Blood Red

by Gabriela Ponce, Sarah Booker

Genres: Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

The exhilarating English-language debut from celebrated Ecuadorian author Gabriela Ponce, Blood Red centers the female body in a radical exploration of desire, choice, and consequences.

Description: 

In a torrent of stream-of-consciousness fragments, the unnamed narrator of Blood Red recounts the aftermath of her failed marriage in explicit, sensual detail. She falls in and out of love, parties with her friends, skates around the city at night, does a lot of drugs, and gives in to her impulses. Her internal monologue is punctuated by bouts of trypophobia, an obsessive cataloging of holes that empty, fill, widen, and threaten to swallow her entirely. Blood courses through her every encounter from periods, fights, accidents, wounds, sex, streaming to and from her holey fixation. Blood is a vibrant reminder of her physicality, a manifestation of her interiority, a link to memories and sensations—until its abrupt absence changes everything. 

Provocative and raw, Blood Red is a fierce portrayal of a woman navigating the gray—or red—zones of her uncertainties and paradoxical urges. A subversive grappling with what it means to wrest power over one’s body, revels in the narrator’s autonomy to make choices and face the outcomes, no matter the scale.

 

Read more

Release date: October 4, 2022

Publisher: Restless Books

Print pages: 184

Sample

1

WE ROLLED INTO the warehouse spraying spit that glittered amid an uncontainable excitement while the night seeped in through our skirts and sleeves. Hands smelling of menthol and eyes vibrating with a dazzling intensity. Keeping our skates on, we entered and started dancing frenetically, trying to embrace the untouchable or unnameable while pouring ourselves out among the crowd and the noise: an intense beautification of everything. We felt as if we were just one body—bone, blood, flesh—that momentarily splits apart to come back together, pulled by the irremediable need for touch. We grabbed each other’s hands and waists and long blonde, black, golden, red hair. Our rhythms were synchronized and every now and then our lips touched, our breasts brushed against one another. In one of those impulses to flee that strikes in moments of greatest pleasure, flashing from my tailbone up my body, I skated toward the bar, ordered a whiskey, and grabbed the hands that were at my side, hands that were familiar and eyes that felt like accomplices even though I’d only ever seen them once or twice. I slipped in the sweat of that body, smelled it, and pulled it outside, back onto the street, to skate again in the open air and experience the night as a black volute that attracts unstable bodies within its reach, showing no mercy to those who ask for help. The sentence outside is the night echoed inside me, and I skated.

Holding that hand, I spun a few times, getting dizzy, grabbed a taxi, drank whiskey, skated down a street plastered with dog shit, scrambled over chunks of sidewalk, and arrived at the door of a little house on a dead-end street. Pasaje H—hawk, hole, horror. Then I calmly studied his eyes anew. Eyes that didn’t avoid anything, not even that which didn’t interest them or didn’t seem the least bit useful. His eyes traveled over everything. And while that fearless gaze roved over the disorder of the world, it discharged sparks that impregnated the air and objects with an almost shameless tenderness. I stood there, between the wall and door, shivering, my arms twisted, freezing to death. He started undressing me while opening the door to the garage, then the metal door, then the wooden door, and he was pushing me toward the humid, warm interior into which I placidly slid, a little worried I was still bleeding. When we got inside, my pants and underwear were already around my calves. He didn’t turn on the light, he just kissed my nipples and kissed my thighs and savored my bleeding vagina and with that blood he returned to my mouth and kept kissing me with a smoothness I’d never experienced before—damned tenderness that swallows what’s left of me: shame about my bones and skinny legs. I expected penetration, but we kept kissing in the darkness while the tail of something that felt like a cat, plush and repulsive, brushed our legs. He took off his clothes and lit a few candles with matches he pulled from his jacket pocket while I studied his body, his shapely ass sidling down an immense hallway. I stood there, half naked, wearing roller skates, feeling the icy air piercing through everything again. Helplessness like a white mist permeating my ass and the effects of the ecstasy that, like waves, returned to my chest asking, again, please, where is the rest of the body—bone, flesh, blood. I tried to follow him but slipped. I took off my skates and felt the damp floor like wet clay between the toes of my bare feet. I sunk my soles in, imagining mud, my toes embossing the earth and leaving behind a delicious imprint, painted by the flesh of my injured heel. I felt another trickle of blood. Walking slowly, following the dim light and smearing the blood on my thighs, I found him, his long, tangled hair. Naked, in the middle of an immense mattress taking up the entire room. I lay down at his side and felt his stiff cock, and he started kissing me again and the desire to feel him inside me became liquid that warmly oozed onto my inner thigh, over the dried red. He kept going, all his attention on my mouth, kissing it with an unusual delicacy. We didn’t make love that night. That night his cock pushed against my pussy, squeezed between my thighs, rubbed between my butt cheeks several times, but didn’t enter me. I fell asleep with my vagina sweating red and the ecstasy returning, no longer like waves but like soft ants that became an army, swarming, and I couldn’t hold anything back.

