by Julián López
Our little tree was quite sparse, and instead of tinsel and baubles we had homemade decorations: little drawings of mine and little knitted figures that my mother had bought in a regional handicrafts store. It was very close to Christmas Eve, and that was the only reference we would need. I no longer insisted upon affirming the historical truth of the event, to save myself a lecture about a world of starving children, about how the real celebration was being together, and that in reality, the origins of this birth nearly two thousand years ago was the most scandalous lie in the history of the Western world.
What could be so wrong about getting together to eat chicken, open presents, and to think, for just a moment, that the arrival of the kingdom of God is possible? But I thought of this in total silence, avoiding the discursive rage of the lady of the house.
—
My mother asked me to take off my little blue suit, to give back her headband and the knitting needles, and to put on my pajamas, because we would be spending the afternoon at home.
She curled up on the sofa, wrapped herself in the red poncho she used for a blanket, and sat watching the little rays of afternoon sun that streaked through the whole apartment.
“I’ll fix you some milk later,” she said without looking at me. I went to my bedroom to open up the Jack and the Topolinos on top of my bed. Inside the Jack chocolate bar was a figurine of the witch, Cachavacha, and the lollipop packages had a green car with poorly molded wheels, a little figurine whose expression and purpose were impossible to discern, and an olive-green monkey. I gathered them all up in a pile on the blue mattress with the intention of inventing a game, but I gave up almost immediately. The links between a primate, a green car, and a witch that makes children disappear were so improbable that I knocked them away and opened the closet to look for my Goliath cannon. If I’d had any more of the gunpowder caps left I would have passed the evening shooting the cannon at those irreconcilable surprise toys. Instead, I had to use my imagination to shoot at everything, my little bronze cannon leaving the world in flames.
The days that followed were strange. My mother was more and more serious, and she sat on the sofa with her feet tucked beneath her during the day until the night transformed it into her bed, without reading, in silent concentration. She got up very carefully to make me something to eat or to help me with one of my more difficult homework exercises or to sweep up. In the living room there was a woolen rug, like a long beard that formed a warm and gray lawn that didn’t quite reach the walls. My mother brushed it from the center outward and then swept the uncovered parquetry. If I was nearby, drinking my milk or watching an episode of Astro Boy or playing with my stickers. I couldn’t stop watching the way she swept—the sensation overwhelmed me. I don’t know why this activity captivated me. From my vantage point it was normal to see the imperfections in my mother’s task, the tiny mounds of dirt that she left behind, the spots she missed without realizing. From her height, she lost the perfect vision of the floor she was sweeping that I could see.
“Stop pointing it out to me, stop showing me where I’m missing spots. Mind your own business! Do your homework, and let me do mine!” She burst out one time, the last time.
On one of those afternoons, Uncle Rodolfo came over. It was a long time since I’d seen him, and he was different: his sideburns were thicker and he’d let his mustache grow long. He pressed the doorbell twice and then after a while knocked on the apartment door before opening it with his keys. My uncle usually came over with a pile of Suchard chocolate blocks, one of each flavor, and another pile of Milkybars, just as big. I loved chocolate, and I loved how his visits provided me with this drug that made my mother mad and caused her to warn me about the toxic effects of devouring all the little blocks of chocolate and the Milkybars in one sitting. The theme of the parasites was a serious one; my mother was firm and unwavering when she spoke of it.
That evening my uncle didn’t bring me anything. When I heard him arrive I ran from my bedroom to the living room to greet him, and I found him with a grave expression. He greeted me rather hurriedly and then looked at my mother and said to her with a cold fury that he had been waiting over the road for a long time but the shutters were down. My mother jolted awake all at once, jumping up off the sofa, and then she told me to go to my room, that she was going to prepare some yerba mate for my uncle and that they were going to have a grown-up talk.
