Perreando, the Failure to Mother

When a kitten is killed in her courtyard, Katya learns intimately why, in Mexico, having many sexual partners is called ‘dogging’.

“You have fifteen minutes,” Katya says, briskly running her palm over the leg of her sleeping lover. “And then I’m going to yoga.”

“Mm?” he opens one eye and looks at her.

“Quinze minutos,” she says sharply, tapping her wrist. He grabs it where she had tapped, and pulls her back into bed. “No,” she says. He pulls up her t-shirt and suckles her breast, then tugs her shorts down and flips her over, pushing his hard, naked cock into her. They’ve been using condoms all afternoon, but this surprise assault takes her off guard, and she holds off from scolding, just for a few seconds, because it feels good.

Then, “NO!” for real, forcefully pushing him off, rearranging her outfit, grabbing her phone, opening the translation programme, typing something in, and waiting while the thing thinks its way through the coastal internet.

“Travieso!” She shouts up the answer as soon as it loads, from the glowing screen. He grins back, caught.

*

The saw buzzing, the hammer hammering. The other hammer also hammering.

*

After yoga, Katya goes over to Tomas and Belinda’s apartment to hang out. Cannabis clouds make the room hazy. Another friend is there, Rafael. He has a big energy, his big, hairy body swinging from the hammock in the middle of the room, taking up more space than seems visually right. Katya likes how warm he is, physically, the heat comes off of his body in waves that Katya’s body laps up, and his blatant attention to her is flattering.

“Damn, Katya. Look at your gorgeous, long legs!”

“Thanks,” she says politely, accepting the compliment with reserve, her eyes twinkling. Neither pushing him away, nor responding in kind, she plays with the elasticity of the edge of the attraction, ensuring that she is always at the furthest point away from him, without breaking the connection. She can feel him responding to this.

Tomás has his eye on Katya too, but for a different reason.

“So you’re flirting with Rafael, now? I thought you had a boyfriend.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“You going to tell that to Miguel?”

*

In Mexican Spanish the word for sleeping around is “perreo” — literally, dogging. Katya knew it because, after her lover had left, she had strutted around so proudly that Tomas had teased her about her new “boyfriend”.

“I don’t have a ‘boyfriend’,” she said. “Maybe I want to have lots of men.”

“Oooh,” Tomas sang at her, jeeringly. “You’re a perrea now, is that it?”

“So what if I am? Is that bad?”

“No,” he had said, growing serious. “It’s bad ass.”

*

Before bed, next to the darkly glowing pink Guadalupe candle, Katya is listening to an audiobook lecture about how, sometimes, years of gynaecological and menstrual problems clear up after a woman does a ritual to let go of the soul of a baby she has aborted.

It freaks her out. Her worry disks start spinning, language racing in her mind.

What if we made a baby today, she thinks, what if I am pregnant, what if some of his sperm got up there at the end, just before he left, what if there is a soul trying to get in?

She gets on her knees and bows her head into the mattress and presses her forehead into it, at the foot of the bed. Dear God, she whispers, dear Mother Earth dear Universe dear angels, please please let the soul know, if there is one there waiting to come, that I can’t help it at this time, please please please God, please, angels and Mother Earth, please —

*

The next morning, to the high trilling of birds, Katya awakes from a dream in which she receives a message from her mother that there was blood, and that the baby could not be saved.

Thank you Mother Earth thank you God thank you Universe thank you Spirit

*

The kitten’s weirdly tiny body somehow props up its head, which seems gargantuan, attached by a thin neck, redolent of snake. A sliver of mothering instinct in Katya makes her reach out to grab the small thing, but the kitten is so new, or perhaps terrified, that it strains against her gentle hands, forcing her to feel strain and sinew, and to scramble to contain the flailing paws, so that the kitten will not fall from her hands to the ground.

Belinda, who doesn’t seem to have been phased by its scrawny, awkward struggles, is bent in half at Katya’s side, her face peering inquisitively into the mouth of the mewling kitten, furrowed with concern.