The next morning, I woke up to his cock stiff again. This time there was penetration. But there were other things occupying my attention. The walls with clumps of green moss growing on them, the moisture dripping from the surface, the density of the air, and his tongue bending in my mouth. He fucked me while around us the moss and insects came and went through tiny holes that pierced the walls; I felt the chill of trypophobia: I imagined holes like pores also opening all over his back and swallowing his body. The morbid curiosity growing until it was interrupted by a disturbance somewhere in the house that made him stop and stand up. It’s the cats, he said, a new one’s arrived. I slowly got up behind him, and, following him, discovered a passageway bathed in strips of sunlight falling through a circular skylight. Heaped on the floor were musical instruments and books. Piles of books. Flutes. Drums. Scores. Objects, necklaces, and masks. Coffers. All over the dirt floor. At the end of the hall, a little pile of clothes and my skates, which I approached. As I stepped over the dust, an immense cat appeared and behind it, two smaller ones. They shot through an open window where ferns spilled in. I walked toward my clothes and got dressed, noting a useless red cabinet—pure adornment—and a leather chair that looked as if it had come from an office building. In a corner was a little speaker and on it, a computer that hadn’t stopped playing, even though right now I can’t remember any of the songs it played. Music all night.

This is a cave or a cavern or a chute or a well, I thought, feeling that everything was as real as it was absurd. The man came out of what I assumed was the kitchen and offered me a chirimoya. He split it in two. Two white halves made of a furry, delicate texture. He kept one half in his hand and handed me the other with a spoon that I used to gut the fruit until there was only a cavity full of seeds. Then he passed me the other, extending his pale hand, and that image was one of such beauty it made me think something extraordinary was happening; the gravity of the moment right before the irreversible happens. The two peels of the chirimoya remained, and he put one inside the other and brought them close to his penis and peed a little. Then he laughed, offering it to me to drink. I paused. He laughed again and started walking to his room while saying he had to go out. It’s Sunday, there are unavoidable family things, that’s what I thought I heard, but he could have also said unmissable, or maybe unspeakable. He also said I could wait for him, I’m sure of that. But I’d already put my skates on, feeling that in my stomach a cold blast was slowly forming, rising, and hitting my throat. I started to cry. Immense was the hole I had to cross to leave. The man didn’t understand anything. He hugged me, and I tried to tell him I wanted to stay here to live. Please. And out of embarrassment—for the feeling and for the thought and for the tears—I almost left without saying goodbye, skating awkwardly, and, even more awkwardly, I opened the doors and picked up speed. I reached the main road and took a bus. Getting home with a deathly hangover, with the anguish slashing my throat, with the sun hurting my skin, with my now dry vagina, barely any little red drops, and the ecstasy like an obscene hole in the middle of my body through which everything flees, I peeled and sliced up a mealy apple, which was the only thing I could stomach for breakfast. Watching how the honey fell in a perfect stream, from the spoon held in my shaking hands onto the strips of apple, returned a certain calm, and I was able to sleep.

María came over that afternoon and, drunk after we finished off two bottles of white wine to get over the Sunday pain, talking about the party, roaring with laughter, I said: the truth is, I’ve fallen in love again. Holding her cup with her skinny little fingers, she pronounced—as was her norm—one of her ironic little phrases: but you’re a married woman; to which I responded, also cynically, again dying with laughter, with a gesture in which I raised my glass and nodded with my whole body, I said yes, I am a married woman.

2

I WENT BACK to the cave countless times. In my car, speeding down the highway, I wondered why I kept returning. What was I doing there? Every Thursday. Or every Friday. I went back to the cave, and each time the place would get wilder; it grew mounds and crests of dirt that turned to dust. I returned so often that one day I woke up dressed in clumps of moss. In truth I woke up with my torso pale and naked; my tits declaring themselves like soft little hills looked smaller, as if someone who wasn’t him but an animal had sucked them. My pink nipples, somewhat irritated and hard, hanging over the deep curve of my waistline, my arms covered by the sleeves of what remained of a now shredded sweater, purple sleeves with white stripes. A sheet gathered with a cord at my waist, a brown skirt from which moss also sprouted, my large feet, my curly hair with pieces of grass rippling in it. Standing, holding onto the doorknob behind which another door opened and another door and another door; at my feet, a hairless black cat who appeared to have sprouted wings. It wasn’t a dream. Or the ecstasy. It was my birthday, and I was there that morning, transformed, in the cave.

I’d only been in certain parts of the cave: the room with the enormous mattress, a bathroom the light didn’t reach, and the sense of a garden or forest with branches that shook at night. I’d been in the kitchen. Made wild with moss that morning, I decided to familiarize myself with this cavern, but then came a series of thoughts that filled me with fear, among them the proliferation of doors and my inability to decide which to go through. I think he noticed because he put on music that distracted me from the negative thoughts I’d gotten lost in. The music never stopped playing in the cave. I remember it now as isolated, sharp sounds; sometimes those sounds made me cry, other times they could become dirt or water like everything else; sometimes, like that morning, they showed me the path to follow. I saw a photo and asked about the strangeness of the colors in the image, and he said I was born in Russia, I lived in Yugoslavia, and we both laughed because everything suddenly made sense. Months had already passed with messages arriving on Wednesday or Thursday. Are you coming today? And I’d spring to my keyboard. Do you want me to come? Of course, I will. My body was always stiff because the darkness in my room swirled, trying to suffocate me, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with that desolate late afternoon landscape, with that last sliver of sun. Get in the car, get on the highway, arrive, pass through the electric gate, past the mechanic, embrace him, allow the kisses to fill my empty body. ...