In the mirror room
- Turn on the light!
This routine had been going on for at least a few weeks, from Tajo's perspective. Although the light turned on and off completely randomly, and it was not possible to distinguish the passing of the days except by keeping the discipline of the calculations. But Tajo was far from trying to find out what was happening. Since last winter everything had been an accumulation of impossible situations that they had no clue nothing about. Neither the environment, nor the events, nor the words they heard and saw had any relation to anything they had experienced before. It had been so long since they had lived as in a dream that they had given in. They concentrated on survival, and watched with parsimony as food arrived every day and hunger began to fade into the energy of their body. In the last few days they had realized with curiosity that the food was improving. Even the last time they had turned on the light meat was brought into the cell. When the hatch through which the lunch was delivered was opened, they observed with even greater surprise that there was an ornately decorated tray, a shiny metallic jug filled with a red liquid that they had never seen before (it did not look like blood), and a feast with fish, shellfish, and nuts.
They had never lost their appetite. They had always liked indulgences (they lived for them, they might say), so they felt satisfied and ate slowly and heartily.
Likewise, every time they looked up at the mirror that was their only company, she was there, right through them.
- Come out, come out all of you. Leave me alone
Behind the mirror, Aythor was never tired of looking. For months the councilors had been handling affairs of state and he only went to the palace to attend the ceremonies and bedroom protocols. Every time Tajo opened their mouth to eat he felt an immense satisfaction that he did not understand. He scrutinized their every move hungrily. He anxiously waited for them to start making those strange gestures that Tajo obsessively repeated exactly every six hours.
Tajo tasted the red liquid, which tasted bitter but attractive. They drank it down, raising their elbow to the smooth stone ceiling. They got hot. They tightened the girdle around their waist, the red silk collars. They loosened them and wanted to remove the girdle, but when they got up from the ground to do so they felt a sudden dizziness and stumbled. In the mirror the mysterious stranger had also stumbled and now they were looking at her with a certain innocence. Tajo approached her slowly. She also came closer, at exactly the same speed and reproducing the same gestures of them. Although Tajo already had the habit of she always doing it, this time she irritated them more than usual. Tajo normally played at trying to get out of her constant imitation by limiting the size and quality of their gestures. Tajo would try to trick her by changing the direction of a slight nod suddenly to the opposite side of her, or they would lie still for hours waiting for her to get tired and do something else, but she never did. This time, however, Tajo felt like challenging her, breaking her, dissolving the image of her leaping into the small vertical puddle that separated them. Tajo launched themselves headfirst into the mirror only to feel a hard blow to their head and fall to the ground scattering all the layers of red silk several meters around their body. The girdle came loose and their naked body remained motionless, looking at the stones of the ceiling.
Aythor got up worried and was about to call the service for assistance, but he repressed himself. No one had entered the cell of the mysterious stranger in all these months and he felt that he did not want anyone to intrude. He got up from his chair and leaned close to the mirror to look at Tajo. When he looked at them he felt a swarm of golden filaments bristle under his stomach. The filaments crackled within his flesh and sent sparks running under the skin of his back, the nape of his neck, and between his ribs. A large red ball was growing and heating up in the center of the swarm. Sometimes it went up through his esophagus and produced a few tears. From his misty eyes the sinuses of his nose opened up his face and let a great deal of air into his lungs. The air penetrated through the pleurae and was returned in the golden filaments, reproducing the same path every time he continued to look at Tajo, and even when he was already in his chambers hours later and remembered each of Tajo’s micromovements in front of the mirror, or each of the spirals that they repeated every six hours and that were a mystery to the palace doctors.
He was fifty-five years old and had never felt anything like it, not even close.
The first day that he had said that thing of “turn on the light!”, Tajo was sleeping on the floor, with their hands forming a dove under their face. The woven locks of kinky hair rested on the red silk of the dress. They didn't seem to be breathing. They looked almost lifeless, their body long, pale ocher and their features decisive and smooth, like stone. That day the sensation had started from his skin. An almost imperceptible tinkle of hair standing on end on his scalp, and a slow longitudinal awakening of each of his vertebrae. Then Tajo's eyes snapped open without moving at all, and Aythor's entire trunk suddenly stiffened. Tajo followed a small walking insect with their gaze a meter away from their body, and when they lost interest they looked up at the mirror. Then the red ball exploded in the center of Aythor’s entrails. Aythor felt this explosion as his eyes met the mysterious stranger's through the mirror, even though he knew Tajo couldn't see him. The mysterious stranger stood up almost in a jump and approached slowly towards the mirror, until they looked at themselves only a few centimeters away. Tajo touched their face, hair, clothes, chest, shoulders, neck. Aythor felt that Tajo was touching him. Tajo felt the touch of silk on their own body, even though they had never used it (silk was for service). Aythor felt that he did not want to lay a finger on them, that he was not going to allow them to be mistreated in the harem, that there was no way he was going to follow the protocol.