some noise. I sound like a one-man show.
You are, she thought. --Right, because we really should be advertising what is going on in here! Néstor, you're brilliant! The most clever-
--Pero ¿por qué dicés esto?-- Without seeing his face it was hard to tell whether he was joking or actually somewhat put off by her. --You’re in charge now and you can do what you want.-- His arm slid around her waist, scooping her up a little from the desk. –Anyway! Whoever's here ought to hear what you’re really like.
--This is not what I’m really like.--
--No?-- He ran his hands sloppily through the broom-straw of her hair. –I know you’re angry at me and I know you love it.
--Careful what you say to me, you,-- she breathed. –I could have you hauled back to jail for crimes against my administration. Whatever I want.-- What separated them from the other couples she knew was how, even in their moments of thrilling intimacy, they debated, their words battled like two senators. Her heartbeat quickened a little more than imperceptibly. She did, in fact, get strange pleasure from being angry at him. Even more pleasure from the fact that he knew that. Even more pleasure, still, from the sound and feel of the strings of their power tangling with their bodies.
His words, ragged like his breath. –Can’t do much now, Cristina, can you?-- He reached under her, running his hands along her front; her toes, unconsciously, curled. Her right shoe finally gave up and dropped off her foot, clattering onto the hardwood floor. He whispered her name, whispered it as though he held a diamond between his teeth. She relaxed a bit. He was right; in fact, there was nothing she could do now except continue praying no one would walk through the door. Still on her desk was a small framed painting of the Virgin she had received after her First Communion all those years ago. The Virgin’s skirt was streaked with real gold. She did not want to look at it, and closed her eyes. The few lamps that were on in the room bleached the edges of her darkness, though, and from the direction of the grand chair he snuffled as he pushed further inside her. She opened her eyes again. Her hands flailed once more, and she tried hard not to disturb the Virgin. She couldn’t think of anything more ominous than sending her and her gold-streaked skirt flying to the ground.
They had been through much together, him and her, from the very mundane (memories of friends teasing her, long ago, asking why such a beautiful young woman was in awe of a man whose nose looked like Cerro Aconcagua) to the terrifying (protests stormed by the military, his pale, gaunt face that lasted for months after the stint in prison). She had hoped that tonight, of all nights, they could present the unified front that got them through so many of their adversities. She didn’t want to struggle tonight. She wanted to celebrate herself and how fantastically she had achieved the highest office in the nation. She was not interested in a battle without a winner, and if there was a winner, it had better not be him--
He certainly hadn’t asked what she was interested in, though. From behind, the noises came and crescendoed to a peak, the noises that a gangly man with eyes like a puppet and mismatched socks and suit-jacket buttons makes while in moments of undignified ecstasy. He seemed the very anti-hero of eroticism and normally she found that attractive, a nice syncopation to her carefully matched outfits and armed combats against grey hairs. Tonight she closed her eyes once more against his spasmodic thrusts and succumbed to the way the lamplight left small white spots dancing before her.
He collapsed noisily into the chair. She stood up, noting the red mark that being pressed into the desk had left just above her hips. Not looking at him, she put herself back together again. Underwear, ripped tights, right shoe, skirt. She buttoned up her shirt and ran her fingers through her hair. On legs that wanted a shower, she walked through the room and, finally, switched off the remaining lights.
The moon was gone, disappeared somewhere behind the luxury condos. Enough light came in from the plaza and the construction sites that she could see him splayed in the chair, somewhat deflated but still grinning. She picked up the picture frames. A small crack had appeared over her son’s birthday cake. She combed her bangs carefully into place with a finger and sat on the desk in front of him, ankles crossed the way the nuns had always instructed her to do.
--You are perfect,-- he said. His pink shirt was dotted with sweat and horrendously wrinkled.
--You look like a bird.-- She narrowed her eyes. –A dumb pervert of a bird.-- The shirt was too tight at the shoulders and too loose around the torso. A triangle with a mountain for a nose and a puppet’s eyes.
–I can’t wait to see what you’re going to do with all this.-- He gestured at the wide windows, at the empty brightness of the city’s night.
