“Juan, did I ever tell you about the transsexual I was in love with?"

“…”

“No, I suppose I didn’t. Well, it happened. Yes, it did. She wasn’t an ostentatious tranny or anything. Not like one of those you meet on the street or in a bar, one whose carrying the virus and wants to fuck you in the ass. It wasn’t like that. She was just a girl who’d been born a boy. Or, a boy who’d always been a girl at heart. Nothing complicated or fucked up, just a case of mistaken genetics, or mistaken identity. She was a student of mine. This was during my time in Rome. I was a young professor then, and I wanted desperately to be liked. I had a good image of myself: vigorous and funny and understanding. I liked to think that many of the girls were in love with me. And they were, of course. It was bad business to get mixed up in, in hindsight. The going out and partying and fucking recklessly. It was bad business. But it was fun. I miss it, to be honest. I missed it even while it was happening. It was one of those things. Anyway. It must have been my second semester there. It was my second semester there. I was living in a nice hotel across from the train station. And there was this lovely, quiet girl in my class. A little boyish, sure, but like a feminine boy, one of those angelic boys you might see singing for the pope. She had fine, delicate features. That wonderful skin the Italians have, and small dark eyes. The kind of beauty that beguiles, Juan, the kind that lures you in and then traps you, helpless and dying for more. You’ve seen a lot in your days, you know the type, I’m sure. She wore sun dresses and sneakers. I was teaching Latin American literature. I was teaching a lot of your stuff, actually. God, your early stuff. Christ it holds up. It more than holds up. They’ll be reading your early stuff for longer than either of us can imagine. Girls love your early stuff. It got you laid, didn’t it? I can only imagine how much it got you laid. None of us were even close to you back then, so we all taught you instead. Hell, it got us laid. Me, Enrique in Madrid, Aquilano in Paris. We’d teach you and it’d be like picking fruit from low hanging branches. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Stealing candy from babies.”

Finally Juan Carlos let out a sickly smile.

“She wore these diaphanous little sun dresses, Juan, with no bra underneath and you could see the fine bones of her chest, which was very small and fine. It was like her chest bones were the chest bones of a little bird, if that makes sense. It’s what I thought of, I can’t help what I thought, Juan. Things began accidentally, everything always begins accidentally. She spotted me sitting at a café looking lonely. Well, really, I saw her coming up the street and I pulled out a book of your poetry and tried to look as forlorn and pensive as possible. I’ve never told any of this to anyone. She stopped in to sit with me. After that I started taking her for coffees, and then for wine. She was so smart. Irreverent, too, and funny, very funny. Hysterical, even. I’d hurt from laughing at her. She liked to do impressions, you know, of her classmates, or other professors. I’ve never laughed like that in my life. She wrote, too, these beautiful compact little poems that she sometimes passed to me before or after class. She had a gift for whittling a thing down to purely essentials. A gift for deconstruction. I would show off in class for her, talk out my ass, wear my nicest suits. Foolish things. You know how it can be, I’m sure. You’ve been a professor, too, although I guess not when you were so young as to give into those foolish flights of the heart. Or maybe you have, because we don’t ever really grow up, do we? I remember being a kid and having this vague notion of adulthood being some serene period of wisdom where you no longer felt the need to question things, and where you just did the right thing all the time because that’s what adults did. Because, of course, the right thing was always unequivocal and clear. But now I guess we’re inarguably adults, and kids look up to us as paragons of some old, probably dead, movements, but I don’t feel any clarity or wisdom, I feel just as goddamned foolish as back then when I was reading this fine girl’s poems at my desk and shaking, literally shaking. Maybe you feel the same way about all of it. Not the poetry, of course, but adulthood, or the notion of adulthood. That it’s all some big farce we build as kids, some grand myth. Anyway. I invited her for a weekend in Florence, and there outside the Duomo she told me. Told me that she was a man, that she had the organs. That’s how she put it: ‘had the organs.’ The most beautiful boy you’ve ever seen, I swear. I’d kissed her by then, of course, ran my hands all along the lines of her neck and little bird chest. I’ve never told a soul about this. She kissed me outside the Duomo and I tried to kiss her back, honestly I did. I wanted so badly to love her still. But I didn’t. You’d think I’d have been repulsed, a man as straight as me, but I wasn’t. Fuck, I don’t know what I felt, even now. I guess I felt like something had been stolen from me, something very valuable and rare. Something beautiful and good. It shouldn’t have changed how I felt, right? But it did. I don’t think I’ve ever been that sad in my life. I was so full of pity. I didn’t think I’d ever recover from it.”

