I look at myself in the mirror and I don’t recognise the person I see.

She’s twenty pounds lighter, has ill-fitting translucent skin and a line that divides her in two. She has dead eyes. We’re swollen, cut, wet. My body screams. My nipples are scorched nerves. There is a web of taut threads under my breasts that burn and wrap around me, almost strangling me. My ovaries are funnels of hollow pain, starting wide and then intensifying at the point where they end.

My body is pain, a funnel of pain.

Mateo was born six days ago. We’re living in the flat my grandmother Pilar owned when she was alive: Andrés, my mother, the baby, me, and an unbearable humid heat that comes in through the windows and burrows into my body, leaving only the floor tiles untouched. I survive by being two people. A cold mother with apathetic legs who’s lost a lot of blood, and another who gives orders: I’m going to stand up, I’m going to pick up the bucket and I’m going to take it to the kitchen and I’m going to fill it with hot water. I’m going to carry the baby and I’m going to walk ten steps. I’m going to sit down next to the cradle, I’m going to dry him and I’m going to put his head inside his pyjama top. A person who is a useless body, and a person who is a voice of command.

It’s nine o’clock. I’ve already washed and dressed the baby and put him in the bouncer in the living room. I’ve had the same button-up pyjamas on since the day before yesterday. They were Pilar’s, bought in Madrid, old but pretty and comfortable. I walk through the flat carrying huge, overheated breasts. I reach the laundry room. I put the bucket in the sink and I throw Mateo’s dirty pyjamas in the washing machine. Sweat trickles from underneath my breasts and runs in drops down the lines of my belly before reaching my white cotton knickers. The verbs “to wash,” “to pick up,” “to walk,” “to hang up” don’t take long to write, but each one demands an order from the Susana who commands to the Susana who is incapable. It’s exhausting.

I stay in the laundry room, leaning on the washing machine. I hear a noise and sense that the baby is about to start crying. Don’t let him cry don’t let him cry don’t let him cry, I pray-recite. My legs feel anaesthetised. My mother comes from the kitchen with a mug.

“How are you doing today, Susi?”

“Fine, ma.”

The baby is crying. I walk to the sofa next to the bouncer, but I don’t pick him up. I close my eyes. My mother doesn’t pick him up either.

“Have you had breakfast yet? Would you like a coffee? Shall I hand you Mateo?”

“OK.”

My mother unstraps the baby and passes him to me, and then brings me a flask of water and a coffee with milk. I clamp him to my breast. My nipple hurts once more as if it were a scorched nerve, but while I feed, I don’t feel the threads wrapping or strangling me. I close my eyes, I touch his hair, I smell him. He smells of camomile and operating theatre. I love you very much, Materile, I love you very much, I say without speaking. I open my eyes. I look at the yellow wall of the living room and see an imperfection that looks like the right-hand edge of the map of Colombia.  Hold on, Susi, hold on, concentrate on something, let’s count. It’s the only time, despite the pain, that I feel connected to something. I hold Mateo with one hand and drink my coffee with the other. It’s boiling and I imagine it running down inside me and heating my legs. Because I’m both cold and hot. Outside, it’s unbearably hot, and inside, my muscles and bones feel cold and abandoned.

“Merce and Cecilia are coming for lunch. Or should I tell them not to, Susi?”

“Yes, better tell them not to.”

After a while I move Mateo to the other side.

“Would you like to come shopping with me?”

“Didn’t we have to take Mateo to the paediatrician?”

“We can take him and go shopping in Carulla on the way back.”

“OK, I’ll get changed and we can go.”

I leave the baby with my mother to burp him. I put on some light blue American Apparel trousers and a pink T-shirt. I’m thin, I don’t recognise myself. It’s quarter to eleven. I pick up the Maxi Cosi, we put the baby in and we strap it on. I’m going to carry the baby and I’m going to walk. I walk to the lift. He weighs a lot, my legs weigh a lot. We hook the Maxi Cosi into the back seat and close the doors, I get in the front. We take the Avenida del Poblado. I can feel myself shivering and regret not bringing my jumper. My mother asks me if she should leave me at the lift or if we should park together. Better stay together, I tell her. When we take the Maxi Cosi out of the car, Mateo starts crying intensely loud. We get into the lift with the screaming baby. There are two women and a lad who looks about fifteen. We press floor ten.

“The baby must be feeling hot.”

“Pick him up.”

“Or he’s hungry.”

“Take him out, poor thing, he needs his mum.”

Interfering cows I can’t handle it what do you know about it I don’t know what to do I can’t handle it shut up. I roll my eyes and stare at them angrily. We step out of the lift. Mateo is crying his head off, we arrive at the clinic, we unstrap him and I try to feed him but he doesn’t latch on. He cries for ten minutes during the consultation, he cries while my mother carries him in the corridor, he cries when the paediatrician picks him up and says he’s a chubby rascal, he cries while they weigh him, he cries while they measure him, he cries when the paediatrician tells me he has a spirited temperament and while we talk about feeding and my weakness. He cries when I try to feed him again. He cries when the paediatrician asks me if I’ve been back to the gynaecologist and I say yes, I’m no longer anaemic but I feel as if I still were. He cries while he explains that there are babies that cry more, that he has a healthy weight and height. He cries in the corridor while I’m paying, I cry when I finally manage to feed him in a little room before getting back in the car.

“Don’t cry while you’re feeding, it’s not good for the baby,” another interfering woman says to me.

My mother takes me by the hand. This time the pain doesn’t abate, it’s a twenty minute funnel of pain. I squeeze her hand. Mateo falls asleep, we put him in the Maxi Cosi, my mother carries him to the car. We don’t talk at all on the way home, and we don’t shop. When we open the apartment door, it smells like Rosalinda is there. She comes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to help.

“Wow, Rosalí, that smells fantastic.”

She takes some onions out of the vegetable drawer.

“Put the boy down, love, and sit and keep me company while I finish the sauce.”

“Coming.”

I pull up a chair. She sits on a wooden bench as if it were the kind of little step that kitchens have in the patios of old country houses, and we talk about when she was working in our beach house in Arboletes and I was fifteen years old. Mateo starts to wake up. I turn to look, my mother takes him on her lap and I hear “Materile, Materile, Materile rile ro.” She’s waving the doll with black and white spots at him. Rosalinda cuts white onions in a plastic bowl without looking. I remember Pilar, three years ago, when the first baby in this family was born, cutting red onions in a plastic bowl without looking in a house in Galicia. My clothes are different, the climate is different, the colours, the faces of Rosalinda and Pilar are different. Rosalinda’s is big, Pilar’s petite. Rosalinda’s knife is big with a white handle, Pilar’s small with a black handle. The bowls are different: today’s is huge and white—you can barely see the onion in the bottom—and Pilar’s was pale blue and small. And even so, the scenes are alike, what I see is almost identical: women who are nearly seventy cutting onions without looking. They know by feel how far to push the knife in, where the vegetable ends and the palm begins, and they stop there. Half chatting to me, half muttering a lullaby. Rosalinda singing, “At your mami’s breast you’re fed and your papi brings you bread.” Pilar singing, “Sleep little baby warm and tight or the vivi may eat you up tonight.” Why do they cut onion the same way? Why do they sing to themselves while they do it? I begin to think that there are things that must come from far away, to think of the lovely and almost poetic thing that is that mesh of transparent, half white, half purple squares that both of them make with their hands. Of the lovely, almost poetic thing that is the short life of those squares that are uprooted and thrown into the void seconds after being created. And that nobody sees.

“Do you know if Miss Mercedes is coming to lunch in the end, love?”

“No, they’re not coming.”

“Ah, are they coming in the evening?”

“I don’t think so.”

“They’re not coming today,” my mother calls out, “Leave food in the microwave just for the two of us.”

Your papi brings you bread, at your mami’s breast you’re fed. The squares that fall into the void seconds after being created. The size of families.

Rosalinda finishes, we stand up. She scrapes into a frying pan with oil the onion, together with the tomato and spring onion that she’s cut on a board, with a sprinkle of salt, a pinch of cumin and a spoonful of tomato sauce. She stirs it with a wooden spoon, rests, stirs again. The kitchen smells delicious and Mateo is calm. It’s a thin slice of happiness. Lunch is rice soup, mince, ripe plantain, cornbread and avocado. My mother and I sit to eat at a round table with five seats. I want to eat, but when I have food in my mouth I want to throw up. Old people must feel like this when they’re not hungry. I’m thinking that Pilar would be sitting to my left if she were still alive. Before dying she used to tell me she would give anything to be hungry. I’m going to eat, I have to eat, just a spoonful. Mateo becomes restless and my mother takes him on her lap. Just a bite, a sip of juice. I cut the avocado in two, take out the stone with a knife, scoop it out of its skin with a spoon, cut into squares and sprinkle on some salt. I have salty grease in my mouth that doesn’t taste of anything else. I put some of the sauce on my cornbread. A tiny bit of mince in the soup. Another spoonful.

“Susi, you need to eat more.”

I look at my mother, she knows I’m not hungry. I look at the clock, it’s two o’clock. I pick Mateo up. Another bite, another sip, another spoonful, more avocado. I stop eating. When I stand up, he starts to fuss. I hand him to Rosalinda while I go to the toilet to pee.

“Must be because he’s hungry.”

“Can’t be hungry, he ate while we were at the paediatrician.”

“So he’s sleepy.”

“I’ll take him, Rosalí, I’ll get him to sleep.”

I will walk and carry him. I will be able to get him to sleep quickly.

“It’s fine, Rosalí, pass him over,” I say while I take Mateo by the arms.

The baby carries on fussing. I lull him. I whisper the song to him that Pilar sang while she cooked, but I change ‘vivi’ for ‘coco,’ we sing ‘coco’ here. I walk towards the bedrooms and sing and cry for exhaustion. Sliplittle bebywar mantight orthe co rru cu cú. In my head I am writing down what is happening to me. I stop singing and start walking like a clown with big slow steps.

Boom the baby calms down. Boom the baby starts crying. I go back to the kitchen.

“Take those clothes off him, love, I bet he’s feeling hot.”

I change the rhythm. I move my hands up and down in small movements bobbing the package up and down. Drops of sweat trickle down. The baby calms down. I sit on the white rocking chair. I’m a cold mother with freezing legs. Now I’m not singing the words of the song but la la la with the same rhythm. Lalalalala lalala lalalalalala lalalala. I remember Kim Thuy’s book in which she says that ‘la’ means different things in Vietnamese depending on how it’s pronounced: ‘la’ is ‘scream,’ ‘be,’ ‘foreigner,’ ‘faint,’ ‘cool.’ Lalalalala lalala lalalalalala lalalala. Scream, be, faint. I feel like I’m fainting. My feet float free in the hot air and the baby falls back asleep. I look at the imperfection on the yellow wall again. I look at the baby’s closed eyes. I think of the lovely, almost poetic thing that is the short life of those squares that are uprooted and thrown into the void seconds after being created. I say it with my eyes: I won’t let you fall. It hurts, my whole body hurts but it’s not your fault, it’s not. And I fall asleep.

Mateo wakes up, cries, I feel the web of taut threads that burn and wrap around me, I clamp him to my breast. My nipples are bleeding. I stretch both my legs and my feet and I start counting my toes and wiggling them as I count. The pain eases. He’s not so hungry, I hold him and burp him and then I put him in the bouncer. He doesn’t do anything. I take out the doll with black and white spots and a tortoise rattle. Materile, Materile, Materile rile ro. I don’t want to stand up. My legs are heavy. I don’t want to stand up, he’s going to cry. Don’t let him cry don’t let him cry don’t let him cry. My mother sits next to him and straightens his socks. I take a photo of him with my phone, he’s wearing a blue and white striped T-shirt and blue trousers, I upload it to Instagram. Mateo in stripes, I write, I delete it. Mateo the sailor, I write, I delete it. Materile, I write. Don’t let him cry. I lie back on the sofa. I’m going to stand up. I drink all the water in the flask. I’m going to stand up. One, two, three.

“Miss Olga, Susi, I’ve left you food there.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

I’m going to stand up. I stand up. I look at the clock, five past six. There are two plates side by side with dinner served. It’s steak, mashed potato and peas.

“Susi, will you be OK on your own?”

“Yes, ma.”

No ma no mo no more. I don’t think I can do it, I’m afraid, but I say yes, and she picks up the keys and she goes out to shop. I am very afraid of staying alone with Mateo. The verbs ‘to bathe,’ ‘to dress,’ ‘to pick up,’ ‘to walk,’ ‘to carry,’ ‘to reach out’ don’t take long to write, but each one demands an order from the Susana who commands. I lay Mateo down by my side on the sofa in his pyjamas and I switch on the TV with the plate of food on my lap. I’m going to stand up, I’m going to carry him, I’m going to feed him. I leave the plate untouched on the kitchen counter, I walk to my room, I lie down on the bed and I feel my nipples burning. I feed him in the dark, the pain doesn’t ease but I don’t cry, I lay him down in his cradle.

I look at my reflection again in the bathroom mirror. My eyes are dead. I can hear Mateo shifting in the cradle. He’s going to cry, he’s going to wake up. He doesn’t wake up. Susana and I are both tired. I close my eyes and I pray-recite Don’t let him wake up don’t let him wake up. I imagine I have the strength to walk, open the window, stand on the terrace wall and throw myself off. I imagine falling and hitting the floor and the floor isn’t concrete but water. I sink into the water and it’s a pool with dark blue tiles and my legs are not heavy. I hear the apartment door opening. I open my eyes, look at her and tell her: “It’s OK Susi, I won’t let you fall.”

Translated by Matthew Shorter

Photo: Tommaso Pecchioli, Unsplash.

Ricardo Piglia

Glance and my own silhouette against blueness, the afternoon dissipating in the sky. I was going to write about speed, but a headstrong flock of starlings escaping winter distracted me and became the text and then there was nothing else but their migration. From their roosts in search of the next season they form an arrow and above my head a storm brews, the name with which the wind whips up snow. Climate phenomena silence me. Glance at the sky and the afternoon closes in. Golden hues give in. The waves insist on pointing out the limit where the city simultaneously starts and finishes. The starlings’ plumage is purpled bronze and I, wrapped in a long coat, am still watching the way the clouds roil the sky. I’m alone here. The stars snuff out and now the bulbs hanging from the posts on the dock blink on. The water crashes persistently against the wooden stakes.

Ten years ago I went to Paris. It was also winter, I was also on a verge, I was also alone when I saw something that stayed with me, that is still in my memory. Two boys walking together. They walked away from the river and from me. I imagined that they had met each other that same afternoon, while one was taking research notes on the metro. He would be called Aurelien; he would be a science student and would carry a notebook in his hands. Glance at the ground. The other would be called Maxime. The water finds a way to continue its course between the rocks. Underground crashing. Glance into the abyss, human thoughts and face of an angel. The carriage was passing through a tunnel, the metal rails creating the sleepy impression of continuity. The shore is pronouncing, the waves are always the same. Aurelien closed the cover of his notebook because he didn’t want Maxime to see what was written inside. The insistence of Maxime’s gaze had begun to irritate him but the excess of past in those eyes calmed him. His sadness balanced out how beautiful he was. Sturdy, broad and determined. Seemingly inoffensive. His skin was covered in what had once been pimples. Maxime, without looking away from him, suggested they get off and gestured with his fingers as if drawing an arch mid-air. Then, out of the blue, Aurelien considered the possibility of cancelling the plans he had with his dad that evening. An outward abduction amidst the interlinking of words and sentences which were not being said. Train tracks rattling, train tracks rattling. They left the station behind and crossed the underground wind, together. 

