The Night the Village Worshipped a Trans Woman

I woke up in the mahogany-and-palm-thatched hut with the jungle seeping in through the cracks, that thick air smelling of old moss and freshly opened earth. I had been in the village for three days and still wasn’t used to the silence left by voices I couldn’t understand. In the hammock, my body still warm with sleep, I did what I had done every morning for as long as I could remember: I felt myself over, as if to make sure I still existed.

Back in the city, I had learned to be invisible. A trans woman who went into cartography offices and whom no one looked in the eye, whom they called by a name that wasn’t mine until I got tired and demanded the right one. Even so, indifference had weight. I had grown used to taking up as little space as possible, to not raising my voice, to wanting things without letting it show.

I took my only traveling companion from my knapsack: a small figure carved from dark wood that I had bought at a market in the south, a totem in the shape of an upright body that, half joking and half serious, I had given a name. Colossus. I squeezed it between my hands.

Today someone is going to really look at you, I told myself, pretending the voice came from him.

***

The village opened into a clearing surrounded by colossal trees, vines hanging like arteries from some enormous, living body. The inhabitants moved about almost naked, with a naturalness that left me breathless. Nobody hid their body; nobody apologized for having one. Men with skin painted crimson with clay, women with bare torsos and leaf skirts, everyone touching one another as they passed with a familiarity that would have been scandalous in my world and here was simply morning.

I didn’t speak their language. I communicated with signs, patiently, reading gestures. And for the first time in a long while, no one asked me what I was. There was no box here that I had stepped out of. I was just another person, tall and different, an outsider who had arrived with strange equipment, and that was enough.

A woman approached the brazier where something smelling of root and smoke was cooking. She had black eyes and a smile that calculated nothing. She touched her chest.

—Yara —she said.

I touched mine, and for the first time in days my voice didn’t tremble.

—Vera.

—Vera —she repeated slowly, as if the name had a taste.

Something loosened inside me. A word. My name, spoken by someone who didn’t doubt it. I felt warmth rise up my neck and knew it wasn’t shame.

***

I spent the morning doing my work. That was what they had hired me for: mapping that region, which changed with every rainfall—cliffs appearing and swamps swallowing the trails. I carried the GPS, notebook, compass, and water-resistant radio I used to report to the company, a mining consultancy from the capital called TerraNova, which cared about nothing but my coordinates.

—Good work, Vera —Rubén, my contact, crackled over the radio. —Keep it up.

Three dry words, but I wrote them in my notebook as if they were treasure. In the city, nobody acknowledged anything. Here, even routine praise over the radio made me smile to myself in the middle of the jungle, sweat sticking my shirt to my back and insects buzzing in my ear.

I walked among the trees, drawing lines in my notebook, each contour line a small challenge to the feeling that I was nobody. I’m here. I exist. I leave a mark. The map was that for me: proof that I had passed through the world.

When I returned to the edge of the clearing, I stopped despite myself. Beneath the shade of a kapok tree, two men were fucking without trying to hide it. One was on his knees, his mouth full of the other man’s cock, jaw spread wide, saliva running down his chin. The man standing held his head in both hands and fucked his throat at a slow, deep, unhurried pace, like someone who had all day to come. Nobody looked at them reproachfully. In the village, desire didn’t seem to have rules of gender, only rules of consent and wanting.

I watched them longer than was prudent. I saw the kneeling man pull the other’s cock from his mouth to lick his balls, then take it back down to the root, eyes wet and nose pressed to his belly. I saw the other throw his head back, groan hoarsely, and push his face against his pelvis. What I felt wasn’t just lust, or not just lust. It was a deep envy: that freedom to fuck and be fucked in broad daylight, without hiding. I felt my pulse throb in my crotch, that part of me I had spent years teaching to keep quiet, and noticed myself hardening inside my pants without permission. I looked away and breathed deeply. I want that, I thought. I want to be on that side, not on the side of the window.

***

I returned to the hut at noon, aroused and exhausted at the same time. I sat in the hammock with Colossus in my hand, rested him against my chest, and spoke to him softly, like someone praying.

—I saw so much today —I murmured. —They touch each other without fear. They fuck without asking permission.

