Just Before the End (Justo antes del final), Emiliano Monge’s sixth novel, is a story both in time and about it.  In eighty microchapters, each devoted to a year of his mother’s life, Emiliano Monge—or a nameless narrator who suspiciously resembles one Emiliano Monge—inculcates a three-part structure: a conversation with the mother, a corresponding interview with a family member, and an investigation of world events contemporaneous with the year in question.  The book, with echoes of Fuentes’ Aura, is told in the second-person future tense, locating the narrator and the reader on the same plane.  Are we witnessing a narrator in dialogue with himself, immersed in an asymptotic search for his origins as he reconstructs his mother’s story, or is the reader, cast in the second person, the story’s fictionalized recipient, a coparticipant traversing the thin membrane of the page?

The net effect is a spiraling, recursive format performed upon linear chronology, an implicit, reiterative rhythm coextensive with the unwavering march of the years. While the decisive events of the latter half of the twentieth century interpenetrate with the particular history of a single family, the mother—in whose archetypal resonance there’s no forfeiture of verisimilitude—becomes the story’s central figure.  The novel could likewise be envisioned as the 4D representation of its multifaceted protagonist, as the portrait of a woman at once tangible and elusive, intimate and remote.  Whereas in What Goes Unsaid (No contar todo)—Monge’s first production to mine the symmetries and the discrepancies between memory and imagination—the author traces the paternal over three generations, the overlapping biographies of grandfather, father, and son told, respectively, in third, second, and first person, here Monge introduces the other side of the family—with its guiding obsessions, its inherited fixations, and its private rationale.

The novel’s merit—its complex protagonist and innovative structure—is mobilized by its language. Monge’s formal accomplishment is the outgrowth of this technical excellence, the proof of ruthless attention at the level of the prose. Told in a voice equally searching and ironic that alternates spare brushstrokes with syntactic extension, invoking touches of humor and, at times, the plangent notes of a dirge, Just Before the End thrives in multiple registers and, in my admittedly biased view, delimits its own space, both in Monge’s oeuvre and in Latin American literature. I’m delighted to present the opening chapters. The English-language rights are available. Inquiries can be directed to Paula Canal at the Indent Literary Agency: paula@indentagency.com.

Josh Dunn

From Just Before the End

1947

No beginning is easy, your mother will say.

Did you know your grandma got sick the very day I was born?

She’d stomached her aches and pains for years, and when things went from bad to worse, she blamed me.

She never fed me, your mother will say, looking for herself in her voice.  She refused to pick me up. Her arms hurt, her joints ached, her bones were deforming one by one.

Excuses.

If I’d died, she would’ve found me forty-eight hours later, your mother will say, a pause coloring her words. So Ofelia fed me.

Obviously I don’t remember. Ofelia was your grandfather’s patient who ended up working for your grandmother, your mother will say, finding something in her voice. In her sewing shop, that hobby store that grew into a business.

The same shop where my mother worked for decades without complaining about her arms, her joints, or her supposedly bedeviled bones.

Your aunts, who’d told your mother the story of Ofelia, will tell you the wetnurse was unwell.

Something screwy in the head, they’ll add, each making a face. She muttered in foreign languages, wandered from one room to the next. But that’s not what you’ll want them to tell you.

No, your grandfather didn’t make it to your mother’s birth, they’ll say, going back to the beginning because you’ll believe such a thing is possible. The truth is he didn’t make it to her first months, as if he’d forgotten about his most recent daughter, born tiny and destined to be petite.

Their father, your aunts will explain, their voices, you’ll think, tediously woven into one, being the psychiatrist he was, testified in Goyo Cárdenas’s second trial. Before the La Castañeda fugitive spent the next 34 years behind bars.

That case—the mental wellbeing of the accused—kept your grandfather busy during his youngest daughter’s first months.

You’ve heard of the Tacuba Strangler, right?

You’ll read that that year, in France, Jean Genet debuted The Maids, the story of two domestic workers who, after an apparently miniscule inconvenience—they can’t finish ironing because of a burnt-out fuse—, murder the mistress, disfiguring the body of the woman with whom they’d lived in such apparent bonhomie and such intimate proximity that one of them could have been her daughters’ wetnurse; that, in the United States, Edwin Land presented before a jam-packed auditorium the Polaroid Land Camera, the first instant-exposure device in history; and that, in Mexico, the infamous serial killer Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández—alias Goyo Cárdenas—was sentenced to 34 years, even though your grandfather, the medical expert, declared the encephalitis he’d suffered during childhood had irreparably damaged his neurological structures and that he should, therefore, be considered not criminal but ill.

