Before I was born my mom had already written a suicide note. I read it sitting in her house one afternoon, I was a little older than twenty. She was watching some documentary about the Phoenicians while I leafed through a notebook I’d come across in a box filled with old papers and cards. The notebook was from her university days when she was studying literature. It was filled with notes from her classes, phone numbers, love poems. I found it in the last few pages. I read it in silence and then said, slightly perplexed:
“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