“Poor little thing! We found her on the side of the road. A neighbour said she had just been abandoned.”

“How did they know?”

“They saw someone jump out of a car, put her out on the street, and then drive off.” Katya clicks her teeth in a show of care, but really all she is willing to feel is the pressing weight of the imminent problem of who is going to feed and take care of it now that it is inside the gates of their building. It isn’t going to be me, that’s for sure, she thinks.

The dogs have followed Belinda upstairs, and are sniffing at the butt of the furry bundle that Katya is still trying to contain. Centi, the youngest, eagerly licks the stranger’s dangling back paw. Balam, the black pitbull mix, sniffs hungrily, with more intention. Katya eyes her suspiciously.

“I’m surprised the dogs are okay with her being here.”

“Why?”

“A lot of dogs will kill a cat given the chance. It’s their instinct.” She brings the kitten’s fuzzy skull to her lips and plants a small kiss, immediately wrinkling her nose.

“She smells pretty bad.”

“I wanted to give her a bath, but Tomas wouldn’t let me.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. He’s asleep now though.” Peering into the mirage of possibility opened up by Tomas’ mid-morning nap, Belinda turns back to Katya with resolve. “I’m going to wash her.” Grabbing the kitten around the middle and scooping it out of Katya’s grasp, Belinda folds away the limbs that still paw the air, and heads down the walkway.

Relieved, Katya goes inside her own apartment and shuts the door. People are so sentimental when they’re in love, she thinks. Let them play house with their fur baby, but who’s going to take care of it when they go out? Oh well, not my problem.

*

“I feel bad about it.”

“Why? Was the sex bad?”

“No, no. Not at all. I feel bad that I had a good time but that I maybe don’t want to see him again.”

“Why does that make you feel bad?”

“Because… women aren’t supposed to enjoy sex that way?”

“It’s true. It’s one of those deeply ingrained things. And I can tell you as much as you like how it’s okay and you shouldn’t feel bad, but by and large in society, women who like to fuck are whores, and men who like to fuck are just men.”

“It’s so annoying! On one level I totally know this and agree with you. And on another level I feel like I’m drowning in shame and badness.”

“Oh babe. I’m sorry.”

*

There is no one in the yard. No Tomas, no Belinda, no dogs, no kitten.

“I’m going to the beach,” Katya calls up the stairs.

“I want to come,” Belinda shouts from the window.

Katya hears a bustle through the screen and then Belinda is out of the door and hurrying along the walkway towards her, clutching the same fur bundle from before, except different. “I bathed her! In the sink.”

The kitten is still straining and clawing at the air, but now her fur is spiked with damp, stuck to its skin in places, giving it a scruffy perimeter. Belinda is holding her towards Katya, waiting for her to stroke it. It looks like a fur worm, Katya thinks, and then notices herself thinking it, and feels shame. I’m a woman, I’m supposed to be nurturing. Why don’t I feel any care for this helpless thing? Am I a bitch?

“Where is Tomas?”

“He’s sleeping.”

“Ok.”

Belinda puts the kitten down, onto the concrete, inside the gate. They walk out and Katya locks the gate.

*

They take an hour of sun in empty blue sky, interspersed with dips in crystalline Caribbean, but the air feels inexplicably heavy. Both women, feeling some strange discomfort, decide to head back to the apartment. Taking her towel from the sand and shaking it out, Katya turns and sees coming in, from the West, a deep, dark raincloud, the size of the entire horizon. She gasps.

“Jesus. Look at that.” It’s mushrooming at some speed, gathering a gigantic darkness. “It’s gonna throw it down,” she says, although it feels like something much worse than a storm.

They begin bobbing their way through the gelid cenote water that gushes between the shore and the paved road, moving slowly. As they reach the road, they see Tomas walking towards them. Belinda smiles and kisses him as if she hasn’t seen him in a week.

“There’s a storm coming,” Katya nods to the insane cloud.

“Yeah. I wanted to see if I can catch a swim before it hits.”

“Where is the kitten?”

“I left her outside.”

Katya immediately feels her gut shifting. “And the dogs?”

