A Beautiful Young Woman
Page 1
A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMAN
First published by Eterna Cadencia Editora
Copyright © Julián López, 2013
Copyright © Eterna Cadencia Editora, 2013
Translation copyright © 2017 by Melville House Publishing, LLC
First Melville House printing: November 2017
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“Bien Pudiera Ser” by Alfonsina Storni, first published 1919,
Irremediablemente, Buenos Aires Cooperativa Editorial Limitada
Ebook ISBN 9781612196824
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: López, Julián, 1965- | Rutter, Samuel, translator.
Title: A beautiful young woman : a novel / Julian Lopez; translated from the Spanish by Samuel Rutter.
Other titles: Muchacha muy bella. English Description: First English language edition. | Brooklyn, NY : Melville House, 2017. | First published in Spanish as Una muchacha muy bella. Primera ediciâon. Buenos Aires : Eterna Cadencia, 2013.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026694 (print) | LCCN 2017037971 (ebook) | ISBN 9781612196824 (reflow able) | ISBN 9781612196817 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Children of disappeared persons–Argentina–Fiction. | Mothers and sons–Argentina–Fiction. | Political violence–Argentina–History–20th century–Fiction. |
Abduction–Argentina–Fiction. | Loss (Psychology)–Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Political. | FICTION / Historical. | GSAFD: Political fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ7798.422.O647 (ebook) | LCC PQ7798.422.O647 M8313 2017 (print) | DDC 863/.7–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026694
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Betty Lew
v4.1
a
For Francisco,
for Elsi,
for Delia,
for Oscar,
for Guillermo.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A Beautiful Young Woman
A Note About the Author
My mother was a beautiful young woman. Her skin was pale and opaque; I could almost say it was bluish, and it had a luster that made it unique, of a natural aristocracy, removed from mundane trivialities. Her hair was black, of course—I already said she was a beautiful young woman—her hair was straight but heavy, and she wore it in a way that I haven’t seen since. I’m not talking about her hairstyle: no matter what she did with it, her hair fell gracefully and in shape and always seemed tidily cut. I’m talking about the outline of her hair, of the linear sketch of that ocean of flexible antennae rushing into the sea of her face. Her hair began symmetrically and became visible in its contrast, each strand powerful, and it traced a subtle heart at the top of her head as it flowed down over her elegant temples.
My mother was a beautiful young woman, and she was voluptuously delicate; even as we spent our lives in almost total solitude, she had an extraordinarily sensual way of being, just for herself. Of course, I was there too, only seven years old, and she was like that just for me.
She spoke in a way that was profound but at the same time stripped of pretension, of appearing intellectual, or even seductive. In the middle of pronouncing an unusual word, she loved to linger in her own language. Verbal instincts kept her lively, and she would pull her heavy hair from one side to the other like the sumptuous cape of a bullfighter; she would lock her brown eyes on the ground—have I already said that my mother was a beautiful young woman?—and then slowly raise them to meet mine, starting again quickly with her lines of argument that were almost always indignant, almost always offensive, almost always naïve.
We lived in a two-room apartment with a bright kitchen that looked out into the light well of a modest but sophisticated building, one of those constructions from the 1950s with no more than three floors and no elevator, cool in summer and freezing once autumn arrives. Our home had a bathroom festooned with black mosaic tiles, pale green porcelain, and once-grand bathroom fixtures that had worn down faster than one turns the pages of a several-seasons-old fashion magazine. The apartment had a balcony that was unusable—merely opening the sliding door caused the moldings to crumble off in chunks. My mother hated the soot that came in from the avenue two blocks away, and she hated the noise that came from even farther away, from the auto shop and the truck beltway, and she was afraid of the birds that made their nests in the ash trees that shaded our two windows. One time I saw her in my bedroom hiding from a pigeon chick, still without its feathers, that the mother bird had thrown out of the nest because of its imperfections. It lay dying on the edge of our balcony. With a stick I pushed it over the edge so that my mother could come out of her hiding place and the tiny monster could end its gasping directly on the street below.
For a while, I kept an eye on the chick to try to see the exact moment the gelatinous mass would settle, the exact second of the final death rattle. It had no feathers, and its eyelids were still sealed, but it had been snubbed by its own mother and feared by mine; it deserved to die quickly.
—
The house was a living room with red walls that ran up to plastered ceilings hiding fluorescent tubes that tended to flicker in rhythmic agony rather than light up the room. A few adornments hung from the walls: a Mexican sombrero, made of silver, about the size of the palm of a small hand; a bronze casting of an Aztec sun with a sour expression and a colorful woven beard with a handful of bells on the end; a framed photograph of Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant that my uncle had sent from Paris; a photograph of Che Guevara, whom my mother called her boyfriend, stuck to the wall with a pin; a reproduction of a graffiti by Alonso—a woman sitting on the ground, her back arched and seemingly naked—and a few other postcards.