A long, deep sigh of strangeness stepping out onto the street. Ah, the water soaks the stones’ surface, but in the centre they stay dry, dark, a mystery. Outside it was drizzling and the pavement reflected the upside-down cathedral, the bridge seemed surrounded by a halo of death. It was an ice-cold night in December. The river was there too. Attracted by this moving mirror, Aurelien, who still had his notebook in his hands, leaned against the railing and new interval. Suspension systems are composed of a flexible element and another muffled one which neutralises the oscillations of what is suspended. Just like us, said Maxime pointing out the two figures reflected and distorted on the water’s surface. It’s freezing, said Aurelien and turning back towards the Seine he thought, What am I doing here? Thick purple clouds ruffled the horizon above the Paris rooftops. He flipped up the collar of his jacket. That December night he had arranged to meet his dad, but the river, the river was an iridescent continuum. Along it the gazes of other men had also slipped, those of men who had come out to walk in the night before them. The boy with the notebook saw the other drop tobacco on the floor and fumble with the cigarette paper. He felt like rolling it himself, but then he had the impression that between this boy’s palms a portal was opening. Glance at the strands playing with fingers that change from one figure to another: triangle and polyhedron. New suspended structure. Short, fair hair and eyes encircled with deep shadows. 

It’s possible, everything is strange. The weather, the silence. He didn’t know how much time to let pass before it got uncomfortable. Aurelien blinked. He found this boy’s seriousness strange, stood in front of him, determined. He watched him exhale a cloud of smoke high into the air. With their fingers they passed the cigarette between them, their fingertips promising another, more intimate touch. A minute passed and they didn’t laugh. Glance at the deep well inside. Stones that find no end. It’s not that the boy with the notebook wanted the night to turn into a drama, but it seemed that abandoning impostures calmed him. He stretched. Another minute and ten passed. Maxime stayed still, committed to contemplating the river. Although they didn’t know what to say to one another, they were comfortable with the novelty of silence. The wind was ice-cold. Maxime coughed and asked what he was doing. Aurelien told him that he was researching Haicheng numbers. Hai-what? The only earthquake in history that has been predicted. 

We have to go and see it, said Maxime. For the first time that night the boy with the notebook laughed with pure enthusiasm. To China?, he asked seriously. Journey to where the light is unable to touch the traces of the light before. It was snakes that predicted it, that knew that there would be a disaster. With the cigarette in his mouth he said alright, let’s go. Let’s go to China. And he told him that more than two thousand people had died in that earthquake. From where I’m now watching the sunset and setting sun (which are not the same thing), the dock seems to show some kind of resistance to the waves. My melancholy wasn’t letting me resist, either. I was still for a long time, without moving. On top of the water there is foam breaking and figures that disappear as soon as they have formed. Let’s go to Haicheng, said the boy with the notebook, the other raised his eyebrows and sucked in smoke. Snakes? They looked at opposite points in the sky.

I think about a story slowly fading away. A relay of replacements where each phrase replaces the following and at the end the only legible part is the last line. The storm drawing closer above the city where I live, pushed by an ancient force. Glance at the century when men sculpted the stones of that cathedral by the French bridge: they avoided the void. In my story the opposite would happen, the blanks taking shape in the calligraphy would gradually accumulate until the end. The rocks remain unchangeable. Glance at the bridge, face of a worn-out angel and fingers trembling. It’s too cold, let’s go, said the boy with the notebook. Filament of light between the clouds suddenly illuminating the sky. Constant advance of that plane ignoring the storm. The waves insist on melting over the stones, it’s getting late. I forecast a trip to China, said Maxime laughing. The other liked that his laugh was like that: terrible. That his skin seemed eroded, that he was apparently immune to the cold. 

Docks are temporal extensions of the brink, bridges are pauses and the waves are the same. I was going to write about simultaneity. About double things like bridges or the shore. About what starts and finishes at the same time, but the trawling of the wind breaks the smoothness of the surface and so starts the displacement of water. I was going to write about likeness, but these two boys, so beautiful and so distinct. I saw them walking away from the Seine, ten years ago. I saw their backs, in their overcoats. I felt so alone when I lost them from view. The rest is pure fiction. Now I’m facing the breaking storm. Now I know that when a wave is created the particles of water don’t ever return to the same point where they started, but rather return to another, slightly distinct. Completely unknown. 

A notebook exists with a black cover worn down with use, made up of fifty hand-bound pages, which records the trip that two French boys took to Valparaíso for the millennium. On the first pages are the two plane tickets (economy seats in aisle J with Aurelien and Maxime’s full names), a fold-out map of the port and a few brief annotations. Stuck in the inside flap is the luggage ticket: each of them only carried one rucksack with them.

Juan is a Chilean student who lives in New York and is now looking for something to read on the eighth floor of the university library. He casts his gaze along the shelves disregarding the names of Latin American authors and the titles of their work until suddenly, he feels as if a torch is moving within him and illuminating something that he doesn’t want to see. With curiosity he dwells on the only one of the books on the shelf that isn’t bound with a plastic cover like the rest. The difference seems like a sign. He draws nearer, running his finger down its black spine, and pulls it out. Which is how the French boys’ notebook falls into the hands of an aspiring writer, who leafs through and finds that its pages are written entirely by hand. There is no biographical ticket stuck inside its covers, nor any stamp to indicate that the book is part of the library’s collection. 

Somebody could have left it there accidentally or intentionally. Juan passes his hand over the notes and quickly discovers that the notebook is written in French, a language that he cannot speak but knows how to read. He also notes that it is missing its final pages. So he closes it, puts it in his rucksack and steps out into the corridor, praying that there is no hidden sensor that will go off when he passes through the library security barriers. 

Once out on the street he regains his breath, takes the notebook out of his rucksack and thinks that there are two ways to broach it: as an unfinished story or one that’s still being written. The distance between these two possibilities is, in his eyes, similar to the vertigo that separates a climate phenomenon from the forecast predicting it. A few hours ago, Juan read on AccuWeather that it would snow in New York, but now, as he leans out of the metro carriage window, crossing the bridge from Williamsburg towards Brooklyn, he discovers only an unalterable purple sky. 

The fact that the weather wants nothing to do with meteorologists’ forebodings is, for Juan, both disappointing and reassuring. Leaning against the glass he asks himself what this sequence of facades stretching out along the other side of the river will look like, when the storm breaks and the neighbourhood he lives in falls silent with white. 

On page eleven of the travel logbook Juan discovers that the French boys arrived in Valparaíso on the last Sunday of 1999. They also write that the first thing they saw when they got out at the bus terminal was a puddle of fresh blood on the pavement. One entry begins with Aurelien writing and the next Maxime. Although their handwriting is similar (at first glance it might seem that the log was written by just one hand), with the passing of the pages distinctions between each of their observations begin to appear. Maxime explained his encounter with the puddle of blood in a sentence without adjectives, while Aurelien noted that on seeing it he felt disgust, then fear and then he thought about the body that had lost it. 

The passage in Aurelien’s handwriting ends by saying:

Death doesn’t scare me.
(On the page is the number eleven, written in blue pencil next to an ‘A’ on the footer)

Maxime thought that the log was an opportunity to record the change of millennium, but what also seemed to be the end of his relationship with Aurelien. It was him who had insisted on keeping a record of the end. For Aurelien, on the other hand, the notebook was a distraction, a game. During the days that they spent in Valparaíso they both wrote inside, alternately, notes and occasional drawings about their outings. With these clues Juan was able to form a first impression of them: what they looked at, what they preferred. But there are also (in the margins) a few notes about what they were not able to say to each other. These entries are sparks.

The log is written in a linear fashion until page fifty when the records stop abruptly. The rehearsal is interrupted. The game is over.

The notebook has no closure.
At the start of the new millennium, the French boys stopped taking notes.
Or they decided to hide the pages.
What is certain is that the log is currently unable to narrate its own ending. Or at least that’s what Juan thinks when he sees the first flakes dragged by the wind crack like stars on the kitchen window. 

With the money from a government grant Juan rents a small flat on the sixth floor of an old building in Williamsburg, opposite Marcy station on the JMZ line. It’s a studio flat with two windows from where one can see the neon lights of the Ortiz undertaker’s and the beginning of the bridge leading to Manhattan. This flat is the home of his solitude. There he eats wontons and spring rolls that he buys for a few dollars in a place over in Havemeyer. There he smokes. There he reads his horoscope and the daily weather forecast. There he reads and rereads Z-list novels that he brought from Chile and rewatches nineties films on Netflix. There he leans out of the window to look at the stars and to draw imaginary lines between them. He writes infrequently. It’s the first time that Juan sees it’s snowing and doesn’t want it to stop.

ARIES

The windows are glittery with frost. Nature exists even if you don’t notice it. When Mercury fell in your house, you also fell into a state of consciousness about something in your own way of being, what is it that makes you feel uncomfortable deep down? This planetary retrograde favours reflections about movement and about hidden identities. Mercury meets the Sun in a powerful alliance. In the cracks in the sky, furious locomotives flee. Looking within is like turning on the light in a dark room, but it’s also like finding yourself with something unexpected in an ordinary place. 

Translated by Beth Hickling-Moore

Excerpt from Las olas son las mismas (Los Libros de la Mujer Rota, 2021; Paripé Books, 2022)

Photo: Isaiah B, Unsplash.

That night we mixed Coca-Cola with Sprite in cut crystal tumblers to imitate the grown-ups, who were drinking whisky. We raised toasts to each other. All the cousins clinked our glasses and downed our drinks, giving rise to an imaginary drunkenness that made us feel bubbles on the napes of our necks, like tickles, which were only in the mind. This is what we’d been told by the Relative, who also brought us a test one day to determine if we were indigo children.

What do you call your grandparents?

• Grandma/Grandpa
• Granny/Grandad
• Gran and Gramps
• Nana Papa

But we were worse than common children. We used to injure our own noses by sticking fingers up them and eat butter by the spoonful.

That night there was plenty of whisky. We also danced, just us girls, who adored Britney and Selena in equal measure and had learned how to tie our shirts to show off our bellybuttons. Then came the sobbing. Round here, there’s no cumbia without heartache. Before midnight, grandma poured the whisky down the drain, yelling: You’re all a bunch of foolish creatures! Grandpa and the uncles became irate but were so drunk they couldn’t do much about it.

That’s when the Relative arrived, stepping out of her red Fiat Punto and saying it was time. Time for what? No one knew. But we all listened to the Relative because she was well-educated and always loaned people money. She handed out sparklers to the kids and slipped banknotes into the pockets of the grown-ups. Within minutes, she had us all inside the house and was telling us how everything would end.

The end of days is upon us. Don’t worry, my little darlings. I’ll take care of what remains.

***

Who knows how long ago that was. It was New Year’s Eve, and as the neighbors leapt over bonfires and the ashes of their Old Year effigies, we watched our sparklers flare up, with our fake whisky and the halo of that fire that grew inside us, while the Relative covered up the windows with grubby yellow newspapers and garbage bags and shut off the music forever. All the clocks will stop, my loves, hush now boys and girls.

That night ended with grandpa asleep in his armchair and grandma removing the robes and wigs from all the saints and virgins. Bald little heads. Cloth bodies, with gorgeous carved hands. And no private parts. Just how grandma imagined all of us. My mother wept in her old bedroom as the Relative declared that we’d survived the end of the world. From the sky shall come a great King of terror, she said, before and after, Mars shall reign as chance will have it. And her small square frame inside a black housecoat drifted through the rooms like a snub-nosed ghost.

The new day arrived. We could almost hear the turquoise jays singing. And yet we couldn’t see a thing. Not even the dogs devouring the remains of the end-of-millennium garbage, nor the ashes of grown-ups with half-burned masks depicting politicians, sports stars and celebrities, because for us that day heralded the beginning of another era: the era of the New Man.

The New Man has hair that causes envy. And he carries death. This is how it has been for all eternity. Every war creates a single man, who hides in the shadows like a savior, but soon comes apart. The New Man is usually very tall and has been gradually killing himself in some lightless room, and when a person enters they can detect only the flies that accompany him and the stench of New Man, which is like smelling god himself: a blend of budget shampoo and sheep droppings.

First the plants died, without any natural light. Only the begonias survived. Today we eat them, crushing them up entirely and swallowing the green mush that helps us raise whatever we carry inside us. The walls became covered in mold; the Relative replaced the bags and newspapers with planks, and before we knew it, we were pissing and shitting in sacks the Relative made vanish. Our hair reached down below our waists and our breasts grew larger. That’s when things began to go south. We must prepare to go out into the new world, she would say in her tattered black housecoat, which she refused to take off. When will we see it? When will we see the world? we asked her. Hush now, she told us, first we must create life. Like turnips and cabbages. We must resprout.

So here we are, creating the New Man, and yet our fetuses have not survived because it’s well-known that a union between close relatives is destined for failure. In this family we inherit shiny, silky hair, thick and black; but also the tendency to sweat too much and have nerves like scorched straw. At night we tremble and have nightmares, and any disturbance can leave us dazed.

But no one cares about that.

One day, Juli was on the verge of giving birth and her womb deflated, releasing a dirty dust down below. And yet she didn’t cry, because we’re used to it. It isn’t our fault. Who wants to bear the child of their father, their brother, their cousin. We don’t want to save the species. I’m not even convinced I could tell the difference between a turnip and a cabbage.

For a long time, all the women in this house have been hallucinating. The Relative tries to stop it. She submerges us in tubs of tepid water and then fries our neurons. It’s for your own good, she says, hush now. Shhh. It’s like homemade electroshock. We lie floating in the water, our skin completely wrinkled. When she activates the current, we all let out a long, collective moan, and then our bodies seize up and, though I’m unable to see them, I know the others are nearby—Juli, Renata, Maribí, Catita—convulsing girlwomen with long and beautiful hair, which slithers like viperine serpents.

We don’t know how to leave the water.

The worst thing is we aren’t sinking either.

Before, the cat used to come and console us. Billy, Billy, Billy! When the Relative lifted us out wrapped in towels, Billy would lick our legs, his fur standing on end due to the electricity. But he didn’t mind. Billy died, of old age or grief or who knows what, and all fried on the inside, his guts turned to ashes. The Relative wouldn’t allow us to see his body. She said he’d woken up stiff as a post and smelling of urine, and she’d had to get rid of him. At night, we used to make Billy sleep between us; he would lick our noses if they came in. He’d warn us. Sometimes, I believe he’s locked inside one of the rooms of this house. Billy, Billy, Billy! Like mamá and grandpa, who were first to be punished. They tried to rebel and leave. They claimed that, outside, the world was carrying on as normal, they thought they’d heard the turquoise jays singing. Hush now, said the Relative. Turnips and cabbages. Now they moan from behind doors, and at night they scratch. Grandma just stays silent and gets on with her life. Dressing and undressing saints and virgins. Caressing their hands and reciting pious prayers to them. Then she looks at us and calls us filthy, lazy, stubborn creatures. Our cousins, fathers and uncles, on the other hand, are all living the good life. The Relative forces us to feed them, like big fat babies, and once a month one of them visits us in our rooms. It makes no difference if we scream or cry. For a long time, we’ve preferred silence. We let them do it, imagining we’ll forget all the horror inside the tubs of electrified water.

