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Nonfiction

Three

By Gabriela Wiener
Translated from Spanish by Lucy Greaves
Gabriela Wiener finds romantic safety in numbers. 

I never got the knack of fidelity. Ever since I first experienced pleasure outside the four walls of our tacky bathroom, I’ve continually violated the most sacred pacts of love. At first I put this down to my lack of character or inability to assert my desires in relation to an Other, to have some coherence in my life. How could I enjoy properly transgressive sex without sacrificing Sunday movie nights and breakfasts in bed? How could I keep the excitement of a secret rendezvous but still sleep cuddled up to someone who loved and protected me? How could I live without a trick up my sleeve? For years a wicked, ancient voice has whispered to me: “You can’t have it all. You have to choose.” But I’ve never been able to choose. I wanted it all. And instead of laying the blame for my contradictions on “society” or “my Catholic upbringing,” I decided to subvert love, that imperfect model, the deadly trap that had hopelessly condemned me to the miseries of a double life. So I started a guerrilla war. If the groundwork wasn’t yet laid for a true revolution, I figured it was my job to work for change: to participate in clandestine meetings with my occasional lovers, write them coded letters, and perpetrate indiscriminate attacks against reactionary targets; in other words, against my partners. I saw myself as an unfaithful avenger battling for freedom on the fringes of the law. I went out at night, wearing my mask and patched-up latex suit, to place small charges of dynamite against the wall of monogamy. I returned at dawn, more alone than ever. And happier. I’ve been unfaithful to everyone, on a single night and over many years. I’ve been unfaithful in a stairway, on several buses, in dozens of zero-star hotels and under a starry sky, on a beach, in a car park, in a museum, in a gaping chasm, under their noses. I’ve been unfaithful on Good Friday, Mother’s Day, Christmas, and even during a coup d’état. Drunk, sober, first thing in the morning, and last thing at night. I’ve been unfaithful with my neighbors, my classmates, my workmates, my exes, my male friends, my female friends, their best friends, their other selves, with fascinating strangers and with, simply, strangers. With six people the same day, two the same night, three in the same bed. I’ve been unfaithful, first and foremost, to my infidelities. And, of course, I married one of them.

Jaime once told me that the first book he remembers holding, even before he could read, was a copy of Othello he still owns. I can safely say, however, that for him, the jealous beast, the “green-ey’d monster, which doth mock / The meat it feeds on” had never taken on a concrete form or seemed half as threatening until he met me.

Jaime is a poet and, although he tries desperately hard to act like a rational being, he tends to behave like a superhero whose powers have been stolen by an unknown villain: he’s inward-looking, impenetrable, you never know what he’s really thinking; you could say he’s a great big bag of complexes but, and I’m in no doubt about this, there’s not a selfish bone in him. He’s noble and true. He corresponds more or less to the idea we both share of what a man should be. I suppose that’s why we’re together.

Around the time I met Jaime, I was stuck in a dying relationship and he became my lover. For him, though, I was nothing more than an occasional fling: he never showed any romantic interest until I broke up with his rival once and for all. Moreover, Jaime was innocent. I was the one who’d decided to lie, I was the one doing the cheating. At least that was what he wanted to believe. Jaime saw himself as nothing more than a spare part in my story and felt pretty comfortable with that. But then something unexpected happened: we fell in love.

One of my favorite authors, Philip Roth, wrote: “If you don’t go crazy because of your husband’s vices, you go crazy because of his virtues.” A year into our relationship, Jaime and I were living together. We were very different, but we’d decided to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into our new family setup. I thought this meant the end of an era and my initiation into the paradise of monogamy, which thus far had proved incomprehensible and elusive. Jaime loved it. It hadn’t taken long for him to go from cynical lover to protective companion. It was like meeting one of those actors who swear they’ve been waiting all their lives to play that exact role. But our differences soon became clear. Jaime was repulsed by my fantasies, my excesses, the whole framework around which I’d built my sexual identity up to then. He couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else invading our bed, not even as part of a simple fantasy. It wasn’t like I was free from jealousy myself; in fact, the mere thought of Jaime falling for another woman or feeling emotionally attached to someone other than me filled me with anxiety. But in Jaime’s case those feelings revolved almost exclusively around sex. What’s more, his jealousy was like most men’s: retroactive. That’s something I’ll never understand. For me, asking Jaime (basically forcing him) to tell me the details of his sexual encounters was a way of sharing them, a way for me to appropriate them. Why did he find it so painful to even imagine me with somebody else? When it came to my past, Jaime felt like the biblical Lot: if he looked back, he ran the risk of turning into a pillar of salt.

I once read in an encyclopedia that a jealous man has far more powerful orgasms and ejaculates more sperm than a man who feels confident in the love promised to him (so, really, they ought to be thanking me for those painful orgasms). Their spermatozoids are like little soldiers from Star Wars ready to tear the competition to shreds. It’s not just the desire for absolute possession or the concept of exclusivity. It’s not just an ego problem. I don’t believe there’s an intrinsic conservation mechanism driven by the “wisdom of the species,” like that cretin Schopenhauer said, either. Jealousy is clearly an irrational, instinctive reaction, but it’s based on the social construction we’ve built like a concrete bunker around a flower. Someone like me who’s unfaithful by nature (anyway, who cares!) ends up getting lost once and for all in the labyrinth of jealousy and feels her cheating heart crack with each roar from the minotaur, that jealous beast that hurls his bloody horns against the walls of a prison he himself has built.

In the feverish labyrinth of monogamy we survived by sheltering under a roof full of holes until, just when we least expected it, things changed.

I don’t know exactly when the idea of having a threesome went from being a bedroom joke to a family project. I don’t know how it happened: maybe we felt too alone with the number two. In part, the suggestion to have a threesome was one of my dubious contributions to our relationship because when I met Jaime I already had the jealousy thing perfectly under control. I mean that I’d drunk the bittersweet potion of seeing my guy with another woman for the first time: it’s as unpleasant as letting a stranger use your toothbrush. Watching the person you love make love to someone other than you gives you a feeling that concentrates around your middle (as if you’d done fifty sit-ups); it’s one of those productive pains you know will do you good sooner or later.

I’ve always been a firm believer in not having limits, especially when it comes to sex. I don’t remember how I started taking part in threesomes and later suggesting them; they weren’t in fashion yet, there weren’t television programs or films about threesomes or famous people talking about theirs. I was sixteen years old. I was sleeping with a guy who was older than me. He was the one who first showed me a porn film in which two blonde women moved their tongues up and down the same cock. Grateful for his pedagogical efforts, I tried to impress him or turn him on with my schoolgirl stories. I liked telling him about my masturbatory rituals in the bathroom at home. It made me feel powerful to describe the celibate games I played with my girlfriends, especially when it was my turn to be the man. It was our innocent way to practice kissing with tongues for the first time. As far as I can remember there was nothing more exciting at the age of ten than when a girlfriend stayed over and we played at touching each other in the dark, in silence, almost by accident. I think that letting third parties into my first relationship, which I’d so longed for and only recently won, was due to those pieces of news from afar, those fairy stories about kissing under the covers.

