A Beautiful Young Woman

by Julián López

  —

  When I got out of the bath, I sat on the edge and began to dry myself with the towel, and I sniffed myself like a bloodhound to seek any trace of that Sweet Honesty that my mother and I both hated. There were now so many odors in the steam from the bath that I couldn’t tell. I think I liked all of them.

  I wanted to stay dripping, cover myself with the bathrobe, and lounge on the sofa watching TV, but my mother complained that I left her bed all wet. When I finished drying myself, I stood in front of the mirror to comb my hair to the side. I opened the cabinet to take out the black comb, and I saw the shaving brush that had been kept there forever. When I asked my mother who it belonged to, she usually said it was my grandfather’s, but other times she mumbled a little—once she said it belonged to my uncle. I almost never had the courage to touch it, but that night I did. I took it out very carefully and put the bristles close to my nose to smell them, to breathe them in, to inhale any particle of a grown man that might linger there, in the history of shaving before me, from the unknown hand of the man who took the brush and covered his face with foam.

  That was all that remained of this, in my house, and there had to be some reason why it remained there. Perhaps my mother too would breathe it in, or maybe she dared to brush her face with its softness that prickled like a beard.

  —

  Combed and wearing the bathrobe, I went to the sofa and turned on the television. Lili gathered her suitcase, walked along a painted path in the background, and then walked up the steps that led to the most dangerous trapeze and promised her a way out of her destiny as an orphan. The screen was gray but suddenly it seemed filled with color as Reynardo, Zsa Zsa the ballerina, and Carrot Top beckoned her over to settle their dispute about the puppets. I suppose that Mel Ferrer, hidden in the darkness of his little theater, felt like one of those men who was too old, too ugly, too sick, because he had a limp from World War II, and throughout the whole film he had a look on his face that made me sad.

  I wanted to tell him that my mother had a book that was dedicated to him; I strained myself wondering how I could let him know so that he could stop waiting for whatever it was he was waiting for. I worked to convince myself, and every now and again I repeated this equation as if it were a lesson in logic, that whatever seemed sad at the beginning necessarily had to turn out happy in the end.

  —

  Zsa Zsa’s beautiful puppet legs passed in front of Lili’s fascinated eyes, and then the chords of that song started up that says that a song of love is a sad song and don’t ask me how I know and I sit at the window and watch the rain and hi Lili hi Lili hi lo.

  —

  Toward the end, the camera enters the little theater and almost crashes into the man who brings the puppets to life. I got up quickly and ran once again to the mirror in the bathroom to look at my face. I wanted to see if I looked like Mel Ferrer, if I had that same look. What I saw was a twinge of preoccupation on a serious face. I looked at myself for a while; it was impossible to know what face I had if I interrogated an expression too long. I had to be super quick, as quick as Speed Racer. I practiced a few more times, but there was no way to shake off the expression of someone who is trying to capture an expression.

  I went back to the sofa, and Lili already had another gaze upon her—now it was Mel Ferrer who wanted to capture her expression.

  I’m not sure at what point I fell asleep, but my mother woke me up telling me that she had to rush out, that Elvira would come to stay with me, that she would make me bow tie pasta with butter, and that we could watch TV. So many concessions! Bow tie pasta with butter was my favorite food, far better than milanesa with mashed potatoes, and being able to watch TV at night pleased me to no end.

  My mother went to the bathroom, tied her hair back in a ponytail, and washed her face with cold water. I watched her from the doorway, and then Elvira arrived shrieking about the love of her life. “Here I am,” I said, while in the background the final music from Lili could be heard, and my mother came out of the bathroom without saying a word. She put on her coat, and, with a worried expression on her face, told me not to wait for her.

  How could I not wait for you, I wanted to ask her, but Elvira had enveloped me in her web of kisses, and my mother took the opportunity to leave, almost running out the door. She added, “Don’t wait up for me. Don’t wait up.”