We long to turn ourselves into water snakes, into medusas, and escape down the drainpipe until we reach a sea we can no longer remember the sight or sound of. Was it like rattles? Catita always asks. It was like hearing the Virgin pee, I tell her. And we all laugh.

What’s got me losing sleep is that, this time, I felt the kick. I’m certain the New Man is inside me, inside my womb. The fetus has already formed. If my womb doesn’t deflate like Juli’s, I’ll give birth to a homunculus destined to bring about the end of everything. When he kicked me, I sensed the horror, a well-formed little fish, muscular and violent. He isn’t kicking me to let me know he’s alive, he wants to come out of me as soon as possible, he kicks at me with hatred until my insides hurt.

The Relative must never find out.

Maribí helps me to wrap myself every day and my tummy doesn’t show. The other day, my uncle told me I should eat less or, better yet, even fast a little. It fortifies the spirit, he added. There’s no problem with putting on a little weight, he said, but consider us. It isn’t nice seeing you like this, muffin, and thinking about the other thing.

The Relative gave me dirty looks.

Grandma said: You’ve gotten very pudgy, stubborn creature.

It makes no difference, the Relative always gives us dirty looks. If we eat too much, or eat too little, or if we’re ungrateful, or if we haven’t given birth to even a single child. When we stop bleeding, during the first months, when something starts to grow inside us, she accuses us, because she believes we’re conspiring with our spoilt-little-girl attitudes, she believes we can prevent the fetuses growing. She believes our infantile thinking—magical, all-powerful—can achieve more than the rotten milk injected into us by the men of this family. Filthy liquid that impregnates us and makes us look more and more like old ladies. If anyone ever manages to open up this house, they’ll find a bunch of plump, gigantic babies, with pink cheeks, and an army of servile old ladies, small and wrinkled, with hollow bellies that have given birth to nothing but dust and evil, sustaining this wretched humanity. They won’t blame us; we had no choice but to subjugate ourselves.

When the New Man arrives, the world subjugates itself, to then sink beneath his feet, turning his bones into a carpet, his recollections into charred ashes in tubs of pure water.

The New Man I carry inside my womb cannot be born.

In spite of the electric tubs, I haven’t been left completely witless. It was worse for Catita, who for several months has been unable to say her own name, and also struggles with words beginning with H. Ope, she says, ibiscus, azel, ummingbird, ug me tightly. Who knows how the electricity works on our brains, if it sears whole pathways, if it scorches parchments and entire books written in the dullness of our childhoods, if it erases memories or only the inscription of those memories on the gray walls of our cerebral mass, and if one day we might find ourselves imagining another life, transformed into a fantasy full of butterflies whose wings are turned to ash by merely blinking.

I ask myself if there’s anything I’ve forgotten. Sometimes I make lists, of names, of fruits, of plants of the high forest, of plants of the primeval forest, of everything I knew when I was outside this house. I believe the lists are complete – when I read them, I recognize what I’ve written. The one I’m writing now says:

Cloud forest:

• Common Mallow
• Mist
• Kidney
• Hare
• Llama

I had to stop writing because the Relative came in for an inspection. She does this from time to time; I can’t even say if it’s been days or months. Time has been converted into small lines on the wall for the things that matter: the birthdays of the little men, the festival of Saint Dominic Savio, patron saint of the impregnated. We don’t say impregnated, screams the Relative, we aren’t animals! We girls don’t get lines on the wall, except for our last bleeding. And the Relative doesn’t allow us to see them. In the beginning, we kept calculations. We had our own system. Scratches on our legs, locks of hair we cut for every period. But the Relative has become shrewder over time. Also, the fathers, uncles, brothers and cousins enter our rooms more often than they’re supposed to, and sometimes we confuse this with the other bleeding. Because they’re beasts. They don’t care about tearing us. Nor do they care who we are; sometimes I get called Juli or Maribí. I turn out the lights, though this annoys them, and cover myself with blankets or take off my glasses. I should have replaced them long ago. I see very little. The contours of the Relative. Shadows of men. The stains on the underwear we’re forced to wash. When I was small, I used to hate my glasses, it felt like having a prosthetic for my eyes. Today, I’m grateful for losing my sight, and sometimes, at night, I take a sip from the alcohol the Relative keeps for curing wounds.

My dream now is to live in darkness.

On asking me to remove the wrapper, the Relative discovered what I’d been hiding from her. She flogged me and I didn’t so much as whimper. I want the pain to fill me to the point of reaching the New Man I carry inside, for it to contaminate him and, being only small, him to be unable to endure it. But I know this won’t happen. My body wants and does not want him. My body cares for and abhors him. My body sometimes wants to live, to race to a virgin forest and leap into the ponds. My body wants to trap grasshoppers and place them in my bellybutton, so they can spring inside and multiply. I want to be able to flee this house and touch the forest, I want to smell the grass and hear the turquoise jays and live there in a dark cave, fur-covered and moaning, darkly eating turnips and cabbages, cabbages and turnips.

I don’t know when I lost consciousness, but on waking, Catita tells me how my waters broke as soon as the Relative placed her hand on my tummy. Ug me tightly, she says, I’m ere.

I get out of the bed; there’s blood everywhere.

I don’t want to ask if the baby’s dead.

I don’t want them to tell me the baby is alive.

But when I least expect it, I hear his cry. The Relative, in her ghostly black robe, cradles him all over the house. The uncles, cousins, fathers and brothers look at the baby as if they had souls. So pink and rosy! they say. He looks just like you! they yell, pointing at one another. Then they clap their hands and open bottles of beer the Relative has kept solely for this occasion.

I stagger over to them. I look at the baby boy, who is actually pink and wrinkly. Who is like grandma’s saints and virgins. Who smells of turnips and cabbages.

The New Man has been born from me.

Carefully and quietly, I head for the tubs. The Relative doesn’t notice. She’s so busy with the child, so happy at having brought a baby boy into the end of the world, that she even forgot to feed us the green soup this morning. As I get into the tub, I feel my body expand, the water fills me, fills the hole where the fetus was, fills the damaged and deflated uterus, fills my eyes with new and hopefully blinding water. I know the switch to activate the electricity is far away, but I also know I need only submerge the cable that gives it power. A mere touch and I’ll fry. I take the cable and launch it in the air.

One, two, three.

Brain fried.

I smell the scorched forest. I hear the crackle of fire everywhere. Butterflies of ash. Turquoise jays sing, dogs bark, but I don’t know where they are. Perhaps they’re everywhere. I hear rattles. The virgin peeing. A door opens: the new world! In the distance, a small voice whispers old on, ug me tightly, and a scream: What a stubborn creature!

Translated by Victor Meadowcroft

Photo: Joshua Fuller, Unsplash.

“It isn’t much farther! Just here, at the end of the hall!” Olinda rallied them, unable to conceal her impatience. Each time the cabriole legs got stuck in the narrow hallway, she thought about the varnish and winced. With considerable effort, they managed to bring the bed upstairs and through the door of an apartment with high ceilings and a balcony that, fully open, let in the Havana summer. In the distance, the statue of the Virgin Mary at the Iglesia del Carmen cut an outline against a white sky, the entire city a postcard of deterioration. Once they fit the bed into the room—a difficult task, considering the minuscule amount of space left by the armoire and the dresser, also Queen Anne—Olinda brought her palms together in ecstasy with a cacophony of bracelets. Next, they installed the canopy, and in addition to paying them generously, she made coffee to reiterate her gratitude. One of the men let his eyes wander around the apartment.

“Whoa, it’s like a museum in here!” he exclaimed, dumbfounded. Without a doubt, it was an odd place, a capriccio amid the smoke from the bus. 

When she met Armando, one afternoon at Coppelia, the ice cream parlor, he was reading an edition of Père Goriot with golden letters on the spine. That man had to be special. Marrying him—a man with a promising career as an agricultural engineer boded well for a position at a Ministry—confirmed her status as a great lady, which she always suspected was her destiny. They would have children and she would bring them up to be important people. But there was no position or lofty future, no children either. Armando ended up in a shirt factory, stealing fabric cuttings to resell on the street, and she was a salesgirl at a bland little store in Central Havana.

To compensate, she turned her house into an empire of kitsch. Norton, who was Jamaican by blood, knew Havana like the back of his hand and was knowledgeable about antiques. He served as her dealer. Mahogany furniture, crocheted doilies and porcelain shepherdesses mingled with Bavarian dinnerware and an old, but still functional, grandfather clock. As a solitary touch of modernity, a portrait of Camilo Cienfuegos and a calendar featuring beauties in thongs. It was Norton who got her the bed, an old woman in Lawton was selling it for three hundred pesos. Now whatever happened, more frequent blackouts and more severe hunger, but she was sleeping in a Queen Anne, her own form of rebellion and resistance, the only thing they couldn’t take from her.

The men went away. She was left alone, happily absorbed in the contemplation of dinnerware and figurines. The light began to dissolve, and Armando would be home soon. She waited for him on the sofa, posed like Goya’s Clothed Maja, and a look on her face like it was her birthday.

“I have a surprise for you!”

“Are they shutting off the power today?”

“No, not today. Hey! Did you hear me? I have a surprise for you.”

“Yes, mi china, sorry. It’s just that I’m dead tired,” he responded gloomily as he put away the bicycle. “It was a terrible day, the inspector showed up out of nowhere.”

They had to put the big fabrics on top so the missing ones wouldn’t be noticed. If they got caught, they’d be sent to jail. On top of that, there was the heat: a thick steam that greased the skin and the soul. The Chinese-made fans at the factory weren’t enough to scare off the island’s crushing summer. Fatigue, exacerbated by hunger and the hours spent pedaling their bicycles, made the workers faint often. All of the island was a torpor; a fistful of flies atop the unmoving wheel of destiny. 

“Okay, show me your surprise.”

“Close your eyes!” Olinda took him by the hand and guided him toward the bedroom. “Now open them!”

“Ah… it’s pretty.”

“Pretty? That’s all you’re going to say?”

“No, no. It’s beautiful, like everything you have,” he started covering her neck with kisses. “We’ll sleep like royalty, do everything like royalty, in there. Now give me the towel, I’m going to take a shower.”

His enthusiasm sounded false. Olinda could hear the water breaking against the tiles as she served a plate of rice and beans and got ready to watch Día y Noche, the police drama most Cuban families were probably watching at that hour if they had electricity. The episode was about solving a crime involving a firearm that took place at a bus stop, but what was more important to Olinda was the subplot of the possible breakup of Pablo and Elia’s marriage. In the end, she had told him that helping her do the dishes didn’t have anything to do with real solidarity in a marriage.

Armando came out of the bathroom and sat down to eat. In the dining room light his face looked yellowish. He didn’t speak, the only sounds were the noise of the spoon against the plate and the muffled voices from the television set. Olinda looked at him with a furrowed brow.

“And what’s the matter with you?”

“I already told you, I’m tired…”

“Sorry, Armando, but I know when something’s going on and when you’re tired. What’s going on with you?”

Armando dropped the spoon and held his head in his hands.

“Oli, I have to tell you…”

She got dizzy. Now what?

“Drop the mystery, spit it out.”

“Do you remember Rafelito, the young guy that works with me?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Well, he’s like Alberto, the soldier that came out in the procession…”

“What?”

“Launching a boat to sea… He’s leaving, Oli, he’s leaving. He’s building a raft. something better than a raft! He’s got everything planned, and I’m leaving with him. We’re leaving!”

“Finish eating, come on, Día y Noche is starting.”

“Are you listening to me? We’re leaving. I can’t take it any more, I can’t handle this.”

On TV the intro to Día y Noche started playing. Olinda got up and started stacking the plates. Armando followed her with his gaze. In the kitchen, she exploded.

“Do you really think that’s how it works? Leave and that’s it? How do you know Rafelito isn’t a gigantic snitch? Do you know how many years we’d get if they catch us? Do you have any idea of the number of people who’ve died in the ocean? Besides, who the hell told you that I want to leave on a raft? You can’t be talking seriously!”

“But I am serious! C’mere, sit down.”

“I don’t feel like it!”

“I said sit! Cojones!”

She burst into tears. She didn’t tolerate anyone yelling at her, and Armando didn’t yell at her or say bad words to her. That sudden rage scared her; it seemed to her like a bad omen. Shaking, she sat down next to him. He knew Rafelito wasn’t lying because he’d seen the plans for the raft with his own eyes, along with his mother’s desperation.

“Anguish like that can’t be faked. Besides, I already know the plan, I’m the one helping to set it up.”

They would leave in April of next year. Departing from Santa Clara, where Rafelito’s uncle lived and, if they were lucky, they’d make it to the islets of Key West. The uncle, who had been a fisherman all his life, had plotted a route; in the vicinity of the Bahamas they could rest a while. The vessel would be safe, it would float on steel tubes. They would also add on a Russian tractor motor and a sail. Of course it would have an oar, in case the motor fails.

“Remember that Rafelito studied at CUJAE Technological University and he’s good with engineering. Mima, we’re going to build a Kon-Tiki!”

“But… Armando, that’s nine months away! What am I supposed to do with the house and the furniture?” Olinda sobbed. “You shoulda told me before and I wouldn’t have been killin’ myself to buy the bed!”

“We can sell the stuff. We’ll need money to build the boat. Whatever’s left over, we’ll take it with us.”

She started crying. The chinaware and armchairs were her assets. How did he think she could get rid of her assets?

“What assets, Olinda? What do we need porcelain plates for? To fill them with rice and beans? Cut the bullshit, chica!”

She stood up, feeling offended, and went into the bedroom. If she could have screamed, she would have done so with such pitch that only dogs would have heard. Were there still dogs in Havana? She covered herself up completely in bed and sank into the abyss of the cabriole legs.

The next few months were dizzying. By virtue of his wife’s possessions, Armando made himself into the capitalist partner of the enterprise. Havana had become a good market for the antique trade, a lot of families still had family relics—not out of a sense of heritage or sentimentality, but because there was no other option—and they were selling well to collectors and merchants who, disguised as run-of-the-mill tourists, would buy them at ridiculous prices. The first to go were the jewels that Olinda inherited from her grandmother: the gold zirconia ring, the silver barrette, the pearls (she refused to part with her wedding ring, made of white gold. If the raft sank, the ring would sink with it. If the sharks ate her, they’d gobble up the ring too). Next went the furniture. Norton, without asking too many questions, took it upon himself to get the best deals. With the money they got for the armchairs, they bought two steel tubes. They bought them from a guy from the provinces who worked in La Antillana and they had to go pick them up, at night, in a beat-up little truck that tumbled down the streets of El Cotorro. The other pair was acquired through a contact, who in turn had a contact who worked in construction.

In Santa Clara, the new Kon-Tiki developed according to plan. “With revolutionary efficiency, comrade!” Armando and Rafelito would joke. The hardest part was the motor. A guy who worked at the UBPC agricultural cooperative in Arroyo Naranjo was asking two hundred dollars for it. Weeping, Olinda bid farewell to her dining room set. That day she didn’t want to eat, or even to watch Día y Noche. In vain, Armando tried consoling her: he spoke to her of the furniture, of all kinds, that they would buy once they got to Miami; of Tiffany lamps bought for a bargain from Jews in New York, of Asscher cut emeralds and diamonds. But it wasn’t about furniture. It was about her life, brought to ruin once and for all by mediocrity.

