Two Women, One Smoking
History is the soul of no one. The soul cannot speak outside the writing of light, and speaking inside light is to have mispronounced writing. This language is a photograph of a conversation no one can transcribe. Photograph—light writing. The soul may see the photograph but seeing the photograph is impossible. The voice sees itself, and that is to have written at all. Cada palabra viene sin una madre.[1] Let me have one then. Of what? If I cannot have one, then let me have a word. We are mothers of blackberries before we are daughters of men. If the camera is innocent, then so are we. If the camera has sinned, then look, we had sinned at some hour, and the camera was kind to impart us as an hour born outside the day, that some stranger will know our sins. Are our sins unintelligible in their eyes that they invented new ones to see us? When the sun looks at us our cheeks flash like ice, but it is the shape of your brows that I admire. They are the original night the black end of my cigarette repeats, but the darkness we stand beside is not ours, even if the roof is ours.
Your left brow has the benevolence of a dull liar, since it always rises when I make you laugh. Oh, how difficult it is to make you laugh, you, the virgin of reticence, or am I being shy when I read you? Even love needs introduction, but they said to reason not the need.[2] I’m glad no one will ever see my face. Does that make me more of a virgin than the picture of one? Your hair is thick with health wound into a perfect melon. I think you will always look young. Why do you keep your head wrapped in this heat? I want to ask you, but we’re meant to be concerned with our lives. Habit. Let us invent a new word for what is between women. I don’t think sister will satisfy me. I don’t think sin includes our lives. How are your feet, my friend? My toenails have become that sleeping shade of white, never snow, not yet ghost, hardly peeled lychee. I am faithful to the thoughtless character of the color. I like the purity its presence made against us, even though I knew it from the way it was against us. Why? Why, it looks good on me. Well, my eyes are clean. I hide my feet so I can stay thoughtful. The diameter of my skirt controls the ambition of my stride. My sleeves may carry innumerable secrets, wings of an angel with slits cut all the way down to their roots, each feather having always been two. That’s how I sell the corn every day. All wings turn green, then brown, and I sell them in the time of yellow. I have an ear of corn in mind, and an ear of corn I hope to never see again. You’ve never hoped then. You’ve only waited. I dreamed the ears of corn were my brothers and sisters. I was thirsty, and I sucked on the corn. Did they scream? No, they were laughing. They were ticklish and free.
We are too old to receive the myth of a great country, but our children know the dream. Do you have children? Can we stay within the frame, or must we speak of children? I love children. How can you love me if you do not love children? Our words can barely stay still beneath the wood-tiled roof. I might have as many pesos today as children for a life. Gracias. No, thank you. Is that what we’re supposed to say? I wear the formality of those words in my own tongue better than I do in theirs. I want to stand here for a while longer. I can barely see anything. I don’t need to see. Three years after the war I dreamed I forgot my husband’s name, and when I woke up, the feeling of forgetting changed the feeling of the name, and all the more lost he seemed to me, since, in the dream, I did not forget him. Do we really speak of men if they are real men? The souls of women are as lean as the rubber trees in their regard. From what hour of their regard do you reap such resentment? I resent nothing. I’m smoking, and I’ll smoke tomorrow. I’m going home, and I’ll go home tomorrow.
You know, there was a handsome man—Was he handsome? He looked educated. Does that make someone handsome? Certainly. Unless that’s our version of their use of sin. Well, he was handsome. He was the perfect picture of a civil servant, and he pondered the elements of Spanish in the English language. What is romance to them? Their romance depends on the weight of two languages touching in our memories. Yes, but what is it for them?
Who is the mother and who is the father of our country? America would say it was the father, but Spain was as much of a father. Both have been mothers in the way we regret the possibility of becoming mothers at all before we are old enough to take responsibility for our names. We should pity the wood-tiles. They must tire from pretending to be alone one after another placed on the edge of each after. Does the wood of our crates ever get jealous of the wood that became tiles? If so, I’m jealous of you, but I’m too gentle for anything more than a half-smile. I give you my teeth. My voice tires of seeing itself. What is there to be tired of? If we have the same fate, are we not the same woman?
“[Two women, one smoking] : Mandalay; 1119; 1900/1930.” In the digital collection Philippine Photographs Digital Archive, Special Collections Research Center, University of Michigan. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclphilimg/x-1119/phlf089. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed November 21, 2025.
[1] Each word comes without a mother.
[2] (Shakespeare, King Lear, II.IV.257.)