A Beautiful Young Woman

by Julián López

  When I got up the next morning my mother was tidying the bookcase. She had washed her face, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. I said good morning but she didn’t respond. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and then to the kitchen to make myself a Nesquik. I delighted in putting two heaping soup spoonfuls into the glass, but with such an excessive amount I had to make sure that my mother wasn’t watching. Then I had to pour the milk down the side with the glass tilted, so that it wouldn’t disturb the chocolate layer. The milk would be tinged slightly with flavor but in the depths lay the thick mud, the destination I had to reach, the prize I had to earn. I loved to peer through the glass and inspect the marine landscape of peaks and troughs and, beneath the surface of the liquid, the paleness of dry earth. Only the line of contact held the dark brown coloring from the fusing of the elements.

  I had to drink carefully, because to maintain that topography required a certain stability, and as the minutes went by the bedrock could be infiltrated, the liquid could permeate the upper layer, and then it was just a matter of time before everything mixed together and everything was lost.

  My mother kept picking out books from the bookcase, and, before tossing them to the ground, she would empty them of dried flowers, postcards, and letters written on silky yellowed paper, stained with the blue ink of calligraphy.

  What was written in those letters? I wondered. If they were from people who were now dead, what would those letters say about the time when they were written, about the authors they had survived?

  Perched on a painter’s ladder she thumbed through the books as if remembering; she wore that grave expression that was familiar to me, the one that said she wasn’t available to anyone.

  I went back to my Nesquik and saw that on one of the promontories, a trough, one of the largest ones, had begun to leak. I remembered something Ms. Zulema had told us: the deepest marine trench in the world was found in the Mariana Islands, in the northwest of the Pacific Ocean. It was eleven thousand meters deep.

  “What?” I’d asked in the middle of geography class. I had heard perfectly well—I understood completely each of the words Ms. Zulema had used to weave her sentence. The teacher repeated the information for me. “The deepest marine trench…”

  “What?” I said again, unable to contain myself.

  “Did you not hear or can you not understand when you are spoken to?” replied my teacher.

  I asked the same thing again, short and simple, but silently, just to myself. It left me perplexed to think that people kept on living in the face of monstrous things they could never face up to, things that could swallow them whole, carry them off into the darkness without even the remotest chance of survival. If that trench began to suck downward, what body could flail strongly enough to reach the surface? And if that bedrock was infiltrated? What if the very ocean itself began to seep through a crack? If that bewildering mass of water could wash away entire continents, what would happen to us? Would we all be sucked away?

  “What?” I said in a low voice and finished my milk in one huge gulp, holding my breath as the sweet mud from the bottom of the glass began to reach my tongue.

  I myself had swum in the sea, not in the Mariana Islands, of course, although it was all part of the ocean. On a family vacation in Miramar, I was enjoying the beach, and my mother insisted I go in the water with her. I ran up to the sea ready to deliver myself but when I arrived at the shoreline I was left petrified by the sight of the horizon, where the ocean meets the sky. I stood there for a few moments until my excitement came back and I looked all around me, at the people enjoying the waves that crashed about their feet, at their happy faces. There’s no danger, I’d told myself. Everybody is getting in.

  But my feet were trapped by the sight of the horizon and the certainty that out there, those people wouldn’t be much help. “I’m not going to surrender myself to that hole,” I said. I saw the vacationers moving toward that Goliath with smiles on their lips and my voice repeated its calm and desperate diatribe: “No.”

  But my mother led the counterattack. Standing on the sand and staring at her, I resisted. “I’m not going back into that hole.”

  She spun around and disappeared—she stopped watching me and slipped under the sea. But after a while, just like Venus, her head emerged in almost the same place, a sequence of events that turned me into a reciter of psalms, into a rabbi drowned in his own psychotic chanting: Come back up, come back up, come back up.

  —

  When I finished the Nesquik, I went to the living room to watch her. I sat on the sofa while she remained on the painter’s ladder pulling out notes from inside her books. She opened them, read them a little, then pulled out all sorts of things I had no idea were inside there and seemed much more interesting than the texts of the books themselves. It was disturbing to see how the books had clutches of secret information inside that I didn’t know about; they seemed like top secret spies who were waiting like sleeper agents for a sign that would wake them, and that could be deadly to the world as we know it.

  What did I care about the fantastical lies told on the printed pages of the books? I wanted the secret story dried up in the petals of that flattened rose, on the autographed tickets from a theater in Stockholm, on that receipt with so many zeros that I couldn’t tell if it was from Argentina or some strange continent, on those notes to people whose names I’d never heard. For me, next to this literature of unknown hands and signs that could become a part of the torrent of my blood, the other stuff, the typeset stories, were like tombstones stacked neatly in an ordered cemetery against the wall.

  Why did my mother love books so much? Why did she declare her love with such school spirit? What did she think books could give me, or what could they free her from giving me?

  In one of her readings, in one of those moments where she stopped what she was doing and stood there as if she had climbed a hilltop to give herself over to a letter she had been waiting months to receive, she saw me watching her and changed her expression. With her right hand she loosened the tie that held her hair back in a ponytail, relaxed her brow, and moistened her lips, almost imperceptibly. I took the opportunity to sink deeper into the sofa and lean into the backrest with my legs crossed.

