A Beautiful Young Woman

by Julián López

  Like a big meringue, he’d said.

  —

  Of Casa Suiza, I remember that the first thing the waiter brought out was a silver triolet tray alongside a glass platter with little pastries arranged according to how moist they were and what they had inside them. I’ll never forget my disappointment when I found out that they’re “not for eating.” I thought they were a part of our tea, which we used to take with toasted sandwiches of ham, cheese, and tomato, but the first time that bounty of cream and marzipan and almonds and tiny little brioches sprinkled lightly with sugar like snow was laid before me I didn’t hesitate to dig in.

  My mother intercepted my swiping hand, and I’m not sure how, with what strong words, or with what action, but she informed me of the tragedy. The pastries were a devil’s bargain; they weren’t included in the price of tea, and it was a habit of the patisseries to tempt their diners with delights that would that would swell the final bill each time a greedy hand made them disappear one by one from the tray.

  For me this was an incomprehensible cruelty; it filled me with disbelief that we could keep on living in the face of such a thing, as if we were walking along a path in the fresh air, in a Versailles-esque picnic, never realizing we were stepping barefoot on a nest of venomous snakes in the slums of New Delhi. I couldn’t comprehend it, and I looked over at the tables where the triolet tray was visited with permission: tables peopled by large and ostentatious women who seemed to delight in the selection of the most promising pastries, the ones with most cream, the ones that were most delicious.

  My mother always drank strong coffee—a double. After the first sip she would light a cigarette, take a long drag, and then forget about it in the ashtray. It wasn’t unusual for her to repeat this action and find herself smoking two cigarettes at once. I suppose she liked the sensation of the new, the inaugural, and that when the matter began to repeat itself her memory disappeared.

  She was crazy about ice cream sodas, she loved them. She would tell me with her eyes ablaze about the long tricolor glasses of her childhood, the unforgettable afternoons in La Vascongada with her cousins, her siblings, and the tubular vessel in which the ruby of the grenadine, the smoothness of the cream, and the explosion of the soda bubbles slowly mixed together. It was wonderful to hear her speak so passionately, to know that she was so easily pleased by those treats and the sharing of a simple childhood, surrounded by equals.

  In Casa Suiza, or in whichever café we visited, she would call over the waiter with great refinement, and then with a cheeky and smiling urgency she ordered her double espresso, an ashtray, and “a large vanilla ice cream soda for my son.”

  I never really liked ice cream with soda, cream, and grenadine, and I imagined I’d like a different treat more. I was dying to sit at a café on a corner in Buenos Aires and look out a window, read a newspaper, and drink endless cups of double espresso, smoke my pack of 43 70s until I filled every ashtray in the place with butts. But I decided to make her happy—which, in this case, seemed so easy to do—and I smiled at the ice cream soda full of sugar and the colored syrup that made me nauseous.

  Because I only took a few sips just to please her, at the end of our afternoon tea, my mother’s mood darkened a little. “Why do people order things if they don’t want to eat them?” she would say. “It’s a waste, an ice cream soda sitting there like that. The movies, a patisserie, everything under the sun,” she would pronounce, crushing her cigarette against the ashtray and calling the waiter again to ask for the check—refined but curt this time. Then she would pay and get up with deliberate movements.

  Who spoke for my mother, and to whom? Who were those “people” who appeared and put an end to our outing? Who spoke inside my mother?

  —

  There is a dark light—I could almost say it was bluish—a light that defines the perimeters of the world in such a way as I have never seen in another room, as if certain leaves refract an opacity that shimmers and translates luminosity in a more material manner, a more granular manner. Something happens in the air of those rooms; everything seems calm. And everything seems both strange and recognizable.

  My mother often took me to the botanical gardens. We spent long afternoons in the silence imposed by those rapturous gardens. It was incredible to be in the middle of the city and then suddenly come across such verdure amid all the rough and muted blue; every sound was magnified, each footstep was a reminder that we walked there on our own feet, and each footstep supposed an act of unknowing consequences. A trail of dying insects behind us, of freshly shooting buds, of fungal spores pressed down inside their reproductive copula, everything lived there in the splendor attracted by the moisture in the granules of air, in those immaterial pools that multiplied the system.

  Every single one of our footsteps had consequences; they reminded us that we were there, a mother and her son passing through the forest. An amniotic space amid urban electricity, paths of luminous darkness, and Victorian silence.

  There was a whole world there for me, a place full of mystery and beauty. But the only thing I could do was contemplate it, enter into an enforced trance, visit the carp in their tanks and dream that I stroked their flanks while they gifted back to me their nobility and fidelity, just like the animals in Blancos caballos de agosto.

  The natural world was an unsettling experience. We went down those cool and opaque tunnels, and then suddenly we emerged into round clearings where the sun shone on beautiful rocks. The neatness of the light and shadow was astonishing. They were perfectly delineated kingdoms, although their lineage was mixed along some branches. The green leaves that irradiated blue seemed like secret sentinels. In any case, this was clear: every single thing and every single one of the states of that place was a voice that proffered silence. We walked through the tunnels, and suddenly we caught sight of terraces of light at the end, and we went out into them.

