The Weight of the Heart

by Susana Aikin

  Later that night I woke up with a dry cotton-mouth, and a headache like lancinating spears piercing my temples. The rum in the mojitos must have been rat poison at the very least. I groped my way down the corridor toward the bathroom for a desperate drink at the faucet, when I heard the racket. It was coming from Julia’s room. I stumbled toward her door, and when I pushed it open, the scene before me made me rub my eyes in disbelief: Julia with a large kitchen knife, slashing her canvasses, smashing her school portfolio collection of ceramic nudes.

  “Julia, what the hell?” I started.

  “Don’t you dare come in and interfere! All of this is going.” Her eyes were bloodshot.

  I stepped in. “This is no way to deal. Can’t we talk for a minute?” But her eyes were gone, her pupils spiraled inward toward some dark place I had never seen before.

  Father was already behind me. “What on earth is going on here?” he asked, and Rosita, who also stayed nights, peeked over our shoulders and started screaming at the sight of the knife. I tried to touch Julia’s arm, but she yanked away from me and her face tightened into a threat.

  “Step out, Anna,” Father said. “Just close the door and let her be. I’m going to call Dr. Martinez.” He walked away after saying to Rosita, “Shut up, woman, get the hell to your room this minute, and don’t come out until I tell you!”

  But I didn’t step out. That would have meant admitting that Julia’s lack of control was irrevocable. I hoped for a tiny window of discernment somewhere, in this surreal scene. I slid down to the floor by the wall and squatted, my head heavy and bursting, ready to throw up.

  “Dr. Martinez will arrive with an ambulance and you’ll get committed. Get ahold of yourself! This is not a game.”

  “I am not leaving anything around that reminds me of Alina. I don’t want any of this, or this!” Julia screamed, but she had already put down the knife and was tearing a sketchbook apart. She grabbed the coil to stretch and bend it, when one end stuck her finger. She jumped back in pain, watching the blood pouring out onto her nightshirt.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Hot tears streamed down her face.

  I stood up. “It’s nothing, Julia, let’s wash it out.” She clasped her finger as we walked to the bathroom, where I put her hand under the cold running water and wet a towel to dampen her face. “Let’s change your shirt. We don’t want them thinking you stabbed yourself.” Julia calmed down, but in the aftermath of her frenzy she started shaking so badly I had to wrap her in a blanket. She refused to sleep in the bed she had shared with Alina. I took her to my room and put her in my bed.

  When Dr. Martinez arrived an hour later, his grayish waxy complexion haggard with forced insomnia, Julia looked calmer, although exhausted. He prescribed Valium as always, the ultimate mental elixir of the time, and asked her to come into his office in the morning. He left, after casting a last sour glance at Father, as if he were beginning to suspect that it was he who needed treatment instead of his daughters.

  A couple of days later, Julia packed a few belongings and moved out of the house into an apartment a group of her student friends shared in the city. She had no money and Father refused to let her take anything belonging to the house. But I was already working for him at the office and gave her all my salary behind his back, until she managed to pull her resources together.

  It was just Father and I in the house now. Rosita only came a few hours during the day, mostly when we were both away at the office. In the evenings after work, Father and I would sometimes dine briefly together, and then each of us would get lost in our darkened, silent part of the house. The house was just that, dark and silent, with some corners like black holes pulling me into moods of longing, and the hushed garden peering in through thick panes at night, into my bedside lamp–lit room, drowning me in memories of sun-drenched moments, bustling parties, late swims, guitars.

  * * *

  “What was that?” Marion perks up, startled. “Can you hear it? It’s Julia!” Muffled shrieks come from down below. I get up and listen out in the corridor.

  “I don’t care what you say!” Julia sounds flustered. “It’s your job to handle every room in the house. That was the deal.” I hurry downstairs and find her, Delia, and Constantine outside Father’s studio. Constantine is holding a sort of metal bowl in his hands full of dried herbs. Sage, probably. Behind him against the wall are two big bags of salt piled up, together with the bucketful of water and the mop. Delia stands facing Julia, staff in one hand, handbell in the other. Her expression is impenetrable.