1948

Your mother will tell you that from her second year she doesn’t remember bim or bom.

Wait, she’ll say, stopping herself, her voice like a crystal dyed with the colors of the past. I remember the cold.

The curtains were always closed in that crypt of a house. And lowering her voice, she’ll add: they made up a room for Ofelia and me.

So they say. Since she doesn’t remember that space or anything else from her second year, your mother will tell you what her brothers and sisters told her: she never cried, never made a peep. She seemed to be allergic to hair and the cold gave her a rash. She was fragile, sick nineteen days out of twenty.

Her cheeks, she’ll say, repeating what your aunts and uncles told her, were coated with a sheen, a gloss of boogers and dried spit.

Hence, she’ll smile, the nickname: trout face.

Your uncles will confirm the neglected hygiene and the chronic iridescence of their kid sister.

And to justify that nobody thought, for example, to wet a Kleenex or to daub her cheeks, they’ll say that your grandmother had begun using the wheelchair from which she’d rarely—and only if she thought nobody was watching—get up.

Their father—who’d quit judicial work after an altercation in a trial—dedicated more and more time to private practice. He also became assistant director of the hospital where he’d worked for years.

All to say he spent little to no time at home. He was obsessed with mental illness. With diagnosing it. With dodging it. His mother, your great-grandmother, suffered from premature dementia, and his brother, your great-uncle, was schizophrenic.

He always, your uncles will conclude, had a soft spot for the crazies.

You’ll read that that year—a leap year, dooming your mother to an extra 24 hours’ cold—Bell Laboratories brought out the transistor radio whose warblings, your mother will say, defined her scant recollections of her first two years; that, in Colombia, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán convened the first silent march in history; that the World Health Organization—fated, among other contributions, to impede the understanding of mental wellbeing—was founded while in England the first ever one-piece hearing aid was unveiled and, in the recently established Israeli State, a sniper downed a first Palestinian boy; that, in France, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was published and, in the United States, Alfred C. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a book fated to enrapture your grandfather and to scar one of your uncles; and that, in Mexico, Mario de Ángeles Roque, accused of murdering and quartering his wife along with their three children, jumped from the witness stand in a foiled gambit to strangle the medical expert who would’ve diagnosed him—your grandfather who, little inclined to listen to the radio, almost didn’t have the time (or the breath) to read Alfred C.

1949

Your mother will untangle a first memory.

It shines like the photos in an album whenever I close my eyes, she’ll say in a firm, iridescent voice. Or like, you’ll think, the embryos of a Polaroid.

In those images, a sequence of superimposed exposures which your mother’s hypothalamus will illumine word by word, Ofelia gets kicked out of the house. Your mother couldn’t say if it happened during the morning or the afternoon. Imploded, she’ll say, a word you never imagined she would use.

Locks of your mother’s hair, the flickers of a half-made sentence, scissors flashing in Ofelia’s hand. The scissors again, Ofelia’s bruised arms, her hair—the dead cells of a woman who’d gone from batty to seamstress and from seamstress to wetnurse—strewn on the floor. The blood. You grandmother in her wheelchair, shouting; your aunts and your grandfather, running; the orderlies he’d called—if not him, who?—pinning Ofelia to the floor amidst her insults in three languages and her protests in four.

She never saw her surrogate mother again. The brutal precision, the untiring exactitude with which she describes Ofelia’s departure stems from, you’ll think, the pain or a feint of the imagination, maybe an amalgam of the two.  You grandpa’s lackies subdued her, you’ll hear. They gave her a shot in the arm or neck. They put her on a stretcher, crossed the living room, and carried her out.

Would you believe those goons dumped her on the street? They grabbed her arms and legs to haul her into the ambulance while one of my sisters ran her fingers through my hair and the other hugged me from behind.

That’s the last image on the reel.

Your aunts, who consoled your mother the day they took Ofelia and who will live only two blocks apart, will tell you your mother moved into their room.

Seeing as she arrived without a bed—the one she’d shared with Ofelia didn’t fit—, trout face, your mother, slept in a dresser drawer. The bottom one, they’ll explain, on the front step of one of their homes. A sweater for a blanket and a t-shirt for a pillow.