  My mother’s eyes filled with tears at the sight of every sculpture: The First Chills, an old bearded man sitting down and embracing a girl; Sagunto, a mother who sacrifices her son and then takes her own life to escape Hannibal’s advancing army; the series of sculptures dedicated to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony; Flora Argentina. Almost all of them were reproductions of European originals.

  We stopped in front of each work, and she would read out the information about the sculptors (I only remember hearing men’s names), the characteristics of the piece, and their stories from the plaques. In her voice, these stories became a sort of exaggeratedly somber master class, although I was fascinated to know the names of those who had been able to shape the earth’s rocks. It fascinated me just as much as standing before Saturnalia or Columna Meteorológica, a gift from the Austro-Hungarian community for the centenary of the Republic, in gratitude for having welcomed the wave of citizens from its crumbling empire.

  I became aroused among so many Venuses. I walked up, in the same measured footsteps used by lovers who enter a chapel to marry, walked around them slowly, as if my eyes could caress them in a completely new way. I circled around them and discovered that they were alive. I scrutinized them like a serious child so that they would reveal to me the secrets they clearly possessed. Or I made as if to set upon them, to catch them trembling or gasping so they would have to give themselves over to me, for the mistake of revealing themselves. I spoke to them in the language of the devoted, a mental language that few children know and that I believed turned me into a steady enchanter of silent ways. I had an unbridled desire for them to catch sight of me from their stone and rest their gaze upon me.

  I wanted them to choose me over their own eternal beauty. I wanted them to look at me and return to life.

  My mother used to leave me on my own for a while, sitting on the wooden slats of one of the wrought iron benches, near the little waterfall of the artificial stream that appeared and disappeared from view according to the bends of the path. Back then it was normal for children to be left alone a while in a public place. Kidnappings were highly u
nlikely—they were almost unimaginable, unknown. At a certain moment, my mother would begin to grow anxious and lose patience with me. She changed her battery of gestures, and although this was imperceptible from her appearance, I knew that this would signify the moment of solitude. One of the passwords that unlocked the moment was unmistakable: she would mumble a string of half-pronounced words that ended with the clear diction of “Always hiding behind his mother’s skirts.” She didn’t say it to me, at least not directly, although it was obvious that my only occupation was (is?) being with her. Who could be talking to my mother, who could accuse her of being a coward? She never looked at me when she said it, and she wasn’t addressing her words to me. But there I was. There I was, hiding behind her skirts.

  One time we came across a lady with her children, a girl and a boy; the boy was calm, sitting on one of those wrought iron benches, although he seemed absorbed in an activity that excluded others, you could almost hear the humming of a tiny engine between his eyes on his slightly malevolent face. I remember that I found the scene attractive; it was the image of a sort of evil genius in the midst of scheming. How extraordinary to catch someone in that moment before! At the stage in which everything is still perfect in its potential.

  To one side, on a terrace made of gravel from crushed bricks, the girl played alone. She spoke the different voices of each of her characters as they responded to one another and displayed a stupidly harmonious community in the lightness of her little body. She was a girl determined to show everyone that she was convinced of her girlhood, covered in terracotta dust.

  My mother approached the woman and struck up a casual conversation, the woman told her about her children, about how nice it was to enjoy these days of sunshine in the botanical gardens. In an instant it was clear that with just a few sentences—and with the skill of an assassin of vegetables—she had arranged for me to stay there with them, under the protective gaze of the woman who sat knitting beneath a willow, while my mother slipped away for a few minutes. My mother’s maneuvering was a strategy to avoid even the most minimal gesture of reprobation from the other lady. With regard to me, she knew I was aware that naturally, a woman, sooner or later, has to slip away.

  She looked at me and said, “Why don’t you play with that little boy?” She looked at him and said, “What’s your name, sweetie?”

  “Santi,” replied the boy, who seemed to be an expert in conceding answers to questions that if they were posed in open conflict, he would clearly lose in advance. “Santi,” he said, as if explaining to my mother that he was answering her only to save himself from the slap across the face he would surely receive from his mother if he dared to give a more honest answer of “What’s it to you?”

  After retrieving this password for me, my mother left quickly, following the snaking path of the water far beyond the waterfall.

  A slave to her secret service tactics, I sat down next to Santi, but I made no attempt at contact. He was a child, but he looked like an old man, dressed in a handmade woolen sweater, from a pattern that would fit a middle-aged man, an old lady in a retirement home, or a little girl more or less living on the streets. He was sitting with an exaggerated tranquility, as if he were focusing on breathing.

  I don’t know how long we sat there like that, swinging our feet in our round-toed, lace-up shoes, mine brown, his black, without speaking a word to each other.