I closed my eyes. The image of the two men beneath the kapok tree lodged in my head and wouldn’t leave: the cock sliding between stretched lips, the squeezed balls, the throat opening. I pulled my pants down to my knees and grabbed myself with my right hand, already hard, already wet at the tip. I spat into my palm and wrapped it around myself, squeezing slowly, imagining it was another mouth squeezing me. With my left hand I pinched one nipple through the fabric and arched in the hammock, biting my lip so I wouldn’t scream. I jerked myself quickly, without tenderness, with the filthy urgency of someone who had been holding back too long, until I came into my hand in two hot spurts that stained my belly. It was a brief, solitary relief, the kind that tasted of the city. I lay there staring at the palm-thatched ceiling, semen cooling on my skin, and a new certainty lodged in my chest: I didn’t want to keep enjoying myself alone. I wanted someone to watch me burn. I wanted a mouth, hands, a cock, a cunt, anything, as long as they watched me open myself.

—Maybe tonight —I told the wooden figure, once again pretending she answered yes.

***

Yara came to find me at dusk. She gestured toward the central brazier, where smoke rose straight up like a spirit and mingled with the smell of roasted meat and something sweet and fermented. The nighttime gathering began quietly. The inhabitants shared food, juicy fruit, and a thick root broth, conversing in their incomprehensible language while the children already slept in their hammocks, far away at the other end of the village. Along the edges, some couples caressed each other with the same naturalness as in the morning, as if they were stretching their legs.

I sat beside Yara, shoulder to shoulder. She passed me a gourd filled with a viscous, sour liquor made from fermented grain, which burned my throat like liquid embers. I coughed, and everyone laughed, but it was laughter that included me, not laughter at my expense. I took another sip. Then another. The heat loosened my muscles and softened my defenses, the ones I had built over years.

And, emboldened by the liquor and by something older than liquor, I did something I never would have done sober. I took Colossus from my knapsack and raised him over my head in the brazier’s light.

—This is Colossus —I said, knowing they didn’t understand and saying it anyway, for myself, for them, for no one. —He’s the only thing that’s always been with me.

I expected an uncomfortable silence. What came was the opposite. There was a murmur of recognition, hands reaching toward the figure with curiosity and respect. Yara took it, turned it beneath the light, showed it to the others, and said something that made everyone nod. They passed it from hand to hand as if it were a sacred object they had been missing forever. My eyes burned. Not with shame. With belonging.

—Colossus good —Yara told me in her broken Spanish, returning him with both hands. —Vera good.

***

I don’t know when the gathering became something else. It happened gradually, like the tide coming in. A caress that lingered, a mouth seeking another, one body lying down over another beside the fire. No one gave an order or lit a fuse; the desire that had been restrained during the day simply began to overflow, and the clearing filled with bodies seeking one another beneath the orange glow. A few yards from me, a woman straddled a man and impaled herself on his cock with a long moan, rocking slowly; farther off, two women devoured each other’s mouths while one thrust her hand between the other’s legs and drew moans from her that sounded like prayers.

I watched from the edge, my heart about to leap from my chest and my cock hard again against the fabric of my pants, until a young man with a lean body and clay-painted skin knelt in front of me. He said nothing I could translate, but his open hand on my knee asked with perfect clarity. And I, for once in my life, didn’t make myself small. I nodded.

He kissed me slowly, surprisingly slowly, and the rest of the world became distant noise. His tongue entered my mouth with the same naturalness with which his fingers began unbuttoning my sweat-soaked shirt. He opened it wide and licked my neck, my collarbone, then moved down to my nipples and stayed there, sucking them one after the other, barely biting them until they grew hard as stones and I let out a moan I hadn’t known I had been keeping inside. There was none of that moment of hesitation I had learned to fear in the city’s lovers, that second when they reevaluated what they were touching as their hand moved lower. Here there was no reevaluation. When his palm closed over my pants and felt the shape of my cock pressed inside, he smiled against my mouth and squeezed harder, as if saying, this too.

He unbuckled my belt and pulled me out of my pants. I was rock-hard, the tip shining, and he looked at me with the same frank hunger with which he had looked at the food by the brazier. He crouched and took me into his mouth without hesitation, swallowing me whole in one go, his tongue curling around the glans, his throat tightening around me. My vision went hazy.

—God —I gasped. —Look at me. Really look at me.

And he did. He raised his black eyes without removing my cock from his mouth and held my gaze while he sucked me, moving his head up and down with a devotion no one had ever given me. That was what undid me, more than any touch: eyes fixed on mine while he sucked me, as if I were the only thing worth looking at all night. I moaned, and my moan braided with the ones around us into a chorus I no longer envied, because now I was part of it.

Yara joined us from behind. She knelt behind the young man, stroked my hair, then took my face between her hands and kissed me deeply, with her tongue, while he kept swallowing me. I felt her breasts press against my shoulder, her hard nipples marking my skin. She took one of my hands and guided it between her legs, and there I found her cunt, soaked, swollen, open for me. I slipped in two fingers, and she arched against my hand, moaning into my mouth.