“The same.”

Katya eyes Belinda, who is lightly considering.

“Do you think it will be ok?” she asks Katya, in a way that says she is unwilling to consider the worst possibility.

“I’m sure it’s fine. Tomas has only just left.”

*

Katya unlocks the gate, and Belinda heads in first. The dogs greet them as always, but only Centi jumps up at their knees. There is less tumult than usual, less innocence.

Belinda looks at Katya with her eyebrows raised, unconcerned and puzzled at the same time.

Katya can feel it somewhere. She stays by the gate, scanning the ground. Belinda is already at the stairs.

It’s there, just a meter in front of her on the ground, a pale pink bubble, slightly damp. Katya knows what it is, but it takes her eyes some moments more to adjust to the white string that the bubble is attached to, a long, fat white string that winds around and around the bubble, making ever larger spirals, before trailing off towards the banana tree.

It takes some moments, but once her eyes have fully taken in the vision and assimilated it into meaning, Katya shrieks to Belinda, who is now at the top of the stairs.

“DON’T LOOK!”

She moves quickly towards the back of the courtyard, already blinded by tears, looking for something, she doesn’t know what. She finds it, an empty bucket, and takes it back to the bubble, holding it out in front of her to block the sight of it. She places it over top, leaving the horrible string trailing out from underneath the ridge of the bucket. The tiny, deflated bubble is out of view, but its tininess is now imprinted in her mind, the horror of the rubbery string searing itself into her brain.

The dogs have all been sitting, watching her responses in silence and stillness. Just as she is about to climb the stairs she whirls around and catches them, five pairs of eyes. Each pair curious, detached, a little nervous — except one. As she meets them, Balam’s eyes flash quick, like a snap of jaws. The kitten’s blood burns in a red ring around the black of her eyes.

“You!” Katya howls, pointing her finger. “What did you do! What did you DOOOOOOOO!” She shrieks at all of them, because maybe Balam started it, but they all did it, maybe even the littlest one, innocently, trying to learn, and the long last syllable of her cry becomes a hysterical wave of sobbing that pumps her lungs.

Belinda stands watching her, unsure of what to do, before finally deciding, “It was my fault.”

Katya stumbles up the stairs past her, along the walkway to her apartment, fumbling the keys through sheets of saltwater filling and emptying her eyes.

She goes blindly into her bathroom and turns on the shower, her sobs becoming tidal, convulsing her, the horror of the sad balloon string, its sad torture, its tiny absence of chances, flooding her lungs with grief. She wonders if the little thing had suffered, if they had taunted her, if they had drawn out their horrid game, and the sobs wrack her more deeply. She doubles over on the floor of the shower, kneeling in the water.

“Katya?” Belinda’s voice comes in through the window, afraid, and Katya suddenly realises the grief sounds she is making.

“I’m fine,” she calls back through choking sobs, “don’t worry Belinda, I’m okay,” her body still wracking but trying to quiet herself, redirecting the sound into her shoulders, which buck.

*

The next day, Katya’s lover texts. He wants to come over again. But she feels raw still, the death of the little creature all over her insides, and she turns him down.

That night, he goes to the hostel down the street from his house and finds another woman. Katya doesn’t know it, of course, but she feels it. When she reaches out to him with her heart, to feel whether she can feel him there in an energy, she feels the air turn icy, as if she had just opened the fridge topless.

Perreando.

The next day, she writes to her landlady to start an argument about the rent.

*

The soul of the baby we made jumped into the kitten, and then the dogs killed the kitten. I had prayed for the baby not to come to me. He had unprotected sex with me, I didn’t stop him in time, I started something I didn’t want to finish, I prayed to God to take the baby away. God put the baby in the kitten, that’s why it was me that had to find her, because it was me that killed her.

Will the dogs forget the cat? Have they already forgotten it, the way they have forgotten dinner? The way that Miguel has forgotten about Katya for the night, the way he will forget about the other woman a couple of weeks later, when he passes a blonde woman on the street and it reminds him of Katya?