  “What’s the problem?” I ask.

  Delia turns toward me, and she’s about to speak when Julia cuts in. “Delia is just being difficult. She refuses to work inside Father’s study until someone goes in first. Well, it’s not going to be me.”

  “You’ve been designated to clear the paths in this limpieza,” Delia says patiently. “I told you it would be your job to open every door and every window in the house before we even arrived. You requested the limpieza, and therefore you’re the one who needs to lead the way. And you’ve done it everywhere but here.”

  “I already unlocked the door. All these rules are a pile of crap.”

  “I cannot clean this room if you don’t clear the path. There’s no way around it.” Delia’s tone is stubborn.

  I approach Constantine. “What’s going on?”

  “Julia is breaking the energetic grid of the limpieza,” he whispers back. “It’s bad news. It could be even worse than if we hadn’t started at all.” I want him to further clarify this last cryptic statement, but my attention turns back to Julia, who is going off on one of her tantrums.

  “I think we should call the whole thing off. I’m sick of having to take all the responsibility!” she shrieks.

  “Julia, what’s the big deal?” I ask her.

  “The big deal is, I’m not stepping into that freaking den. I don’t give a fuck if the limpieza can’t go on,” Julia says, her eyes red with fury. Then she screams at Delia over my shoulder, “I won’t pay you a dime if you don’t finish the whole house, this room included! Not even cab money.”

  Delia clicks her tongue. “Constantine, please bring a chair, it looks like we’re going to be here for a while.” Constantine brings a chair and she sits down ceremoniously, like a queen.

  I take Julia to the side. “Hey, what’s wrong?” I ask her in a softer tone. Julia looks at me, befuddled, and I see the agitation in the depth of her gaze. “Are you all right?” Julia doesn’t say anything, her face is contorted as if she can’t shake off an image or an idea. All of a sudden, the strange thought enters my mind that it’s possible that the memories I have been entertaining in the last hour have not just welled up in my mind, but maybe in Julia’s also, as if they were emerging from a different source than our individual brains, and impregnated the consciousness of us both, playing themselves out on a larger scale. In this sense, both Julia and I could have simultaneously relived the same scenes. Is the house regurgitating memories and engulfing us all in its own recollections?

  Julia holds my gaze as if she were also contemplating a similar weird thought. “I’m not stepping into that room. I’m not putting myself through his shit.” I see real fear in her eyes.

  “Julia, we’ve come so far,” I say, “we need to finish this.”

  “I’m not doing it.”

  CHAPTER 10

  A scream pulls me out of Julia’s stubborn gaze.

  “Help, Anna! Oh God!”

  “There she goes again,” Julia mutters.

  “Stop it! You’re not making things easier right now.” I turn away, annoyed, and make for the stairs. But at the second step my foot skids over a wet, slippery surface, and looking up I see sheets of water cascading down toward me. Marion stands at the top of the stairs, a metal piece in her hand. “It broke, Anna, I swear I only tried to flush it,” she says with a mortified grin.

  On the landing the water advances in gushes, rushes forth with the greed of a stream that ha
s overflown its banks. It washes against the base of the corridor, where the wallpaper is curling up as if in dread of the avalanche.

  “Marion, what the hell?” I yell, yanking the metal piece from her hand, and wade toward the bathroom.

  “I thought it’d stop when the tank emptied out. But it kept flooding.” Marion walks behind me, chattering away, anxious. In the bathroom, the sound of rushing water fills my ears as I ogle in horror the toilet overflowing from tank and bowl, a muddy geyser springing from under the house.

  I gasp. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  I hear Delia’s voice from downstairs. “It is written, the gates shall be opened and oceans of tears will flood through.” She pauses, and then adds, “I hope you didn’t empty your bowels before you flushed, or else we would need to substitute tears for . . .” She chuckles. Constantine snickers.

