A silver stream runs into the eroded cavity of the mountain's rock. Inside the cave, the edges of the water run through the coiled channel and pile up inverted in the puddle. The entire ceiling vault constantly drips condensed water. Too much moisture for weeds to grow. The ground, frigid. The cave dwelling is located a few meters from the exit into the forest. Some of the air also icy, but dry, reaches from outside.
The mysterious stranger sent the dogs away because they wanted to bite me. They keep howling at the moon outside. You can hear them far away, but not so far that they can't come running in less than a few minutes.
At dawn she leaves and leaves me berries. The day passes long and slow listening to the rain. Every day it is raining. The foliage works like a huge canopy. It barely lets in the light. Clumps the streams of rain and separates its sound from the cave. It creates two layers: the sound of rain in the distance gives an idea of the distant landscape and distances. It feels like the cave is under the top of a mountain. The winds come sinuous, as if the mountain were among more peaks. The other layer is the soggy foliage around the cave. The jets fall on both sides of the entrance arch.
The mysterious stranger left me on top of the pool. Some seven meters above the height of the puddle rises a promontory of giant stones. On these stones, a flat limestone that must weigh more than a ton forms a small plain. The mysterious stranger has her house here. It is the driest place in the cave, although the air that fills it is almost always steamy, except for the few sunny days. On the limestone there is a kind of mattress that I don't know how it's made, because it doesn't look anything like those of Duga. I'd say it's made of several layers of pressed dog hair, because I've seen bits on the scissors she keeps up on the ceiling, where I can't get to. At the bottom of the limestone there is a hole that works as a small latrine.
The pool must be emptied in the dry season, because it is a river. I always fear that on heavy rainy days the cave will flood, but it never does. Now that I can start to peek a little over the puddle, I have been able to see that the stream that comes from outside forms a gentle eddy on the surface of the water. At night, the persistent dripping doesn't let me sleep. The mysterious stranger has hoarse nightmares in which she howls and utters random syllables that don't seem to belong to any language. I look at the scissors, which could henceforth provide me with an escape. Actually I only think about what she will dream about. Not a night goes by without opening my body from behind before entering her animal world of dreams. She does it until exhausted, but I think she just wants to warm up.
The first night, when I woke up for the first time in the cave, I saw the huge eyes of the mysterious stranger staring into mine. There was a fire burning a few yards away and the flames burned red in her black irises. She was crushing me with the weight of her on my hip astride. Her cold hand pressed my neck against the mattress of dog hair. A symphony of thousands of icy water drops vaulted the space between her body, my body, and the cave.
Her legs were cold. Her gaze flaming. Her sex was wet, wet as the fish. I was immobile, but also my limbs were numb, soft, droopy. I imagined that she had given me drugs because I had no control over them. I also saw things. Only now after a long time do I have this reconstruction of the scene of that first night. I had to replay the scene thousands of times in order to discern what was real in it. Because I also saw mermaids bathing in the pool, with long golden and purple manes, and fluorescent tails that sprinkled silver drops on the dark and lean body of the mysterious stranger. I saw the giant drops on the ceiling of the cave, like big planets that were going to explode above my eyes. I listened to the songs of the sirens, which were like the harvest songs of the idente traditions, but much more shrill and sensual. But above all, I felt that my limbs were skin bags about to be punctured, joined only by a few knotted hairs, slowly slipping from the cave cot towards the pond. My face was a great glass and from the mouth to the anus a long and fine shaft of glass was softening and heating downwards.
At some point, I don't remember, she turned me around and, I don't know how, entered me. The stem of the cup continued to heat up. The hair that joined my limbs turned into worms, the skins into pieces of mud, the worms into fig pulp, the mud into mosses on a stormy night. The sirens stopped singing. The drops of water from the ceiling began to fall on the back of my neck, breaking into violent waves that spilled all over my neck, flooding my clavicle and licking my chest. The glass of my face overturned on the cot. My tongue, my eyes, my brains, overflowing anemones seeking the crystalline swirl of the aguazal on the precipice of sliding jelly. I was on the brink and my arms were falling like vines. Drops fell from me breaking the mirror of water. The echo of the voice of the drops bounced off all the walls of the cave splashing the most remote corners of my ears. The drops that entered my ear snailed into the cóchlea. I felt that I was going to fall into the pond. My organs had already arranged themselves in the direction of the fall and the pit of my stomach was tightening in my throat. The end of my vertebrae had become fuzzy. The crystal shaft had become cylindrical algae, the algae slime, and the slime foam. Strong lightning bolts lit my body from the pelvis to the eyes. When I was about to fall the return of a violent attack returned me to the cot. The weight of the mysterious stranger's body collapsed onto my back. I regained consciousness of my form. Although as the days, weeks and months went by, I discovered that her body was smaller than mine, at that moment it felt as heavy as the limestone on which we lived.
