I love my husband.

• Author: Pinon, Nalida
• Position: Short story

I LOVE MY HUSBAND. From morning to night. Scarcely awake, I offer him coffee. He sighs, exhausted by his usual poor night's sleep, and begins to shave. I knock on his door three times, lest his coffee get cold. He grunts in anger and I clamor in distress. I don't want my effort confused with a cold liquid that he will consume just as he consumes me twice a week, especially on Saturdays.

Afterwards, I fix the know of his tie and he protests because I have fixed merely the smallest part of his life. I laugh so he can go off more calmly, ready to face life outside and bring an always warm and bountiful loaf of bread back to our living room.

He says that I'm demanding, that I stay home to wash dishes, go shopping, and on top of that, complain about life. Meanwhile, he builds his world with little bricks, and though some of these walls topple to the ground, his friends compliment him on his effort at creating brickyards, all solid and visible, from clay.

They salute me, too, for nourishing a man who dreams of mansions, shanties, and huts, and so makes the nation progress. And that is why I am the shadow of the man whom everyone says I love. I let the sun enter the house, to brighten up the objects bought with our joint effort. Even so, he never compliments me on the luminescent objects. To the contrary, through his certainty about my love, he proclaims that I do nothing but consume the money that gathers together in the summer. Then I ask him to understand my nostalgia for the terrain formerly worked by women: he furrows his brow as though I were proposing a theory that disgraces the family and the definitive deed to our apartment.

What more do you want, woman? Isn't it enough for you that we married with community property? And while he was saying that I was part of his future, one that only he, however, had the right to build, I noticed that the man's generosity qualified me to be only the mistress of a past whose rules were dictated in shared intimacy.

I began to think longingly about how wonderful it would be to live only in the past, before this preterit time was dictated for us by the man we say we love. He applauded my scheme. Within the house, in the oven that was the hearth, it would be easy to nourish the past with herbs and oatmeal so that he could calmly manage the future. He definitely couldn't preoccupy himself with the uterus of my womb, which must belong to him in such a way that he wouldn't need to smell my sex to discover who else, besides him, had been there, had knocked at the door, had scratched inscriptions and dates onto its walls.

My son must be only mine, he confessed to his friends on the Saturday of the month that we entertained. And a woman must be only mine and not even her own. The idea that I couldn't belong to myself, touch my sex to purge it of excesses, provoked the first shock to the fantasy about the past in which I had been immersed until then. So the man, as well as having shipwrecked me in the past while he felt free to live the life to which only he had access, also needed to bind my hands...