Swift as Desire Read Online Free Page B

her clitoris and send her messages in Morse code, which, though she didn’t completely understand them, were sufficiently explicit for her to respond with frenzied passion. Júbilo’s mind simply couldn’t be completely diverted away from his work, but nor could his work be separated from his loving. He argued that this was because these two activities were intimately linked.
    To begin with, both needed an electric current in order to function. The telegraph machines obtained it from power lines, but in small pueblos where there was no electricity, the telegraph still functioned thanks to glass cylinders about fifteen inches tall and about six inches in diameter, which were filled with chunks of sulfur and water. A copper coil with two contacts would be placed in the top of the jar: one was for the water and the other for the copper coil, one positive and the other negative. The jars worked like Volta batteries and grouped together they provided the necessary voltage. Júbilo’s theory was that the vagina functioned in a similar way, it contained fluid and was of an adequate size to produce, upon entering into contact with the male member (which could be compared to a sophisticatedcopper coil), a strong electrical current, just like a battery. The good, or bad, thing, depending upon how one looked at it, was that the battery only lasted a short while for Júbilo, and he regularly needed to plug himself back in to recharge his batteries. Lucha and he would rise early and make love, then Júbilo would go to work, send a few messages, and return to eat lunch. After eating, he would make love, then return to work. In the afternoon, he would transmit more messages, then go home again. In the evening, they would go out for a walk, have dinner, and before going to sleep they would make love again. Now that they were in Veracruz, the only variation in their routine was that they took time each day to go to the beach. But that was basically their entire life as newlyweds.
    Though things had started to change a bit lately. That is not to say that the time between amorous interludes had grown longer, or that his wife’s pregnancy had interfered with their sex life. Yet Júbilo felt there was an interference that disturbed the exchange of energies between them. He didn’t know how to explain it, but he sensed that Lucha was hiding something from him. It was a thought she didn’t dare to express and that Júbilo was unable to read, but he could feel it in his veins. This is best explained if one takes into account that a thought is an electric current, and water is one of the best conductors of electricity. Since there is an abundance of this element pumping through our bloodstream, it wasn’t at all difficult for Júbilo to “feel” his wife’s thoughts during theexchange of energies produced by their sexual intercourse. His wife’s womb was his energy receptacle, as well as his power company, and lately he had suffered a change in voltage. It made Júbilo despondent, but when he questioned Lucha about it, she denied anything was wrong. Since he didn’t have a device like a telegraph machine at hand to capture her hidden thoughts, he was forced to speculate about them. Of course, instead of guessing, he would have loved to be able to convert those electrical impulses into words. If only he could find a way to do that! If he could somehow invent a thought decoder. To his way of thinking, thoughts were entities that existed from the moment they originated in the mind; they consisted of waves of energy that traveled silently and invisibly through space until they were captured by some sort of receiving apparatus and converted into sounds, written words, or even images. Júbilo was convinced that some day an apparatus would be invented that would be able to convert the thoughts of others into images. There was nothing to prevent it. Meanwhile, he would have to keep using the only reliable receiving system he had at hand, which