  “Santi,” he said directly to me in an almost conspiratorial tone and as if he were inviting me to join in a conversation with colleagues during the five minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette, far from the bosses. God knows all I wanted to do was tell him my name straightaway and break into a lively and animated conversation about our interests. I was prepared to think nothing of what he would say to me, to not jump to conclusions or draw mental sketches of his opinions, which—after all, he was only a boy—would surely seem banal to me.

  The devil knows all I wanted to do was tell him my name. But I expected so much from myself that the letters piled up on my tongue and my mouth opened by itself. “Santi,” I said.

  I lowered my gaze and returned to the soles of our shoes swinging in the air beneath the slats of the wooden bench.

  Santi didn’t appear to notice my disappointment, and I suppose he assumed that we shared the same name and this excited him. At one point he moved forward in complete slowness and said, “Watch this.”

  My eyes followed him obediently, and he smiled to the side, a tiny smirk leaving me in no doubt that he would make me his accomplice. Santi ducked down and picked up one of the little rocks of crushed brick, making sure none of his movements were noticed by his mother, who was knitting together a tangle of horrible colors and moving her thin lips along with every thrust of her needles.

  Santi marked his forehead with the little orange rock and let out a muffled but audible “ay,” a wounded cry that masked something serious. Then he dropped the rock and raised his hands to his forehead while contorting his face in mute pain. The sequence of events was so rapid, it left me astounded. I couldn’t understand what happened to him or why he asked me to watch. In response to his noise, his mother lifted her gaze and showed her sharp features.

  “Can’t you breathe? Is that it, what’s wrong, son?” she said in a voice that couldn’t be anything other than a mother’s voice, or a principal’s voice, or a nurse’s voice at a sanitary checkpoint on the border, or the voice of someone deaf from birth. The combination of wool that the lady was knitting together was nothing short of insulting, and I wondered which of these children’s bodies would have to wear such an ensemble. But the palette of wool wasn’t the only horrible thing, the entire lady herself was a problem of proportional perception. How could my mother have chosen her if it weren’t one of her tricks that made her look like a normal person engaged in normal activities? I thought, without being able to articulate it completely.

  “What happened my son? What is it? Tell Mama,” said the lady, as if in that moment the world needed any more vulgarity.

  Parsimoniously and with his head barely tilted, Santi slowly uncovered his forehead with the orange mark ringed with red from the pressure of his fingers. Without changing the position of his head even by a millimeter and rolling his eyes back as far as they could go he began to speak. “It was Yani,” he said. “From over there she saw me sitting here with my little friend, Santi, and she picked up a stone and threw it at me, Mama.”

  Then he placed one of his hands back on his forehead, straightened his back a little, twisted himself around slightly, and looked at his sister, who continued playing her own little game without noticing anything.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and the excitement of it all seriously threatened the health of my heart. Where had this malevolent little man come from, so unscrupulous and sure of his efficacy?

  The lady stood up, stuck the needles into her ball of yarn, put it into her string bag, and left it all on the bench. As parsimonious as her son, she began to walk directly toward the little girl, who, once she noticed the huge body of her mother arriving, raised a smiling face and then squinted her eyes because the sun struck her full in the face.

  It was the perfect movement for her mother’s slap to be laid upon her face like an outlandish ruby, for it to sound out clearly and to make the girl roll across the little piles of crushed brick that she had arranged for her game. “You’re the skin of Judas! Bad girl!” her mother screamed. “Are you trying to tell me that it annoys you to see your brother sitting over there with his little friend Santi?”

  Before the scene of the little girl knocked over in the orange dust, the woman had a slight hesitation, a millisecond of doubt, I suppose that the sonorous slap took her by surprise also, but then, recomposed, she added, “And get up from there and dust off your dress—it’s in tatters from all that rolling around on the ground!” After the spite of her final word she turned around, walked back to her seat, and took out her knitting from that awful bag.

  Santi sighed
and seemed relieved, looser, more childlike. He grinned at me and told me that woolen pants made him itch, that the itching made him nervous, and that he thought that the scientists should invent a smooth and light fabric that didn’t cause eczema. Silk, I thought a bit haughtily, but I was unable to speak because I was still taken by surprise.

  “Do you want me to show you?” he asked with a jolt, and before I could answer he began to pull down his pants and his underwear on one side until a raised, purplish streak appeared on the whitest part of his flesh near his groin. With an enthusiastic look on his face, he said, “I also have it on my neck and behind my knees and on my elbows, and sometimes I get it on my face.”

  Now Santi was breathing more comfortably. His mother’s voice made us look up: “Never forget that other kids have that inside of them, my son. They have it in their hearts,” she said, and she smiled at him with a face that made me sad.

  His sister had picked herself up in complete silence and had begun to brush off the red dust with complete gentleness. The rays of sunshine that separated her from us were filled with tiny microscopic pebbles, and they seemed like shining prison bars that left her stranded on the other side from us. “Get out of here, dummy!” yelled the mother. “Go and brush yourself off behind the greenhouse, will you? You’re going to irritate your brother’s chest.”