A Beautiful Young Woman

by Julián López

  —

  From the passing of that day I remember the feeling that I didn’t quite want to wake up, that I didn’t want to change out of the pajamas I was wearing during our embrace, the period when my skin tingled like the aerial view of a sea of city lights in the middle of the night, and my nose wished to slowly and definitively take in all the air around that beautiful young woman who once again opened her legs to receive me.

  This was a moment of pure truth, the moment when I was set free from that woman, the moment before the Christmas Eve feast. Santa Claus meant nothing to me, and any fantasy I’d ever held about his beard being red like an Irishman, or a Spaniard or a Viking, all those men who enlisted in history before me slipped away in the trace of his skin in mine. Who, what man, who didn’t want to find that imprint on his body, the imprint of a dark-haired woman with noble and pale, bluish skin, so removed from the triviality of the world?

  —

  After a compulsory siesta, my mother sent to me wash up, and I had no other option but to pretend I had bathed myself fully. I enveloped myself in the steam of the bathroom, I wet my hair, making sure my whole head soaked through, and I stood like that for a good while so that the steam would open the pores on my face and my ruse would seem credible. I sweated profusely but my essences remained with me: the researchers of the future could run a carbon 14 test on my body, and they would find the incandescent traces of humanity in my skin.

  Let it be Christmas, let what must happen happen. For hours I felt something in my chest that I couldn’t quite understand: a certainty, a calm, a secret happiness I couldn’t yet celebrate.

  All the wings of the lapwing birds healed, and they thanked their masters for their slavery, like a sacrificial gesture in the face of the clear ineptitude of their owners, like another offering before returning home to tend to their nests in the swamps and to parade about, exaggerating their ferocity so that no predators would ever approach.

  Let it be Christmas. Let the Son of Man be born.

  —

  At around seven in the evening, our doorbell began to ring frequently. Elvira was more anxious than anyone about the table setting and doing things right, so she came in and out of the house slowly. When I opened the door the first time she rang, our neighbor hovered in the doorway, asked a casual question, and then left. A few minutes later she came back and rang again, taking a few steps into our apartment, and so on, successively. Each time I opened the door I tried to make out the figure of her sister in the dark apartment opposite, but all I could see was the outline of the sofa covered in parcels and no sign of Ñatita, who had to cede her throne in honor of the recent arrival. What caught my attention was that there weren’t any suitcases or overnight bags, what I could see were parcels tied up with rustic string, packages wrapped in old newspaper, and bags made out of old milk cartons and woven into crochet. That was a sign of tradition in Elvira’s family; that was the proof that her sister had arrived with her cargo of promises.

  In one of those comings and goings by our neighbor, I couldn’t hold it in any longer, and before she could get started, I asked her, “What about the birds?”

  “What?” said Elvira with surprise.

  “I want to see the lapwings.”

  “Oh, the lapwings. She didn’t bring them in the end, but she did bring me some chickens from the countryside for tonight that are just divine. Tell your mother that between the chicken and the veal I prepared yesterday, the salad and some ham with melon, we should be fine.” Then she stopped for a moment before adding, “Now what did I come over here to tell you?”

  The signs of the most scandalous lie in the history of the West made themselves plain before me, and the changing of the birds seemed sinister. From the promise of a pair of lapwings to a couple of oven-roasted chickens there was a long list of horrors perpetrated by a bloody mob capable of clipping wings, decapitating, gutting, plucking, seasoning, roasting, and crucifying bodies.

  “I’ll never eat chicken again. I’ll never be a Catholic,” I promised in silence, swearing before a holy image of myself on an improvised altar I constructed in my head before the revelation of a truth that my mother had always maintained. “Now it’s the two of us against the church, Mama,” I said again in silence, ending my prophetic psalm.

  At that moment Elvira’s telephone began to ring. “Ay, I hope they don’t wake my sister, she’s resting, the poor woman,” she exclaimed.

