To the Editor:
In Buenos Aires I was boarding with Don Lucas Yel and his wife who was always affectionately known as Senora Mussolini for her precise resemblance to the long-gone Italian dictator.
So then, I was with Don Lucas a little time before, during, and after he lost his testicles and the other thing, so remarkably. The shorn gentleman, seventy years old, was originally from that superb, most envied, and gallant group of men on the continent. He was a gaucho. One thrown up by old age on the shore of the pampas where it touches the city, living in an old, untidy, happy neighborhood where milk is sold in the streets by a cow door to door. "You cannot tie a string to the sun," he would say of his passing years. At night he would play his guitar and weep over moonlit nights and well cooked steaks on the great pampas where he and his legendary companions acted immortals.
One morning he took it upon himself to climb the highest steep slate shingle roof of the corner church, the tallest building in the neighborhood. Why? I do not know.
Hearing his voice singing "I saw Mary making water" high above me, I looked up and saw the teetering form and then the noiseless slide down the sharp slate shingles and his body catch on the very end of the eaves.
When I reached him there, he was lying on his back, the flesh from his lower belly to the thighs exposed and running with blood. My very last thought was of his losing anything from his body. I was filled with the worries of old brittle bones and broken skulls.
He was calm and talking in a voice wonderfully curious to hear and peering at his middle - where his lap would be were there a series of identical, long, bloody, horizontal lacerations running from one side of the frail trunk to the other. Neatly slashed, perfect rows or gutters resembling a washboard down to and across his upper thighs.
I took off my shirt and pressed it firmly over his bloody middle. He laid back, held out his hand to me, opened his fist and gave me his penis - at the very moment that I realized that what was always there on men was not there now. Everything had been cut cleanly away. Down between his legs lying on the roofing like glistening almonds were his testicles. I picked them up with my empty hand just as I was smartly nudged away by Red Cross workers who came to save Don Lucas' life.
In my room I placed the private parts of Don Lucas in a glass of red wine. Don Lucas never asked after them. So I have them. I cannot get over how young they look. Perhaps they do not age with the rest of the body.
Copyright © 1996, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 124, Number 22; April 26, 1996
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