--I’ll do it better than you did.-- She nudged his leg with her shoe.
--Cristina, Cristina.-- He propped his feet up on the desk as before, his legs surrounding her. He sighed like a man finally on vacation. --I love to see a woman in power. None of this Isabel Perón shit, a woman who the people wanted.
A small thermometer rested against the window where she had stood before. Even in the darkened room, she could see the red line dancing just above zero degrees, Celsius. Not quite freezing, yet, but close enough, close enough. She imagined the stars she could not see, hanging high over the city and the smog, gleaming white in the cold air like a set of teeth.
Author:
pouletinbondage, babyFandom: I have no fandom. My OTP drifts alone in a sea of Obama/Rahm Emanuel slashfic :(
Pairing: Los K
Word Count: 3,473
Rating: Umm? Soft R, cause I couldn't bring myself to make it super-explicit?
Disclaimer: This is fiction! Duh!
Summary: On an important night, power disturbs, disgust and love become the same. Bonus: adults sad about aging & flagrant abuse of a very antique chair! The ex president does weird things with tights! READ ON
Notes: Guys I am MORTIFIED. Also, I have nowhere at all to post this; I have proven to be weirder than the internet! Don't be thrown off by my peculiar indications of dialogue & occasional usages of castellano!
--Stand there,-- he said.
She stood.
--Uy, you look even better behind that desk than I thought you would.-- He shuffled to the right, to the left, squinted. –Yup. You should be in a painting.-- He squinted again. –I think you should start wearing your hair like that every day.
--I already do,-- she said, still standing. With half the lights turned off, shadows had appeared in unexpected places throughout the room. She felt as though she stood backstage, like the last person to leave the theater at night, or the first to enter. Somewhere around her there ought to be scenery half-constructed or sweaty costumes discarded in a pile. She turned her back to him deliberately, walked to the window and thrust open the heavy blue curtains.
--I was still looking at you,-- came a protesting voice from behind her.
--Leave me alone, you’ve had years to look at me.-- She said this with her face pressed so close to the windowpane she sounded underwater. The glass was cold. She recalled the headline on one of this morning’s papers. It was expected to go below 0° tonight.
--And so?
She sighed, pressed further into the glass. –Just shut your mouth. This city is mine now. I want to look at it.
His presence behind her, then his side against hers and his arm around her waist. –It’s beautiful, isn’t it.
--I’ve looked out this window almost every day.
--And you don’t think it looks different now that it’s yours?
She turned, tilted her head upward to look at him. His shoulders, the ski-slope of his nose, his eyes that seemed disconcertingly full of mirth: His entire body was an enormous campaign ad patronizingly proclaiming, ¡Amorcita! Together we can do nothing wrong! on the side of every colectivo in the country.
--No,-- she said. Two guards met in the middle of the plaza outside. They looked up at the lighted window and gestured wildly at her figure. One of them waved. –The city is the same as always, except I can’t see the river anymore because they’ve built all those fucking condos.-- Now the other guard was waving. –Would you turn off the lights?
He refused to move. –But do you feel different looking at it?
--Yes.
--How?
Being infuriated with him always seemed to raise her body temperature. The window, the cold, were consoling. –Well…It’s mine now, more than ever?
--And?
She pulled away from him, stomped the foot she’d hurt stepping out of the helicopter earlier. –Uy, what kind of husband are you…?
--One who thinks you look beautiful like this, standing in front of your city.
She turned her head so that their faces nearly touched. She wanted both to kiss him while running her fingers through his thinning grey hair and to spit her frustration at him in the most eloquent way possible. However, she had been eloquent all day and it was tiring, the way mornings after mornings with her foundation and eyeliner were tiring, the way her excitement at their mutual love for her growing power was tiring.
--Stop fucking with me and turn off the lights.
Little spots of red crept up his cheekbones. He reached out and pulled the blue curtains closed.
--Oh, that’s how you’re going to be?-- She opened the curtains again.
He sighed. –Well, you’re in charge now.-- He turned, kicked his shoes off. –Mind if I sit in your chair?