  —

  From inside her robe Elvira revealed the neck of the bottle of peppermint liqueur, and while she gave me a wink, she opened one of her pockets, a nest from which two little resting doves were about to take flight: the little cups with handles in which she poured her own little version of absinthe. The tone of the evening had changed radically, and it seemed wonderful to be able to drink until I was good and drunk with a real dame by my side, even if this dame wore a quilted pink dressing gown, the collar and sleeves festooned with Swiss cotton tulle, a material that produced sparks if you rubbed it together, and wore slippers with terry cloth socks, her face greasy with ointments, her eyebrows gone and mustache appearing, and her head a tangle of rollers covered by a bonnet meant to look like silk.

  “Where did Mama go?” I asked her.

  “Ay, be quiet! Pobre diabla is starting!” she said, and twisted the knob on the television. A single point of light concentrated in the center, and suddenly a big bang made the entire universe appear on the screen. Solita pulled down on her tiny skirt and ran, all skinny and beautiful, across the sleepers of a railway track with a desperation that fixed my eyes to that image and made me breathe like a diver who reappears on the surface after holding out in the depths. The camera tracked this sexy little woman, who ran like a deer that had been startled by a furtive gunshot or a heavy presence or a twig that snapped underfoot.

  The camera stayed with her, then suddenly zoomed out and showed a vast expanse of railway tracks, an area filled with silver rails and wooden sleepers where trains transported masses of people. It was the logic of worlds merging under the sign of work, a horrifying copulation of the city with the suburbs.

  “How wonderful, how wonderful!” exclaimed Elvira, completely disentangled from me and given over to her native Guarani passion: she was like a songbird, trilling her bewitching harps from on high as soon as Arnaldo appeared on screen, with his sweet expression and his lips overripe as if he had just eaten every orange on the mountain.

  “Why is it called Pobre diabla? Did you ever get married? Why is the show called Pobre diabla?”

  Elvira was a statue frozen by the cathodically charged gorgon in the living room, and my charms as the love of her life had no power whatsoever. The show was, of course, much more interesting than me. Just like when my mother read One Hundred Years of Solitude, reclining on the sofa and completely engrossed in a way that drew me in but left me completely on the outside.

  Elvira came back to life with the first commercials, poured herself a cup of peppermint liqueur, drank it down in one gulp, and filled the cup again. Only then did she notice me, filling my cup halfway and winking.

  “I don’t know why they called it Pobre diabla,” she said without looking at me. “And I have my Ñata, my records, my show, my aunts in Tolosa…” She went silent, then buttoned up the highest part of her dressing gown, which had come undone with all the movements from pouring the liqueur.

  “You promise me—” she said directly to me, but just then the show came back on, and Elvira once again became a statue who only moved to refill her cup every time it was empty. Of what happened on screen, I remember nothing more than the forest of rails and that frail little deer running away in a miniskirt. What I can remember is Elvira’s voice at the end and her eyes filled with tears, I suppose because of the prospect of a whole week without Arnaldo, that loneliness that tasted like mint that she would have to drink in little sips.

  “You promise me,” she began again, and it seemed she needed to steady herself with another cup of peppermint liqueur, which by now must have been staining her blood green. “Promise m
e that you’ll never…When you were very small your mother came with me to Paraná, in Entre Ríos, you know? We arrived there one afternoon to take back what was mine. Your mother stayed in the hotel while I went to the promenade along the river to see if I could catch him looking in her eyes the same way he looked in mine. I told your mother I knew where to find them…But that was a lie. All I knew was that she lived there and that he even went so far as renting a boat to take her out and kiss her on the mouth beneath the willow trees. Your mother waited for me in the hotel’s tearoom, drawing mburucuyá flowers in a huge sketchbook. Your mother was excellent at drawing, did you know that?

  I was determined to return to Buenos Aires with what was mine. But I had nothing, not even an address, not even a clue, nothing. Along the promenade nearly everyone was in a couple, and nearly all of them were eating fritters. Each stand had a line of people waiting, and I went up and down each one of them, certain I would find them. Someone had told me her name was Judith, and each time I saw a dark-haired woman buying more than one fritter, I approached in a friendly manner and asked, ‘Are you Judith?’”

