My son inherited more than his father’s surname

What this platform calls, with its prudent euphemism, “filial love” is nothing new. History and mythology are full of examples. Lot’s daughters offered their bodies to give their father descendants, because in those days it was believed there was no greater misfortune for a man than to die without leaving children. No one called them perverse. They called them pious.

Then there is Electra, that daughter whose devotion to her father drives her to commit terrible acts to avenge Agamemnon’s death. Centuries later, a psychologist took her name to describe those burning desires that some daughters develop for our fathers, desires that lead us to give ourselves beyond what this society considers acceptable. As if love could be indecent.

And finally there is Jocasta. The woman who, without knowing it, gives herself into the arms of her own son and loves him to the point of delirium, until she discovers the truth. Thus, in the silence of anonymity, a number impossible to define of women exist who carry that bond that begins in the womb and is cemented in the breast that nurses. Women who, without understanding why, feel that warm sucking unleashes something deep, an uncontrollable hormonal surge, and that in the middle of that sweet and tender moment we notice how the crotch grows wet without permission.

I do not expect any of you to understand it. Only if you are a mother who lives and feels what I feel will you be able to put yourself in my place and stop judging me. Because you know, just as I do, that there is no perversion here, only the purest form of love. You formed him in your womb. You bound yourself to him the first time your nipple brushed his mouth. And though it is hard to say it out loud, you know your body belongs to him, that you exist by and for him.

There are those who seek an answer to all this, a cause, a trauma that explains why a woman ends up like this. I stopped looking for one years ago. There is no answer. There is only a dilemma that is never resolved, a loneliness that is not filled by anyone else, and an infinite pleasure that, the moment it dies down, gives way to a brutal inner conflict. A conflict that, I realized too late, is not even mine. It was sown in me by the same society that insists on murdering one of the few true loves that exist. Because no one, no one, can love a child more than the mother who gave birth to him.

***

That has been my life. I have gone from being the most faithful Electra to becoming the most surrendered Jocasta. I have overcome the pain of a judgment that lives only in my head, because until today no one besides you, anonymous readers, knows this story. Only you, if you have followed me, know about my love for my father. My dominant male, my old man, the man who taught me that desire does not respect the names we give things.

You have also read my confessions, sometimes hysterical, sometimes almost mad, in which I was processing this mother’s love that knows no limits. It is all on my profile. Even my love affairs with Amparo, another mother who lived exactly the same as I did and whom I could only love in the complicity of those private encounters. Amparo made me understand that incest is blood, and that blood binds beyond reason. In that understanding I was freed, although the ungrateful woman appears and disappears whenever she feels like it.

Now we wake up free, my son and I, naked inside this small apartment that grants us the anonymity needed to love each other without anyone lifting their eyes. I live in permanent domestic nudism, as my own father taught me more than twenty years ago. Always available. Always ready for my boy’s instinct, worthy heir to the other, with a man’s body that I claim every night and every dawn.

My entire day revolves around the urgency of getting home again. Of kneeling before him, of taking him all in, of drinking down everything that has accumulated during the hours we are apart. I suck with a desperation I would be ashamed of if I did not enjoy it so much, imagining the amount of life that could impregnate me if I were not such a coward. If I stopped taking the pill that denies me the possibility of filling up once more, of having my breasts swell with milk again, where all this sweet sin began. But I am a coward. I do not dare, even though my body begs me for it.

No one prepared me for this. One expects to become a mother and then, when the years pass, to become a grandmother, a respectable lady who knits in front of the television. What no one tells you is that breastfeeding marks the body in a way that cannot be erased. That physical bond, that dependence you feel when a small mouth clings to you, does not disappear with weaning. It only transforms. And one day, without your knowing exactly when, you look at the man he has become and understand that you will never be able to look at another.

***

This is the part no other woman would ever forgive me for telling.

He is patient. He spends long minutes preparing me before anything else, opening me slowly, millimeter by millimeter, until my body yields and allows him to go on. I feel him enter little by little, holding his breath, until I find just the right elasticity to receive him completely. Then he stops being delicate. Then he takes out on me all the stress of the day and charges into me with a fury that steals my breath.

He takes me the same way his father took me more than two decades ago, with the same beautiful rage, and I come apart remembering it. The two things blend in my head: the man who was my owner and the boy who is now. When he finally comes inside me, I lie trembling, emptied out, feeling how he fills me from within and thinking that blood, once again, meets blood.

Without giving me a moment’s respite, the ritual continues. He changes position and takes my sex, which is already a warm, soaked mess. That is the sublime moment, when he stops fucking me like an animal and starts doing it like what we are, one flesh, looking me in the eyes. He says to me, very softly, almost without a voice:

—I love you, mommy.

And it does not matter how many times I have heard it. I cannot stop the tears. As he moves inside me with a tenderness that contradicts everything before it, I cry with emotion, with pure joy, because I know that after him there will be no more men in my life. That I will grow old with my neighbor Amparo and with this secret, and that it will be enough for me.

***

When the end comes, my owner gets ready to empty himself completely into me, and then I cry again, but no longer with joy. I cry with sorrow. Because as the spasms of orgasm run through me from head to toe and leave me wrecked, my conscience screams that once again everything will be wasted, that once again I will not be left pregnant with him. The cowardice of the pill. The fear that does not let me complete the circle my body demands.

But pleasure is stronger than remorse. I remain stretched out on the bed, legs open, feeling my whole body throb in retreat. The sheet becomes a map of our night, the mattress smells of sex and nothing else but this, what he gives me and no one else could give me. I watch him breathe beside me and think that no church, no judge, no proper woman will ever know what this is.

Sooner or later he will leave. He will go off to study in the capital, and all this will become memory, just as his youthful loves with his father are memories. Sometimes I imagine him leaving with his suitcase, and I feel something split inside me that has no name. But I also know I will let him go, because my love, unlike the kind this society practices, is not a cage. It is surrender.

***

You, filthy-minded one, who came here only to masturbate, will not understand it. You, fantasist, fantasist woman, who were looking for a steamy story, neither will you. You, writer by trade or craft who measures every word so it will sell, will never understand it.

Only you, silent Jocasta reading me in the dark. Only you, Electra hiding your desire in the silence of your own sin. Only you will know, just as I do, that this is the only life we know, and that in this anonymous, secret love, forbidden by all but us, lies our only true happiness.

Kisses.

Cassandra.