Once he’d plopped himself down in the grand chair and propped his feet on the desk (his socks were mismatched again—this was something the starved newspapers would kill to know), she turned back to the window, to the plaza that was, thankfully, momentarily free of guards, and to the offending buildings piled with cranes that blinked red lights brighter than stars. She was aware that he was studying her carefully. Years and years of marriage had trained her to feel his stares.
Sure enough. –I love that skirt on you.
--I hate it.
--Why?
--It’s too tight.
--Well, I don't mind.
She knew his eyes were following along the outline of her body, down to the fabric straining vaguely at the back of her skirt. She focused intensely on the plaza; it was so cold outside, though, that there was nothing to see except modernity towering in front of the sky. No ambulances careened by, no late-night high-heels clacked skittishly across the distant sidewalk. No sound at all, really, except--In the midst of all this she (God help me, I'll kill him) heard the exclamation of something unzipping.
--Oh, please,--she said, refusing to turn around. –Not now.
--But you’ve never minded before.
--This was your office then.-- Buildings so high it was no longer possible to see the river from the room. Boats could be slogging through the river and she would never know.
--And so?
She turned again, always turning back and forth tonight, and rolled her eyes to find him sitting with a hand out of sight and his eyes bulging hugely like a perverted marionette.
--You're disgusting me right now.
He smirked at her, one-handedly.
She sighed. --Okay. Okay. I’m done with you. Do whatever you want to yourself.-- She walked over to the desk and began rearranging things. The family pictures, the paperweights. The things that belonged to them both.
She felt him fumbling behind her—then, suddenly, he began to slowly pull her down, hands wrapped tightly around her waist. She acquiesced and nestled into his lap.
--I’m going to miss this chair.-- He reached around to stroke the top of her head and clumsily tuck some of her hair back from her forehead. His elbow encircled her face; this made her feel like she was a participant in a wrestling match, a wrestling match with spectators that made no sound, and she was losing. She pushed his arm away roughly, shifted on his lap to watch his eyes flutter a little. He was always so unabashedly aroused by her and tonight this felt incongruously patronizing.
--Can we turn off the lights now?
He unbuttoned the top button of her shirt in response. His large crablike hands skittered warm against her skin, which was still cool from her time at the window. Then the second button, then the third and fourth. Hands now pressing flat against her stomach. –It is still so strange to me that the kids came from in here.-- His sentimentality was discomfiting, hardly sentimental. The fifth button. –They’re old now.-- The sixth. –Uy, Cristina. I think I’m also old now.-- The sev-
-and she jumped up and off and hopped onto the tremendous desk, the damned skirt riding up her legs, her right shoe dangling off her foot. –If you are going to put me in a compromising position then— she slammed her fist hard upon the smooth wooden surface –I want the lights off. Look at me. If someone were to come in—no, look at me—to come in here, see in the window, you know who they would criticize. Of course you do.
Wide eyes staring up at her.
--You think I don’t get it, do you? Hmm? I know how you feel about your last day in here. That now you have to hand it all over to me. A bit sad it’s not going to be me bending over this desk for you anymore?
His face fell, eyes narrowed just a bit. –Not at all. Presidenta.
Her grin was big and wide, a relief to jaw muscles tired from talking into cameras all day. –-I don’t believe you.-- She leaned over, breathing into his face. --Mi ex-presidente.
At first she wasn’t sure what had happened. One second his unblinking brown eyes were all she could see, and then the next second, a flash of desk wood and then the opposite wall. Her stomach pressing hard into the flat surface, his weight shifting behind her. Suit-pants wool against her legs.
--But Cristina,-- he whispered, ignoring the discomfort that was whispering with the lights on, --this is the only way it works.
--Uy! You-- Her protest was half-hearted. Of course attraction pounded hot through her just as it had all those years ago when she noticed how passionately he wrote for the university socialist party’s newsletter. But tonight-the symbolism of it was-and with the lights still on.
She lifted her body up from the desk, turned her head back to look at him. Strands of her hair fell over her eyes in a cascade of brown, blocking her view in such a way that all she could really see was a jagged image of his blue jacket with the mismatched buttons being tugged off his body. –Turn off the-!