My mother liked postcards from Holland in tulip season; she bought them herself, wrote little travel tales on the backs of them, and put them in the post so that I would receive them about forty days later. Then we would get together in the kitchen to drink tea and eat fruitcake, and she would tell me everything she hadn’t been able to write in the small space of the postcard. My mother loved describing all the tiny details of the journey: the red valleys where poppies grew spontaneously, the measured comforts of the carriage in the train that arrived from the Urals, skirting around the Danube or that took her first to Pest and then Buda, or the delicious violet sweets that were sold in the patisserie Sachel, in Vienna. My mother’s dark pupils grew large with fascination, and she made the most of the storytelling, using it to instruct me on a range of matters, from the geography of daydreams to the anthropology of European exaggerations.
Up until that point, my mother had never left the country and had only visited Chapadmalal, the Río Tercero dam, Córdoba, Necochea, Tandil, La Reja, Highway 12, and El Etrusco, a little hotel in Paraná.
Nonetheless, every time she visited a new neighborhood, she returned home like Marco Polo exhausted by the excitement of his journey. She would tell me about the strange customs of our neighbors in Floresta or in Villa Real, the types of trees they had by their sidewalks, if she had seen packs of street dogs, if she had discovered libraries or museums, or if she had seen an old man urinating in a drain.
We loved to travel, and I took the opportunity to pick out the pieces of shiny fruit from the cake and peep through the holes they made while my mother, completely engrossed by her st
ories, gathered them up with surprising dexterity and ate them without noticing and without scolding me.
—
At nighttime the living room became a bedroom. That’s where she slept, on a sofa that folded out and provided comfort after a laboriously complex set-up process. My mother complained that she could never find sheets that would fit her stretcher—they were either too long or too wide, and even small sheets weren’t the right size for her bed. One time she came home with a shopping bag filled with a piece of white percale, a huge pair of silver-colored scissors, some needles, and a spool of thread. The first thing she did was get out her thimble, a porcelain treasure handed down from the diluted women of who knows which generation of the family on her father’s side. A jewel that no one used, beautiful but uncomfortable, loaded with an unbearable power: the smudged history of those women who arrived to us all mordant, defeated, and mutilated through my grandfather’s line.
I watched her face as she unfolded the handkerchief in which she kept the thimble, and I never knew what that word was, the one that I had to spell out from the air of the moment to comprehend the scene before me.
“Tomorrow, I’ll make them,” she said with enthusiasm.
The bag with the white percale transformed into a cat, and with each new day it became more and more comfortable between the cushions of the sofa until it became an unnoticed bundle. Each time night fell and the living room needed to be turned into a bedroom, I heard her rediscover the bundle and mew softly to herself, “Tomorrow…”
Then one day I stopped seeing the bag altogether, and the percale became a stuffed animal perched high up on a shelf.
Our house wasn’t a good place for pets.
—
I remember seeing three books on the tiny table that only became her nightstand once her bed had been made and her hair rested on the pillow. There must have been many more, but I remember only these: The Golden Bough, a study of magic and religion by James Frazer, published by the Economic Culture Fund, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and The Manipulated Man by Esther Vilar. Of the one Latin American book, the title alone was enough to summon all my prejudice against the author; I wasn’t going to allow myself to be drawn into all that. How much time had my mother spent carrying that book around, how many times had I seen her slip it into her purse before heading out, and how many times had she placed it back on the table, the very first thing she did when she got home? The blue squares and the red letters on the cover were a printed motif that stayed with us a long time— with us, a long time. Perhaps even for a whole century. I knew that book by heart.
I remember the impact that the end of the Vilar’s dedication to the reader had upon me; I think it was the first time, and I’m not sure if it was the only time, that I heard a book as it spoke to me: “To those who are too old, too ugly, too sick…”
Of the other book, I remember only that it had many pages and that my desire to read dwindled very quickly after the first few lines. Reading always fascinated me, but books always ceased to be interesting almost at the same time as I took them on a plane and decided to venture forth into adventure. Books seem like women. Or they seem like men.
—
When we were at home my mother used to shell green beans, broad beans, or pods of black beans; I can’t recall the meals she made with these vegetables, although I do recall the steam and the brilliance of some of them. Other vegetables perfectly resembled the skin of the long and elegant fingers on my mother’s hand. Her index finger passed smoothly but firmly over the vegetable seams and found the exact spot where the structure would give way under pressure, an inaudible creaking that unsealed the natural lock of the beans and instantly made the green pearls or the veined buttons fall into the bowl, where they would bounce until finding their definitive resting place.
My mother was like the perfect murderer of vegetables; I watched her do away with them with a natural coolness of which she herself was not truly aware.
Every now and again she stopped for a moment and lit a 43 70 cigarette, rotating through her tasks. But for her, in those moments, it didn’t seem to me like a sensual pleasure. Perhaps due to smoking a mix of dark and blond tobacco, rather than affirming her with a “You’ve come a long way, baby,” each puff seemed to paint her as a country girl who looked on in terror at the road signs, frightened in her flight, only a few steps beyond the limits of town.
I think I can remember (although, is it just a strip of loose images that I’m editing together to have a magnificent film, a story to tell myself?) that my mother’s hands spent entire afternoons peeling vegetables and that in the evenings I had to empty the tea towels my mother deployed in the kitchen to catch the waste from the broad beans and the peas, the empty pods and the tangle of green fibers.