“Why are you telling me about this?”

“Hell, I don’t know Juan. Just to talk, I guess. I’ve never told anyone about this. I haven't lost a son, or anything. I can’t match what you’ve lost or tell you a goddamned thing to help with that loss. So I just figured I’d talk and try to share something. I don’t know. I guess I shouldn’t have told you.”

Juan Carlos made a gesture of indifference with his hands, a limp lilt of his wrists. “Say whatever you want, really.”

“There’s more, if you want to hear it.”

“I don’t care.”

They sat in silence for a while, looking in opposite directions, two very old friends.

“The worst part of it was when we got back to Rome. Well, there were many worst parts of it. Losing her, that was the worst part of it. Being unable to keep loving her. That hurt, though I know it hurt her more. She was brave about it. She was a remarkable woman, absolutely remarkable. More adult than I’ll ever be. She came to class every day, and never showed a hint of weakness or loss. She continued to talk in class, the most incisive comments anyone made, including me. She continued to give me her poetry. One night she even asked me out for wine. We got wine and we went dancing but it was just so sad. That’s right though, I went dancing with her, or I tried to dance with her. Mostly we sat at the table and watched others dance. But the worst part was that the next week, somehow, some of the boys in class found out, discovered that she was a really a man. How they found out, I don’t know. I haven’t told a soul until right now. But the day they found out in class, they kept making subtle jokes about her, little things. Puns, or grunts, whispers to one another. And she knew, of course. She suffered. She just sat there and took it. And I knew, too. And I didn’t say anything. Not a word, Juan. Not one fucking word. Can you believe it? Maybe you can. Maybe, since you’ve known me so well, you could have predicted my failure at that moment, could have said, ’yes, he’ll be a coward.’ I think about that class every day, the jokes, the way they escalated until the whole class knew what was going on, how she sat there, still as a bird, frozen, not moving, not crying, not doing anything. And I just let it happen without a word. I think, now, that that was the most important moment of my life, the moment when I was to be tested, when all my decisions, and actions, were to be put to the flame. When God, or the gods, or whomever, finally decided to see if I was worth anything as a human or not. And I failed. I was a coward. I’ve never recovered from that. Nothing I’ve done since then has seemed half as important. None of the good deeds, and I’ve done many, can atone for that failure. That was it, Juan, don’t you see, that was the one chance I got. Our whole lives build to that one chance, and we don’t even know when it’s upon us. And we fail, or we don’t.”

Juan Carlos looked at his friend now, who forced a smile.

“She didn’t come to class after that. I gave her an A, of course. It didn’t matter. I saw her once, some number of years later. I was back in Rome for a conference. And she came. She sat in the audience and listened to me give some limp dick talk about the poetics of the Diaspora. She clapped along with everyone else. She’d grown her hair out then, and looked older, of course, skinnier, ravaged by disappointment. She had a wedding ring on. I took her hand and kissed it. She called me professor. We went for gelato and talked about nothing important, nothing at all, and it was so painful, for both of us, I think. I have no idea where she is now, if she’s alive or dead. No idea at all. She visits me in my dreams, of course. Naturally. And I look forward to them now, those dreams, even the ones in which she has a dick, and she‘s forcing me to suck it, or she‘s fucking me with it. I even look forward to those dreams. I'm sorry. I shouldn't go on like this. I shouldn't tell you all this. You've lost so much, and here I am, talking your ear off about something so strange. I wish there was a point to it. Some moral to the story that could help you. But there's not, of course. I'll never see her again, probably. I'll die, she'll die. And that's that.”