Then, seated in the living room, your aunts, the older and the younger, the plump and the peaked, the fabulous cook and the fabulously devout, two women always on the brink of the next laugh and whose words, like your uncles’, you won’t combine again, will tell you how they built your mother’s niche: shoe boxes.

Our grandfather, the miner who became our mother’s stepfather and visited whenever he could, was the only help we got. Great-grandpa spelunker, you’ll think, as industrious above ground as below.

You’ll read that that year, in Havana, a platoon of gringo soldiers desecrated the tomb of José Martí, one of your great-grandfather’s favorite poets, while, in Barcelona, four members of the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia were executed by firing squad, the oldest of them not only your great-grandfather’s boyhood best friend but the individual responsible for his marrying your great-grandmother and becoming your grandma’s stepfather; that, in the United States, a movie based on Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman, a film destined to obsess your grandfather to such an extent that he could recite swaths of dialogue and would brag about having seen it some thirty times, was released while, in Quito, a version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, translated and rebroadcast, unleashed the same chaos that had run roughshod over London ten years back, only worse: in that Andean country whose name splits the world in two, a tricked, humiliated, and infuriated mob burned down the radio station and lynched the workers when they learned everything had been a hoax; that, in Vienna, Doctor Leo Kanner, synthesizing numerous theories from the turn of the century, coined the term refrigerator mother and laid the groundwork for the study of autism as a syndrome linked to a cold, aloof parenting style “ubiquitous among intellectuals”; and that, in Vatican City, Pope Pius XII excommunicated any and every Communist—past, present, or future—as if he were Methuselah incarnate while, in Madrid, the First Iberoamerican Congress of Mental Health began and your grandfather’s keynote address, which extoled the merits of psychotropic drugs, heralded the case of Ofelia, a patient who succumbed to neurosis despite a battery of electroshocks and took scissors to her own skin.

1950

That year, your mother will tell you, she stopped sleeping through the night.

Closing her eyes, she’ll second guess herself, asking if it started that year or the next, but opening them, she’ll say she was right: in nineteen fifty, sleep started to elude her.

And not because I slept in a dresser drawer. I couldn’t sleep because of the shouts I heard—or thought I heard—in the boys’ room. Shouts that, despite being muffled by the distance and the doors, were shouts of terror, a plea.

One of those nights, rather than trying to fall back to sleep, I summoned what courage I could. I got up. It may have been less bravery and more imprudence or desperation, your mother will admit, her lips turning into an upside-down smile, saying, without words, that what she’s about to say will hurt.

The smallest, the youngest member of the family tiptoed in the half-dark, one hand covering her mouth and the other scratching at the space in front of her.  The door to your uncles’ room was open a crack.  So, for the first time in my life, your mother will say, her voice surfacing amidst the same capsized smile, their little sister turned into a ghost. I entered that masculine space, only to discover my second oldest brother was gone.

The surprise didn’t last as long as the confusion. I inched back and, in the hall, your mother will say, her fingers tracing the upholstery of the couch, I closed my eyes and concentrated. I made out the stifled screams, the thread of my missing brother’s voice—your uncle who, years later, would become the first Mexican to try out for a United States football team.

The noise came from my father’s office. I should’ve left. But rather than turning back, rather than lying down in my makeshift bed and pretending I heard nothing while I pretended to be asleep, I remembered I was invisible. I crouched down, crawled forward, and, with one eye, peered into the room.

My brother was on hands and knees. I couldn’t see what he and my father were doing, what your grandfather was doing to your uncle—your uncle who, decades later, would crisscross the city, driving you from one bookstore to the next.

But your mother will remember the muted suffering, the choked-out cries, and that your grandfather held something in both hands.

The middle brother of your mother’s older brothers, your grandma’s favorite, will tell you from behind the wheel of his taxi that he didn’t even like football.

He played because your grandfather, inspired by Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, made him. Because according to Doc Alfred, who never examined him and who knew nothing of the case, he needed to vent the pent-up energy he didn’t want to or simply couldn’t control.

And he’ll tell you—that same day and during that same commute, taking Calzada de Tlalpan while you look out the window, fixing your attention on a convoy of orange trailers to avoid the dampness eroding your uncle’s features and clouding the pewter of his eyes—about the most frightening moment of his life, the only time he was absolutely terrified.

At twelve, thirteen at most, he’d made the roster of the football team.  That night, your uncle will say, downshifting and accelerating the taxi, while I slept on the floor in my mother’s room, they came. Three or four of them, wearing Halloween masks.