  Right away my mother appeared in the kitchen and said to her quickly, “Don’t answer—that’d be better, no?”

  “No, I was hoping she’d get up soon, so you can meet her.”

  As soon as she’d said these words, the sister appeared from behind, from the depths of the darkened rooms of Elvira’s house. From her size, she seemed like Elvira’s mother, or Elvira herself, but with breasts twice as large, her features a little more round, more youthful and flushed. She came out of the apartment, her eyes heavy from deep sleep, adjusting her hair with her hands. When she arrived at our house, Elvira let her in.

  “I’d like you to meet my dear neighbors,” she said with a mixture of respect and nerves that her sister received with a smile.

  “I’m Desiré, Elvira’s sister. It’s a pleasure,” she said, bending down and looking me in the eyes as she held out her hand in the face of my confusion. Once we had shaken hands she bent down a little more and placed a noisy kiss on each of my cheeks.

  “I’ve heard so much about you, young man,” she said in a tone that I’d never heard before. She winked and shuffled over to greet my mother. With her she was less ceremonious, more familiar. She wore a flowery dress with a white collar and short sleeves fringed with the same material as the collar. Desiré was a surprise: her cheeks were chubby and rosy, she was curvy, with huge calves and big feet. She had full lips that seemed always to be promising a kiss. Desiré was a surprise: I didn’t know why, but compared to all the women I knew, this big country woman seemed extraordinarily beautiful. In each step she made, timid and silent in the worn-out moccasins she wore, she seemed to unfurl something I hadn’t seen before. I’m not sure if it was music or the sound of a river rushing over rocks or the rustling of reeds in the wind by the riverbank. I’m not sure if it was her almost-bitter perfume, green and freshly cut, or if it was a strange voice like a half-opened treasure chest inside a water hyacinth filled with bugs. Desiré seemed beautiful, a matron embossed by her geography, the geography of a map I had never seen before. Desiré was big, her skin ripe to bursting. Desiré was fragrant, like a grapefruit warmed by the afternoon sun in a fruit bowl on the kitchen table, and she was standing there quietly among us. But for me, a hidden nation danced behind the fabric of her dress, an entire nation danced there, and no one here noticed.

  I had to cover myself, the fabric of my pajama pants did little to hide the pomp and ceremony that Desiré had stirred in my loins. I couldn’t remember that ever happening before. Before that giant earthen sculpture, in that living room filled with postcards, before the presence of a beautiful young woman that, for the first time, disturbed me and next to our singing neighbor, all the blood in my body went either to my cheeks or my hard penis, erect and anxious to display itself to this wondrous woman of Christmas.

  My penis was exultant, incriminating, erect. And then I was shut up in my bedroom, dying of shame and wishing a thousand deaths on Santa Claus and every single person in the Vatican.

  I wanted to dissolve in my mother’s embrace, let myself go forever, turn into a dolphin that never had to come back up to the surface, surviving in the depths of the water without needing to breathe. In contrast I wanted to conquer Desiré, to wound her, approach her in a helmet and iron boots up to my knees, I wanted to raze her, destroy everything of her, eat her, melt her down for my own use. How strange.

  In any case, it would be best for Santa Claus not to appear, nor any redheaded man. My fanged mouth opened wide, and my penis was like a bloody arrow.

  So that was my first Christmas: an orgy t
hat wore itself out before it even began, a feast with three women who watched me, laughed, stroked my hair, and never stopped talking and laughing while I became lost between the staring and the flushed cheeks that those voices pointed out to me every time I stared too long at the woman from Corrientes.

  Present time was no less humiliating: My mother’s gift was three pairs of underwear wrapped up in little cardboard boxes, along with a bathing suit and a T-shirt. Elvira’s gift was another pair of underwear and some socks. Desiré’s gift was a jar of sweet papaya, a fruit I had never tasted before, and one I regretted tasting the moment I did.

