Please Talk to Me

Please Talk to Me: Selected Stories

LILIANA HEKER

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALBERTO

MANGUEL

TRANSLATED BY ALBERTO MANGUEL AND MIRANDA

FRANCE

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW HAVEN & LONDON

A MARGELLOS

WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS BOOK

The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the
globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of
leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America,
Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

Selections and introduction copyright © 2015 by Alberto Manguel.

English translations by Miranda France copyright © 2015 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond
that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyright Law and except by reviewers
for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Translated by Alberto Manguel: “The Stolen Party,” “Bishop Berkeley or Mariana of the Universe,”
“Jocasta,” “Family Life,” “Georgina Requeni or the Chosen One,” “Early Beginnings or Ars
Poetica,” and “The Night of the Comet.” “The Stolen Party” English translation copyright © 1985 by
Alberto Manguel. “The Night of the Comet” English translation copyright © 1997 by Alberto
Manguel. English translations of other stories copyright © 1994 by Alberto Manguel.

Translated by Miranda France: “A Question of Delicacy,” “Every Person’s Little Treasure,” “Now,”
“Strategies Against Sleeping,” “The Cruelty of Life,” “The Music of Sundays,” and “They Had Seen
the Burning Bush.”

All stories originally published in Spanish. Copyright © 1966 by Liliana Heker: “Los que vieron la
zarza” (“They Had Seen the Burning Bush”), “Yokasta” (“Jocasta”), and “Ahora” (“Now”).
Copyright © 1978 by Liliana Heker: “Georgina Requeni o la elegida” (“Georgina Requeni or the
Chosen One”). Copyright © 1982 by Liliana Heker: “La fiesta ajena” (“The Stolen Party”),
“Berkeley o Mariana del Universo” (“Bishop Berkeley or Mariana of the Universe”), “Vida de
familia” (“Family Life”), and “Los primeros principios o arte poética” (“Early Beginnings or Ars
Poetica”). Copyright © 2001 by Liliana Heker: “El pequeño tesoro de cada cual” (“Every Person’s
Little Treasure”), “Maniobras contra el sueño” (“Strategies Against Sleeping”), “La música de los
domingos” (“The Music of Sundays”), “La crueldad de la vida” (“The Cruelty of Life”), and “La
noche del cometa” (“The Night of the Comet”). Copyright © 2011 by Liliana Heker: “Delicadeza”
(“A Question of Delicacy”).

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Ernesto Imas
CONTENTS

Introduction: The Stories of Liliana Heker, by Alberto Manguel

“The Stolen Party”
“They Had Seen the Burning Bush”
“Bishop Berkeley or Mariana of the Universe”
“Jocasta”
“Family Life”
“Every Person’s Little Treasure”
“Now”
“Strategies Against Sleeping”
“Georgina Requeni or the Chosen One”
“Early Beginnings or Ars Poetica”
“The Music of Sundays”
“A Question of Delicacy”
“The Cruelty of Life”
“The Night of the Comet”
INTRODUCTION
The Stories of Liliana Heker

In 1966, the twenty-three-year-old Argentinian writer Liliana Heker won

the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize with a collection of short stories,
Los que vieron la zarza (Those who saw the burning bush). The book was
published in Buenos Aires, in July of that same year, by Jorge Alvarez, an
editor whose keen eye had led him to discover such future luminaries as
Manuel Puig and Rodolfo Walsh. A few days earlier, in June, the weak
democratic government of President Arturo Illia had been overturned by a
military coup led by General Juan Carlos Onganía. Onganía was an
antiliberal ultraconservative who quickly dismantled the workers’ unions
and tried to place the universities under his own authority. The attack on
professors and students, effected less than a month after the coup, came to
be known as the “Night of the Long Sticks” because of the brutality of the
assault. Paradoxically, this repression sparked a vigorous opposition to the
government which would, years later, force the military leaders to call for
democratic elections.
At the time, Liliana Heker, besides writing short stories, was working as
subeditor of El Escarabajo de Oro (The gold-bug), a celebrated literary
magazine she had founded in 1961 with the writer Abelardo Castillo.
Clearly left-wing but interested, above all, in publishing good literature, the
magazine continued to appear until 1974, and throughout Onganía’s
dictatorship, it maintained the same ideological and literary position it had
before the coup. El Escarabajo de Oro became the centre of vigorous
debates, explicitly opposing censorship and acts of violence, defending the
Cuban Revolution and Third World movements and offering a platform to
some of the most distinguished contemporary writers.
Later, during the bloodiest era of Argentinian history, Heker’s position of
resisting in situ and taking active part in the public debate did not change.
In 1976, as a result of another coup, General Jorge Rafael Videla became
the new head of government, and under his authority tens of thousands of
men, women and children were arrested, tortured and killed or forced into
exile. Hundreds of babies born to so-called terrorist women in military
prisons were taken away and sold or given to families close to the regime.
To justify his actions, Videla explained that “a terrorist is not only someone
who carries a bomb or a gun, but also someone who spreads ideas contrary
to Western and Christian civilisation.”
To write under a dictatorship is, unfortunately, an all too common
experience in the history of our literatures. Those who oppose a tyrant are
all too often either imprisoned, killed or exiled, even though the authorities
never realize that such measures, however drastic, never quite succeed in
silencing a writer. The words of Ovid in exile, Boethius in prison, and Isaac
Babel murdered continue to resonate for us, their readers, today. As Heker
wrote at the time: ‘Censorship is never infallible . . . It is the advances made
by a writer against the limits imposed on him, and not a fatalistic
acceptance of those limits, that change the cultural history of a country, and
therefore history itself.’
Heker, true to this conviction, and faced with the option of exile, chose to
stay in Buenos Aires. The strategies of survival under these circumstances
are complex and mysterious, and owe much to chance; they have to be
reinvented day after day. In a few cases, they turn out to be successful, and
both the writer and the work manage to outlive the oppression. ‘My fiction
writing,’ she later explained, ‘didn’t change at all during the military
dictatorship. A novel, a short story, are always elaborate constructions and
they are meant to last; in the small space of freedom that your own room
conquers, you can work on a piece with a bare heart and give in to the most
scandalous or audacious ideas. I will give a personal example: during the
first years of the last military dictatorship, in the midst of its horror, fear and
threats of death, I kept on working on a short novel about an alcoholic man
and his wife that I had started sometime before the coup. This passionate
and meticulous writing, this diving into my characters’ intimate nightmares,
rescued me, during my working hours, from the external nightmare, and it
allowed me to be carried away, through the adventure of creation, from the
constraining world.’
To follow her policy of what she called ‘cultural resistance,’ besides
leading underground writers’ workshops and signing petitions in favour of
the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, towards the end of 1977, at the height of the
military dictatorship, and again with Abelardo Castillo, Heker founded a
new literary magazine, El Ornitorrinco (The platypus), whose motto was
taken from Oscar Wilde: ‘One should always be a little improbable.’ The
magazine published Argentinian authors silenced by the regime, as well as
foreign ones who could not find a home in more orthodox publications.
Among the subjects debated in El Ornitorrinco were the defence of human
rights, the themes of censorship and self-censorship, the absurd possibility
of a war with Chile (promoted by both Videla and Pinochet) and other
questions related to the role of the intellectual in a climate of terror,
including the differences between writing in exile and writing from home.
In this latter debate, Julio Cortázar, who had been living in Paris since the
fifties, defended the exile’s choice as the only possible one to maintain a
testimonial presence and bear witness of the abuses back home; Heker
countered with a long letter defending the position of the writer who
chooses to stay and fight on home ground. ‘We are neither heroes nor
martyrs,’ she wrote to Cortázar, who was a friend. ‘One can be a traitor
abroad or at home. One can have a national perspective from the vantage
point of exile, or write in an ivory tower in one’s own country. What a
writer has done, what a writer does with his words, that is in the end the
only valid question.’
What Heker does with her words is never political in a super-ficial or
dogmatic sense, and yet her world is firmly grounded in the reality of her
place and time. The Dutch author Cees Nooteboom once suggested that a
writer has ultimately only a handful of themes at his or her disposal.
‘There’s hunger,’ he said, ‘there’s death, there’s illness, there’s war. But
everything, from the writer’s point of view, is political.’ Nooteboom used
‘political’ in its etymological sense: belonging to the polis, to the society in
which the writer writes. Heker accepts Nooteboom’s connotation of
political: her characters are steeped in the Argentinian ethos or, rather, in
the ethos of Buenos Aires, and in its particular emotional geography, which
Jorge Luis Borges so poignantly charted in the thirties and forties.
After Borges received international recognition, it seemed impossible for
any Argentinian writer to avoid falling under his enormous shadow. The
novelist Manuel Mujica Lainez became so tired with the devotion the
younger generation showed towards Borges that he composed a short poem
entitled “To a Young Writer.”
It’s useless for you to foster
All hope of forging ahead
Because however much you scribble
Borges will have been there first.
 Heker carefully avoided the obvious paths that Borges had laid out. The
master’s fantastic themes, his abhorrence of psychological and sociological
portraits, his labyrinths, his games with time and space, never became
features of her literary landscape. She admired, of course, Borges’ craft and
knew, like all those who came after him, that she wrote in a Spanish that
had been cleansed and made more efficiently rigorous by Borges, but her
interest lay in other things.
Over the years, Heker published a book of essays, Las hermanas de
Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s daughters), and two widely acclaimed novels,
Zona de clivaje (Cleavage zone) and El fin de la historia, the latter
translated into English by Andrea Labinger as The End of the Story. But
even though these are notable accomplishments, it is in the short story that
she achieves a kind of unique perfection.
Heker’s central theme is the family and its responses to the encroaching
world. Also, the curious rituals that couples, adults and children, and
siblings among themselves, invent to relate to one another, rituals that, at
the same time, help them find their singular identities. The consequences of
tiny acts may be enormous (“Now”) or ineffable (“The Night of the
Comet”). They may distil the creative life to a handful of experiences
(“Early Beginnings or Ars Poetica”) or portray a future life in a single all-
encompassing relationship (“Jocasta”). They may entail the loss of
everything we take for granted (“The Cruelty of Life”) or everything we
might hope for (“The Music of Sundays”). They may stem from a quasi–
soap opera atmosphere (“Family Life”) or from lives of quiet desperation
(“Georgina Requeni or the Chosen One”). They may lead to vast existential
questions (“Bishop Berkeley or Mariana of the Universe”) or to
infinitesimal epiphanies (“Strategies Against Sleep”). In every case,
Heker’s stories raise the quotidian to the literary status of an epic. Her
characters face minute dilemmas with the wholeheartedness and courage of
knights errant, as if they realized that possible solutions to our greatest
sorrows can sometimes be discerned in the undergrowth of private
heartbreaks and the tangle of intimate losses, in secret paths that may lead
away from the traps of private violence, alcoholism, betrayal of love,
familiar misunderstandings. A certain Hasidic belief in the microcosm
reflecting the macrocosm underlies Heker’s conception of the universe.
One of Heker’s best-known stories, gathered in countless anthologies, is
“The Stolen Party.” The careful building-up of a child’s expectation at a
birthday party that lies implacably beyond her unnamed borders, mirrors,
on a miniature scale, the partitions and prohibitions of society as a whole.
Everything can be played out as normal, but one tiny misplaced gesture is
bound to shatter the entire social structure. Nothing is said, but the
outstretched hand of the ‘lady of the house’ in the last paragraph, poised in
the conventional action of giving, becomes all of a sudden its shadow, the
hand of a society that robs children and denies them their right to equality.
Commenting on the craft of the short story, the Irish writer William
Trevor said: ‘I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an
intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an Impressionist painting.
It should be an explosion of truth.’ When the explosion has taken place and
the dust has settled, the reader of Heker’s stories is aware that something
has been revealed, and that now the world seems both stranger and clearer
than before, and feels grateful for the modest miracle.
Alberto Manguel
THE STOLEN PARTY

As soon as she arrived she went straight to the kitchen to see if the monkey
was there. It was. What a relief! She wouldn’t have liked to admit that her
mother had been right. Monkeys at a birthday? her mother had sneered. Get
away with you, believing any nonsense you’re told! She was cross, but not
because of the monkey, the girl thought; it’s just because of the party.
‘I don’t like you going,’ she told her. ‘It’s a rich people’s party.’
‘Rich people go to Heaven too,’ said the girl, who studied religion at
school.
‘Get away with Heaven,’ said the mother. ‘The problem with you, young
lady, is that you like to fart higher than your ass.’
The girl didn’t approve of the way her mother spoke. She was barely
nine, and one of the best in her class.
‘I’m going because I’ve been invited,’ she said. ‘And I’ve been invited
because Luciana is my friend. So there.’
‘Ah yes, your friend,’ her mother grumbled. She paused. ‘Listen,
Rosaura,’ she said at last. That one’s not your friend. You know what you
are to them? The maid’s daughter, that’s what.’
Rosaura blinked hard: she wasn’t going to cry. Then she yelled: ‘Shut up!
You know nothing about being friends!’
Every afternoon she used to go to Luciana’s house and they would both
finish their homework while Rosaura’s mother did the cleaning. They had
their tea in the kitchen, and they told each other secrets. Rosaura loved
everything in the big house, and she also loved the people who lived there.
‘I’m going because it will be the most lovely party in the whole world,
Luciana told me it would. There will be a magician, and he will bring a
monkey and everything.’
The mother swung around to take a good look at her child. She put her
hands on her hips.
‘Monkeys at a birthday?’ she said. ‘Get away with you, believing any
nonsense you’re told!’
Rosaura was deeply offended. She thought it unfair of her mother to
accuse other people of being liars simply because they were rich. Rosaura
wanted to be rich, too, of course. If one day she managed to live in a
beautiful palace, would her mother stop loving her? She felt very sad. She
wanted to go to that party more than anything else in the world.
‘I’ll die if I don’t go,’ she whispered, almost without moving her lips.
She wasn’t sure if she had been heard, but on the morning of the party,
she discovered that her mother had starched her Christmas dress. And in the
afternoon, after washing her hair, her mother rinsed it in apple vinegar so
that it would be all nice and shiny. Before going out, Rosaura admired
herself in the mirror, with her white dress and glossy hair, and thought she
looked terribly pretty.
Señora Ines also seemed to notice. As soon as she saw her, she said,
‘How lovely you look today, Rosaura.’
Rosaura gave her starched skirt a slight toss with her hands and walked
into the party with a firm step. She said hello to Luciana and asked about
the monkey. Luciana put on a secretive look and whispered into Rosaura’s
ear: ‘He’s in the kitchen. But don’t tell anyone, because it’s a surprise.’
Rosaura wanted to make sure. Carefully she entered the kitchen and there
she saw it, deep in thought, inside its cage. It looked so funny that Rosaura
stood there for a while, watching it. Later, every so often, she would slip out
of the party unseen and go and admire it. Rosaura was the only one allowed
into the kitchen. Señora Ines had said, ‘You yes, but not the others, they’re
much too boisterous, they might break something.’ Rosaura had never
broken anything. She even managed the jug of orange juice, carrying it
from the kitchen into the dining room. She held it carefully and didn’t spill
a single drop. And Señora Ines had said, ‘Are you sure you can manage a
jug as big as that?’ Of course she could manage. She wasn’t a butterfingers,
like the others. Like that blonde girl with the bow in her hair. As soon as
she saw Rosaura, the girl with the bow had said, ‘And you? Who are you?’
‘I’m a friend of Luciana,’ said Rosaura.
‘No,’ said the girl with the bow, ‘You are not a friend of Luciana because
I’m her cousin, and I know all her friends. And I don’t know you.’
‘So what,’ said Rosaura. ‘I come here every afternoon with my mother,
and we do our homework together.’
‘You and your mother do your homework together?’ asked the girl,
laughing.
‘I and Luciana do our homework together,’ said Rosaura, very seriously.
The girl with the bow shrugged her shoulders.
 ‘That’s not being friends,’ she said. ‘Do you go to school together?’
‘No.’
‘So where do you know her from?’ said the girl, getting impatient.
Rosaura remembered her mother’s words perfectly. She took a deep
breath.
‘I’m the daughter of the employee,’ she said.
Her mother had said very clearly: ‘If someone asks, you say you’re the
daughter of the employee; that’s all.’ She also told her to add: ‘And proud
of it.’ But Rosaura thought that never in her life would she dare say
something of the sort.
‘What employee?’ said the girl with the bow. ‘Employee in a shop?’
‘No,’ said Rosaura angrily. ‘My mother doesn’t sell anything in any shop,
so there.’
‘So how come she’s an employee?’ said the girl with the bow.
Just then Señora Ines arrived saying shh shh, and asked Rosaura if she
wouldn’t mind helping serve the hot-dogs, as she knew the house so much
better than the others.
‘See?’ said Rosaura to the girl with the bow, and when no one was
looking she kicked her in the shin.
Apart from the girl with the bow, all the others were delightful. The one
she liked best was Luciana, with her golden birthday crown; and then the
boys. Rosaura won the sack race, and nobody managed to catch her when
they played tag. When they split into two teams to play charades, all the
boys wanted her for their side. Rosaura felt she had never been so happy in
all her life.
But the best was still to come. The best came after Luciana blew out the
candles. First the cake. Señora Ines had asked her to help pass the cake
around, and Rosaura had enjoyed the task immensely, because everyone
called out to her, shouting ‘Me, me!’ Rosaura remembered a story in which
there was a queen who had the power of life or death over her subjects. She
had always loved that, having the power of life or death. To Luciana and the
boys she gave the largest pieces, and to the girl with the bow she gave a
slice so thin one could see through it.
After the cake came the magician, tall and bony, with a fine red cape. A
true magician, he could untie handkerchiefs by blowing on them and make
a chain with links that had no openings. He could guess what cards were
pulled out from a pack, and the monkey was his assistant. He called the
monkey ‘partner.’ ‘Let’s see here, partner,’ he would say, ‘Turn over a
card.’ And, ‘Don’t run away, partner. Time to work now.’
The final trick was wonderful. One of the children had to hold the
monkey in his arms, and the magician said he would make him disappear.
‘What, the boy?’ they all shouted.
‘No, the monkey!’ shouted back the magician.
Rosaura thought that this was truly the most amusing party in the whole
world.
The magician asked a small fat boy to come and help, but the small fat
boy got frightened almost at once and dropped the monkey on the floor. The
magician picked him up carefully, whispered something in his ear, and the
monkey nodded almost as if he understood.
‘You mustn’t be so unmanly, my friend,’ the magician said to the fat boy.
The magician turned around as if to look for spies.
‘A sissy,’ said the magician. ‘Go sit down.’
Then he stared at all the faces, one by one. Rosaura felt her heart tremble.
‘You, with the Spanish eyes,’ said the magician. And everyone saw that
he was pointing at her.
She wasn’t afraid. Neither holding the monkey, nor when the magician
made him vanish; not even when, at the end, the magician flung his red
cape over Rosaura’s head and uttered a few magic words . . . and the
monkey reappeared, chattering happily, in her arms. The children clapped
furiously. And before Rosaura returned to her seat, the magician said,
‘Thank you very much, my little countess.’
She was so pleased with the compliment that a while later, when her
mother came to fetch her, that was the first thing she told her.
‘I helped the magician and he said to me, “Thank you very much, my
little countess.’”
It was strange because up to then Rosaura had thought that she was angry
with her mother. All along Rosaura had imagined that she would say to her,
‘See that the monkey wasn’t a lie?’ But instead she was so thrilled that she
told her mother all about the wonderful magician.
Her mother tapped her on the head and said: ‘So now we’re a countess!’
But one could see that she was beaming.
And now they both stood in the entrance, because a moment ago Señora
Ines, smiling, had said, ‘Please wait here a second.’
Her mother suddenly seemed worried.
 ‘What is it?’ she asked Rosaura.
‘What is what?’ said Rosaura. ‘It’s nothing; she just wants to get the
presents for those who are leaving, see?’
She pointed at the fat boy and at a girl with pigtails who were also
waiting there, next to their mothers. And she explained about the presents.
She knew, because she had been watching those who left before her. When
one of the girls was about to leave, Señora Ines would give her a bracelet.
When a boy left, Señora Ines gave him a yo-yo. Rosaura preferred the yo-
yo because it sparkled, but she didn’t mention that to her mother. Her
mother might have said: ‘So why don’t you ask for one, you blockhead?’
That’s what her mother was like. Rosaura didn’t feel like explaining that
she’d be horribly ashamed to be the odd one out. Instead she said, ‘I was the
best-behaved at the party.’
And she said no more because Señora Ines came out into the hall with
two bags, one pink and one blue.
First she went up to the fat boy, gave him a yo-yo out of the blue bag, and
the fat boy left with his mother. Then she went up to the girl and gave her a
bracelet out of the pink bag, and the girl with the pigtails left as well.
Finally she came up to Rosaura and her mother. She had a big smile on
her face; Rosaura liked that. Señora Ines looked down at her, looked up at
her mother, then said something that made Rosaura proud.
‘What a marvellous daughter you have, Herminia.’
For an instant, Rosaura thought that she’d give her two presents: the
bracelet and the yo-yo. Señora Ines bent down as if about to look for
something. Rosaura leaned forward, stretching out her arm. But she never
completed the movement.
Señora Ines didn’t look in the pink bag. Nor did she look in the blue bag.
Instead she rummaged in her purse. In her hand appeared two bills.
‘You really and truly earned this,’ she said handing them over. ‘Thank
you for all your help, my pet.’
Rosaura felt her arms stiffen, stick close to her body, and then she noticed
her mother’s hand on her shoulder. Instinctively she pressed herself against
her mother’s body. That was all. Except her eyes. Rosaura’s eyes had a
cold, clear look that fixed itself on Señora Ines’ face.
Señora Ines, motionless, stood there with her hand outstretched. As if she
didn’t dare draw it back. As if the slightest change might shatter an
infinitely delicate balance.
THEY HAD SEEN THE BURNING BUSH

They undertake the almost infinite adventure. They fly over seven valleys, or seas; the name of the
penultimate is Vertigo; the last, Annihilation.
—Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’

‘That’s the way it is,’ Néstor Parini had said. ‘Life’s like that.’
The observation was for Irma (she still had black hair in those days and
he used to call her his Negra) but on that occasion she paid no attention to
the words; it was his eyes that held her. They were like the eyes of a man
possessed.
Nine years later, those eyes were also what Anadelia liked best about her
father, although she didn’t exactly mind that he was a boxer, either. She had
seen boxers on the television and been taken once to the place where they
train, but that wasn’t the reason why: in fact it had frightened her, the way
they hit each other, and the faces they pulled. Mom had explained that Dad
didn’t have anything against the other man: boxing is like a game, she said.
Anadelia didn’t believe her, but she still liked thinking that she had touched
his gloves and knowing that some Saturday nights he was on the radio and
that if she really listened she might pick up the odd word from the bedroom,
another formidable left hook, this is no longer a fight, my friends, and
would be able to infer that all this was being said about her father, although
it was much better before when she hadn’t had to infer anything because
she hadn’t had to listen to the radio from her bed in the other room.
It was different before. On the Saturdays that Néstor had a fight on, they
would talk of nothing else and in the evening the three of them—Irma,
Rubén and Anadelia—would sit down to listen to the radio together; Irma
used to bite on her handkerchief and cuff them if they made a noise.
Occasionally she cried. Any neighbours who were still awake in the small
hours would sometimes hear shouting. If nothing else, Anadelia used to say,
having a father as a boxer was a great way to scare your friends. You’d
better, or my dad will get you.
That wasn’t an opinion shared by her brother, Rubén. One Sunday
morning he had stopped asking what happened the night before, and it was
just as well, Irma told herself, because she’d rather get the silent treatment
than have to keep trotting out the same explanations: Dad wasn’t feeling
well last night—he shouldn’t even have been there or Best fight of his life,
but they fixed it for the other guy or He was up against a new kid, you know
Rubén, sometimes it’s not so important to win, while Néstor would be
yelling why give the boy so many explanations? He must have been
listening, for Christ’s sake. But the boy’s silence wasn’t healthy. On the
days after a match he never wanted to go out, even to run an errand.
‘Looks like they stuck it to your old man again.’
And it was true: he had lost. Perhaps people thought that in boxing only
winning counts, or that being someone’s dad means you have no right to
lose, ever. At any rate, Rubén didn’t want to go out any more: he spent all
day Sunday at home, kicking anything in his path, and swearing at people.
Néstor also stayed indoors on Sundays. Apart from one time when he
went out slamming the door behind him and didn’t come home for two
days. Before leaving he had punched right through the window and hurt
Anadelia, who was standing watching: he came back on Tuesday, drunk and
shaking. That was the only time he ever went out. He spent Sundays at
home, sleeping all over the place, naked to the waist and glistening with
green oil. It was strange how they had finally got used to that pungent smell
of mint and alcohol. There was a time when Irma would laugh about it. Let
this be the last time—she laughed as she rubbed it in—that you come to me
all beaten and bruised; otherwise some other Negra can go looking for it
down in Riachuelo, he thinks his perfume works wonders on me. That was
all long ago, though. These days Sundays still smelled the same—they
didn’t even notice it unless they were coming back in from outside—but
Irma wasn’t laughing any more.
The worst thing about Sundays isn’t the smell, Irma thought: it’s the
football. And not because of the shouting that sometimes reached them
through the window but because of the boy shouting indoors. Excessively.
Deliberately. Avenging himself, with every goal he cheered, of a year-old
grievance: his father’s great hand tearing the picture of his football team off
the wall. It’s so that you learn, he had said, and to start with Rubén had
watched him, fearfully. A son of mine should be prepared to tear his own
heart out to get to where he wants, like I did at your age. I got by just with
these (and he looked at his own hands as if they belonged to someone else)
because you have to know how to stand up to everyone, you alone against
them, to show what you’re made of. Put everything on the line. And you
come to me with eleven poofs—film actors by the look of them—as
interchangeable as football cards and who fall about crying if anyone so
much as puts a finger on them.
It was like growing up in an instant: the scales fell from Rubén’s eyes. He
stood facing Néstor, who had ripped down his poster with one swipe and
was now calling him queer, and saw everything differently. Who was this
man to lay down the law, to him, someone who had to hide indoors the day
after a fight? Because you can say yes he lost, so what, once. But not over
and over. One day someone or other’s going to ask, and not without reason:
‘what exactly makes your old man a boxer?’ And the insults will come
next. That’s why Rubén thinks who am I afraid of? and holds his gaze
steady. And keeps watching him, even when Irma slaps him across the face,
to teach you to grin when your father’s talking to you. And Néstor Parini
has to withstand his son’s gaze.
‘That boy’s gone wrong,’ he said that night.
Irma said he hadn’t: he was a bit rebellious, but incapable of malice. And
it occurred to Anadelia that her mother was lying. Rubén hated his father,
she could have sworn as much, she who knew her father better than anyone
because one Sunday morning, when she had moved closer to watch him
sleeping, he had woken up. That gave her a shock because Mom said he
mustn’t be disturbed when he’s asleep, but her father had squeezed her
against his chest, which was big and hard, and asked her who he was, What
in God’s name am I? was the question, and Anadelia had answered that he
was the best in the world because he was a boxer. Dad had cried and so had
she. Nobody else knew what he was like, least of all Rubén.
Finally Irma had to acknowledge this, too. It was a Tuesday night, four
days before the last fight. She had just told Rubén to go down to the store to
get the meat. The boy slowly—scornfully?—turned his head and looked at
the window. Cold had misted up the glass panes; rain beat against them.
‘Well you have to go anyway,’ said Irma. ‘He’s got training tomorrow.’
And she saw in her son’s eyes, which were now fixed on her, that there
was something fraudulent about these words. They didn’t sound like the
ones that, nine years earlier, on another night—one that had such a new
smell of spring as gave her a wild desire to be with Néstor until dawn—had
made Irma understand that wouldn’t be possible. He’s got training
tomorrow. She’ll have to go back home early and on her own, and without
protestations. Because there’s one thing his Negra has to understand if she
really loves him as she says she does: he’s going to be a champion,
whatever it takes; life’s not worth living otherwise.
Rubén shrugged his shoulders and Irma intuited two things: that perhaps
it was true that her son didn’t love his father, and that there was something
grotesque about all this. Grotesque that Néstor Parini had to eat a juicy
steak at six o’clock in the morning and that she had to get up at five o’clock
to have everything ready and that her son had to go out in a storm to get
meat for the next morning. Why go to such lengths?
‘Because he’s got training, idiot,’ she yelled.
And for a few seconds she was frightened that Rubén would say
something back. She had a chaotic presentiment of words that were going to
be cruel, wounding and irrefutable. Words that, once out of Rubén’s mouth,
would bring the world down around them. Or at least her part of the
strange, vertiginous world that Irma Parini didn’t comprehend but which
she had lived in since the age of eighteen, when she had entered it as one
enters a dream, love-struck, falling into the madness of others, of men who
burn while they wait, bound by an obsession that will either lift them to the
highest reaches or eat them alive.

. . .

‘With these,’ Néstor said, looking at his fists, and she believed him.
It’s an evening in Barracas. They’ve been strolling in Patricios Park, the
sun is setting and Irma is happy. He’s just told her that he’s a boxer. Irma
pretends to be amazed, though she already knew this. When they first told
her (it was a friend who found out because Irma, ever since she laid eyes on
him, speaks of nothing else) she laughed the easy laughter of a woman who
knows about such things. All the guys are into that nowadays, she said, and
she meant that they should stop spouting nonsense and tell her something
serious about the boy with the eyes.
Today they’ve been walking for hours and there could be no more
ecstatic day on earth than this one, the day that Irma discovers Néstor’s
hands and finds out what it is like to fall in love for life and decides that
nothing else matters, except this crazy boy. Because he is a crazy boy: just a
lad. Now night’s falling in San Cristóbal and she knows it more than ever
because she has seen a side of him nobody else sees. Out of control: crazy
in love. He stops on a corner and, even though people are watching, raises
his hands in front of his face, challenging the air. A left hook, a blow to the
face; shouting to his laughing girl and shouting into the wind that he holds
the whole world between these hands and that he will give it to her.
It makes her heart pound to see him like this. For that reason—because
now Irma’s desperate to throw herself at him, to run her hands through his
hair—she spontaneously reinvents herself as a wise woman, like the one
who said yesterday that all the guys are into that and means to say it again,
this time for him. So that he learns. Néstor walks over to her and she
laughs; she’s ruffled the big man’s feathers—how funny! She’ll say it now
as though mocking his obsession.
‘But what is it with you men nowadays?’ Her observation sounds stern,
reproving. Righteous.
All of them; her brother too: mad about football. At home they’d like to
wring his neck; get a job, they say. They don’t understand the way boys are.
Let him be, she always says; he’ll get over it. And it makes her laugh, her
weighty mission to protect the big boys.
She doesn’t know exactly when she stopped laughing. At some point
Néstor grabbed her roughly by the arm and in that second she knew the
horror of losing everything.
Afterwards, looking for him in dark streets, she thinks that it was the way
he looked, not his hand, that made her universe explode.
She learns the reason for his reaction later on. They’re standing beside a
wall and looking down at his hands he says that boxing is different. There
are people who don’t understand it, right, but they aren’t boxers: they’re
just doing sport. This is worthy of something better, Negra, and if I can’t do
it, nobody can. I’ve known it since I was a boy: I saw my old man working
away with his plastering trowel every day and you wonder where’s the
point in a life like that. Not me. I’m going to the top, the very top, and with
these, see, with these fists and this body. Because that’s what boxing is: you
give it everything you have. You don’t keep anything back. If you get there
it’s because you laid your soul on the line. Anything less is Sunday
afternoon sports.
She doesn’t understand. But it’s enough to look in his eyes, which are
shining and strange, for her to say that she believes him. Later on a night-
bound patch of waste ground, lying in Néstor’s arms, she thinks that yes,
that world of vertigo and pain that she was so frightened to see in his face a
moment ago is one they will share from now on. For the rest of their lives.
 . . .

But Rubén said nothing: just shrugged his shoulders again and went out.
When he came back with the meat he went straight to his room without
even looking at her; the wet prints left by his trainers seemed like a
provocation to Irma. Hearing him sneeze behind the door, she was going to
shout to him to look after himself but that would be absurd, Weren’t you the
one who sent him out in the rain?
‘What’s wrong?’
That was absurd too: Néstor’s question at five o’clock the following
morning.
‘Why do you ask?’ she said.
Before leaving, he said:
‘My Negra is getting tired.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said, ‘your Negra doesn’t get tired.’
And nine years earlier it would have been the truth.

. . .