With the blessing of your grandma and the maniacal enthusiasm of my old man, they stuffed my head into a cloth bag and tied my hands behind my back and threw me into the trunk of a sedan. Half an hour, an hour, or for all I knew a lifetime later, they dragged me down a flight of stairs, shouting, telling me I’d better say my prayers because my time was up. They tossed me into the void.

After a fall that seemed infinite, measured by the seconds during which I grappled at the air and tried to regain my breath, I landed in a mass of lukewarm water. They’d flung me off the ten-meter diving platform.

They pulled me out after twenty seconds, their way of saying welcome to the squad. A hazing—I understood years later—my father had concocted.

When I read Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, I knew.

You’ll read that that year, the Soviet Union failed for the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the fourteenth time to detonate a nuclear bomb, carving crater beside crater in Semipalatinsk; that, in Brazil, the Uruguayan national team defeated the Brazilians two to one to take the World Cup, unleashing a wave of euphoria that culminated in self-immolations: nosedives from the upper deck and the hysteria of ad-hoc acrobats who clambered to the roof, eager to jump from a greater height; that Celia Cruz, quite likely the only singer to transcend three generations of your family’s musical delights, debuted with Sonora Matancera, covering “Rhythm, Drums, and Flowers” by José Vargas whose lyrics say: “A gardener sows a seed / in the soil of his love / another prunes its leaves / for whom does the flower bloom?” while, in Peru, an earthquake destroyed two thirds of Cusco, paving a trail with the dead and turning the living into ghosts, the wordless, faceless, spiritless survivors who wandered for days or even weeks amidst the rubble and the deceased in a psychological if not spiritual daze that garnered the attention of Doctor Raúl Watanabe, a forerunner of Latin American social psychiatry with whom your grandfather would trade innumerable letters: nearly all of the survivors had gathered in the environs of the stadium where Cienciano would play Sports Boys del Callao for the title; that, in Viena, the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, responding to the theory of the refrigerator mother, shook what had been to date the pillars of the study of autism, redefining it as an emotional disturbance rooted in the psychological damage inflicted by the mother; and that, in the prefecture of Niigata and more specifically the city of Gosen, the Japanese drawer, illustrator, and animator Yoshifumi Kondō, famous for Princess Mononoke, Only Yesterday, and Whispers of the Heart, but not for his equally decisive Hear the Neurons Sing, a study commissioned by Kyoto University to trace the development of the fetal nervous system as no person or institute had before, was born.

1951

Your uncle’s screams, your mother will tell you, disappeared after he moved into your grandma’s room.

No, I couldn’t say when my parents stopped sharing a bedroom—assuming they ever did, your mother will reply, digressing from what she, apparently, wanted to say.

While my older brother slept blissfully through the night, even the silence woke me up. A silence pockmarked, she’ll add, staring, without realizing it, at the wall behind your chair, by whatever bugs and vermin were chatting in the wainscoting.

Other times, she’ll continue, separating her gaze from the wall and fixing it on the ceiling, her lips drawing a familiar downturned arc, I heard the moans my father never bothered to conceal.  So, not too unlike the year before, one night I struck out on my own. I crossed the house, strolled through the kitchen, and crawled the last meters to his office.

She was a distant relative or the domestic help, your grandmother’s friend, maybe a nurse. Could be a former patient, one of the many who, like Ofelia, became assistants in the hospital, the clinic, or my mother’s shop.

They never caught you? you’ll ask, filling a pause between her words. Not once, she’ll answer. They didn’t see me. Because they couldn’t see me. Because after I’d tried for so long to be invisible, invisibility had become my absolute.

I understood, she’ll explain, gathering her hair over one shoulder, that I already was invisible, that no one in that house paid me any attention.

Yes, her sisters and her youngest older brother, yes. But not at school, where she didn’t have friends, where the teachers forgot her name.

I really believed I was different.  That maybe, my body didn’t exist.

No, no way.

They would’ve nabbed her on the spot, your youngest uncle will contend. One night or another—your mother’s brother will snap his fingers—bango! my kid sister caught in the act.

Your grandpa stayed up preparing for his conferences. Be it in the clinic or the hospital, Pops worked like a horse. Those were the only hours he had left.

