“Just on time,” the smaller one said. “Hurry up.”
The other took off his hat with respect. “With your permission, sir,” he said to my papa’s sealed eyes, “but we have a contractual obligation to carry out.” And then, rapidly, he withdrew the hands as if they were a couple of gloves. Nobody, not even mama, could have perceived that those hands had been ravaged. Their shell was still there—enough to fool any inspection.
And then, unexplainably, papa’s face, as begrimed and old and cracked as his hands, opened into a smile.
“What’s with this one?” the smaller one asked. “How come the happiness?”
“What do you care? If he wants to die cheerful, what’s it to us?”
The smaller one hesitated for another instant. He walked his eyes around my parents’ bedroom. I felt for a moment that gaze slapping my skin and passing like the hot air of a fan. Then he left.
I heard them moving down the stairs. I heard them on the way to that place I had seen only in dreams.
It was then that papa died. With the smile still on his lips. Because he had had the last word. The hands of my papa would not be useful to those men: not to infiltrate the lives of the unborn children, not as the hands of a soldier to hurt rebels, not for anything. Let them take his hands to their washroom and cellar. They would be unable to erase even so much as a scar. Someone had listened to the secret cantata of those hands, giving refuge to each line, rocking each memory in a cradle, singing the couplets that this man’s mouth would never more pronounce.
That someone was me.
I was young, less than five, but the first time he confided in me, an intimate secret, talking to me as you talk to children when you think they cannot understand, as so many have talked to me during these years, that first time I knew that if the resonance of his voice floated on the surface of my mind, for everybody to see, when those men came to get the hands, they were going to carry away my memories along with his.
At the moment of my papa’s death, I should have rushed to bury his story in some depth of myself, should have covered it with all the earth in the universe. So inside my fear that nobody would ever find it. But something inside me had muttered no, that if I had thrown his hands into the grave, I would never be able to retrieve them. So young I was and I already knew that memories can rot as quickly as a body. Quicker.
At that very moment those men were testing my papa’s hands, and the boiling pot was proving unable to whiten them; at that moment they were asking themselves about that final mysterious smile, and, without another word between them, they were starting out on the way back to my home.
I ran to my own room and waited by the high window that looks out on the street. And yes, a while later they appeared. They were coming up the avenue, arguing, cursing one another, each blaming the other for what had happened. When they stopped in front of the door to our house, they let their hands speak. That was when they took out those knives. As if out of the air. As if they were leaping from inside the fingers.
They entered without knocking.
I could hear them down there, opening and closing drawers, overturning furniture, ripping up cushions, slashing portraits. Room by room, down there. Coming nearer.
They began to mount the stairs.
They were looking for a tape, some notes, papers. Something concrete, something that made a sound, something written. The ephemeral resources with which adults preserve a past that escapes them. Those two men were looking for something they could read and burn, touch and burn, hear and burn.
In the room next door they tied mama to a chair. She would not remember later, but they tied her to a chair, asking her where that smile had come from. Only when they had searched the house from top to bottom did they drag their legs in my direction.
I had nothing to offer them.
After they had kicked open the door to my room, the only thing that those two men saw was a girl of almost five backed against a wall. A girl who did not even have permission to cross the street. A girl playing with a panda that her grandfather had given her. She did not lift her eyes. It was as if she could not see them.
I was not the one who was in that room. It was Oriana.
A moment before the door opened, a moment before having to expose my father’s hands to the eyes of those two men and to their knives, I had retreated to the last wall of my room. I felt behind me the hard barrier of cement through which my body could not pass. There was no longer anywhere to flee.
There was no longer anywhere. But when the door opened, I took a step backward.
And watched them, from here. I watched them tear the panda’s plush. I watched them undress the little girl’s body with their eyes. I watched them place the angle of a flashlight in the most hidden of that body’s seven holes.
I did not care. I was already in this kingdom where I now find myself, this kingdom I have inhabited ever since. It was not a kingdom back then. It was not even a house.
Over the years I built the rest. Anyone could have done it. But people fall in love with the cities where their feet can take strides, where their lungs can breathe, the cities full of beings as driven as they are. From here I watch them. I too journeyed afterward to those cities which they call real. I also journeyed there to collect their lives, to read what their hands had sung, to sink myself into their eyes that were about to be snuffed out. I like the dead, the people who are about to die. They ask for nothing more than to be relieved of their voices. They ask for nothing more than to die with a smile.
I did not know that I would have to build a whole kingdom. When I started, I knew only that I needed a secure place to gather my papa’s words. I took my time transplanting them to the bedroom I was building inside myself. When that space was filled with my father’s phrases and still his stories kept on spilling over as if from a fountain, I went on with the rest of the house. And in each room I would put one of his melodies, and when there were no more rooms left, I simply continued, adding imaginary halls and invented towers and endless furnishings. Some children build their father a tomb. I built him a palace to lodge the sounding shadows of his hands as he tendered them to me. It was enough to know that to be with him again I need only enter that palace and stroll through it with the slowness of the slowest of pianos. The proof was in the smile. Papa had died with the certainty that his hands, at the end, belonged only to him.