I stayed in my room trying to figure out what it was they would speak about in a grown-up talk, what sort of things a child couldn’t hear. I had already seen a ñandú gutted with a knife, a colony of blind snakes that died moments after being removed from their home in the insides of the bird, I had dreamed of hyenas and the prohibited sweets of the Casa Suiza Patisserie, someone had threatened to blow up my school before the friendly aliens could arrive. I already knew that children all over the world with bloated bellies died from starvation, that I should never ask about my father, and that baby Jesus was a miserable liar for whom people stole and murdered. What topic of conversation was inappropriate for my age?
A few minutes later I heard Uncle Rodolfo leaving and my mother entering the bathroom. With the door open, she washed her face with cold water and tied her hair in a ponytail. In a rush she put on the coat with the gold buttons and told me she needed to go out, that she would see if Elvira was in and could look after me while she was gone.
Elvira didn’t answer the door, neither the doorbell nor the anxious knocking of my mother, who came back, sobbed in front of me, and said, “I can’t take you with me.”
In no time at all she wiped away her tears, two solitary tears, one from each eye, turned on the television at very low volume, sat me down on the sofa, wrapped me up in the poncho, and told me to watch my cartoons. She told me that I shouldn’t get up for any reason at all and if the doorbell rang I shouldn’t answer and that I shouldn’t open the door for anyone. Not even Elvira. She emptied the can where we kept our savings, kissed me on the forehead, went out, and turned each of the two locks on our door twice. She never locked up so much.
It was almost nightfall when I was left alone. What cartoons could I watch? The programs at that hour were for grown-ups, and the news reports scared me. I unwound myself from the poncho in a dangerous act of disobedience, got up from the sofa, and went to the kitchen. I took a little bread roll from the bag behind the door, then went to the fridge and took out the butter dish, and got a knife and the sugar bowl. I went back to the living room, breaking the bread in half and spreading it with butter and sugar. I changed the channel and became hypnotized, sitting on the edge of the living room table, a few centimeters away from the screen.
My mother wasn’t long in coming home. Much sooner than I expected she came in, shut the door, and leaned against it, her eyes swollen. She stayed like that for a while, and with the sound of the television in the background, she seemed to be asleep with her eyes open, less agitated but more tired. Then she woke up suddenly and walked across the room to the bookshelf, taking down the tin full of our savings. She put her hand in her pocket and took out the fistful of bills and put it back in the tin. From her other pocket she took my bankbook from the National Savings and Insurance Fund and put that back in the tin too. I hadn’t noticed that she took it, and I felt a mix of indignation and sorrow, but I didn’t say anything. I was still trying to capture the breeze of my mother’s passing, but the air didn’t have that metallic odor it normally did after one of my mother’s outings. I tried to breathe in deeply without her noticing; for me it was a very intimate act, a way of embracing her without showing dependence. That time the air around her just smelled of air, nothing special.
She lowered the shutters completely, and the little rays of light that came in at that time of the evening from the streetlight went dark.
On TV they were showing some red-pelted animals in the snow in some place near Alaska, their eyes half-shut against the wind, gathered next to a bare, black tree. The ground was white and the sky was white. The came
ra focused in on the head of one of the huge bison. It was calm, awake, covered in frost. Stalactites of frozen mucus hung from its nostrils, and, to me, its expression seemed strange, as if its despair had passed through the state of panic and it was simply waiting for the moment when its internal mechanics would stop. Like a soldier trained to be steadfast, for the obligation to resist without freezing, for the unlikely promise of a sliver of springtime that would bring the thaw, that would redress so much suffering, so much injustice.