Next were the porcelain figurines, dinnerware, and fountains. They sold the dressing table to buy the canvas for the sail. The apartment was emptying out, the walls becoming naked. Olinda’s empire turned into a wasteland, and the desolation laid waste to her; unkempt curls, a slack and colorless mouth. The departure was two months away and Armando spent nearly all his time in Santa Clara. When he came back, he’d only talk about building materials and progress, of routes and islets, of what they would do and wouldn’t do once they got to Miami. From an outside perspective, the vessel was an absurd heap of rubble, a mashup of dissimilar objects that would have delighted the Surrealists: the encounter, not of an umbrella and a sewing machine, but of truck canvas, metal tubes, and a Russian motor. Nonetheless, he was convinced that it was a marvel of naval engineering and applied design.

One Saturday, he showed up in dirty clothes, dark circles around his eyes, and an air of triumph. He poured himself a glass of water with sugar and sat down at the plastic table that had taken the place of the antique dining room set. In the kitchen, Olinda was plugging away at a new recipe for condensed milk made with powdered milk.

“Mima, I’ve got good news! It’s ready, it’s got almost all its parts! It’s time for us to start packing up!” The rhythmic and continuous noise of the fork was the only response.

Armando continued with the checklist of things they still needed: white clothing for daytime and black for nighttime, which would hold in the heat. He’d been told that they could make it thermal by lining it with newsprint. May the Granma newspaper be useful for something besides wiping our asses! They’d also need to wax the backpacks they would use to carry their important papers, to protect them from the water. To finish the vessel, the only thing they needed was the floor that would go above the planks. 

She kept whisking, waiting for Armando to finish his monologue, but then there was just a long silence. She wiped her hands on her apron and left the kitchen. Armando wasn’t in the dining room or the living room. She found him in the bedroom with his gaze fixed on the bed.

“Don’t even think about it! Forget about the bed!” She screamed and lunged at him, as he tore off the sheets. Olinda grabbed them and tried to put them back in their place, but a shove from him threw her against the wall. Huddled in the corner, she watched him take everything apart and look for a saw. She watched the teeth bite into the flesh of the wood. Two hours later, the dismembered boards were piling up, the cabriole legs scattered and alone. Armando left and came back with two guys. Together they carried everything off. Once she was alone, she threw herself on the mattress and cried herself to sleep. When she woke up, night had fallen. She groped blindly for the light switch. The power was off.

In the dark, Central Havana was a silent mass, you could almost hear the ocean. She stood out on the balcony and exhaled deeply, the air smelled like garbage and efflorescence. The Virgin Mary at the Iglesia del Carmen looked like a specter, cut out against the blackboard sky. A young couple walked by on the street, and their laughter ruptured the sadness of a city forgotten by the gods. She remembered her first years with Armando, how he made her laugh and now, at her feet, the void called out to her. Then she felt him come in, approach stealthily, hug her from behind.

“Forgive me, china,” he said in a whisper. “You know I’m not like that, but I’m going crazy, this country is driving me crazy. What’s the point of the beautiful furniture, the beautiful things, if we can’t eat, make choices, talk?”

“It’s funny, right? A Queen Anne bed,” Olinda turned around. In her face there was a weary resignation. “I guess, in the end, that’s what this island is too: a piece of stylish furniture turned into a raft.”

They finished packing that week; they would go to Santa Clara a few days early. They hardly said goodbye to friends and family. They told the neighbors that Armando had been transferred outside the city. The day of departure, he went downstairs first as Olinda stayed in the doorway, looking at her house for the last time. What was awaiting her? The image of the ocean, an ocean like a desert of water, gave her chills. Would they make it? Would that vessel, her Queen Anne, rise to the occasion? In the living room, all that was left was the clock, Camilo Cienfuegos, and the beauty in a thong. She said goodbye and closed the door. The hands marked eleven, the peal of the clock chimes shook the empty floor.

Translated by Whitni Battle

Photo: Carlos Torres, Unsplash.

“JJ, sit down and relax,” Grandma yells at me. Mom flings a cashew and it lands on my head. With my eyes glued to the TV screen, I explain to them, “if Miss Venezuela wins this will be the second time in three years. It would be a great honor for the Latin America of the twentieth century.” Grandma’s demands grow louder while a teary-eyed Miss Brazil gives a lame answer and destroys her chances to be the next Miss Universe. “JJ, your grandma is talking to you,” Mom reprimands me, and meanwhile Miss Venezuela gives a dumb answer to the final question. She says “world peace” and just like that the crown no longer returns to the south. More cashews bounce off my head, now followed by a pair of Grandma’s sandals, and I pray that Miss Canada will freeze up when they ask her the final question.

The battle finally comes to an end. The little old man holds in his hand a slip of paper with the winner’s name written on it. Mom demands that I “stop the racket.” But try as I may, I can’t. Only three remain standing, and if Miss Venezuela wins, I won’t be able to contain myself. Now only two remain. Miss Venezuela is gripping Miss Canada’s hand. A ton of hairspray is holding up her voluminous hair and her face is glowing from all the estrogen. “She won, she won, the Venezuelan won!” I burst out. I cover my face with both hands to catch my tears. “She gave a great answer. Peace on earth. What a great answer. The Venezuelan… She’s drop-dead gorgeous,” I say, but Mom and Grandma are not watching the crowning anymore. They’re observing me jump around the living room, and demanding that I calm down. “Listen, I told you to stop your antics,” says Mom. I exclaim louder and louder, “the first time was in 1979 and again now in 1981!” and they start furrowing their brows. I want to tell them to join me, to celebrate with me, but my mouth only manages to say, “That woman has baby-soft skin. The Miss in pink is giving Latin America another crown. It’s the second time in three years.” Grandma finally realizes that my excitement is not going to let up, so she stops looking at me and starts scowling at Mom. Mom can’t stand it so she gets up from the sofa, puts on her pink robe, and runs to the telephone to call Dad.

Dad didn’t come see me until the following week because he was very busy with all of his business affairs, and his wife had kept the message from him.

“We’re taking him straight to the psychiatrist. He’s going to be seen by the best Panama has to offer. I’m not paying a fortune for an American health insurance policy for nothing, shit,” said Dad after patiently hearing Grandma’s and Mom’s whining.

Mom found not one but three psychiatrists. 

“We work as a team, and we are not psychiatrists. We practice psychology and specialize in child development,” the three women clarified in chorus before launching into a series of questions, endless silences and eternal sighs. Tired of Dad and Mom’s evasiveness, they abruptly escorted me out of the office and, without the slightest regard for Mom’s anguish, they walked me to the end of the hallway, where an empty, windowless room with blue light bulbs awaited us.

“Wait for us here until we come back,” they say in unison before exiting the room and closing the door. The lights go off but it’s not dark. Without the blue light, one of the walls comes alive and transforms into a glass window revealing the room next door. I’m standing, and I see the three quacks walk into the room on the other side of the glass, each one carrying a stack of books, notebooks, and pencils.

The three of them are watching me and waving their hands around, and then I notice that one of them is wearing azure nail polish, a trend that died over three seasons ago.

They sit down on three wooden chairs arranged side-by-side. 

They look at me. They smile. They talk among themselves. They take notes.

They look at me. They talk among themselves. They furrow their brows.

They look at me. I look at them. One of them is wearing white heels. I guess she’s taking advantage of the August dryness. The other two have the nerve to show up to work wearing cloth sandals with plastic straps that cover their feet. The one with azure polish consults one of her books while the other two talk among themselves. They look at each other in agreement. The one in heels bursts into tears. The other two console her with hugs. She gives a sign of agreement and dries her tears.

They turn to look at me.

I look at them and my conclusion is that those three could use a jumbo-size bottle of hair conditioner with paraffin wax.

The lights come back on, the glass wall disappears, and the silence leads me to conclude that the professional woman of the eighties is neglecting her basic obligation to society by ceasing to read health and beauty magazines. Fashion, good looks, and style aren’t a matter of taste; they’re the lubricant that soothes the hard and constant friction of society. 

I stand in a corner of the room and watch as the three psychiatrist-psychologists ask Mom more questions in chorus. “Why do you allow him to watch soap operas? Children have no other option but to imitate behavior.” When Mom’s stony look destroys them, they turn on Dad. “And when was the last time you took him to the park to play soccer? Have you taken him to the beach? Just the two of you? What kind of films do you watch with your son? Have you ever taken him to judo classes? Boxing classes? How about swimming lessons? Children have no other choice but to imitate behavior.” Now they’re met with a second stony look, and one of the quacks concludes in a tone suited for a speech in the 1:00pm Mexican telenovela, “I do not know how to put this, but your son was not born with this condition. You caused it.” Dad hurls insults at the gang of cheap stylists before turning against Mom. “Where did you find these clowns? A bar? Grab the boy. I’ll take care of the rest.” 

Daniel, with Dad in charge of the mission, it took less than two days for the countless medical exams to begin. These would eventually reveal my terminal diagnosis. Male doctors, female doctors, nurses, and a certified witch-doctor with a framed diploma hanging on his wall examined the organs and fluids that I refused to believe existed inside of me. It took that group of explorers more than two months to discover that I have a condition that enjoys its degenerative power so much that it qualifies as a syndrome and is cured by the brute force of pills combined with an unattainable willpower.

First, there were the routine exams: the eyes, the ears, and the heart. The internal medicine specialist offered his recommendation, “Men with his clinical presentation are prone to overexcitement. A daily dose of Digoxin for the rest of his life. It will calm his heart.” Then things got a little complicated. They took me to an orthopedist who is practicing without a license since he is German, and around here, only Panamanian doctors understand the needs of Panamanian patients. He suggested that my balance problems were caused by an underdeveloped auditory system, and that this explained my disturbing hip movements. My dad asked him to prescribe me something, anything, so that I could achieve balance, and the German demonstrated his knowledge of Panamanian laws and said that there was no treatment for my case. An endocrinologist with offices on Peru Avenue pricked my entire body and concluded that even though nothing abnormal showed up in the exams, my problem was hormonal. The recommended treatment? Zinc supplements and fish stew on a daily basis. A nurse with banana-colored hair stuck dozens of white, yellow, and green cables to my head, arms, and legs. It turned out that my cerebellum and spinal cord were not the problem. The iridologist asked if my urine was white, and I didn’t know how to answer because I always sit down to pee. Why should I pay attention to fish food? “He pees sitting down,” the iridologist repeated like a parrot. I nodded and my dad sank his head into his hands. “Nothing fatal here,” the homeopath pronounced, “Nothing a mango egg-white juice can’t fix.”

Finally, the pediatrician called my dad and told him that he and his colleagues had met and come to a conclusion. “Juan José’s Condition is the result of a combination of illnesses. A syndrome is attacking his body,” Doctor Santos explained to Dad, who then explained it to Mom, who then explained it to Grandma. Mom told Grandma that I will eventually lose control of my body and that soon I will become very depressed. Sooner rather than later I will suffer from something called promiscuity. Grandma cried out, “Havin’ to deal with those problems at such a young age. First, Doctor Santos didn’t know what to diagnose. Now look at that!”

The worst part about it, Daniel, is that this mix of illnesses will eat up my brain before the worms get a chance. My mind is going to keep running, but processing information as it pleases, “without a moral compass.” I will be like an Atari that runs Space Invaders when you insert the cartridge for Pac Man. My software for “things to do past midnight” will stop functioning and instead of entering sleep mode, a little button in me to “wander around vice-filled streets” will ignite. My controls for reminding me “not to pee here” and “not to overeat” will get stuck, and instead of going right, I’ll go left. It appears that I’ll lose my sense of hearing and go color blind before the game ends, but I’ll still have my sense of smell and that will be the only software left to inform me that I’ve shit my pants. It turns out that the effects of the syndrome are so devastating that “North American studies show that those who suffer from it have their life expectancy shortened by twenty years.”

In the end, my brother, none of that will matter. My depression will be so deep, Daniel, so sharp, and so painful that my Atari’s CPU will order me to execute the only possible logical solution to my condition and blow out my brains with a little gun from Space Invaders.

Translated by Alexander Aguayo

Photo: Estúdio Bloom, Unsplash.

“I’m not going to be like my grandmother,” Cecilia had been telling me. I said I didn’t get it and the truth is I didn’t. Had women’s desire to procreate been exhausted forever? Didn’t anybody care about continuity? Have a child for the species, for the family name. Have a child to love someone. Was that so absurd?

“I don’t give a crap about the continuist credo and your desire for me to be a mother, Martín.”

Last week Cecilia was pretty irritable. Ever since she took on more responsibilities at work, everything makes her hysterical. She hurries up the natural process of things, takes the plates from the table before we’re finished eating, slamming doors and dropping utensils with complete clumsiness. But, at the same time, she’s exultant. I’m not exaggerating with the adjective. Any little thing is up for debate. She wants to “decide” what brand of sweetener we’re going to buy, what we’re going to do on the weekends, what we should do about our broken Nit connection. My participation appears unnecessary and provisional to her. She wavers, consults me, does the math, but in the end she solves everything by herself. From the brand of milk we’re going to drink to the pants I should wear to the office. I like to see her debate, from the trivial domestic details to her biggest work problems. Sometimes I just watch how she gets caught up in the thousand and one activities that she wants to tackle. Still, even though I reject it, there’s something about it that attracts me: Cecilia settles down when she decides, and it makes things easier for me when she goes on alone.

“What is it that you don’t get?”

“What you said about your grandmother.”

“We’ve been over this a thousand times, Martín.”

“I still don’t get it.”

It’s true. We’d been talking about it for weeks. But it’s also true that we’d never been on the same page. Cecilia’s grandmother was the last woman in her family to give birth.

“I want to keep myself intact,” she went back to saying, as if I was the obstacle to each one of her projects.

“Intact how? And anyways… What does your grandmother have to do with you? We’re talking about having a kid, sheesh, about the fear of putting your body on the line to have a kid. The thing with your grandmother happened a long time ago. Things are easier now.”

“Just leave it. We can’t talk about this. We’re never going to understand each other.” She puts on her corduroy coat and gives up on the conversation. She always does this. She tamps down the urge to retort, stops what she’s doing or saying, and leaves in a huff.

Cecilia is the daughter of continuists. I don’t know the family dynamics well, but I do know that Hugo, her father, agreed to undergo various male fertilization tests during the embryonic stages of those experiments and that after a few tries he managed to get through the first trimester of a pregnancy that would result in his first and only daughter. Cecilia’s mother, who was an actress and tap dancer, reached new heights of fame after inseminating more than five anti-patriarchal guys. Fame wasn’t so great for Cecilia, who had to put up with cameras and all kinds of exposure. Especially after Hugo, a lawyer specializing in civil and criminal law, sued several times for custody of Cecilia, all after filing for digital divorce and becoming a hot commodity in the Nit forums. Hugo got his wife to pay for his daughter’s food and education and proposed the first piece of domestic gender equality legislation. This messy personal backdrop muddied our talks and distanced Cecilia from the desire to be a mother.

“Why don’t we just take it easy?” I say, trying to end the conversation.

“No, it is what it is.” She cuts me off and grabs the house keys in a fist.

“Wait a minute. We’re talking. Don’t be such a hothead.”