She went to look at the boy as he slept and told herself no: today he won’t
go to school. The previous day’s drenching had brought on a cold, she told
him later; he should just stay in bed. So she wouldn’t go to work? No, she
wouldn’t go; she was going to stay at home and look after him.
‘When I’m older,’ said Rubén, ‘you won’t have to work any more.’
She smiled.
And three days later, on Saturday, sometime before Néstor headed out to
the stadium, her back to him while she cleaned a window, she said:
‘My brother’s opening an ice-cream parlour.’
Néstor looked up surprised because a moment ago he had asked, again,
what’s wrong.
When Irma turned round, his expression was still questioning, without
understanding. He was never going to understand, it was futile; at heart he
was still the man he had always been. But there are things that are fine
when you’re twenty-one years old, or when Néstor Parini is out wooing his
girl. Now he is thirty, the age, or so he told her once, when a boxer is
finished. That’s when you have to throw in the towel, see Irma, before you
start to look pathetic. And afterwards? Forget it. There was no afterwards
you said, and that was frightening. But it’s been like this for nine years.
What are we waiting for now?
She saw shock register on Néstor’s face and realised that she had been
shouting.
‘Can you tell me what the hell we’re waiting for now? For you to get
killed in the ring so you can finally be noticed? Don’t you see that you’re
finished? Or will they have to put you to work sweeping the stadium floors
so that we have food in the house? Come on, tell me now that you weren’t
born to sell ice cream; tell me again that you were born for greater things.
To be a laughing stock, that’s why you were born. Jumping rope in front of
the mirror while your children die of shame. Castrated in bed so you can
satisfy your coach the next morning. Well go on, it’s your big day. Get
going or you’ll be late. Show them who’s boss, Néstor Parini. Like the man
you are.’
The door closed before Irma finished speaking. Later, a neighbour would
remark on how pale Néstor Parini looked as he left the house. Irma, still
standing by the window, tried to persuade herself that none of that had
really happened: she could never have shouted at him like that; in the street
Rubén had to be pulled away from someone who said that news of the
outburst was all over town; when Anadelia asked about the match, Irma
said there would be no boxing tonight and that it was already time to go to
bed, and the girl cried harder than ever; Rubén, when he came in, smiled at
his mother and Anadelia wanted to hit him. At half past ten Irma put on the
radio and, while waiting to get a signal, had a premonition that something
senseless was going to happen and that this event had already been
inexorably set in motion. The commentator was saying it isn’t a fight to
write home about. Irma heard Néstor Parini and felt calmer because nothing
unusual was happening. Anadelia, from her bed, heard Parini and stopped
crying. And Néstor Parini, who, one night about twenty years ago, under a
lamp post of a small town, had clenched the fists of his gigantic shadow,
vowed to raise himself above everyone else and heard a unanimous clamour
shouting his name, heard his name again: Néstor Parini.
And he knew how to win.
In the same way that someone can grasp in a moment the actual size of
the sun, and never forget it. With the same simplicity that prompts us, after
marvelling from the ground at the mystery of vertical men, one morning to
raise ourselves on our legs and start walking. In that same way, Néstor
Parini knew how to win. Right now, opposite Marcelino Reyes. Tomorrow,
when he climbed back into the ring. Yesterday, in every fight he ever
contested. And in those faraway, elusive fights, the ones he imagined on
sleepless nights. The ones that he would never have.
Irma, who had scarcely been paying attention, had to bring her head
closer to the radio. In the fourth round she said thank you God and went to
call the children. The neighbours woke up when they began to hear the
imperious tone of the broadcaster coming through the wall. ‘Something’s
happening at the Parinis’,’ said the neighbour and put on his radio. The
commentator declared that in all these years this was Néstor Parini’s first
good fight. And Néstor Parini wondered if it was for that, to hear them say
that, that he had spent thirteen years punching a sandbag.
Irma brought out nuts. Patiently she opened them for her children, who
were sitting on the floor in their nightclothes. She had put on every light in
the house. The three of them sat together around the radio, on tenterhooks,
not wanting to miss a single word. Rubén explained to Anadelia what a
cross was.
‘Dad’s winning and you’re crying,’ he said to his mother. ‘What is it with
women?’ And he asked her not to wake him too late the following morning.
Because he’s got something to do tomorrow. Out in the street. Irma thought
how beautiful life can be, how beautiful life is when your husband starts to
become somebody.
And Néstor Parini asked himself again if it was all for this. For what was
left to him: to win his next four matches against four poor bastards who
hardly know how to stand up and to hear Irma celebrating him as if he had
accomplished a feat; to hear her in ten years’ time telling some neighbour
that her husband had been a boxer in his youth. And to know that nobody,
not even the dogs, will ever remember Néstor Parini. If it was for that that
he had torn his heart out. And wrecked her life. And made my own son hate
me.
The commentator said that perhaps this lad Parini could still retrieve his
form and give us a few more good matches.
And Néstor remembered his vast shadow and grew to the size of his own
shadow, lifted himself to the heights from which there’s no return and said,
no. Not for that. And he landed a formidable blow right in Marcelino
Reyes’ liver. Not for that. And he punched him in the kidneys. Not for that.
And his fist described a cold parabola, then smashed into Marcelino Reyes’
testicles.
The spectators roared their indignation, the commentator gave shrill
explanations, Irma put the children to bed, the neighbours told one another
that Néstor Parini had gone mad. And Néstor Parini kept hitting, right up
until the moment when the referee ended the match.
Two hours later, while a hundred thousand people were still trying to find
a motive for this extraordinary behaviour, an ambulance travelled across
Buenos Aires. And sometime later, when Irma had finally struck on the
most beautiful way to ask her husband’s forgiveness, a police officer came
to inform her of the death of Néstor Parini. He said that he had thrown
himself under a train for reasons still unknown.
BISHOP BERKELEY OR MARIANA OF THE
UNIVERSE

‘How much longer till Mom comes home?’

It’s the fourth time Mariana has asked that question. The first time, her
sister Lucia answered that she’d be back real soon; the second, how the
heck was she to know when Mom would be back; the third time, she didn’t
answer, she just raised her eyebrows and stared at Mariana. That was when
Mariana decided that things weren’t going all that well and that the best
thing to do was not to ask any more questions. Anyhow, she asked herself,
Why do I want Mom to come back, if I’m here with Lucia . . . ? She
corrected herself: Why do I want Mom to come back, if I’m here with my big
sister? She blinked, deeply moved by the thought. Big sisters look after
little sisters, she told herself as if she were reciting a poem. How lucky to
have a big sister. Lucia, with large guardian-angel wings, hovered for a
second over Mariana’s head. But in a flash the winged image was replaced
by another, one which returned every time their mother left them on their
own: Lucia, eyes bulging out of their sockets, hair in a furious tangle, was
pointing a gun at her. Sometimes there was no gun. Lucia would pounce on
her, trying to rip Mariana’s eyes out with her nails. Or strangle her. The
reason was always the same: Lucia had gone mad.
It is a well-known fact that mad people kill normal people, which meant
that if Lucia went mad when they were alone together, she’d kill Mariana.
That was obvious. Therefore Mariana decides to abandon her good
intentions and asks again, for the fourth time, ‘How much longer till Mom
comes home?’
Lucia stops reading and sighs.
‘What I’d like to know,’ she says (and Mariana thinks, She said ‘I’d like
to know’; does one say ‘I would like to know’ or ‘I should like to know’?)
‘What I’d like to know is why in God’s name do you always need Mom
around?’
‘No.’ Now she’ll ask me, ‘No what?’ She always manages to make things
difficult. But Lucia says nothing, and Mariana continues, ‘I was just
curious, that’s all.’
 ‘At twelve.’
‘What do you mean, at twelve!’ Mariana cries. ‘But it’s only ten to nine
now!’
‘I mean at twelve, six and six,’ Lucia says.
Mariana howls with laughter at the joke; she laughs so hard that for a
moment she thinks she’ll die laughing. To tell the truth, she can’t imagine
anyone else on earth could be as funny as her sister. She’s the funniest,
nicest person in the world, and she’ll never go mad. Why should she go
mad, she, who’s so absolutely terrific?
‘Lu,’ she says adoringly, ‘Let’s play something, okay? Let’s, okay?’
‘I’m reading.’
‘Reading what?’
‘Mediocre Man.’
‘Ah.’ I bet now she’ll ask me if I know what mediocre man means, and I
won’t know, and she’ll say then, ‘Why do you say “Ah,” you idiot?’ Quickly
she asks, ‘Lu, I can’t remember, what does Mediocre Man mean?’
‘The Mediocre Man is the man who has no ideals in life.’
‘Ah.’ This lays her mind at rest, because she certainly has ideals in life.
She always imagines herself already grown up, all her problems over,
everyone understands her, things turn out fine, and the world is wonderful.
That’s having ideals in life.
‘Lu,’ she says, ‘we, I mean, you and I, we’re not mediocre, are we?’
‘A pest,’ Lucia says. ‘That’s what you are.’
‘Lucia, why is it that you’re so unpleasant to everyone, eh?’
‘Listen, Mariana. Do you mind just letting me read in peace?’
‘You’re unpleasant to everyone. That’s terrible, Lucia. You fight with
Mom, you fight with Dad. With everyone.’ Mariana lets out a deep sigh.
‘You give your parents nothing but trouble, Lucia.’
‘Mariana, I wish you’d just drop dead, okay?’
‘You’re horrible, Lucia, horrible! You don’t say to anyone that you wish
they would drop dead, not to your worst enemy, and certainly not to your
own sister.’
‘That’s it, now start to cry, so that afterwards they will scream at me and
say that I torture you.’
‘Afterwards? When afterwards? Do you know exactly when Mom will be
back?’
 ‘Just afterwards.’ Lucia has gone back to reading Mediocre Man.
‘Afterwards is afterwards.’ She lifts her eyes and frowns as if she were
meditating on something very important. ‘The future, I mean.’
‘What future? You said Mom would be back very soon.’
Lucia shakes her head in resignation and goes back to her book.
‘Yes, of course, she’ll be back very soon.’
‘No. Yes, of course, no. Is she coming back very soon or isn’t she coming
back very soon?’
Lucia glares at Mariana; then she seems to remember something and
smiles briefly.
‘And anyway what does it matter?’ She shrugs her shoulders.
‘What do you mean, what does it matter? You don’t know what you’re
saying, do you? If someone comes home very soon, it means she comes
home very soon, doesn’t it?’
‘If someone comes home, yes.’
‘What?’
‘I just said that if someone comes home, then yes. Will you please let me
read?’
‘You’re a cow, that’s what you are! What you really want is for Mom
never to come home again!’
Lucia closes the book and lays it down on the bed. She sighs.
‘It has nothing to do with my wanting it or not,’ she explains. ‘What I’m
saying is that it simply doesn’t matter if Mom is here or there.’
‘What do you mean, there?’
‘Just there; anywhere; it’s all the same.’
‘Why the same?’
Lucia rests her chin on both her hands and stares gravely at Mariana.
‘Listen, Mariana,’ she says. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. Mom doesn’t
exist.’
Mariana jumps.
‘Don’t be stupid, okay?’ she says, trying to look calm. ‘You know Mom
doesn’t like you saying stupid things like that.’
‘They’re not stupid things. Anyway, who cares what Mom says, if Mom
doesn’t exist?’
‘Lu, I’m telling you for the last time: I-don’t-like-you-say-ing-stu-pid-
things, okay?’
 ‘Look, Mariana,’ Lucia says in a tired tone of voice. ‘I’m not making it
up; there’s a whole theory about it, a book.’
‘What does it say, the book?’
‘What I just said. That nothing really exists. That we imagine the world.’
‘What do we imagine about the world?’
‘Everything.’
‘You just want to frighten me, Lucia. Books don’t say things like that.
What does it say, eh? For real.’
‘I’ve told you a thousand times. The desk, see? There isn’t really a desk
there, you just imagine there’s a desk. Understand? You, now, this very
minute, imagine that you’re inside a room, sitting on the bed, talking to me,
and you imagine that somewhere else, far away, is Mom. That’s why you
want Mom to come back. But those places don’t really exist, there is no
here or far away. It’s all inside your head. You are imagining it all.’
‘And you?’
‘I what?’
‘There’s you, see?’ Mariana says with sudden joy. ‘You can’t imagine the
desk in the same exact place that I imagine it, can you?’
‘You’ve got it all wrong, Mariana sweetheart. You just don’t understand,
as usual. It’s not that both of us imagine that the desk is in the same place:
it’s that you imagine that both of us imagine that the desk is in the same
place.’
‘No, no, no, no. You got it all wrong. Each of us doesn’t imagine things
on our own, and one can’t guess what the other is imagining. You talk about
what you imagine. I say to you: how many pictures are there in this room?
And I say to myself: there are three pictures in this room. And at exactly the
same time you tell me that there are three pictures in this room. That means
that the three pictures are here, that we see them, not that we imagine them.
Because two people can’t imagine the same thing at the same time.’
‘Two can’t, that’s true.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m saying that two people can’t.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’
‘I’m saying that you are also imagining me, Mariana.’
‘You’re lying, you’re lying! You’re the biggest liar in the whole world! I
hate you, Lucia. Don’t you see? If I’m imagining you, how come you know
I’m imagining you?’
 ‘I don’t know, I don’t anything. You are just making me up, Mariana.
You’ve made up a person called Lucia, who’s your sister, and who knows
you’ve made her up. That’s all.’
‘No, come on, Lu. Say it’s not true. What about the book?’
‘What book?’
‘The book that talks about all this.’
‘That talks about what?’
‘About things not really existing.’
‘Ah, the book . . . The book is also imagined by you.’
‘That’s a lie, Lucia, a lie! I could never imagine a book like that. I never
know about things like that, don’t you understand, Lu? I could never
imagine something as complicated as that.’
‘But my poor Mariana, that book is nothing compared to the other things
you’ve imagined. Think of History and the Law of Gravity and Maths and
all the books ever written in the world and Aspirins and the telegraph and
planes. Do you realize what you’ve done?’
‘No, Lucia, no, please. Everyone knows about those things. Look. If I
bring a lot of people into this room, and I say when I count up to three, we
all point to the radio at the same time, then you’ll see. We’ll all point in the
same direction. Let’s play at that, Lu, please, come on; let’s play at pointing
at things. Please.’
‘But are you stupid or what? I’m telling you that you are the one who’s
imagining all the people in the world.’
‘I don’t believe you. You say that just to frighten me. I can’t imagine all
the people in the world. What about Mom? What about Dad?’
‘Them too.’
‘Then I’m all alone, Lu!’
‘Absolutely. All alone.’
‘That’s a lie, that’s a lie! Say that you’re lying! You’re just saying that to
frighten me, right? Sure. Because everything’s here. The beds, the desk, the
chairs. I can see them, I can touch them if I want to. Say yes, Lu. So that
everything’s like before.’
‘But why do you want me to say yes, if anyway it will be you imagining
that I am saying yes?’
‘Always me? So there’s no one but me in the world?’
‘Right.’
‘And you?’
 ‘As I said, you’re imagining me.’
‘I don’t want to imagine any more, Lu. I’m afraid. I’m really frightened,
Lu. How much longer till Mom comes home?’
Mariana leans out of the window. Mom, come back soon, she begs. But
she no longer knows to whom she’s begging, or why. She shuts her eyes
and the world disappears; she opens them, and it appears again. Everything,
everything, everything. If she can’t think about her mother, she won’t have
a mother any more. And if she can’t think about the sky, the sky . . . And
dogs and clouds and God. Too many things to think about all at once, all on
her own. And why she, alone? Why she alone in the universe? When you
know about it, it’s so difficult. Suddenly she might forget about the sun or
her house or Lucia. Or worse, she might remember Lucia, but a mad Lucia
coming to kill her with a gun in her hand. And now she realizes at last how
dangerous all this is. Because if she can’t stop herself thinking about it, then
Lucia will really be like that, crazy, and kill her. And then there won’t be
anyone left to imagine all those things. The trees will disappear and the
desk and thunderstorms. The colour red will disappear and all the countries
in the world. And the blue sky and the sky at night and the sparrows and the
lions in Africa and the earth itself and singing songs. And no one will ever
know that, once, a girl called Mariana invented a very complicated place to
which she gave the name of Universe.
JOCASTA

When will night be over? Tomorrow all this will seem so foolish. All I need
is morning when he will come and wake me, though God knows if I’ll be
able to sleep through the night. Just like any other child in the world, isn’t
he? Jumps out of bed as soon as his eyes are open and comes running very
fast, otherwise maybe Mother will have gotten up already and we’ll miss
the best part of the day. Only at night can one believe something so
monstrous; only at night, and I feel sick imagining him now, jumping on my
stomach and singing Horsey, horsey, don’t you stop, let your hooves go
clippety-clop; just a little longer, Mommy. And how can one refuse, Just a
little longer, Mommy, when he’s playing; who would have the courage to
say no, after he looks at you, with longing in his eyes. No, that’s enough,
Daniel; it’s very late. It’s enough because tonight your mother felt filthy,
once and for all, and now she knows that she’ll never be able to kiss you
like before, tuck you into bed, let you climb up onto her knees whenever
you like; from now on it’s not right to demand that mother look after you
alone and speak only to you, tell you stories and nibble your nose, and
tickle you so much you laugh like crazy, and we both laugh with your funny
somersaults. He does them carefully, the imp, so you won’t take your eyes
off him, and then you forget the rest of the world.
I do what I can. I told them today, I do everything possible so he won’t be
around me all day. They laughed; you know, it looks funny when you’re
stuck with me all day, watching each of my gestures, scowling like a
miniature lover every time I pay attention to one of my friends. They call
you Little Oedipus, and even I laugh at the joke. Little Oedipus, I tell them,
gets furious—furious—when I’m in bed with his father; it’s terrible. But it
wasn’t terrible, Daniel; nothing that happens beneath the trees in the garden
on a lovely summer’s day during a restful afternoon with a group of friends
is terrible. Your odd ways even add a certain charm; we can spend the hours
talking about you without the slightest uneasiness. Of course, my love; it’s
all right to want to be with Mommy, to enjoy her; she is young, she is
pretty, she guesses our words before we say them and knows how to hold us
in her arms and make us laugh more than anyone in the world; and she’s
silly, stupid, to feel so dirty tonight, to think that never again will she be
able to stroke you, or let you climb into her arms. She’ll put you away, in a
school, the sooner the better.
That’s a lie, Daniel; it’s the night, you know; it transforms even the purest
things; loving you as I do becomes awful. But tomorrow it will be the same
as before; you’ll see when you come in, horsey, horsey, don’t you stop, just
like any day. Or did it ever matter? I’ll let you jump in my arms even if they
keep on talking: But that child, Nora; he doesn’t let you out of his sight
even for a second. See what I mean? I said. But you kept on hugging my
neck and putting your fingers on my lips, my little tyrant. You said, Don’t
talk, and then I explained, What can I do? He’s my little tyrant. Don’t you
think you should do something? I do everything I can, I swear, but there’s
nothing to be done, and I pushed you gently, go on, Daniel, sweetheart,
trying to put you down. But it was just another joke; like calling you Little
Oedipus beneath the trees in the garden, when the hideous part was far
away. They’re funny words we use, words we like listening to: That child is
in love with you, Nora. Or saying to them, He’s jealous of his father, the
little monster. Everything proper, correct, even saying, But get down,
Daniel, you see Mommy has something to do. Go and play with Graciela,
sweetheart. So what was to come later would have its place. Because, you
know, I myself would have put you down, I swear it. Because sometimes I
do get angry and say, Well Daniel, that’s enough, and I carry you in my
arms over to Graciela. Graciela, here’s this little rascal for you to look after.
I don’t know if she liked the gift. Before she used to play alone, quietly, and
now she has to look after you, make the effort of holding you back because
you, the young gentleman, of course want to go with me but in the end,
thank God, you stay there quietly and I can go back to my friends who are
still talking about how strange you are. You see, I say, he has me very
worried. I don’t know what to do; I try to get him to play with other
children but immediately he comes after me, running in circles around me
like something demented.
Did you see how he kisses me? One would say he’s making love to me,
lecherous little rascal, and I must say that for his age, he does it
wonderfully! And we all laugh because we are spending such a splendid
afternoon. All except you, my poor Daniel; while we talk I watch you from
the corner of my eye. Graciela is trying hard to entertain you, but you won’t
take your eyes off me. ‘What a devil, do you think he’ll be alright with
Graciela? He won’t take his eyes off you . . .’ Of course; you’re fighting to
get away and however hard Graciela tries to hold you back, she can’t. But,
now you’ve freed yourself; you are running towards me; the respite was
brief; you’ve climbed back into my arms; here you are, and it’s useless to
try to get you down again. You’ll stay with me, growing quieter and quieter,
until sleep comes over you, and I have to climb the stairs with you in my
arms, half asleep, and tuck you into bed. Goodnight, Daniel. Goodnight,
Mommy. But there are no good nights for Mommy, Daniel. Never any good
nights again. Never again to kiss you and nibble at your nose and tell you
stories and wait till morning for you to climb all over me and sing horsey,
horsey. It is useless to wait for daybreak: there are things that neither day
nor night can blot out. And today, maybe just a second before taking you
over to Graciela and allowing everything to happen as usual, I thought,
Graciela, that devil of a child, standing there, at a distance from us. Yes,
that’s what I thought: Devil of a child. Yes, Daniel, the shame of thinking
that, the hate that comes from seeing you make faces at her, this doesn’t go
out with the light. Because I knew you were looking at her: at her wicked
and marvellous eyes, her black strands of hair falling this way and that, her
pug nose, her naked legs all the way up to the forbidden place. You loved it,
Daniel, you loved it.
My God, why did I think something like that, how did I ever imagine she
was provoking you with her charming cheekiness? Yet I knew she was
wicked and that she was challenging me. We were fighting over you,
Daniel. And she was so far away, so free and naked; alone and something to
be jealous of, telling you: I can show you my legs up to where I want, I can
eat you up with kisses, if I want, we can roll around in the grass, right there,
in front of everyone, because I’m a little girl and you can see my knickers,
yes, without people thinking things; they’ll just say, How lovely, look at
them play, happy is the time when one can do those things; and you pull my
hair, you tangle yourself in my legs, and I’ll lift you up, and we’ll both roll,
both, because I’m nine years old and I’ll do everything for you, so you can
have fun. She stood there so invulnerable, all odds on her side, sticking her
tongue out at you and calling you with her eyes: Come, Daniel. You smiled
at her. The others were still saying, That child, Nora, is really in love with
you, but I saw how you smiled; I knew that in a secret way, a way I couldn’t
reach, you two understood each other. You knew how to say yes to her, if
she accepted you as her tyrant, and she answered, Yes, you are so lovely
with your blond hair, your blue eyes and your unabashed way of being
tender. So here I come to Graciela, you thought: she and I are the same and
we love each other.
You went, Daniel. You slid out from my arms without even looking at
me; as if you’d climbed up on something like a bush and seen Sebastian
behind the hedge and gone off to find him. It’s so easy when one knows
nothing about betrayals, isn’t it Daniel? One is in mother’s arms, the best
place in the world, wishing to spend one’s life like this, huddled up, letting
yourself be loved; one feels one would die if anyone tried to tear us away;
and then Graciela appears with her devilish eyes and sticks out her tongue,
and rolls around in the grass, the best place in the world. One feels one
could live like that, rolling around in the wet clover; nobody could ever stop
us from playing together, from pulling her hair until she screams, from
making her come running from far, far away to make me fly up in the air;
laughing out loud at her faces that no one can pull as well as she does. They
will never take me from her side; it’s useless to watch us, Mommy; it’s
useless to feel like you can’t take your eyes off me and that you can barely
hide it with a smile from your friends when they tease: He betrayed you,
Nora.
Yes, all men are the same, and you fake a voice as if you were saying
something funny, but you’re not even looking at them; you’re still waiting
for my eyes, just one of my looks to let you know that everything’s the
same, and you’ll be calm again; so I can go on playing with Graciela, but I
still love you more than anything else. But if it weren’t so? But if I loved
Graciela more, Graciela who can lift her legs? And you can’t. Who can yell
like Tarzan. And you can’t. Who can fight with me in the grass. And you
can’t. Who can smear her whole face with orange juice. And you can’t.
Who can kill herself laughing at the grown-ups all sitting there, looking so
stupid. And you can’t. So it’s useless to smile every time I turn my head;
and to make funny faces to win me over. I’m not amused by those faces; I
don’t even notice them. I don’t see you even when you pass by my side.
And you’ve passed three times now; and you’ve touched me; I felt how you
touched me but I didn’t turn around. And I know you make noises for me to
hear, and you sing that song about the bumble-bee because I like it best. But
I don’t like it any more. Now you know. Graciela can sing much better
songs, pretty Graciela, nobody will take me from her side even if it’s night-
time and we have to go to sleep. She’ll come, earlier today than all the other
days, with more cuddles and more promises. But I won’t. And I won’t. I’ll
resist up to the last minute; I’ll scream and kick when Mommy wants to
hold me in her arms. Yes, Daniel, you want to be with Mommy, of course
you want Mommy to put you to bed. It’s night-time, can’t you see? You
must remember we love each other so much, Daniel. That I’m the best in
the world for you, Daniel. You can’t climb the stairs screaming and kicking
that way; don’t you see you are betraying me, my little monster who doesn’t
understand betrayal? Don’t you know that Mommy does understand and
that her heart aches, and she can’t stand letting you fall asleep in tears,
remembering Graciela? I didn’t want to hurt you, my darling. I didn’t hurt
you, it’s not true. You fell asleep in peace and quiet and I’m sure that you’re
having lovely dreams now. Only I am not sleeping. Only I’m afraid of the
kisses I gave you, of the caresses, of the terrible way we both played on the
bed till you fell asleep, happy and exhausted, thinking of me, I’m sure. And
it’s useless for me to repeat over and over again that I always kiss you, that
I always caress you, and that we always play, both of us, because my little
Daniel must be happy. It’s useless to say that little Daniel is happy now and
he’s dreaming lovely dreams; that he doesn’t know anything about his
miserable mother’s ugliness. It is useless to repeat that night turns
everything horrible, that tomorrow it will be different. That you will come
running to wake me, and everything will be lovely, like every day. Horsey,
horsey, don’t you stop, let your hooves go clippety-clop. Like every day.
FAMILY LIFE