It wasn’t about pleasing anyone or trying new things, or maybe I did want to try new things and do a bit of pleasing, I don’t know. But what I do know is that that first boyfriend and I let one of my friends into our bed. Or rather, we got into hers, her parents’ bed to be precise. We didn’t have a bed yet and weren’t old enough for hotels. The morning I watched aghast as someone else manhandled the man I thought was my property, my inalienable right, something inside me shattered forever. My old beliefs, perhaps. Suddenly, the pleasure of exclusivity was replaced by the pleasure of being one more. I’m not sure if what I’m saying is quite true because I wasn’t in fact one more, I was the official girlfriend, a Countess Báthory overseeing the sacrifice of virgins. I learned that, whenever possible, it’s best to avoid being the third person. From my bureaucratic fiefdom in the Palace of Love I could decide who I shared a bed with, who I lent my boyfriend to, for how long, to what degree. Controlling what happened between our bodies was my prerogative and my get-out-of-jail-free card.

You’re always afraid. That’s why I’ve been simultaneously bad and incredibly good. I was a sadist and a masochist; I couldn’t give a name to that new anger, that new energy. The confusion of that day has stayed with me through all my subsequent threesomes. That unsettling feeling arises because, at the moment of tripartite lovemaking, jealousy and desire compete with equal ferocity. Sometimes jealousy wins and devours everything in its path, other times it’s desire that overcomes. After my first threesome with another woman I demanded one with two men. I took it very seriously. My boyfriend owed it to me. We started looking and one night, when we were both very drunk, we found two guys who seemed nice and they followed us to the beach without a word. That night I did it with the two of them while my boyfriend closely supervised the action. When you’ve got the hang of threesomes you start to feel like the gonzo director of a porn film (genre: threesome) trying to make the cast better and better.

According to Wikipedia, a threesome is a ménage à trois (Fr.), group sex which involves three participants and isn’t an orgy. As director of films in that genre, I had to be very careful. I didn’t want my attempts to stage Jules et Jim to end up as The Three Little Pigs. For a while I tried to carry out strange assessments of the threesomes around me. I tried to find the perfect formula of three beings brought together with more or less decorous ends, like Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If sex is a question of numerology then three is surely my lucky number. Three is speculative, it evokes the cosmos and the infinite. Because a threesome isn’t a triangle, of course. It doesn’t have a hypotenuse or a right angle, and it goes without saying that none of the parts is out of harmony. There are no relevant statistics but there could well be more threesomes than couples in the world, even though, in most cases, one of the parts is unaware that there are three instead of two. When they finally find out, many women and men who aren’t liberal by nature or by choice decide to share their partners in order to escape impending abandonment.

When I met Jaime, I felt an increasing desire to reproduce the tenuous experiences I’d had with more than two people as a teenager, in a way that would finally be mature and systematic. I had to press the issue, but not that much. Once the details had been negotiated (in other words, when Jaime felt reassured we’d only do it with women), we set to work. As you can tell, it didn’t look like a fair deal from the outside. In fact, a hardened feminist might stone me for it. But watch it, it’s important to remember that I was coming from an impressive, shameful spell of cheating that had to be purged in some way. Allowing my new love tons of glamorous freedom, albeit within the limits I set, was my passport to heaven. What’s more, and this is something to bear in mind, I, like so many other women, like women. I’ve heard it said that nobody knows a woman’s body better than another woman. I don’t believe that. With due attention, a man can be just as skillful. That’s not why women get together. It’s not because women know where to touch. Sometimes I like to destroy the myth of the original couple and reunite with my own substance. I believe in this antinatural magic. But, more precisely, I like to feel in another woman what a man feels in me. When a woman kisses me on the lips I perceive all the softness, smoothness, suppleness that I intuit in my own body, which others can joyfully possess but which I would only be able to know through an act of doubling or some other sci-fi procedure.

All told, we were both looking for a woman for almost exactly the same reasons. We didn’t know where to find our soul mate, but we sensed she was very close by. If one lives in a “state of three,” fully at home in the third dimension, as it were, it can happen. Why not imagine that just as there are people in the world seeking their other halves, there are some looking for their other wholes?

To cut a long story short, we did find someone. She was a friend of mine, one of those friends who’ve always been there. She wasn’t a very sociable person; in fact, when she wasn’t being shy she had a fairly hysterical temper and was permanently sarcastic. I knew her well but was still always surprised by the strange aggression she could unleash when least expected. I think she’d always hated people but hadn’t come to terms with that, so it gave her panic attacks and made her withdrawn in public. She was also a loner but seemed trapped rather than helpless. Another detail: she didn’t have a partner. She wasn’t Anaïs Nin, but neither were we Henry and June. That winter we started seeing a lot of each other. We met up every afternoon. We talked about sex and sex.

The first triple kiss happened in a terrible bar in the center of Lima. First, she told Jaime to kiss her. He glanced at me to check I was OK with it, then kissed her. Then he kissed me, then her, then I kissed her, then we both kissed him. A triple kiss is something strange until it happens. Three mouths come together like three chicks fighting for the same worm. We realized, however, that the worm of death was the fourth character in our story. And it started to eat our tongues.

Three-way relationships don’t tend to last long. They defy the mathematics of the heart. Sudden death hovers over them and their fretful sleep. It’s one thing to have a tripartite adventure for a night, something quite different to formalize it. A threesome in real life isn’t a porn film twenty-four hours a day. I, however, like the porn actresses who suffer the damage of double penetration in a boy-girl-boy threesome, have come to prefer the less exhausting girl-boy-girl configuration; in other words, two women becoming one and a man who counts for two.

Sudden death hovers over any threesome. For example: Jaime drives sixty miles an hour while she and I lavish damp caresses on one another in the back seat. We’re naked, we kiss so hard we bite each other. She comes on Calle X. Me, on the corner of Calle Y. This is a scene from real life, it happened the same night as that first triple kiss, but it could also work metaphorically. Simultaneity is the utopia of a threesome. She might be driving with Jaime and me rolling around in the back. Then she’d decide to get out of the car and leave us with no gas. Or it might be me driving while they stain the upholstery and steam up the windows. In that case, I wouldn’t be able to see and would accelerate until the car got smashed to smithereens.

The outcome of a threesome is as hazardous as any car accident (and seatbelts aren’t enough). After a three-way collision there’s almost always one person dead and two left seriously wounded. Soon enough, she was completely in love with Jaime. Her inexperience and obstinate heterosexuality had made her tip toward that side of the scales.

First came the abortion. A fatal error on all of our parts. She knew what she had to do and that morning we went with her to the clinic. To keep from feeling sad we played with the idea of having it, a child with Jaime’s nose, her Asian eyes, and something of my overconfident personality. We’d live under the same roof and take him or her to see Harry Potter at the cinema. I’ve been on the other side of it, too, but I was now experiencing the despair of an abortion from the waiting room, like a guy, albeit reading girly magazines and biting my nails.

When it was all over we went out for dinner, drank a lot of wine, and promised not to sleep together again. We really did love each other. When Jaime and I got married the three of us spent our wedding night together.