He grabbed her wrists from behind and tugged them forward, pushing her back down to the desktop. His wedding ring danced over her left arm, sparking by in a streak of gold. –Lights on or off, what does it matter to you? I want to look at you.-- He pushed her skirt up and over her hips, letting it pool around her waist in a grey puddle of fabric. She felt his hands between her legs for a moment, and then, as he liked to do, rip a wide, neat hole right where the legs of her tights met. How many pairs of these have died because of his strange little habit? she found herself wondering. And what if someone were watching through the window? Ha! they’d say. So this is where the presidential salary goes! One of his fingers hooked around her underwear, a shade of purple she had specifically picked because it went well with her blue shirt, to pull it aside, and she laughed aloud. Time to give the president a salary cut! Her laughter turned to coughing as the full weight of his body thrust her sharply against the desk. And again. And again. She stopped laughing.
--Here’s to four more years of this!-- he puffed merrily.
She combed her hair out of her eyes with one hand. Directly in her line of vision stood the door, shut but not locked. Even at this hour, there were people in the building, always people in the building. If someone were to walk in, they’d see her with her shirt seven-eighths unbuttoned and her hair flying around like straws from a broken broom, and they would—What would they do?
--Cristina, Cristina, he monologued from behind her. –Presidenta de mi corazón. You look the same from this angle as you always have.
--Fuck you, okay?—she gasped, finding it difficult to talk with her diaphragm squashed as it was against the desk. –Flip me around so I can at least see your face-
Instead, he placed his hand over her mouth. The sensation of his fingers against her lips distracted her. His hands had always been an intriguing combination of smooth and firm, the hands of someone who preferred to toil with pen and paper and schemes but had not forgotten that he was a country boy, from a brown city in the mining provinces, at heart. She remembered fondly the first time she realized this about his hands, years and years ago when they released him after a month spent in prison for leading protests against Videla's regime. They let him out of the dank cell and he ran his hands over her face for what seemed like a blissful eternity (Cristina, Cristina. I thought they were going to let me die in this shithole). She had been pregnant with their son at the time, the bulk of carrying a child beginning to look odd on her small frame. His hands had felt like clean cotton sheets against her skin. On this half-lamplit night, they still felt that way. She bit his palm in anger.
--I thought you liked when I did that,-- he puffed again. He had once been indefatigable, keeping her up for hour after exhaustingly satisfying hour, always wanting more the way she thought men couldn't. Maybe he is actually getting old, she thought. She bit him again, with no result. Of course, sometimes he liked when she became violent.
--I'd feel a little differently if we were at home.-- His hand made her sound idiotic, her muffled, dominated words a mockery of anything she'd ever said.
He had no response, but he removed his hand from her mouth. Outside the moon began to rise, an otherwordly orange that reached out from the hidden horizon like tentacles. He accelerated his rhythm, and her hands shot out from under her and flailed at things wildly to steady herself. Accidentally, her left hand sent a picture frame flying to the ground: Their son on his sixth birthday, already wide-eyed like his father, mystified by the candle in his cake. Her right hand displaced two more: A picture his sister had taken of the two of them right after he had spent the month in prison, his hands protectively on her stomach and his lips buried in her hair, her beaming at the camera, a rare smile in the paralyzing days of the last dictatorship. Their daughter and son and a cousin, laughing in a heap of snow outside their home in the country. She flung her hands into the vacated spaces and hung onto the edges of the desk, her body forming a shape like--she couldn't keep the thought from her head--a pornographic imitation of Jesus.
--You’re so quiet,-- he panted. –-Make some noise. I sound like a one-man show.
You are, she thought. --Right, because we really should be advertising what is going on in here! Néstor, you're brilliant! The most clever-
--Pero ¿por qué dicés esto?-- Without seeing his face it was hard to tell whether he was joking or actually somewhat put off by her. --You’re in charge now and you can do what you want.-- His arm slid around her waist, scooping her up a little from the desk. –Anyway! Whoever's here ought to hear what you’re really like.
--This is not what I’m really like.--
--No?-- He ran his hands sloppily through the broom-straw of her hair. –I know you’re angry at me and I know you love it.
