For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose. This week, Hannah Bonner—whose review “Husbands and Wives: On Sarah Manguso's Liars” appears in our Summer 2024 issue—dissects a passage from Boulder by Eva Baltasar.
Who among us is still learning the language of erotica? Its palpitations and cadences? I’ll admit, I am one of those stubborn pupils. Reading Catalan author Eva Baltasar’s Boulder, translated by Julia Sanches, I feel myself on the edge of an extinct volcano, emerging from a dark preverbal core into the heat of lyricism, and light.
The novel follows a woman who serves as a cook on a merchant ship. She falls in love with Samsa, who gives Boulder her nickname. Soon thereafter, Samsa determines she wants a child. When Samsa becomes pregnant, the two women grow estranged from one another as Boulder grapples with her own needs, of which parenthood is not one. Early on, however, the clarity of their carnality is inviolable. Of their first encounter, Boulder says, “I don’t fuck her, I whet myself on her... I swallow her as if she were a sword, little by little and with enormous care.” Eros courts Thanatos or, at the very least, danger. Primal intimacy can both “care”—and cut.
In a subsequent encounter, Boulder confesses,
I’ve never felt so merciless, so inhuman. I kiss her as if I could dissolve the skin of desire that coats her lips and teeth… Fucking her with a strap-on is like waking up summer and drowning it in its own swelter, it’s tossing her way up high and fighting the undertow that pulls me under before I give in to the quiet. For hours and hours. Time drips off our bodies, trickles between our legs.
The language in this passage engorges itself on the violence of desire. To fuck Samsa with the strap-on is to transmogrify into a god who chokes the summer on its own sweat, to become not an animal but, indeed, “inhuman.” Even the word choice swelter amplifies the embodiment of oblivion that sex promises: from the Germanic dialect, swelt means “to perish.”
Later, Baltasar writes, “Maybe love is unfurling above us like an enormous branch that bends and touches all the most sensitive, reticent parts of us.” I’m not sure I’m hot for suffering as a prerequisite to existence, but I’m drawn to Baltasar’s notion that sex, love, and growth carry connotations of pain. When I say pain, perhaps what I mean is intensity. How the immediacy of certain acts asks everything of our attention. Which is presentness. Which is the highest state of existence for being ardent, and alive.