Nicolas Broda belonged to that type of people who are cardinally

unemotional. It is certain that if, one night, looking up into the sky, he saw
two stars about to collide, instead of waiting for the bang he would set out
to gather the necessary information. And on the very next morning, after a
lot of fiddling with Lagrange’s equations applied to the mechanics of three
heavenly bodies, he would have reached the conclusion that yes, a satellite
launched in the past thirty-eight days and another only four days ago would
create the illusion of a crash if observed at the time and place from which
he was now staring at the sky.
On the morning of July 7 he woke up because a saucepan or something
metallic had just been dropped in the next room. Every house sounds
different, and for a split second he had the intention of asking himself why
the word ‘different’ had crossed his mind. I’ve got to get up, he thought, but
he didn’t even open his eyes because he vaguely remembered that no, of
course, he didn’t have to. He didn’t have to get up because it was Saturday
or because the alarm had not yet rung. It’s true that he had to visit the
Computer Centre to inspect a routine tryout (he was a Fortran programmer,
as well as an advanced-maths student), but it didn’t matter if he went now
or later. He stretched luxuriantly and reasoned that this was the great thing
about Saturdays: they begin like any other day, and then, suddenly,
freedom. Freedom? But he immediately discarded this avenue of thought
because it occurred to him that it was asinine to start the day with
hairsplitting.
He made a small effort and opened his eyes. The next effort took longer
and required a little more will power: he turned his head to see the time. It
was 8:30. The alarm had not gone off.
For his third effort—pulling his arm from under the blanket and reaching
for the clock—he required nothing at all, because his movement was
sparked by real curiosity. He wanted to know whether the alarm was broken
or whether he had forgotten to wind up the clock. He immediately realized
that he had forgotten to wind it up. He also noticed that the alarm hand,
usually fixed at 8, now pointed to 8:30. Whatever did I do last night? He
tried to remember. He was now wide awake.
The saucepan made a noise again, something like a light tapping that
stopped at once. It came from his parents’ room. He remembered his father,
in his dressing gown, standing on the balcony. Suddenly he remembered
what he had done last night. He had been in Segismundo Danton’s
apartment. They had discussed the complex theory of a binary chain,
several women, the novels of Musil and finally the times (long gone) when
they used to see Tarzan films at the Medrano Theatre. Nicolas had walked
home feeling as light as a bird. He later discovered, to his dismay, that his
birdlike condition—the feeling of having the brain of a bird—could be
attributed to his having forgotten in Segismundo’s apartment a briefcase full
of IBM manuals, a dump at least thirty pages long, a rare collection of
Maupassant’s stories, a universal treatise on pre-Pythagorean mathematics,
personal documents, a few odd bits and pieces and the keys whose absence
—though not so literally weighty as the rest—obliged him to ring the bell
for almost ten minutes and then to exchange socio-economic arguments
with his brusquely awoken father. And yet, in spite of this incident, he had
felt so carefree and elated that it wasn’t strange, he now thought, for him to
have forgotten to set the alarm. For the time being he didn’t care to consider
the question of why the hands were pointing at 8:30. He felt happy. So he
jumped out of bed like a soldier and began to sing ‘Ay Jalisco, no te rajes’
with all his body and soul. ‘Porque es peligroso querer a las mala-aas!’ He
held the ‘aas’ until he could hold it no longer, then he opened the door of
his room.
An unknown woman in a lace-trimmed dressing gown—fat, with
peroxided hair—was coming out of his parents’ bedroom.
‘Will you stop shouting?’ the woman said.
She went into the bathroom and slammed the door shut.
Nicolas interrupted his song as if someone had switched off his current.
There’s a limit to surprise, he thought. Over that limit there’s inhibition. He
stood in the middle of the hallway, not knowing exactly what to do.
The woman opened the bathroom door and poked her head out.
‘Hey, Alfredo,’ she started to say, but she stopped herself and stared at
him with interest. ‘Store’s open,’ she said, pointing at Nicolas’ open fly.
Nicolas rearranged his underwear. He couldn’t help admiring the cool
head he was keeping under such extraordinary circumstances. He tried
imagining the scene when he would tell all this to Segismundo. ‘And then
an old cow came out of the toilet and called me Alfredo.’ ‘Sure, and then
you both started to sing the drinking song from Traviata, right?’ ‘Look, I
swear, there she was, I could have touched her.’
‘So?’ the woman asked. But something in the way Nicolas was acting
must have worried her, because she changed her tone of voice. ‘You feeling
sick, baby?’
‘No.’ Nicolas replied. ‘No.’
He realised that the woman was approaching him, her hand stretched out
in front of her with the unmistakable maternal purpose of feeling his
forehead to see if he was running a fever.
‘No, no,’ Nicolas said again. He arched his body backwards like a soccer
player about to hit a ball with his head, turned around, walked away and
threw himself into the bathroom with such violence that the woman
screamed.
First he looked at himself in the mirror. He needed to think things over,
quietly. No, what I need to do is wash my face. He washed his face, his
neck. Then he put his whole head under the tap. He reasoned that a rational
explanation—based on such limited verifiable data—of something as
irrational as what had just taken place would imply that he was somehow
accepting the irrational. He was certainly capable of not letting himself be
deluded by appearances. He dried himself energetically, ran his fingers
through his hair and began to stretch out his hand to reach his toothbrush.
What he saw made him stop his hand before it reached its goal. Five
toothbrushes. Though he could never have described the toothbrushes used
by his parents and his brother, he could nevertheless confirm three things: a)
they were not these; b) there had always been only four toothbrushes in the
bathroom; and c) his own, with the rubber tip—highly recommended for the
prevention of paradentosis—wasn’t there.
He didn’t try to understand. Instead, he thought of doing something more
practical: getting dressed. Being in his underwear added a difficulty that it
would be wise to overcome. He combed his hair. Hanging from a nail on
the door (he had never before seen a nail there) he found a pair of jeans and
a shirt. He accepted the fact that they weren’t his. The end justifies the
means, he thought a little incoherently as he was dressing. He noticed that
the shirt and the jeans fit him fine.
 He came out of the bathroom feeling nervous. He didn’t have a clear idea
of how to behave, what to do. Should he call that woman? Above all, what
should he call her? She had said to him that his ‘store’ was open. Also, he
did have a fever. He sighed and tried not to think about what he was going
to do.
‘Mom,’ he said.
After a few seconds the bedroom door opened a crack, and the head of
the blonde woman peered through the opening.
Nicolas took a few steps towards her.
‘Lady,’ he said decisively, ‘first let me tell you that you are not my
mother. I also want to know the meaning of all this, and where,’ he coughed
briefly, ‘where I can find my mother.’
He felt one of his eyelids twitching, which bothered him no end.
The woman took a deep breath (she was certainly very fat), pursed her
lips and turned around. She spoke to someone inside the bedroom.
‘So?’ she asked. ‘Now what do you say?’
‘What, what do I say?’ a hoarse voice answered, a man’s voice. ‘I say
that I’ve been asking for a cup of tea for over an hour, that’s what I say.’
The woman took another deep breath, let out a sound like hmm and
turned again towards Nicolas.
‘Look here,’ she said. ‘Your father’s got his gout again. And you bloody
well know he’s got his gout again. And on top of everything you give me
this monkey business.’
Nicolas stared at her in astonishment.
‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ he said, with such nerve or subtle humour that he was
truly sorry that, here in the hallway, he was the only person capable of
appreciating it.
The words seemed to have some effect on the woman. She came out of
the bedroom, closed the door and approached Nicolas with the vague
attitude of a stage conspirator.
‘It’s terrible, baby,’ she whispered in confidential tones. ‘Really terrible.
This and that, the armchairs, I don’t know—everything. This isn’t a life,
baby.’ She pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of her dressing gown
(now she was wearing a plum-coloured dressing gown) and blew her nose.
‘And then last night. You didn’t hear the fuss?’ She paused but not long
enough for Nicolas to answer. ‘Chelita came home at six; she’s a slut your
sister, knowing how he flares up. I swear, I thought he’d drop dead then and
there. You really didn’t hear a thing?’
Nicolas made an ambiguous movement with his head.
‘Well,’ the woman said. ‘You can imagine. I swear, I really swear, there
are times I just want to leave you all and run away. Are you going out?’ she
asked, startled.
Nicolas observed that, with no warning whatsoever, the woman had
changed her tone of voice, as if her last question belonged to an entirely
different scene.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Oh, good,’ the woman said. ‘Thank God. When you come back, bring
me a bag of corn flour from the corner store, Brillo pads, two bags of milk
and small noodles to put in the soup. Ask the man if the vaseline arrived.
He’ll know.’
Just for a second, Nicolas lost his foothold. Then he stepped back on firm
ground, like a conqueror. He had determined that, henceforth, he would not
lose hold of the situation.
‘Can’t Chelita go?’ he said.
The woman sighed.
‘She went to bed at six or later,’ she said. ‘You think there’s a chance in
hell she’ll get up before one?’
Through the closed door they heard the man with the hoarse voice ask for
his tea.
‘What did I tell you?’ the woman said. ‘Sometimes I just want to leave
the whole lot of you and run away somewhere.’ She pointed at Nicolas’
feet. ‘Put your shoes on,’ she said and went out through the opening that led
into the dining room.
As Nicolas entered his room, he noticed that, where the bookcase had
always stood, there was now a chest of drawers with shelves in the lower
half. He found shoes under the bed. The socks were inside each of the
shoes, carefully rolled into balls. Nicolas reasoned that someone who takes
such care in stashing away his socks probably always wears clean clothes;
he sat on the bed and put on the shoes. He found that they fitted him
perfectly.
On the back of a Louis XV–style chair he found a sweater and a coat.
Without knowing why, when he saw that they also fitted him, he
remembered the story of Goldilocks. In the coat pocket he tucked away two
hundred pesos which he had seen on a sort of bedside table, then he left.
It was a grey morning, rather cold. Diaz Velez Street was on his left;
Cangallo on his right; the upholstery store right next to the house; the
mattress store, La Estrella, just across the road. At the corner Nicolas said
hello to the newspaper man, and the newspaper man said hello back. It
occurred to him that the best thing to do would be to go home, check that
everything was fine and stop all this nonsense. But he immediately
abandoned that idea. If everything was indeed fine, the compulsion to return
would only have meant that his mental state was abnormal. And if, on the
contrary, the woman was there, Nicolas would find himself once again in
the middle of a situation with no visible solution, a situation from which he
needed to escape. So he carried out his purpose to go to the Computer
Centre and caught a 26 bus on Corrientes.
He got off at Uribiru and walked to Paraguay. He crossed the entrance
and the large hallway and mechanically walked up to the brown door on the
left where, on a golden plaque, was written ‘Computer Centre’.
He pushed the door open and walked in.
It wasn’t the first time he had been aware of this feeling. He had felt it
one night, two or three years ago, on his way to the Lorraine cinema. From
the moment he had climbed onto the bus he had begun to create and polish,
as in a daydream, a program that would allow one to write soap operas
through computers. He had gotten off at a stop, which, according to gut
feeling, was Parana Street. (His gut had been mistaken; the street was
Ayacucho.) He had crossed the road while at the same time going back over
his program to see whether he hadn’t fallen into a dead-end loop. Only
when he was at the point of entering the cinema had he realised that no
cinema was there at all, no bookstore to the right, no theatre across the road.
He was in a totally unfamiliar place. For several seconds he had borne the
unbearable impression that reality had shifted, that everything he believed
in was false, that his points of reference suddenly made no sense.
The same thing happened to him again at the Computer Centre. But this
time he had made no mistake. When he left, sixty seconds later, he had
found out something of the utmost importance: no Nicolas Broda worked
there. No Nicolas Broda had ever worked there.
Another important fact came to him in front of a yellow apartment
building. He had gone there to retrieve his briefcase and to confide his
tribulations to Segismundo Danton. He had carefully thought out how to
explain all of this to Segismundo, but when he reached for the intercom
phone to call apartment 10B, he realised that there was no tenth floor nor Bs
of any kind. The building was eight stories high and the apartments were
numbered from 1 to 27.
He walked for a long while. He had told himself, somewhat
compulsively, that his only hope was not to spend the eighty pesos he had
left. But shortly after midday it began to drizzle, and Nicolas was forced to
admit that, even though the very idea of going back to that house filled him
with anxiety, for the time being there was no other place to go. So he picked
out six ten-peso coins and took the bus. Just as he was about to reach his
destination, he saw through the window, leaning against a doorway, a large,
red-faced man who seemed thrilled at seeing the bus. The man whistled,
waved his arms wildly, made a circular gesture with his finger in his ear,
indicating that Nicolas should phone him, winked an eye and nodded his
head. Nicolas felt himself blushing up to the ears. He tore his eyes away
from the window. The lady sitting next to him smiled back a tender and
happy smile.
As soon as he got off the bus, a problem occurred to him. Should he go
into the store and buy the things the blonde woman had asked him to get, or
should he ignore her request? He imagined that if he arrived without the
parcel and if the woman saw him, not only would she burst into a rage but
she’d probably have him go back into the street to fulfil his duties. To save
himself the fuss, he decided to buy the things now.
The shopkeeper looked like the same one he had always known, but he
couldn’t be certain.
‘Just put it on the bill, would you?’ he asked, a little anxiously, as the
man handed him the parcel.
‘No problem, my friend,’ said the shopkeeper.
Before leaving, Nicolas undertook one final task.
‘Has the vaseline come in?’ he asked.
It hadn’t. Nicolas hurried to tell the woman when she opened the door, as
she was taking the parcel from his hands. He was worried about the
possibility of having to touch her. Large women had always frightened him.
He felt great relief—too much relief, he thought—when the woman told
him it didn’t matter. ‘It doesn’t matter, Alfredo baby,’ the woman said. ‘Go
and sit down to lunch.’
 Nicolas went into the dining room and knew them all at a glance. The
man at the head of the table, skinny in his striped pyjamas, was the
gentleman suffering from gout. To his left was Chelita. To his right was an
empty chair in which the blonde woman had been sitting. Next to the
blonde woman’s place, the Fifth Toothbrush. And next to Chelita was
another empty chair in which he sat himself. They were having soup.
The gentleman with the gout tapped his index finger on the edge of the
table and turned towards Nicolas.
‘Would you be kind enough to tell us where you’ve been?’
Nicolas tried to think up an appropriate answer, but didn’t manage to
voice it because the Fifth Toothbrush leapt to his defence.
‘Come on, it’s good for him to air himself a bit, Rafael,’ she said. She
had the voice Nicolas had expected from someone wearing those little
round glasses. She let out a sigh. ‘It’s such a nice day out there.’
She winked tenderly at Nicolas by raising one of her cheeks and bending
her neck towards the side of her closed eye.
‘Fine, fine,’ muttered the gentleman with gout. ‘In this house
everything’s fine. If someone spits in the shoe polish, that’s fine. If we’re
overrun with ants, that’s fine. If that slut over there comes home at six in the
morning, that’s also fine. In this house everything’s fine.’
The expression on the Fifth Toothbrush’s face changed from tender to
insidious.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I certainly don’t know how come a decent
girl doesn’t spend the night under her own roof.’
Nicolas sneaked a look at Chelita and couldn’t help admiring her. She
was eating her soup like a princess sitting among pirates. He thought that
the image had been conjured up by her hair, long and red. Briefly, he saw
himself biting it, lying with her in bed. This is an abomination, he thought.
And then he had a shock. He had just realized that what he had found
abominable was what he had been on the point of thinking: This is an
abomination, she’s my sister.
‘What I don’t know,’ the blonde woman said, ‘is why you don’t stick that
tongue of yours up your ass.’
With this, the group became sullen. From time to time, the Fifth
Toothbrush would pull out a handkerchief and blow her nose. When she
did, the blonde woman would grunt briefly and stare at the gentleman with
gout. Finally, it seemed that the gentleman with gout could bear the tension
no longer. He told Nicolas to go and turn on the TV. Nicolas understood the
role that he (or his other) played in this household.
He undertook a minor experiment: he asked Chelita to pass him the salt.
Thanks to a mental effort he had managed (he thought) to recover an
ordinary air of ‘ironic and aloof man of science.’ He felt handsome.
Discreetly uninterested he waited to see what would happen. He was
disappointed: when Chelita turned her head to reach the salt, she didn’t
show the slightest recognition of any change in his appearance. All she
managed was a quick grimace, as if she were fed up with something. Then
she carried on eating. Nicolas felt—never before had he felt anything like it
—that Chelita despised him.
After this failure, he refrained from trying to charm anyone. He behaved
just as the others expected him to behave, and this spared him any more
bother. The truth is that he had very little chance to behave in any way
whatsoever, because as soon as he finished his meal he locked himself away
in his room. (If it could be called his room, this room without a single book
or a single number jotted down on paper; not even the slightest secret
cigarette burn that Nicolas could recognize as his own.)
In a grade-four notebook he learnt his full name: Alfredo Walter di Fiore.
He also learnt that his teacher had felt certain that, with dedication and
effort, he would be able to overcome his present difficulties and come up a
winner. The reading material proved to be even less revealing. The only
indication of some sort of passion (perhaps simply a question of chance)
was a pair of books on accountancy. Nicolas also found My Mountains,
poems by Joaquin V. Gonzalez; The Citadel by Cronin; three or four
westerns; one Harlequin novel; Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts;
a history book by Bartolome Mitre; Don Quixote; several special issues of
Fantasy Magazine; a women’s weekly; three issues of The Reader’s Digest;
a botanical handbook for high schools; a third-year accountancy primer;
Heidi; Everything you ever wanted to know about Accountancy; Everything
you ever wanted to know about the Great Ideas of Mankind; Everything you
ever wanted to know about Your Digestion; The Thirsty Nymph; and Little
Men.
There were no letters anywhere. He found the photograph of a fat, rather
plain girl. For Alfredo, Love, Always. He also found a pad of receipts with
several pages torn out. On receipt number 43 was written in pencil—the
handwriting resembled his own—‘love,’ ‘dove,’ ‘heart,’ ‘dart,’ and a bit
further down, ‘Why don’t you all go fuck yourselves.’
By 7:00 he had managed to put the facts into some sort of order: either
this was a dream, or this was really happening. If this was a dream, was it
possible that, within the dream itself, he was considering the possibility of
its being a dream? Yes, of course, things like that do happen in dreams. But
do reasonings like this also happen in dreams? By 7:20 he had accepted that
this was really happening. He went out for a walk.
At the corner store he asked the man to let him have a packet of
cigarettes on credit. The man agreed with a sly conniving smirk. At the
entrance to a bookstore, he stopped himself from smiling at a teenager
loaded down with parcels and rolls of wallpaper because he was
unaccountably afraid that his smile might seem stupid or obscene. He
carried on with a vague feeling of guilt. He heard the parcels and the rolls
of paper fall to the ground behind his back. Without thinking he turned
around, retraced his steps and picked up the teenager’s belongings.
‘Thanks,’ she said. And something happened: she looked at him.
Nicolas had been looked at as Nicolas.
Only then did he smile at the girl. You might take all away from me . . .
And yet . . . The quotation crossed his mind. He was a student of higher
mathematics, lover of Musil’s books, old fan of Tarzan’s films at the
Medrano Theatre, and he was smiling at a girl.
She rearranged the parcels and the rolls of paper, thanked him once
again, warmly, and went on her way.
Nicolas realized that the stars had come out. He managed to find a couple
in the Centaur constellation. You might take all away from me! Everything
—the rose, the lyre! . . . And yet, one thing will still remain! Something in
his heart sang out.
It wasn’t as if he were suddenly happy, though. Those he had loved, the
things he had shared, that which until yesterday had been his past: where
would he look for them now? He felt utterly alone. But he was himself. And
not all the blonde women in the world, not all the gentlemen suffering from
gout, not all the red-faced men who lean against doorways would ever be
able to dispossess him of this feeling (so like a song, like the happiness of
someone singing), this feeling of being himself on a clear evening in July.
He decided that there was only one way out and that he would proceed
along that way. He would be Alfredo Walter di Fiore, and he would make
Alfredo grow vaster and more powerful than all the blonde women and all
the men with gout. He would do for Alfredo Walter di Fiore what he might
never have done for Nicolas Broda. Because, ever since his Tarzan days, he
had waited for a test, for that heroic or herculean act that only he would be
able to undertake. And now he would undertake it.
That very night, as soon as he got home, he took the first step. ‘I need to
talk to you,’ he said to Chelita. ‘I think you never actually knew me.’ The
look in her eyes changed from scorn to surprise, and Nicolas knew he
would succeed in his brave efforts. He spoke like an idiot who in the end
was not an idiot but in fact had a tortured and contradictory soul. Crushed
by life itself, crushed by a family who had pampered him since childhood,
all of them, she also, yes, don’t start crying now, she also had a part in it—
he was fed up and had decided to put an end to all this and start again from
scratch. He was letting her know that he was going to study maths. Maths?
He, study maths? Yes, maths, he had always dreamt of studying maths, and
he was sure that he would make a success of it. He had been secretly
preparing himself, he had read many books without letting anyone know,
and he was firmly convinced of what he was saying. He was also letting her
know that very soon, as soon as he found a new job, he was going to go off
and live on his own.
At last she admired him. She felt ashamed and sorry, and wanted to
apologize. He didn’t need her apologies but allowed her to kiss him and
even give him a little hug. He went off to bed as if he’d been to a party.
It wasn’t until the next morning, when he woke up and thought about
everything that had happened, that he was able to peel the wool off his eyes.
He realised that he had barely taken one first step. Ahead lay a long and
difficult path.
A great uneasiness swept over him. Suddenly he felt that he would not
have the strength to continue. No, he said to himself, I mustn’t let myself go
to pieces. One by one he repeated the decisions he had made. Slowly and
through sheer will power he began to recapture the enthusiasm of the
previous night. It occurred to him that enthusiasm is an incomprehensible
state of mind when one is not feeling enthusiastic. He recalled that
Weininger had said something similar about genius.
He heard a noise and looked up. Someone was opening the door to his
room.
 Nicolas saw a tall, thin woman walk in, her hair grey and dishevelled.
The woman approached the window and lifted the blind. She turned
towards Nicolas’ bed.
‘Nine o’clock, Federico,’ she said.
Then she walked up to a sort of desk, drew a finger across its surface and
peered at it. ‘Again everything in here is covered with dust,’ she said.
Before leaving the room she looked at him once again and then told him
to hurry. She reminded him that last night he had promised to get up early
and paint the kitchen ceiling.
EVERY PERSON’S LITTLE TREASURE

The inner door barely opened. The face of a grey-haired woman appeared in
the crack. Smiling. Ana was unexpectedly reminded of a book illustration.
Was it from Alice in Wonderland? A smiling cat that disappeared. Not all at
once: little by little it rubbed itself out, first the tail, then the body, and
finally the head, until only a giant rictus was left hanging in the air. This
was similar, but the other way round. As if the smile had been there before
the door opened. Waiting for her.
‘How can I help you, Señorita?’
The woman’s question did not, however, suggest that she had been
expecting her visitor. Odd, considering all the publicity there had been, but
never mind. Ana put on what she thought of as her bureaucrat’s voice.
‘It’s about the national census, Señora. I’m the census taker.’
‘Oh the census taker!’ the woman’s exclamation was surprising, part
enthusiastic greeting, part lamentation. ‘I told my daughter that you were
coming at midday, but she . . .’
Her sentence hung between them, unfinished. It occurred to Ana that this
was a woman who often left things hanging.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We come when we can.’
‘Of course you do, my dear,’ the woman opened the door. ‘Please come
inside or the wind will carry you off, you’re so slight.’
The reference to her size made Ana realise that she was hungry. Or was it
the smell? For as she stepped through the door, she was seduced by the
aroma of some hearty cooking. The front hall was impeccable. Polished
mosaic floor, little crocheted coverings, gleaming furniture; only a comic
lying open on the floor seemed out of place. The woman shook her head
when she saw it. ‘Those children,’ she admonished gently, stooping to pick
it up. Ana breathed deeply in the smell of cooking, which was stronger now.
‘I realise that this is rather an inconvenient time,’ she said, ‘but it will
only take a few minutes.’
‘Not at all, my dear. Stay all afternoon if you like! I’m sorry, I didn’t
introduce myself: I’m Señora de Ferrari. But everyone just calls me
Amelia.’
 ‘And I am Ana. Shall I sit down here and we’ll get started?’
‘I won’t hear of it—come with me to the dining room, you’ll be more
comfortable there,’ and she opened a door that led into the courtyard. ‘What
worries me is that my daughter’s gone out and my husband told me only
this morning that he’s not coming back for lunch, the rotter.’ She smiled
fondly. ‘Poor man, I shouldn’t really call him a rotter when he’s using his
day off to get ahead with work.’
‘Actually your husband doesn’t need to be present for this.’
The woman coyly raised her hand to her mouth.
‘I know you’ll laugh at me, and I say that because I have three daughters
of my own so I know how young girls think in this day and age—this way,
please—but I can’t help it, I’m old-fashioned. I’m used to thinking of my
husband as the person who takes charge of things in the house, he got me in
that habit, I suppose, he’s fifteen years older than me. At the time of our
marriage I could have passed for his daughter so you see for him I’ll always
be his—Careful!’
Just in time. A second later and Ana would have stepped on the
skateboard that was lying across the doorway.
‘Oh those children,’ complained the woman again, as she had in the hall.
‘You sit down here, my love, and recover!’ The chair she indicated was at a
table covered with a cloth on which there were lots of cups and the remains
of breakfast. ‘The thing is he’s the baby of the family, you know, the only
boy, my little blond munchkin,’ she couldn’t suppress a giggle. ‘We spoil
him rotten, as you can imagine.’
Yes, Ana could imagine it. What she couldn’t imagine, on the other hand,
was why the woman had insisted on bringing her to the dining room when
the table was covered in crumbs and there was no clear space to put her
forms down. The woman seemed to realise this because she brought a tray
to the table and began to clear away the things.
‘What must you think of me,’ she said; Ana watched impassively as the
woman picked up a half-eaten piece of toast and jam. ‘The trouble is, with
such a large family . . .’
Ana started filling in the headings, trying not to pay attention. Wasn’t
there something rather voracious about these wives who showed off their
husbands and children as though they were minor works of art? When she
had finished writing she followed the woman’s bustle for a few seconds.
 ‘Don’t worry about the table, please. Would you mind very much sitting
down for a moment so that we can get this wrapped up? It’s only a few
questions.’
‘I’ll be with you in a minute.’ Now the woman was gathering up the
tablecloth, trying not to let any crumbs fall. ‘I hate seeing everything in a
mess, believe me, the thing is that, what with today being a holiday, the
children didn’t get up until twelve. And then of course they went dashing
out. I’ll just take this to the kitchen then I’m all yours.’
‘Señora, please, I still have lots of houses to visit and I haven’t had lunch
yet. Could we just get down to—’
‘Oh my dear, what a monster I am! Here you are starving hungry and I
haven’t even offered you a bite to eat. Look, I tell you what, since they’ve
all gone and left me landed with lunch, come into the kitchen—come on—
you can ask your questions and I’ll give you lunch. You’ll be doing me a
favour, hand on heart, I’m not used to eating on my own.’
‘The thing is Señora, that I’m here in a particular capacity,’ said Ana, and
she felt vaguely stupid.
‘Come on, you can’t fool me—I’m old enough to be your mother! Come
with me to the kitchen, you look famished. My husband and the children
love eating in the kitchen.’
Hadn’t she been praying until a few minutes ago for someone to offer her
something to eat, even a miserable biscuit? Greedily she inhaled the smell
of food and stood up.
The woman walked to a door that must lead into another room; she
opened it then, as though she had seen something that displeased her,
slammed it shut.
‘Good God, I was about to make you walk through the bedrooms,’ she
said. ‘I forgot that I haven’t even made the beds today. Come this way’—
and she stepped out of the door that led into the courtyard.
Ana shrugged and followed her, what did it matter, at the end of the day.
The distant shouts of a woman and a boy’s voice could be heard on the
other side of the partition wall. The next-door neighbours, she thought. This
house has it all.
‘They shout at each other all day, it’s exhausting,’ the woman
complained; she looked briefly at Ana and softened her tone. ‘Well, they’re
children just like mine, aren’t they? One always sees the speck in another
person’s eye. Anyway, here’s the kitchen—come in.’
 A great pot was steaming on the hob. The woman took off the lid and
stirred the contents with a wooden spoon. A succulent aroma dispersed
through the kitchen.
‘Come, look at this, tell me you won’t leave me stuck with all this food—
there’s enough to feed a regiment!’ she laughed good-naturedly. ‘I always
make too much, what can I say, I mean this lot are forever showing up with
another guest to feed.’
She’s sort of like the ideal mother, Ana thought. She sat down and got the
forms ready while the woman set the table for two and ladled the food into
a kind of tureen. Finally she brought the tureen to the table and sat down.
‘Ask away, dear, then we can eat in peace.’
She sat down and started serving the food onto plates. Ana picked up her
pen.
‘How many people live in the house?’ she asked, although by this stage
the question was redundant.
‘Only us,’ said the woman with a certain pride. ‘I’m sorry, you’ll want to
know who we are and so on. There’s my husband, my three daughters and
the boy: the little one.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Shall I tell you their
ages?’
‘No, that’s not necessary. How many are working?’
‘My husband.’
‘Only him?’
‘Well yes, he supports all of us. I mean, my eldest daughter also works,
she’s an interior decorator. But just as a hobby, you know. My husband
didn’t want her to, but I’m with modern youth on this one.’
‘Yes, I see. Does anyone go to school?’
The woman laughed.
‘What a question—yes, of course. The boy is still in primary school. The
youngest of the girls is in the fourth year of secondary and the next one up
is finishing Medicine. She’s bright, that one, and I’m not saying it just
because I’m her mother.’
Surreptitiously, Ana eyed the plate that had just been served. Paris was
worth a Mass, it turned out.
‘How many bedrooms does the house have?’
‘What?’ The woman seemed first to brighten and then subside. ‘Ah, five.
Five bedrooms.’
 Ana glanced into the courtyard: it didn’t seem like a big place. Oh well.
In the box she wrote ‘five.’ She looked at the woman.
‘Very well’—in the tone of a teacher at the end of a lesson.
‘Is that it?’
Ana put down her pencil and shuffled the forms together.
‘That’s it,’ she said.
She considered the woman’s fascinated expression for a moment before
deciding to reach for the plate herself. Unexpectedly the woman sang softly
to herself. She seemed younger now: she was glowing.
‘So that was it,’ she murmured thoughtfully.
Ana ate. The food was really delicious. And the woman could talk all she
liked now. About her model husband and her three talented daughters and
her cheeky blond boy, the family’s pride and joy. Why not? Everyone has a
little treasure. Eating made her magnanimous.
‘It wasn’t that bad, was it?’ she asked playfully.
The woman shook her head. She seemed not entirely to have taken in all
the extraordinary things that had just happened. Timidly, she pointed to the
forms.
‘And this, where does it go?’ she asked.
‘This?’ Ana glanced charily at the papers. ‘I don’t know, I suppose
they’ll use them for statistics, that sort of thing.’
‘Statistics,’ the woman repeated, dreamily.
On second thought, it might be better to finish eating quickly and get
going, before the woman started talking again. ‘Get down from there
immediately!’ she heard someone shout. ‘I’m not going to!’ The next-door
neighbours: a rowdy bunch, as the woman had said. ‘Get down!’
‘I said I’m not coming down!’ louder now, or closer. ‘I want my
skateboard!’
Ana looked towards where the voice was coming from. She saw a boy’s
blond head appear over the partition wall. ‘I said get down. You’ll fall.’
‘Eat up quickly, or it will get cold.’
‘I want my skateboard,’ the boy repeated. ‘Amelia!’
‘Señorita Amelia,’ the neighbour corrected.
‘Señorita Amelia!’ the boy shouted. ‘Are you there?’
Ana looked at the woman; she was eating with her eyes fixed on the
plate.
 ‘Señorita Amelia!’ The boy spotted Ana in the kitchen. ‘Hey, you!’ he
shouted, ‘is Señorita Amelia there?’
Ana looked at the woman, who was still focussing on her plate.
‘Listen,’ she said with exasperation. ‘They’re asking for Señorita Amelia
—can’t you hear them?’
‘And what’s that to do with me?’ said the woman. ‘Am I expected to
know everyone in the neighbourhood?’
‘Can you do me a favour?’ the boy asked Ana. ‘I lent it to her because
she said it was for a nephew but now my mother says that she doesn’t have
nephews or anything. You’re not her nephew, by any chance?’ he laughed,
delighted by his joke, and the neighbour murmured something inaudible. ‘I
have to get down now or she’ll kill me, but if you see Señorita Amelia,
please tell her.’
And like an actor concluding his part, the boy and his blond mop
disappeared back behind the wall.
‘Have you finished?’
Ana looked up, startled. The woman was standing right beside her. That
overflowing quality that had earlier surrounded her like an aura seemed
entirely to have disappeared.
She took away the plates and the tureen. Meticulously, determinedly, she
threw all the food that was left into the rubbish bin. All that work wasted,
Ana thought. She remembered the six dirty cups, the half-eaten toast, and
wanted to get away from the flat as quickly as possible.
‘Dessert?’
The face turned to her without expression. As if the woman felt herself
mercilessly compelled to play out her role until the last.
‘No thank you, I have to go.’
She stood up and collected her things together. The woman very slightly
raised her arm.
‘So this doesn’t . . . ?’
She stopped short. Ana’s gaze fell on her hand, fearfully pointing at the
forms.
‘This stays as it is,’ Ana said, very quietly.
For an instant the woman recovered the quality that had previously made
her glow.
‘Thank you,’ she said, barely audible.
 Then, in silence, she led Ana to the door. When Ana said goodbye she
didn’t answer or even look at her. She waited for her to leave, then firmly
shut the door, turning the key twice.
NOW

Perhaps it would be best if I go away for a while, if I stay here I’ll end up
getting agitated. Mama and Adelaida do nothing but cry in the room where
Juan Luis sleeps (as if that’s going to help my brother in any way) and it’s
terrible to see Papa: just now I looked into the living room and he’s still
standing at the window, watching the entrance into our road. We’ll know
from his face when the ambulance turns in.
It’s odd that I wrote ambulance because, even as I was writing it, I was
imagining them arriving by car. A car would be worse, I don’t know why.
Actually, I do know. I can’t stop thinking that Juan Luis is going to scream
like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire. And they came for Blanche in a
car.

. . .