I put everything in plastic bags my mother made appear from one of the drawers in the larder as if to suggest I should free her from all the mess. I did it just as the sun went down, when my mother shut herself up in the tiny service room we had behind the laundry room, to cry—or to curse I suppose—or to plan the best lives in which I might not have appeared.
In truth, I don’t think I ever filled one of those bags. What I’ll never forget is the smell of the incinerator room. The black void when I lowered the hatch, the fresh air that flowed out of its dark mouth, the need to build up the courage to let go of the bag, not being able to run away quickly enough to avoid hearing the bag fall and bounce into the basement, because I had to close the hatch again before getting out as quickly as I could, spurred on by impalpable monsters. I don’t know exactly why I walked toward the incinerator with an assuredness that I myself was not aware of, my feet flat on the ground, my footsteps firm, precise, and silent to avoid any blunder that might hold me back. I don’t know why I was so assured; if I really paid attention, if I stayed behind to listen, that black mouth that led down to the basement could have spoken to me.
—
My mother was a beautiful young woman, and she loved me. But it’s not difficult to suppose that there is quite a distance from being a beautiful young woman, in love with an incredibly handsome man who offered perpetual romance, to becoming an abandoned mother.
A distance that became the flesh and blood—and then “all eyes,” as the ladies in the building used to say—that was me.
A human being who was nearly always silent and obedient—except when I shut myself in my bedroom during the times when my mother made herself scarce, to cry or to curse, or to plot the most effective ways to make me disappear.
—
My mother loved me. Even more than that, I could say my mother loved me madly. My mother loved me, of course; but I was her son.
That beautiful young woman listed my virtues while she stroked my hair. I suppose she was dictating out loud the list of abilities through which I could free her from the yoke of motherhood. As if with those caresses she was, in fact, feeding me, with a moral nourishment that swelled the muscles of a manhood that when the moment arrived, would relieve her, would make her proud, would make her forget the drabness with which her liberating dreams had been stained.
Whilst she rattled off these oaths, she sunk her fingernails with great gentleness into the trails that opened up in my hair and traced the outline of my head while reciting the rosary of my qualities. That’s how we passed the hours of the afternoon.
Sometimes, and only very few times (but the problem is I can never forget them), her fingers stumbled over a double cowlick on the top of my head and tensed up. From the friction against my hair came an almost inaudible rustling, and then pearls began to fall from my mother’s eyes and she gave in to an unhinged but self-controlled race to shut herself up in the service room.
I went and combed my hair in front of the bathroom mirror. I simply wet the comb with a little water, and I smoothed out the wild jungle my mother had left on top of my head.
Unlike her, I’m redheaded. My hair is a messy and endless amount of notes that remind her of my progenitor. A
permanent wildfire, my mother used to say, and like terrified sheep, her desire to extinguish me escaped through her eyes.
My mother was a beautiful young woman. My mother loved me and knew intimately my potential virtues. My mother admired the seed of a man that was inside me.
But I was her son.
—
Once a month my mother dressed me in my little sky-blue outfit, a lightweight guayabera-style suit with little golden buttons and shorts that she had made for special occasions. She took me for lunch to the Bambi Patisserie or to the cinema and then afterward for tea at the Steinhauser Café or Casa Suiza. She said that every month we would have an outing “just like everyone else,” although I have such fleeting memories that I doubt the monthly regularity was observed. I suppose that the happiness the plan promised and the desire to multiply the moments of pleasure with me made my mother believe it was an endurable ritual that could be repeated periodically. I could never be sure, but I don’t know that we ever went to the same place more than once, although of course it was repeated in my memory, in the conversations when my mother told me how much fun we’d had in those extraordinary places she’d taken me.
I loved Bambi. It was a unique restaurant in Buenos Aires, on a tree-lined street in Barrio Norte, casual but distinguished, yet not too expensive. The curious thing about it was that you served your own food from trays upon which every item on the menu already sat. I always chose a little bottle of peach-flavored Delifrú, and my mother chose a tomato-flavored one seasoned with celery salt, the most delicious flavor of course, and the same one I would have chosen if it weren’t for the fact that her choosing turned it into a modernism for adults only. Back then in the city there was no place like it, and so the outing became extravagant and sophisticated.
I loved Steinhauser; the strawberry tarts were a real event, luminous like stained-glass windows up high in the nave of a gothic cathedral and delicious as only the best German pastries can be. I enjoyed feeling elegant and sharing with my mother the pride of spending some time on a special outing that I would never be able to recount to my schoolmates, because the most charming thing about it was the symbolism of it all, and back then I couldn’t quite comprehend it. Once I tried to tell Darío, who sat next to me, all about it. I tried to tell him what a tart was; I suppose my description made him see something like suspension bridges hanging in the fog because the look on his face became more and more concentrated as I tried to be more specific. At some point I stopped. My failure was so obvious that I stopped talking right in the middle of a sentence that, for my friend, seemed pretentious.