I can still hear the paper he gave at the First Iberoamerican Congress of Mental Health, your uncle, the one who could see your mother, will say. It was his doctoral thesis and his research in La Castañeda mashed into one. My oldest brother along with yours truly formed a compulsory, two-seat audience while he rehearsed.

Your favorite uncle, a sensible and to appearances impartial man, a caring father and an exemplary spouse who will vigorously deny your grandfather tortured any child in any way at any time and will categorically reject the suggestion he bedded other women in the family home, will tell you that, thanks to his thesis, Mexican neuropsychiatry shook off Medievalism and began implementing drug therapy as an alternative to electroshocks.

But without realizing it and almost by mistake, your mother’s most brotherly brother, your uncle who countless times and on innumerable occasions will sub for your father and anchor your emotional universe, will wonder if maybe, after your grandpa polished his papers and dared to dabble in the drugs better left for patients, crossing—call it professional curiosity—into a room he hadn’t inhabited or even peered into before, if maybe then the cocaine, the heroin, or some other undiagnosed addiction turned him into someone else.

And although it sounded supremely unlikely—improbable but not implausible—, if his father slipped a former patient into his office during the dead hours of the night, who knew? To the extent that your uncle recalls or would presume to speak, there was only one: his sister-in-law, your grandma’s half-sister.

Your uncle, when you try to pursue the subject, will clearly prefer not to, not denying it but skirting it, precluding it, flitting over its surface. He’ll go on and on about your grandpa’s dissertation, as if a piece of antediluvian doctoral work were the keystone to your questions and the centerpiece of your doubts.

Your grandpa, your uncle will continue, was basically the godfather of Mexican psychopharmacology. He revolutionized the treatment of neuroses and epilepsy, he introduced and popularized chemical castration.

Aberrant sexual practice always fascinated him. And again, estranged from his own voice and aloof to the meaning of his words, he’ll admit that yes, maybe yes, he may have done something untoward to his second son.

But with an indispensable caveat: for his father, his brother wasn’t a case study but a source of inspiration.

You’ll read that that year, in New York, the UN created the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; that, in West Germany, Ilsa Koch, the witch of Buchenwald and the wife of the concentration camp commander, was sentenced to life in prison for her role in the torture, murder, and chemical castration of thousands of human beings, mostly Jewish, while the Mossad, the newly founded Israeli secret service, would disappear seven Palestinians, none of them to return; that, in Mexico, Televimex launched the Stars Channel, the first guests being Celia Cruz—performing “Rhythm, Drums, and Flowers”—and Sansoncito, grandson of El Sansón, a Jota singer and native of Zuera, Aragón, who never recognized your great-grandmother, the half-sister of Sansoncito’s mother, a woman conceived during El Sanson’s tour through the heart of Mexico and fated to perish in an asylum: your great-grandmother who, years later, would remarry, this time to a miner of Spanish descent, as if to remedy her own beginnings; that, on the Enewetak Atoll and in accordance with Operation Greenhouse, the United States military successfully detonated their seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth atomic bombs while, in Mexico, the Association of Spanish Language Academies was created, deriving from the First Congress of Spanish Language Academies and, in England, Ludwig Wittgenstein, an unequivocal opponent of language academies and any suggestion of that ilk—“whatever remains encapsulated in the idea of language’s expressivity is necessarily incapable of being expressed in that language and is, consequently, in the most perfectly precise sense of the word, inexpressible”—, died; and that the Mexican pharmacist Luis E. Miramontes synthesized 19-noretisterona, the first oral contraceptive in history, a pill your mother would take—and subsequently stop taking—years later when, she’ll tell you, in the besotted clairvoyance after a night of drinks, she knew she wanted to be a mom.

Translated by Josh Dunn

Photo: Jonathan Tesmaye Salvador, Unsplash.

Boredom leads to breakups, she says after a brief silence.

This is the real reason she’s invited us—to tell us about her last year. We haven’t seen her since the flames laid ruin to her apartment.

When boredom takes over, the only thing left is to leave, break up with your partner, or find someone to have an affair with, like I did, she tells us, searching for an ashtray among the dirty dishes, the plates, the empty bottles.

I don’t know if it was an accident, or if he started the fire on purpose, I’ll never know, she tells us, lighting a cigarette, pulling up her hair, and fixing her gaze on me, the only one, according to her—according to Teresa—who still talks to Felipe, which is to say, the only one who still talks to her ex-partner, the man who allegedly set all her things, and her home, on fire.