Just now I told Papa that I was thinking of going out for a stroll but he
didn’t seem to like the idea. It’s not surprising: Juan Luis could wake up at
any moment and if he’s anything like he was last night, Papa won’t be able
to manage him alone (and it’s clear that we can’t count on Mama and
Adelaida). I wonder how long this nightmare can go on. But we must not
give in to despair. Now that they’re taking Juan Luis away, we have to try to
forge a new life; we were on the verge of becoming demented ourselves. It
seems like centuries since I last felt the sun on my skin.
The first thing we should do is move house. I mooted the idea to
Adelaida just now, but she looked at me with a kind of horror. I do
understand: our childhood was here. It’s not easy detaching yourself from a
place. We used to play in this room, when it was the family room, while the
adults took a siesta on Sundays. She would be Aleta and Queen Guinevere;
I was the wizard Merlin; Juan Luis, Prince Valiant. That crack over there
served for tempering the Singing Sword. And in the summer we used to run
around in the sun until our heads hurt. But this is precisely what we need to
avoid: sentimentality. It’s as if everything here is somehow tainted by Juan
Luis. Full of his memory, I mean. If we stay in this house, we’ll never be
able to make a fresh start. Every morning, when Mama waters the azaleas,
she’ll say the same thing: ‘To think this is the flower bed Juan Luis made
for me after he sold his first painting, my poor son.’ And if anyone points
out the cobwebs in the birdbath in the courtyard, Adelaida will say: ‘This is
where Sebastian tried to give Juan Luis a bath, when Juan Luis was three
years old.’ And she’ll look at her mother and they’ll both cry. Only
yesterday afternoon, Mama was searching for an X-ray or something and
she found that photograph from when Juan Luis won the drawing
competition. ‘Do you remember how handsome he was?’ she said. ‘When
he came out on the stage everybody cheered. Do you remember how proud
I was?’ She held the photograph against her heart. ‘How old was he?’ she
asked. ‘Ten?’ ‘No, eleven,’ said Adelaida. ‘Don’t you remember that
Sebastian wore long trousers for the first time that day?’ Mama sighed
deeply and I realised that she was crying. ‘How happy we might have
been,’ she said. Then, hearing a noise, she glanced up. When she saw me
watching from the door she quickly dried her eyes with the back of her
hand; she doesn’t like anyone to see her crying. I sat down beside her to
comfort her, but she started stroking my head like a ninny and murmuring
my darling boy. She’s very nervy, poor Mama, and she ended up making me
nervous too. Or, I don’t know, perhaps it’s the result of living with this
tension for so long. The touch of her hand must have acted as a catalyst,
taking me back to another time—I can’t have been more than four years old
because Juan Luis was still sleeping in a cot in Mama and Papa’s room—
and I had been dreaming of dogs (or imagining them). That’s all it was. A
terrifying number of black and hairy dogs, ugly dogs, in a pile, tearing at
each other’s ears with their teeth. I didn’t want to shout for fear of waking
my little brother in the room next door. That was the first night, I remember,
that I ever heard my heart beating. I was about to cover my ears with my
hands and then I felt her come in. Is something wrong, darling boy? I heard
her say, above my head. She was stroking my forehead and then she sat
down on the bed. And it was as if all the peace in the world settled on my
bed, with her.
I suppose that this kind of experience stays fixed in the subconscious,
waiting for the right stimulus to reactivate it. Anyway it was a big mistake
to lose my nerve just at the moment when I most needed to keep calm. As
soon as I opened my eyes and saw Mama’s face I regretted my weakness. It
can’t be helped, these things find a way to burst out. I think we could all
have ended up going mad if Papa hadn’t made a clean break.
Papa came in just now, as I was writing his name. Or rather, he peered
around the door into the room, saw me writing and went out again without
saying a word. It’s incredible, the degree to which people in an extreme
situation can lose consciousness of their own acts; Papa must think that
what he has done is the most normal thing in the world. But I don’t want to
mock him; at the end of the day he has borne the brunt of this situation. It
can’t have been easy to call the hospital. Speaking for myself, I don’t know
if I could have done it. Especially not in the way he did: I confess that I was
amazed by his sangfroid. Last night he tried to kill his brother—I heard him
clearly. I don’t know, I suppose that was the most direct way to convey the
gravity of the situation but it sounded very stark all the same. I was lying in
bed, and the words sent a jolt through me.
No; the worst is still to come. I mean we’ll have to talk to the doctors.
They’ll want to know when we noticed the first symptoms, what his
relationship with me was like, what could have led him to do what he did.
And why should I be the one tasked with explaining everything? For two
reasons. First: because I have to spare Papa and Mama (and also Adelaida)
the trauma of talking about this. Second: because I don’t think they would
be able to contribute much given that they have pretended for so long that
everything Juan Luis did was normal. It’s a natural function of their
neurosis. Or a survival mechanism. (They did know, however. I remember
one particularly significant incident. The five of us were having dinner. A
music programme had just ended on the radio. The presenter was reading
Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla. At the point in the story where it starts to
become clear what illness the protagonist is suffering from, Adelaida stood
up and switched off the radio. A silent gesture, but charged with meaning. I
waited for Mama or Papa to do or say something fitting to the parent of a
girl who—without asking us—had just interrupted the broadcast of a story
to which we were all listening. Nothing happened. The silence that followed
was so dense that for a few seconds I feared Juan Luis might pick up the
radio and hurl it at someone’s head.)
Then again, even as a boy he wasn’t normal. Brilliant, yes, but not
normal. That’s what worries me, I realise now. How to explain that to the
doctors. They’ll ask me: And why did you never say anything about those
strange looks? I’ll say, He didn’t always look at me that way, Doctor, and
when he did I thought it was because he was angry with me. They’ll ask:
Why did you never tell anyone that he shouted at night? I’ll tell them: We
were children, Doctor, you know how these things are. I was scared that
they would beat him (then Mama will jump in protesting that she has never
lifted a hand against any of her children; on second thought, I’d better be
careful not to say that and spare myself the complications). They are going
to ask: And why did the others notice nothing? That will be the hardest part
to explain. I could say: You know how parents generally treat the youngest
child, especially someone like Juan Luis, an apparently perfect boy, Doctor,
the kind who always carries off the end-of-year prize. Or alternatively:
You’re the psychiatrist, Doctor; I don’t need to explain to you the lengths to
which a bourgeois family will go to protect itself from abnormality. No, I
can’t say that. I won’t have the courage to destroy Mama’s cherished image.
It might be better not to mention our childhood; I don’t want to give them
reasons to find me responsible for Juan Luis’ illness. We all know what
psychiatrists are like—they attribute a significance to everything. I’ll say
what everyone thinks: that the first sign was at Baldi’s house. Nobody can
refute that because all five of us were there that time.
We were in the garden, I’m sure of that because I remember noticing the
reddish reflections on the face of Señora Baldi (which made her look even
fatter than she actually is) and thinking that dusk was a particularly irksome
time of day. The talk was of some homeopathic doctor or other. Everyone
knows that I find these inane conversations exasperating, so I did what I
always do on such occasions: I didn’t listen. It’s easy: a simple question of
perspective. What I mean is, if you consider that a radio has a much greater
range from the twelfth floor than it does from sea level, you can understand
that it’s possible to shrink the radio of one’s own perception to the body’s
compass. Except that this time, when I returned from my isolation I had the
impression (to start with it was only an impression, something you could
feel in the air more than anything else) that other people in the garden were
annoyed. I looked around me, but I realise now that even before looking, I
knew what was happening. It was Juan Luis talking, in fact it was most
likely his voice that broke my absorption. It wasn’t the mere fact of his
talking, though, but the way he talked. Without a break, and with a strident
tone that made the skin bristle. I noticed that some people were looking at
me, as though begging me to intervene. Not Mama and Papa; not Adelaida,
either: they still had their eyes on Juan Luis as though nothing strange was
happening. It wasn’t the last time I observed this reaction or piously
contributed to it myself (every time Juan Luis embarked on one of his weird
episodes I would tell an anecdote or think up some gambit to divert
attention towards me). That afternoon in the garden I attempted one such
loving intervention though on this occasion (I must confess) it was totally
ineffective, given its ultimate consequences. First, I knocked over a jug of
sangria, prompting a commotion that forced Juan Luis to be quiet. Then I
contrived to make myself the centre of attention, talking about mechanics,
about spiritualism, all that nonsense that people find so fascinating. I’m sure
that I succeeded in neutralising my brother on that occasion.
But I don’t want any more importance to be given to my behaviour than
it had in reality. The illness was already apparent and, although we avoided
talking about the subject, our behaviour changed. Every day, as the time
approached for Juan Luis to come home, we would start shouting at one
another, taking umbrage at the slightest trifle, lashing out for no reason.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Mama was the most affected. She developed a
kind of hysterical defence: finding herself in the company of any other
human being, she would start to talk about Juan Luis, about his paintings,
his girlfriend, how handsome he was, etc. I mean, I don’t want to come
across as hyper-sensitive but I sometimes got the impression that she
invited people round simply in order to talk to them about my brother. I
don’t think she did this consciously (my mother hasn’t a Machiavellian
bone in her body) but I realised how bizarre this must seem to our guests—
and there was nothing I could do about it. In the beginning, yes, I did try to
rein in her panegyrics but that seemed to make her more anxious, so that
finally I opted for total silence when people came to visit. (Happily that
mania for having visitors seems to have stopped.)
I couldn’t sit and do nothing, though. Not only on account of my family
(who seemed more burdened every day) but for another, more pressing
reason: María Laura. I don’t know—I’ve often asked myself about the
strange workings of love. From a logical point of view, there is no reason
why a girl like María Laura (the very embodiment of joie de vivre) would
feel attracted to a sick man. And yet there she was, as happy as could be
and apparently oblivious to any problem.
I tried dropping hints but realised very quickly that I would never
convince her of the truth. So the best solution (at the time it seemed like the
best) was to go and speak to María Laura’s father. I wish I had never done
that. The man received me very well, listening to me attentively and
promising to do everything I asked but afterwards—I don’t know—
something came over him. María Laura, perhaps: that girl never liked me.
Anyway, the fact is that the man not only allowed Juan Luis to keep going
out with his daughter but then he did something even more hare-brained: he
told Juan Luis about my visit. No, I’m not imagining it. I know it seems
crazy that a serious person would put such a dangerous weapon in the hands
of a lunatic but that’s how it was. That same night, as soon as Juan Luis
came home, I knew what had happened. I could tell just from the way he
looked at me. As if he wanted to overpower my very spirit. For a long time
he stood watching me, then finally he shook his head. I don’t know what he
intended by this gesture but it chilled me to the core. I felt that never in my
life would I know a minute’s peace. You think I’m exaggerating? Not at all.
From that day on he began to persecute me. Especially in the way he looked
at me. I couldn’t take a single step without feeling his eyes fixed on some
part of my body. And his words were almost as unbearable as his looks.
Every time he alluded to me it was with the purpose of humiliating me.
Nothing too obvious, nothing that would make the others think: Juan Luis is
a bully. They were subtle attacks, straight to the point. It made me suspect
that there was a plan: He was doing precisely the things that most vexed
me. His plan then was to make me lose control, so that the household’s
attention fell entirely on me. He wanted to deceive them, to my detriment.
The other evening my suspicion was confirmed.
For a long time Juan Luis had been pressing me to let him do a portrait of
me; to start with I didn’t want to submit to his purposes, but in the end
Adelaida persuaded me to go along with the idea; besides, I was interested
to know what he was after with all this. When I saw the finished portrait I
finally understood. No—it was nothing to do with the painting itself: it was
a good portrait. Too much ochre, perhaps. But there was something that
powerfully caught my eye: an unjustifiably yellow mark between the
cheekbone and the right temple. What did that mean? To start with, I wasn’t
entirely sure, but when I looked up my suspicions were confirmed: Juan
Luis was laughing. I could hardly believe what was happening. ‘My
brother,’ I thought, ‘my own brother capable of such cynicism.’ Blinded by
rage, I wanted to hit him but instead I smashed the painting into a thousand
pieces. I remember what I was thinking: what else might this maniac do if
he is capable of working for two weeks with the sole aim of hurting his
brother? What will he not stop at, now that his game has been discovered?
From that day onwards I tried to avoid his presence, but that simply
exasperated him. He stalked me, monitoring all my movements. And
although I did everything I could to stop him watching me (in these
conditions even breathing becomes difficult) I suppose that he had found a
way to control me without my realising it. The truth is that every time I
tried to do some important work, I would hear Juan Luis’ voice coming
from the most unexpected places, and I had to get away.
It wasn’t so much for myself that I minded, but for my family. For days
now, Mama’s eyes have been swollen from crying so much, and Adelaida
has developed a kind of rash that makes her look terrible. Perhaps it’s better
for everyone that things ended as they have. I don’t know. I have a strange
feeling, even though I shouldn’t be surprised. What he was going to do was
foreseeable. It should have been enough just to see the way he smiled at
supper time—the obsequious way he offered me the breast of the chicken—
to know that he was embarking on another of his crises. And that this time
it would continue to its ultimate conclusion.
But it wasn’t at the dinner table that I knew for sure, it was at midnight,
when I was lying in bed, still thinking it over. How was I so certain? I don’t
know. I suppose it was something like animal instinct: rats abandoning a
sinking ship. All I know is that I was going over what had happened in the
last few days, and what Juan Luis had said at dinner and suddenly I realised
that he was planning to kill me that very night. Initially, I admit, I was
paralysed with terror but some inner voice urged me to fight for my life. I
got up and, barefoot, so as not to make any noise, I went to Juan Luis’
bedroom. He didn’t move, but I could tell that he wasn’t asleep. A fearful
thought struck me: what do I do if he attacks me? (Juan Luis was always
stronger than I was). Although the thought of using a weapon against my
brother was repugnant, I knew that my very survival was at stake. I went to
the storage room to get an axe. Then, feeling calmer, I returned to his
bedroom. From the door I watched the white rectangle of his bed; there was
no discernible movement, but he couldn’t deceive me any longer. Quietly I
approached the bed, and confirming my suspicions, he sat up.
I don’t know how far things might have gone if he hadn’t seen the axe.
Even having seen it, he launched himself at me. Remembering that a person
in his state of mind never abandons the course to which he is committed, I
defended myself as best I could until Papa and Adelaida arrived and
managed to free me.
I must have lost consciousness after that. This morning, when I woke up,
I could barely recall the incident. I was trying to work out why my wrist
hurt so much when, through the door, I heard my father talking on the
telephone. ‘As soon as possible,’ I heard, ‘last night he tried to kill his
brother.’ Shivers ran down my spine when I heard that. But this is for the
best. I can’t spend my life hiding away. It’s terrible not to feel the sun on
my skin. I want to be happy.

. . .

My God, I think I must have fallen asleep. I can hear his voice outside.
Perhaps they’ve come to get him. I think I’m afraid.

. . .

Papa isn’t standing at the window any more. I called him and he shouted
that he was coming, that I should keep calm. I have to speak to him. I have
to explain. I had a dream. No, it’s not that. It’s a feeling I have, that an
injustice is about to be perpetrated—that’s it. That he grew up with us, or
don’t they remember that any more? He liked sunny mornings and Prince
Valiant. And perhaps, even though we think that everything suddenly
changed for him, perhaps within his soul there is still a beautiful and hidden
part that nobody yet knows. That nobody will ever know, now. I hear the
voices outside. They’ve come to get him. They are going to encircle him
with walls through which the sun shall never enter.
STRATEGIES AGAINST SLEEPING

When the time came to leave, Señora Eloísa still considered herself
fortunate to be returning to Azul by car. The travelling salesman—who
worked for her daughter’s future father-in-law—had arrived punctually to
pick her up at the hotel and seemed very proper; he had shown great care in
placing her little crocodile skin suitcase on the back seat and even
apologised about the car being so full of merchandise. A pointless apology,
in the opinion of Señora Eloísa, who always found the exchange of
pleasantries with new acquaintances trying. As the car pulled away, she too
felt obliged to make trivial remarks about the suffocating heat, prompting
an exchange of opinions on low pressure, the probability of rain and the
good that rain would do to the country, this last observation naturally
leading to the fields of Señora Eloísa’s own husband, the trials of being a
landowner, the highs and lows of life as a travelling salesman and the
various attributes of many other occupations. By the time they reached
Cañuelas, Señora Eloísa had already spoken—amiably at first, but with a
growing reluctance—about the characters of her three children, the eldest
one’s impending marriage, assembling a cheese board, good and bad
cholesterol and the best kind of diet for a cocker spaniel. She also knew a
few details about the man’s life, details which, before their arrival in San
Miguel del Monte—and after a blessedly prolonged silence—she could no
longer even recall. She was tired. She had lent back against the headrest,
closed her eyes and begun to feel herself lulled by the low, soporific hum of
the engine, evoking cicadas during scorching afternoon siestas Do you mind
if I smoke. The words seemed to reach her through an oily vapour and with
an effort she opened her eyes.
‘No, please do.’
She looked sleepily at the man who was driving, whose name she had
completely forgotten; was it Señor Ibáñez? Señor Velazco? Mister Magic
Bubble? Master Belch?
‘A great driving companion.’
This time her eyes sprang open in alarm. Who? Who was a great
companion? Looking around her for clues she found nothing: only the man
smoking with his eyes open unnecessarily wide. The cigarette, of course.
She made an effort to be lively.
‘Everyone tells me they’re wonderful for clearing the head.’
Nobody had told her any such thing, it had been a mistake not to take the
coach back, by now she would have been stretched out in the seat and
sleeping peacefully. She half-closed her eyes and thought that she could, up
to a point, do the same here. Lean against the headrest and go to sleep. Just
like that, how delicious: to fall asleep and not wake up until a godsend. Did
she hear him speak? Had the man just said ‘a godsend’? So was he never
going to stop talking?
‘. . . because the truth is that tedium makes you tired.’
A joyful spark ignited within Señora Eloísa.
‘Unbearably tired,’ she agreed. She thought the man would realise now
that she needed to sleep.
‘And it’s not only the tedium. Shall I tell you something?’ said the man.
‘Last night I didn’t sleep a wink. Because of the mosquitoes. Did you know
there’s been an invasion of mosquitoes?’
Please be quiet, she cried out, silently.
‘It’s because of this heat,’ she said. ‘We need a good storm.’
‘The storm is on its way—look,’ the man nodded towards a dark mass
approaching from the south. ‘In a couple of minutes we’re going to have
ourselves a proper drenching, I can tell you.’
‘Yes a proper drenching.’
The need to sleep was now a painful sensation against which she had no
desire to fight. She let her head loll back again, almost obscenely, her
eyelids falling heavily. Little by little she disengaged herself from the heat
and the man and surrendered to the monotonous rattle of the car.
But I don’t mind the rain if I’m well rested. She let the words slide over
her head, almost without registering them. The thing is that today, for some
reason, I feel as if I could drop off at any minute. Was some state of alert
functioning within her somnolence? The splattering of the first raindrops
seemed to trigger it.
‘Shall I tell you something? Today, if I hadn’t had good company and
someone to chat to me, I wouldn’t even have come out.’
She didn’t open her eyes. She said crisply:
‘I don’t know that I am particularly good company.’
 Fury had brought her almost fully awake, but she wasn’t about to give
this man the pleasure of a conversation: she pretended to be dozing off.
Immediately the clatter of rain started up, like a demolition. For a few
minutes that was all she heard and gradually she really did begin to fall
asleep.
‘Please, talk to me.’
The words burst into her dream like shouting. With difficulty Señora
Eloísa opened her eyes.
‘Well just look at this rain,’ she said.
‘Terrible,’ said the man.
Already it was her turn again.
‘Do you like the rain?’ she asked.
‘Not much,’ said the man.
He certainly wasn’t helping. All he wanted was for her to talk and keep
him awake. Barely anything.
‘I like it, I like it very much,’ she said, fearing that this avenue of
conversation was leading nowhere; quickly she added: ‘but not this kind.’
In a garret, I’d be an artist or a dancer, half-starving, and there’d be a
handsome man with a beard, loving me as I had never imagined it was
possible to be loved, and rain drumming on a tin roof.
‘Not this kind,’ she repeated vigorously (she needed to give herself time
to find another direction for the conversation: the tiredness was leading her
into dead ends). On an impulse she said: ‘Once I wrote an essay about the
rain.’ She laughed. ‘I mean, how silly I sound, I must have written lots of
essays about the rain, it’s hardly an unusual theme.’
She waited. After a few seconds the man said:
‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’
But he didn’t elaborate.
Señora Eloísa applied herself to thinking up new avenues of
conversation. She said:
‘I used to like writing essays,’ luckily she was beginning to feel talkative.
‘A teacher once told me I had an artistic temperament. Originality. That
essay I was telling you about, it’s odd that I should suddenly remember it. I
mean, it’s odd that I should have said “once I wrote an essay on the rain,”
don’t you think, when in fact I wrote so many’—the secret was to keep
talking without pause—‘and that I shouldn’t have had any idea why I told
you that when I did and that now I do. I mean, I don’t know if you’ll
understand this, but now I am sure that when I said “once I wrote an essay
on the rain,” I meant the beggars’ kind rather than any other.’
She paused, proud of herself: she had brought the conversation to an
interesting juncture. She would be willing to bet that now the man was
going to ask her: Beggars? That would certainly make her job easier.
But no, apparently the word had not caught the man’s attention. She, on
the other hand, had struck a rich seam because now she clearly remembered
the entire essay. This was just what she needed: a concrete subject,
something to talk on and on about, even while half-asleep. She said:
‘Here’s a curious thing: in that essay I said that rain was like a blessing
for beggars. Why would I have thought something like that?’
‘That is curious,’ agreed the man.
Señora Eloísa felt encouraged.
‘I had my own explanation for it, quite a logical one. I said that beggars
live under a blazing sun, I mean, I suppose that I imagined it was always
summer for them, they were burned by the sun and then, when the rain
came, it was like a blessing, a “beggars’ holiday,” I think I called it.’
She leaned back on the headrest as though claiming a prize. Through the
rain she read AZUL 170 KM and sighed with relief: she had managed to
keep talking for a long stretch, the man must be feeling clearer-headed by
now. She closed her eyes and enjoyed her own silence and the water’s
soothing litany. Gently she let herself be pulled towards a sleepy hollow.
‘Talk to me.’
He sounded both imperious and desperate. She remembered the man and
his tiredness. Could he be as exhausted as her? My God. Without opening
her eyes she tried to remember what she had been talking about before
falling asleep. The essay. What else was there to say about the essay?
‘You must think that . . .’—it was a struggle to take up the thread again
—‘I mean, the teacher thought that . . .’—and now she seemed to see
another angle to this story. She said firmly: ‘She drew a red circle. The
teacher. She circled “blessing” in red and printed beside it a word that I
didn’t know at the time: Incoherent’—she frowned at the man. ‘It wasn’t
incoherent. Perhaps you think it was incoherent, but it wasn’t.’
‘No, not at all,’ said the man. ‘Why would I think that?’
‘Yes, I’m sure you do, because even I can see that it may seem
incoherent, but there are some things . . .’ Some things, what? She no longer
saw as clearly as she had a minute ago why it wasn’t incoherent. Even so
she had to keep talking about something or other before the man ordered
her to continue. ‘I mean that there are times when heat is worse than . . .’
Without meaning to, she caught sight of a road sign. That was a mistake:
knowing exactly how many kilometres she had to keep talking filled her
with despair, as though she were falling into a well. ‘There are times when
heat is overwhelming especially if’ she searched for the words with a rising
sense of panic—what if she never found anything new to talk about? For a
very brief moment she had to suppress a desire to open the door and throw
herself onto the road. Abruptly she said: ‘I once saw a beggar’ and her own
words surprised her because the image didn’t come from her memory or
anywhere else: it had come out of nothing, clear against the suffocating heat
of Buenos Aires: a young woman, dishevelled and a little distracted among
the cars. ‘I don’t know if she was a beggar, I mean I don’t know if that is
the right way to describe her: she was fair, and very young, that I do
remember, and if she hadn’t been so unkempt and so thin, with that
expression of hopelessness . . . That was the worst thing, the feeling that she
was going to go on, day after day, traipsing among the cars as though
nothing in the world mattered to her.’
She paused and looked at the man; he nodded slightly, as though bidding
her to continue.
‘There were cars—did I tell you there were cars? A traffic jam or
something. I was in Buenos Aires with my husband and my . . . I’m sorry, I
forgot to tell you that it was shockingly hot, if you don’t know about the
heat you won’t understand any of this. The car was stuck in traffic and the
sun was beating through the windscreen, so I put my head out of the
window to get a bit of air. That was when I saw her, watching us all with an
indifference that frightened me. My husband didn’t see her, or rather, I
don’t know if he saw her because he didn’t mention anything, he doesn’t
particularly notice these things. She was well dressed—do you see what I’m
saying? A blouse and skirt, very dirty and worn, but you could tell from a
mile off that they were good clothes. There she was, among the cars, and
she wasn’t even making an effort to beg, that’s why I’m not sure if it’s right
to call her a beggar. It was as though one fine day she had walked out of her
house dressed in these same clothes and closed the front door on everything
that was inside: her husband, her silver service, those stupid functions,
everything she hated, do you see what I mean? Not the boy, she had him
with her, she saw that in reality she didn’t hate the boy. He was heavy, that
was all, especially in that heat. But no, she didn’t hate him. She had brought
him with her, after all.’
‘Sorry, I think I got lost,’ the man seemed more awake now. ‘There was a
child?’
‘Of course,’ said Señora Eloísa, irritably. ‘I told you there was a child at
the start, otherwise what would be so terrible about it? The woman was
there, among the cars, with the boy in her arms and looking at us with that
expression of—. A baby, big and very fair, fair like the woman and fat, too
fat for someone to be carrying in such heat. Do you see what I’m telling
you? Don’t tell me that you do, that you understand, I know that however
hard you try you can’t understand it. You think you do, that you understand
it perfectly, but you have to carry a child when you’re tired and hot to know
what that’s like. And I was sitting down, mind you, not like the woman; I
was sitting comfortably in the car. But even so I felt the weight on my legs
and my skirt sticking to me and then my baby who was crying as if she
were being . . .’ she looked with suspicion at the man who seemed about to
say something. She didn’t give him the chance. ‘But the woman wasn’t
even sitting down and I think her back must have been aching terribly. She
didn’t look like someone in pain, she looked indifferent, but even so I could
tell that the child was too heavy for her.’
She fell silent, absorbed by these thoughts. The man was shaking his
head. Suddenly he seemed to think of something cheering.
‘Life, eh?’ he said. ‘I bet she’s the one getting married.’
Señora Eloísa stared at him, perplexed.
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘Your daughter, I mean, it just occurred to me, the crying baby you were
carrying,’ the man laughed good-naturedly. ‘How time flies, she must be
the one who’s going off to get married.’
‘I never said that,’ said Señora Eloísa with violence.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . . You said that she was crying and then I
thought . . .’
‘No, you didn’t understand me, she wasn’t crying. I said very clearly that
she was heavy and that the woman’s back must have hurt. But I never said
that she cried. Admittedly, she may have been about to cry at any moment. I
didn’t make that clear, but I admit it now: they all cry. See how desperately
they cry when you think they have everything they need and you can’t think
what’s wrong with them? That day it was hot, intolerably so. And the sky
was painfully blue, the kind of blue one could be happy with if one were
alone or beside somebody very’—she turned her head towards the man. She
said angrily: ‘If one didn’t have to carry on one’s lap a baby who keeps
crying for no reason’—she waved her hand in front of her, as though batting
away an insect. ‘The woman didn’t make any kind of gesture, just stood
there with an air of abandonment, but I could tell straightaway that she was
raging. She wanted to throw the boy, hurl him against something, but not
because she hated him. She wanted to throw him off because he was very
heavy and it was hot, do you understand? It’s not possible to bear such a
heat, and the weight, and the terror that at any moment they will start
crying.’
Then she gazed out at the rain as if she had never said anything.
The man shifted in his seat. He cleared his throat.
‘So what happened next?’
She turned back towards him with irritation.
‘What do you mean what happened? That happened—doesn’t it seem
like enough? A very tired woman and with those lovely clothes, I don’t
know, as if one fine day she had decided that she was tired of everything.
Then she grabbed the child, carefully closed the door to her house and off
she went. As simple as that. I realize that it’s hard to understand but these
things happen. One might be perfectly happy, drawing the curtains or eating
a biscuit and suddenly one realizes that one can’t go on. Do you know what
it’s like to have a child who cries all day and all night, all day and all night?
A child is too heavy for a woman’s body. Afterwards, with the others, one
gets used to it or, how shall I put it, one gives in, perhaps. But the first is so
exasperating. One resists, believe me, one resists and every morning one
tells oneself that all is well, that one has everything a woman might dream
of, that how the others must . . . No, it’s shaming to confess it, but it’s true,
one even thinks this: about the others, I mean how the other women must
envy one with this husband who is so attentive and such a comfortable
house and this nice, fat baby. These are the sorts of things one may think of
to calm oneself. But one fine day, I don’t know, something snaps. The baby
who won’t stop crying, or the heat, I don’t know, it’s hard to remember
everything accurately if afterwards one isn’t allowed to talk about it, don’t
you see? They kept saying no, they insisted that they knew what it was best
to say, that I was ill at any rate and it wasn’t advisable for me to talk . . .
They put a whole story together, an accident or something like that, I think,
but I don’t know if it was for the best. Because the only thing I wanted, the
one thing I needed was to tell them that I didn’t hate her, how could I hate
her? I loved her with all my heart. Do you at least understand? All I did was
dash her against the floor because she kept crying and crying and she was
so heavy, you can’t imagine, she was heavier than my whole body could
bear.’
Now she was very tired and she thought that she didn’t have the strength,
she simply didn’t have the strength to keep talking for the rest of the
journey.
‘I want to get out,’ she said.
Without saying anything, the man stopped the car. He must have been in
a great hurry to get away because he looked at her only once, standing in
the rain on the hard shoulder, then immediately pulled away. He didn’t even
tell her that she’d left her crocodile skin suitcase on the back seat. Just as
well, that suitcase was too heavy for her.
GEORGINA REQUENI OR THE CHOSEN ONE

But if I am nothing, if I am to be nothing, why then these dreams of glory which I’ve had for as
long as I can remember?
—Maria Bashkirtseff