Three-way relationships don’t tend to last long but nor do they die the day you decide to kill them, however dramatic you make the supposed final scene. One night in our gorgeous triple bed, she started crying inconsolably while we made love as only three people can. Jaime was behind her so that when he rocked up and down the echoes of their shared movements reached my pubis. Finally, Jaime lowered himself onto me. And that was when our girl started crying. We hugged her, but it was no use. I think by then we’d talked too much. It was as if all the damage we’d caused her had been hidden just beneath her skin and suddenly came to the surface before our eyes.

“I want to go,” she said.

Jaime took her home. It was an especially cold night. I stayed in bed with the stupid and grateful sensation of not (for once) being the one going to shit. I had the same feeling as when I’m in a car and I see a couple fighting in an empty street: relief that I’m not the girl. I was grateful that we were three and not two. That I wasn’t the girlfriend in distress, somebody else was, and one person was enough to deal with it. Someone other than me. I was grateful to be alone with the whole bed for me and my sadness.

If she was the victim, didn’t that make us torturers? We’d never told anything even resembling a lie, but at that moment Jaime realized sincerity wasn’t enough. When they arrived at her building, she didn’t move to get out of the car.

“You bastard!” she shouted at Jaime while trying to hit him.

Until Jaime, the politest, most friendly guy I know, pushed her out of the car and drove home.

When she left for good the two of us were alone and heartbroken. Our bed became huge, unimaginably huge. That was when we decided to explore the incredibly limited market of prostitutes for couples.

In a threesome there are always two exhibitionists and a voyeur. I’m not exactly sure why I like watching Jaime make love to another woman. Each voyeur has their own highly developed reasoning. Since we gave up on prostitutes for good we’ve organized various threesomes, always in neutral territory, far from friendship and even further from love. With acquaintances or curious strangers. Sometimes I watch Jaime and our special guest from a corner of the room, hidden in the darkness, and with a timid hand I follow the rocking of their bodies, like stroking the back of a raging animal. They know I’m there, but I’m not. I make myself invisible. I don’t masturbate, I just watch, I lust in solitude. I watch them because, in some way, at that same moment I become flesh, I take over their bodies. For someone who doesn’t particularly like being who she is, it’s incredible to have the possibility of being someone else. I’m like a ghost looking for an organism to inhabit. Once we’re alone after a threesome with another girl, Jaime and I relive what happened. I play at being those women, with their names and shapes, with the sound of their moans; I copy their movements in bed, their ways of pressing themselves against Jaime and quivering. I become them, I find a space to inhabit. I ask Jaime to call me by their names. As is often the case, one person’s illness is another’s cure. Sometimes, in the middle of the game, Jaime takes my head, looks me in the eyes, and says my name: “Gabriela.” And I start to cry without knowing why.

Tres © 2015 by Gabriela Wiener. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2016 by Lucy Greaves. All rights reserved.

English Spanish (Original)

I never got the knack of fidelity. Ever since I first experienced pleasure outside the four walls of our tacky bathroom, I’ve continually violated the most sacred pacts of love. At first I put this down to my lack of character or inability to assert my desires in relation to an Other, to have some coherence in my life. How could I enjoy properly transgressive sex without sacrificing Sunday movie nights and breakfasts in bed? How could I keep the excitement of a secret rendezvous but still sleep cuddled up to someone who loved and protected me? How could I live without a trick up my sleeve? For years a wicked, ancient voice has whispered to me: “You can’t have it all. You have to choose.” But I’ve never been able to choose. I wanted it all. And instead of laying the blame for my contradictions on “society” or “my Catholic upbringing,” I decided to subvert love, that imperfect model, the deadly trap that had hopelessly condemned me to the miseries of a double life. So I started a guerrilla war. If the groundwork wasn’t yet laid for a true revolution, I figured it was my job to work for change: to participate in clandestine meetings with my occasional lovers, write them coded letters, and perpetrate indiscriminate attacks against reactionary targets; in other words, against my partners. I saw myself as an unfaithful avenger battling for freedom on the fringes of the law. I went out at night, wearing my mask and patched-up latex suit, to place small charges of dynamite against the wall of monogamy. I returned at dawn, more alone than ever. And happier. I’ve been unfaithful to everyone, on a single night and over many years. I’ve been unfaithful in a stairway, on several buses, in dozens of zero-star hotels and under a starry sky, on a beach, in a car park, in a museum, in a gaping chasm, under their noses. I’ve been unfaithful on Good Friday, Mother’s Day, Christmas, and even during a coup d’état. Drunk, sober, first thing in the morning, and last thing at night. I’ve been unfaithful with my neighbors, my classmates, my workmates, my exes, my male friends, my female friends, their best friends, their other selves, with fascinating strangers and with, simply, strangers. With six people the same day, two the same night, three in the same bed. I’ve been unfaithful, first and foremost, to my infidelities. And, of course, I married one of them.

Jaime once told me that the first book he remembers holding, even before he could read, was a copy of Othello he still owns. I can safely say, however, that for him, the jealous beast, the “green-ey’d monster, which doth mock / The meat it feeds on” had never taken on a concrete form or seemed half as threatening until he met me.

Jaime is a poet and, although he tries desperately hard to act like a rational being, he tends to behave like a superhero whose powers have been stolen by an unknown villain: he’s inward-looking, impenetrable, you never know what he’s really thinking; you could say he’s a great big bag of complexes but, and I’m in no doubt about this, there’s not a selfish bone in him. He’s noble and true. He corresponds more or less to the idea we both share of what a man should be. I suppose that’s why we’re together.

Around the time I met Jaime, I was stuck in a dying relationship and he became my lover. For him, though, I was nothing more than an occasional fling: he never showed any romantic interest until I broke up with his rival once and for all. Moreover, Jaime was innocent. I was the one who’d decided to lie, I was the one doing the cheating. At least that was what he wanted to believe. Jaime saw himself as nothing more than a spare part in my story and felt pretty comfortable with that. But then something unexpected happened: we fell in love.

One of my favorite authors, Philip Roth, wrote: “If you don’t go crazy because of your husband’s vices, you go crazy because of his virtues.” A year into our relationship, Jaime and I were living together. We were very different, but we’d decided to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into our new family setup. I thought this meant the end of an era and my initiation into the paradise of monogamy, which thus far had proved incomprehensible and elusive. Jaime loved it. It hadn’t taken long for him to go from cynical lover to protective companion. It was like meeting one of those actors who swear they’ve been waiting all their lives to play that exact role. But our differences soon became clear. Jaime was repulsed by my fantasies, my excesses, the whole framework around which I’d built my sexual identity up to then. He couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else invading our bed, not even as part of a simple fantasy. It wasn’t like I was free from jealousy myself; in fact, the mere thought of Jaime falling for another woman or feeling emotionally attached to someone other than me filled me with anxiety. But in Jaime’s case those feelings revolved almost exclusively around sex. What’s more, his jealousy was like most men’s: retroactive. That’s something I’ll never understand. For me, asking Jaime (basically forcing him) to tell me the details of his sexual encounters was a way of sharing them, a way for me to appropriate them. Why did he find it so painful to even imagine me with somebody else? When it came to my past, Jaime felt like the biblical Lot: if he looked back, he ran the risk of turning into a pillar of salt.