  Elvira went silent, and it had been a while since she looked at me. She got up and switched off the television—all the expended light concentrated into a point at the exact center and then disappeared just as quickly as it had appeared. Elvira sat back down next to me and put her left arm around me, placing me on her lap of her sparking dressing gown. I stayed very still, partly out of fear of catching on fire and partly because I was uncomfortable; my body was twisted the wrong way, and when Elvira became serious like this she scared me.

  “Someone told me that couples in the area would go to Bajada Grande because there, at dusk, the sun lured the surubí fish up from the depths, and couples would kiss furtively in the light reflected up off their flanks in the river. I began to run, and after two blocks I realized I had no idea what direction I was running in or where I had left my wristwatch. I had no idea how long I had been there, and we had to catch a bus to go home. One afternoon was all the time I had to find them and to show him that I was capable of hanging on to him.”

  Elvira breathed in deeply and stayed quiet for a few seconds, and I made the most of the opportunity to get comfortable, sitting stiffly by her side without looking at her.

  Then she bent down and whispered in my ear. “Never run off with a Sephardic Jewess,” she said. “They bear the thirst of the desert in their bellies. They are such fiery women, they’re like odalisques whose gaze men can’t resist. The moment they hear the jingle of the coins on their skirts, the men turn and go to find them. And if they lie down together, you’ve lost—you can’t compete with that. They’re women who don’t worry about falling pregnant, they have the thirst of the desert in their bellies. That’s what a Jewess is, and because they come from no country, they live in tents in the middle of the desert, and they’ll go anywhere to bewitch the men and take them away to build a nation and dominate the world. Look at what’s happening here. Everything they gather up they take away with them, they’re evil. Promise me…”

  Elvira got rid of me and went to the bathroom. I got up to turn on the television, but after the point of light, there was only static. In a hurry I filled my cup up with peppermint liqueur and tried to drink it down in one gulp. It stung my tongue and tasted bitter and sweet at the same time, something for strange palates; until then all I had done was moisten my lips, and the act of drinking that little bit of color was what I loved. Sometimes it seemed that grown-ups consumed horrible things just to be able to get on with the world. I could understand coffee and yerba mate—I loved drinking yerba mate with milk and lots of sugar—but how could anyone truly enjoy whiskey or Cynar or Pineral or lit cigarettes? I thought that smoking was a sensual pleasure; I smoked menthol cigarettes that I stole from my uncle, and I smoked them without lighting up, they were delicious. It was a very complex activity that required a level of attention where you had to pretend to be distracted but actually give it your entire presence. I loved to smoke, and what’s more, it gave me a reason to be alone, to shut myself in the bathroom and practice in front of the mirror.

  The next thing I saw when I barely opened my eyes was my mother’s neck as she carried me to the bedroom, to my bed. As soon as she saw I could rouse myself and begin asking questions, she said, “It’s very late. Go to sleep because you have school tomorrow, and it’s the big concert.” I relaxed into her capable arms. I had become an expert in enjoying the fleeting things, the moments of true contact. The texture of my mother’s jacket was different from that of her sweater, though I could feel both of them. The jacket smelled like blue, and one of its golden buttons, big and concave, pressed into my cheek. I loved that metal button, warming up as I rested my face against it.

  The pressure from my palms was different from that of the fingers I was using to hold on, and it changed with each step, as I slipped a little. I loved just letting myself go on this short journey, hugging tightly to her and drifting to sleep. It was light at night, and I swung in my mother’s arms with a movement from a time I couldn’t quite remember, as if the best way I knew to rest was a kind of hammock in which I could lose control of myself and let myself fall without fear. There were different odors too: the warmest one was hers, an aroma I already knew, sweet and greasy, but her clothes smelled colder, waxier, like in an airport.

  She took off my clothes and put on my pajamas, then tucked me in. “Stay a little while,” I dared to ask. And so, in silence, she lay down next to me, still clothed and on top of the bed. She must have been tired because she fell asleep immediately, in the middle of my most absolute happiness, in the middle of my silent celebration: My mama is spoiling me.