  —

  Until that moment I had been perched on the edge, ready to dash off if she noticed me watching her and became angry.

  “Do you want to know what it says?”

  “Yes,” was my only response.

  She read a poem written by hand on the first page of the book she was holding, a poem that I remember ended with the line, In the molten wind, will you recognize me?

  When she had finished reading she turned her face to me with a careless smile, too careless for the unease awoken in me by intrigue.

  “I want to know who wrote that for you, who gave you that book. Was it a boyfriend?”

  “Don’t you want to know who it was that wrote such a sad poem?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Is that how you answer me?”

  “I want to know who gave you that book, who copied that poem out for you, what he said to you. Why did he give you that book? Why did he copy it out for you? Was it a boyfriend?—

  “And who said the poem was copied out for me?”

  —

  Right at that moment the doorbell rang, and I automatically ran to see who it was. My mother yelled for me to ask who it was before I opened the door, but the end of her sentence arrived when Elvira and her floral nightgown were already standing before us.

  “May I come in?” She mixed her convent-school education with a worried gesture, exactly the type of manners that made my mother nervous.

  “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain,” my mother would say, after our neighbor had left, elongating the vowel sounds as if instead of complimenting her, she was drowning her in the Baltic Sea for being so vulgar.

  And Elvira, any time Ñata’s breathing changed or she gave a whimper or barked at a
n unexpected moment, would change her entire body language and take on an expression of panic, as if she were barefoot and east of Java at the very moment the molten blanket of Krakatoa began to flow and turn into a burning carpet. Whenever she heard a sign like that coming from her apartment, Elvira stopped what she was doing midconversation and rushed back to check on Ñatita, who would be barely alive on the sofa, wrapped up in her pink crocheted woolen blanket, watched over by the doll dressed as a bride on the cotton tulle doily sitting on top of the television, and the Virgin on the sideboard, who perhaps made the most of the solitude to undertake the promised changing of colors, letting layer after layer of clothing drop to her feet until she was just down to her bra and panties, alone with the secret of her indecent but discreet conscience.

  One time my mother worked up the courage to criticize her; she told her she was being melodramatic, that there was nothing wrong with the dog, and that it was just a dog anyway.

  Elvira frightened me then—she went deep red and completely silent. It seemed like the veins on her neck would explode, and she began to cry suddenly, fat tears rolling down her cheeks, and she had to hold her jaw because it was trembling, and little howls slipped out, like from a beast in a muzzle. Elvira always had a handkerchief on hand, a little embroidered one that she carried around hidden up the sleeve of her jacket so that she would always be ready for the role of damsel in distress. But this crying fit turned out to be more like a fit of rage, a wall of impotence that required nothing more than that to make my mother understand her error, her lack of pity. But that crying fit also made Elvira part of our family, and Ñata, with her eyes almost as white as the Niagara Falls, became one of us too. It also meant that my mother and I adopted that neighboring family in tacit agreement, even though they seemed to us as sweet as they were ridiculous and united.

  We used their telephone—although I never made or received calls, it was always my mother who ran her communication center from Elvira’s house. All this despite the fact that it seemed impossible to us to live among the vulgarity of the crochet, the Swiss cotton tulle, and the clear plastic coverings. After all, we thought, what would we think of our own decorations if we walked into this apartment on the third floor and instead of living there ourselves, we were visiting the home of some distant relatives?

  My mother said that books made all the difference, and that I should look out for them whenever I entered someone’s home. If they had books, that was another thing.

  One time Darío invited me over to his house to study. We had to prepare a project for the science fair at school and he loved my little steam boiler, a toy that worked when you lit the fuse and added alcohol. It would heat up the water in the little bronze boiler and turn it into steam, which would make a tiny wheel turn. Darío was a master of opportunity, with the porteño habits and wiles well rusted on. Backed up by his father, who made up a speech explaining how the steam engine worked, which of course had nothing to do with the requirements of the science fair, Darío decided that my little steam boiler would be our project.

  And our brash little apprentice wasn’t mistaken. Our project was a huge success. It was incredible to see the faces of our teachers and classmates, so fascinated that it seemed they weren’t aware of the risk and the fraud of the project. All we had to do was show the steam boiler, and we received an “Outstanding,” and Darío let it be known that I should let him keep the toy because he was the one who had figured out how to make use of it, how to turn it into something the entire school considered extraordinary.

  But luckily I was able to use my greatest resource, my most effective weapon, one of those talents that comes from nature and can’t be learned in any university; to avoid giving him the toy, and also to avoid conflict, I pretended to be stupid, the kid who doesn’t quite get it, the dummy. I just gave him a dopey smile with big, empty eyes.

  When I had successfully concluded the affair of the steam boiler, through a mix of total misunderstanding and brazen uncertainty, I managed to obtain another “Outstanding,” but this time I earned it myself. And it was conferred upon me with mute cheers, olive wreaths, and a twenty-one-gun salute in front of the Sphinx of Giza. I suppose I was unaware at the time, but I could still take on that boastful little tin god and bewilder him with a dose of my Hellenic cynicism.

