A Beautiful Young Woman

by Julián López

  Then she looked at me and said, “Santi’s asthmatic, you see? He’s not allowed to do anything.”

  —

  All of a sudden everything seemed to grow silent, and I’m not sure why, but we both looked up at the footpath that led off in front of us. As if the air itself had rippled to announce the arrival of an apparition, we began to see, at the end of the path, a beautiful young woman. My mother had come back to rescue me from a scene that didn’t quite enchant or horrify me, but perhaps did both of those things and more: it captivated me completely, like those shining fish that stop moving in terror at the sight of the fierce cuttlefish that hunts them.

  My mother wasn’t asthmatic, but she too seemed relieved upon her return, although when she arrived I realized that I didn’t know the exact word to define her way of returning. It wasn’t quite relief exactly; it was a changing mix of things, a renewed charge, a better architecture for the weight she carried.

  Every time she came back, it seemed to me like she had something different, but I could never identify what it was, if her clothing was slightly askew, or her hair looser, or if all that had changed was that her face had relaxed a little. Perhaps my mother was more of a woman when she came back.

  She walked in a way that was delicate, voluptuous, and elegant; she had smooth black hair, and it always looked recently trimmed in a style I had never seen before.

  Seeing her arrive was like a party that, for some reason, I always avoided celebrating. A party that made me a little sad. My mother was a dark-haired woman, with pale, opaque skin—I’d almost say it was bluish—and she wore tweed skirts lined with silk.

  My mother was a beautiful young woman.

  She loved to say that her skirts were made of tweed, like the skirts worn by female characters in detective novels. Although her skirts were never made of tweed or lined with silk, my mother was an elegant woman. A very beautiful young woman.

  I didn’t know why, but every time I saw my mother coming back from one of her escapades that made her look like that, even though they might have been brief departures, it made me not want to be her son. All I wanted was to escape from there, to be big and grown, to greet her with admiration and say to her in a firm voice, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

  —

  Santi and I were seated together on the same bench, our dark swaying diminished the impulse of our last swing, the image of my mother on the path seemed to make the leaves fall slower and more gracefully from the trees, spirals that came down through the air as if to land at the bottom of a pool.

  That Santi also kept his feet still was a confirmation I needed: it was clear, a beautiful young woman was approaching from that direction. I saw his enraptured face, and then that boy sitting next to me on the bench looked back at me with an expression that ended up making me sad. I suppose it must have been a congenital condition, something suffered by everyone in his family. On their faces, a smile looked like a grimace, a little buoy lost in a sea of sadness.

  Santi looked back at the path, and that woman, just a few steps away from us, was once again my mother. Things went back to their normal state, and the autumn settled the mutability in the air, the speed and the trajectory of the racing leaves of the oaks, the poplars, and the acacia trees.

  “How did he behave himself?” my mother asked as she watched Santi’s mother stick her knitting needles into her ball of yarn, understanding nothing. I looked at him again: Santi was swinging his feet, his hands clenched into fists resting on the bench and his shoulders hunched all the way up to his neck, then he was calm again, like the deep end of a pool, where a boy would drown if he fell in.

  The girl came back from the greenhouse with only a very few traces of orange dust on her dress but with her ponytail a little messy, and she stood next to her own mother, watching my mother, who dominated the scene with movements that seemed like ballet in this context. The girl was a little less of a girl now, and the simple imaginary community that had once kept her company had been disbanded and had left her alone; it made her feel like shouting at those bodies in exile that moved off into the distance, walking backward: “Hey! Come back! You forgot me, the girl!”

  —

  It seemed to me that we were all sad because it was easier than being angry. But where did I get these ideas from, and at what moment did the fierce aquamarine of that scene turn into the dying light of a cloudy afternoon over a river that lies about its meekness, to become the night?