I once read in an encyclopedia that a jealous man has far more powerful orgasms and ejaculates more sperm than a man who feels confident in the love promised to him (so, really, they ought to be thanking me for those painful orgasms). Their spermatozoids are like little soldiers from Star Wars ready to tear the competition to shreds. It’s not just the desire for absolute possession or the concept of exclusivity. It’s not just an ego problem. I don’t believe there’s an intrinsic conservation mechanism driven by the “wisdom of the species,” like that cretin Schopenhauer said, either. Jealousy is clearly an irrational, instinctive reaction, but it’s based on the social construction we’ve built like a concrete bunker around a flower. Someone like me who’s unfaithful by nature (anyway, who cares!) ends up getting lost once and for all in the labyrinth of jealousy and feels her cheating heart crack with each roar from the minotaur, that jealous beast that hurls his bloody horns against the walls of a prison he himself has built.

In the feverish labyrinth of monogamy we survived by sheltering under a roof full of holes until, just when we least expected it, things changed.

I don’t know exactly when the idea of having a threesome went from being a bedroom joke to a family project. I don’t know how it happened: maybe we felt too alone with the number two. In part, the suggestion to have a threesome was one of my dubious contributions to our relationship because when I met Jaime I already had the jealousy thing perfectly under control. I mean that I’d drunk the bittersweet potion of seeing my guy with another woman for the first time: it’s as unpleasant as letting a stranger use your toothbrush. Watching the person you love make love to someone other than you gives you a feeling that concentrates around your middle (as if you’d done fifty sit-ups); it’s one of those productive pains you know will do you good sooner or later.

I’ve always been a firm believer in not having limits, especially when it comes to sex. I don’t remember how I started taking part in threesomes and later suggesting them; they weren’t in fashion yet, there weren’t television programs or films about threesomes or famous people talking about theirs. I was sixteen years old. I was sleeping with a guy who was older than me. He was the one who first showed me a porn film in which two blonde women moved their tongues up and down the same cock. Grateful for his pedagogical efforts, I tried to impress him or turn him on with my schoolgirl stories. I liked telling him about my masturbatory rituals in the bathroom at home. It made me feel powerful to describe the celibate games I played with my girlfriends, especially when it was my turn to be the man. It was our innocent way to practice kissing with tongues for the first time. As far as I can remember there was nothing more exciting at the age of ten than when a girlfriend stayed over and we played at touching each other in the dark, in silence, almost by accident. I think that letting third parties into my first relationship, which I’d so longed for and only recently won, was due to those pieces of news from afar, those fairy stories about kissing under the covers.

It wasn’t about pleasing anyone or trying new things, or maybe I did want to try new things and do a bit of pleasing, I don’t know. But what I do know is that that first boyfriend and I let one of my friends into our bed. Or rather, we got into hers, her parents’ bed to be precise. We didn’t have a bed yet and weren’t old enough for hotels. The morning I watched aghast as someone else manhandled the man I thought was my property, my inalienable right, something inside me shattered forever. My old beliefs, perhaps. Suddenly, the pleasure of exclusivity was replaced by the pleasure of being one more. I’m not sure if what I’m saying is quite true because I wasn’t in fact one more, I was the official girlfriend, a Countess Báthory overseeing the sacrifice of virgins. I learned that, whenever possible, it’s best to avoid being the third person. From my bureaucratic fiefdom in the Palace of Love I could decide who I shared a bed with, who I lent my boyfriend to, for how long, to what degree. Controlling what happened between our bodies was my prerogative and my get-out-of-jail-free card.

You’re always afraid. That’s why I’ve been simultaneously bad and incredibly good. I was a sadist and a masochist; I couldn’t give a name to that new anger, that new energy. The confusion of that day has stayed with me through all my subsequent threesomes. That unsettling feeling arises because, at the moment of tripartite lovemaking, jealousy and desire compete with equal ferocity. Sometimes jealousy wins and devours everything in its path, other times it’s desire that overcomes. After my first threesome with another woman I demanded one with two men. I took it very seriously. My boyfriend owed it to me. We started looking and one night, when we were both very drunk, we found two guys who seemed nice and they followed us to the beach without a word. That night I did it with the two of them while my boyfriend closely supervised the action. When you’ve got the hang of threesomes you start to feel like the gonzo director of a porn film (genre: threesome) trying to make the cast better and better.

According to Wikipedia, a threesome is a ménage à trois (Fr.), group sex which involves three participants and isn’t an orgy. As director of films in that genre, I had to be very careful. I didn’t want my attempts to stage Jules et Jim to end up as The Three Little Pigs. For a while I tried to carry out strange assessments of the threesomes around me. I tried to find the perfect formula of three beings brought together with more or less decorous ends, like Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If sex is a question of numerology then three is surely my lucky number. Three is speculative, it evokes the cosmos and the infinite. Because a threesome isn’t a triangle, of course. It doesn’t have a hypotenuse or a right angle, and it goes without saying that none of the parts is out of harmony. There are no relevant statistics but there could well be more threesomes than couples in the world, even though, in most cases, one of the parts is unaware that there are three instead of two. When they finally find out, many women and men who aren’t liberal by nature or by choice decide to share their partners in order to escape impending abandonment.

When I met Jaime, I felt an increasing desire to reproduce the tenuous experiences I’d had with more than two people as a teenager, in a way that would finally be mature and systematic. I had to press the issue, but not that much. Once the details had been negotiated (in other words, when Jaime felt reassured we’d only do it with women), we set to work. As you can tell, it didn’t look like a fair deal from the outside. In fact, a hardened feminist might stone me for it. But watch it, it’s important to remember that I was coming from an impressive, shameful spell of cheating that had to be purged in some way. Allowing my new love tons of glamorous freedom, albeit within the limits I set, was my passport to heaven. What’s more, and this is something to bear in mind, I, like so many other women, like women. I’ve heard it said that nobody knows a woman’s body better than another woman. I don’t believe that. With due attention, a man can be just as skillful. That’s not why women get together. It’s not because women know where to touch. Sometimes I like to destroy the myth of the original couple and reunite with my own substance. I believe in this antinatural magic. But, more precisely, I like to feel in another woman what a man feels in me. When a woman kisses me on the lips I perceive all the softness, smoothness, suppleness that I intuit in my own body, which others can joyfully possess but which I would only be able to know through an act of doubling or some other sci-fi procedure.

All told, we were both looking for a woman for almost exactly the same reasons. We didn’t know where to find our soul mate, but we sensed she was very close by. If one lives in a “state of three,” fully at home in the third dimension, as it were, it can happen. Why not imagine that just as there are people in the world seeking their other halves, there are some looking for their other wholes?

