An extract from Yuliana Ortiz Ruano’s essay ‘The ages of pleasure–or, a childhood by the sea’, translated from Spanish by Madeleine Arenivar.
Photo of Yuliana Ortiz Ruano
To think about the sea’s edge, I have to consider seriously the question of pleasure. My thoughts bring me right back to my childhood, which is still, for me, the age of imperceptible joys. In the house where I spent my first years there was a guava tree, a chirimoya tree, and an innumerable quantity of vegetal beings imposing their presence on the yard. But the guava and chirimoya trees were the gods of that earthy-green kingdom. My body was drawn towards them with a force such that sometimes, I didn’t know who was climbing whom. Sometimes I dreamed myself as a tree, and I watched as from my hands, from my fingers, from my hair, the guavas showered down, singing, like moons full of pale worms that still I devoured, urgently.
Those trees were my other selves, I thought. Their trunks a shiny mahogany, sometimes tinged with green. Sometimes they were peopled with ants; other times, as their leaves drifted down to the earth, I would cry out from my post by the back door that opened onto the yard. I thought, each leaf that falls is a lock of hair, like the ones I yank out when I untangle my hair in the shower. I used to collect the fallen leaves and bury them in the same secret hole where I buried my bits of hair: together, the bundles of hair and leaves formed one self, greener and disintegrating.
I spent endless hours up in those branches, talking to myself. The trees responded to me by flaking off their skins onto my body, or onto the ground. A whole unfurling of encounters between the earth around the trees, my own thin, almost vegetal body, and the other undergrowth. Sometimes I wanted to stretch myself out to embrace both trees against my chest. I stretched with such force, opening arms and legs, trying to expand myself to bring them to me. The pain after this ritual of trying to make myself one with them was another beautiful encounter with pleasure. Crab-walking around until my legs once again regained their natural placement.
When I speak about pleasure, I return to my childhood. To those first encounters, non-innocent explorations of my body in relationship to other living bodies around me, including those object-bodies that to me were so present already that a breath or pulse would have made an unnecessary racket. These things were born and lived between my eye and my tongue. My tongue inhabited these things, cleaved to them in order to recognize them, to know their existence. Childhood is the world’s extravagant touch and that extravagant touch is: the eye touching the water, the water examining the iris closely; the iris tormented by the salt entering it; the dirt penetrating the crannies between my nails and my skin, making its permanent home in my cavities and hollows. The wormy fruit peopling the inside of my throat; the slug’s invertebrate body gliding damply between my fingers; my fingers spasming softly at its dampness; a red worm the color of an open tamarillo fruit digging a hole in the top of a leaf, my nose breathing in the sound of the insect. The sound of a young coconut opening to the dry thwack of a machete, pouring out its liquid like a woman’s water breaking; the transparent skin that detaches from the inside of the coconut, little by little clinging to the roof of the mouth.