I take advantage of her distraction and pull the keys from her hand, teasing her. She doesn’t take it well and gets mad, glaring. I like it when she gets mad.

“No, no. That’s enough, give me that.”

“Don’t be so lame.”

“Martín, give me the keys.”

“Take ‘em.”

“Stop trying to be funny.”

“What? Did I make you laugh? Come on, you’re laughing. I made you laugh.”

“I’m not laughing,” she says, trying to hide her grin and letting herself be hugged. Then she gives me a peck, as if to get me off of her, backing her mouth away from my face. But I hold on, my hand on top of hers, my hand that now holds the keys, pushing them into the couch; with my other hand I trace two fingers along the metal zipper of her jeans. I push down hard and in the same movement kiss her on that elastic mouth, which she resists. She’s backtracking her decision to keep forcing her way out, so I pull off her T-shirt and kiss her. Then I watch her get turned on; I hear her let go of the keys that fall to the floor and she pushes me backwards.

“You asked for it,” she says, “don’t complain about it now.”

She takes down her hair and shifts down to her knees, in front of me, unbuckling my belt, opening my fly and pulling off my dress pants. She doesn’t do it carefully. She scratches my legs and squeezes my dick with one hand. I’m doing the math as fast as I can. I’m not sure that the fertilization window has passed. Even so, I’m not opposed to the attention and I let her go ahead. Cecilia sucks my dick, turning her head, looking me in the eyes, making like she’s choking on it. I hold on as long as I can and avoid the thought of that tragic coincidence when an egg is attracted by the strength of the sperm towards the cavernous body of my penis and then everything activates for fertilization. That’s where I am, pondering, when I can’t take it anymore. I lose control. I feel an intense trembling and I see Cecilia sitting on top of me, shaking like an animal.

I let her.

I enjoy her.

Ecstatic, underneath her, I see the way she enjoys it, or seems to. I hold on for a few more minutes and then I explode. In that moment she runs to the bathroom and brings back the apparatus that one of the Nit labs sold her. I suddenly realize what’s happening when I see her put a gadget inside the micro-orifice of my penis that’s losing its erection. I don’t feel anything other than the pain I had already imagined. The device is a kind of tiny syringe into which a geneticist has inserted Cecilia’s frozen eggs. She knows how to handle the equipment. She has all the moves memorized.

When we’d go to the movies and whatever was playing bored us, Cecilia would recite all the steps for fertilization in my ear. She was always a little obsessed with the idea. I would listen, but later I’d say no, not with me; to put those ideas into practice, she’d need to find herself another guy.

I want to have a child. I always have. But I never imagined that experience would happen inside of me. Cecilia worked to convince me as if she knew all along that this moment would arrive. When we started dating and we would talk about it, she would look me in the eyes and smile a charming little smile, or else she’d pout, pursing her lips like a spoiled little girl pleading with her father. I tried to convince her that it was better to travel to Euramerica, without kids, or to buy a house, or a virtual campground where we could relax. In fact, once we googled “web camping” and found ourselves in front of virtual cows and sheep and horses, even a working stable. But, evidently, the moment for such things had passed without me having been able to convince her. I don’t know how, but now we’re here, on the couch, me face-up with my neck stretched out and Cecilia’s hands inserting the speculum into my penis.

“Is that it?”

“No. Here comes the best part.”

Cecilia brings her hands together over my penis and resumes her forceful rubbing. We’d read in Beings magazine that it was important to recreate the pleasant feeling of the sexual act in the moment that the sperm meets the frozen egg. Still, I feel more aching and burning than pleasure.

Cecilia talks to me, moves in front of me, touches herself, closes her eyes, caresses her legs and tits, and once again she has me under her spell. When she realizes that I’m about to ejaculate, she enthusiastically lowers the syringe’s piston between her fingers, emptying its contents into my glans. A sudden chill comes over my body and immediately I see Cecilia pulling the instrument back as she yanks it out with a triumphant cry.

“Stop, you nut,” I’m telling her. “Are you crazy?”

But she’s cackling with glee. As soon as the assisted conception is complete, Cecilia hops off the couch and walks naked through the living room to the bathroom, skipping from floor tile to floor tile. Then she showers and heads off to work.

2

I read the shaving cream ingredients and put the can back on the shelf under the sink. With my elbows on my knees and my hands on the back of my neck, I end up thinking about children’s reach. “Keep out of reach of children.” Anybody could reach our cabinet at this height, even a crawling baby. I imagine a little hand pushing the door open, sticking its head in first, then its small body, its plump knees wiping across the floor. I pull up my pants, adjusting my cock to the right, and close my fly. I never push it backwards, or to the left, by habit. Sometimes I think that political ideology has a lot to do with which way we adjust our cocks. It doesn’t matter, I think, changing course: it can’t be that the egg has taken hold. First of all, because we didn’t do the procedure on the date of optimal sperm fertility, and secondly, because I don’t feel any weird symptoms, like the geneticists Cecilia and I visited suggested I might.

Just in case I look at the test’s folded instructions. A slogan on the packaging insists that “one minute is enough.” I wait a few more seconds anyway. I want to be completely sure. I observe the reactive strip like someone looking inside a casket. In the apartment, it’s as quiet as the grave. On the back of the box read the word “absorbent” and the initials “M.P.T.:” Male Pregnancy Test. I wonder about the clarification. Why divide the tests by gender when the hormonal modification of the urine, in these cases, is identical between men and women?

Positive.

I look at the reactive strip without realizing it and the answer is already there. “Positive again, no way.” My breathing becomes agitated, and I start to feel suddenly hot. I put it all in a bag and throw it in the trash can. I don’t do it in the bathroom but out in the street. I’d prefer Cecilia not find out right now. And what if the test doesn’t meet health standards? What if I’m facing a technical glitch and I fill Cecilia up with false hope and even I believe in the mistake of a conception that isn’t? I want and I don’t want to be going through what I just confirmed. I take it back: I didn’t fill my body with hormones for the past few months for nothing. Nonetheless, a part of me resists the fact that what is happening is actually happening.

All of a sudden an unknown burst of energy is springing up in my body. It’s been a while since I felt like this. I leave the house with a nimble step. Maybe it’s just the adrenaline for the tennis game I’m planning to play when I get to the club, like nothing else is happening. My nervous system anticipates it and sends a fistful of adrenaline to my legs that now move faster and surer. It has to be that, I think, it must be that. Dazed, I enter the Gascón y Sarmiento pharmacy to buy a better test and rule out any kind of glitch in the result. My phone lets me know it’s nine o’clock. I go up to the checkout and pay quickly. Pedro is waiting for me in the open-air court where we play doubles every Tuesday. He doesn’t tolerate impunctuality and I don’t tolerate losing. It bores me not to win. It bores me and discourages me.

[…]

I tell Pedro to get going, I’ll shower at the club then I’ll head back to the salt mines without breakfast. That’s what I tell him, “the salt mines,” like my old man said my grandfather used to say. Meetings first thing are pretty typical, so he takes it for the truth and claps me on the back goodbye. Then he loops a towel around his neck and heads straight for the parking garage.

When I’m in the locker room bathroom, I take out the box with the new interactive test, put a drop of urine on the test strip and enter the day and time as indicated by the instructions. The numbers on the reactive tape light up instantaneously. I look at the date and wait. I’m not an anxious person, but two minutes with eyes fixed on that reactive strip put me at the edge of despair. The Nit sites claim that this version of the test is simpler and doesn’t make mistakes. Someone bangs on the door while I’m in the middle of the procedure. I say I’ll be right out and ask my phone again for the time. It is five past ten, the voice says. I

grab the test strip and again: “positive.” I kick the bathroom door and violently head toward the locker room. The gray-haired guy who doesn’t know what it means to wrap a towel around your waist looks at me like he wants to tell me something. It’s a good thing he doesn’t open his mouth. In this state I’d be able to crack his jaw with one good punch.

I grab my bag and leave. In passing, I slam into the wooden locker room bench. I hit it dead on with my operated knee and I let out an interminable stream of obscenity. The old guy looks at me horrified, still in the towel, dragging his feet as he shuffles along in his slides.

Maybe I should just go home, I think. I head down Humahuaca and as soon as I turn I remember Cecilia and I imagine the relief on her face when I tell her:

“I’m pregnant. I got pregnant, just like you wanted, are you happy now?” 

But quickly I reproach myself for being so soft. When I wanted to wait. This could have happened later, another year, in other circumstances, she could have eased up, but no, she insisted, like she always does. When I get to the office and I tell Carrezi I’m sure she’ll send me straight to hell with directions, if I know her.

I stop at Bar Almagro for a second, trying to calm down. I leave my bag on the floor and order a coffee. I need to take it easy, think cool. It’s all going to be ok, I tell myself.

“Double, no sugar.”

Once again I wonder if I’ve done the right or the wrong thing. Maybe the most convenient thing would be an abortion. Can you abort an injected fetus? Pedro told me a while ago that when he got pregnant he didn’t have any choice but to go ahead with it and give up some stuff: alcohol, coffee, fucking. Well, fucking, not entirely—he said—except the first few months and the last couple of days.

I give the waiter a thumbs down. He understands, lowers his chin, and aims his exit towards the kitchen. When I watch him go I notice he has wider hips. I wonder if the waiter might not be, too. The waiter who took my order and the one by the windows. That one also looks fatter, expanded, more irritable. I wonder again how I should deal with this. When I get home, I’ll shower, I think; I can’t stop giving myself orders: Get home, shower, wake Cecilia and go to work. No matter what, don’t tell her anything.

I was never an indecisive person. When I bought the car I brooded less. I saw it, I liked it, I had the dough, and I signed. This should be the same, or similar. After all, everyone has been through it at some point. I put the reactive strip in its folder and go home. I wake up Cecilia and get in the shower. She gets up and connects. I hear the Nit while I’m in the bathroom. After a while Cecilia lets me know that she’s about to place the grocery order. When I get out, to avoid contact, I tell her I’m in a hurry, that I have a meeting first thing and I’ll give her a kiss on my way.

“But should I get you something from the store?” she asks, raising her voice so I can hear her while she watches me leave.

“Yeah, shaving cream,” I yell. “Actually, never mind. Don’t get me anything.”

In the parking garage I wave to Cosme and get the monthly garage ticket on my phone. I accept the file and check the date. The charge should have already gone through, I think. I thank the old guy with a dry gesture and I get in the car. The onboard computer starts on its own. Right away I hear the little alarm that lets me know the Nit connection is good. I activate hands-free and with my finger on the thin screen’s display, I locate the search.

“Penile birth,” I say out loud.

“Search cannot be performed,” the clipped robot voice answers. 

I say it again, enunciating each syllable.

“Pe-nile birth.”

The little search wheel spins on the display in the time it takes me to turn off of Acuña de Figuera and take Corrientes. A list appears in blue, underlined letters:

All-genital-warts-are-hpv.

Sexual-disorders-after-giving-birth.

The-use-of-Viagra-during-pregnancy.

Natural-and-cesarean-birth-by-penile-route.

Masculine-reproductive-health-and-birth-control.

I open the link. A pop-up asks if I want to activate the browser’s speaker. 

I accept. I try not to distract myself. The first image that appears grabs all of my attention. Just in case I press pause and cut the engine at a red light on Medrano. I drive forward when everyone else does. Halfway down the block, on the left, I park in front of the perfume store that’s in front of the historic McDonald’s. I cut the engine and cue up the video. I need to watch this closely. There’s a green curtain and a man with his legs open towards a light. Five people are attending him. The tension is high. Still, everything is under control. A woman tells the man something in his ear. The man closes his fists and stabs his elbows into the gurney. The nurses tie his hands to lateral railings so he won’t tear out his lines. Then the camera, from the perspective of the parturient, shows us what he sees. His own legs, a sheet covering his cock and the face of the concentrating female obstetrician.

Without me doing anything, a picture-in-picture appears on the right side of the screen and expands their assistance in detail: the gloved hands of the midwife pulling foreskin back, the glans appearing, bloodied, the little cranium coming out of the central orifice, just barely visible beneath the translucent skin of the fetus.

A honk brings me back to reality.

I start up the car and head down Corrientes at the max allowable speed. I don’t have to say anything when I get to the office. The phone rings and it’s Cecilia. As if she knows, she asks what’s going on with me.

“Nothing, why would anything be going on?”

“You left the coffee maker on.”

“Yeah, I didn’t have breakfast at home,” I answer sharply.

“But you turned on the coffee maker.”

“I’m in a hurry, we’ll talk later.”

Because I don’t answer again for ten seconds, the call gets canceled. There’s a brief beep inside the car’s cabin.

At work I forget to print the daily raw material sheet for suppliers, experience some kind of anxiety, and I’m voraciously hungry at eleven in the morning. I make myself some tea and take a sip once it cools down. I avoid calling the obstetrician. I look at the public health database under gynecology and obstetrics for a last name that gives me confidence. I’m about to ask Carrezi’s secretary, who helped her the first time, but I remember the best thing is to just keep quiet. The best thing is to not raise suspicions and to find a specialist as soon as possible. I tamp down the need to solve everything today. The workday ends later than ever.

Translated by Maggie Dunlap

Photo: Vítor de Matos, Unsplash.

Translated by Emily Hunsberger

From the book Larga distancia (Buenos Aires: Concreto Editorial, 2020)

Photo: Giulia May, Unsplash.

Months and months repeating the same useless question: Why?

Why did they take us prisoner?

What did we do, what did we think, what did we say, what threat did we pose without realizing? The country was calm and seems to be staying calm, as though nothing, as though we had never existed. Eighteen women writers deleted. House arrest. Fucking fiasco.

Maybe I’ll get a glimpse of an answer if I start to write, if I recount what happened on the Mañana, all these months of lock-up it’s been eating away at my brain as I try desperately to find an answer to this stupid and very pregnant question.

The mere idea of writing makes me want to vomit. It’s all because of writing that eighteen women writers are where we are. But. Writing might lead to some form of understanding, and questions were always my spur. The moment has come to face this thing, enough already with impotence, frustration, and fury.

I have no choice.

I must write, make a show of having hold of my life, even though they are constantly deleting me.

At least it will be one more adventure.

Sunday

I know it’s Sunday but I’ve lost all notion of dates. The men only mark a few days of the week: Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays. Bastards. The air now has turned warm, it smells of spring. So it’s more than six months since they stormed in on us, in the middle of the dance, in the middle of the night. It was easy for them. We were sailing gently along, almost becalmed, the river barely slapping the sides of Mañana. Of the boat named Mañana, and also our Mañana, our future, because the day before we’d already realized how long five days afloat could be. But at the moment of the siege, we were celebrating like mad and they had no right, they had no right, a few of us screamed in the face of a few of them once the fracas cooled and we could grasp what had just happened. If they really and truly had to do it—if the order was so iron-clad—they could have chosen another moment, for example, unleashed themselves during one of our most heated arguments.

They did it deliberately during the dance, the best part of our conclave which among ourselves and with a good dose of irony we named the FimFen, First Confidential Meeting of Female Novelists. They threw themselves at us once our conflicts had been filed down, once we’d battled with language and played with it and trampled it and even splashed around in it as in preverbal times, and to celebrate all this we were dancing like crazy, really kicking it up, even Ophelia in her wheelchair was dancing…

In that very first sudden instant, we were happy to see them. Men! We were delighted, men! Like it was manna fallen from heaven. Totally the opposite. More like released from the river, from the tame and heavy water that had been our friend until that moment when the wide river turned traitor and allowed those minions to sneak onto our boat in their rubber boots, their black rubber boots, their black everything. Everything they wore was black, but their skin tones were every color—the youngest were darker, the ones in charge contemptibly white. But when sheathed in black they burst into the dining room—we’d moved the tables for the sarao—they looked divine. Especially a few, to a few of us, looked especially divine. A male body can be very good for dancing and other carnal pursuits.  At least for some of us, like Ophelia who was the first who managed to get close, wheelchair and all.