To cut a long story short, we did find someone. She was a friend of mine, one of those friends who’ve always been there. She wasn’t a very sociable person; in fact, when she wasn’t being shy she had a fairly hysterical temper and was permanently sarcastic. I knew her well but was still always surprised by the strange aggression she could unleash when least expected. I think she’d always hated people but hadn’t come to terms with that, so it gave her panic attacks and made her withdrawn in public. She was also a loner but seemed trapped rather than helpless. Another detail: she didn’t have a partner. She wasn’t Anaïs Nin, but neither were we Henry and June. That winter we started seeing a lot of each other. We met up every afternoon. We talked about sex and sex.

The first triple kiss happened in a terrible bar in the center of Lima. First, she told Jaime to kiss her. He glanced at me to check I was OK with it, then kissed her. Then he kissed me, then her, then I kissed her, then we both kissed him. A triple kiss is something strange until it happens. Three mouths come together like three chicks fighting for the same worm. We realized, however, that the worm of death was the fourth character in our story. And it started to eat our tongues.

Three-way relationships don’t tend to last long. They defy the mathematics of the heart. Sudden death hovers over them and their fretful sleep. It’s one thing to have a tripartite adventure for a night, something quite different to formalize it. A threesome in real life isn’t a porn film twenty-four hours a day. I, however, like the porn actresses who suffer the damage of double penetration in a boy-girl-boy threesome, have come to prefer the less exhausting girl-boy-girl configuration; in other words, two women becoming one and a man who counts for two.

Sudden death hovers over any threesome. For example: Jaime drives sixty miles an hour while she and I lavish damp caresses on one another in the back seat. We’re naked, we kiss so hard we bite each other. She comes on Calle X. Me, on the corner of Calle Y. This is a scene from real life, it happened the same night as that first triple kiss, but it could also work metaphorically. Simultaneity is the utopia of a threesome. She might be driving with Jaime and me rolling around in the back. Then she’d decide to get out of the car and leave us with no gas. Or it might be me driving while they stain the upholstery and steam up the windows. In that case, I wouldn’t be able to see and would accelerate until the car got smashed to smithereens.

The outcome of a threesome is as hazardous as any car accident (and seatbelts aren’t enough). After a three-way collision there’s almost always one person dead and two left seriously wounded. Soon enough, she was completely in love with Jaime. Her inexperience and obstinate heterosexuality had made her tip toward that side of the scales.

First came the abortion. A fatal error on all of our parts. She knew what she had to do and that morning we went with her to the clinic. To keep from feeling sad we played with the idea of having it, a child with Jaime’s nose, her Asian eyes, and something of my overconfident personality. We’d live under the same roof and take him or her to see Harry Potter at the cinema. I’ve been on the other side of it, too, but I was now experiencing the despair of an abortion from the waiting room, like a guy, albeit reading girly magazines and biting my nails.

When it was all over we went out for dinner, drank a lot of wine, and promised not to sleep together again. We really did love each other. When Jaime and I got married the three of us spent our wedding night together.

Three-way relationships don’t tend to last long but nor do they die the day you decide to kill them, however dramatic you make the supposed final scene. One night in our gorgeous triple bed, she started crying inconsolably while we made love as only three people can. Jaime was behind her so that when he rocked up and down the echoes of their shared movements reached my pubis. Finally, Jaime lowered himself onto me. And that was when our girl started crying. We hugged her, but it was no use. I think by then we’d talked too much. It was as if all the damage we’d caused her had been hidden just beneath her skin and suddenly came to the surface before our eyes.

“I want to go,” she said.

Jaime took her home. It was an especially cold night. I stayed in bed with the stupid and grateful sensation of not (for once) being the one going to shit. I had the same feeling as when I’m in a car and I see a couple fighting in an empty street: relief that I’m not the girl. I was grateful that we were three and not two. That I wasn’t the girlfriend in distress, somebody else was, and one person was enough to deal with it. Someone other than me. I was grateful to be alone with the whole bed for me and my sadness.

If she was the victim, didn’t that make us torturers? We’d never told anything even resembling a lie, but at that moment Jaime realized sincerity wasn’t enough. When they arrived at her building, she didn’t move to get out of the car.

“You bastard!” she shouted at Jaime while trying to hit him.

Until Jaime, the politest, most friendly guy I know, pushed her out of the car and drove home.

When she left for good the two of us were alone and heartbroken. Our bed became huge, unimaginably huge. That was when we decided to explore the incredibly limited market of prostitutes for couples.

In a threesome there are always two exhibitionists and a voyeur. I’m not exactly sure why I like watching Jaime make love to another woman. Each voyeur has their own highly developed reasoning. Since we gave up on prostitutes for good we’ve organized various threesomes, always in neutral territory, far from friendship and even further from love. With acquaintances or curious strangers. Sometimes I watch Jaime and our special guest from a corner of the room, hidden in the darkness, and with a timid hand I follow the rocking of their bodies, like stroking the back of a raging animal. They know I’m there, but I’m not. I make myself invisible. I don’t masturbate, I just watch, I lust in solitude. I watch them because, in some way, at that same moment I become flesh, I take over their bodies. For someone who doesn’t particularly like being who she is, it’s incredible to have the possibility of being someone else. I’m like a ghost looking for an organism to inhabit. Once we’re alone after a threesome with another girl, Jaime and I relive what happened. I play at being those women, with their names and shapes, with the sound of their moans; I copy their movements in bed, their ways of pressing themselves against Jaime and quivering. I become them, I find a space to inhabit. I ask Jaime to call me by their names. As is often the case, one person’s illness is another’s cure. Sometimes, in the middle of the game, Jaime takes my head, looks me in the eyes, and says my name: “Gabriela.” And I start to cry without knowing why.

Tres © 2015 by Gabriela Wiener. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2016 by Lucy Greaves. All rights reserved.

Tres

Nunca pude ser fiel. Desde que descubri el placer fuera de las cursis paredes del cuarto de baño no he dejado de violar los pactos de amor más sagrados. Al principio lo atribuí a mi falta de carácter o a mi escasa habilidad par imponer mis deseos frente al Otro, para vivir con cierta coherencia. ¿Cómo disfrutar de buen sexo delictivo sin sacrificar los domingos de película y desayuno en la cama? ¿Cómo reservarme la emoción de los encuentros clandestinos sin dejar de dormir abrazada a un cuerpo amado y protector? ¿Cómo vivir sin una carta bajo la manga? Una maldita y viejísima voz me ha susurrado durante años: «Non puedes tenerlo todo. Debes elegir». Pero yo nunca he podido elegir. Lo quería todo. Y lejos achacar mis contradicciones a la «sociedad» o a la «educacíon católica» decidí subvertir el amor, ese modelo imperfecto, esa trampa mortal que me había condenado irremediablemente a las miserias de la doble vida. Así inicié una guerra de guerrillas. Si todavía non estaban fijadas las bases para una auténica revolución humana me veía en la obligación de trabajar por el cambio: participar en reuniones clandestinas con mis ocasionales amantes, escribirles cartas cifradas y perpetrar ataques indiscriminados contra los objetivos reaccionarios; es decir, contra mis pareias. Me creí el personaje de la infiel vengadora que lucha por la libertad al margen de la ley. Salía por las noches, con mi antifaz y mi traje de látex remendado, a colocar pequeñas cargas de dinamita junto al muro de la monogamia. Volvía al amanecer, más sola que nunca. Y más feliz. He sido infiel a todos, una noche y muchos años. Lo he sido en una escalera, en varios autobuses, en decenas de hoteles sin estrellas y bajo un cielo estrellando, en una playa, en un parquin, en un museo, en un abismo, en sus narices. He sido infiel un Viernes Santo, un Día de la Madre, un Navidad y hasta durante un golpe de Estado. Borracha, sobria, recién levantada y a punto de dormirme. Les fui infiel con mis vecinos, con mis comparñeros de estudio, con mis colegas del trabajo, con mis exnovios, con mis amigos, con mis amigas, con sus mejores amigos, con sus otros yos, con extraños fascinantes y con simples extraños. Con seis el mismo día, con dos las misma noche, con tres en la misma cama. Fui infiel sobre todo a mis infidelidades. Y, por supesto, me casé con una de ellas.