--Careful what you say to me, you,-- she breathed. –I could have you hauled back to jail for crimes against my administration. Whatever I want.-- What separated them from the other couples she knew was how, even in their moments of thrilling intimacy, they debated, their words battled like two senators. Her heartbeat quickened a little more than imperceptibly. She did, in fact, get strange pleasure from being angry at him. Even more pleasure from the fact that he knew that. Even more pleasure, still, from the sound and feel of the strings of their power tangling with their bodies.
His words, ragged like his breath. –Can’t do much now, Cristina, can you?-- He reached under her, running his hands along her front; her toes, unconsciously, curled. Her right shoe finally gave up and dropped off her foot, clattering onto the hardwood floor. He whispered her name, whispered it as though he held a diamond between his teeth. She relaxed a bit. He was right; in fact, there was nothing she could do now except continue praying no one would walk through the door. Still on her desk was a small framed painting of the Virgin she had received after her First Communion all those years ago. The Virgin’s skirt was streaked with real gold. She did not want to look at it, and closed her eyes. The few lamps that were on in the room bleached the edges of her darkness, though, and from the direction of the grand chair he snuffled as he pushed further inside her. She opened her eyes again. Her hands flailed once more, and she tried hard not to disturb the Virgin. She couldn’t think of anything more ominous than sending her and her gold-streaked skirt flying to the ground.
They had been through much together, him and her, from the very mundane (memories of friends teasing her, long ago, asking why such a beautiful young woman was in awe of a man whose nose looked like Cerro Aconcagua) to the terrifying (protests stormed by the military, his pale, gaunt face that lasted for months after the stint in prison). She had hoped that tonight, of all nights, they could present the unified front that got them through so many of their adversities. She didn’t want to struggle tonight. She wanted to celebrate herself and how fantastically she had achieved the highest office in the nation. She was not interested in a battle without a winner, and if there was a winner, it had better not be him--
He certainly hadn’t asked what she was interested in, though. From behind, the noises came and crescendoed to a peak, the noises that a gangly man with eyes like a puppet and mismatched socks and suit-jacket buttons makes while in moments of undignified ecstasy. He seemed the very anti-hero of eroticism and normally she found that attractive, a nice syncopation to her carefully matched outfits and armed combats against grey hairs. Tonight she closed her eyes once more against his spasmodic thrusts and succumbed to the way the lamplight left small white spots dancing before her.
He collapsed noisily into the chair. She stood up, noting the red mark that being pressed into the desk had left just above her hips. Not looking at him, she put herself back together again. Underwear, ripped tights, right shoe, skirt. She buttoned up her shirt and ran her fingers through her hair. On legs that wanted a shower, she walked through the room and, finally, switched off the remaining lights.
The moon was gone, disappeared somewhere behind the luxury condos. Enough light came in from the plaza and the construction sites that she could see him splayed in the chair, somewhat deflated but still grinning. She picked up the picture frames. A small crack had appeared over her son’s birthday cake. She combed her bangs carefully into place with a finger and sat on the desk in front of him, ankles crossed the way the nuns had always instructed her to do.
--You are perfect,-- he said. His pink shirt was dotted with sweat and horrendously wrinkled.
--You look like a bird.-- She narrowed her eyes. –A dumb pervert of a bird.-- The shirt was too tight at the shoulders and too loose around the torso. A triangle with a mountain for a nose and a puppet’s eyes.
–I can’t wait to see what you’re going to do with all this.-- He gestured at the wide windows, at the empty brightness of the city’s night.
--I’ll do it better than you did.-- She nudged his leg with her shoe.
--Cristina, Cristina.-- He propped his feet up on the desk as before, his legs surrounding her. He sighed like a man finally on vacation. --I love to see a woman in power. None of this Isabel Perón shit, a woman who the people wanted.
A small thermometer rested against the window where she had stood before. Even in the darkened room, she could see the red line dancing just above zero degrees, Celsius. Not quite freezing, yet, but close enough, close enough. She imagined the stars she could not see, hanging high over the city and the smog, gleaming white in the cold air like a set of teeth.