A coach drawn by four white horses is turning the corner. The decorated
gentleman inside, astonished at the sight of a six-year-old girl walking
alone and not afraid along a dark street, leans out of the window, and with a
dry monosyllable, orders the coachman to stop.
‘Who are you, beautiful child?’
‘I’m Georgina Requeni, Sir.’
‘And I? Do you know who I am?’
Georgina doesn’t know. The gentleman is the President of the Republic,
the most important person in the entire country. When the President tells her
this, Georgina isn’t taken aback and looks him straight in the eye. That is
when the President realizes he’s facing the most extraordinary child in the
world and takes her to live with him in a palace surrounded by gardens. He
gives her French dolls and real ponies as big as a big dog, and allows her to
wear frilly dresses inside the house. From that day, Georgina appears in all
the papers and newsreels. She always travels in a crystal carriage. People
greet her with deep bows.
‘She looks like a bear in the zoo,’ she hears someone say behind her.
Then she wants to die. She, who at that very moment is smiling to her
subjects from the window of her carriage, appears to others a rather stupid
girl smiling to herself as she turns and turns in the empty patio. From that
day on, her mother and her grandmother entertain visitors with stories of
how Georgina walks back and forth across the patio like a bear in its cage.
When they find her swirling round and round, they call her to ask why she
won’t play like the other six-year-old girls. I do play, Georgina says to
herself, I play in my head. And then one day she’s avenged by the President
of the Republic, who orders that her entire family be sent to the dungeon.
How wonderful I was! Georgina feels her eyes glisten. She’s thirteen and
the memory enthrals her. She takes one small dance step. The window of
her room is open, which makes her behave in a very particular way. She
lives on the ground floor, and she is certain that some day a handsome
young man will stop without her noticing him. He will fall madly in love
with the enigmatic girl who does such beautiful things when she is alone.
From the corner of her eye she looks towards the window and something
happens: a small bird has just landed on the windowsill. Intermittently it
preens its feathers, examines with apparent interest the interior of the room
and chirps briefly. He likes me, Georgina thinks. She feels observed; this
troubles and delights her. She places her hands on her chest and casts a
tragic look on the bird: ‘What has brought you here?’ she asks it. ‘Go away.
Are you not aware that my husband has found us out?’ The bird flies away
in fright. How very funny. Georgina jumps up and hugs herself for joy.
‘How wonderful I am!’ she says. ‘How wonderful I’ll always be!’ Today is
a very important day for her: about three hours ago, she went to the
stationery store and bought an exercise book with red covers. She’ll keep a
diary, like Maria Bashkirtseff, because there’s something that concerns her.
One day she’ll appear in a book such as the Wonderful Lives of Famous
Boys and Girls. How will the author know the extraordinary things that
happened to her unless she writes everything down very carefully? You see,
my child, here are the lives of all the children in the world who one day
became famous: this is Pascal, the young enlightened genius, and this is
Bidder, the marvellous little mathematician, and this is Metastasio, the
infant troubadour of Rome, and this is Georgina Requeni, the girl who . . .
The world collapses around her. She is already almost fourteen years old,
and she still doesn’t know what she’s going to be. Her father has promised
her that when she turns fifteen she’ll be able to take classes of Elocution
and Dramatic Art with the teacher who lives on Santander Street, but that is
a long time away. Sometimes she remembers that at the age of seven
Mozart dazzled a prince, then she feels like ending it all and throwing
herself out of a window. But she lives on the ground floor, she’s out of her
mind, she’ll be famous and the world will love her. She looks at herself in
the mirror. And I will also be very beautiful. She lifts her hair, lets it fall
over one eye, half-lowers her eyelids, sees a pimple on her chin and
wrinkles her nose, oh well, she’ll be very beautiful and have lovers,
thousands of lovers strewn at her feet. How they’ll suffer because of her!
No, dear Sir, don’t do it! Don’t kill yourself for my sake! The man kills
himself; she is dancing in front of the mirror. She doesn’t know what is
happening to her; what she does know is that no one, ever, was as happy as
this. She goes up to her image and gives it a kiss. This makes her laugh out
loud. She runs to the window and looks up at the sky. ‘God is blue,’ she
whispers. The November air, the smell of leaves, of tides; she wants to hug
someone very hard and tell him all about her. No, there’ll be no need to
talk; he’ll look her in the eyes and know everything, the tragedies she’s
been through, her fears, the incredible things she still must do. My God, life
is so wonderful. Then she makes up her mind: today is the day to begin. It’s
been almost a year since she bought the exercise book. Since she bought it,
she’s been waiting for the perfect moment; she believes that every event
should be made up of perfect moments. She goes to the night table, opens
the small drawer and takes out the exercise book with the red covers. She
sits at her desk, and with coloured crayons, she writes on the first page: The
Diary of Georgina Requeni. Then she turns the page, takes her fountain pen
and writes, ‘I’m fourteen years old. No one can know the feelings in my
heart. My heart is wild, and on this day, the whole world is like my heart.
Yes! I feel as if my life is going to be wonderful. I feel.’ She stops because
she doesn’t know how to carry on. She reads what she has written, and she
approves.
Now she reads it again as if she were another fourteen-year-old girl
reading the words she has written. The other girl can’t believe that, at her
same age, someone wrote such beautiful lines and cries over the diary
which has become a book with Georgina’s picture on the cover. The whole
world is crying. She has died. Hidden among piles of paper, they have
found the exercise book with the red covers, the confession of so many
thwarted ideals. It doesn’t seem possible that someone like her should die at
the dawn of so much promise, she who could have soared so high. Georgina
blows her nose, she’s such a fool. She crosses out the last ‘I feel’ and writes
‘I wish.’ ‘I wish to soar very, very high.’
Amazing. She rereads the last sentence, she is truly impressed. For the
past two hours she has been trying to get started on what is for her one of
the most terrifying jobs in the world: sorting out her papers. She is eighteen
and says that sorting out your drawers is like cleaning out your soul. Her
soul is full of astounding junk, tatters of stories, but she only needs to
rescue whatever is concerned with the relentless destiny she has chosen for
herself. She hates being sentimental; she knows that the chosen ones are
cold and strong; she has read a lot. The exercise book with the red covers is
a real find. She has opened it on the first page and has felt that God is
speaking in her ear. The wish to soar very high, amazing; only those who’ve
been predestined can write a sentence like that at the age of fourteen. For an
instant she can imagine the exercise book, under a glass cover, in the
Museum of the Theatre Arts. She turns the pages but nothing. Here, on the
very first page, the diary ends. A few lines of verse copied out, the drawing
of a large heart with her name and another name pierced by an arrow, some
notes taken in class, and no more. How unsettled one was at fourteen, she
thinks with adult insight. She smiles. She has remembered the absurd idea
she had that day when she thought of starting the diary. Heroic and
premature deaths! At eighteen, she has understood that true heroics lie in
the act of living. She rolls up the exercise book and throws it into the
garbage. It is like a signal. With unaccustomed energy, she spills out the
contents of drawers, throws papers away and tears faded photos of once
fashionable stars off the wall. She sighs with relief: now everything is in
order. Now she can, at last, do what she has been promising herself she will
do all afternoon. She takes a huge poster with the portrait of Sarah
Bernhardt and fixes it to the wall with four thumbtacks. The two women
stare at each other. Now Georgina knows what she wants.
‘You want me,’ he says. ‘It’s as simple as that.’
They are leaning against the riverside wall, waiting for the sun to come
up. Georgina sighs with resignation and somewhat loudly, because she’s
just realized that Manuel has not understood a single word of what she has
been saying. Very carefully she begins to smooth out a green and golden
candy wrapper. ‘No,’ she says. Yes, of course she wants him, she loves him,
but it’s something else. Theatre, of course. Something else.
‘Why something else?’ Manuel asks, but a ship’s foghorn is heard in the
distance.
Georgina has finished smoothing out the wrapper and now rolls it around
her index finger. He looks at her hands.
‘What will you do?’ he asks.
Her face brightens.
‘Well,’ she replies, ‘it’s all a bit complicated, I don’t know. I could just
tell you that I’m going to be a great actress, but it’s something more, I don’t
know how to explain it.’
‘No,’ he shakes his head. ‘With the candy wrapper. I mean what are you
going to do with the candy wrapper?’
 ‘Ah,’ she stares at her finger. ‘A little cup. Daddy always used to make
one for me. You twist the paper here, then you take out your finger and
there: see?’
Manuel pushes the hair away from her face.
‘Georgina,’ he says. ‘Why something else?’
She lifts her eyebrows with a look of surprise. ‘Theatre, I mean. Why
does it have to be something else?’
She laughs and points a finger at him.
‘He’s jealous,’ she says in a singsong. ‘Manuel is jealous.’ She looks at
him in the face and becomes serious. ‘Not at all, you fool. It is the same
thing. Love, theatre and . . . I don’t know how to explain, it’s as if I were
fated. I mean, as if with everything I do, I’m supposed to rise higher and
higher . . . Who knows? To be in decline must be something terrible.
Haven’t you ever thought about that? I’m always thinking about these
things, it’s awful.’
Manuel whistles admiringly.
‘It’s true,’ says Georgina. ‘The problem is that you don’t take me
seriously, but that’s how it is. What’s more, long before I turn into one of
those old actresses who go on living God-knows-why—’ She stops and
looks at him with determination. ‘I’ll kill myself,’ she says.
Manuel puts his palms together and mimics a jump into the river.
‘Splash,’ he says.
No, no, Georgina shakes her head desperately. Not in the river, what a
philistine, he doesn’t understand a thing. She’s talking to him about a
luminous ascent towards the loftiest heights, she means putting an end to
all, cleanly, at the very top, and he comes out with something as unaesthetic
as drowning oneself. Virginia Woolf, of course, but does he imagine her a
few moments before the end, thrashing about and swallowing water and
probably retching? And then what? A bloated half-rotten corpse drying out
on a slab in the morgue. Lovely posthumous image. No, never, nothing like
that. A beautiful death, Georgina means. Like her life.
He has watched her as she speaks. Lightly, he touches the tip of her nose.
‘Do me a favour,’ he says. ‘Don’t ever kill yourself.’
They can’t bear persistence, she thinks from high above a pedestal.
‘But yes, you fool. Don’t you realize?’ she says. ‘They must remember
me beautiful. Beautiful for ever and ever.’
 As soon as the words are out, she has the disagreeable impression of
having said too much. She glares at Manuel and then covers her face with
her hands.
‘No, not now, what an idiot you are,’ she says. ‘At six in the morning
anyone looks awful,’ as she uncovers her face and places her hands on her
hips, aggressively. ‘Anyway, I’m twenty, right? I still have my whole life to
get what I want.’
‘Get what?’ he asks.
‘Everything.’
Manuel arches his eyebrows. He sits on the wall. Georgina stands as if
waiting for something, and then finally she sits down as well. They sit with
their legs dangling towards the river, the sun is about to rise and all is well.
‘See, that’s what I was telling you,’ Georgina says. ‘We come into the
world with these things, who knows why. Strange, isn’t it? Imagine: I was
only fourteen and already I wrote it down on the very first page of my
diary.’
Manuel slaps his forehead with a wide open palm.
‘No!’ he says. ‘Don’t tell me that you also keep a diary!’
Georgina is about to explain something to him. She shrugs.
‘Of course,’ she says.
‘Of course?’ he laughs. ‘Women are out of this world. Okay, tell me.’
‘Tell you what? What have women to do with this?’
‘What you write in your diary, all that stuff. Let’s see if I can finally get
to understand you.’
Georgina pulls a face as if she’s bothered: curiosity seems to her an
unworthy and irritating sentiment. She can’t imagine Ibsen worrying about
what people write in their diaries.
‘Well . . . I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It makes no sense if you tell it.’
‘Tell what?’
Georgina turns around, her feet on the wall. The sun has started to come
out, and the glimmer hurts her eyes. She crumples the green and golden
cup, makes it into a ball and throws it into the water. Then she regrets
having done it: Manuel mustn’t believe that something has put her in a bad
mood. It’s a good thing the sun is coming out: they’ve been on the riverside
for an hour now waiting for it to rise. And it does. The sky is blue, red and
yellow. That’s good.
She turns and sits as before.
 ‘I don’t know where to start,’ she says. ‘Because it turned out to be a
very long diary. I would write in it every day . . . And there was always
something to write about. I was a terrific adolescent, you know. I mean it,
don’t laugh. I mean the theatre and all that. I was always talking about the
theatre, and about the actress I was going to become. About my idols and
about how I was going to work harder and harder until I’d be even greater
than all my idols . . . Because unless you reach the highest peaks, life has no
sense at all . . . I would also write about that, of course. And my thoughts
about life, about fate . . . I don’t know . . . that one’s fate isn’t written down
anywhere. I mean, there’s no star carrying a sign saying “Georgina Requeni
Will Be The Greatest.” That’s it, you make up your own fate; that’s the
thing. See my hand? Look! Even the lines of your hand change. You change
them, see? Really, a palmreader explained it to me once . . . So, well, that’s
what I wrote about. I felt, I don’t know—’ She stops and looks at him.
‘Happy now?’ she asks.
He is about to speak. She anticipates what he is about to ask.
‘It was a beautiful diary,’ she says. Then, in a mysterious tone, she adds,
‘The ceremony was really impressive.’
‘Ceremony?’ he asks. ‘What ceremony?’
His expression is very funny. Georgina is about to laugh.
‘The ceremony,’ she says. ‘Death. Everything must have its ceremony.’
She laughs like someone who has just remembered something hilarious.
‘You know what I did when I was eighteen?’ she asks.
He shakes his head.
‘I wrote the last page,’ Georgina is glowing. ‘A fabulous page, you
should have seen. In my opinion, the best page in the entire diary, I mean it
. . . The days of small gestures were over; one couldn’t help it. Now was the
beginning of the real struggle . . . I didn’t cry or anything like that. I put the
diary on a blue tray. A tray with little angels painted on it, I’ll show it to
you when you come to the house. I lit a match and pfff. It became a blazing
bonfire. I stared at it for as long as it took, and then the ashes . . . I bet you
can’t guess? I threw them to the wind. Don’t laugh . . . Just a game, I know.
But wasn’t it a beautiful ending?’
Manuel looks at her and says nothing. She’s in despair because she can’t
figure out whether he’s truly moved (and by what) or whether he’s making
fun of her.
 ‘I mean it,’ she says. ‘Everything must end in the same way it lived.
What else could I have done? Thrown it into the garbage?’
Imposter, she thinks. A Hedda Gabler who shoots herself then throws
kisses around is an imposter. Doesn’t anyone notice? No one notices. The
applause increases, followed by an ovation. Georgina must admit that,
speaking in general terms, the public is stupid: they call out the name of the
star because they are fans, not because they understand anything about the
theatre. The young woman on the proscenium throws one last kiss with an
ample movement of the arm. Georgina, back in the wings with the rest of
the cast, sees only her back but imagines her starlet’s smile. She looks at the
woman’s nape with scorn. Now Doctor Tesman and Councillor Brack
advance and stand on both sides of Hedda Gabler. A new wave of applause;
the two actors bow their heads slightly. Now: this is the moment when they
are all meant to come forward. What for? Hear them clap, no need to take a
bow. The applause becomes weaker. What do they expect? A miracle?
Georgina would have liked to know how Sarah Bernhardt herself would
have managed to make something decent out of the role of Berta. Yes,
Madam. It’s morning already, Madam. Councillor Brack is here to see you,
Madam. No, she can’t take it any longer. Today she’ll give it all up. She
thinks about it hard, as hard as a tombstone, and the clearness of her
decision makes her feel better. She’s certain that only a privileged spirit is
able to be as inflexible as she is: the spirit of a great artist. She lifts her eyes
and smiles haughtily at the public. Dear Lord, she thinks. Grant them a
minute of greatness to allow them to understand this smile. The curtain falls
for the last time. Georgina heads for the dressing-rooms. She feels that one
day, this too will be part of her history. Alone and unknown at the age of
twenty-four, making her way through a throng of people who embrace and
congratulate one another and ignore her, crossing dark corridors without
paying attention to anything, without greeting anyone, without thinking
about anything except—
‘Oh no, it never concerned me,’ she’d smile condescendingly. With
exquisite good manners, she’d overlook the fact that several young men, out
of sheer admiration, have brought up the subject of her nebulous
beginnings.
‘But it was something outrageous. A talent like yours . . . Wasted on
unbearable minor roles. How were you able to put up with it? Did the
thought of giving it all up ever cross your mind?’
 ‘Never,’ she’d answer indignantly. ‘Do you think that with displays of
false pride I’d have become who I am? Learn the lesson well, my children:
nothing, nothing at all is ever achieved without struggle. One must start
from the bottom, bear every blow and never falter.’
How true! she thinks, reaching the end of the corridor. She has at last
understood the meaning of this moment, the greatness locked in all those
anonymous years. She opens the door to her dressing-room. The other two
women have taken off their costumes. The last performance of the Three-
Penny Opera is over. In their slips, the two women, both perched on the
only chair in the room, are smoking cigarettes. Georgina sees them, steps
back and closes the door.
‘Come in,’ she hears. ‘If we try, all three of us can fit.’
Inside the room, they laugh.
‘What can you do,’ she hears. ‘The inconvenience of not being a star.’
Georgina makes a grimace of distaste.
‘Let her be,’ she hears. ‘That’s how she is.’
‘How?’ Georgina cries. ‘How am I?’
Santiago, his back towards her, lying by her side in the bed, isn’t startled.
In the seven years he has known her, he has learnt not to be bothered by her
sudden questions.
‘You’re Georgina,’ he says simply.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘But. I don’t know. I don’t know how to explain.’
She remains silent for a moment. Then she says, ‘Why are you here, with
me?’
He laughs half-heartedly.
‘Don’t you think it’s a bit late in the day to ask me that?’
‘You don’t understand,’ Georgina says. ‘In the early days . . . Don’t you
see? In the early days it was different. It was . . . I don’t know. There was a
time when everything was crazy, vertiginous. Each time we were together it
was something new, something unpredictable. The joy of sin, remember?
As if we had things to teach, as if. It was so lovely, Santiago. So lovely.
Wasn’t it? It was. Wasn’t it? It was as I just said, yes? Santiago? Was it?’
He’s silent. He looks up at the ceiling and smokes. He seems eternally
tired. Or sad.
Georgina speaks again. Her voice is anxious and afraid.
‘Was it like that? Tell me, Santiago. Was it?’
Santiago touches her hair.
 ‘Yes, Georgina, yes,’ he says.
‘I too, you know,’ Georgina says. ‘I too always felt that way and would
think, I don’t know, would think, please don’t laugh, that every day I’d be
more beautiful and more, I don’t know, and then. Of course, it’s so absurd if
you say it yourself, but that’s how it is, understand? I thought one day we’d
die of too much love.’
Santiago laughs, but it is not a happy laugh.
‘Don’t laugh. As with all the rest, you know. But I don’t. Now . . . Of
course, nothing can be repeated. Isn’t there . . . ? Isn’t there anything,
Santiago? How am I?’
‘It’s okay, Georgina. It’s okay. Be quiet.’
‘No, no. It’s awful. As if I were denying myself, don’t you see? Sinking.
You know what I should do now if I were the way I imagined myself? You
know what? I should say, Goodbye Santiago, goodbye my love, it was all
very beautiful but it’s all over now for Georgina. And put an end to it all.’
The silence that follows frightens her. She doesn’t dare move. At last, he
puts his hand on her waist. She relaxes, it’s fine. Now everything will be the
way it was. And it will be beautiful. Won’t it be beautiful? Words are such
nonsense. She feels a great calm. This is not being vulnerable, no, it’s all
right, everything is all right like this.
He still has his hand on Georgina’s waist but makes no movement, says
nothing. This troubles her. She sighs and curls up against Santiago,
suddenly tender and fragile. She laughs.
‘I’m a fool,’ she says. ‘Words are so foolish, you know. Don’t ever
believe what I say, Santiago. Never believe anything I say.’
He lifts his hand away. Then, with so little violence that the change of
position seems rather a thought than an act, he draws away from Georgina.
‘No,’ Georgina says. ‘Why? Everything’s okay, silly. Everything will
always be okay.’
Santiago is barely smiling. Georgina speaks again: he must believe her
when she says it’s all a lie.
‘That’s it,’ he says. ‘That’s exactly it. You’ve got to understand.’
Before leaving, he touches her face. Georgina sees him leave, without
making sense of what is happening.
‘Go!’ she shouts. ‘I never want to see you again, you heartless man!’
Then the door slams shut. The part is over.
 Another of the extras, a rather fat man with a stupid face, stares at her
inquisitively.
‘Why did you make that grimace?’ he asks.
‘Grimace?’ Georgina looks at him with studied indifference. ‘When?’
‘Just now,’ the man says. ‘As you closed the door.’
‘It wasn’t a grimace,’ Georgina says, reflecting that the tone of her voice
had been far more violent than what the scene called for. ‘I was laughing.’
‘Ah.’
The man yawns. He plays with the signet ring on his finger.
Georgina waits a few seconds, impatient and uncomfortable not to be
asked anything.
‘Because once, years ago,’ she laughs inexplicably, ‘What madness. I
kicked a man out, with more or less the same gesture.’
A model in a leotard crosses the studio.
The man follows her with his eyes.
‘Yes, of course,’ he says.
‘I loved him, you know.’ Georgina shrugs. ‘And all the same, I kicked
him out.’
The woman in the leotard turns. She balances a tin of wax in her hand.
The man watches her, amused.
‘Really,’ he says.
‘No,’ Georgina says. ‘No need to be surprised. It was necessary.’
Now the woman in the leotard is half hidden by a gigantic pudding made
out of cardboard. The man stares down at his shoes. Georgina follows his
stare. They’re horrible shoes, an indefinite mustard colour. She wonders
what would make a human being choose such ugly shoes.
‘You can’t understand, can you?’ she asks. ‘Of course you can’t
understand. Life in the theatre, you know.’ She looks up at the man
guardedly. ‘It demands many sacrifices.’
The man chuckles softly.
‘That’s rich,’ he says. ‘People like us.’ He looks at the front of his shirt.
He chuckles again. ‘That’s really rich.’
Georgina looks at her nails.
‘How could an idiot understand,’ she says.
The man does nothing in particular. He looks around the studio at the TV
cameras, the sets. Then he looks at Georgina.
‘How old are you?’ he asks.
 Georgina lifts her head, as if in defiance.
‘Thirty-four,’ she replies.
Now the man stares at her from head to foot.
‘You’re still young,’ he says.
A blow. As if the meaning of the words were exactly the opposite. I
shouldn’t mix with people like that. Georgina is about to explain something,
but the man is no longer there. She shrugs and goes out into the street. It’s a
cold, bright night. Momentarily, she feels relieved. I can’t bear this life.
She’s startled. No: it’s just the noise. I was never able to bear it. She lifts
her head haughtily. Nothing so distant from art as all this stupid cackling,
yes sir. She doesn’t realize how fast she’s walking. A man with a little
feather in his hat says something to her that she doesn’t quite understand.
She feels a sweet sensation of pleasure. I’m still young, she thinks. But as
soon as she has the thought, she’s overcome by uneasiness. Someone once
said these words to her. When? Oh well, better not think about it. The man
in the hat wasn’t old. Everything’s fine once again, isn’t it? Of course it is.
After all, no one ever said it was going to be easy. What matters is carrying
on: reaching the end without stopping. One day, they’ll know the whole
truth. The Memoirs of. Of course it was difficult, but one had to keep
climbing. Higher, understand? Higher and higher each time. So that life
itself becomes one luminous ascent. That’s something you carry within, do
you hear? It’s as if a light had been lit somewhere inside.
Georgina laughs, ecstatic. It’s been a while since she’s felt so joyful. The
young men laugh with her. One of them fills her glass again; this promises
to be a night of great rejoicing. Guitar music, young poets, meat rolls and
gallons of wine. The noise doesn’t allow one to listen very carefully, can
you hear? As if one were God and forced to do everything. The hand, look,
even the lines of the hand can be changed. Through sheer will. Will to be
beautiful, will to be great. Because nothing is written, don’t you realise,
destiny isn’t written on a star, and where, where does it say that Georgina
Requeni will be a great actress, will be beautiful?
Joy! Joy! There’s much laughter here, many young voices. Another
samba, they say. I love you. More wine. Have you noticed? Have you
noticed there’s always an old bag getting pissed at these parties? But
Georgina can’t make out the voices very clearly and goes on laughing,
drinking wine, talking. Because there’s no Santiago, there’s no one to tell
her to shut up, to tell her everything’s fine, to tell her she’s fumbling over
the words and is about to fall down. ‘Never fall, never ever fall,’ she says.
Because a woman grown old is a monster. And before reaching that stage,
Georgina will kill herself.
Now they’re no longer laughing. ‘It’s pathetic,’ they’re saying. And also
that life is cruel.
And Georgina Requeni, who is still holding her hand in front of her and
has just shouted something, even though she can’t remember what, looks
around, terrified, as if her own cry had woken her and sees, as one sees the
end of a dream, that all the faces are strange and are staring at her. And that
the hand stretched out in front of her is the hand of an old woman.
Then she says ‘Goodnight,’ and leaves.
She walks away unsteadily. Every so often she holds on to the sides of
houses so as not to fall down. Then the houses come to an end, but all the
same she crosses Libertador, heading towards the riverside. Wavering but
on her own two feet, she reaches the wall. She thinks that at six o’clock in
the morning, the colour of the river is somewhat depressing. They were
laughing. Now Georgina can remember it distinctly. She looks down,
almost tenderly. Tomorrow they’ll read about it in the papers. It’s so easy:
all you need is a little push and then allow the body to fall all on its own,
through its own weight. Splash. The word comes unbidden to her head, like
a small explosion. She brushes the hair away from her face. Santiago had
joined his palms over his breast and was clowning around. Georgina leans
over the wall and vomits into the river. Now she feels better. The important
thing is to live.
In front of her, the sky is turning red. She reckons that in just a few
minutes the sun will come out. It’s going to be a beautiful morning.
EARLY BEGINNINGS OR ARS POETICA

In the beginning (but not in the beginning of the beginning) a horse is going
up in the lift. I know he is brown, but what I don’t know is how he got there
or what he is going to do when the lift comes to a stop. As far as that is
concerned, the horse is quite different from the lion. And not only because
the lion climbs the stairs in a reasonable manner, but also because, above
all, the appearance of the lion has a logical explanation. I say to myself:
there are lions in Africa. I say to myself: lions walk. I ask myself: if they
walk, why don’t they ever leave Africa? I answer myself: because lions
don’t have a particular destination in mind; sometimes they walk this way
and sometimes that, and therefore, just going and coming, they never leave
Africa. But that deduction doesn’t deceive me of course. Even if they don’t
have a particular destination, at least one of the lions, unintentionally, might
walk always in the same direction. He might walk by day, sleep by night,
and in the morning, not aware of what he’s doing, he might walk again in
the same direction, then sleep again by night, and in the morning, not aware
of what he’s doing . . . I say to myself: Africa ends somewhere, and a lion
walking always in the same direction will one day walk straight out of
Africa and into another country. I say to myself: Argentina is another
country, therefore that lion might come to Argentina. If he came at night, no
one would see him because at night there are no people out in the street. He
would climb the stairs up to my apartment, break the door without making a
sound (lions break doors without making a sound because their skin is so
thick and smooth), cross the hallway and sit down behind the dining room
table.
I’m in bed; I know he is there, waiting; my blood throbs inside my head.
It’s very unsettling to know that there is a lion in the dining room and that
he hasn’t stirred. I get up. I leave my room and cross the dining room: on
this side of the table, not on the lion’s side. Before going into the kitchen I
stop for a moment, turning my back on him. The lion doesn’t jump on me,
but that doesn’t mean anything; he might jump when I come back. I go into
the kitchen and drink a glass of water. I come out again, without stopping.
This time the lion doesn’t jump either, but that doesn’t mean anything. I go
to bed and wait warily. The lion isn’t moving, but I know he’s also waiting.
I get up and go again into the kitchen. It is almost morning. On my way
back, I glance sideways at the door. It hasn’t been broken. But therein lies
the real danger. The lion is still on his way; he will arrive tonight. As long
as he isn’t here, one lion will be like a thousand lions waiting for me, night
after night, behind the dining room table.
In spite of all this, the lion isn’t as bad as the horse. I know all about the
lion: how he came, what he is thinking every time I go for a drink of water;
I know that he knows why he doesn’t jump every time he doesn’t jump, that
one night, when I decide to meet him face to face, all I’ll have to do is walk
into the dining room on that other side of the table. About the horse, on the
other hand, I know nothing. He also arrives at night, but I don’t understand
why he has gone into the lift, nor how he manages to operate the sliding
doors, nor how he presses the buttons. The horse has no history: all he does
is go up in the lift. He counts the floors: first, second, third, fourth. The lift
stops. My heart freezes as I wait. I know the end will be horrible, but I don’t
know how it will happen. And this is the beginning. Horror of the
unexplainable, or the cult of Descartes, is the beginning.

. . .

But it’s not the beginning of the beginning. It is the end of the beginning.
The time has come when the little people inside the radio are soon to die,
and God will also die, sitting cross-legged on top of the Heavens with his
long mane and a gaucho’s poncho. Because throughout the whole
beginning, the world was made so that God and the dead could sit and walk
on top of the Heavens; that is to say, the Universe is a hollow sphere cut by
a horizontal plane; moving on that plane are we, the living, and this is
called the Earth. From the Earth, looking upwards, you can see the inner
surface of the upper hemisphere, and that is called the Heavens. Or the floor
of the Heavens as seen from below. If you go through it, you can see the
real floor of the Heavens, Heaven itself, on which the good dead walk and
where God is sitting; to us, this seems difficult, because the floor of the
Heavens is rounded, but the dead can hold themselves upright on a Heaven
like that, and so can God, because He’s God. Underneath our floor, inside
the lower hemisphere, is the burning Hell, where little red devils float
around together with the evil dead.
 Now, before the end of the spherical universe, and before the lions and
the horse, in the very heart of the beginning, are four cups of chocolate on a
yellow plastic tablecloth. I’m four years old, and it’s my birthday. But there
are no guests, no cake with candles on it, no presents. The three of them are
there, of course, sitting around the table; but in the beginning they don’t
count, because the three of them have always been there, and a birthday
hasn’t. I am alone in front of four cups of chocolate and a yellow plastic
tablecloth. I’m moved to tears. This must be what it’s like to be poor, and
I’m supposed to feel terribly sad. The roof of the kitchen is made out of
straw and the walls are of mud and my body is covered in rags; wind and
snow seep through the cracks of my poor hut. I’m dying of cold and hunger
while, in the palace, the spoilt little princess celebrates her fourth birthday
with a ball: coaches at the door, dolls with real hair and a monkey that
dances for the princess alone. I drink my chocolate. I weep inside my cup.
And this really is the beginning. The trick of stories—the trick of the power
of the imagination—lies in the beginning.

. . .

But this isn’t the beginning of the beginning either. It is an awareness of the
beginning. It is the beginning of an awareness of the beginning. Beyond this
awareness, rising from behind strange faces like flashing images are a straw
chair on a tiled courtyard, a wrinkled great-grandmother with a black scarf
around her head, a madman climbing into a streetcar with a stick and, in the
true beginning, a white hood. The white hood is mine. Or it was mine, I
don’t know, I don’t understand what’s happening, she has it on her head
now. She arrived this morning and ever since she arrived everyone is
fawning over her. I’ve been told she’s my little cousin, but she doesn’t look
like my cousins because she isn’t bigger than I am. She doesn’t call me her
baby, and she doesn’t lift me up in her arms. But they lift her up in their
arms, all the time, because she hasn’t yet learnt how to walk, like the little
babies in the park. I hate her. It’s night-time already. They say she’s going
to leave, and they say it’s cold out there. I run through the rooms. I throw
myself against the legs of the grownups. I roll around on a mattress. I don’t
care if they scream at me, I’m happy; she’s leaving. I look at her and it’s
there. She has my hood on. They say it looks big on her; they say she looks
like a little old lady; they laugh. I’ll sink her eyes in, like with a doll; I’ll
bite her nose off; I’ll tear my hood away from her. Then it happens.
Someone looks at me and says: ‘Won’t you lend your little cousin your
hood?’ I don’t know what ‘lend’ means; I know I want to tear her up into
small bits. I look at them. All eyes are fixed on me. Then I understand: all I
need is a gesture, one single gesture, and the kingdom will be mine once
again. They are waiting. They are laughing. I smile at them.
‘Yes,’ I say.
They laugh louder. They pinch my cheek and tell me I’m a darling. I’ve
won. It’s the beginning.
Further back, there is nothing. I look carefully for a taste of clementine,
for my father’s voice, for a smell of lip ointment. Something clean that will
change my beginning. I want a whitewashed beginning for my story. It is
useless. Further back, there is nothing. That hood, my first infamy, is for
ever the beginning of the beginning.
THE MUSIC OF SUNDAYS
To Gonzalo Imas

There was a moment in the afternoon—usually around four o’clock,

perhaps five o’clock in the summer—when the old man would lean against
the window, his head a little to one side, his hand pressed against the other
ear, and say in a mournful voice: ‘what a shame about the music.’ By then
we might have been talking for hours about the tangos of Magaldi or Charlo
and all to please him because (as Aunt Lucrecia once said) there’s no point
coming to see him with a face like a wet weekend—we can make a little
sacrifice to see him happy. In fact this little sacrifice was bigger than it
seemed because if he was to enjoy his football as God intended (in his
words), apparently the old man needed to feel a crowd around him. That
meant we all had to stay glued to our seats until midnight because, as he put
it, he wasn’t going to sit down and watch even the league table with the
other residents in the Home, they were a bunch of old farts, and once a
Basque had got so excited about a Chilean goal that he took a great leap
backwards, fell on his neck, and now he’s pushing up daisies. So on Sunday
nights we settled down in front of the television—Mom, Dad and me, Aunt
Lucrecia, Uncle Antonito and even the twins—all grouped around the old
man, who sported a knotted handkerchief on his head for the occasion and,
in the absence of chuenga, that home-made gum you could buy at 1940s
football matches, worked his jaws on a piece of old tire. It was even worse
when Boca was playing: then it was the blue and gold shirt he stuffed in his
mouth and not even Uncle Antonito, who’s a devoted follower of River,
dared crack a joke; the one time he ventured that somebody’s goal had been
offside, the old man jumped on him with such ferocity that if the twins
hadn’t stepped in—the old man dotes on them, never mind that they wear
little hooped earrings and hair down to the waist—Uncle Antonito might
have gone to join that codger who cheered the Chilean goal.
In short, other than an inadequate musical accompaniment, the old man
really had nothing to complain about. So whenever he started harping on
this theme about the music all we did was tell each other he had a screw
loose and think no more of it. Until one afternoon Uncle Antonito, who was
sick of hearing about the tangos of Corsini—and especially sick of the old
man greeting him with the chant You should see our goalie. What a star!—
which is how Boca fans celebrated their legendary goalkeeper in the 1920s
—lost his patience and as soon as he heard ‘what a shame about the music’
he said ‘What is this music you keep bleating about, Dad? Because the only
music I ever hear is you yattering on all the blessed day.’ But the old man
stopped him there; he raised his hand in a signal to be quiet and said loftily:
‘I’m not talking about the music I hear, Antonito, I’m talking about the
music that’s missing.’
I think if it had been left to the rest of us, the story would have ended
there and then. I, for one, confess that I had absolutely no interest in
ascertaining what glorious music it was that the old man found lacking in
his life. I was beginning to tire of his whims; it isn’t exactly fun for a girl of
my age to sit with her grandfather until midnight, screaming like a banshee
every time someone scores a goal and all for the sake of making him feel
loved. Uncle Antonito put it bluntly: If his problem is that he can’t find
some music or other, let him go and look for it up his sister’s fanny. But the
twins aren’t the sort to give up so easily. They kept badgering the old man
until finally he said: Well what music do you think I mean, boys? The
music of Sundays.
Later they told me how they had coaxed out of him what he meant by the
music of Sundays, something that had once been everywhere—or so he told
them—and that you would have heard as soon as you woke up. They said
he compared it to a communion or a symphony that ended only when night
fell and the last of the lorries returned. Which lorries? I asked the twins. But
I could scarcely make out their explanation with both of them laughing so
much as they tried to imitate lorries making music.
The following week they came up with an idea: for the old man’s
birthday, their gift would be the music of Sundays. All the people in their
building had already agreed to help: all we had to do was persuade my
grandfather that this year the celebration was going to be at the twins’ house
(they live in a kind of tenement block, in Paternal) and bring the food; they
would arrange everything else.
We protested, of course, but it’s hopeless with the twins.

. . .
So on the Sunday of the birthday party there we were with our platters:
Mom, Aunt Lucrecia, Uncle Antonito and me, waiting for Dad to arrive
with the old man. The twins had instructed Dad to bring him as late as
possible, and Dad agreed, but that turned out not to be such a good idea: the
old man arrived in a foul mood and didn’t say hello to anyone, merely
observing that even the old neighbourhoods were a disgrace these days. He
said that there was no communion any more, no harmony, and that
nowadays everyone was looking out for themselves. It wasn’t a promising
start and things went downhill from there. I spent lunch wondering why I
was wasting my whole Sunday in this tenement for the sake of pleasing
some miserable old fantasist. By the time coffee arrived I had made myself
a firm promise that this would be the last Sunday I sacrificed for the old
man (and in fact it was). Perhaps we were all thinking the same thing,
because suddenly we all fell silent, as though by design. And in the midst of
our silence the sound of a radio came from the window. It was transmitting,
rather louder than you’d usually expect, something that sounded to me like
the Avellaneda Derby. See, Grandad, we were right, said one of the twins;
you can still hear music in the barrios. The simulation had begun.
We looked at each other with resignation, because we already knew from
the twins what was coming: lots of radios, turned right up, broadcasting
different games from behind the windows, two or three lads in a doorway
singing that chant the old man loves, a bunch of kids audibly kicking a ball
around somewhere. And us, like a bunch of idiots, humouring him. That’s
not music, he said; you think one swallow makes a summer? Well I felt like
chucking it all in and leaving then, but the twins were undeterred, insisting
that no, the music of Sundays had not disappeared, that in the barrios you
could still hear it in any street. And then with apparent spontaneity, they
suggested we all go for a stroll to see if they were right. Showtime, Mom
whispered to me, and Uncle Antonito snorted angrily.
We filed outside in a kind of procession. The twins went at the head;
behind them was Dad, trying to soothe Uncle Antonito; then came Aunt
Lucrecia with my grandfather. As we were leaving, Mom grabbed my arm
and said: Wait, let’s stay back a bit because this is the most ridiculous
charade I’ve ever seen. So we went last of all.
We were walking very slowly, following the twins, and straightaway we
began to hear radios. One or two in front of us, another, at full volume
behind us, others, still faint, further off. From behind a thick wall, the
voices of children could be heard; they were saying pass to me, they were
saying come on, ball hog. Three boys sitting in a doorway started singing,
just as we passed them, You should see our goalie / What a Star! / He can
stop a penalty / Sitting on a chair / If the chair breaks / We give him
chocolate / Come on Boca Juniors / Down with River Plate! I stole a
sideways glance at the old man; for the first time that afternoon he appeared
to be smiling. Cheers came from one house; their echo seemed to expand in
the street. On the other side of the wall, the boys’ shouting grew louder and
more passionate as though this were no longer a performance but something
on which their lives depended. The afternoon quietened, the noise of buses
and cars fading away, while the voices on the radio got louder and more
numerous, they were saying Negro Palma intercepts, they were saying
Francéscoli moves forward, they were saying header from Gorosito,
Márcico’s waiting for the pass. I heard, or thought I heard, Rattin’s name,
but it couldn’t be—wasn’t he the one the old man said insulted the Queen
back in the 1960s? I heard Moreno takes it on the chest, kills it with his left
foot, turns and . . . Goooal! shouted the boys in the doorway, goooal! from
the windows on that block, and from a different building too, and another
further away. And some element of that shout lingered, as though caught in
the air, I saw it in Dad’s face, and in Aunt Lucrecia’s; even Uncle Antonito
seemed to sense it, something like a net being woven around us, gathering
everyone together in the benevolent Sunday afternoon. Mom squeezed my
arm, the twins looked at each other with amazement, the old man shook his
head as though to say that it was true after all, the music was there, the
music was still there. The doorway boys roared, the people in flats started
arguing from one balcony to another. Mamita, mamita, shouted a boy
coming towards us, and a startled mother looked up from the kitchen sink,
elegant dodges were celebrated on vacant lots and patches of grass, Oléee-
olé-olé-olá, they chorused in the stands, Look at us now, look at us now,
they shouted in the streets, Come on Argentina / we won’t stop cheering
you, they sang in the halls, the roof terraces, the courtyards. And from far
away came an unsteady noise, a murmur that kept growing louder,
emanating from the very edge of the afternoon, that hour when people start
listening to old dance songs and mulling, with contentment or bitterness,
over the events of the Sunday that is ending. We saw them approaching,
ever clearer in the hazy light of dusk, blowing their horns in time, a surging
crowd of people waving blue and white flags, blue and red flags, red and
white flags, gold and blue flags. Everybody in the neighbourhood came out
to welcome them to the party, and the whole city rang with noise, like one
unanimous, jubilant heart.
Afterwards would come the melancholy of Mondays, and there would be
stories of fear and death, and later we would close the old man’s eyes for
the last time. But we would always know that under the sky of a distant
Sunday, there had once been a music that had made us briefly happy and
peaceful.
A QUESTION OF DELICACY