Una ves, Jaime me contó que el primer libro que recuerda haber tenido en sus manos, aun antes de saber leer, fue un ejemplar de Otelo que aun conserva. Puedo dar fe, sin embargo, de quel el demonio de los celos, ese «monstruo de ojos berdes que se burla del pan que lo alminenta», no tuvo para él una forma concreta ni un apsecto tan amenazador hasta que me conoció.

Jaime es poeta y, aunque intenta desesperadamente actuar como n ser racional, suele comportarse como un superhéroe al que un desconocido villano le ha quitado sus superpoderes: es ensimismado, impenetrable, nunca sabes qué está pensando realmente; alguien podría decir que es un verdadero saco de complejos, pero, de esto no tengo la menor duda, no hay un ápice de egoísmo en él. Es noble y verdadero. Resonde más o menos a la idea que compartimos él y yo de lo que debe ser un hombre. Supongo que por eso estamos juntos.

Por esa época yo estaba en medio de una relación agónica y Jaime se convirtió en mi amante. Para él, sin embargo, yo no era nada más que una aventura ocasional, jamás dio una sola muestra de interés romántico hasta que rompí definitivamente con su rival. Además, Jaime era inocente. Era yo quien decidía mentir, era yo quien engañaba. El menos, eso era lo que él quería creer. Jaime se veía a sí mismo como un simple recambio dentro de mi historia y se sentía bastanted cómodo con eso. Pero entonces ocurrió algo inesperado: nos enamoramos.

Uno de mis escritores favoritos, Philip Roth, escribió «Si no te vuelven loca los vicios de tu marido te vuelven loca sus virtudes». Un año después de empezar nuestra relación, Jaime y yo vivíamos juntos. Éramos muy diferentes, pero habíamos decidido entregarnos por completo a nuestra pequeña y nueva familia. Yo pensaba que con ella había cerrado una etapa y ante mí se abría el hasta entonces incomprensible y esquico paraíso de la monogamia. Jaime estaba encantado. En muy poco tiempo había dejado de ser el amante cínico para convertirse en el compañero protector. Verlo era como estar frente a una de esos actores que aseguran haber esperado toda su vida ese pape. Pero poco tiempo después nuestras diferencias empezaron a hacerse patentes. Mis fantasías, mis excesos, todo el andamiaje sobre el que hasta ese momento yo había basado mi identidad sexual, a Jaime le repelían. Non soportaba la intromisión de nada ajeno a nosotros mismos en juestra cama, ni siquiera si se trataba de una simple fantasía. No era que yo misma no sintiera celos; de hecho, la sola idea de que Jaime se enamorara de otra od ea que se sintiera emotivamente ligado alguien que no fuese yo me llenaba de angustia. Pero en el caso de Jaime esas sensaciones estaban casi exclusivamente ligadas a lo sexual. Sus celos, además, eran como los de la mayoría de los hombres: retroactivos. Esto es algo que nunca entenderé. Par mí, pedirle (casi exigirle) a Jaime que me relatara al detalle sus anteriores experiencias sexuales era una forma da compartirlas, de aporpiarme de ellas. ¿Por qué e él le resultaba tan doloroso incluso imaginarme con otro? Con respecto a mi pasado, Jaime se sentía como el Lot bíblico: si miraba atrás corría el riesgo de quedar convertido en sal.

He leído en una enciclopedia que un hombre celoso tiene orgasmos mucho más poderosos y expulsa más cantidad de esperma que un hombre seguro del amor que le profesan (por eso deberían darme las gracias por esos dolorosos orgasmos). Sus espermatozoides son como soldaditos de la Guerra de las Galaxias dispuestos a despedazar a los espermatozoides de la competencia. No es sólo el deseo de posesión absoluta ni el concepto de exclusividad. No es sólo un problema da egoísmo. Tampoco creo que exista un intrínseco mecanismo de conservación impulsado por la «sabiduría de la especie», como decía el cretino do Schopenhauer. Los celos son  una reacción ciertamente instintiva, irracional, pero se basan en la construcción social que hemos levantado, como un edificio de concreto alrededor de una flor. La infiel por naturaleza termina, ¡qué más da!, definitivament perdida en el laberinto de los celos y siente crujir su mentiroso corazón a cada alardio del minotauro, ese celoso que estrella sus cuernos sangrantes contra las paredes de una cárcel levantada por él mismo.

En el laberinto febril de la monogamis sobrevivíamos guarecidos bajo un techo lleno de agujeros hasta que, sin que pudiéramos sospecharlo, las cosas cambiaron.

 

No sé en que momento la idea de hacer un trío pasó de ser una broma de alcoba a convertirse en un proyecto familiar. No se cómo sucedió, quizá nos sentíamos demasiado solos en el número dos. En parte la ocurrencia de hacer un trío fue uno de mis dudosos aportes a nuestra relación. Para cuando lo conocí, yo ya tenía el tema de los celos perfectamente bajo control. Quiero decir que ya había pasado por el trago agridulce que es ver a mi chico con otra por primera vez: es una sensación tan desagradable como dejar que una persona de confianza use tu cepillo de dientes. Ver a la personas que amas haciendo el amor a alguien que no eres tú te produce un dolor que se concentra a la altura del estómago, como después de hacer cincuenta abdominales, es uno de esos dolores productivos, que sabes que tarde o temprano te harán un bien. Por instantes puede invadirte una sensación de verídico altruismo –salvo que el marido sea insoportable-, como segundos después de donar una buena cantidad de sangre: cierto vértigo, los ojos abiertos como platos, la vena abierta y un poco de ti en un tubo transfiriéndose a alguien que no sabe que en realidad tienes un extraño tipo de sangre que lo envenenará.

