Translator: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Since I was very young I have been waiting for a man.
One could run up at any time, I had to be prepared.
I've never had one that I can properly call my own.
Well, you know.
I've seen them though, since childhood.
Their shoulders were broader spatula-shaped,
the chest was flat and some were amazingly covered with hairs.
Everywhere.
More hair than a doormat.
But this did not worry me, it was fine.
I had teddy bears, I was used to it.
In fact, I always wanted to have one since childhood.
A man, not a bear.
I had a brother, yes, younger than me.
But that was not the same; not at all.
For starters he was not mine, he was from mum,
and I did not like him much, ate with his mouth open, like the horse of Alexander the Great.
Besides spitting and killing birds, he belched.
With such an example it almost surprises me that I like men.
Luckily they change as they grow diametrically and don't do these horrid things any more.
That's right, isn't it?
So I want one.
Dad was also one, that was not mine.
Nor was he from mum.
(Laughter)
The sad thing, I can now say without it affecting me,
is that I think dad never liked me.
He never found me pretty, ha, he even found me ugly.
In fact, he never found me.
I was invisible to him, transparent, like sugar-free jelly everyone finds insipid.
Insipid little thing!
That's how I must have seemed to him.
And I do not understand why, I did everything I was ordered, the most awful things:
setting the table, clearing the table, washing dishes, dry the dishes, putting away the dishes, setting the table,
sitting with my legs crossed and not scratching in public, not stretching in public, not yawning in public,
not speaking in public, sitting with my legs crossed, I kept my elbows off the table,
I asked permission to retire, permission to stay, permission to ask permission, I sat with my legs crossed!
My brother did not.
While I was sweeping a territory equivalent to Patagonia, he played football.
Obviously there was some way that we differed and I decided to find out.
After much spying, I followed him to the bathroom.
Behold, I understood everything.
He urinated standing just like Dad. Ha, ha, what a relief!
If this wasn't just the thing I was disposed to learning quickly.
I faced the toilet with a great faith in myself,
I spread my legs and prepared to send forth with distinction and elegance a bright jet.
That failure marked my life.
The bathroom looked a jacuzzi and I a survivor of the Titanic.
I realized two things: why I should sit with my legs crossed
and why dad so loved my brother.
He was such a shot.
I decided to imitate him, not his tricks at the urinal, of course,
but I learned to play football, to torture lizards and to swear.
In the end, I could distinguished between a Ferrari and a Volkswagen beetle without any difficulty whatsoever,
I presented myself to my dad, sure of victory, with a dirty face, broken knees
and spitting with incomparable style to the side.
But obviously not well enough to attract his attention.
Dad wanted a little woman. Give him a little woman!
I dedicated myself to growing. During the day I spent entire hours tirelessly growing
like leavened bread. After a furious effort ...
(Groan) Puff! Two, four, three inches.
Ha, ha, ha, another effort concentrating on Sofia Loren. Here they come, here they come.
A succulent pair of breasts.
(Groan) Puff! Well, a pair of cornstarch cookies. Ha, ha, ha. Not even an excuse for a bra.
But no matter, I tenaciously kept growing.
Suddenly: waist, long legs, hips, underarm hair, how horrible, I did not have that.
What was I thinking of? Sean Connery?
And not just under the arms.
Down below, in the hellish depths of my body, right where the lower extremities bifurcate.
That was remarkable, and made me think again
On that site that no one, ever, had made a comment or a expressed an opinion.
In fact, it was the portion of my being that caused me most concern.
I remember as a little girl I had just a vague idea of how it was shaped.
I knew I had a little hole for peeing, another little hole for pooping,
and another that was good for absolutely nothing.
Sexual education classes did not contribute much to clarify the picture.
Scrotum, urethra, glans, gonad, vulva, pubis, pituitary gland, coitus.
No, no, it wasn't Aramaic.
It was the dictionary of horrors revised and corrected by the mad monk.
Finally, after a blitz of drawings, transverse planes and diagrams in black and white
I understood shocked how and where children come out of their mothers.
At this site without a pronounceable name.
Incredible! Like, what fool did the design.
What I did not yet have completely clear was how they entered.
My biology teacher, for his part, gave us an extensive explanation of the mating of toads.
And they have some very strange habits.
The male is smaller, mounts the female and puts its forelegs under her armpits.
And rubs. So.
So that was the rite of insemination.
I looked around at my classmates terrified and thought:
the first to put his hand in my armpits will get a broken jaw from my fist.
Finally one day I discovered sex.
To begin with, mine and its mysterious consequences.
As my cornstarch cookies began to make themselves increasingly visible
until the impudent male gaze indicated to me the imminence of a bra.
I could only buy two cloth patches.
Thirty-two triple A. I dreamed of a brassiere and I put on a pair of Woody Allen's glasses.
But I had had my oestrogen honours and I was almost a woman.
Being a woman.
No one had warned me how difficult the business was.
For those who would inform themselves of who aspires to such a post: a woman cannot,
being a woman is defined by "cannots",
sit alone in a park without the harassment of a chamber of horrors
of guys more ugly than the exchange deficit, emerge unscathed from a crowded bus,
be president of the Costa Rican soccer federation, or at that time, far from my childhood,
graduate as a doctor of urology or swear.
It is curious this about bad words,
its goal is to insult, to harass, to offend and to humiliate the enemy or opponent.
But, why: son of a bitch?
Well, you know what I mean: son of a whore.
And then why is only the mother insulted?
Why does nobody say,
your dad is a vicious, promiscuous, aberrant, gigolo, whore-monger and lippy pimp of 12th Street?
Why?
The reason is simple. Nobody cares if you insult the father. They assume that you're right.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
They look at you with indifference and say: "Yes, what's unusual about that? What's yours? A missionary?
But on the other hand, the mother, the mother is sacred.
A life-size replica of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
So without knowing her, treating her like a whore raises more hackles than a brick in the head.
Bad words taught me something very important.
Sex, or rather, the free exercise of sexuality, occasioned consequences
which were very different depending on whether you were a lady or a gentleman.
A woman who lost her virginity before paying a visit to an office of the Holy See
ipso facto became a vamp, meddler, soap-seller, bitch, lost, prostitute,
chick, whore, hooker, hetaera, cat, dog, fox, licentious, cougar, floozy, streetwalker,
woman gone astray, woman of easy virtue, or woman of the streets.
(Applause)
A woman of the streets, of course, has nothing to do with a man about town.
The man on the other hand is a Don Juan, a Casanova, a Valentino,
conqueror, seducer, matador, whipper, playboy, Latin lover, jungle fever.
From all this I got one thing clear:
the honour of a woman was to be found in one very specific place in her anatomy,
by a cruel joke, Catholic and apostolic in nature.
And to lose it was more serious than losing your passport in a coup in Uganda.
(Laughter)
(Applause)