But the real house where I had passed the first five years of my existence was in ruins. I watched those men opening the legs of that girl where I had taken up residence since my birth. And I could not do it. I could not return to that body.
At that moment I promised that years later I would return to that little thing leaning against an unyielding wall. But at that moment I knew it to be too dangerous. Let those two waste their years spying on Oriana. I was going to prepare my kingdom, I was going to distribute my papa’s calm and defiant smile as if it were the wind. Out there, beyond Oriana’s sad voice that was singing alone to itself, beyond the ballad that she rippled to herself in order to sleep, I could hear, in the miserable cities where people are not the owners of their own hands, thousands of men, thousands of women, who awaited me.
It took me more than a decade to ready the sanctuaries where I could preserve the residue of their lives. I did not approach them until my kingdom was in place.
At the beginning they were, they had to be, people those men could never associate with me. Later it would be possible, I thought, to receive other voices, closer, more intimate voices. But I began with the tramps, the unemployed, the fugitives, the solitary and unmarried domestics, the blind who passed their days in the plaza listening to the wings of crows, the sick agonizing in the dampest recesses of the worst hospitals. I made Oriana, when she was old enough to go out by herself, walk through those neighborhoods. And I located my loved ones by that sorrow that human beings sweat when the body glimpses, though not yet the mind, that they are going to die. The hour of their death was written on their hands.
I visited them awhile before that hour came. I demanded of Oriana no more than an attentive ear and a compassionate face. As for me, I supplied my memory and my kingdom. And when the sounds of those hands had been registered, we left, as soon as we could, through the back door, before those two men came in through the front. Of my presence, of Oriana’s footsteps, they never found a trace. What they found, invariably, blooming greenly in the desert of the dying face, was a smile.
At times I would stay in the area, asking Oriana to keep a prudent distance—so that I could relish the violent despair of those two men. At such moments, the only thing I missed was someone with whom I could share their defeat. With one more person, with two, with three, I might one day go further still, I might follow those men to their hideaway, descend into that cellar where the hands of all the human beings who had lived in this world lay, with four, with five minds such as my own, I might initiate the rescue of those other voices, so that the living could discover what the dead had once upon a time murmured. But in the puddle at Oriana’s feet only her solitary face was reflected. Nobody, nothing more.
It was Oriana who wanted me to keep living in my kingdom. She obeyed me when I whispered to her to get up, to smooth her dress, to go and untie mama. Just as, years later, when I needed her muscles in order to go out and gather the voice of an old woman who was peeling potatoes in the devastation of a kitchen and who was about to die as helpless and exposed as one of the potatoes she was peeling, Oriana also agreed. But she did not invite me to lodge in her body forever. I was no more than a passenger. Yes. She was the one. She was the one who did not want us to become one person again, she the one who decided to stagnate endlessly on the threshold of five. She was the one who, as her body grew, refused to mature, refused to bear children, refused to be an adult.
I did not contradict her. It was for her own good. Her childhood innocence saved her from becoming the sluice through which so much pain came, the pain of others that I flushed into me. And it made people trust her, sure that someone of that countenance, transparent as a child, would not betray them. I did not complain. I’ll admit it. I preferred it like that.
I lacked the wisdom to understand that between us a frontier of ice and resentment was gradually extending itself. But there was no other body I could employ. There was no other way of salvaging those voices. And did she have another use, a better use, for her life? What more did she want than to be the elder sister to those neglected words, to be the savior, the confessor, almost a saint? What more can anybody want?
Only now do I know that somebody can want considerably more than that, can want to be more than the tunnel for another person’s light, more than the repository for someone else’s memories.
I should have realized that she had a mind of her own, but I did not even understand how frightened she was. I could have sensed it that morning decades after our father’s death, when mama woke us up, woke her up and woke me up, the mother we had shared the way we shared a body. As soon as I felt her hands in Oriana’s hair I knew, with the clarity with which one remembers the past rather than the vague penumbra with which you predict the future, I knew that mama had only three years left to live. I knew it before Oriana opened her eyes. It was something in the absent trembling of the hands, as if they were trying to caress me underwater, already distant. If not then, at least that evening, when for the first time Oriana imprisoned me in my kingdom, I should have realized how her fear would lead her to rebel.
There had been, however, no lack of signs. Though she had never sabotaged even one of my encounters with the thousands of anonymous beings who were dying in their remote beds, the few times I had timidly proposed to rescue the serenata that might be concealed in the hands of people who were more familiar, nearer to us, her reaction had been categorical. She would walk away.
That morning some sort of anguish in my voice must have alerted her. When I murmured to those motherly hands in our hair that I would harvest them before they were eradicated, when I told them not to be sad. How was I to allow those men to boil to the bones those soft guardians that had washed us, nourished us? Of course Oriana had understood the consequences of my plans before I could formulate the plans themselves: again the multiplication of crawling hands in the night, again the steps of those men approaching the room where she was leaning against an unrelenting wall.