Señora Brun had almost finished getting ready to visit her friend Silvina
when she noticed a little water coming from the spout in the bidet. She tried
firmly closing the taps, but that didn’t help. Then she opened them fully so
as to close them again with more force, but no matter how hard she
tightened them, hot water kept jetting out, now with enough pressure almost
to reach the rim. She tried opening and closing the hot water tap again, to
no avail: the flow was undiminished. Now the floor was wet and the
bathroom full of steam and she herself was soaked so that there was no
option but to turn off the hot water at the stopcock, change her clothes, and
set about finding a plumber.
Not easy. The one who usually came to her house had jobs lined up for
the next three days; the one the Neighbours’ Association used couldn’t
come until the following afternoon. Finally, a plumber whose number was
given her by the doorman in the building next along said he could be there
in half an hour.
Señora Brun went downstairs to ask the doorman if the plumber was
trustworthy.
‘I don’t know him, Señora,’ said the porter. ‘But these days you can’t
even trust your own mother.’
That was hardly reassuring but what choice did she have? She rang her
friend Silvina and explained the setback.
‘It’s probably nothing and I can come later on,’ she said.
As a precaution, she locked away her wallet and jewellery; she also rang
her husband to tell him about the incident and to let him know that an
unknown plumber was about to come to the house. Her husband would
know what to do if anything untoward should happen.
The plumber, a wiry man in his fifties, arrived half an hour later, as
promised. To Señora Brun’s consternation, he wasn’t alone, but
accompanied by a large youth with long curly hair gathered in a pony-tail.
‘Oh I didn’t realise you would need to bring an assistant,’ she said, very
pleasantly. ‘It’s such a simple little job . . .’
‘We haven’t seen it yet, Señora,’ the plumber said curtly.
 He seems rather short-fused, Señora Brun thought. She led both the men
to the bathroom and explained the problem.
‘Where’s the stopcock?’ asked the plumber.
‘Do you need to open it?’ The plumber’s expression was withering. ‘Of
course, of course, bear with me,’ she said quickly, ‘I’ll go and do it.’
She went to the kitchen and opened the stopcock. Water started gushing
out again. The assistant was turning something with a kind of spanner while
the plumber gave him instructions.
‘Oh dear, the whole bathroom’s getting wet,’ Señora Brun said.
‘It’s water, Señora,’ said the plumber. ‘It will dry.’
She sighed.
‘Do you think that . . . ?’
‘Now we need to turn off the stopcock,’ said the plumber.
She ran to the kitchen, turned it off and came back.
‘I’ll need a cloth,’ said the plumber.
She went to look for a cloth. When she came back with it the plumber
was working. ‘Dry this up a bit,’ he said to the assistant. To Señora Brun he
said, ‘It’s the washer in the hot water tap, but the transfer valve is broken,
too. Did you know that it was broken?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s always worked perfectly.’
‘Perfectly?’ said the plumber. ‘Could you switch from the central spout
to the side jets?’
‘No, not really.’
‘So it wasn’t working perfectly. It’s the transfer valve.’
‘And will it take long to fix?’
‘About half an hour. But I am going to need to turn the stopcock on and
off a few times. It’s probably better if you tell me where it is.’
The plumber’s brusque manner made her uncomfortable but she decided
that it would be better not to put up any opposition. You never know, with
these people, she thought that she would say to Silvina when she recounted
the incident later on, and she led him to the kitchen. She waited. The
plumber opened the stopcock, shouted something to his assistant, who
shouted a reply, then closed it again.
‘Shall I go with you to the bathroom?’ asked Señora Brun.
The plumber looked coldly at her.
‘I think I know the way,’ he said.
 She waited for him to walk away then went to the study from where she
could at least see the bathroom door. She felt like ringing her friend Silvina
to tell her how unpleasant the plumber was but finally decided that it would
be better not to call: with the door open the men were sure to overhear her
and if she closed it she wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on the bathroom
door. One doesn’t want to be on top of them, she pictured herself saying to
Silvina; I don’t like to keep monitoring people as they go about their work,
but this plumber is such an odd character, and bringing that assistant, too—
tell me, did the man really need to bring an assistant? You should have seen
how he insisted on being the one to control the stopcock—what was I
supposed to say? So now I’ve got him here, wandering around my house as
if he owned the place.
She went to the bathroom.
‘How’s it going?’ she asked cheerfully.
‘Well,’ said the plumber. ‘It’s nearly done.’
‘Oh, thank goodness. I’ll have time to visit my friend, then. She’s laid up
with a sprained ankle, poor thing.’
Neither the plumber nor his assistant had anything to say about that, so
Señora Brun waited a little before deciding to go to her bedroom to get her
clothes ready: she was going to change as soon as the plumber left so that
she could go straightaway to her friend Silvina’s house. She took the
earrings she was going to wear out of her jewellery box and it was at that
moment that she remembered the chain with the teardrop pendant: she had
left it in the bathroom cabinet as she always did before getting into the
shower. She tried not to panic: there was no reason why the plumber would
open the cabinet.
She went to the bathroom and paused in the doorway, not wanting to
appear anxious.
‘So, everything all right?’ she asked. ‘You’re nearly finished?’
‘That’s right, Señora,’ said the plumber.
‘And is it home for a rest after this?’
‘Not yet,’ said the assistant.
‘What a difficult job,’ said Señora Brun, ‘always some last-minute
emergency. Could you excuse me a moment? I need to get something.’
She stepped into the bathroom and opened the cabinet. A shiver of fear
ran through her body: the teardrop wasn’t there. Helplessly she glanced
around her to see if it had been left on the vanity top or on a shelf or sill.
Nothing. On the floor? Nothing.
‘Oh no,’ she cried involuntarily.
The plumber looked at her.
‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.
‘No nothing, I just suddenly remembered something,’ she said, and went
out of the bathroom.
Of course I am sure, she imagined herself telling her friend Silvina, I
always put it there before I have a shower (but just in case, she was
checking her jewellery box, the chest of drawers, the bedside table). I make
a point of putting it into the cabinet so that it can’t fall down the drain—
imagine how awful that would be, a three-carat diamond. No of course I
don’t wear it every day, do you think I’m mad, with all the insecurity there
is these days? I keep it for special occasions and only if I’m going out with
Ricardo. That’s precisely the reason I wear it at home, where there are no
risks. Otherwise when would I ever wear it? And I adore that teardrop.
She had looked in every conceivable place without finding it. What
should she do now? Obviously I can’t march up to him and say ‘you stole
my teardrop,’ she imagined herself saying to Silvina. It’s a question of
delicacy, you know, one can’t simply accuse someone of being a thief,
without any proof. Besides, his character is quite . . . What if he sees red
and thumps me on the head? Things could turn really nasty. And there are
two of them; I’m lying there unconscious and in five minutes they clean out
the house and no one will be any the wiser.
Señora Brun was standing in the middle of the hall, wondering how she
ought to proceed; generally she favoured a delicate approach, but she
couldn’t allow the plumber to walk off with her diamond just like that. Most
likely the man wasn’t actually a professional burglar: he had spotted it in
the cabinet, realised that it was valuable and pocketed it there and then. At
that moment Señora Brun began to see a clear course of action: she must
give the man an opportunity to return it. She let out a scream. The plumber
had suddenly appeared before her eyes.
‘Where are you going!’ she shouted at him.
The man stared at her with surprise.
‘To open the stopcock,’ he said.
‘Ah yes, of course, I’m sorry: my mind was somewhere else,’ said
Señora Brun.
 She walked towards the bathroom thinking over what she was going to
say. The boy with the curly hair was fiddling with the diverter tap.
‘Turn it on,’ she heard the plumber shout from the kitchen.
The boy turned the hot water tap. Water flowed out in a respectable
stream. He turned the diverter tap: water came up from underneath. He
turned it off: the flow of water stopped.
‘Isn’t that wonderful,’ said Señora Brun. She pretended to be looking for
something on the vanity top.
‘Everything in order?’ asked the plumber, who had just come into the
bathroom.
‘Yes,’ said the boy.
‘Oh my God!’ cried Señora Brun. The plumber and the boy both looked
at her. ‘I could swear I left it right here,’ she said, in an anguished tone; she
waited for them to ask her to elaborate, but no. ‘I’m so absent-minded, it’s
terrible. I don’t suppose either of you has seen a little pendant on the
countertop?’
Both of the men said that they had not.
‘Oh, I could shoot myself! It has enormous sentimental value for me. My
husband gave it to me when we got married. It had been his mother’s, poor
thing, she died so young.’
‘Could you have left it somewhere else, Señora?’ asked the plumber, a
little impatiently.
‘No, I’m sure I didn’t.’
‘Well, you can have a good look for it in a moment,’ said the plumber.
‘We’re finished here.’
The man’s got no shame, Señora Brun imagined telling her friend
Silvina, but she had already thought this all out; the important thing was to
give them an opportunity to return the necklace.
‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘it couldn’t have fallen down the plug in the basin,
could it?’
‘If you’re asking can it, then yes it could,’ he said. ‘It all depends on the
size.’
‘It was very small,’ Señora Brun said quickly. After all, if the man had it
in his possession he was hardly going to say ‘no, Señora, I happen to know
that it’s enormous.’
‘Well then it could,’ said the plumber.
 ‘Would you be so kind as to have a look? I can make you both a coffee in
the meantime.’
The plumber exchanged a glance with his assistant that did not escape
Señora Brun’s eye.
‘Something cold will do fine, Señora,’ said the plumber.
She went off to the kitchen. It was a shrewd move on her part to leave
them alone, she felt. The thing was to give them time. If they weren’t
professional thieves maybe they would feel remorseful and when she
returned with the drinks would say, Here it is; it was in the drain.
‘And?’ she said, returning with the drinks.
The man had taken the little grille out of the plughole in the basin.
‘I can’t see anything there,’ he said.
‘But what a disaster!’ said Señora Brun. ‘Please tell me it hasn’t
completely disappeared.’
The plumber looked at her with open hostility.
‘No Señora,’ he said. ‘Nothing can disappear completely in this world.’
‘So it must be somewhere,’ said Señora Brun.
‘Evidently,’ said the plumber; he looked at his watch.
‘Where?’ asked Señora Brun. ‘Where do you think it could be?’
‘Well if it was washed down the drain it could be in the trap.’
‘Oh, and couldn’t you have a look there?’
‘Look where?’ asked the plumber.
‘In the trap.’
The plumber heaved a sigh.
‘It can be done, Señora. But it means removing the whole basin unit.’
‘Never mind,’ said Señora Brun. ‘You can’t imagine how important that
little necklace is to me. I would be so grateful.’
‘Señora, let’s get this straight: you don’t have to be grateful to me. I’ll do
what you ask and then I’ll charge you for it. It’s my job.’
‘Of course, of course it’s your job. That goes without saying. I’ll keep out
of your way. Take out everything that you need to. It’ll probably turn up
when you’re least expecting it. I’ll be close by. If you need me, give me a
shout.’
And what else could I do, she imagined herself telling her friend Silvina,
once things had got to that point—I had to give them one last chance, didn’t
I? Besides, the man looked like he wanted to wring my neck . . . One never
knows how these people are going to react.
 She paced anxiously between the study and the living room, listening to
the banging. She was dying to go into the bathroom, but no: she had to give
them time to talk about it together, to reconsider: she had read somewhere
that even the worst criminals are capable of some feeling.
When the noise of banging had stopped, she went into the bathroom: her
beautiful vanity counter with its marble top was on the floor and there were
holes in the tiles.
Señora Brun pressed her palms together, as though in prayer.
‘Please tell me you found it,’ she said.
‘Unfortunately not, Señora,’ said the plumber.
She was furious then; this was going beyond a joke, she thought.
‘But that’s impossible!’ she said severely. ‘I left it here, on this
countertop! Look again, carefully—it must be somewhere!’
‘Yes, certainly. It’s got to be somewhere,’ the plumber said calmly.
The man’s perverse, Señora Brun thought that she would tell her friend
Silvina; he obviously enjoys tormenting me, but I’m not giving in so easily.
‘So, what would you suggest as a solution?’ she said.
The plumber, now without the slightest dissemblance, fixed Señora Brun
with a cold, cruel stare.
‘We can rip up the bathroom until we reach the drain box, if you like, to
see in which section of piping your little pendant finally appears.’
He wants to kill me, Señora Brun thought. He looked at me with the eyes
of a murderer, she imagined herself telling her friend Silvina, and I realised
that if I tried to cross him, he would kill me.
‘Yes, rip it up, rip it up,’ she said. ‘If you can guarantee me that my
pendant’s going to turn up.’
‘Yes, Señora, it’s going to turn up,’ said the plumber with a controlled
savagery. ‘Sooner or later everything turns up.’
Señora Brun looked at him fearfully.
‘But what if you don’t find it even then?’ she asked in desperation.
The plumber fixed his eyes on her.
‘If we get down to the drain box and still don’t find it, do you know what
we can do?’ He paused. Kill you, Señora Brun thought the plumber would
say. ‘We can carry on ripping things up until we reach the river. Because, if
it isn’t here, it must be in the river, right? The important thing is to find
your little pendant.’
 ‘The river, yes you’re right, the river,’ said Señora Brun, drunk on her
own terror. ‘If it’s not here it’s bound to turn up in the river,’ she was
surreptitiously edging towards the door. ‘Rip it up, please, go down as far as
the river. But quietly, please, very quietly because I’m going to have a nap.
Help yourselves to drinks. My husband will pay you when he gets back.’
As she closed her bedroom door the banging started. Señora Brun took a
sleeping pill and stretched out on the bed. In the moment she lay down her
head she remembered that she had hidden the diamond teardrop there,
under the pillow, hurriedly because the plumber had rung the doorbell just
as she was taking it out of the jewellery box. It was a fact that, if the
teardrop was there, her husband would never understand the need to rip up
the bathroom, so she got up, went out onto the balcony, and threw the
pendant far enough away that it would never be found. She wondered
whether she would tell her friend Silvina this.
The banging was getting louder and louder, so before lying down again,
she put in earplugs. Now they could smash things up as much as they
wanted. Until they reached the drain box, or until they reached the river, or
until nothing remained, not one stone upon another, of the safe and
comfortable world Señora Brun had enjoyed.
THE CRUELTY OF LIFE
To my mother, at last

I was at the police station, sitting between a monobrow and a big girl, dark-
skinned, who was breast-feeding her baby, and I felt sticky and verging on
terrified after a five-hour peregrination on the most stifling March afternoon
in living memory, and I was wondering if that intimation of terror owed
more to my mother’s disappearance or to the fact of not knowing what I
would find, if I ever did find her, when for no apparent reason, the lion
appeared. It wasn’t the first time that had happened to me, that some
troubling incident popped into my head out of nowhere, there was that room
with the dancing legs, for example, and me watching them from under a
chair and then the boy who came headlong through them, a boy with curly
hair they called Moishke Copetón. From my vantage point under the chair, I
couldn’t grasp the concept of parties (even today I can’t be doing with the
crush and the noise) and caught none of the words except those very strange
ones: Moishke Copetón. Whenever I remember that sea of legs it’s an
unchanging image, and it was the same in Precinct No. 17 of the Federal
Police as I waited my turn between the monobrow and the brunette, when
the lion burst in. Mostly it’s the lion I see but that afternoon, rather than
seeing him only from the vantage point of my bed, as he crouched behind
the dining room table, I happened to switch the focus towards my six-year-
old self, lying in the bed, sensing the lion. That was when—another blow—
I realised that I couldn’t think of him any more.

. . .

It wasn’t that I had forgotten the lion: I could still imagine him (there was
ample time to verify this before the police officer called me) crouching
behind the dining room table, waiting for the perfect moment to leap onto
me, and I could also see myself, fighting off sleep with my eyes stretched
wide—because I was more afraid that the lion would catch me unawares
than I was of the attack itself—huddled in the dark until it became so
unbearable to keep still that I had to get up (to provoke the lion, forcing him
to attack once and for all). I could also recall the voice of my father, asking
from the other bedroom where I was going, the first time with concern, the
second a little exasperated and the third on the brink of eruption (I was
careful never to get up more than three times; then, as now, I would rather
be mauled by a lion than endure certain tribulations of family life), and the
unintelligible murmur of my mother, calming him down or perhaps poking
fun at me. My mother never had much faith in people (and still doesn’t now,
truth be told). I could re-create the desperation I felt as I listened to Lucía
sleeping soundly, a mere two yards from my bed—as though the world
were not imperilled—and even reproduce the nightly sequence of thoughts
with which I persuaded myself that a lion could indeed be waiting to
pounce on me from behind the dining room table. What I couldn’t do was
know the lion; it was another sensibility, different to mine, that had been
frightened of it. I saw her now, fearing the lion in the same way that I saw
the lion—but that was all, for I was no longer that child who lay awake in
the silence, eyes wide open, straining to interpret signs. It was as if the
thread that connected me to her had weakened or broken. Is that what it
means to grow up? There in precinct No. 17 it seemed an inadequate term
to describe the passage of my years. Growing up. The concept alarmed me.
Was I, in that respect, not so different to my mother? I’m getting old now,
Mariúshkale, she had said to me on her eighty-fifth birthday but with a
certain ambiguity, as though to say ‘we both know that isn’t so: old age
wasn’t made for me, I am invulnerable, my daughters are invulnerable,
everything I have brought into the world is perfect and therefore immune to
fever, pimples, melancholia, failure and death.’ So all that rigmarole,
dashing from pillar to post—was it just to come here and discover I’m like
her? Not in a million years, I thought with a violence that made me shudder.
The monobrow glanced over at me disapprovingly and a friendly nudge
from the breast-feeder informed me that it was my turn.

. . .

What are his distinguishing features, asked the officer, disregarding the fact
that this missing person—as I had just informed him—was called Perla and
was my mother. Female, I answered. Sniggers at my back (I guessed from
the monobrow) alerted me to the mistake. I was just so tired. I had endured
so many grillings in police stations and hospital emergency departments,
had tripped up so many times on the slippery police patter that even if I
were to give a less vague answer than ‘female’ or ‘white skin’ I doubted it
would spark any understanding in the face of my questioner—of course, of
course I knew what he was after, but what was I supposed to say: lying in
bed with her throat slit, officer? Lost an eye? A drooling stuttering wreck?
And anyway, a few minutes earlier I had discovered something with such
disheartening consequences for my future that nobody had any business
expecting rational answers from me. Features, not sex, said the officer. I
could feel the monobrow’s raspy breath on my neck: he didn’t like time-
wasters. I said nothing. Distinguishing features—characteristics, prompted
the officer. I wanted to tell him that my mother was, from top to toe, a
distinguishing characteristic. I suffered, officer, how I suffered as a child
because I longed to have a mother like all the other mothers; a longing she
must have inculcated herself with her songs. The mothers in them, when
they weren’t blindly abandoning their children, in which case they were
called heartless—which is to say unmotherly, given that the heart is the
quintessential maternal organ, as can be deduced from that poem (often
recited by my mother) in which the son, at the request of his cruel lover,
stole his mother’s heart as she slept (probably dreaming of him), and as he
reached the dark threshold of his lover’s house he stumbled and the heart
called out ‘Are you hurt, my son?’—when they had a heart, as I was saying,
they were saints who prayed alone for the nation to bestow five medals on
their five heroes or selfless old ladies washing clothes in the kitchen sink,
welcoming home with open arms the disoriented son who had been seduced
by some other world and swept by the dangerous new passions vice had
taught him into a deep, churning sea. Mother! the delirious boy would cry
on his return, I’ve been consumed by sorrow, bereft without your love. And
she goes: Come here, scallywag, a kiss will make it better. That was how
mothers were, according to the songs my mother sang. But not her. She
neither cruelly abandoned me nor devoted herself to solitary prayer. And
she did the washing, yes, but grumbling all the while, because she thought
herself destined for something greater than the laundry. She must have had
a heart, but it was arbitrary and deceitful. For instance, on the very day she
first met El Rubio she had no option but to lie to him. How could she have
had no option, I thought, lying in my parents’ bed. It must have been a
Sunday morning, because Sunday mornings in the marital bed were
reserved for story-telling. The stories were always different. Sometimes
they were nothing more than a detailed account of the previous evening’s
movie. (On Saturday nights Perla and El Rubio went to the cinema; he in a
wide-brimmed hat and white silk scarf; she with a grosgrain rose pinned to
her lapel and a hat that transformed her—Perla looked radiant beneath her
hats as though these delicate creations of feathers, tulle or straw had the
power to banish the little disappointments of her daily life.) That kind of
story was told only once and presented no greater complexity than the plot
of the movie itself, which was no small thing because Perla recounted every
detail and even (as I found out in time) embellished a few so that, each
Sunday as I pressed against the soft body that seemed to promise a safe
harbour even as the voice filled me with fear, I would hear about one man’s
heinous scheme to convince his wife that she was going mad, or the dead
woman in league with a housekeeper to torment her widower’s new, young
wife, or the deaf-blind girl savagely raped by a brutal man. What is ‘raped,’
I asked, intuiting some menace behind the word. It’s the worst thing that
can happen to a woman, said Perla, firmly, creating one of those pockets of
darkness that I would struggle to elucidate on my journey towards the
uncomfortable adulthood I occupied now, as I sat dumbstruck before the
officer of Precinct No. 17, trying not to ask myself at which moment the
thread had weakened or broken, if there ever had been anything like a
thread, anyway. The films in themselves weren’t necessarily disturbing
because they always had a beginning and an end and no ramifications. The
real-life stories, on the other hand, sometimes linked to stories from other
Sundays, but they were unreliable links. And the story could get lost in the
details. Or be nothing but details, as tended to happen with clothes. Clothes
came as part of a story but then were described with so much theatre that
they ended up becoming the story itself, like that party dress in lemon-
yellow crepe, covered from top to bottom in rolled-up feathers that Perla
called aigrettes, a diamante nestling at the centre of every single one. I had
to make an effort not to picture my mother as a bird-woman, gigantic and
malign with the face of a sparrowhawk and a feathery body, an image that
returned to trouble me at night, like all the others, and which I had seen
once in a book; I let myself be swept along by the words—aigrette, lemon-
yellow, diamante: words whose significance I didn’t always know but
which submerged me in a beautiful haze that had no need of illustration
because what was sketched by the words was, for me, better than any
picture. When it came to the clothes, however, the process was complicated,
not least because it meant believing Perla (how can a dress covered in
feathers not be monstrous? Is it possible to distinguish a diamante in the
centre of a rolled feather? Early on I suspected that Perla was exaggerating
or changing things as she saw fit) but because it also forced on me the
appreciation of a beauty that was alien to me. A holm oak, a pitcher, a
wagon, these things appealed to my own notion of beauty, but lemon-
yellow crepe transported me to a world I could only covet through Perla’s
own covetousness.
It was even worse with the accessories, which conferred on an outfit its
crowning splendour. Perla, who had carefully drawn a design and saved her
pennies to pay for the fabric and the making up and followed with a critical
eye the work of the local seamstress until the dress of her dreams was
finally a reality, had also given careful thought to the accessories. If even
one was missing she would rather shut herself away in the house and never
show off her new dress. And given that most of them were generally
missing and she never had enough money to buy them she had to spend a
long time working on the consciences of her five sisters (who were almost
as selfish and quarrelsome as she was) until each one lent her what she
needed. Only then, when everything was in its place, the grey beret picking
up the collar of the little suit, the crocodile clutch bag in exactly the same
colour as the shoes, the gloves no shorter or longer than they should be,
would she puff up like a peacock and go wherever she had been invited. I
was so beautiful (she would say, finishing her story in bed) that when I
came in everyone said I looked like a girl from the aristocracy.
I didn’t have a very clear idea of what the aristocracy was, but I knew
that it was a state highly fancied by my mother. What confused me was that,
in her songs, aristocrats were dreadful people who invariably thwarted the
desires of Perla’s heroes and heroines (consumptive worker-girls, dying
orphans and starving poets). Hearing about these tragic lives, to which Perla
gave somewhat cheerful expression, singing in the style of a chanteuse as
she cleaned the house, I often wept for the world’s wretches. But whenever
we went out, all of us, even El Rubio, had to look like members of the
aristocracy.
And speaking of El Rubio, why did you have no choice but to lie to him?
I asked her eventually, because I was shocked that a girl would think of
deceiving the man of her life on the very day she met him. Well it’s simple,
said Perla, like someone who’s about to explain the most natural thing in
the world: he had obviously asked me when my birthday was because he
wanted to give me a present.
Perla had turned twenty-two only a month previously and telling the truth
looked like wasting an opportunity. So she took two months off her life and
he didn’t disappoint her: on the afternoon of her fake birthday—they were
already on their fourth or fifth date—he waited for her at the corner of
Pringles and Guardia Vieja with a blue velvet box wrapped in tissue paper:
inside, a little Girard-Perregaux watch.
It was that sort of attention to detail that made Perla fall so madly in love
with him. Not only was El Rubio the kind of man to give a girl a beautiful
bracelet watch, he also danced the tango vals better than anyone and in a
café he would pay for everybody, as if he were loaded with money. His
friends (Perla said) called him Paganini. One December afternoon, nearly a
month after the fake birthday, he even turned up with a new DeSoto. But
she didn’t want to get in that day or indeed on their subsequent dates: it’s
frowned upon (she told him) for a single girl to get into the car of a single
man. It was a shame because after the DeSoto he never had a car again in
his life, and she loved cars. She used to imagine herself crossing Buenos
Aires next to El Rubio in a gleaming voiturette. He never knew about that at
the time. Patiently he would leave the DeSoto outside her house on Pringles
Street, then the two of them would take a tram to Lezama Park: Perla
adored going to Lezama Park—and singing tangos about dying lovers and
having long conversations about her future. If he got sick of all that
jacaranda and tuberculosis he didn’t let on: he would never knowingly have
slighted anyone. He did accidentally, though. One day during the carnival
he arranged to meet Perla at the corner of Corrientes and Maipú and stood
her up. Just like that, stranded amidst the streamers and the cheap cologne,
in the ecru linen dress she had embroidered herself in cross-stitch.
And then she heard nothing more of him, apart from a photograph, sent
months later from Ernesto Castro, For Perla, From the beach. No
apologies, no promises, nothing to cling to. It should also be said that the
photograph was dreadful: he was sitting on the ground near a kind of shack,
in some get-up of shabby pyjamas, fraying hat and espadrilles, looking
more like a vagrant than the tango-dancing object of her desire. (Sorting
through other photos of El Rubio thirty years later—in Azul, in Olvarría, in
General Acha—it struck me that his character was hard to pin down: he
could just as easily be pictured as a bather or a gaucho; in an impeccable
white suit and panama or in a T-shirt, swilling wine with low-lifers. The
only thing we can know for sure is that he loved himself, I said to Lucía,
and we couldn’t stop laughing, despite the whispering presence of death.
Because he was always taking photographs of himself: in good times and
bad. And he even had the nerve to send Perla, who was all willowy
elegance and cross-stitch embroidery, that one in which he looked so ugly
in the scruffy hat.)
We’ll never know how she came to reconcile the vagrant with the
Paganini. She must have been broken-hearted because for five years she
continuously sang that tango Be gone! Don’t come here begging me to
remember each hour of our tragic romance. But the fact is that she turned
twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-six, rejecting one after another, all the
suitors who presented themselves to her.
At twenty-seven she went to see a gypsy. (My mother was an odd kind of
Jew: she liked priests for their sermonising and gypsies for their fortune-
telling, not to mention that every Good Friday she took us to the cinema to
weep over the Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ.) The gypsy told
her that she was going to meet the love of her life soon and give him her left
hand. She foresaw a home in which there would be daughters but no money.
The money won’t stay, she said; it’s going to come in and go out but never
stay. Since she was desperate to be rich, Perla decided not to believe the
gypsy’s prophecy. And six days later she was waiting to meet a new suitor
in the house of the only one of her sisters to have married a millionaire.
The thing she most liked about that house was the Baccarat crystal
chandelier in the dining room and what she most disliked was the deep,
bitter line on her brother-in-law’s forehead and the wart beside his nose.
Subconsciously she assigned the same line to the suitor who was at that
moment making his way to the house. She was wrong. That man was a
brick, affable and kind. En route to the house he ran into a friend who had
just arrived from Bahía Blanca taking advantage of a free passage given to
him by virtue of the Eucharistic Congress that was being held in Buenos
Aires. There and then the brick invited his newly arrived friend to share in
his good fortune.
‘I’ve been invited round to someone’s house,’ he said. ‘Apparently
they’re going to introduce me to a pretty girl. Do you want to come along?’
The friend did want to. It was El Rubio.
 Of all that happened in that house the one salient fact is that Perla gave El
Rubio her left hand to shake because the right one was bandaged up.
Knowing her, it isn’t too far-fetched to suppose that the bandage may have
been somehow contrived, because she was always a cheat, which isn’t to
say that events didn’t transpire exactly as she told them—that two days
earlier she got a nasty burn on her hand and needed to bandage it—because
it’s also true that there was always something a bit magical about her.
At any rate, afterwards, when the two men were in the street, barely had
his friend ventured a few words on how pretty Perla was (he called her
Perla, without compunction) than El Rubio stopped him dead.
‘Be careful what you say,’ he said, ‘because that woman is my fiancée.’
And he must have known what he was saying because eight months later
they were married.

. . .

So when did you tell him the truth? I ask, in my parents’ bed, more
concerned about the moral problem than about the story itself. And not
surprisingly. Why would any child familiar with that tale of the girl who
plays next to a pond with a gold ball, accidentally drops it in, then gets in
return a toad that finally turns out to be a prince, be much impressed by the
story of a man who turns up after a five-year absence at the house of the
brother-in-law of the woman who’s been waiting for him? The very least
one asks of any story is that there be an element of chance in the plot. The
problem of truth, on the other hand, does worry me. Although not in the
way it worries Lucía, who believes that one should always tell the truth,
regardless of the circumstances, because it’s the right thing to do. The
problem of truth worries me because I can’t imagine going through life with
the weight of certain lies on your back. A fake birthday, for instance. There
are literally millions of things relating to a person’s birthday, so if you are
going to lie to one person about your date of birth, in order for that lie never
to be discovered, you’re going to have to keep modifying each of those
millions of things for the rest of your life, not only for the sake of the
person to whom you lied but for all those others to whom the deceived
person may speak at some time or other. The complications are infinite,
beginning at the moment of the lie and ending only at death. All of which
goes to show that lying did not actually constitute a moral problem for me.
It was a purely practical question—even if, in front of Lucía, I was prepared
to swear that the act of lying was abominable in itself. That was a lie that
didn’t frighten me because I considered it a matter of self-defence and
because it replaced a hazy concept about good and evil that I felt impinged
on me, although I wasn’t able to explain it. Besides, it was a lie that began
and ended with Lucía (it was cut to her size), which exempted me from
having to apply it to millions of cases.
Perla, on the other hand, has no problem lying. Neither in the moral
sphere nor in the practical one.
‘I honestly can’t remember at what point I told him the truth,’ she says,
putting an end to the question.

. . .