My mother went to the kitchen and came back with two glasses of hot Nesquik. She sat next to me on the table to watch TV and gave me one of the glasses, then drank from hers. How disgusting! How could she drink hot Nesquik and pretend that the curdled milk on top is an easily avoidable obstacle? I left my glass on the tray and began to nibble around the edges of a cookie. I loved to eat cookies in tiny bites, gnawing away at the edges like a guinea pig or a squirrel. At one point my mother gave me one of those looks like she was going to start with one of her Why do people ask for Nesquik, cookies, and everything else under the sun? lectures, but when our eyes met, hers turned to water, and instead of scolding me, she hugged me and sat there in silence watching the people watching us from above the bison. Behind the television was the bookcase, and on one of the shelves, leaning against the spines of the books, there was a row of rag dolls with inscriptions on their bellies along the lines of Don’t Leave or A Star Is Born, and they stared us down with their plastic eyes. They sat there side by side, their shoulders slumped and a look of stubbornness on their faces that defied their consignment to that shelf. For a long time I tried to figure out the complete sentence that could be formed with the words on those rag dolls, to figure out what hidden message we couldn’t decipher, my mother and I, while we watched TV or gazed at the rising sun or the pink of its setting as it filtered in rays from the gaps in the shutters at dusk. But all I can remember now are those two phrases: Don’t Leave and A Star Is Born.
When my mother turned her gaze back to the television I summoned the courage to ask her, “What happened?”
She waited a few seconds and responded with a question of her own. “What do you say we go to the kitchen and make some bangers and mash?”
I cackled with glee and my mother stood up, loaded the two glasses and the tea towel onto the tray, and said, “Go on then, you bring the cookies, and we’ll start cooking.”
In the kitchen the whole atmosphere changed. While my mother saw to the boiling water for the sausages, she suggested that I prepare the mashed potatoes. I opened the box, read the instructions out loud, and then got out everything I needed: milk, butter, water, a cup, and a pot. When the food was ready we put out the place mats, the cutlery, and the breadbasket, and we sat down opposite each other. We were happy and hungry. In fact I just felt like eating—it was unusual for me to be hungry, and it was unusual for me to remember to eat or to feel like interrupting what I was doing to sit down in front of a plate of food.
Full of enthusiasm, my mother chatted away about any old thing, and all of it seemed entertaining to me. I delighted in these conversations in which I barely spoke a word except to ask her to be more specific about some detail or another, especially things about her childhood, which she never usually spoke about.
She took out the bottle of Crespi table wine and poured me half a glass, then she looked at me as if she were about to speak, but stopped. A few seconds later she jumped up from the table and put on her blue coat, told me she’d be right back, and left the apartment with her hair out. I was left alone in the kitchen watching the vapor rise from the sausages on my plate, playing with the mashed potatoes with my fork. At one point I heard footsteps approaching in the hallway, and I stayed very quiet to see if it was my mother returning. By the door of our apartment the footsteps stopped, and I heard nothing more. Whoever it was, they were just on the other side of the door, and for a moment I was scared. I stood, grateful that I was in socks so I could sneak up without making any noise. I went into the living room and stared down the door, breathing very lightly and taking great care that I moved without the slightest noise. I stood there not knowing what to do. After a while it seemed that the feet on the other side of the door were moving, and I wanted to run away, but then I heard the sound of the key in Elvira’s door and her squeaky voice that said: “Where’s my Ñatita? Mommy’s home! Guess what Mommy brought you today!” Just then the door shut, and I never found out what surprise awaited the old and blind dog, curled up in a ball on the sofa.
I ran back and sat down at the table, and there was no longer any steam rising from the sausages, but I could hear the footsteps of my mother returning. Before she even finished opening the door I heard her asking me, “Guess what I brought you?” She had run to the kiosk to buy me a bottle of Mirinda soda. “We have to make a toast, and if I have some wine you can’t say ‘chin-chin’ with water.”
We toasted, ate the cold bangers and hardened mash, but we never stopped chatting the whole time. After an apple for dessert my mother made some coffee and poured herself a cup, then returned to the table and lit a cigarette. There was something special about that night that made us feel comfortable and willing, as if instead of the kitchen we were seated at Bambi, or Casa Suiza, or the Steinhauser Café, and instead of bangers and mash, we had eaten fancy charcuterie and a sticky frangipane cake made from aromatic almonds.