  —

  I began to deploy innumerable strategies to avoid falling asleep; I wanted to be awake so I wouldn’t miss a moment of it. I could barely move without waking this sleeping beauty, but the higher priority of my sleeping mother—although she was so close that she was as unsettling as a Picasso—was something I felt grateful for. Seeing my mother sleep was a complete happiness, but I had to remain calm, attentive, awake.

  Everything I did to stay awake had an opposite effect, I had to change tactics quicker and quicker, and at some point my fatigue was so great that the only thing that occurred to me was to count sheep. Then I decided to think about wild beasts, about giant tigers crouching in the grass. I brought in wolves howling in the distance that could smell fear and were convinced of the success of their hunt. I saw the sheep giving in to this fear, paralyzed in the face of the vastness of the plains, certain they could not negotiate the wire fences due to their weakness. I saw one of the brave sheep become entangled in the fence, the barbed wire stuck in its wool, trapped in a position of escape, but calm, with the other sheep bleating around her. I saw the bewildered sheep run and launch themselves in a foolish attempt at escape. I saw them gather about the lambs, trying to hide them behind their spindly legs. The hyenas arrived, resigned to the hatred and disdain on which they were nurtured, moving around with clear laziness in the middle distance, prowling about tentatively, obeying the order of their scent, but prey also to the furrow of their obligation. I saw the mouths of the sheep bleating without air, muted noises as they went nobly toward the jaws, calm with their eyes open and their ears full of dull sounds, flesh against flesh, breath against breath. I saw how, their pupils dilated, they gazed without seeing the portrait of the entire night, bleating silently until they were just a stain of innards on a shared tableau.

  —

  I was woken by the foghorns of ships in the oceans of the night. It was something that fascinated me, that filled me with terror but also with a happy curiosity. It wasn’t common for me to hear them because I wasn’t usually awake at that hour. The first time I heard them, there were two of them, one shorter and one longer, and I realized I had heard them before but never noticed. But my ears clearly recognized them. I hesitated over whether this was real or a dream, so I looked around my room and took stock o
f all the things I came across. The die-cast Donald Duck hanging on the wall, a picture of the town hall from Billiken drawn on the inside of the belly of a giant bear that my mother had tacked to the wall in a fit of laughter, the huge closet opposite the bed, with the doors closed tight so that all the terror would stay inside, the curtains over the window into the laundry room, the desk with its huge lamp. Just as soon as I had taken inventory of all this, I became aware of the flat reality of it all, and I stopped to marvel at everything the dead of night had brought me.

  After the first time I discovered this, if I remembered, I tried to go out and seek that nocturnal presence, but I could never outlast my fatigue, no matter how I tried. Fatigue and willpower didn’t seem to be made of the same stuff. The more I tried to steel my will, the harder I set myself, the sooner I was at the mercy of my unconscious, and the sooner I fell asleep. Fatigue and willpower were materially dissimilar, strangers to each other, natural enemies.

  Nonetheless, on the morning after I heard the foghorns, I never remembered them. The memory would come back through something else the day delivered, some fickle and meaningless detail that left me with a strange sensation, and after a long while, an inopportune prow appeared before me with its nocturnal cargo. If I recalled the darkness during the day, it filled me with fear, but if I woke up at night, I was delighted to be awake while everyone else slept.

  —

  The foghorns sounded deep and distant but clear and powerful. Where did those ships come from that left in the middle of the night? What port was so close to my house in the middle of all the cement, that in the deepest dark of the night, I could hear the somber trumpets of enormous ships?

  From this open-eyed sleep I was woken by the cold. A cold that swam over me like a tide and froze me: I had wet the bed. It made me horribly sad that I had given in to a warmth that was now a frozen and shameful puddle. By luck my mother had managed to escape before the storm without me noticing. She was no longer in my bedroom. And the shame of my piss was ostensibly greater than that of her ruse, her mockery of my attempts to surveil her. She left me like that: alone in the nocturnal vastness of my bed, when it was dry.