Siempre he creído firmemente en la conveniencia de no tener límites, sobre todo en el sexo. No recuerdo cómo empecé a participar y luego a fomentar tríos; no estaban muy de moda todavía, no habían series de televisión ni películas de tríos, ni famosos hablando de sus tríos. Yo tenía dieciséis años. Me acostaba con un chico mayor que yo. Fue él quien me mostró por primera vez una película pornográfica en la que dos rubias mimosas movían sus lenguas sobre el mismo pene. Agradecida por los esfuerzos pedagógicos de aquel chico, intentaba impresionarlo o ponerlo caliente con mis historias de colegiala. Me gustaba contarle mis ritos masturbatorios en el baño de casa. Me sentía poderosa cuando le narraba los juegos célibes que compartía con mis amigas, sobre todo cuando me tocaba hacer de hombre. Era nuestra inocente manera de practicar los besos con lengua por primera vez. A los diez años no recuerdo nada más excitante que los días en que alguna amiga se quedaba a dormir en casa y jugábamos a hacernos las dormidas para tocarnos a ciegas, en silencio, casi por casualidad. Creo que fue así, gracias a esas noticias lejanas, a esos cuentos de hadas que se besan bajo las sábanas, como dejé entrar a terceras personas a mi tan ansiada y recién conquistada primera relación de pareja.

No fue por agradar y por probar, o quizá sí quería probar y agradar un poco. Lo cierto es que ese primer novio y yo pronto dejamos que una de mis amigas se metiera en nuestra cama. En realidad, nosotros nos metimos a la suya, a la de sus padres para ser precisos. Todavía no teníamos cama ni edad suficiente para ir a un hotel. La mañana aquella en que vi cómo era mancillada lo que yo consideraba mi propiedad privada, mi derecho inalienable, noté con estupor que algo dentro de mí se hacía añicos para siempre. Quizá mis viejas creencias. De repente, el placer de la exclusividad fue reemplazado por el placer de ser una más. No sé si estoy diciendo la verdad, porque yo no era una más, era la mujer oficial, la condesa Báthory oficiando un sacrificio de vírgenes suicidas.  Aprendí que en lo posible hay que evitar ser la tercera persona. Desde mi feudo burocrático en el palacio del amor podía decidir con quién compartir lecho, a quién prestar a mi marido, por cuánto tiempo, con cuánta intensidad. Controlar lo que pasaba entre nuestros cuerpos era mi prerrogativa y mi carta de inmunidad. Siempre tienes miedo. Por eso fui al  mismo tiempo mala y demasiado buena. Fui sádica, fui masoquista, no pude darle un nombre a esa nueva rabia, a esa nueva energía. La confusión de aquel día me ha acompañado en todos los tríos posteriores que he formado. Se resume a que en el momento del amor tripartito compiten en mi interior con igual fiereza los celos y el deseo. A veces, los celos ganan y devoran todo a su paso, a veces es el deseo el que abduce. Después de mi primer trío con otra mujer, demandé un trío con dos hombres. Era un tema bastante serio para mí. Mi novio estaba en deuda conmigo. Nos echamos a buscar y una noche en que andábamos muy borrachos conocimos a dos chicos muy simpáticos que nos siguieron a la playa sin preguntar nada. Esa noche lo hice con los dos mientras aquel novio supervisaba de cerca. Cuando ya tienes controlado lo de los tríos, cada vez más te sientes la directora gonzo de una película pornográfica (género trío) que intenta mejorar el casting.

Un trío es, según el wikipedia, un ménage à trois (fr), el sexo grupal que involucra a sólo tres participantes y que no es una orgía. Como directora de películas del género trío tenía que ser muy cuidadosa. No quería que mis intentos de montar Jules et Jim acabaran en Los Tres Cerditos. Me dediqué durante un tiempo a establecer extrañas valoraciones de los tríos que me rodeaban. Trataba de encontrar la formula perfecta de tres entes reunidos con fines más o menos decorosos, como el padre, el hijo y el espíritu santo. Sí, si el sexo es cuestión de numerología, el tres era mi número de la suerte. El tres es especulativo, evoca el cosmos y el infinito. Porque un trío no es un triángulo, claro. No tiene hipotenusa ni ángulo recto, y es de suponerse que ninguna de las partes está en discordia. No hay estadísticas al respecto pero quizá existan más tríos que parejas en el universo, aunque en la mayoría de casos uno de los tres no tenga ni idea de que son tres en lugar de dos. Cuando finalmente lo descubren, muchas mujeres y hombres que no son liberales ni por naturaleza ni por opción, aceptan compartir a sus parejas para salvarse del inminente abandono.

Todos mis intentos de hacer un trío habían fracasado con mi siguiente novio, tanto como mis planes de tener una relación más “abierta”, así que cuando conocí a J me empeñé en que lo lleváramos a cabo. Tuve que insistir, pero tampoco demasiado. Una vez que se negociaron las formas, es decir, cuando J se aseguró que sólo lo haríamos con mujeres, nos pusimos manos a la obra. Como se ve, en apariencia no era un trato justo. De hecho, una feminista contumaz podría apedrearme por eso. Pero cuidado, cabe recordar que yo venía de una impresionante racha de cuernos inconfesable que debía ser de alguna manera purgada. Obsequiar a mi nuevo amor con toneladas de glamorosa libertad, aunque dentro de mis confines, era mi pasaporte al cielo.  Además, y esto es un dato a tener en cuenta, a mí, como a tantas otras, me gustan las mujeres. He oído que nadie conoce mejor el cuerpo de una mujer que otra mujer. No lo creo. Con la debida atención, un hombre puede ser igual de diestro. No es por eso que las mujeres se juntan. No es porque las mujeres sepan dónde tocar. A mí me gusta, de vez en cuando, destrozar el mito de la pareja primigenia y reunirme con mi propia sustancia. Creo en una magia contra natura. Pero más concretamente, me gusta poder sentir en otra mujer lo que un hombre siente en mí. Todo lo manso, blando y dúctil que yo intuía en mi propio ser, que los otros podían poseer con regocijo, pero que yo sólo podría haber conocido por obra y gracia de un desdoblamiento o algún otro procedimiento de ciencia ficción, se resuelve cuando una mujer me besa en los labios.

En fin, ambos buscábamos una mujer, casi exactamente para lo mismo. No sabíamos dónde encontraríamos a esa alma trilliza pero intuíamos que estaba muy cerca. Si uno vive en “estado de trío”, instalado de lleno en la tercera dimensión, digamos, no es imposible que suceda. Por qué no imaginar que así como hay personas en el mundo buscando su media naranja, existen algunos seres buscando una naranja entera.

El caso es que nosotros encontramos a alguien así. F no era demasiado amiga, sólo una amiga de esas que siempre han estado ahí. Pequeña y quebradiza, usaba el cabello corto y las uñas largas. No era una persona muy sociable, de hecho cuando no era huraña tenía un mal humor bastante histérico, permanentemente sarcástico. Aunque yo la conocía bien nunca dejaba de sorprenderme esa extraña agresividad que mostraba en los momentos más inoportunos. Creo que odiaba a la gente, pero no lo tenía asumido y esto le provocaba algunas situaciones de pánico en público y más de un ensimismamiento. También era una solitaria, aunque más que desamparada parecía acorralada. Un dato más: no tenía pareja conocida. No era Anais Nin, pero nosotros tampoco éramos Henry y June. Ese invierno, empezamos a vernos muy seguido. Quedábamos cada tarde. Hablábamos de sexo y de sexo.

