Chavis Mármol: Pearls Should Be Eternal

Chavis Mármol grew up with the two pearls of this story in his paternal grandmother’s house. The sculpture is a tribute to them. He exhibited the piece at Zsona Maco, at the JO-HS gallery. Chavis was looking for an intimate and raw introduction. I wrote this text based on what he told me: childhood memories, admiration for their twin uncles… We printed it on shiny pink paper, like the pearls—like the uncles—and we read it at the fair in front of the sculpture, which is also an offering.

Pearls Should Be Eternal

Twin brothers, my uncles were born in Apán, round and shiny like two pearls from the same shell. Brown, obese twins, they discovered homosexuality in the confused darkness of the first impulses of the flesh. A first love tears off pieces of reason and squeezes the juice into the pulsing muscles of feelings. The juice lubricates jealousy –jealousy of seeing your twin, the pearl from your same crust, the nacre of your same nacre, wrapping himself around the man you desire, the living model of your idea of romance, the ghost of your longing. The juice lubricates reckless acts– like calling the police to say your twin is trafficking drugs. You have the proof. Lock him in a cell, imprison the competition. This way you secure your victory. This way, the man you both love doesn’t have to choose between two thick bodies encasing mirrored skeletons and eyes. Your nerves lift you from the chair, take you down one, two streets to the corner store, where you buy a Coke, hoping the fizz will calm you, the bubbles bursting into the ceiling of your madness. You step outside, and there they are—the police you summoned with your spirit and your voice. You insist you’re not the one they’re looking for, but how can you prove it when you have the same thick skin, the same nacre, the remnants of the same crust? They lock you in a cell for ten years, and you don’t know what your other half does during that time. Still shackled to the cell inside your mind, your lungs taste the strange air of freedom when they release you. They set you loose in the town where you were born, bound to another pearl. For two years, the two of you roll through Apán, avoiding each other. Why face yourself in a broken mirror? You decide to accept the thin hand of death offered to you through illness. Your twin, pulp of your pulp, nacre of your nacre, accepts the other thin hand. And together, you rise, round and luminous, two balloons vanishing into infinity.

— Fernanda Ballesteros