—Vera —she gasped. —Vera, Vera.

Another woman lay down beneath the young man and began licking his balls from below while he sucked me. A large, broad-backed man got behind him, pulled his ass cheeks apart, spat on his asshole, and began easing his cock inside him. The young man moaned with my cock in his mouth, and the vibration traveled up my spine. There were no turns or hierarchies, only bodies fitting themselves together like pieces that had spent their whole lives searching for one another, a chain of mouths and hands and sexes in which I, for the first time, was a link and not a spectator.

Yara lay down on the mat beside the fire and opened her legs for me without shame, showing me her pink cunt gleaming with saliva and juices. She made a clear gesture: come. I knelt between her thighs and ran my tongue all the way up her, tasting her, sucking her clit until she began pulling my hair. Then I straightened up, spat into my hand, spread it over my cock, and pushed slowly, burying myself to the hilt. She was hot, tight, alive. I began fucking her with long thrusts, looking into her eyes, and she held my gaze just as the young man had, never lowering it for a second, moaning my name in her broken Spanish each time I reached deep inside her.

—Vera —she moaned. —Vera good, Vera good.

The young man settled in behind me. I felt his hands spread my ass cheeks, his hot tongue licking my asshole, pushing, entering. A hoarse cry escaped me. No one had ever eaten my ass like that, with such hunger. Then he moved up, coated his cock with something oily someone handed him, and began easing it inside me, millimeter by millimeter, while I remained buried in Yara. When he was fully inside, I stayed still for a few seconds, impaled, trembling, with a cock in my ass and a cunt squeezing mine, and I began laughing and crying at once, because a body that had spent years closed couldn’t contain so much.

The three of us began to move. He pushed me forward and I sank into Yara; she thrust her hips against mine and sent me back toward the young man. It was a rocking motion that required no thought. Another mouth found my breasts, another hand squeezed my balls from beneath, someone kissed my shoulder, someone licked the sweat from my back. I lost count of the hands. I lost count of the names I didn’t know. Only the rhythm existed, the heat, Yara’s black eyes fixed on mine, the young man’s breath on my nape.

I came first, with a roar I didn’t recognize as my own, emptying myself inside Yara in long spasms while the young man kept fucking my ass and forced me to keep thrusting even though I was trembling. She came seconds later, squeezing me so tightly she wrung out my last drops. And the young man came inside me, burying himself to the hilt with a guttural moan, and I felt his hot semen run through me and down my thighs when he pulled out.

I remained on my knees, panting, sweat falling in heavy drops onto Yara’s skin. She drew me against her chest and embraced me, my cock still soft inside her, the young man’s semen running down my back, other hands still caressing me.

—I’m yours —I said, laughing and crying at once. —At last I belong to someone.

***

When the fire began to die, the inhabitants rose amid lazy laughter and walked toward the river. I followed them, naked, my body covered in sweat, someone else’s clay, saliva, semen, and the whole night. The water was cool and welcomed me like a blessing, licking my heated skin, carrying away the exhaustion and sticky traces between my thighs. Around me, the others washed and joked, their incomprehensible voices wrapping around me like an embrace in a language the body understood.

Yara swam over to me and squeezed my hand beneath the water.

—Vera, friend —she said.

I nodded, unable to speak. A shadow of doubt crossed me for a second, the old habit: Are they seeing me, or just another body among all the others? But I looked into Yara’s eyes, at her tired, open smile, and let the current carry the doubt away. They saw me. They had said my name. They had fucked me while looking at me. Where I came from, that was more than I had received in years.

***

Back in the hut, I reclined in the hammock, my skin still damp and Colossus resting on my chest. Outside, the jungle continued to breathe.

—I introduced you to them —I murmured to the wooden figure. —And they didn’t laugh at me. They loved you. They loved me.

I said it aloud, and for once I didn’t need to invent his answer. The answer was in my own tired, satisfied body, in the warm ache between my buttocks, in Yara’s taste still on my lips, in the echo of my name spoken without hesitation, in Yara’s hand squeezing mine beneath the water.

I closed my eyes, thinking of the map I still had to draw, of the cliffs and swamps still waiting for my notebook. But that night I understood that the hardest cartography wasn’t that of the jungle. It was the cartography of myself: a territory I had spent years believing invisible, and that, far from everything, amid smoke and clay and the bodies of strangers who treated me as one of their own, someone had finally taken the trouble to look at. And by looking at me, they had drawn me onto the map of the world.

I fell asleep with the figure between my hands and, for the first time in a long while, without feeling I had to apologize for existing.