El primer triple beso ocurrió en un bar horroroso del centro de la ciudad. Primero F le dijo a J que le diera un beso. Él me echó una mirada de rutina para cerciorarse de mi complicidad, luego la besó. Luego me besó a mí, luego a ella, luego ambas nos besamos y después lo besamos a él. Un triple beso es algo misterioso hasta que ocurre. En realidad, las bocas se congregan en un gesto como el que harían tres polluelos peleándose el mismo gusanillo. Sólo que hasta ese momento no caíamos en cuenta que el gusano de la muerte era el cuarto personaje de la historia. Y que estaba comenzando a devorar  nuestras lenguas.

Por lo general, un trío tiene corta vida. Desafía las matemáticas del corazón. La muerte súbita planea sobre él, sobre su sueño trémulo. Una cosa es tener una aventura tripartita de una noche y otra muy distinta es formalizarla. Un trío de la vida real no es una película pornográfica las 24 horas del día. Aunque yo, como sostienen las actrices porno que sufren los perjuicios de la doble penetración en un trío chico-chica-chico, he llegado a preferir el menos fatigoso trío chica-chico-chica, esto es, dos mujeres que se hacen una y un hombre que vale por dos.

La muerte súbita planea sobre el trío. Por ejemplo, J conduce a cien kilómetros por hora, sin quitar los ojos del espejo retrovisor, mientras F y yo nos prodigamos húmedas caricias en el asiento trasero. Estamos desnudas, nos besamos hasta mordernos. Ella se corre por una calle X. Yo me corro doblando por la calle Y. Esta es una escena de la vida real, ocurrió aquella primera noche del triple beso, pero también puede funcionar de un modo metafórico. La simultaneidad es la utopía del trío. F podría ir al volante mientras J y yo nos revolcamos en la parte de atrás. Entonces ella decidiría bajarse del coche y dejarnos sin gasolina. O puedo ser yo la que conduce mientras ellos manchan el tapiz y empañan el parabrisas. En este caso, yo podría perder visibilidad y acelerar adrede hasta hacer que nos estrelláramos para siempre. El saldo de un trío es tan azaroso como el saldo de cualquier accidente automovilístico y no basta el cinturón. Luego de un triple choque, casi siempre hay un muerto y dos heridos. Al poco tiempo, F estaba completamente enamorada de J. Su inexperiencia y su porfiada heterosexualidad habían hecho que se inclinase hacia ese lado de la alabanza.

Pero primero fue lo del aborto. Un descuido fatal de los tres. F estaba absolutamente segura de lo que quería hacer así que aquella mañana ambos la acompañamos a abortar. Para no estar tan tristes bromeábamos con la idea de tenerlo, ¡un hijo de los tres!, con los ojos de J, el cabello de F y algo de mi presuntuosa personalidad. Viviríamos bajo el mismo techo y lo llevaríamos a ver la secuela de Harry Potter. Yo, que he estado en el otro lado, ahora experimentaba la desesperanza de un aborto en la sala de espera, como un chico pero leyendo revistas femeninas y comiéndome las uñas. Cuando acabó todo, nos fuimos a cenar, tomamos mucho vino y prometimos no volver a acostarnos.  Nos queríamos mucho, en realidad.

Por lo general un trío tiene corta vida pero no muere el día que decides darle muerte, por más dramatismo que uno quiera ponerle a la supuesta escena final. Una noche más en nuestra hermosa cama matrimonial para tres, F empezó a llorar desconsoladamente mientras hacíamos el amor como sólo pueden hacerlo tres personas. Si F hubiera estallado en llanto minutos antes, quizá las lágrimas habrían caído en dirección a nuestros pechos adheridos y habría permitido una jugosa sensación resbaladiza en nuestros pezones. J estaba detrás de ella, de modo que cuando se movía arriba y abajo, a mi pubis llegaban los ecos de sus sacudidas conjuntas. Al final, J vino hacia mí –en mi hipotética película me gusta sentir que paso de ser un personaje secundario a protagonista sin el menor mérito –. Y entonces se puso a llorar. La abrazamos pero fue en vano. Creo que para ese momento ya habíamos hablado demasiado. Fue como si todas las heridas que le hicimos hubieran permanecido en estado de suspensión hasta ahora y de repente brotaran ante nuestros ojos.

–Quiero irme, dijo.

J la llevó a su casa. Era una noche especialmente fría. Yo me quedé en la cama, con la estúpida agradecida sensación de no ser al menos esta vez yo la que se estaba yendo a la mierda. Sentí lo mismo que siento cuando desde la ventanilla del coche veo a una pareja desconocida pelearse en una calle desierta: Alivio de no ser la chica. Agradecí que fuéramos tres y no dos. Que no fuera yo la novia en problemas sino otra y que bastara uno para hacerse cargo. Alguien que no era yo. Agradecí estar sola y tener toda la cama para mí y mi tristeza.

J me dijo que F lloró todo el camino. Pero si ella era la víctima ¿eso nos convertía a nosotros en verdugos? Nunca habíamos dicho algo ni siquiera parecido a una mentira pero en ese mismo momento J se daba cuenta de que no bastaba con la sinceridad. Cuando llegaron a la puerta de su piso, F no hizo ninguna señal de bajarse del coche.

–Maldito hijo de puta –le gritó a J, intentando golpearlo.

J, el tipo más amable y educado que conozco, la empujó fuera del coche y volvió a casa.

Cuando ella se fue para siempre nos quedamos solos y desesperados. Nuestra cama se había vuelto enorme, inconmensurable. Fue así como nos dedicamos a solventar la prostitución para parejas, un target minoritario pero un target al fin.

En un trío siempre hay dos exhibicionistas y un vouyerista. No estoy muy segura de las verdaderas razones de esta afición por ver a J haciéndole el amor a otra. Cada voyeur tiene su propia y refinada justificación. Desde que nos alejamos para siempre de las putas hemos organizado varios tripartitos, siempre en territorio neutral, lejos de la amistad y muy lejos del amor. Con conocidas o interesadas. A veces, miro a J y a nuestra invitada especial desde una esquina de la habitación, oculta en la oscuridad, y acompaño con una mano tímida el vaivén de sus cuerpos, como acariciando el lomo de un animal rabioso. Ellos saben que estoy ahí pero no estoy. Me hago invisible. No me masturbo, sólo observo, codicio en soledad. Los miro porque, de alguna manera, en ese mismo instante, me encarno, me apodero de sus cuerpos. Para alguien a quien no le gusta demasiado ser quien es, resulta fascinante tener la posibilidad de ser otro. Soy como un espectro buscando un organismo donde habitar. Después de cada trío con otra chica, J y yo a solas, rememoramos lo vivido. Entonces juego a ser ellas, con sus nombres, sus formas, con el tono de sus gemidos; copio sus movimientos en la cama, su manera de apretarse a J y palpitar. Me convierto en ellas, encuentro dónde habitar. Le pido a J que me llame por sus nombres. Como suele pasar con estas cosas, lo que para algunos es una enfermedad para otros es el remedio. A veces, en mitad del juego, J me coge la cabeza y mirándome a los ojos dice mi nombre: “Gabriela, Gabriela, Gabriela”. Y yo lloro sin saber por qué.

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