  Santi’s mama had put away her knitting and stood up next to my mother in a ceremony that showcased their bodies like unequivocal postcards for maternity. To one side, the girl, sitting on the bench, rooted around in her mother’s purse and took out a bottle of perfume that she shook before opening. She daubed her index finger with it, then painted herself with fragrance behind the ears. Attracted by the movement and in full possession of a new character, my mother said, “What looooovely perfuuuume, my deeeear.”

  The girl regained a little of her childhood and answered her like a girl once again. “It’s swee honestí, madame,” she said, making her best attempt at the English label, before her mother corrected her: Sweet Honesty, from Avon, a label that seemed like an extraordinary and unjust settling of scores. For the first time that afternoon, I gave my respects to the lady. For the first time that afternoon, Santi’s mother displayed her weapons to a battle that I have no idea why my mother initiated.

  My mother said, “Well, off we go,” and I got up from the bench thinking, Off we go, just the two of us, off we go.

  I stood up very slowly in honor of Santi, who was watching his shoes swinging and looking at them as if they were boats that dragged his feet to and fro uncontrollably. He was serious, and you could almost hear the humming of a little motor of concentration deep inside that made him frown.

  I began to walk while I took in the scene of the mothers: disdain from mine and a pantomime of distraction from Santi’s. To one side, his sister began to enter again into her imaginary community, and now it was my new and fleeting and surprising friend who was left alone.

  When I stood next to my mother, the smell was truly overwhelming. If honesty was such a sweet treat that it invited me to retch, then perhaps I could understand the things that I did not understand: my mother’s tones of voice and her airs of a chaste diva.

  When I stood next to my mother, I put my right hand in the left-hand pocket of her coat, and the coolness of the silk returned something to me that I didn’t even know I had almost lost: the feeling of softness and lukewarm coolness.

  My mother thanked Santi’s mother and began to walk, pulling me along from inside her pocket. “Wait a minute,” said Santi’s mother, and she picked up her bag and pulled out the bottle of perfume, shook it, opened it, and sprayed a little into the hollow of her left hand, then asked the little girl to close it, before rubbing her hands together and approaching me with a smile. Staring at me straight in the eyes she stroked my face and hair with hands damp with Sweet Honesty, then looked at my mother and said, “There you go, all primped and perfumed.” It was a brutal caress.

  “Say goodbye to your little friend Santi, Santi,” she said, closing the scene, and my mother took my hand out of her pocket and walked off with me behind her, confused and aromatic, in a scene in which no one was a minor character.

  I turned around and waved at Santi, who didn’t see me, his neck hunched into his shoulders, as silent as a ship on a foggy night. Next to him a rosebush would have looked more lively.

  My mother advanced through jasmine bushes from Paraguay, laurels, the dark bark of hardwood trees from Tucumán, and she immersed herself into the blue of one of the paths that would lead us to the exit.

  Once we arrived at the sidewalk, the air seemed different and the light began to wane, the cats from the botanical gardens began to parade out from their dens. Following an afternoon of siestas, this bright but narcotic animality seemed like blotches from the night that was drawing near. Between the bars that marked the b
oundaries of the gardens, the cats began hatching the plots of their nocturnal escapades. They could see in the dark, but I wanted to get home before the dark.

  For some reason my mother took me by the hand with a different firmness, and we walked in silence to the bus stop. My mother said nothing.

  The whole street was silent: cars rumbled and their drivers shouted, but everything was silent.

  —

  “What are they throwing up against the wall?”

  “What?” replied my mother.

  “That,” I said, pointing to some workers up high on a scaffold in a construction site.

  “That’s the cement they put over the bricks, so the walls are smooth. But you should ask Uncle Rodolfo about these things. He knows better.”

  “Yes, but he hasn’t come around for a while.”

  “You know he’s very busy, but one of these days he’ll slip away for a quick visit. We should call him.”

  “Mama, are the workers poor? Are Santi and his mama and his sister poor?”