That’s typical of my mother, managing to work herself into the story in a

way that reflects well on her and gives her a greater role than the one
originally allotted her: that of missing person. But whether she likes it or
not, her presence here is incidental and the hunt for her through hospitals
and police stations—plus an episode featuring the Happiness Care Home,
still to come—is merely the backdrop to this story’s real drama: the missing
lion. I could have discovered its absence at any time, but it had to happen
on the same day of the other loss, while Lucía was looking for my mother
in one direction and I in another, communicating all the while via a
complicated system of messages because, to make matters worse, the
woman—or guardian angel—who usually helped my mother had gone off
to La Plata on some urgent business that meant she couldn’t serve as a
bridge between us. It was in the midst of this chaos that I realised I had lost
the lion but, what if I had made the discovery on a quieter day? Would I
have managed to avoid becoming the creature I was for the next two years
(exactly until the morning in March when we visited the Happiness Care
Home)? Drained, muddle-headed, incapable of any thought that didn’t
somehow rebound back on me and my obvious stupidity? I would reach for
a tin of biscuits and some awareness of the banality of that action would
detain me halfway, crushed by a suggestion of failure. It didn’t stop me
from eating the biscuit after all, but even such a small event held no
pleasure for me. It’s an unpleasant sensation, especially for someone who
has built her life on the supposition of a certain eccentricity or state of
grace. Now I knew that that state, if it had ever existed, was deep in the
rock bed of my past and not able to illuminate my present, and that the
woman whose hand had reached for the biscuit tin didn’t deserve a jot of
sympathy from me.
It may seem extravagant to some that a missing lion had depressed me to
this degree but the thing is that, of the three or four formative events that
have seemed to shape my life (inconspicuous events which I have
nevertheless loaded with significance and allowed to shed light on my every
act, however trivial, oh there she is the oddball, reaching out to pinch a
biscuit, how crudely her brain grapples with such a simple act, how clearly
she sees herself, pathetic, greedy, looking for the one with the most filling;
and then, somehow redeemed by my own pitiless gaze, I could calmly
savour the biscuit like someone eating consecrated bread), of those three or
four episodes, as I was saying, two actually feature lions. In the first of
these I’m four or five years old. I’m running in circles around my
grandmother’s patio while, in an effort to mitigate my disappointment in the
real world, I invent a story of which I am the heroine and in which people I
don’t like get their comeuppance while other extraordinary people praise
me for my charm and courage. Each time some incident or character
doesn’t fit into the picture I have to change it, thus imposing other
modifications which in their turn bring new imperfections that I have to
remedy. As I get closer (or so I think) to the perfect version of my story, my
excitement mounts and I spin around faster and faster. I’m now at a
vertiginous point, on the cusp of a time when all difficulties will be over
and I’ll be happy. Then, behind me, coming from the kitchen door, and with
the same effect as something heavy falling on my head, I hear: ‘She looks
like a caged lion.’
The second is not so much an episode as a line of thought, one I follow
night after night and which leads mercilessly to the lion. I’m in bed, sensing
his presence, and he is behind the dining room table, waiting for the
moment to leap on me. All my nights, between the ages of five and eight,
are marked by this awareness of the lion. And what I had discovered in
Precinct No. 17 of the Federal Police was that the complete memory was
there and that I could recount it as often as I liked and pretend to be
recounting part of my life, but that for some time now—how long?—I had
been telling somebody else’s story.
 My actions had been emptied of meaning, something like that. And my
punishment was to know it. Perhaps one day my stolidity would reach a
point where I could not even recognise that turn of events and I would go
through life as a perfect imbecile. For the moment I was a mutant, awaiting
my transformation—into someone else? into myself? I still didn’t know
from which point I was observing the phenomenon. Like a good mutant, I
didn’t have an assigned category.
On the bus or queueing up to pay taxes I surreptitiously studied my
fellow men and women. I envied them deeply: they seemed to bear no
shadow of worry. I tried a few experiments to speed up the process of
transformation. One morning, at the Water Company, I nearly managed it. I
was waiting in a crowded area to arrange payment of an outstanding debt
which—or so I hoped—would turn me in more than one sense into a good
citizen. People were talking all around me. Hearing themselves speak
seemed not to bother them. Perhaps they didn’t even hear it. They talked to
fill the time and because it was easier to talk than to endure the silence. I
decided to join in. First I agreed with a blonde lady that you come to pay
your bill and they treat you worse than a criminal, then I made a few
contributions to a plan one bald fellow had to get the country booming and
vibrant in less than a year. This time no inner laughter distanced me from
my companions. I was who I claimed to be, nothing more and they—you
could tell a mile off—accepted me without question. I was just beginning to
feel comfortable in my role when a voice from nowhere murmured: Art
thou, indeed, that woman? Now I see that in a way these words anticipated
what I would later discover at the Happiness Care Home. And not because
of the question’s meaning: it was typical of the recriminations that regularly
interrupted my actions, leaving me speechless, that particular afternoon, in
front of my fellow queuers, neither able to speak to them nor to call on the
vanity that would have distanced me from them in times past. Not, as I said
because of the words’ meaning, but because of that archaic style which
reminded me of the question the Sleeping Beauty asks, at the moment she
opens her eyes, after sleeping for a hundred years and sees the Prince, who
has just woken her with a kiss on the lips. Who art thou Sir, and what dost
thou here? a line to which I had returned time and again, trying in vain to
penetrate its perfection and wondering if I, woken abruptly after my
hundred-year sleep, could have formulated such a rigorous question,
condensing—and so politely!—everything that needs to be known in such
unwonted circumstances. That flashback should have alerted me, but I was
so absorbed by my loss that I didn’t even think about how old-fashioned—
or bloody-minded—my subconscious can be left to its own devices. Not to
mention Sleeping Beauty. I didn’t let myself think of her, or of the girl
spinning in the patio or of the lion. These thoughts felt plundered; they
belonged to another person. That girl who knows the lion, with every fibre
of her being and can sense him from her bed, not the woman crying for his
loss.
Bed is the place for big problems. When Lucía’s asleep, when Perla and
El Rubio are sleeping, Mariana can mull over her big problems without
anyone coming to scold her for not doing anything. Is thinking not doing
anything? In fact that is one of the big problems she can devote herself to
considering when nobody’s around to bother her. When she’s not in bed, the
only other time she can devote herself to thought is when she’s pretending
to be a dog—and she only does that on cold days. On hot days Lucía’s feet
don’t get freezing so she doesn’t ask Mariana to come and sit on her like a
dog. Lucía feels the cold easily, but not Mariana. She likes to feel an icy
wind on her face and she loves frost. What she most likes about frost is the
word frost. If she thinks: This morning when I went to school the street was
covered in frost, she can believe that she’s in one of those story-book
countries where people use sledges to get around. When it’s very cold, her
mother says: Today it’s a frosting cold, turning frost into a verb and calling
to mind cake decoration, which isn’t nearly as pretty. Her mother comes up
with some strange verbs, sometimes. If she’s eaten a lot she says: I’m
stiffed. Mariana has never heard other people use either of these words and
much less the word musgrevely. It’s a word that features in a very sad song
her mother sings that goes: Little Paper Boy they called him and he to see
them all musgrevely. So Mariana reckons that musgrevely means
demonstrating to others that you are what they think you are. They called
him little paper boy and he, without deception, showed that he was one. She
even has the impression that he was proud to be musgrevely. But sometimes
it seems to her that the song says ‘Little Paper Boy they called him he could
see them all most easily.’ Although the day they argue about it Lucía says
that neither version is correct. What the song says, according to Lucía, is:
Little Paper Boy they called him and he to sea had set out previously. In
that case, he had been a sailor before he was a paper boy. The problem is
the next bit, says Mariana, who always listens carefully to her mother’s
songs. What’s the next bit? asks Lucía, who doesn’t pay them much
attention. Mariana sings: Little Paper Boy they called him and he could see
them all most easily, when one day on a street corner a mother with no
intestines abandoned him to fate. It’s entirely baseless says Lucía, who has
read William Saroyan. The two roll around laughing because thinking of
that reminds them of the other preposterous lyrics their mother sings, that
one about the suicidal lovers, says Lucía breathless with laughter and
Mariana sings Goodbye mother, goodbye father, goodbye brothers and
sisters, we must go now and we won’t see each other again; if our love on
earth was true, in the tomb it will be even greater. Every time they’re about
to stop laughing they remember some new example—that one that begins I
loved her with the gentle soul of my evidence, says Lucía; entirely baseless,
says Mariana—and they’re off again. The trouble is that there are songs
they have never heard anyone else sing and the only time they dare to ask
their mother if the song about the paper boy is ‘he could see them all most
easily’ or ‘to sea he’d set out previously’ she looks at them as though they
were completely mad and says: haven’t you two got anything better to talk
about? She’s like that, their mother, it’s impossible to get the better of her.
She always finds a way to turn things round and walk off cool as a
cucumber. She says, ‘I’m stiffed,’ and she says musgrevely and nobody will
ever know where she gets these words from. Like sarcirony. Their mother is
always using the word sarcirony. She says: Don’t look at me with sarcirony,
and she says: He said it with sarcirony. Mariana understands perfectly what
sarcirony means. She herself often speaks with sarcirony. And so does
Lucía. And El Rubio. They’re a very sarcironic family. But then one day
she writes sarcirony in an essay and the teacher crosses it out with a red
pencil and says that the word doesn’t exist. She refutes this and even
explains the significance. But the teacher makes her look it up in a
dictionary and that’s when Mariana discovers that her mother can never be
entirely trusted, even when she’s using a beautiful word like sarcirony.
Lucía, on the other hand, does know how all the words should be because
she reads the dictionary. She takes it with her into the bathroom and spends
hours locked in there where nobody can bother her. The dictionary is a bit
battered and has a story that predates Mariana’s birth. Stories from before
her birth give her a hollow feeling in the heart. Not the ones from the time
her mother and father first met, because those are so old they’re practically
fables. The ones about her mother and aunts when they were children even
more so. There were six Malamud sisters (not counting the boys) and all of
them were wild, but the wildest must have been her mother, because now
they’re all old ladies and she’s still wild. Mariana loves the stories about the
Malamud sisters because they were very poor and very prankish and
laughed at everything, and because they lived next door to a family of
cheerful and friendly Italians who ended up being Mafia chiefs. By contrast,
the stories in which Lucía features but isn’t yet born give her that sense of
emptiness because they show that her mother, father and Lucía lived
happily without her and had no need of her existence. She hates that—but
nothing is as infuriating as the dead girl. The dead girl appears in some of
these stories from the past. Lucía and her mother talk about this child and
about how they waited for her and some of the things that happened while
they were waiting, but they never mention the thing that causes her the most
fear—and not any kind of fear but a peculiar, retrospective kind. They never
say that she would not be in the world had this child not been born dead,
and that nobody would be any the wiser. Mariana hates this child and is
tremendously happy that she’s good and dead. But that also frightens her,
since the worst thing you can do in life is take pleasure in the death of
another person, especially a sister, so she can’t tell anyone about this and
it’s the most terrible secret she keeps. That dictionary dates from the time of
the dead girl. It was given to Lucía before the child was born, because
nobody knew that she would be born dead, so they were happy and brought
round presents. Apparently it came on a little shelf, with six story books,
three on either side of the dictionary. Mariana’s never seen a mini-bookcase:
she believes that it has been her lot to live in a time in which there aren’t
such beautiful objects. She enquires about the storybooks that came with
the dictionary. Nobody knows anything, nobody remembers anything, they
have disappeared without a trace; vainly she tries to imagine the splendour
of those books which will never again be possible on earth. It’s unfair that
all that is left of such a splendid collection is the dictionary. She hates
dictionaries and that whole business of the words being listed
alphabetically. In fact she despises alphabetic order, the ABC strikes her as
the most boring system in the world—there’s no way to learn it because
there’s no reason in it. If something can’t be rationalised, it can’t be learnt.
She used to think that the letters came in an order of familiarity so that you
would simply need to decide which was the better known of two letters, the
N and the R, for example, and that way work out the position of each letter,
but—what was the K doing before the M? And the S after the Q? With the
alphabet the only option is to learn it parrot-fashion and it’s a shame to see
the words arranged that way, with some very boring definition underneath
them, it makes them ugly; she likes to see a word in the middle of other
words so that, even if you’ve never heard it before in your life, you work
out what it means and it’s like a game. But Lucía loves the dictionary and
spends hours locked in the bathroom reading it so as not to be disturbed. Or
perhaps it just seems like hours to Mariana because she’s on the other side
of the door waiting for her sister to come out so that they can play together.
When her sister’s in the bathroom, Mariana imagines that if she comes out
and they play she’ll be happy, but when Lucía does emerge it’s hard to
believe that happiness can ever be attained: Lucía gets furious because,
even though Mariana said—and repeated—that Lucía can stay in there
forever, for all she cares, that she’ll never ask her to come out, ultimately
she hasn’t been able to bear the wait and has ended up calling her, which (as
she already guessed would happen) seems bound to have unhappy
repercussions. Not on one occasion, though. That time her dream comes
true because Lucía, after her confinement with the dictionary, comes out of
the bathroom looking for her: she wants Mariana to listen to a song she
composed in the bath about her yearning for an encyclopedia. Mariana
knows what that is because, a few days ago, when her sister mentioned
wanting one for the first time, she asked: Luci, what is an encyclopedia?
And Lucía gazed into the distance and said: It’s a book that has all
knowledge in it. She had to make a great effort to imagine that totality of
knowledge and another, even greater, to imagine a book big enough to
contain it. Was this really the way things were? That Lucía locked herself
away to read a dictionary but really wanted an encyclopedia? That she
longed for her sister to come out of the bathroom only to regret it and feel
even more wretched than before? That perfection was impossible in this
world? At any rate, the afternoon that Lucía seeks her out to sing the song
she composed in the bath comes pretty close to perfection.
The song tells of Lucía’s longing for an encyclopedia, about the money
that would be necessary to buy one, and ends abruptly: And since I haven’t
got it I’ll just have to wait. Straight to the point, the way Lucía likes her
poetry. What is poetry? You’re asking me? Poetry is you. They say what
they want to say, no messing around. But things are rarely so simple. That
business with Amado Nervo, for instance—Mariana can’t even bear to
remember that ill-fated afternoon, with Lucía lying in bed reading Nervo’s
The Immovable Beloved and her being a dog, never happier. She doesn’t
even like the title of Nervo’s book, imagining a paralysed woman in a
wheelchair whom she can’t imagine anyone loving, let alone writing poems
for but, to be on the safe side, she’s never told Lucía that. And then her
sister says: Listen to this poem. Lucía always reads her things she really
likes and Mariana loves it, especially when she reads her the funny bits out
of novels, because she can understand them and they both roll around
laughing. But this time she puts on that tone she uses when she’s going to
read something sublime so, with trepidation, Mariana prepares to hear the
world’s most beautiful poem. It’s called Cowardice, her sister says, and that
reassures her, because Mariana knows very well what cowardice is: it’s the
worst thing after treachery and no hero ever forgives it. But in the poem
Lucía’s reading nobody flees the battle or quakes in the presence of the
enemy. The beloved woman walks past with her mother—whose presence
in a love poem is already questionable—and has hair the colour of flaxen
wheat. Mariana doesn’t know what flaxen wheat is but can’t help picturing
the beloved wearing a kind of bush on her head. To make things worse, all
the wounds the poet has on his body—we don’t know how he came by them
but there seem to be an awful lot—start opening up and bleeding in front of
the beloved and the beloved’s mother. The poet says very sadly that he let
them walk past without calling out to them, but Mariana can’t help feeling
that this was for the best, since he’s gushing blood. Things are no clearer by
the end of the poem. Did you like it? Lucía asks. Yes, Luci, she says. Then
Lucía, who has a mean streak, says: Explain it to me. It’s the most awful
moment of her life. She can only think of the wounds all opening up at once
and the scene seems revolting to her but it’s too late to say that. Is she a
coward? Undoubtedly. Why did you say you like it if you didn’t understand
a single thing? Lucía says. She’s unyielding and merciless, and when she’s
with her, Mariana doesn’t know which is worse, to get things wrong about
art or to tell a lie. It’s not like with God, who can look into her head and so
knows why she lies when she does and knows that she doesn’t do it to hurt
other people but rather to benefit herself—and God’s fine with that. It’s so
reassuring to have someone really know how you are and not to have to
keep giving explanations. Besides he’s happy with her because she talks to
him like a normal person, unlike the others who are always sucking up to
him. God finds her approach to life refreshing. Every night, when the light
goes off, she puts her hands together as she’s seen people do in the
illustrations of books, and she asks him for things she wants. She can’t
kneel beside the bed because Lucía would notice, but God doesn’t mind
about things like that. He knows perfectly well that she can’t kneel because
she’s Jewish. She doesn’t fully understand what it means to be Jewish, it’s
annoying that she can’t take communion and that, at school, instead of
studying Religion, which is so lovely with all those lives of the saints, she
has to take Moral Philosophy which seems to be the opposite of Religion,
though she doesn’t entirely understand what it’s about and neither, it seems
to her, does the teacher. In one class she makes them write an extremely
dull essay on thrift, in another she reads them The Brave Little Tailor and in
another she recites a poem about a peach that must not be allowed to stain
the immaculate whiteness of the dress belonging to the little girl eating it,
because the stain will never come out. At the end there’s something about
wicked deeds but it’s the least interesting part of the poem and Mariana
can’t help thinking that if the author wanted to talk about wicked deeds he
should have put them up at the start. The only thing she learns from the
poem is that, of all the things that may stain a dress, a peach is the worst
and from then on, although her clothes are quite messy and often have ink
marks or chocolate and other kinds of stain on them, every time she eats a
peach she takes extra precautions because, thanks to that poem, she’s
convinced that if peach juice falls on her dress she may as well throw it out
—the stain won’t ever come out. But this doesn’t help her to understand
fully what it means to be Jewish. Her mother will say of a person who fasts
on the Day of Atonement that he or she is ‘very Jewish’ as if that were
rather admirable, but she makes no great effort herself to be very Jewish: on
the Day of Atonement she simply eats little. Going without food makes me
feel listless, her mother says, and she seems sure that that’s an incontestable
reason not to fast. Mind you, I don’t eat very much, she says. Mariana
thinks that her mother is not very Jewish and her father even less so than
her mother, because he eats the same as usual on the Day of Atonement,
and Lucía least of all because if she’s told she has to go to the synagogue to
see her grandparents on the Day of Atonement, she vomits and falls ill.
Clearly as a family they are scarcely Jewish at all, but she still can’t kneel
beside her bed or say Little Jesus I Love Thee, because that’s what the goy
do. It’s quite complicated: she can not do the things Jews do but can’t do the
things the goy do, so instead of saying Little Jesus I Love Thee, she says
Little God I Love Thee. And she prays to him with her hands together every
night, when nobody can see. As for asking, she does that one thing at a time
because God may know what she’s like, but he has no reason to know all
the things she wants. There are things she wants just once and things she
wants all the time: she asks God for those every night. One of the things she
asks for every night is that, in six and a half years, when she’s the same age
as Lucía is now, she’ll know as much as Lucía. And a little bit more. The
trouble is that Lucía wants her to know everything now, because otherwise
she’s an idiot. Who wrote The Iliad? asks Lucía when they’re playing
Questions and Answers one day. Homer, she replies. Who wrote Don
Quixote of La Mancha? Miguel de Cervantes, she says. Who wrote The
Divine Comedy? Lucía asks. (Sometimes, when they aren’t playing,
Mariana likes to imagine that they are playing Questions and Answers and
that Lucía asks her a question that is so difficult she never would have
imagined such a young girl being able to answer it. And she answers
brilliantly! But imagination doesn’t get you far with Lucía. Who wrote The
Divine Comedy, is what she asked.) Since Mariana hasn’t the faintest idea
who wrote The Divine Comedy, she can’t even invent an answer to cover
her ignorance. So she opts for the moral high ground. Valiant, honourable,
true to the last, she lifts her gaze and says, I don’t know, Lucía. But her
sister, impervious to this moment of moral high standing, tells Mariana
she’s a moron anyway. You moron, she says, how can someone of six years
old not know who wrote The Divine Comedy? And the game ends there.
‘You’re twisting everything!’
This is new. For Lucía to butt into the story is totally unexpected. And
anyway, she isn’t twisting anything. She’s simply telling her version of the
facts.
‘That’s not true. You’re only telling a part of it, which isn’t the same
thing. And the part that makes me look like a monster, too. But, who used
to play Shopkeeper with you? And who made you fairy bites? And, by the
way, this doesn’t count as butting in, it’s self-defence.’
The Shopkeeper thing is undeniably true. In the afternoons when they sat
at the table in the little kitchen to have their milk, Lucía used to be the
Shopkeeper. How much cheese would you like, Señora? Would you prefer a
baguette or a French loaf? Then brandishing the knife she would cut with
the firm but generous hand of our local shopkeeper. Mariana loved it when
Lucía pretended to be a shopkeeper. Every afternoon, watching Lucía
prepare the milk, she waited for those minutes of happiness to arrive.
‘You see? Your subconscious has given you away. I prepared the milk, I
cut the cheese, I made the pancakes. You sat and watched.’
She sat and watched. And gave instructions. She knew it all, the theory of
everything: how much flour the pancakes needed, what a bain marie is, how
to stir the milk so that it doesn’t stick.
‘And what about the torrejas? Bet I’ve got you there.’
She had indeed. Mariana hadn’t the slightest idea how to make torrejas.
She knew as little on this subject as Lucía did, worse luck. Because
sometimes they both had an unbearable urge to eat torrejas—the word
alone sounded like a promise of happiness. They knew they had bread, and
perhaps eggs and honey, but they didn’t know how to make them. So they
would spend a long time discussing the properties that something with such
a beautiful name ought to have, throwing in everything crunchy, everything
golden and delightful that is possible on earth. Perhaps it’s for that reason
(and also because of the way life’s absurdities could make them laugh and
laugh, clutching their sides and weeping helplessly) perhaps it’s for that
reason that over the years, and despite their differences—I pretended to be a
dog to warm up your feet, and I had to make your hot milk, I had to look
after you all the time because you were a bit stupid—despite the roles,
never abandoned, of younger and older sister, they still turn to each other
when all else fails.
But let’s not get sentimental. These girls have a peculiar relationship—
otherwise there’s no pathos.
‘You see, that’s what I mean. You don’t continue with the torrejas theme
because all the perverse stories serve your purpose better. I wonder what
else you’ve left out?’
The fairy bites, for sure. She promises to come back to the fairy bites, but
not right now. She’s losing the flow, her characters are rebelling and she,
usually so careful—this event here, the other one further on, avoid
sentimental outpourings unless they’re relevant because if all the elements
aren’t in the right place there’s no story—so I lock myself at home and
don’t come out until someone lends me a little grey hat? Shh—who’s this
interrupting now?—she’s starting to realise that this story, which began with
a fairly orthodox I—though perhaps it was teetering even then—and the
discovery that she’s lost the lion, has cunningly slid towards a she, who far
from confronting her loss tiptoes around the edges, as though venturing that
nothing serious has happened here, neither pimples, nor failure nor death. A
phrase that can’t help but lead back to my supposed similarity to Perla. And
that’s not the story. The story is the lion, how I lost it and how I sat petrified
in front of the officer who was asking now for the third time: You can’t
recall any distinctive characteristics of the missing person?
None, I said; not one. And with a bovine docility I got the rest of the
questions over quickly, so that the monobrow would have no cause for
complaint and the nursing mother would think, how nice, what a normal
mother this lady has, how normal and loving and perfect all the mothers of
the world are and this lady too, even if she isn’t a mother, poor thing, how
normal she seems.
Conclusion: I left Precinct No. 17 as ignorant of my mother’s
whereabouts as I had entered it and with this new problem of not being able
to think of the lion. Heat swept over me like an infernal wave.
I looked for a public telephone. From the answering machine in my
house, Lucía’s voice dazed and discouraged, outlined the steps she had
taken, the ones she would take next and her readiness to die; on the
answering machine in her house I recorded my own recent adventures and
my own desire not to die without first killing all the old people in the world.
I also rang my mother’s house, just to be safe, although I knew that the
Guardian Angel could not yet have returned from her business in La Plata.
You go to La Plata, I had said to her less than six hours earlier. Lucía and I
can manage. What rubbish, Lucía and I can’t manage anything that isn’t
The Divine Comedy or torrejas. Or rather the illusory taste of torrejas,
because we still haven’t learnt how to make them. You concentrate on your
studies, Perla used to say, when the time comes that you need to cook I’m
sure you’ll pick it up. Another of her lies: we know our way around a
formula for deoxyribonucleic acid or a hendecasyllable but the simple
prospect of frying an egg paralyses us. The Guardian Angel would certainly
have been able to find Perla, she knows what to do in these situations, she is
competent and friendly; at the very least she could have taken me into her
lap, I’ve lost my little rooster taloo talay I would have sung, in the words of
the nursery rhyme, and she would have wrapped me in her great angel
wings and my mother and the lion and all the lost things screeching at that
moment in my head would have vanished from the face of the earth. But
she wasn’t home, taloo talay. I hung up and walked aimlessly around Las
Heras: all I wanted was to sit down in some doorway and sob my heart out.
There, on my right, were the steps leading up to the Faculty of Engineering
—why not stop there? After all, I didn’t have Perla dogging my every step,
making sure I didn’t fall over, or bump into something, or cry, what reason
have you got to cry, Mariúshkale, when I’ve given you everything, cod liver
oil to make you the strongest, green apples to make you the most intelligent,
stories to feed your imagination, little piqué dresses to make you look
aristocratic. What more could you need, my darling daughter? The lion,
mother, I need the lion and the sad thing is that I should have realised
before, this very morning I could have thought of it, instead of staring like
an imbecile at the computer screen, all my energy invested in online
patience as if existence came down to this, putting a red Queen beneath the
black King, a black Jack beneath the red Queen, moving to the right-hand
box the Ace of Spades, the two of Spades, the three of Spades, as though
the minute movement of the mouse that generated this displacement of
cards on the screen were enough to keep me from noticing a fait accompli:
that it wasn’t through mere distraction or poetic idleness that I had been
momentarily diverted from a path towards greatness. My God, how long
had it been since I last spoke that word, and not with coy italics but loud
and clear with the head-to-toe conviction that the girl who had invented a
lion from her bed could aspire to nothing less. And yes. Perhaps she could.
Except that (I could have found this out playing patience if the phone hadn’t
rung then) the diversion wasn’t momentary and appeared to have no
solution because I was no longer that girl.
The phone rang just as I was putting a red nine beneath a black ten. I
rushed to answer. Was I expecting the call of the muse or of eternal youth?
It was neither of these. In fact it was the Guardian Angel: Señora Ema has
just called me. Your mother was supposed to be there at noon but she hasn’t
arrived. She left here at twenty to eleven and seemed fine. Do you have any
idea what could have happened to her?
No, I don’t have a clue. I’m sitting on the steps of the Faculty of
Engineering and I don’t know nor can imagine ever knowing in the rest of
my life where Perla may be. I picture her dressed in immaculate white
leaving her house to walk the twenty-five blocks to see Ema, Specialist in
Beauty Masks (quite some title). Ema applies a mask, beautifies you,
smoothes away the fatigue, the fear, the corruption, and sends you out ready
to face the day. To understand why Motherpearl—eighty-five years old,
husband long dead, skin like parchment, cranium disfigured by
osteoporosis, ditto crumbling bones—walked twenty-five blocks every
month for a beauty treatment you have to try to picture her hard at work in
the tiny apartment that El Rubio (after years travelling around provincial
towns looking for a job that didn’t make him miserable) finally managed to
rent so that the four of us could have a home; you have to picture her
polishing the floors until they shone like mirrors, all the while dreaming of
herself wrapped in big, fluffy towels, pampered by expert hands that would
send her back into the world looking like a girl from the aristocracy, with
her lovely face made even more lovely. What I’m trying to say is that Perla
went every month for her beauty treatment simply because now she could
and it mattered very little to her that her face was falling to pieces. Wrapped
in those big fluffy towels doubtless she felt splendid and charmed, albeit
belatedly. And she walked those twenty-five blocks to Ema’s—as well as
other routes to various destinations—because three years ago, sitting with
Lucía opposite the doctor’s desk as he had calmly predicted the gradual
deterioration of her bones she, with the authority of someone who is always
sure she’s right, had said: Doctor, the day that I can no longer walk I would
rather die. And she said it without a shade of self-pity because the years had
made her wise. (Or perhaps she had always been wise and it was just that I,
overwhelmed by her determination to protect me from every kind of
misfortune, hadn’t seen that at the time but only in the last few years when,
drinking maté together in her house and cheerfully tucking into the
croissants I had brought, I realised that, being so capricious actually made
her a better listener, able to understand anything you might care to tell her.)
So she started walking for the simple reason that movement is better than
immobility and that if one has legs one should use them as well as possible,
secretly knowing that if she ever stopped one day she would never start
again. She used to look impeccable from head to foot, all in white,
coordinating shoes and a matching bag and would set off on that day’s
journey like someone who has all the time in the world because old age had
granted her enough serenity to sit down every so often in the window of a
cafe to get her breath back and watch the world go by. And she always
reached whatever objective she had set herself. Through sheer
determination and sheer eccentricity. The only exception being that heavy
March afternoon when she didn’t arrive at her destination.
 And there I was, sobbing on the steps of the Faculty of Engineering, with
not the faintest inkling of where to look for her. I’ve lost my little rooster,
taloo talay. The song came back into my mind and now I had time to ask
myself where it came from. From Perla, of course, her song for lost things.
It was infuriating. Lucía and El Rubio and I would be turning the house
upside down in pursuit of the missing object while she hindered our efforts
with her singing. For three nights I haven’t slept, taloo talay, thinking of my
little rooster taloo talay, I’ve lost it, taloo talay, poor thing taloo talay, last
Sunday taloo talay. Where did she find them, for God’s sake, all the pimps,
the roosters, the blind girls, the handsome swineherd Jerinaldo, the
shepherdess called Flor de Té, the poor old man who, from the tram, de
dum de dum saw his daughter go by, a shameless hussy, half-drunk on
champagne, there are just too many emotions, sometimes I prefer El Rubio,
who has only one song. It’s a very sad song and El Rubio says that when he
goes to the South with his brother León, they’re always singing it. It’s
strange to think of El Rubio and his brother León, who’s quite ugly, driving
along the road at night and singing something with the words little Virgin
Mary in God’s name I beg you, don’t be mean to my papa, he gets drunk
and often beats me, since we lost my dear mama. And the funny thing is
that, the way El Rubio sings it, it’s hard to tell if the song is making him
laugh or cry. It seems to be a bit of both, that on one side he’s making fun of
it and on the other he feels enormous compassion for that unhappy girl. You
can never tell with El Rubio. Perla gets annoyed with him because he sings
badly and she wants her loved ones to do everything well, but El Rubio
sings whenever he feels like it. Calmly—because he almost never loses his
temper—but he always does what he wants. He probably doesn’t even
realise that it upsets her. The man’s so absent-minded that every lunchtime
when he leaves to go back to work he says Bye lads. As if he had never
noticed that it’s only Perla, Lucía and me around the table. Bye lads, just
like that, and it’s even worse with the chandeliers.
The chandeliers arrive three years after we move in and it’s quite an
occasion. This is the first time that Perla, El Rubio, Lucía, and I have lived
in our own house. In truth it’s not a house, it’s a tiny apartment, and it isn’t
ours because we rent it, but after twelve years of marriage, it’s the first time
that Perla has been able to unpack the tablecloths that she embroidered for
her trousseau and a blue china tea service given to them as a wedding
present. For a while the only furniture we have is the beds we sleep in, a
folding table, and a few benches. Every lunchtime for two years Perla
spreads out on the dining room floor the poncho that El Rubio won in a
country music competition, then brings the table from the kitchen and opens
it out over the poncho. When we’ve finished eating, Perla folds the table
and puts it back in the kitchen, covering it with one of the embroidered
tablecloths from her trousseau. When it’s prettified like that she can forget
that it’s an ugly folding table and be pleased to look at it. As more pieces of
furniture start to arrive she surveys these, too, with quiet joy. They are big
pieces, polished to a shine and filling up all the empty spaces. Only the
chandeliers are missing. In every room there’s still a cable hanging from the
ceiling and a bulb hanging at the end of it like an affront. Until one day
there’s enough money and Perla goes to buy chandeliers. She tells us that
they are splendid and for once it isn’t a lie. One lunchtime I come back
from school to find them in place. The one in the dining room is particularly
sumptuous: ten lights above a shower of lead crystal teardrops. It hangs
over the table and seems to fill the small dining room ceiling entirely.
Underneath the glassware, Perla, Lucía and I sit ready for lunch, waiting for
El Rubio, bursting with excitement.
His arrival is always a happy occasion. As soon as you hear whistling in
the corridor you know that a few seconds later the key is going to turn in
the lock and that before coming all the way in, he’s going to peer around the
door at us, as though checking that we’re the right family. El Rubio has
lovely, flecked eyes somewhere between grey, green and blue; beneath his
wry, slightly sad gaze the world falls into precarious order. So, on the day of
the chandeliers, the lock turns and he peers at us around the door as usual.
The three of us are waiting expectantly as he must have noticed, because he
doesn’t come all the way in but studies us, disconcerted, from the doorway.
We wait with bated breath. Finally Perla can’t stand the tension and asks
him: Haven’t you noticed anything different? El Rubio is one of the kindest
people I have ever known. He would never knowingly disappoint anyone.
And so, still at the door, with that look he sometimes has of being all at sea,
he struggles to identify the change that has us all enrapt. Finally his face
lights up. With a complicit smile, happy to make us happy he says You
bought bananas—right? That’s El Rubio all over. So absent-minded and
unassuming that he dies one summer without ever having told us he was ill.
Perla, on the other hand, hasn’t an unassuming hair on her head. Not for
her an unheralded death. It’s more her style to disappear off the face of the
earth en route to a beauty session. Sitting on the steps of the Engineering
Faculty, I can’t think where else to look for her. I keep singing I’ve lost my
little rooster taloo talay and the worst thing is that I may not be singing it
for Perla but for the lion. And for all the things that once were and will
never be on the earth again. But especially for the distraught woman who
doesn’t know where to look for her elderly mother.
Grudgingly I got to my feet and went to look for a public telephone.
There were no new messages at my house. I rang Lucía’s house and listened
to her voice on the Ansaphone but decided there was no point leaving her
another message when I had no news to report. I rang my mother’s house in
hopes that the Guardian Angel had returned. The phone rang five times.
Just as I was about to cut the line someone picked up. There were muffled
noises, as though of someone struggling with the receiver. Then came the
unmistakable voice of the chanteuse. She didn’t say hello. Sounding bossy
and a bit cross, like someone who has decided that, whoever is on the other
end of the line must be the cause of her recent troubles, she asked,
‘Who is this?’
‘Mariana,’ I said.
‘Who?’ she shouted. I forgot to mention that she was quite deaf so, as a
precaution, I held the receiver away from my ear.
‘Mariana,’ I shouted, attracting glances from a few passers-by.
‘Who?’ she shouted again.
I sighed.
‘Mariana, your daughter,’ I yelled.
‘Which daughter?’ she said, as though she had a dozen. Then I knew for
sure that, just as I had been fearing all afternoon, I had got my mother back.

. . .