Holy sh–! we yelled, come aboard! we yelled once the shock faded and we thought we could turn the tables and pounce on the men who just moments before had silently invaded our ship. Come aboard! we yelled, as though flipping the rules, though they looked less like pirates and more like the storm troops they really were. Adela, our DJ, switched to heavy metal and for a few instants we fantasized that these men in black had come to throw us in the air like the rock-and-roll of times past.

Throw us up in the air was exactly their intention, which had nothing to do with fun or pleasure.

At first the invaders didn’t know how to react to our explosion of enthusiasm. When we women writers throw parties, we throw parties. They stopped dead, astonished, then they started forward in single file, very close together and hugging the wall, the better to surround us. They didn’t seem fierce until the platoon leader started spitting out orders. Because a platoon is what they were, that was now clear, and if at first, we laughed and soaked up their rivers of testosterone, it’s because our guard was down, we were deep into our farewell party and a little tipsy on top of it all.

In that first bewildered moment, a few of the youngest men had come forward unsuspectingly to dance. They’d taken a few of us by the waist and who could know where that might lead. But the leader reacted in time. Their leader. Whom now we have to call Captain, as though our ship had lacked a capitán, or better said, capitana, we’ll talk about that if they should let us talk—if they do let us, if they don’t cut out our tongues, which they clearly want to, we can read it in their eyes.

They turned the page on us. Blotted us out for a whole new story. Eighteen women writers from our own country, erased from the literary map.

I am so full of rage that I can’t even tell it right, shitfuckingdammit, and I’ve been trying since they locked me up.

It feels like I’m evaporating under the press of time, desperation, and impotence. But not because of my rage. Rage endures: it’s a combustible fuel, it’s what stokes me to keep making these notes. Rage is flammable, I know because it’s burning my guts, and if all my notes end up erased like us writers, it would be better for them to burn in a great pyre of rage and not in the slow fire in which they intend us to suffocate.

You’re women, women have no intellectual interests: stop thinking, enjoy the solitude, work out, concentrate on your appearance. That, more or less, is what they told us; to synthesize, although they lack all ability to synthesize, they’re wild and ferocious and. Now that they’re in charge, the men are not merely men; I must be careful, keep repeating this, so as not to fall into the trap of easy dichotomies. They are power itself: men and women sick with power, never forget this; they are the law, a fucked-up law persecuting us without reason, without giving any explanation.

Why?

They planted drugs on the Mañana, planted guns in every caliber, the latest models. They accused us of being terrorists, witches, lesbians, and conspirators. They even planted a string of electrodes supposedly for making bombs. They didn’t plant anything else because that’s all that would fit. And they did it with the utmost sneakiness, while we in glorious oblivion were dancing in the dining room and forecastle, honoring the figurehead whose high breasts cut through the waters of the river. We were all dancing, even Ophelia in her chair, from the Capitana to the deck hands, it was a ship crewed entirely by women, now that was something to celebrate. At dawn we would reach the city of Corrientes, Our Lady of the Seven Currents, hallelujah!! To Her we danced, not to the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows, which is what the eighteen novelists would soon become.

Of course there were lesbians among us. Maybe a few nostalgic witches, not to omit transgressors, and who knows what. Language terrorists or guerrillas, but no more than that. We were an eclectic group and we were happy. It was the last time we were happy.

In thanks, we’d even sent up some flares. Tracer bullets, the minions declared in the rush to trial that was a total hoax, an enormous lie to numb the resistance of those who couldn’t understand why the country’s most prominent female writers were being persecuted.

That never came out, no one even hinted at the real reason for the kidnapping. What kind of threat could one think we represented? We ourselves didn’t understand. I still don’t. We’d only been weighing possibilities, trying to open spaces for reflection, for ways to write from greater depths. Playing with language, possessing it for ourselves. Nothing more. Nothing less, they’d decided behind our backs. Now we have all of time ahead of us for thinking from the depths—because that’s all we can do even though it’s forbidden: No thinking! they warn us, and they’ll keep warning us until who knows when. We have all of time ahead of us, yes, but it’s strangled time, and no thoughts can squeeze through. If only we could communicate among ourselves, even if only for a few minutes, if these words could reach even a few of the others. But I know they won’t reach anyone.

But your families, aren’t they doing anything, protesting, filing appeals for protection or whatever, some invisible interlocutor keeps asking me. I imagine that those who have family will be better off, having company under house arrest—although you never know, because confinement in company can turn into a Sartrean hell, still I hope Ophelia has someone to be with her. I wouldn’t know how to answer, since I have only a distant cousin who won’t have been informed. And the international organizations, they’re not doing anything? They’ll be trying to do something, no doubt about that, but a lot of people must feel more comfortable with our voices silenced, and who knows what horrors they’ve been led to believe, how many lies, how much slander they’ve been told. All they’ve left me is a device that switches in equal intervals between folk music and classical, with a bit of tango or cumbia, but not too much of the latter, just in case. I’m sick and tired of “Amor silvestre”; enough already with “Amor silvestre,”  I turn off this fake radio and listen, in silence, to the street sounds. My apartment is at the rear of the building and I have no neighbors. My bad luck. I bought it for this very reason. Not for the bad luck, for the tranquility. It’s on the thirteenth floor, I’m not superstitious, it has a lovely balcony full of plants that point up to the sky. It’s a calm neighborhood high on the embankment. The vast river is not close, they keep reinforcing the shoreline, so every day it’s a bit farther away. But at least one can still get a glimpse from a distance.

At the beginning of being locked up, I distracted myself by throwing paper airplanes made from the pages of the few books they left me—a desperate attempt, vandalism—but it’s obvious that no one wants to get involved, brainwashed for sure, and the eighteen women writers from the retreat, we’re anathema, we’re a plague, we’re subversives; to a certain degree, those labels would honor us, if we didn’t have to suffer this house arrest, it’s perverse, unimaginable.

I’m lucky to be surrounded by objects I love. But there are days and especially nights when I come to hate them. During one of my attacks of rage I threw more than one piece of pottery against the wall, things I brought back from my travels, and some token of what’s left of my meager family. More than once I’ve felt the impulse to bust up everything, including my own head, or throw myself over the balcony. Until one fine day, they got suspicious and installed some very high barbed wire, thick, cage-like, it makes me despair. And I had to pay for it out of my own pocket.

Right on time I receive the rent on the apartment downtown, purchased when I won the Astralba Prize; I’m telling this so that if anyone asks—but who the fucking hell is going to worry about my fate?—or even read these annotations that will go straight to the devil as soon as I decide to click on Select All, Delete?

And then, like every other time, the screen goes white with cynical innocence.

I must stay calm.

It is the only way I can fight them.

Ideas have stopped coming, I’m losing my grip on language. Where have my documents gone to? My archives burned or erased. As though publishers had never existed; that shitty piece of information the minions blew in my face, the very ones who usually never say a word. They said: For the publishers, not one of you is worth a dime, your numbers are nothing, and so on and so on…

but here I stop

breathe deep

because I was on the verge of giving my desk such a kick that I would have wrecked the old computer I have here, a black and white monstrosity long obsolete, one of those laptops from the eighties fit for a museum. One of the first things they did was take my latest-generation shining jewel that let me communicate with the world and was even gratifying to touch. With her I could do anything, even talk face-to-face with many of my interlocutors, and now I have this mute, insipid, inert, and blind monstrosity, and here I sit though I was just on the verge of smashing it into a thousand electronic pieces and now I worship it because it’s the only thing that can connect to anyone. It connects me to myself; it’s my intermediary, my buddy.

My language center. My creature.

My female minder said that the other participants in the retreat are just like me, totally cut off from information. No one keeps us from writing because we need something to somehow pass the time, but the minder—that’s what I call her—comes on every Saturday, to erase the hard disk. They don’t allow us a printer or external hard drive, not a pencil or any equivalent; we have no way to save a document. I don’t even care anymore, I’m writing for myself, it’s only on principle that I’m addressing you who aren’t here and won’t ever read this; I’m doing it out of a need for company, so I don’t lose the memory of dialogue. How long has it been since I talked with someone? I no longer even have the books my friend wrote, my bookshelves have been stripped, all I have left are some solitary texts by those damned masters, the docile masters, not the maîtres maudits I so admire.

Which brings me back to an earlier question: No, I have no family, well hardly any, and the few distant relatives I have left think that writing is a form of contamination. Better to be business managers, like them. Them—women as well as the rest of them. Let’s be honest, we have always fought against this eternally masculine conventional plural when it discriminated against us, but we mustn’t forget the exceptions to the rule, and accept that many women have allied themselves first and foremost with men.

 Is that clear? What the hell do I care if it’s clear!

Before I abhorred exclamation marks, now I abuse them !!!!!!!!!!! Ratatatatatá. It’s the only protest I’m allowed, my little machine gun.

Ellipses I also used to avoid but now I use them… and moreover…. and moreover…. At least they leave room for a little hope.

We’d planned the retreat a year in advance. It was our chance to get together, behind closed doors, to exchange ideas, design a collective project, and evaluate past victories. For we did have victories over the last decades, there are (were!) many.

The country’s first closed-door conference of women writers, without critics or academics, not even an audience or any publicity whatsoever. It sounded interesting, no doubt about it. Invitation only—and not for the most famous, but for the boldest. The organizing committee was made up of young women who were full of enthusiasm, some already with a third novel, and they needed the conference to go as well as it possibly could.

The proposal seemed more than ambitious, even a little pretentious, but I was happy to sign on. It was a precious opportunity to meet in privacy with my peers and to focus on what matters most, that’s to say, language.

It would be the most intense and possibly only conference of this magnitude (although magnitude isn’t the right word, is it, pertaining to women). And now we’re locked up, silenced, the word is forbidden, writing is forbidden. Maybe thinking is also forbidden.

Was the Mañana/the Tomorrow a Pandora’s Box?  That’s what they tried to turn it into, the agents of repression, the minions or whatever they are, because what should we call the enemy?

Our final goal was the city of Corrientes, where many of us would disembark to take the first plane back to the Capital, where obligations of all sorts awaited us.

Are still awaiting us.

House arrest for mothers means being with family, of course, but from what I’ve understood they suffer even more surveillance than those who are single or, like me, divorced. When they take us out for air, we have to wear a chador; not that anyone notices, because the chador is in fashion, more and more women are wearing it, but not writers, on the contrary, it’s the husbands and boyfriends and lovers (but are there any lovers left, I wonder, with things having become so conservative, I understand there are even mass weddings), who want women to be demure and entirely in their possession.

For me, the actions are less important than the words, the indelible marks, with which they designate the actions. The veil can be removed; “veiled” as adjective covers us forever.

I was born a rebel, so now what?

This happened because we embarked on the Mañana, a ship with a punning name. How should we translate it? Mañana in the feminine form is that which is happening now, flowing beyond our reach, and one mañana will bring another mañana, but only a neutral mañana with no specific gender which is no more than the following day: I’ll see you mañana por la mañana. On the other hand, the masculine mañana contains everything, the promise of a better future, “mañana will come and nothing will be the same,” says the poem, including us, still here and yet transformed, yes, in a milky mañana made of gentle clouds where they’ve pinned us like butterflies to a noun, like those joking and very productive anglophones: Mañana, mañana, they say in our own language, as a synonym for a promise that will never be honored.

Adela Mignone was the one who told us about the ship, and it seemed like a brilliant idea. It ended all the quibbling, some wanting the conference in the mountains up north, others in the lakes down south, a big group saying here in the capital, but no one wanted it to be public. On that we all agreed: no audience, only a closed-door meeting for the first and almost certainly last time, because enough already with separating ourselves from the body of literature, enough already with women writers on one side and men on the other, enough with all those discriminations.

That’s how the ship named Mañana sailed into view, floating in our dreams. It seemed perfect with a figurehead salvaged from earlier times, a sort of siren pointing with her breasts to a safe future, to the best harbor. The Mañana had her own female captain who would assemble—she promised—an entirely female crew. We took it as a joke, but we were also reassured: we well knew the power of enchantment sailors have over the tender souls of certain female writers, even if they’re only freshwater sailors and the slow crossing lasts only five days including nights and even if these writers have their minds on other matters. The mind, yes, said one of us, but the body?… and thus, we unanimously agreed to sail with a crew of women. To sail with a fixed destination, our ideas floating free.

I must go to bed, and like every night, I will miss my sweet bitch Sand. The locked-up writers with cats have somehow managed, but I had to give Sand to my doorman. The guy raises canaries, I hope at least with animals he has a kindly disposition. It killed me to give up Sand, but how could I take her out to the sidewalk three times a day when they only take me out twice a week if it doesn’t rain. Monday and Thursday. At 6:30 in the morning, the hour of my best dreams. But that was before. When I could dream. Now I try to sleep; that’s all I can do. Mañana (to repeat the term) will be another day exactly like all the others but I’ll keep writing, until my last breath I’ll keep writing, that’s to say, until next Saturday when the minder comes and erases everything, and I’ll start writing again and the next week and the next and a mark will be left on this screen that turns totally gray and luminous, and laughs at me, but I will keep marking like one who writes with water on a rock and one day, one day that rock will be chiseled. I don’t have much time. I don’t have millennia but it’s as though I did. Time arrested is all time.

Tuesday

DON’T BE FRIGHTENED
I’M HERE TO HELP YOU
PLEASE DON’T PANIC
DON’T SCREAM I’M HERE TO HELP YOU
I’M OMER KATVANI FROM ISRAEL
DO YOU REMEMBER ME?

“Medusified” is the word Elisa Algañaraz would have chosen if she could have expressed her horror, her disorientation. It was Tuesday, no one was supposed to disturb her, she’d finally managed to get some real sleep after nights of insomnia and at eight in the morning she felt fresh, ready to dive back into writing without paying attention to her pathetic circumstances. With some real enthusiasm she fired up the screen on the old laptop and even before opening that obsolete WordStar, the only program available, she was faced with the same message and read it again:

DON’T BE FRIGHTENED
I’M HERE TO HELP YOU
PLEASE DON’T PANIC
DON’T SCREAM I’M HERE TO HELP YOU
I’M OMER KATVANI FROM ISRAEL
DO YOU REMEMBER ME?

She pressed every single key but nothing happened and she gradually fell prisoner to a paralysis that started at her fingertips and spread until it completely overwhelmed her. Medusified, like one who accidentally saw the atrocious head of snakes and was turned to stone. Don’t scream, said the message, as though she could have screamed or had any reaction before such an enormous intrusion from the beyond.

Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz

Photo: Utsman Media, Unsplash.

And sit while their kids run around.

None of them showed up on time. Them meaning the kids. Some of our friends got pregnant accidentally when we were very young, and the rest of us babysat while they studied for exams, sat at the back of the classroom like fake families during their end-of-semester presentations. Others got pregnant late, almost too late, after tests and thermometers and treatments that wiped out their savings. We cried over their losses at bar after bar, tried to console them by saying maybe this one wasn’t right, maybe next cycle. We toasted and celebrated when the blue line appeared on the test and three months went by—and look at that belly grow!