  —

  The afternoon light faded away gradually, my mother hurried along, and I kept walking without taking my eyes off the scaffold with those men so high up.

  I was caught in her wake on the sidewalk. My legs couldn’t keep up with my mother’s large stride, and every now and again I tripped over myself and fell. The good thing was that I never managed to hurt myself; my mother pulled on me forcefully, and for a few seconds my legs kicked in the air as I tried to figure out the best way to return them to solid ground and begin walking again in a more efficient manner. If my slowness hadn’t bothered my mother so much—the fury gritted between her teeth almost escaping her silent lips—I suppose I would have enjoyed that tumble through the air, and I would have imagined that after my pirouette, it was the turn of the elephants and the young trapeze artist. A diminutive and pretty young girl, in a sequined bodysuit, always on the edge of the abyss. She was set free during her aerial tricks, held up by the angst of those holding the net below, biting the clasp that made her spin like a whirlwind in the void and left her balanced on a knife edge of danger and imminence. Then, from an unlighted dome came a young man with strong thighs, raised buttocks, hands strong on the swing, and then again the heavenly breast of the young maiden of the air. All illuminated. She lay back and abandoned her responsibility to the flying man who sketched his won challenge in the air and obeyed, dutifully, the circus, and everything that was expected of him.

  A bumpy gray screen swings across my eyes, covering my field of vision, and then suddenly the scene opens again, and they appear behind it, the trapeze artists, on the sand, hand in hand, smiling to the public. Another bumpy and gray screen coils from the beginning of the tail to the trunk of the next elephant that follows it, and then, once again, it’s them, raising their free hands to signal the end of their performance, the grace with which they cloak themselves on the ground the same as in the air. Another gray tail links to another trunk, and that black and glassy eye, so slow in its gait with scant eyelashes, like a dark hollow, vaster than the highest rigging of the tent, with no little woman, no man, and no safety net.

  There is only that vast eye that I lean toward, a predictable future of questions I will never be able to formulate to anyone. In that swinging I am stranded, my own childhood image reflected on the edge of a trapeze no one can see and that moves by the grace of a wind that never ceases and hovers by an unexpected mountain that approaches steadily.

  —

  “Can I change my name to Santi?” The words escape my mouth, climbing on the bus via the running board, while the driver gives the tickets to my mother and winks at her. She leans in and whispers, “Seems like he wants his own nom de guerre too.”

  And then a moment of confusion because of the people who don’t have a ticket yet and want to board the bus that is already overfull, and the pale face of the driver after her comment, and my mother once again annoyed, grabbing me by the hand and pushing me in among the people standing, and my face squashed against coats, against purses, and excuse me, excuse me, and a man who stands up and gives us his seat, a real gentleman, and my name on tenterhooks because I haven’t received a response, and the conceded seat, and my mother’s skirt, and the whole window just for me.

  “When we get home you’re taking a bath. That way we’ll get rid of that horrible smell, what a revolting perfume! Plenty of soap on your face, please. Use some of Mama’s shampoo in your hair, and put in some savia ointment too, because it has a strong smell, and leave it in for a while, or better still, don’t wet your hair while I’m on the phone at Elvira’s place.”

  When we arrived home my mother filled the bathtub halfway and left me a towel on the toilet lid, then she came into my room and said, “It’s ready, get in the bath, I’m going over to Elvira’s.” I had taken off all my clothes except for my socks and underwear, and I was circling my bedroom looking for some kind of ruse to avoid the soaking. I only managed that once and it took me so much effort that, in the end, I might as well have taken the bath. My mother’s tone of voice removed all hope of avoiding it, and when she left my room, I went straight to the bathroom, took off my socks and underwear, and got in the bath. I stood there motionless because the water was scalding hot and my feet, ankles, and shins had turned red. My mother went out of the apartment and then came back in, entering the bathroom to give me a kiss. What a stink!