His excuse, Felipe’s explanation, is lacking: he fell asleep with some candles lit, because a fuse had blown earlier that afternoon. Even I, and I’m supposed to be on his side, don’t believe it. But this—the fact that I don’t believe Felipe, the fact that I’m convinced he set Teresa’s whole life on fire on purpose—isn’t something I think about saying out loud, even less since I don’t know what’s become of him. You can betray people, but not their ghosts.

The afternoon before the night of the fire, Teresa told Felipe she was having an affair, that she’d been sleeping with someone else for several months now, in fact, and that she had no intentions of leaving this someone else, that this someone else didn’t need to stick it up her ass to get an erection, that this someone else was more interested in what she did, in her work on Morelos Mountain, where, as it happened, she’d be returning that very night in the company of this someone else—a man whose parents had baptized Mario.

I’ll never know, because deep down, I don’t think I want to know, she tells us, pausing to take a drag on her cigarette. Which is the same—not knowing—as knowing without wanting to accept it, she tells us a little later, picking up the story and pressing the cigarette into the chipped notch of the ashtray. What I do know, she tells us, smiling to herself, is that the fire transformed boredom into courage. And just as rage burns like fire, I set out to destroy him, to fuck Felipe over for good. So my fling with Mario turned into a relationship, but more out of aggression than desire, she tells us.

The last time I saw Felipe—I think, as Teresa recounts how it was that she and Mario, to her surprise and his, became a couple; as she explains how it was, then, that her rage transformed into their courage, and how that courage decanted into the elixir of their love—was at his parents’ house. He greeted me under the old lemon tree in the garden, a barren and battered tree, surrounded by a sea of cigarette butts and ash, scrawny like a malnourished animal, sad like an uprooted plant, silent like a creature broken and obsessed with itself—like a culprit.

All things that are solid, in the end, can be recovered, Teresa says after another silence that washes over her mind, and mine. That was what Mario helped me understand: what cannot be recovered is that which vanishes but remains, here, inside of you. This apartment, for example, is better than my last one, I like it more, I’ve never felt so at home, she tells us, pulling her face into another wild smile. On the other hand, I can’t stand that Remigio is gone. Or not so much that he’s gone—what I can’t stand is not knowing whether he suffocated, or was burned alive, or if the firefighters drowned him, or if he managed to escape but was so scared that he ran too far away and couldn’t find his way back, she tells us.

Remigio was Teresa and Felipe’s cat, a tabby cat, old and friendly. The pet they adopted right after they moved in together. I’m certain that he—Remigio—died in the fire; I’m certain, in fact, that this is what Felipe wanted—to burn their pet alive—and not what Mario, if I understand what Teresa is saying, would have wanted: for the cat to vanish and never be seen again, for a state of uncertainty to persist forever, transforming little by little into emptiness—an emptiness that grows colder and colder, an emptiness around which all feelings cease to grow. Felipe’s objective, then, was thwarted. There were no remains, the charcoal could not express itself. Teresa and Mario, for their part, immediately found another cat, a cat whose story, in fact, Teresa is just now starting to tell us.

The night I returned to Morelos Mountain, after dealing with the insurance and making it clear to Felipe that we were over, Mario was with me, she tells us. He asked me not to travel alone and offered to go with me, saying he could return the next day, since his work keeps him from spending more than two days away from his lab, she tells us. In fact, that’s why he couldn’t come tonight for dinner, because one of the animals, I think it was a capuchin monkey, though I’m not sure, fell ill this afternoon, she tells us. The tube in its leg got infected, or the hole in its skull, or something, I don’t know, but something infected the poor animal and that’s why Mario had to stay, in case he had to put him down, she tells us.

Mario, Teresa’s partner, who I’ve met only a couple of times, is a neurologist and neurosurgeon. He works with animals, he trepans them, he installs nodules connected to one or several machines and he studies desire and loss, if I understand it right, because it’s also possible I haven’t understood it right and he does something else. But the part about trepanning heads, I know he trepans them, I’m sure of that. As sure as I am that Felipe, the last time I saw him, told me that ashes can speak—that if one writes with charcoal, it is not one’s voice that must be read by those who view the text.

That night, in Morelos, in the mountains, just before dawn, we awoke to the meowing—the screeching, really—of a kitten, she tells us. I was the first to get up, of course, the first to walk through the house and go outside, where the full moon illuminated everything in leaden blue, she tells us, pausing again, lighting another cigarette, and cursing the lack of beer. I can go to the Oxxo for more, I suggest, but the looks I get from my partner and from Teresa keep me seated.