We went to birthdays and baptisms. We got good at choosing age-appropriate toys and guessing how big an outfit to buy. It worked for a while. Our friends, the parents, waited patiently for us. Occasionally one would say, while we played contentedly with their kids, “You guys aren’t ready yet?”

Gloria smiled like always. I lied more than ever. 

Our friends waited and waited. In vain. Our kids never showed up at all.

Not that we went looking.

And so we wound up alone. 

I wake up to a screen glowing in my face. My wife’s hand and arm loom behind it. In her eyes is a spark I haven’t seen in years. 

“Look,” she demands.

I take her phone and read. 

Mommy Time!

I’d laugh, but Gloria’s face tells me this is no joke.

I read carefully, eyes trained on the images and descriptions. At the bottom of the page are the rates. Which are insane. But our situation is dire.

We decide to give it a shot.

We tell our friends we’re dipping our toes in the water, and they’re thrilled. Within seconds, we get invited to the park.

On Sunday, Gloria sits by the door until she hears the bell. She leaps up and smooths wrinkles that aren’t there from her dress. On the doorstep is Gaspar, in a jacket that makes him look like a shrunken adult. He has a book under his arm and Sara, from the company, beside him. She’s holding an iPad that has our contract ready. Gloria signs with her finger, not bothering to read.

“Gaspar, meet Gloria and Tomás, your parents for the day.”

He looks up at us, not smiling. A bit absurdly, he takes off his hat.

“I’ll pick him up at 7:00. Please don’t keep me waiting,” Sara says, and then closes the door.

Gaspar sits in the living room. He seems at ease.

“Are you hungry?” my wife asks anxiously. “Would you like a snack?”

“No, thank you. I just ate lunch.” He’s peering at our art, our décor. Maybe he’s searching for books. “I understand we’re going to the park.”

His speech is so stilted that I wonder briefly whether he’s a robot. Gloria looks at me hotly, begging me to say something. In a tone stiffer than my usual, I say, “We are. Do you like playing games there?”

His face looks like I’d asked if he likes eating worms. I start to debate inventing a migraine so I don’t have to go.

He asks, “What should I call you?”

Gloria and I glance uneasily at each other.

“Your names? Or Mother and Father?”

His formality bothers me. It feels like pity. Like he came here to teach us a lesson.

I’m not brave enough to answer. After all, this was Gloria’s idea. But I couldn’t be more relieved when she says, “You can use our names, Gaspar. Our names are just fine.” 

At the park, the Parents greet us too euphorically. Our friends grab Gaspar’s hand, offer him ice cream—he says he never eats sugar—and take him to meet their kids, who eye him curiously from slides and swings. “So cute!” the Parents cry, ruffling his hair and kissing his cheeks.

Gloria and I choose a bench. We watch him.

But he doesn’t run around. Instead of playing, he just stands in the sandbox, no idea what to do. It’s like he failed Childhood 101. He’s clutching his book like a buoy, like without it he’d sink and drown. His face makes no room for innocence. He radiates a solemn calm that seems completely inappropriate around all these howling kids. Kids who’ve called us aunt and uncle their whole lives.

One time, when Clara and Cristián’s daughter Lauri was a toddler, she got confused about Gloria. She started blinking at her, then asked, “Whose mommy are you?”

My wife was unfazed. Smiling, she said, “No one’s, Lauri. I’m not anyone’s mommy.”

Lauri was completely baffled. “So,” she said, much more shyly than usual, “what are you?”

I wish I could say that my wife kept smiling, or that I swooped in to rescue her. But the truth is that I stood in the corner with my wine glass, an uncomfortable audience, until Lauri—three seconds later—got bored and returned to her toys. But some bit of Gloria broke. It was a crack, hardly perceptible. During lunch, she busied herself scooping ice cream for our fake nieces and nephews; after, she sat with them and watched cartoons. When we got home that night, once we were together and alone, she turned to me and asked tentatively, “Are we sure?”

She didn’t need to say more. I understood what she meant.

But it was a strange we.

It made me feel a responsibility I had never thought of. I was sure. I loved our life, loved a version of us that had no room for anyone new. Certainly not someone who’d change our reality completely. I loved our late mornings, our control over our time, my wife’s devotion to her job. It was hard to imagine Gloria getting up to breastfeed three times a night, or giving up her sleep to nurse our eventual child through a cold. But she’d said we in a way that made it a new word. It was a question; a doubt; an invitation. 

I don’t remember saying yes. I don’t remember saying anything. Gloria, who’d worn herself out, went to make tea, and I fell asleep. In the morning, our world had changed. From then on, we was a door slamming closed.

No one has fun. Not me, not Gloria, and certainly not Gaspar. He’s got great manners, he asks relevant questions (like an adult would, yes, but relevant), but once we get in the car, silence falls. Everybody seems grateful for it. He occasionally leafs through his book, and I want to tell him to save it for later in case he gets carsick, but no words come out.

Sara comes to get him right at 7:00, and Gloria heads upstairs. Another door shuts.

Water runs in the bathtub.

Eventually I go into the bathroom. Her body seems misshapen underwater. Weak bubbles gather by her sides and drift over her breasts. She looks old. Older than she is. Sad, too. I can tell today was intense for her. Not a good call. I consider suggesting a trip—yes, why don’t we get out of town, ditch our problems for a while?—but before I can, Gloria opens her mouth and stuns me by saying, “Would you mind if we tried again?”

I can’t speak.

She adds, “A girl this time.”

Her name is Amalia, and we keep her to ourselves. We’re not going to the park or sharing her with our friends. Maybe that helps Gloria get up the nerve to ask her to call us Mom and Dad—“but only if it feels okay,” she adds apologetically.

I have to admit that the girl is delightful. She’s not a big talker, but she talks like a normal child. She gets excited when we go out for ice cream and let her order anything she wants, and even more excited when we walk into a toy store. “Only one,” we tell her, anticipating trouble.

But Amalia considers her options and then marches through the shelves, beelining for a doll whose hair color you can change. It costs more than we would have preferred, but she asks, in her perfect voice, “Can we get this one, Dad?” 

I don’t get goosebumps or tear up. Still, some bit of me stops working, some piece too small for Gloria to see.

We have a calm week. Gloria’s in a great mood, and we fuck pretty much daily. In the morning over breakfast; in the shower, slipping and laughing. We’re like our old selves. Our selves from so long ago. For a moment, I panic, imagining that Gloria’s gone off her birth control. What if she’s tricking me? But no: here are her pills, here’s the alarm on her phone, here she is taking one every day, punctual as always.

But when I get home on Friday, I hear shrieks.

I open the door to see my wife playing with Amalia, sprinting up and down the stairs like a maniac. Neither of them sees me as they shoot by. For dinner we get a pizza—Amalia’s request—and, after, we curl up and watch a movie together, the little girl between us. Sometimes she glances at us and smiles.

Sara picks her up and wishes us good night. So does Amalia. But as she walks to the company’s car, she doesn’t turn to look at us.

Not once. 

For a few days, life seems normal. Gloria works late, then comes home and tells me happily about a new commission—a house in the south—and an end-of-year bonus. My patients have started referring me to their friends. Life is bestowing abundance upon us. We get a reservation at a hot new restaurant; we order a new living-room TV and throw in an Xbox. Gloria scrolls through photos of Amalia on her phone sometimes, looking dreamy but not sad.

According to our kitchen calendar, Teo has a birthday coming. All our fake nieces and nephews’ birthdays are written there. His mom calls to invite us over. She asks us to bring ice—it always runs out—and then, as if casually, suggests that we give the company another shot. 

“Wouldn’t it be fun?” she asks, her voice creeping higher and higher. She’s on speaker, and it floats through the kitchen like a ghost.

Gloria is already on her phone. She pulls up Mommy Time! I’d like to say the idea bugs me, but it wouldn’t be true. I genuinely appreciate the suggestion. I want to see Amalia. I want to get her the toy car that caught my eye in the supermarket, the one that goes with her doll. I want to tell her the corny jokes my dad told me. But Gloria’s face is clouding. She keeps tapping the screen, searching the company’s catalogue.

“Is she not available?” I ask.

Gloria says nothing. She puts the phone to her ear and goes out to the balcony. I see her gesturing, starting to shake. It’s chilly out, but I don’t dare bring her a jacket. Our Chinese food arrives, and I go to the door to let the delivery guy in. I look through the paper bag, then pay him in crisp new bills.

When I return to the kitchen, Gloria is inside. Her expression is one I’ve never seen.

“We can see her a different day, sweetie. It’s not important if she can’t come this time.”

And she tells me.

Amalia’s parents—her real parents—more or less demanded she stop working. It didn’t feel right to them.

Gloria’s eyes are sad. While she talks, she digs through the paper bag, faking too much interest in our food.

Slowly the calls and invitations taper. We drop by the park a couple Sundays, no child in tow, and our friends are plainly let down. Some ask if we made up our minds, if we’re ready to try now. Others suggest treatments or tell us it isn’t too late to freeze eggs, that we could regret not doing it down the road. None of these are fun conversations. All of them are the kind where the other person looks at the ground while they talk, or just sends us emails without subjects, emails containing only a link to a fertility center and a sign-off.

Hugs!

Love you.

Gloria talks less and less. Something has left her for good, or is having trouble getting back into her body. On the nights she gets home late, she seems totally shut down. I ask if she’d like to call Sara. We could take another girl to Disney on Ice next month.

But she doesn’t answer me. 

While Gloria does the dishes, I glance at her phone.

Amalia isn’t on her lock screen anymore.

Mommy Time!, with its acid-green font, is gone.

Now it’s my turn to say, “Are we sure?”

It takes her less than a second to reply. 

Translated by Lily Meyer
From the collection Una música futura (Editorial Kindberg, 2020)

Photo: Vanessa Bucceri, Unsplash.

“Mom, look what I found.”

***

I used to play pretend, feeding my teddy bears and shiny action figures. With blue crayons I filled white pages. I rocked my stuffed animals and my brown, plastic dolls. As a child, I couldn’t picture who my mom truly was. To me, she was just like anyone else: she wore her hair short, she made hard candies out of lemon and sugar, she pronounced the names of certain plants in a knowing, gentle way. With her thin lips, she would tell me: this is the color red, this is the number four. She would tell me: this is a paper boat, a lobster, a seed, a die, a scar.

***

If the story needs to have a beginning, it would be this: my grandma married Amantino on the twentieth of July, 1946. The next day they moved into an adobe farmhouse with a tin roof, located in the countryside of Buena Unión, the northernmost part of the Rivera Department. They lived just forty kilometers from the Brazilian border and more than four hundred kilometers from Montevideo. My grandma was in charge of the house, and he was in charge of the land and animals. She was twenty-three years old when she married Amantino, her first cousin. 

***

A year later, my mom was born. Two years after that Braulio, and the third child, Ernesto, arrived in the fifth year of their marriage. It rained on the day of the wedding. My grandma always insisted that the rain that fell when she married the only man she would ever know had been a fateful omen.

***

In the grassy fields that circled the ranch there were:

Orange trees, loquat trees, and apple trees to harvest.
Melons, squash, and potatoes to sell.
Chickens, pigs, and cows to care for and kill.

***

My mom had a horse named Cumparsita. She gave her the name of a tango because the mare was born on February second, just like the singer Julio Sosa. The horse had a rich brown coat and a white mark that started just above her eyes and ended at her nose, as if a drop of milk was falling from her brow. She wasn’t broken yet; if she got nervous, she would make like she was going to throw herself against the fence. My mom would move closer and whisper, it’s okay, it’s okay, probably making the same sound she makes at me when she wants quiet, as if water were falling from her lips.

***

The day’s work was finished once the sun disappeared. In its place, the kerosene lamp painted everything golden, the earthen floor, the wooden furniture made of pine, the china cabinet filled with assorted glasses. At dinner time the children leaned over the rubbery tablecloth, eating the stews my grandmother had prepared. There was no dinner conversation. Speaking wasn’t necessary. Instead, Amantino would turn on the radio to stifle the night’s silence and the barking of Cuidado, the stray who wandered around outside the house.

***

The landscape was so vast that everything within its borders was made smaller by comparison. Over time, even the ranch turned in on itself. The weight of the roof’s tin sheets pushed down on the house, gradually burying the five of them deeper and deeper into the earth.

***

I usually remember my mom sitting down: one leg crossed over the other while she talked on the phone; slightly hunched as she sewed knee patches onto my pants; in front of the television watching Brazilian telenovelas followed by the eight o’clock news every night; concentrated as she took notes in the margins of her books; plopped down in front of me, her eyes fixed on the checkerboard, overtaking one of my pieces and laughing.

***

In Amantino’s eyes, his children didn’t have names.

Ernesto was the cripple.
Braulio, the wanker.
My mom, the lunatic.

***

Ernesto developed his limp at five years old after he was infected with polio, the disease cruelly twisting his spine.

Braulio suffered his first epileptic seizure when he was six.

My mom was sixteen when she thought life wasn’t worth living for the first time.

***

“Mom… Mom,” I whisper.

She is still, curled up on the bed. Her eyes are probably closed. She has just gotten back after teaching a class, greeting me with a kiss and asking me how my day was. She ate some leftover pasta without heating it up and then laid down on the double bed to take a nap. Meanwhile, I play pretend—the same as always: I’m a veterinarian and I have to cure Zulu, Bresler, Mimi, and the rest of my stuffed animals. I lovingly give them their medicine and milk, brush their coats, and tuck them in to rest on the armchair in the living room.

After I finish my life-saving work, I approach her doorway one more time. My mom is a mere lump on the bed, her bag lays to her side, halfway open. I call her name, but she doesn’t respond. From where I am I can just glimpse the corner of her agenda and the little white bag where she keeps her chalk and eraser.

“Mom… Mom,” I whisper, but she doesn’t respond.

***

Three different times I’ve lived on the same street in Montevideo. A few days after I was born, my parents brought me home to a two-bedroom apartment on the corner of Magallanes and Mercedes, where you could hear the sirens from the fire station every morning. Three different times I’ve lived on Calle Magallanes, that street that descends from the Palacio Legislativo toward the southernmost part of the city, until the land finally gives way to the rusted silver sea. Three different times, each of them distinct, I’ve lived below the shadow of its trees and the dim glow of its street lamps that do little to illuminate the darkness of the night.

***

Amantino slept with a revolver underneath his pillow, a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson. He used it for certain situations: to fire at a pair of empty cans to improve his aim, to teach my mom how to shoot, and on one occasion, to press it against my grandma’s brow. 

***

When Ernesto was twelve, my grandma brought him to Hospital Clínicas in Montevideo, one of the best in Uruguay, to try to straighten his back out. They returned to the ranch with his body wrapped in plaster. He spent the next six months trying to relieve the itchiness that crawled underneath his cast by scratching himself with knitting needles. The procedure did next to nothing and soon he was bent in half again. A few years before that, they had also tried to treat his one muddy-brown eye that would drift away from the other, but that didn’t work either. Amantino didn’t always call him “the cripple,” sometimes it was just “lazy eye.”