That night Perla explains that at some point on the way to Ema’s house she
felt tired and hailed a taxi. That she gave the taxi driver her address but that
when they arrived her house wasn’t there and she didn’t recognise the
surroundings. That neither she nor the driver, who was very nice, knew how
to resolve such a strange predicament so eventually the driver, poor man,
drove off and she was left alone, looking for her house and not finding it.
Then a very nice girl noticed her wandering around in a state of
bewilderment. She asked Perla where she lived, called a taxi and gave the
address to the driver. The driver, who was very nice, brought her home and
there she was.
The following day she recounts the episode again. This time the inclusion
of a new detail, in direct speech, reveals that Perla didn’t in fact direct the
first taxi driver to the intersection on the corner of which she lives but to
another formed by the street where she lives now and the one of the little
apartment where she used to sing tangos and where she closed her
husband’s eyes for the last time. I draw her attention to this, but she doesn’t
understand. Only when I’m explaining it for the fourth time does a glimmer
of panic light in her face and she asks: How could this have happened to
me? What’s alarming isn’t her difficulty in understanding something so
simple; nor is that the two taxi rides couldn’t have lasted more than half an
hour altogether and she was gone for nearly seven. What’s alarming is that
Perla isn’t the slightest bit concerned about this hole in her life. She seems
not even to have fully registered it. How could this have happened to me? is
all that she’ll say every time she comes to the end of her story, and she’s
referring to the mistake made with the first taxi driver, not the seven
missing hours. One afternoon, for the first time, she doesn’t tell the story;
just poses the question like an unresolved problem or a reminiscence. How
could this have happened to me? We’re in the living room in her flat;
between us, the croissants that I brought and the maté I’ve just prepared, as
though continuing with these rituals were a way to disguise some changes
in the real world. How could this have happened to me? she asks out of the
blue. This time I tell the story: her setting off on the walk, the tiredness, the
first taxi, the mistake, the searching, the second taxi, the homecoming.
Every so often I smuggle in a question. Perhaps if I catch her off-guard
she’ll end up remembering at which point she got lost, if she was
frightened, if, like me, she sat down to cry on some steps. To no avail. Once
I’ve embarked on the story, she seems to hear it merely as a kind of familiar
music, an accompaniment to the maté and croissants. She only intervenes,
now and then, to ask, How could this have happened to me? I’ve already
told you a hundred times, Mother, I say eventually, because I’m sick and
tired of going over the same ground. She doesn’t acknowledge my
exasperation. There is a long silence, then she asks again: How could this
have happened to me? Then one day she stops asking; she seems to have
completely forgotten the mix-up with the streets. The episode itself slips
into oblivion. Along with the croissants. One afternoon, having realised that
I can’t stand watching her eat, I stop taking them; Perla eating is an intimate
activity that only the Guardian Angel should have to witness, I decide. She
never asks about the croissants. Nor about the maté. One day I stop making
it for her but she doesn’t seem to notice. Now, when I go to visit her, all I do
is sit down opposite her and think of the lion. Its loss is an incontrovertible
fact. I’m a suffocated woman with a decrepit mother. And my conversations
with Lucía aren’t about The Divine Comedy any more but about Perla’s
latest catastrophe.
I confess that Lucía and I were both too slow to accept that the repetitive
woman we each visited twice a week and telephoned every day was not the
same as the one who used to sing, in the style of a tango vals, the ten verses
of Nocturne for Rosario. Perla always had a gift for persistence: if we were
ever sad or unwell she, who considered such lapses a personal failing,
would harp on so much about the neglectful habits that had brought us to
such a state, constantly reminding us about her own infallible methods for
restoring good health, that we ended up getting better just so we wouldn’t
have to listen to her any more. We were forever shouting at her to back off,
because her overwhelming desire for our happiness was so trying, her love
so selfish and prodigious that she turned into a kind of mother bear,
determined to keep us away from all evil. She was insufferable, but a bit
magical too. And we had taken it for granted that she would always be that
way, so when her conversations gradually dwindled to the same few
phrases, Lucía and I shouted desperately at her to stop, not to keep saying
the same things over and over, that we had already understood, and we
didn’t even notice that one day Perla had stopped letting the Guardian
Angel dress or groom her and that the person we sat opposite every time we
went to visit was a dishevelled old lady with white hair, invariably wearing
a nightie, who never asked about her grandchildren, didn’t remember El
Rubio and had absolutely no interest in how happy Lucía and I were.
It was the Guardian Angel who opened our eyes. One day she folded
away her great wings and told us that she couldn’t cope with Perla any
more. Lucía and I looked at each other with terror. It was that terror that led
us to the Happiness Care Home.
According to a second cousin Lucía providentially ran into during those
anxious days, the Happiness Care Home was exactly the place we were
looking for. All we had to do was ring a lady called Daisy to arrange an
interview. She would take care of everything else. That was just what we
needed: someone to shelter us in her bosom and take charge. I called Daisy.
Her sunny voice promised the ideal environment to experience the last stage
of life as a veritable paradise. Bring granny and her most important bits and
bobs, she said, and while we sort out the details, she’ll be looked after by
staff who are so capable and kind that of her own accord she’ll beg to stay.
So one March morning, less hot than that afternoon two years earlier
when Perla and the lion were almost lost for good, Lucía sat at the wheel of
her car and I came out of my mother’s house on the arm of the shaky and
demented old lady who had once been our Motherpearl.
With difficulty we settled her into the back seat. I got in next to Lucía.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Perla, as soon as the car started.
‘We’re going, mother,’ said Lucía. ‘The three of us are going.’
‘What did you say?’ Perla said.
‘That all three of us are going,’ said Lucía, shouting.
‘Which three?’ said Perla.
‘You, Mariana and I,’ shouted Lucía.
‘I?’ said Perla. ‘I what?’
Lucía blew out hard.
‘You’re coming with us,’ she shouted.
‘You’re coming with us?’ said Perla.
‘Not me,’ shouted Lucía, absurdly. ‘You’re coming with us.’
‘and’
Under her breath Lucía said, ‘You could speak a little bit too, no?’
‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’ I shouted.
Perla seemed uninterested in my observation.
‘I don’t think she can see anything,’ Lucía said.
‘She can see a bit,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think she’s interested.’
‘Where are you going?’ Perla said.
‘To a place I’ve been told is really lovely,’ Lucía shouted.
‘I doubt there’s anything lovely about it,’ I said.
‘I didn’t say it was, I said I’ve been told.’
That’s Lucía. She can be ferocious all right, but she never, ever lies.
‘Where are you going?’ asked Perla.
Lucía murmured something I didn’t hear.
‘It’s strange,’ I said, ‘with such dishonest parents, where did we both
learn not to lie?’
‘I taught you,’ said Lucía.
 ‘Ah yes,’ I said. ‘You taught me everything. If it weren’t for you I’d be
an ignorant brute.’
‘Yes,’ said Lucía. ‘You would be an ignorant brute.’
Perhaps she was right. I’ve often thought as much. With such a
capricious mother, such a vague father and given my own natural
inclination to contemplate my navel, what would have become of me
without an older sister to keep goading me onwards? I didn’t say that to her,
of course. I gave her a sideways glance: she was driving too cautiously. My
worst trait is laziness, I thought, and Lucía’s is wariness. And what about
fear? Where did the fear come from?
‘No speeding,’ said Perla.
I glanced outside. To break the speed limit in these conditions would be
nothing short of miraculous. We were advancing along Córdoba Avenue (if
‘advancing’ isn’t putting too optimistic a gloss on things) at something
slower than a crawl.
‘I’m not speeding, Mother,’ shouted Lucía, but gently.
I waited for an answer; Perla had never accepted that her opinions were
not the only valid ones. But there was no retort from the back seat. I turned
round to look at her. She was staring into nothing and seemed completely to
have forgotten her earlier admonishment. She may even have forgotten that
she was in a car with her two children. Or even that she had children.
‘I think that it’s the best option, at any rate,’ I said.
Lucía looked relieved.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Besides, if it’s got everything they say, she’s bound to
love it.’
I didn’t believe that she would love it. Rather I thought that it would be
the best solution for us. She, all love and French piquet, had raised a couple
of perfect incompetents who hated old age, feared illness, and were scared
to death of this new circumstance flung up by fate (why hadn’t Perla
educated us for such an eventuality?). That was why we were driving, at
walking pace, down Córdoba Avenue trying to convince each other that we
were doing the right thing for our mother and for the world and that our
destination really was a happiness home in which Perla would finally
rediscover her gift for singing tango vals and El Rubio would peer around
the door to watch her with his enigmatic blue gaze.
We didn’t look back at her. Neither Lucía nor I looked back. We took it
as a given (well I did, and I’d swear that Lucía did, too) that our mother was
going contentedly towards the unknown. I didn’t even think (I had to make
an effort not to think it but I was managing that, out of a devotion to all that
is beautiful and true) that to Perla, who had yearned to travel, this journey
by car to the Happiness Care Home was probably much the same as looking
at the sea, with El Rubio at her side, from the deck of the Giulio Cesare
(something she had dreamt of doing so often, without ever managing a
more glamorous crossing than the one across the river to Montevideo on the
Vapor de la Carrera), or being taken in a coffin to the city of La Tablada,
where he, affable, ironic and ever youthful, had been waiting for her for
forty years—but not for this old biddy, please, bring me the one who used
to sing tangos, says El Rubio, from his sepia photo, the one in the little
linen dress she embroidered herself in cross-stitch, the one who dreamt of
being rich but who used to laugh until she cried as if laughing, when all is
said and done, were the greatest fortune a person could have—and who
could enjoy an anchovy sandwich as though it were a piece of heaven.

. . .

It was during that season, which lasted a whole summer and into the
autumn, that the four of us lived crammed into a back room and El Rubio,
for the first and only time, seemed settled. It was just after the time we
spent living with our grandparents and before we moved to the flat with
chandeliers. El Rubio had taken on the lease of a small shop and we slept at
the back, me sharing a small bed with Lucía then Perla and El Rubio in the
double bed, a yard away. It was wonderful: I could feel my sister’s body
next to mine and hear my parents’ breathing, their hushed conversations. I
didn’t have nightmares in those days. It was a transition period, a time with
no ties in which each person could hope for whatever he or she wanted: El
Rubio that at last he would be able to buy the car he and Perla had been
dreaming of, that he wouldn’t have to count his pennies any more; Lucía
that she was going to live in a real house where she could put together a
library. I wasn’t yet expecting anything very much—I wasn’t even aware of
being happy. (I learnt an awareness of happiness, I remember, one summer
night four years later in the flat with the chandeliers. It must have been at
the end of January because a few days later it would be my eighth birthday.
We were going to have our first summer holiday and for the first time I was
going to see the sea. That night I didn’t need to hope desperately that Lucía
would wake up and chase away my fears: she was as awake as I was and
both of us were sitting on her bed, talking about the sea, about how each of
us dreamt that the sea would be. At dawn we went outside to wait for El
Rubio’s friend to bring his car. I had never experienced the street at that
time of day or the silence, heavy with people’s hopes, that defines that hour.
Lucía and I didn’t argue about anything. Arms around each other, united in
our excitement, we walked along the deserted street singing a bolero. That
was the moment when I understood what happiness is.) During those back-
room months I used to look forward to the hot nights, but I wouldn’t have
been able to explain exactly why. El Rubio used to pull down the shutters
on the little shop, leaving the door open to let in the vibrant summer air and
we would turn off the lights so that we couldn’t be seen from the street and
eat anchovy sandwiches made with pumpernickel and lots of butter and
drink—beer for the parents, Bilz soda for the children—and chat, and laugh
a lot, and nobody thought about death. And even though I couldn’t yet put it
into words, years later I knew that I had been happy.
There are moments in time when everything seems to be in harmony, I
thought. Like the fairy bites.
‘About time too. I thought you’d forgotten.’
And there was I thinking Lucía wouldn’t need to interrupt me, now that
she’s a character with her own speaking part.
‘I’m appearing as a character, but not to my best advantage. Let’s agree
that that car journey wasn’t our finest hour.’
It wasn’t the finest, or the most pleasant, but those two frightened women
who were driving towards the Happiness Care Home were us too. That’s
why I have to talk about the trip. And why I’ve never been able to forget it.
‘Speak about it all you want. But first of all tell the story of the fairy
bites. I’ve already told you that I don’t want to keep being the ogre in this
story.’
I was just coming to that—the fairy bites. The fairy bite, strictly
speaking, because singularity was part of the appeal: you didn’t get more
than one at a time. The fairy bite was an invention of Lucía’s that came
about while we were having our hot milk, and its appearance was
independent of the shopkeeper game. I mean, even though we were playing
Shopkeeper, at the moment in which she prepared the fairy bite, Lucía was
Lucía. The fairy bite comprised all the most delicious things one can eat in
the world, the golden crust of the bread, a lot of butter, the middle of the
cheese, the best ham in the fridge, tomato, olives, if there were any olives,
gherkins, if there were any gherkins. It contained everything necessary for
an exquisite feast, but in such tiny quantities that you could eat one in a
mouthful. It was like happiness: when you wanted to savour it, it had
already passed.
Now we were driving a bit faster and in silence. There was a finality
about the rhythm of the rolling car, something that smacked of death, but
that was less august, more wretched than death. So I said to Lucía:
‘Once we’ve left her there, we won’t stay long, right?’
And Lucía said:
‘Well first we have to make sure that she’s comfortable and everything.’
I looked behind me. Perla was still gazing blankly out of the window. I
tried a little experiment.
‘Are you feeling all right, Mother?’ I shouted to her.
She didn’t even turn towards me but continued immobile and
inexpressive, as if I hadn’t said anything.
‘Are you all right, Mother?’ Lucía shouted.
‘No speeding,’ said Perla.
And that was all she said until we arrived at the Happiness Care Home.
It looked promising from the outside. White, two storeys, the front door
and window frames painted green.
‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ said Lucía, determined to convince herself that
everything was going well.
‘It seems decent enough,’ I said, not able to give Lucía full satisfaction,
even though it would have benefited me, too.
Getting Perla out of the car was no easy task. But it wasn’t the near
impossibility of moving her that struck me; it was her complete lack of
resistance to what Lucía and I were doing with her body. She’s given in, I
thought. She’s finally given in. I remembered the lion and wanted to cry.
So there we were, the three of us facing that green door. On a sign to my
left I read: The Happiness Care Home. Recreational Residence for the
Elderly. I’m getting old, Mariúshkale, Perla had said to me less than three
years earlier, and she didn’t even believe it herself then. Now it had
happened: she was incontestably old. All three of us women waiting at the
door to the Happiness Care Home were old. What kind of unappealing
tableau would we form for the person who was going to open the door any
second now? I could hear hurried steps from inside.
 Now she stood before us. A robust lady in a pink coverall overflowing
with kindness. They were expecting us, yes, yes, Señora Daisy was
genuinely excited to meet us, and was this lovely lady our mother? I was
too cowardly to look at Perla; I don’t think Lucía looked at her either. We
distanced ourselves, letting the lady in pink praise Perla and paw her,
manhandling her into another coverall, this time in pale green. I’m not sure
at what point we lost Perla: my attention was focussed on following Pink
Coverall.
You could see that the place was well organised. Lovely chairs, lovely
plants, lovely little old people with blank expressions dotted around. I tried
not to look to either side of me. Walking beside Lucía I kept my eyes fixed
on Pink Coverall, who never ceased doling out greetings and loving
gestures, wiping a mouth here, rocking a chair there, spreading cheer
wherever she went. She left us in a very tidy office and there, behind the
desk, was Señora Daisy. She was blonde and buxom. And very talkative. I
think she was already in full stream when we arrived, and was still talking
when we left. It may well have been her natural state, as much a part of her
as the big bosoms. Everything she said to us was wonderful. Even we, on
her lips, were wonderful. She was very psychological and had realised
straightaway that she was dealing with educated and intelligent people and
that was particularly gratifying to her because it seemed that people on our
intellectual level were better equipped than hoi polloi to appreciate the
stimulating atmosphere of the home. From what I could gather of her
speech, they got the old people to sew, to do embroidery, to gambol through
meadows of wild flowers, and clap hands, and blow glass. I was trying to
picture Perla—who had lately seemed so far away—physically cajoled into
clapping games or sing-songs when, in the gap Señora Daisy left between
two words, I heard Lucía shakily pipe up. ‘The thing is, our mother is quite
an unusual woman,’ said my sister, incredibly, and I drew in my breath
because now it had been said, and Señora Daisy was not going to be
allowed to believe, like the police officer and monobrow and even the kind,
dark-skinned girl that our mother was any old missing person. She sang
1920s tangos and said ‘I’m stiffed’ and wrapped herself in lemon-yellow
feathers to look like an aristocrat. And she was so magical, that is her love
was so excessive and magical that it had the power to chase away all
misfortune. Until the day I lost the lion, I thought suddenly, and all the
misery in the world came down on my head.
 Without resistance (at least on my part, because by that point I had
decided that it was pointless to resist), we were led here and there, chivvied
along by Señora Daisy, who wanted to show us around the home personally
so that we could appreciate with our eyes its delights, which were perfectly
suited to a person as special as our mother. What rubbish, I wanted to say to
Lucía, there’s nothing special about Mother any more, or about any of us,
all we have is the perfect memory of that beautiful thing we once were or of
that which we now think was once beautiful. Balderdash, I heard someone
say and stopped in my tracks. It felt like a dream, but couldn’t have been
because Lucía had clearly also heard it. She stopped and looked at me. Both
of us knew there was only one person in the world we had ever heard use
that word. Because Perla could lie like the best of them, but if she suspected
the mere whiff of deceit in another person she would come out with those
strange words the origin of which, even today, is still a mystery to me.
Balderdash and poppycock. What’s wrong, dears, asked Señora Daisy. We
didn’t get the chance to tell her: a small commotion nearby brought us all to
a halt. Calm down Granny, we clearly heard a wheedling voice say. I’ll give
you Granny, said the voice of the chanteuse.
Disregarding Señora Daisy, Lucía and I rushed to the place from where
the voice had come. We found Perla on her feet, holding onto a chair for
balance and clutching in her free hand an object I couldn’t identify but
which she seemed prepared to hurl at the first Coverall who dared to touch
her. Calm down, Granny, said the Coverall again. Perla raised her hand to
her breast. Me, your grandmother? she said. And then a small miracle
occurred: she laughed. And I swear she laughed with sarcirony.
Something must have come over Lucía and me because we pushed
Señora Daisy—who was trying to hold us back—out of the way, then went
one to each side of Perla. It’s all right, Mother, we’re going now, said Lucía.
And Perla: It’s clear that you two need to be kept on a tighter rein. We
admitted that she was right and in the teeth of Señora Daisy’s shrill
explanations of how natural and even healthy our mother’s reaction had
been and how this little incident merely confirmed how stimulated our
beloved and very special mother was going to feel in this optimal
environment, we took Perla by the arms and made our way towards the exit.
We could scarcely contain ourselves, Lucía and I, we had to cover our
mouths and stifle the odd snort so that Señora Daisy and the Coveralls
didn’t notice our predicament. As soon as we were outside with the door
closed behind us, we exploded. We had to let go of Perla so as to double up
and laugh properly, long and hard. They would have had her playing
nursery games, said Lucía, weeping with laughter. And I said: That Daisy
woman had no idea who she was up against. Clutching our stomachs we
leaned on each other so as not to fall over, helpless with laughter beneath
the recriminatory gaze of Perla who was gradually retreating into a world
we didn’t know but about which I, there in the street had begun to have an
inkling. I remembered the torrejas. That afternoon on which we had such an
overwhelming desire to eat torrejas that we couldn’t wait another second
before sinking our teeth into one. Then I, in the same way that I deduced
every night the presence of the lion, worked out a formula that we worked
on feverishly, perfecting it to a point where Lucía could have a go at
making them. The end result looked more like dispirited doughnuts. It was
wonderful, all the same. Pointing at the doughnuts we murmured torrejas,
torrejas, and laughed so much that Perla, who was just coming home, heard
us from the passage and when she came in and saw the doughnuts wanted
to get angry but fell about laughing instead.
Now as then, I saw us from the perspective of Perla’s empty gaze,
laughing until we couldn’t laugh any more in front of the green door of the
Happiness Care Home. And there and then I was sure that I had never
stopped knowing the lion. That, in the middle of the night I still conjured
his menacing presence and, paralysed with fear and curiosity, I still waited
for him to leap.
And I understood that the cruelty of life is precisely that: you never really
lose yourself. Although the teeth may soften in your mouth and a mist of
forgetfulness and tiredness cloud your understanding, you’re still prey to
the same vanity, the same fear, and the same uncontrollable desire to laugh
that illuminated the other ages. Even if you have forgotten what you were
frightened of, and there is no longer any reason to be vain, and you aren’t
sure what the hell it is that’s making you laugh.
The three of us got into the car and set off home. Lucía and I not
knowing what we were going to do with Perla, Perla not knowing where
she was being driven, all three of us terrified and full of a sense of triumph
that was entirely baseless. Absurd, devastated, invincible. Until the end.
THE NIGHT OF THE COMET
For Sylvia Iparraguire

All we knew about the comet was that someone had plunged to his death to
dodge its arrival, that its tail had luminously sliced across certain nights of
the Centenary Year of the Argentine Independence, that, like the Paris
Exhibition or the Great War, its path through the world had memorably
illuminated the dawn of this century. The man on the wicker chair had
spoken of a photograph he had seen, he couldn’t remember where, in which
several gentlemen wearing boaters and ladies in plumed hats were staring as
if bewitched at a dot in the sky, a dot that unfortunately (he said) did not
appear in the photograph. I had recalled an illustration in my fifth-grade
reader: a family paralysed by the vision of the comet passing through the
skies. In the drawing the family members could be seen sitting at a table,
stiffly erect, their eyes full of terror, not daring to turn their heads to the
window for fear of seeing it again. (As soon as I said this, I had a feeling
that the text referred to a Montgolfier hot-air balloon, but since I didn’t
know what a Montgolfier hot-air balloon was—I wasn’t even sure that such
a thing existed—and since I found it suggestive that I had attributed the
family’s surprise, whatever the real phenomenon might have been, to the
arrival of the comet as early as the fifth grade, I didn’t correct my
conceivable mistake and everyone, myself included, was left with the
impression that the comet was capable of sending people into shock, of
leaving them frozen in their seats.)
We had a number of questions. How big did it seem when it was last
seen? How big would it seem now? How long did it take to cross the sky?
The man next to the table with the lamp suggested that, since it was as fast
as a plane, unless one paid close attention the second it went by, snap, one
would miss it. The man on the stool said no, that it rose over the river at
nightfall and set over the western high-rises at dawn.
‘That’s impossible,’ said the woman leaning against the French door,
‘because then it would seem stationary in the sky. And something that
seems stationary can’t leave a trail on the sea or in the sky, anywhere.’
Since this seemed illogical but plausible, several of us agreed with her.
What we couldn’t agree on was the size.
‘The size of the moon,’ said the woman in the light-coloured armchair.
‘Of a very small star,’ said the man who was putting on the tape of Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik, and he added that it could only be distinguished from
the star by its tail. And how long was the tail? The questions never stopped.
‘My grandfather told us he’d seen it,’ said the man smoking a pipe. ‘He
was in the courtyard, sitting on a three-legged stool’ (I thought the stool
was an aleatory detail and I immediately decided that his testimony was
suspect) ‘and the comet went by, neither very slow nor very fast, like a scarf
made out of light. No: like a scarf made out of air that was also light, I think
he said.’ But, of course, this piece of information was simply too unreliable:
given the age of the man with the pipe, his grandfather must have died long
ago. Even if he hadn’t made the story up (as the detail of the stool led one to
suppose), who could swear that the grandson remembered the words
exactly? And would he have been able to tell what was false from what was
true? In fact, he had repeated the thing about the stool without lending the
superfluous detail the slightest touch of irony.
But why were we to care what that grandfather saw? We had no need for
grandfathers; our turn had come at last: it would cross the skies of our time.
And we felt fortunate in those unfortunate days just being alive, still able to
move around happily, still able to wait happily on the night of the comet.
Actually, that whole year had been the year of the comet, but since the
previous week everyone’s hopes had run wild. The newspapers predicted
glorious events: this time it would pass closer to the Earth than at the
beginning of the century; it would look mainly red; it would look mainly
white but would be dragging an orange tail; it would have the apparent size
of a small melon, the length of a common snake; it would cover seventy
percent of the visible sky. This last possibility intrigued us the most.
‘What do they mean, seventy percent of the sky?’ asked the woman
drinking coffee.
‘But then almost the whole sky will be the comet,’ said the man who had
come with his girlfriend.
‘Night will become day’ (the woman lighting the cigarette).
‘Better than day’ (the man with the pillow on the floor) ‘as if the moon,
with all its reflected light, were barely a hundred metres from the Earth.
Low down, in a corner, one sees the black night sky, but all the rest is
Moon. Can you imagine? Solid Moon.’ There was a silence, as if we were
all trying to imagine a sky of solid Moon.
‘And how long will it stay like that?’ (the man with his eyes glued on the
woman who came alone).
‘The comet is constantly moving. It will move on and the strip of
darkness will become wider and wider until there’s only a thin thread, a thin
thread of light on the horizon that will then disappear and it will be night
again.’ I felt a sort of sadness; I had only just realised that this thing which
had once seemed out of my reach—like the boiling oil thrown by the
women of Buenos Aires on the invading English troops in the mid-
eighteenth century, or the Firpo-Dempsey match—was not only about to
take place; it would also come to an end.
‘But how fast will it disappear?’ No one knew.
The woman with her back against one of the men’s knees hit herself on
the forehead: ‘Now that I think about it, no,’ she said, ‘it can’t be the width.
The comet will take up seventy percent of the length. Don’t you see? The
tail. It’s the tail that will take up seventy percent. Like a rainbow going
from here to there’ (she drew a vast segment of a circle with her extended
arm) ‘but ending before it reaches the horizon.’ She thought for a moment.
‘At a distance of thirty percent,’ she added, with a touch of scientific rigor.
That wasn’t bad, though I still preferred the vast Moon unfolded a
hundred metres from Earth. And at what speed would that great arch of
light cross the sky? That question—and many others—remained
unanswered.
But we didn’t feel uneasy. Uneasy we had felt at the beginning of the
week, when the papers announced that the comet was already over the
world. We had always imagined that we’d rush out into the street to greet its
arrival. ‘Here it comes, here comes the comet!’ But none of that happened.
We looked up into the sky and saw nothing.
There were those with telescopes, of course. Those with telescopes made
calculations and drew up schedules and strategic points. It seems that the
brother-in-law of the woman caressing one of the men’s ears, after
consulting several manuals, had found the very best optical conditions: on
the balcony of one of his cousins at 3:25 Wednesday morning with a
telescope aimed at 40 degrees off the constellation of Centaurus.
‘But your brother-in-law, did he actually see it?’ we asked at the same
time, as both the man and I played with the cat.
 ‘He says he thinks he saw it,’ was the cautious answer.
We had heard of some people who had travelled to Chascomus or to a
place somewhere between San Miguel del Monte and Las Flores, or of
others who had hurried to Tandil, to a small hill close to the Moving Rock.
But as we had not had the chance to talk to any of them, we didn’t know
whether these peregrinations had been fruitful. Through adverts in the
newspapers we knew that several kinds of charters had been organised,
from a jet flight to San Martin de los Andes that included champagne
dinner, diplomatic suite, sauna and full American breakfast, to bus tours to
several suburban areas, a few with traditional barbecue and guitar music
under the comet’s light. We didn’t know what the results had been. But
three very precise lines in a Thursday paper made us dismiss all those
telescopes and nocturnal ramblings. And that’s how it had to be. Because
what we had always dreamt of, what we truly wished for, was simply to
look up and see it. And that, the three lines in the paper said, would become
possible on Friday night once it was completely dark; then the comet would
come closer to Earth than ever before. Then, and only then, might it be seen
as those men in boaters and those women in hats had seen it, as the
grandfather on his three-legged stool and the bewitched family in my reader
had seen it. Right here, by the river, on the Costanera Sur. And, in honour of
that unique moment for which we had longed since our days of reading
adventure stories and which, with luck, would repeat itself for our
children’s grandchildren, this Friday night, all the lights of the Costanera
would be switched off.
That was the reason that waiting in this house in San Telmo, among
lamps and stools, was something of a vigil. Every so often someone would
go out onto the balcony to see whether it was already dark.
‘No use going earlier’ (the woman drinking white wine). ‘We wouldn’t
see anything in the light.’
And the man on the balcony: ‘No, it’s not because of the light, it’s
because it won’t come over the horizon until it’s dark. That’s what the paper
says.’
But at what time exactly? We didn’t know that either. Darkness isn’t
something that falls over the world for an instant. True. But there comes a
moment when, suddenly looking out at the street, one can say, ‘It’s night
already.’ This was said by the man eating peanuts, and we all went out onto
the balcony to check.
 On the way to the Costanera we said very little. We were crossing
Azopardo when the man nearest to the sidewalk asked, ‘You think it’s
appeared already?’
And the woman next to the wall said, ‘Better if it has. Then when we get
there we’ll see it suddenly, over the river.’
‘The river?’
I don’t know who said that. It didn’t matter much. I realised that I too,
since I’d read the announcement in the paper, had imagined it like that: with
its tail of powdered stars extending down into the river. But there’s no real
river in Buenos Aires any longer.
‘Grass and mosquitoes, that’s all there is on the Costanera Sur,’ said the
man on my right.
‘Still the place has kept its own magic’ (the woman behind). ‘It’s as if it
has preserved a memory of the river.’ I recalled the majestic ghost of the
Municipal Balneario Beach, the square celebrating the triumphant arrival of
the Solitary Seaman, Luis Viale, and his stone lifebelt about to dive (into a
muddy lot where there are now only screeching magpies) to save the
victims of the shipwrecked Vapor de la Carrera. I recalled the drawbridge,
the same bridge I’d crossed in the No. 14 streetcar when my mother took
me to the Balneario, so familiar that I could tell the width of the beach by
the height of the water hitting the stone wall. I loved that bridge, the
breathless wait on the days when it opened leisurely to allow a cargo ship to
pass, the suspense as it closed again, since the slightest mistake in the
position of the tracks (I suspected) would provoke a terrible derailment.
And the joy when the streetcar emerged unscathed and the river lay waiting
for me. The river was like life: the comet was something else. The comet
was like one of those moments of ecstasy that can be found only in books.
Distractedly, I knew that it would return one day, but I didn’t expect it to.
Because in the days when happiness consisted in playing in the mud of the
Balneario, any comet or paradise glimpsed beyond my twentieth year didn’t
merit being dreamt about.
‘And here I am walking across that bridge,’ I said to myself, ‘not so
different from the person who once crossed it in a streetcar so as not to love
it still, nor so decrepit as not to be on the verge of shouting with joy, as I
march in procession to meet the comet with this bunch of lunatics.’
It took me a while to realise that the word ‘procession’ had occurred to
me because of the mass of people who, on foot or in cars or trucks or even
in a tractor, were gathering together in greater and greater numbers as we
approached the Costanera.
The Costanera itself was a virtual wall. Between the crowd trying to find
a good spot from which to view the sky, the smoke from the improvised
bread-and-sausage vendors, and the absence of spotlights, the only thing
visible from the Los Italianos Boulevard (where we now found ourselves)
was a bloated amoeba of more or less human consistency, into which we
were sucked and which didn’t stop moving and humming.
‘Over there, over there.’ Not far from me, a forceful voice managed to
emerge from the amoeba. Several of us turned to look. I detected a thin and
knotted index finger pointing towards the northeast.
‘Where? I can’t see a thing.’
‘There. Can’t you see it? A fraction to the side of those two stars. About
this far away from the horizon.’
‘But is it rising?’ asked an anguished voice to my left.
‘Well, it’s rising slowly.’
I thought I saw it, gently separating itself from the tiny light of a booth or
something, close to the horizon, when behind me a hoarse voice shouted,
‘No, it’s there, far up. To the right of the Three Marys.’
I had no trouble finding the Three Marys and I was scrutinising their
right side when I heard a child’s voice full of enthusiasm: ‘I see it! There it
is! It’s huge!’
I looked for the child’s finger and, somewhat hopefully, for something
huge in the direction his finger indicated. In vain.
‘You know what the problem is?’ said a voice almost in my ear. ‘We’re
looking for it straight on. And that can’t be done: it can’t be seen straight
on. What we should do is stand sideways and look for it out of the corner of
our eyes.’
I turned halfway round. I noticed that several other people had done the
same, only they turned sideways relative to different things. I shrugged and
looked upward out of the corner of my eye, first with my right eye and then
with my left. A hand touched my ankle. Startled I looked down. There were
several people lying on the ground.
‘Can I give you some advice?’ came a voice next to my feet. ‘Lie down
on the grass. That way, face up, you can see the whole sky at once and I
think you should be able to find it immediately.’
 Obediently I lay down next to several strangers and again I looked
upward. In the unlit and moonless night, under the continuous music of the
universe, I felt on the point of discovering something that might have
allowed me, perhaps, to continue with my life with a certain degree of
peace. Then, a few metres away from my head, someone spoke: ‘Don’t you
realise it’s useless to look up from the ground? The trick is to make a
reticule with your fingers. Didn’t you read that this reticular effect increases
the power of your vision? It’s just like having a microscope.’
The microscope man seemed unreliable to me, so I never got around to
trying the reticular effect. Somewhat disheartened, I stood up. I looked
around me. Pubescent youngsters, hunchbacks, women about to give birth,
people suffering from high blood pressure, idlers and matrons were
simultaneously and noisily pointing at the zenith, at the horizon, at the
fountain of Lola Mora, at the planes taking off from the Municipal Airport,
at certain falling stars, at fireworks, at the Milky Way or at the unexpected
phantom ship of La Carrera. Cross-eyed, frowning, using the reticular
effect, twitching their ears, jumping on one leg, swinging their pelvises,
using telescopes, microscopes, periscopes or kaleidoscopes, through
engagement rings, straws, the eyes of needles, or water pipes, everyone was
peering at the sky. Each person was searching, among the avalanche of stars
(cold and beautiful since the awakening of the world, cold and beautiful
when the last little glimmer from our planet is extinguished), each one was
searching among those stars for a singular undefinable light. We never even
realised that we were discovering death. And yet that is what it was: we had
lost, once again, our last chance. One day, like a melon, like a snake, like a
scarf of light, like everything round or with a tail or resplendent that we can
create through our sheer desire to be happy, the golden-tailed comet would
spin again through the space that had been our sky. But we, we who
struggled and waited that night under the impassive stars, we on this bank
and shoal would no longer disturb the soft evening mist to chase it.
Short-story writer, novelist and essayist Liliana Heker was born in Buenos
Aires in 1943. She founded, with Abelardo Castillo, the literary magazines
El Escarabajo de Oro (1961–1974) and El Ornitorrinco (1977–1986),
where she published essays and sustained polemics that went beyond the
issues that stirred them. Heker published five short-story collections and
was twice awarded the Konex Prize, granted to the best short-story books of
each decade. She is also the author of two novels, Zona de clivaje and Elfin
de la historia, and two nonfiction works, Las hermanas de Shakespeare and
Diálogos sobre la vida y la muerte. Since 1978 she coordinates writing
workshops, where she mentors many current Argentinian writers.

ALBERTO MANGUEL is an internationally acclaimed writer, translator,

editor and critic. He is the author of numerous nonfiction books, including
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (coauthored with Gianni Guadalupi), A
History of Reading, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography, The Library
at Night, A Reader on Reading and Curiosity. Manguel has also published
novels in English (News from a Foreign Country Came) and Spanish (El
regreso and Todos los hombres son mentirosos). Among his many awards
are the Guggenheim Fellowship and an honorary doctorate from the
University of Liège. Manguel is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres.

MIRANDA FRANCE is the author of books on Spain and Argentina, as

well as two novels. A regular contributor to books pages, she also teaches
creative writing and has translated various works of Latin American fiction,
including Alberto Manguel’s All Men Are Liars.