  A short while after opening the presents, my mother let me drink some pineapple fizz, and we ended the night playing charades. I laughed then as well. I laughed a lot. I laughed most from seeing my mother giggling wildly in a way I’d never seen before. Although she lost a bit of her sensuality from shaking so much, my mother looked like a happy woman. And for a good while, I could laugh along as well.

  From the summer of wine there remain only a few splotches, as if it were a reel of film that someone yanked fiercely from one end to hurry things along.

  I think it was still January when we went on vacation. My mother decided that we had to go camping, and San Antonio de Areco had it all: a river, history, literature, a zoo. We got ourselves a tent, sleeping bags, and someone lent her a Renault 4. I didn’t even know she could drive, so I was surprised and excited by the plan. I had never slept in a tent before, and the idea fascinated me. It seemed extremely logical, it was something I’d tried to do before in my own room at nap time. I’d put the mattress on the floor and hang the sheet from wherever I could up high. It seemed like a wonderful idea, although I was startled at the prospect of sleeping so close to my mother. And so we went.

  I think I spent the whole trip watching her driving and smoking, looking in the rearview mirror, stopping at gas stations to refuel the car, drinking coffee in little plastic cups, lifting off her glasses and running a hand through her hair, smiling cheekily when she realized I was watching her.

  I remember as soon as we arrived we set up the tent by the river, near the bridge and a little dike. The tent was heavy, difficult to assemble, and it smelled damp. It suited us just fine though; it wasn’t quite long enough, but it was steady. With some instructions from my mother, I set about digging a trench around the tent in case it rained, so the water would run off and not flood us.

  One day we went to the zoo. I remember a leopard lying about like an old drunk on a concrete patio with thistles growing through the cracks, in a tiny cage with just a tiny log and wire mesh. I’ll never forget that, what I felt about myself then, although at the time I couldn’t quite translate the meaning of the scene. I felt bad knowing that the leopard was there for my eyes too. What I saw was a king without claws, a melting iceberg trapped in a warm current that bore it far away, a solitary caged wonder. How do you turn a force of nature into the embodiment of nothing?

  My mother must have noticed something because she took me by the hand and without saying a word led me straight to the exit. We had only just arrived but we left, walking along the sidewalk in silence, beneath garlands of wisteria, chased by heavy gray clouds that blanketed everything.

  We arrived at the campground the moment it started raining. First there was a strong odor rising from the earth, and then fell the thickest raindrops I’d ever seen. “Please don’t rain,” my mother said to herself, thinking I couldn’t hear her. We went into the recreational hall, which was a clamoring mass of people playing cards, and we stood there looking out the window, watching the bubbles as the rain fell onto the surface of the river.

  “It’s going to rain for a long time,” said someone near us.

  “Please don’t rain,” repeated my mother to herself. “Please don’t rain.”

  I watched the river rising slowly, the current swelling forcefully and sweeping along branches and plastic bags from farther upstream. I looked at the river and thought of Uncle Rodolfo. The river was approaching, and I knew I couldn’t ask anything, nor could I say how I missed the afternoons when he used to come and teach me things about the country or take me out to play soccer.

  “Yes, it’s going to rain for a long time. A good soak to wash everything away,” came the same voice from somewhere nearby.

  I think my trench washed away from all the water, and I think it rained inside our tent as well that night. I think we called an end to our vacation earlier than planned because as soon as the sky lightened a little and there was a moment of sunshine, a relentless counterstrike of heavy drops filled the air again. I think it was me who proposed the retreat; it seemed to me that in the face of such a threat we were hopeless and that we would be better off saving our energies and regrouping for another summer. I think my greatest fear was that the rain would soak my mother, would turn her into a teardrop; beautiful women tend to become somber in the face of such dark horizons.