  Marion stares at me blankly. “I swear I didn’t—”

  Before she can finish, Julia walks in, screaming, “What the fuck? Water’s already downstairs! What is it with you that you’re always breaking things?”

  “Stop shouting and help me find the shut-off valve,” I snap.

  A dim bulb hanging from the ceiling is the only source of light in the bathroom. For a few moments the three of us bump into each other while stooping and squatting in search of the valve. One of the vanity cabinet’s doors under the sink breaks loose when Julia yanks it open. Marion hits her head on the metal edge of an elaborate mirror frame. My bare feet slip over the smooth marble floor. Marion has already tried to shut down the valve behind the toilet bowl, a piece of which ended up in her hand. A jet of brownish water spurts out of the rotten pipe with a deafening hiss.

  “There has to be a main valve to the whole bathroom,” I say, desperate, as I feel the water swishing around my ankles.

  “Too many womens in the kitchen.” Julia sneers. “Someone needs to leave.” She gives Marion a sidelong glance as she crouches by the vanity cabinet.

  “You mean me?” Marion snaps. “I’ll gladly leave. I’ve more important things to do.”

  “More important than watching your house conk out under a deluge of shit?” Here they go again.

  “Frankly, the house can go to hell, for all I care,” Marion says.

  Julia bristles as Marion brushes past her, nose up in the air. “That so? Then just get your fat ass out of here!”

  “How dare you!”

  “Could you two just break it up?” I say in a fury, stepping in between.

  Marion clicks her tongue and leaves.

  Julia gets back into the cabinet. “Revolting! It stinks in here. But wait! I think I got it!”

  I dive down beside her. The inside of the vanity is thick with greenish mold along the exposed wall. A mist of fetid spores hits my face as I pull out a bunch of crumbling toilet rolls now sodden to the core, together with two plastic containers filled with yellowed shampoo bottles and other toiletry relics. Now we get a glimpse of dark corroded tubes of exposed plumbing at the far end, topped by a small hand wheel.

  Julia turns it forcefully.

  “It needs oil. It’s too rusty,” I say.

  “Do you know where the main valve for the house is?” Julia asks. “Anna, we need to go down and shut it. Now! This thing won’t yield.” She pulls out her wet hands, red and swollen after turning the impossible wheel.

  I stand up, panting. My feet feel puffy and cold in the streaming water. I plod out of the bathroom and down the corridor, holding on to the banister as I descend the stairs. Why do I always insist on walking barefooted when I’m in this house?

  As I reach the second floor I see Delia and Constantine ahead of me. Delia is still sitting in the chair; her heavy legs and feet are drawn up and rest on one of the footstools that Constantine must have carried from the library. Constantine stands beside her, his trousers rolled up to his mid shins, although he’s still wearing his shoes. On top of an adjacent chair, he’s placed their magical accoutrements collection: the bowl of sage, bunches of white flowers, the coconut shell, a bag of salt, Delia’s handbell. Why are they still here with dirty water flowing all around them, instead of having rushed off to a drier spot, is beyond my imagination. Now and then, Constantine mops water around Delia’s chair in short, precise swishing motions. I see all this in a flash; it’s a very weird scene, but I can’t stop to think about it. The stream of water sloshes down around me, too. I need to pay attention to the stairs in order to reach the kitchen door and the garden as fast as possible.

  Stepping into the sun-drenched patio feels like leaping onto another planet, away from the fetid, flooded house, grime running all over the unstoppable torrent. Burning rays of sun fall harsh on my head and shoulders, the soles of my feet dry quickly on the heated pavers. The water main is just where I thought it would be. At the foot of the thuja hedge by the gate, surrounded by browned ground creepers and long dry weeds. I pull up the stone slab and screw the valve shut.

  When I return to the house, water is still lapping everywhere, cascading down the stairs and advancing into rooms off the landing, but Julia attests to the decline of the leak.

  Now we just need to clean up.

  “We’ll have no water now,” I say.

  “No clean tap water, you mean,” Julia says. “We’ve plenty of the other.”

