Rita Indiana
Asmodeo
Translated from the Spanish by Achy Obejas
MONDAY
Rings of mold covered the edges of the mirror; the humidity had also destroyed the poster from his last concert, in the Santa Ana cave back in 1986. It was originally red and stuck to the wall next to the dresser with pieces of tape he’d torn off with his fingers. His face—eyes outlined in black paint, the chiseled angles of his jaw, and a dog collar encircling his neck—seemed ghostly on paper. There was something different in the reflection: a man with no pants wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and holding a dead sardine in his hand.
The two women who’d come with him were laughing it up. They were too skinny for his taste, with badly dyed hair and crooked teeth, two sluts he wouldn’t have even glanced at ten years before. Their laughter was high-pitched and scratched the air. It was witch laughter. Surely they had something to do with his sudden impotence; they’d worked a spell on him, fed him placenta, snuck a pubic hair in his soursop.
One of them laid out a line of coke on the dresser; the mirror reflected her true mien: the peaks of her tits, raw nipples covered in green warts. The other slut dared to pluck one of the guitars he had all over the apartment out of its case. She slowly strummed the beginning of “Stairway to Heaven” and gazed at him with a smile, revealing teeth too big for her mouth. It was obvious she was making fun of him, of his faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt, of the uselessness of his penis. He tried to snatch the guitar from her, but the witch spun him around, gripping the instrument until they both let go and it went crashing against the wall.
As they screamed insults at him, he reconsidered his theories. Maybe they weren’t witches, maybe they were possessed by witches. Maybe the witches were outside, peering through the window, he thought, and they’d made him see these girls as witches. Maybe his eyes were bewitched, just like his dick.
He walked to the living room. There, in a rattan bookcase, were his books, his vinyl, his cassettes, and the only five VHS tapes he owned: a documentary on The Doors, Teorema by Pasolini, Night of the Living Dead, The Shining, and a porn flick. He put on the porn. He felt the heat in his abdomen that preceded an erection, but his penis still drooped like a wet sock. He turned off the TV without shedding a tear, thinking this was worse than cancer, worse than losing an arm. He was cold. He wanted to die. He sat on the couch with his head in his hands, smushing his balls, which were spreading like water and taking up all available space under his ass cheeks. The body that had served him for decades, that had been beautiful and survived all kinds of horrors, was succumbing to the only witchcraft without an antidote: the passage of time.
Daylight came in through the window off the balcony. The cocaine’s effects vanished as well as any sense of cohesion. Cocaine confused things, created a complete amnesia in which he believed himself to be one with his mount, one with the body just starting to lose its functionality. The right dosage let him believe he was human, possessed of a navel, born of a woman. A ball of cocaine was the cure for the immeasurable annoyance of eternity. The sun warmed his legs, spent from the nightly hustle and bustle. He wanted water and so he drank, he wanted to pee and so he did, he wanted to take a shower, but his host was defiant, so he lay down on the couch again. Without coke, Rudy Caraquita, the true master of that body, regained his will and Asmodeo, the demon inside him, once again had only the power that obsessions, whispers, and memories have over their hosts.
At other times, Asmodeo would have conjured a mental image of a shower, reminding Rudy of the relief cold water could bring to his body in similar situations. This way, he would have whetted his appetite, convinced him to have breakfast, two or three cups of coffee, to repair himself, to prepare himself, to go out in late afternoon to look for another gram. But Rudy took longer and longer to recover and, during those long hangovers, he insisted on the unpleasant habit of thinking about his past, about sad things: the betrayals, the bad decisions, the six years without composing.
Inside his host, Asmodeo could not avoid his trip down memory lane: If he were a tormentor, he thought, he would have his work cut out for him. He found it comical how spontaneously his mount’s mind galloped through all his mistakes. The Church had made hay out of this human tendency. It was also, and Asmodeo loved it, a kind of intoxication.
The sun’s arrival would bring on a great migraine that would immobilize Rudy for the rest of the day and make him vomit into a plastic punch bowl next to the couch. He had no lovers or friends left who wanted to come to his rescue, to make him chicken soup, to bring him ice water. Asmodeo calculated the time the hangover would let him be absent; abandoning his host meant the risk of losing him, of other entities taking his place. But who would want to ride this piece of shit?
Like an anchor that tears away at coral when it’s raised, the demon’s exit made Rudy vomit a yellow slime with a black center into the punch bowl.
Outside Rudy and dissolved into nothingness, Asmodeo was a headless cloud of thoughts. In that state, writing his name with gunpowder might force him to live in a cauldron, serving human interests, forced to tie up lovers, drive enemies mad, make rivals sick due to land disputes, cast spells that could unravel him like a spool of thread in the wind. To avoid these outcomes, he’d established safe routes, pierced by his coming and going toward the refuge of another body that received him in exchange for favors. But his precautions weren’t necessary. He’d been called.
Rita Indiana is a composer and writer. Tentacle was the first Spanish-language novel to win the Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers.
Achy Obejas is a translator and the author of the forthcoming The Boy Kingdom/El reino de los varones, a bilingual poetry collection.