A reflection on the womanhood of Victorino Valentino

‘I guess you can say I’m half saint, half whore.’ Victorino says Diane Keaton’ lines breathlessly

like his own, pursing his lips to draw attention at the ruby-red smile painted into perfection

at the same brand of mirror that pushes  so many to spackle and cover the smallest parts

of themselves, to smoke their eyelids  with blue dust until they are reminded of the sea.

But Victorino wears shades to cover his eyes, because they are red and dry with insomnia

and booze from a midnight adventure, from a love affair with the cocktail of lust and desire,

that thrill of discovering an invisible part of him—the most alluring—sleek as a cat, feline as that silhouette roaming from streetlamps to the dark corners of every road, darker than a rat or the night.

The other person’s words are muffled and genderless, their profile a big blob blending with the Parisian background, undeniably chic and coloured like an abstract oil painting, their departure as unremarkable and subtle as the line between love and jealousy. While Victorino himself wants to become as elegant

as the women in metro station ads, who’ve first inspired him to strut in his mother’s high heels, as they pronounce one sexy word forever, he spits words like a man paralysed at the thought of commitment; Victorino likes to blame his father’s blandness and imperfections, his father who watches TV with the blinds down low, the place featureless and cold, as if summer never tumbled the world to warmth and light, readily taking the identities of fictional characters, pantomiming love and death through leaning forward or slumping back onto his sofa, his eyes gleaming for the love of a blue-skinned alien that wore

a red suit so tight it made her beautiful and dangerous, more desirable than his wife’s beehive. To

feel wanted is to be loved the same way the flowers by the fountain attract bees with their colours,

and nothing but the honking of a metro train pushes himself back to becoming who he is again,

alone, in a disgusting, dimly-lit metro station waiting for a line to get back home, his breath

reeking of booze and smoke.

Reaching the summit of Garbage Mountain V2

Copper-skinned children in tattered clothes, drenched in grease and scum, gather around the base of the highest heap of trash. They cheer for equally squalid individuals, who race under the heat, their hair, eyebrows and clothes covered in thick sweat, for the summit of the perpetually changing mountain.

Each step reveals a new texture: the carcass of a cat, a stack of magazines. They’re careful not to stick their feet into traps disguised as plastic containers and tin cans.

A side of the mountain crumbles. Garbage rattles as substances collide, burying someone–both a casualty and an eliminated opponent. Liquids and smog spew from the new pile of rubbish like fountains. The race goes on.

Tropical sunlight pierces leaden clouds bulging with rain, entrenching into the heap of trash covered in grime and detritus like brass prison bars. Metals glint through the monochromatic wasteland in the prismatic hues of a diamond.

Only two are left. They haste, while assessing, through their acute perception of the physics of the place, every step and everything they grasp. They remain unscathed, observant of glass shards and slabs of wood on which nails are pointed.

The crowd cheers, among them the eliminated. The remaining two are neck-to-neck on opposite sides. One group argues how the other side is less steep, and the other argues the same. They hoot, chant and shake bottles with sand as makeshift maracas.

When the winner, a black-haired girl covered in lice and maggots, reaches the summit, voices are raised; fists are out; these are habitual actions which define the race as a competition. The girl raises her hand toward the setting sun, as the mountain surreptitiously clings around her feet, eventually devouring her.