  The first thing I did when I went into Darío’s house was scan the horizon for my target: the bookshelves. There weren’t any. But in a little shelf unit there was a complete set of twelve books with brilliant white spines and black lettering that said Encyclopedia of the Second World War. Each volume had a subtitle as well, in smaller lettering: the Concentration Camps, the Warsaw Ghetto, the Trains to Treblinka.

  I wandered over distractedly to look, and I saw that the cover of the first volume was visible, featuring a photo in sepia. It took me a while to comprehend what I saw. It took me even longer to realize that it was impossible for me to fully recognize the forms depicted on the cover that looked like a manual. All I can recall is that in the picture I saw, there were shoes, many shoes. It might have been a mountain of shoes, but I can’t quite remember. Or maybe they were unthinkable shoes, shoes I had never seen before. Untellable shoes.

  Until my mother and I told her she could come in, Elvira never even put the tip of her slipper in our apartment. When I closed the door, our neighbor let out a few general commentaries about the cleanliness of houses. I suppose she assumed my mother was working on it at the time because she saw the ladder next to the pile of books on the ground. Eventually she said, “Well, you see, I wanted to ask you both something. Well, because you two are on your own, you see, so…Well, I thought that, seeing as Christmas is coming, we could spend Christmas Eve together, with Ñatita and my sister, who is coming down from Santo Tomé. I mean the Santo Tomé in Corrientes, not the one in Santa Fe that no one’s ever heard of. You see, I asked her to bring some sweet papaya—you can’t get it here. She’ll probably bring panela and roasted cacao husks, and she’s promised for the longest time to bring me a little pair of lapwings for the patio. And I thought we could each make something nice. I can make meatloaf, which we can have hot or cold, or vitello tonnato, which are little slices of veal with mayonnaise and pickles, and fruit salad with moscato, which goes so well with Zuppa Inglese, my sponge cake layered with custard.”

  My mother and I looked at each other, and we were both smiling. I didn’t know what half the things Elvira listed even were, and the image of a woman just like her who was coming all the way from Corrientes excited and disturbed me in equal measures.

  “What’s your sister’s name?” I probed.

  “Desiré.” The word came from her mouth like a huge bunch of gladioli wrapped around many times with a plastic ribbon that was meant to look like satin and finished up in a great bow.

  In my mind, I was stuck with the image of a tall, stout lady dressed entirely in pink and who approached along a dirt path with bags full of squawking birds and monkeys who jumped out to steal fruit from her hat, before hiding again and throwing the peels at the birds, and everything would be made of crochet and Swiss cotton tulle.

  The smile was enough for my mother to say yes, that it seemed like a wonderful idea, that she didn’t like Christmas too much, but that Christmas Eve was a time to spend with your loved ones and how was she going to keep the lapwing birds on the patio without them escaping?

  “Ah yes, you have to clip their wings so they can’t fly off,” said Elvira, dealing with the first of the mysteries in my mind, the pair of birds, the panela, and the cacao husks.

  “Maybe it’d be better if she didn’t bring the birds,” I suggested, imagining birds with purple scars on their sides, sitting on a perch on the cold tiles of the patio, beaks against the wall, surrounded by gray and striped and succulent plants in massive pots.

  The plan seemed wonderful to me. For a long time I had known that Santa Claus and Christmas were the biggest lies in the Western world, but having Elvira and her sister and Ñatita come a
long was the perfect excuse for my mother to celebrate a little, and for me to receive a little present.

  “And I can make mash!” I yelled with glee.

  “Oh yes, he makes a mean mashed potato, let me tell you,” my mother said to Elvira.

  “And she can make bangers!” I yelled again, this time hoping to include my mother in a Christmas menu that met her capabilities.

  “Wonderful! How lovely to sort it all out. I’ll expect you at mine, then?” proposed our neighbor.

  And my mother, quick as a flash, made a counteroffer. “Wouldn’t you prefer to have it here, and then we can open up the balcony if it’s hot? Go on, that way you won’t have to clean up.”

  Elvira’s eyes filled with tears, and she ran over to kiss my cheeks and ask me to flutter my eyelashes. She wet my cheeks with her cold saliva, then picked me up and began to dance a waltz with me in her arms and began to sing in her old porcelain doll voice, “Sweet spring, happy spring…”

  —

  It was a few days until Christmas Eve, and that gave us time to prepare. My mother moved the furniture around and cleaned underneath everything. The next day she returned the furniture to its original geography, but she filled my bedroom with the oldest items and a few ceramic vases. When she saw the air-filled living room, emptied of the old things she had put in my bedroom, she said, “Doesn’t this look much better?”

  I wanted to tidy up too, so I went to my room and put all the old things and the ceramic vases inside the closet. Then I moved the furniture so I could sweep up underneath. I went to the kitchen to fetch the brush and shovel, and when my mother saw what I was doing, she stopped me. “What are you doing with that? Put it down, you’ll make a mess. Why don’t you go and play with kids your own age?”