My Twin Sister Was Waiting for Me in Front of the Mirror

My name is Adrián. I live in Chapinero, in the north of Bogotá. Outside, the city is a chaos of noise and haste, of honking horns and people walking with their eyes on the ground, but inside our apartment, with the curtains closed and the lights low, time stops existing. Nothing urgent ever gets in.

Before going on, you need to understand the central thing in this story. Lucía and I are twenty-four years old. We were born eight minutes apart. We are twins.

Our parents worked as international executives for a consulting firm. We lived in five different countries before we turned sixteen. We were never able to make friends who lasted more than a school term; we never put down roots anywhere. We only had each other. We were “the twins,” a unit no adult ever knew how to split apart. We slept in the same bed until we were eleven, bathed together until later than was decent, and developed our own language, made of half-words and looks that no one else could understand.

The outside world always seemed hostile to us, slow, graceless. Any attempt to date other people during adolescence ended badly. The girls I kissed at parties complained that I was absent. The boys who came up to her ended up blaming her for not understanding what she was thinking when she stared at the ceiling. No one read me the way she did; no one cared for her the way I did.

The transition was not abrupt, nor traumatic. It was more the logical evolution of something that already existed. It happened when we were twenty, just after our parents left for a long project in Asia, eight months away. The first week was an elegant mess. There were strangers in the dining room, expensive liquor opened without restraint, there were substances I’d rather not name. One night, in the middle of the heat of an unusual November, the two of us ended up in bed with a girl we had brought back from a bar in Zona G.

The three of us started out, but the girl stopped existing very quickly. Lucía and I looked at each other over her body, connecting with an intensity that frightened us even ourselves. At one point, without needing to say anything about it, we took her out of the room. We sent her away half-dressed, without explanations, without apologies, like someone moving aside a piece of furniture that is in the way in the middle of the living room.

We were left alone, naked, breathless, our breathing broken. Lucía went over to the full-length mirror on the wardrobe and called me with an open hand.

—Look at yourself, Adri —she said—. We’re the same. We’re perfect.

And we were. The same pale skin with the bluish tint of the veins at the wrists. The same thick black hair. The same green eyes that seem cold until they fill with something darker. When I kissed her, I didn’t feel like I was kissing another person; I felt like I was kissing myself, in a softer, more pliant, more receptive version. Making love to her that night was closing a circuit we had kept open since the womb.

Since that dawn, we isolated ourselves. We left our degree programs half-finished, without telling anyone. The money our parents kept wiring us allowed us to shut ourselves away without having to give any official any explanation. We built a cult of two members. We started dressing alike, getting our hair cut the same day and at the same length, buying the same perfume twice. Sometimes, when we go out into the street holding hands, people look at us with a mix of fascination and rejection, not knowing whether we’re a couple or siblings. That confusion feeds us. It makes us feel alive, separate from the rest.

***

Our relationship is violent and tender at the same time. There is sick jealousy. If she looks at a waiter too long, I break the first glass I find. If I reply to another woman’s message, she hurts herself in silence, pressing her fingernail into her forearm until she leaves herself a red crescent. We know exactly where to strike to make it hurt, because we’ve known every wound in the other since we were children. We know what scares the other when the lights go out. We know which insult empties her eyes from the inside.

This is not romantic love. It doesn’t work with the categories people use to look at others from the sidewalk. It is a biological fusion, almost chemical. It is the absolute certainty that no one in this world is worthy of our blood except us. When one of us gets sick, the other feels the fever before touching her forehead. When one of us dreams something ugly, the other wakes up at the same hour with a tight heart.

We are not going to have children. There won’t be any. Lucía got pregnant a little over a year ago. It was a stupid lapse, a crack in our bubble of perfection. When the test showed two lines, there was no joy. There was panic, then rage, then fear. A child would have broken our symmetry. A third body, even if it came from the two of us, would force us to stop looking at each other and look outward. And besides, we knew the genetic risks. Our vanity would not let us imagine something defective coming out of us.

We went to a private clinic in the north of the city. We paid cash, without giving real names, and we solved the “problem” on a gray morning. That night we had dinner in silence, holding hands under the table, with no need to talk about what had just happened.

A couple of months later, Lucía had surgery. She had her tubes tied. I got a vasectomy the following week, without telling the doctor that there was no longer any risk of procreating with anyone else.

She had it worse. Tubal ligation is major surgery, general anesthesia, days of recovery. Her belly was swollen, violet bruises around her navel, a low fever that wouldn’t go down. I only had ice for two days, a dull ache, and the stupid prohibition against riding a bicycle. But seeing her convalescing, knowing she had mutilated herself for our pact, made me hard in a shameful way. I would sit on the edge of the bed, clean her stitches with warm saline, kiss her forehead, and inside I would come undone thinking about how much she had given herself to this thing we are. How much she had been capable of doing for me.

No one is ever going to love you like this, I thought as I watched her sleep. No one.

We want to be the end of our genetic line. We don’t want to sow anything in this mediocre world. We want to consume ourselves until nothing is left, to be the last of our species. When our parents die and we can inherit everything, we’re going to disappear on some island where no one knows who we were.

We are fine. We are empty and full at the same time. We live in a loop of desire and destruction, looking at ourselves in the mirror, wanting each other in the other’s reflection, waiting for that ending like someone waiting for the last train of the day.

***

While we wait, we celebrate our extinction every night.

Right now, Lucía is naked in front of the dressing table mirror, painting her lips with a red so dark it’s almost black, like dried blood against her whitest skin. The light from the low lamp traces the bones of her shoulders and the line of her spine. I come up behind her. My erection, hard and painful, presses against her cold ass. She doesn’t turn around. She looks at me through the glass, green eyes fixed on my green eyes, without smiling, without blinking, with that stillness of an animal about to bite.

—Come —she orders, in that low, dragging voice she only uses with me—. Fill me with nothing.

I enter her in one thrust, without preliminaries, without asking permission, because between us lubrication is mental. She keeps her mouth open, but she doesn’t close her eyes for a second. She stays obsessed with the image the mirror gives us back: two white bodies pressed together, two dark heads tilted at the same angle, one single beast with two backs. My hands squeeze her breasts, which seem made to measure for my palms. I hammer into her with rage, with urgency, as if someone could come and tear us apart at any moment. The sound of skin against skin echoes through the whole apartment.

The best part is the end. When I feel I’m about to explode, I don’t have to think, I don’t have to pull out, I don’t have to protect myself from anything. Our sterility is our most intimate freedom, the most obscene proof that we belong only to this. I come deep inside her, a long, hot струam, knowing that seed isn’t going to germinate, that it’s going to be deliciously lost in her useless entrails. Lucía tightens her thighs to hold me there one second longer, as if she could keep something of ours that will never go away.

—That’s it —she says, seeing my face distorted by pleasure in the glass—. All for me. Not shared with anyone.

I let myself fall over her back, breathing the same air she exhales, smelling my own scent on her neck. We are a genetic dead end, and it is the most exciting place in the world. If someone found us tomorrow and asked whether we’re afraid of how this ends, we’d tell them the truth: this doesn’t end. It only closes in on itself, like a ring, like a mirror looking into another mirror and getting lost in an infinite hallway.

And us, inside, walking nowhere, holding hands.