But mama’s hands! The hands of the only one who had never lost hope that Oriana might get better. The hands of the first who realized, a bit after her father’s death, that the girl was not reacting well. Those hands which had tried, unsuccessfully, to teach Oriana how to read, to add two plus two, to pull her out of that perpetual infancy into which she had fallen. Those hands that had been driven to the task of persuading teachers, uncles, psychologists, specialists, doctors, that there was a solution, the hands that had formed a human net that would protect the child if something happened to her mother, the hands that had never given up.
I observed her efforts from afar. Absorbed in my own projects, I knew that someday it would be my turn to gather from her own lips her struggle for Oriana, to settle her hands by the side of so many other memories, which filled the infinite coffers of my kingdom.
It was toward that burial ground next to papa’s that I departed on the morning when I understood, when we both understood, that mama was dying. Without knowing that the same evening I would be unable to find the road back to Oriana’s body. I opened the door that led to the outer world and the room into which I stepped was the same one I had just left. I crossed it, opened the door again, and the same endless blind alley of rooms repeated itself on the other side. Fear did not have time to shake me. At the third attempt, Oriana gave me access to her lovely domains. During what might have been less than a minute, I had found myself absolutely cut off from Oriana’s eyes, from her throat, from her legs, from what her fingers were combing. Alone, just as I am now alone—but now it is forever.
I did not understand, I did not want to understand, the danger. I had always kept a window that looked out upon her existence, a floating fragment of my mind that allowed me to control what that body in which I dwelled was doing. I interpreted her transitory blockade as an accident, a short circuit that would never be repeated. Precisely because Oriana had no life to reassume, because without me she was nobody, because not a line had been drawn on the palm of her hands, it never occurred to me that this might be her first rehearsal for independence.
So some days later I sat Oriana down, she with the typical demeanor of a small child, at her mother’s feet, and then I made her lips flourish into the puerile demand for a story, that Mama should retell the one about the most ancient of our grandparents, and I disposed her body to receive and transfer each syllable from that woman who had given us birth. That was when, without the slightest warning of what Oriana intended to do, I found myself enclosed once again in this kingdom with no gates. I don’t know how long it lasted this time. A long time. The time it took mama to complete her story. Because only at that moment, only when mama’s thousand and one words had concluded, did Oriana let me go back to her body. She let the slit of an indolent window swing slightly open. Through her distant eyes I could see mama getting up from the sofa, her vocabulary lost forever in the air of the approaching night.
I did not cross toward Oriana.
I remained here in the room where mama’s fullness should have been reposing. This empty room inside me, like a womb that cannot bear anything alive.
Thinking, for the first time, of my own extinction.
I had experienced how irremediable the world could be without Oriana. That is how I would remain, vulnerable, bridgeless, shoreless, if something happened to her. And if what happened to her happened to be death, the day in which those men came to get the hands Oriana and I had rented before our birth, that day they would follow her traces underground and into our earth, that day they would also obtain the maps of my kingdom. One by one, threshold by threshold, without my being able to do anything
to protect them, house by house, they would exterminate my memories, until my hands would be ready to be hung from some child about to be born, some remote perishing child who would not know of my existence.
If Oriana would not allow me to rescue my mama’s hands, would not allow me to come near mama’s hands, then, was it not then too late to find someone with whom to deposit all the stories I had gathered, all the stories I remembered so they would not be lost, so I could be the one to pierce forth into a smile when those men approached? I had glimpsed women in the mirror of my dreams, faces that multiplied themselves and reminded me of my own. How could I reach them, exiled from Oriana? How could I join that chain of women I longed for, a chain of women who were not deaf, who had not been born defeated, who had agreed to take charge of the howls of other human beings when they are leaving, leaving? Did they not exist out there, in some kingdom less invisible than the one I had dreamt?
It was too late.
There is not much more to tell.
Mama began to get worse. She was unable to care for the creature who looked like a mature woman but was only five years old. They began to leave Oriana in strange houses, one hand to another, as if she were a package. A cousin would deposit her at a friend’s and perhaps return for her, perhaps not, and from there she would be taken to a psychologist and then to an asylum and to another person or maybe to the same one, or who knows who would come to fetch her. Masks in the fog. More difficult each time to know in whose hands we were being placed.
Oriana must have been enchanting and the people must have had quite a bit of fun with her. For a week. Or two. But people tire quickly of the innocent, as they do of the ailing and the crestfallen, and then, you can be sure that to another refuge and another home and another period of playing she went, as if Oriana herself was one of the many lives that we had both given shelter to in other times, so it went, just so.
From time to time we would see Mama again, the anchor that Mama still was, and I would try to leap toward her, to relieve her, to prepare her hands for the day when—but the walls of Oriana are white and cold, as my hands will be in the future after they have been boiled. I do not know how to climb them. The occasions when she would allow me out to breathe, to gather the next to the last music in a dry throat, were becoming less and less frequent, until one day they ceased entirely.
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