  “Wash yourself, dry yourself properly, and then wrap yourself up in the bathrobe. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  When I was alone again, I turned on the cold water faucet, which was the only thing that interested me about a bath: the gushing sound of cascades of water against water, a deep sound that I loved to listen to from beneath the surface as well. I waited a moment for the water to cool, and then I sat down and began to slip underneath the water with my eyes closed and my nose pinched. Once I was fully under I opened my eyes and I stayed down there as long as I could hold on, among those waves that sounded like submarines.

  I couldn’t stay long in one reverie, because as soon as one thing appeared, my imagination exploded and opened up like a Russian doll that made each scene smaller, more specific. The submarine didn’t take long to become a shipwreck in the depths of a dark ocean, and the bathtub opened up like a sluice gate to the sea and attracted the most bloodthirsty sharks.

  Almost leaping, I stood up again and lathered my body, I put shampoo in my hair, and I began to rinse off with the water that would stay in my cupped hands. My strategy to avoid submerging myself again was a total failure so I took a deep breath and sat down, slipping away again and sinking my head underneath to make all the foam on my hair disappear.

  —

  Elvira was our neighbor, a kind and old-fashioned lady who was one of the few people with a telephone in her apartment, and she let us use it. My mother said she had once been a tango singer, and it wasn’t unusual to hear her singing sometimes, in a voice that, to me, sounded like it came straight out of the old movies, waltzes and milongas that seemed to be from another time and another country, just like her name, her hair, her smell, and the decorations in her apartment. My mother said that Elvira’s house was a palace of crochet and plumetí, a type of Swiss cotton tulle with velvet buttons that covered the lampshades in her living room and bedroom. Everything was always very neat, and it was difficult to imagine that anyone could sit comfortably in those chairs that creaked and shone from the clear plastic covering, and the woolen socks on the chair legs to stop them marking the waxed parquet floor, and the handle of the kettle and the ice box wrapped up in little coats that she had knitted herself.

  Elvira adored me, and every time she saw me, she asked me to flutter my eyelids. She said I had the prettiest eyelashes in the whole neighborhood, and she was enchanted to see them batting just for her, just because she asked.

  She kissed my cheeks and told me she was crazy about me, that I was the love of her life. I let her do it even though her kisses were gross. I let her do it bec
ause she was good to us, because she was alone and lived with a little old dog called Ñata, a photo of her father, and an image of St. Anthony and the Virgin of Luján that Elvira said changed color with the weather, although I never saw it. I let her do it because when I stayed in her house, when my mother went away, Elvira would serve me a tiny cup of peppermint liqueur. It was our little secret—she would have several while I moistened my own lips several times from my cup, and the two of us picked at radishes preserved in oil and salt that she served from a little jar.

  Some afternoons she would ring our doorbell and come over bearing a tray with a cake made of apples and raisins and walnuts covered with an immaculate napkin. She would leave it with my mother and say, “All I need back is the tray and the napkin.” Then my mother would invite her to stay; it was just what Elvira was hoping for, and my mother would say to her, “Why don’t you come in and give the man of the house a kiss?”

  I liked Elvira—she was the only one in the building we interacted with. My mother avoided contact with the others and became very short if someone came up to her. One afternoon when she was taking me to the doctor, we came across a boy from the floor below who was playing in the street with his friends from the block. My mother and I would dress elegantly to go out, me in my little blue outfit with the brown coat and golden buttons, her in one of her characteristic tweed skirts with silk lining.

  For these outings she would comb my hair with Brylcreem and dress me in socks that never fell down. When the neighbor saw us pass, he stopped playing and followed me with his gaze and asked, “Where are you going?”

  “We’re going to the movies,” my mother butted in.

  “Will you take me too, miss?”

  “Sorry, dear, we’re in a bit of a rush. Next time.”

  All this without us breaking stride. All while we were on our way.

  Once we had turned the corner my mother said, “It’s very vulgar to ask people where they’re going—it’s bad manners. I don’t like it.”