I watched her smoke, and she seemed to strike up conversations with invisible companions. She arched her eyebrows, touched her hair, let out the first mouthfuls of smoke like ample responses and interspersed them with tendrils of smoke that billowed out her nose, as if supporting or retracting arguments in an internal discussion. I began to hold my breath again, I didn’t want to miss a single detail of this beautiful young woman in front of me, conversing comfortably in silence, her lips moist, notably sexy and daring, and for one night—in a way she hadn’t been in a long time—relaxed.
“What are you laughing about?” she asked when she saw me laughing at the mere sight of her. I wasn’t in the least surprised, and she just pulled her hair to one side and returned to her internal discussion with full knowledge that I was admiring her.
I promised to myself I would smoke. I would wait as many years as necessary, but in that moment I understood that I had given myself over to the notion that I would only become an adult through smoking.
I was delighted to see her like that, and I didn’t mind that she was talking to other men—it was obvious that she was talking to other men—her eyes shone, and her smile changed from shy to cheeky and easy, and her hair opened darkly like one of those nocturnal carnivorous flowers only known to the souls of the desert.
I must have fallen asleep at the table with my arms crossed, the plates to one side, because I remember nothing more of that night that I’ll never forget, that night that stays with me like a precious gemstone shining for me, and me alone.
To whom could I explain the extraordinary sensuality of a meal of cold sausages or the smoke from 43 70 cigarettes?
—
I saw the light of the lamp on the nightstand and realized I was awake. I had no idea what time it could be, but I knew it must be very late; the foghorns always came in the small hours. I got up and walked very quietly across the parquetry toward the living room and when I got there I found her reading.
“Mama, can you hear the ocean liners?” She left her copy of The Manipulated Man to one side and looked at me. From the ashtray on the table, her cigarette sent out a smoke signal that rose in a perfectly straight line.
“What are you doing out of bed at this hour?” she replied.
The same old dynamic as always, she always answered my questions with a question of her own.
“Can you hear the foghorns, Mama?” I insisted.
“What foghorns are you talking about?” she replied.
I put my head down and began to turn around to go back to my bedroom, to get back into bed.
“No, my love, no. That’s not
a ship.”
“Yes, it is, it’s a boat. Can’t you hear it?”
“No, my love, it’s the train.” She held me back. “You know how sometimes we pass the railway crossing at the station about twelve blocks away, the crossing at Ferro, you know? It’s not a boat, my love, it’s the train that goes to Moreno, and at this time of night there’s hardly any noise because everyone is asleep, that’s why you can hear the whistle from the locomotive. During the day it’s impossible because of all the noise.”
“Oh, you mean the railway crossing that Solita runs through,” I said almost to myself, as quickly as I could, while I shuffled back to bed.
“What?” I heard my mother say as she switched on her lamp.
“Pobre diabla,” I said in silence and darkness.
—
I would have preferred not to know. I would have preferred the answer to be a question, like all the other times. I would have liked my mother to have guessed that this was exactly the question that she shouldn’t answer for me. I would have liked her to know that I wanted to think there was a boat in the middle of the night, that the foghorns told me there was something else beyond, after all the oceans that separated us from the world. Even if you had to leave the port in the dead of night, I wanted to think that the darkness itself was my safety, my passport to a daytime port, where the sunshine glimmered like smiles I hadn’t seen in the longest time, the kind of smile that flashes until it consumes itself without measure or fear, a wake on the high sea of a trusting face. I would have preferred to think it was possible to save, to spend years pasting stamps into my bankbook so that finally I could go up to the little window and purchase two tickets, one for her and one for me. In the end I would be like a bison gifting my coins to the snow so my savings would blossom like the springtime, and we would climb up the deck of an ocean liner holding hands, on a rope ladder suspended in the night air over the dark water, on our way to a daybreak in Mexico, in Spain, in Finland. The foghorns themselves would bear us along, sinking and darkening into the depths, then in the next swell bringing up to the surface those silvery sequins that would take us to the next sunny port. Together. Safe.