Soon, Mario caught up with me, she tells us. We were barefoot, and even though the area is swarming with snakes and scorpions, we decided to follow the yowling, she tells us, emptying the dregs of several empty bottles into her glass, trying to make even just one more drink. Seriously, I can go for more beer, I say, but collide again with the glares of my companions. I have to go to the bathroom, I say, getting up before they can stop me.

I’m listening, so go on, I say from the bathroom, leaving the door open. So Teresa continues: We found him about 100 meters from the house, under a mesquite tree, in a pile of rocks, she tells us. He must have been only a month old, maybe a month and a half, and he was terrified, he wouldn’t stop yowling, even when I picked him up and held him against my chest, she tells us as I pull the chain and turn toward the sink. Back at the house, we gave him something to eat and drink, she tells us as I wash my hands.

Then we laid him down in bed with us, between us, really, she says as I dry my hands and then notice, on the glass shelf protruding from the mirror, several different lumps of coal. It’s a strange collection, a series of carbonized figures, really. The next day, after discussing what to do, and before he left to go back to the city, back to his laboratory, really, Mario and I decided we would keep the cat. We named him Felipe, for obvious reasons, she tells us, but I’m only half listening. Suddenly, I’ve just realized that the carbonized figures were bones.

We couldn’t have known then that he would grow how he did, that he would grow and grow and grow, that he would be what he is now, she tells us as I come out of the bathroom. From behind the door opposite the one I’ve just closed, I hear a noise, a sound of tearing or scraping—a solid moan that creeps into my intestines, that dances inside my body. Look, she tells us, lifting her legs onto the table and revealing her ankles, that animal gave me all of these marks, it turns into a beast at night, it turns into a wild and savage force, she tells us, smiling and expecting us to smile with her. Whether you want me to or not, I’m going for more beer, I blurt out, searching the table for my keys and ignoring their stares.

I don’t care that I’m going out alone, leaving my girlfriend there; fear, in the end, also leads to breakups. Terror takes over, and the only thing left is to leave, I tell myself, searching for my jacket. It’s in the bedroom, I put your things in our room, on the bed, Teresa tells me, continuing the story as if nothing has happened, laughing almost maniacally: one day he’s a totally normal cat, a cuddly little kitten even, but when the sun goes down, he transforms into a beast. So before night falls, we lock him in, or Mario and I have to lock ourselves in, because if we don’t, he attacks us, she tells us.

My jacket is on the bed, on top of my girlfriend’s things. I pick it up and put it on, looking out, through the window, at the stone path that communicates like an ancestral language between the buildings of the housing complex where we are. I want to be out there, I want to leave at once and be out there and never come back, I tell myself, turning around and looking down the hallway, where I hear the noise again, the tearing that to me now sounds more like something dragging than something scraping.

Mario says that calling someone would just make things worse, that the supposed experts, they would just euthanize him, she tells us when I come back to the living room and give my rushed goodbyes, without looking at anyone, and without being able to rid my mind of the latest thought that consumes it: someone or something is dragging something—it’s like someone, or something, is leaving its mark. He says that if, in the end, we can’t adapt to living with each other, it would be better if he just dealt with him at the lab, she tells us.

People think that they suffer, that the trepanned animals suffer the whole time, but we give them a life they wouldn’t have out on the street, we feed them, we let them roam free most of the day, we only study them every now and then, and mostly when they’re sleeping, she tells us that Mario tells her, as I leave the apartment.

On the stairs I speed up my escape—as much, at least, as my heartbeats speed up in my chest. Break up with your partner or find someone to have an affair with, I say to myself as I leap, three steps at a time, down the stairs, not knowing why I’m saying that or why I’m panicking.

On the stone path, calm returns to my body and I stop myself; I’m stopped, actually, by a premonition—no, by the certainty—that I’m being watched.

When I look up, in the window of the room that forced me to flee, I see Felipe, a metallic glint shimmering from his skull.

He’s scratching, with a piece of charcoal, on the window pane. Refusing to read what he writes, I pick up my pace again and make my escape.

In any case, his is not the voice I would have to read—if I were to stay, if I were to view the text.

Translated by Max Granger

Photo: Kitten in the street, Yuriria, Mexico. Danie Franco, Unsplash.