  Half an hour passes. We’ve been mopping and vacuuming water nonstop. Delia has finally put her feet down on the floor, and Constantine, who still hasn’t rolled down his trousers, must have returned the footstool to the library.

  Delia leans on her staff. “Well, this was a spontaneous gift. I suppose we’ve been spared of cleaning that particular bathroom. Of course, we’ll need to give one last sweep with salt water.” She looks pensive for a moment. “It’s always interesting how some spaces volunteer their own purification, while others resist like hell.”

  Constantine looks at her with a serious face, nodding in agreement.

  I go up one last time to the bathroom for a final checkup. The smell of mold and rust still lies heavy in the air alongside the stench of rotten sewer. I open the small window over the bathtub, struggling with the handle. A tapestry of ivy appears behind the glazed glass, and the sun filters through, projecting quivering constellations along the pink marble slabs that cover walls and floor. This used to be mother’s bathroom, the most beautiful in the house. A gleaming salmon-colored alcove with hand-painted porcelain fixtures and large mirrors in art deco frames. But now cracks, like dark, green-veined fingers, run along the walls and floor, as if the pink flesh of the original stone has been scratched by the years of neglect. The only remaining mirror is chipped at the corners, its surface veiled with large gray patches where the silver lining has been wrecked. I can recollect happy bubble-bath ventures with Julia inside the large tub, white foam flying over our heads among shrieks, while Nanny’s patience wore thin as she pleaded with us to step out into towels and terry robes. The wide tub has no faucet now. Its bottom is a dry bed of oxidized rust.

  Marion walks in with a mop and a bucket.

  “The house is falling to pieces,” I say. “I hadn’t realized it was so far gone.”

  “I thought the real estate agency report stated that everything was in good condition, including plumbing,” Marion says.

  “That was two years ago.”

  “Can things deteriorate that fast?”

  “They say empty houses wither away once their inhabitants leave. They just languish into decay.”

  “Heavens, Anna, you’re suddenly in a very poetic mood.”

  “And you’re in an unnaturally cheerful mood.”

  “Not at all. I just sense that things are beginning to move.”

  “Beginning to move?”

  “You know, the cleaning is working after all.”

  “Really, by destroying the house through a toilet flood? What a fine purge indeed!”

  “Look—again, I’m sorry for anything I might have brought on, okay? Now let me finish mopping here wh
ile you go down to Delia,” Marion says, and nudges me gently so I will let her pass.

  “Why don’t you go down to Delia? You are the eldest daughter of the house,” I scoff.

  “You know I can’t face the study,” Marion says, looking me straight in the eye. For the first time I see some sort of alignment in her fragmented gaze.

  “What if I can’t face it either?” I ask.

  Marion sighs. “If there is a champion in the family, it’s you, Anna. But I’d understand if you refuse to take this on.”

  I watch Marion as she turns around and starts mopping the pink marble floor. How did the youngest daughter of the house ever get to this position of championship, I reflect, and find myself sliding down that trodden path of regret I have traveled for as long as I can remember. The path of coming to terms with having to accept responsibility for my family. A part of me still has a hard time understanding how Little Anna, the girl who lost her mother at five, was designated to become a pillar of the clan, to take on burdens well beyond her years. And treated from the start as the voice of reason, the only one who could save a crazy family riddled with mad passions and erratic choices. At moments like these, I can’t help but revisit my sisters’ abandonment; how it’s not just all weakness on their part, but also their willful indolence that has landed me in this forsaken position. But there was more to it than my sisters.

  For as long as I could remember, Father had complained about having no sons. “If only I’d had three sons! How much we could have done with the business! We could have conquered the world! As it is, what will happen to my company? Who will inherit it?” he wailed at mealtimes, during outings, in front of business connections and acquaintances. Having daughters was like a sweet curse, some sort of profitless responsibility, a burden to haul along in hardship. Marion, Julia, and I bore these comments with downcast eyes and mortified hearts, besides a good deal of embarrassment, when these words were spoken in front of others.