***

In the evenings, my mom comes to my bed and strokes my hair. In the faintest murmur, as if she didn’t want me to hear her, she sings:

Once upon a time there was a nervous little wolf
Who was scared silly by the sound of sheep
The poor wolf had a few friends, a pesky prince, a noble thief,
And a beautiful witch too, who sang him tangos that lulled him to sleep

She passes her palm over my ear and I hear a sound, almost like the sea, like a wave washing over me again and again.

All of this was true, as sure as day was night
when I dreamed up fell down and left went right

***

One afternoon, my grandma chopped onions while Cuidado, the brown, short-legged pup, snuffled around the kitchen. My mom had Ernesto and Braulio in tow. She was charged with keeping an eye on Amantino because earlier that day he had announced:

“Today I’m going to kill myself.”

My mom, just eight years old at the time, followed him through the dining room, her watchful eyes only coming up to his waistline; she followed right behind him as he went into the shed at the back of the house and took a rope from amidst the tools. She followed right behind him as he walked over to a tree and knotted it around a branch. Only then, squeezing the hands of both her brothers, not daring to take her eyes off her father, did she start to shout:

“Mom, Mom, Mom!”

***

The city of Rivera is named after a genocide. In April of 1831, Coronel Bernabé Rivera arranged to meet dozens of indigenous Charrúa men and their families in the heartland of the country, on the banks of the Salsipuedes Creek. Following the orders of his uncle, the first president of Uruguay, Rivera had told them he was gathering them to help round up cattle on the border, just south of Brazil. However, once the Charrúa arrived they were slaughtered with the help of an army of more than a thousand men. Afterward, the soldiers sold off the women and children as slaves in Montevideo. The Charrúa men who escaped were chased down by Rivera and his men for months until they finally took him hostage in a battle. It’s said they cut off his nose and tore out the veins of his right arm, wrapping them around the spear of the man who had been the first to injure him. Then they left his body floating face down in a shallow cove.

***

Everything about my mom’s face was delicate: her nose was small, coming to a gentle point and her eyebrows were almost imperceptible. Her lips were thin and straight, reminding me of the narrow gap of the mailbox where you can leave messages; this gave her a particular kind of beauty. As a child, I would watch her arms heave kilos of rice and pasta, bottles of mineral water, and pots of blooming geraniums from the market. At that time, her belly was still soft underneath her dresses and the floral blouses she would buy in second-hand stores.

***

My mom used to like chasing chickens and snakes, catching the tiny tilapia that swam in the stream, hiding amongst the wild fennel plants, singing tangos to herself in front of my grandma’s mirror. But more than anything, she liked making a grand entrance in the dining room once everyone was there, taking a large swig of water and then lurching from one side to the other, crashing into the walls like she was drunk while her brothers cracked up. Even Amantino laughed at the shameless way she blathered out strings of nonsense phrases, how her eyes would roll around as she collapsed onto a chair.

***

Based on the eager smiles from both my parents and the enthusiastic way they approached me, I knew they were hiding my birthday present behind their backs. Without a word, they placed an Azaleia shoebox in my lap. It was a bit of a letdown to just get an ordinary pair of shoes, and the box wasn’t even wrapped. But when I opened it, a little head looked up at me with two pinpricks for a nose and two tiny, black eyes that belonged to my new turtle, but just as easily could have been those of a bird. 

***

My grandma was actually pregnant four times.

Shortly after she gave birth to my mom, a baby girl with blonde hair and green eyes, and before Braulio came along, another child warmed her belly. My mom was twelve years old the only time she heard her mother speak about the abortion. My grandma told it in the only way you can tell something like that—without going into detail.

In short, it goes more or less like this: my mom has two brothers, another sibling that was never born, and two more, a man and a woman she has never met.

***

My dad soaks an old, white t-shirt in a bucket filled with water and bleach. Perched at the top of a stepladder, his hands protected by rubber gloves, he scrubs away the mold from the ceiling. The windows are flung open and the furniture shies away from the walls as though some external force were pulling everything towards the center of the room. The big mirror leans up against the wall and for the first time it reflects my skinny legs, my green pants smeared with jam. I could go to my room, protect myself from that strong, almost spicy smell, and from the chill of the winter air, but I stay, staring at the soapy, white trail that remains behind the rag, evidence of the movement that erased the dark splotches from the ceiling.

I assume all the walls around the world are just like the ones in my house, that all dads sometimes get up on a ladder to clean the walls with bleach. I don’t know yet that there’s something in this house, in this city that makes everything go off faster than normal: sugar, biscuits, walls, bones, lungs.

***

The game was simple. Each person took a turn to shoot in the field while the rest waited inside the ranch house. Each player chose their own target, it could be a stick, a can, or a piece of fruit hanging in a nearby tree. This time Amantino was the first to take his shot. He wore a wristwatch, a dark pair of pants, and a striped button-down with two t-shirts underneath, even despite the heat. He thought the extra layers would make him seem burlier—Amantino hated looking like a skinny man. With steady strides and his revolver loaded, he headed for the back of the house while Braulio and my mom, the other players, watched from the window. Amantino pointed his revolver at the sky above him and fired. An apple exploded into pieces in midair.

***

Afterward, my mom came out with a small air rifle. She wore her hair short and a beat-up pair of jeans. Her pink training bra—one of the first she ever had—showed through underneath a thin white t-shirt. She walked a ways from the house, studying her surroundings. Fixing her eyes on a tree, she aimed assertively, imitating her father’s posture. Standing perfectly still, her gaze sharp, she felt the weight of the gun, the adrenaline before the shot. She pulled the trigger. From a branch fell a benteveo. My mom stood still, petrified as if she had not yet fired. Then, she turned on her heel and walked back to the house without looking back, abandoning the bird whose golden breast aimed up towards the sky.

***

Just one street. That’s all that separates Rivera from the Brazilian city of Santana de Livramento. To get to Rivera from Montevideo you have to travel six hours north, going past the cemetery with its high walls that appear almost blue in the dusky evening light. If you start walking along Calle Anollés, down its rows of squat, flat-roofed houses without front yards, you’ll eventually come across a salmon-colored house with white shutters on one corner, wrapped in the shade of an acacia tree.

The house has wooden floors that creak when you walk, glass jars filled with spices, a TV playing Brazilian shows at full volume, a cuckoo clock, and a green parrot with one of its wings clipped, shuffling around the minuscule patio. In that house on Calle Anollés, the one on the verge of tumbling over into Brazil, that’s where my grandma lived on her own for the first time.

***

Early one morning, Amantino called for my mom from his bedroom. My mom, startled and half-asleep, walked toward the side of the bed where he slept next to my grandma. He made my mom sit down beside him and told her without any preamble that she had two more siblings, two children he had fathered before he was married. He told her about the letter. How they had written him asking for their father to acknowledge them, but he’d ignored the request. His real children were my mom and her brothers: the cripple, the wanker, and the lunatic.

“Don’t go throwing your family name around,” he said to her. He never spoke of it again.

***

I can’t figure out if it’s sea or sky. I hold a pale blue puzzle piece in my hand, I rotate it, tracing my finger around its borders. Sometimes I interrupt my mom, who’s watching the news beside me, to ask if a certain piece should go above or below the boats.

A seven-year-old boy has been missing since yesterday in the north of Montevideo. I look up at the TV. A police officer says there aren’t any leads, but they’re searching the area along with the family and neighbors. The child’s mother cries. She’s wearing a faded t-shirt with red and white stripes; her hair is long and her eyes are puffy. Looking into the camera, she says: “Please, I have to find him. He’s so little, please.”

I keep rotating the piece in my hand. I don’t want to ask my mom where it goes anymore. Her eyes are still glued to the screen, her mouth now drooping slightly, making her look tired and listless. I try fitting the puzzle piece into the sea. It doesn’t fit. I try a space a bit further over, but that’s still not it. I try further up and finally, the sky expands.

***

A storm was approaching. The clouds were smeared across the horizon, like the residue left by a dirty rag. Braulio galloped across the field, his horse Cambá fighting against a punishing wind that lashed at the trees. At eleven years old Braulio had never been to the sea, but he imagined it would sound something like this, the air rising in waves until it crashed down against the highest branches. Suddenly, a metallic taste flooded his mouth. He threw himself off the horse, knowing what came next. He writhed on the ground, his back pressed against the thick undergrowth, the whites of his eyes aimed up toward the washed-out sky. When he came to, Cambá was waiting quietly by his side. For more than half his life Braulio had suffered seizures that would knock him down to the ground, forcing my grandma to kneel next to him and hold his tongue between her fingers for fear that he might swallow it. But somehow three years later he was cured. Due to his age, according to the doctors and by the grace of God, according to my grandma.

***

In the summers when I visit the house on Calle Anollés, I’m sent off to sleep on my own in the smallest bedroom. The room looks out onto the street and there’s a large frame hanging on the wall. It contains a black and white portrait of some distant relative, a decrepit old man who they had to tie to the back of a chair in order to capture him sitting upright in the photo.

The roar of a motorcycle streaking past cuts through the utter silence, a horizontal line splitting open the night. Just before closing my eyes, I see an enormous antique doll with cold, wicked eyes staring right back at me from across the room.

***

Amantino had no idea where the hell that crucifix hanging above his bed had come from. During restless nights of insomnia, the Christ figure compelled him to look into the eyes of his creator. While he tossed and turned in his underwear, illuminated by the light of the kerosene lamp, he would go over the orders he planned to give Braulio and the rest of the workers the next day. Eventually, my grandma would wake up and hold her hand out to him. Nestled in her palm—almost as if it were a tiny animal—sat a white pill. He always swallowed it dry, tossing it back with a violent jerk of his head before then laying back down on his pillow, on top of the pistol resting underneath, to sleep until noon.

Having Jesus’ tortured face look down at him unnerved Amantino. There were three things he had always believed would bring bad luck: Carlos Gardel’s tangos, which he refused to let anyone listen to; white hats, which he never wore; and that crucifix, which he never dared to take down.

***

At sixteen, my mother felt a visceral and singular impulse to weep for the first time in her life. She cried in her bed, unable to get up, unable to understand the reason why.

***

When I’m at the house on Calle Anollés, I while away the afternoons munching on Brazilian candies. The few words I know in Portuguese I learned from reading their wrappers: abacaxi, morango, pêssego. I suck on those cheap candies until the roof of my mouth is raw while the grown-ups’ hands—those of my mom, my grandmother, and my aunts—are busy preparing syrupy desserts, knitting, sewing, or decorating napkins, dish towels, and cotton handkerchiefs.

At lunchtime, we eat the animals Braulio brings back from the ranch. The savory taste of the grilled meat mixes with sugary swigs of fizzy Guaraná Antarctica. After lunch, the sunlight scatters around the room through the lowered blinds, the outside now too bright for my eyes to see. By the late afternoon, the colors of the city are restored. My cousins’ scent catches me by surprise, that clean-hair smell of freshly-bathed children.

***

The old man with a gentle bedside manner was the first doctor to prescribe my mom antidepressants. He told her something that would always stay with her: that her pain, just like her brothers’ illnesses, was a consequence of her parents’ incestuous relationship. That it all could be traced back to that, a punishment they had unconsciously inflicted upon themselves.

When she eventually told me this, decades after the fact, it did seem like an intriguing idea. However, as time went on I realized this explanation had almost become a kind of defense mechanism or prophecy to her. I found it hard to believe; the idea in and of itself was ridiculous. But she insisted the doctor’s theory was impossible to move past and she was right about that: her two identical surnames—that of her father and her mother—forced her to give explanations her entire life.

***

We lay out the glasses and plates on the double bed. Sometimes, my mom doesn’t get up from her afternoon nap, so my dad and I eat dinner with her in their bedroom. I write out arithmetic sequences for school, adding by twos, then threes, then fours, until the tuna empanadas are ready. The three of us wolf down the fried pastries while watching English and German detective dramas dubbed into Spanish or nature documentaries where antelope and zebras are ripped to shreds, the full force of a pride of lions bearing down on them. As we watch I say: “Mom, Dad, why don’t the people filming do anything, why don’t they save them, tell me why, why do they let those poor animals die like that?” 

***

When my mom was little she wanted to be a horse trainer or a tango singer, but at sixteen she decided to study literature instead. For her fifteenth birthday, an aunt had given her a copy of Antigone and she was deeply moved by the young princess’s devotion to her fallen brother and Antigone’s own tragic fate, ordered by the king, her uncle, to be buried alive. From that moment forward, although she didn’t completely understand them, she read and reread all of the Greek tragedies over and over.

My grandma and Amantino were surprised by her decision, even a bit disappointed, but they didn’t say anything. The following year my mom traveled to Montevideo on her own. Since her parents could barely afford to send any money, she moved into a student residency overseen by an order of nuns, where she worked as a receptionist from eight o’clock until two in the afternoon.

***

Ernesto became a doctor.
Braulio, a rancher.
My mom, a literature professor.

Ernesto was promoted to hospital director in Minas de Corrales, a mining village known as the gold capital of Uruguay. 

Braulio’s hands bore the brunt of his labor throughout his life, his palms ruined from years of cutting wood, watermelons, and squash, from burying them in the earth and the rough coats of his animals.

My mom worked in different high schools around Montevideo, teaching adolescents about Shakespeare and Baudelaire, Líber Falco and Lautréamont. For decades, her collection of books grew as well as the layers of dust and fluorescent highlighters that sat atop each pile.

***

My mom calls me over to come and look out the sliding glass door to see the cat that had fallen from the rooftop. It’s sitting in the middle of our balcony calmly licking itself, its grayish body plopped down between the pink flowers, our immaculate geraniums. It’s one of the first cats I’ve seen up close and I’m jarred by its barely-open eye, just a narrow slit, mangled as if someone had tried to yank it out. I watch the cat for a few minutes from behind the stain of condensation my breath leaves on the glass door.

“Let’s go out,” my mom says.

As we get closer the cat grows suspicious but doesn’t move. I share its suspicion. Mom takes my tiny hand and guides it through the cat’s fur. 

“See? This is how you pet an animal,” she tells me.

The cat stiffens, turns its head, and looks at me with its one vertical pupil.

***

One morning, my grandma waved at a soldier who was passing by the ranch on horseback. Amantino, witnessing the encounter, immediately flew into a rage; he went straight to their bedroom, took the Smith & Wesson out from underneath his pillow, and pressed it against my grandma’s warm forehead. For some time he had been convinced that she had fallen in love with the man in uniform just from watching the soldier pass by the house day after day, by observing the serious but warm salute with which he always returned my grandma’s greeting. That same afternoon, my grandma fled the ranch. In just a few minutes she frantically packed up a few dresses, two pairs of shoes, her perfume, and her delicate pendants bearing the image of the Virgin. At sixty years old her life was reduced to what she could fit into her bag. Suitcase in hand, she traveled all the way to Calle Soriano in Montevideo, where my mom lived. She never set foot on the ranch again. She never went back to Amantino.

***

My mom, absorbed in her own thoughts, holds up a photo: we’re at the beach, she’s sitting next to my grandma on a piece of driftwood just at the edge of the water. A two-year-old me runs towards them, a yellow swimsuit and my hair wet. My grandma is looking at me. My mom, dressed in a one-piece spattered with saltwater, appears to smile at the camera.

Then, almost like she has just discovered something very sad, she says to me: 

“We must have been happy.”

Translated by Kathleen Meredith

From the unpublished novel We Must Have Been Happy

Photo: Romina Mosquera, Unsplash.