  I remember that just as quickly the shadow of the school building reached my shoes on the sidewalk, and I had the impression that the building could crush me. In the preceding days, while getting everything together for the new school year, I found the notebook where I had written the letters from the television that had been reflected by the mirror on the door of my bedroom. The letters I had written down the night I arrived home with Elvira after watching the Titans, when we found my mother balled up in the darkness on the sofa. Those letters I had deciphered and that I planned to write out correctly using the red glass. It was a notebook from the year before, and I didn’t need it, but even so I’m not sure why I decided to erase those letters written in black pencil. I opened the notebook and left it on the ground, then I got up to look for the eraser but I also fetched the red glass that was in a drawer. I lay down on the ground, and before I started rubbing the page with the eraser, I put the piece of glass in the middle of the page, exactly where the last letter ended. I didn’t have a pencil nearby, but I didn’t need it to make out the letters on the blank page, I could read them clearly in the reflection of the red glass: UNIDAD VIEJO BUENO, it said.

  I erased everything, put the notebook away along with the red glass and the eraser, and made sure I had everything ready for school the next day.

  Despite that white reel that someone yanked to speed things up, I clearly remember my happiness at seeing Darío on the first day of classes and how enthusiastically we told one another about the summer we could still feel. I remember that my little trench around the tent became as big as the Zanja de Alsina in the stories I told my friend, the system of trenches dug to protect Buenos Aires from the Mapuches, that the writhing worms I dug up with each spadeful became Indian raiding parties letting out war cries, that the silent river could not be contained and washed over everything, that it came all the way up to the recreation hall and that luckily, the kids playing cards in there had been able to run away just before the silent tide overtook them. And that when my mother was driving she looked like a movie star.

  I suppose over the course of the days, autumn accustomed us to normality, and for that reason I remember nothing more until one afternoon at the beginning of June.

  I suppose there was no drumroll, like when the tiny trapeze artist launched herself into the air so that the young man with the huge thighs could catch her and steal her away from the void, before the final curtain, all the elephants linked tail to trunk, arms out wide to receive the applause of the public, elephant tail to elephant trunk, and a bouquet of flowers for the young woman, cheers for the young man with thighs like a thoroughbred. And tail then trunk then a rough gray screen. And an abysmal all-seeing eye.

  I suppose there was no time for these things, that nobody had time to answer my questions about whether the workers are poor, if Santi is poor, if his mother and his sister are poor. If Uncle Rodolfo has moved away, because it’s been so long since he came to visit.

  I suppose it was a long time since I’d heard the foghorns on the high seas of the night.


  One afternoon Elvira came to pick me up from school, and I was very pleased with the surprise. It wasn’t at all usual, and I suppose I must have assumed that an old tango singer always has eyes full of sadness because it didn’t seem strange that she didn’t speak to me and that she walked next to me in silence, holding my hand gravely along each block on our way home.

  When we were arriving at the corner I saw a policeman standing on the sidewalk, and I don’t know why but I just took off. Elvira tried to hold me back but I managed to get free and I dashed away, like a leopard tired of lying down before the eyes of his captors.

  I knew something was wrong. I knew. I ran madly, gripping my satchel with my notebooks as tightly as I could, and I knew something was wrong. I knew.

  When I arrived at the entrance to our building, one of those apartment blocks from the 1950s, modest but elegant, cool in summer, freezing once autumn arrived, I saw that the downstairs door was open. I went in. Elvira was slow to arrive, and I wanted her never to arrive. I needed to be alone, and I didn’t want anyone to take hold of me with the excuse that I was just a child.

  From the landing I faced the stairs and began to climb. The door to our apartment was also open, and there was a brilliant white light shining out. A light like I’d never seen before. There was no sound at all, but on the stairs were things, little bits of things. I kept climbing. On one of the last stairs, I ducked down to pick up something I couldn’t quite identify. Once I held it in my hand I recognized it—it was a shred torn out from a book.

  I arrived at the landing of brilliant white light and faced up to the hollow of the open door. My eyes hurt from all the brightness flowing in through the open shutters, opened up in a way we never did, as if there were no shutters at all but just a huge hole.