Comemadre

by Roque Larraquy

  Whatever words the heads might have uttered, whatever piecemeal sentences that were to reveal another world, or our own, will remain unknown.

  The groundskeeper’s shed catches fire a third time. The wind sends the blaze climbing up the nearest trees. One of the flaming branches breaks off, sails toward the entrance, and lands on a pile of papers. General stupidity reigns long enough to allow the flames from the burning pile of papers to lap at the wood paneling and then spread across it in a single burst, encircling the door to the men’s bathroom, with Mr. Allomby inside. We believe the fire can be controlled. The only fear is Mr. Allomby’s, and it’s getting louder. He’s screaming like an animal. I don’t know what kind. Just an animal. He’s pounding so hard on the door it’s about to break. His hands must be bleeding.

  Ledesma stops to think. Considers what orders to give. Gigena walks toward the flames and tries the doorknob. He burns over the perfection of his old scars.

  Those of us who do nothing (let maintenance take care of it, says Gurian) watch Mr. Allomby emerge with clumps of hair between his fingers, smoldering eyebrows, and hands covered in a liquid streaming down his arms from inside his jacket.

  Menéndez appears with a bucket of water. She debates whether to douse Mr. Allomby, relieving his pain, or the wall, preventing the fire from spreading to the rest of the sanatorium.

  Too indecisive for a head nurse. I notice that the hot bricks above Mr. Allomby are about to fall. I jump toward him and grab his legs, pulling him back and winning the admiration of all present, who can sense my bravery among the screams and the smoke.

  Menéndez’s water hits the floor, late. It does not relieve Mr. Allomby’s pain or prevent the fire from consuming the rest of the building, but it does cause Ledesma to slip, land face-first on the floor, and vanish from sight.

  Before long, civility is as scant as breathable air. One patient tears the intravenous drip from his arm and knocks over its metal stand to block anyone who might catch up to him as he sprints for the exit. Gurian takes every shortcut on his way out, a detached look on his face.

  I use the blazing wall to light a cigarette: as studied gestures go, it is by far the best I’ve ever made. I dedicate it to no one but myself. Menéndez is on her haunches, very pale. She can’t see me through the smoke. I call her by her first name, waving the cigarette back and forth. Its red ember is the only thing she can make out.

  She calls me “Doctor” and lets herself be guided by my voice until I take her by the arm, and then by the neck. I lean her forward, tell her to bend her knees. She needs to walk faster. To breathe. To see me in profile and wonder why it took her so long to let herself be found. To stumble over her own feet. To stop trying to hide her surrender.

  I drag her outside, into the fields, into the countryside that surrounds the sanatorium. Her shoes are covered in mud, her apron, too. Why not her face? I push it into the mud to cool her off. I drag her further and further from the sanatorium. For her own good, and so no one can see.

  We’re far away now. Now her neck bears the marks of my fingers. She can breathe the night air. Like all nurses, she believes air is different at night than it is during the day. She is a grateful woman.

  I show her that my shoes have come untied. I can’t walk any further: I might trip over them and fall. With her indestructible love and her skinned knees on the ground, Menéndez reaches for the strings.

  2009 Buenos Aires

  1

  I’m reading the draft of a doctoral dissertation on my life and the things I’ve done. Its author is one Ms. Lynda Carter of Yale University. Lynda informs me in her cover letter that she was born and educated in Baltimore, that she went to fat camp when she was fifteen, and that a patriotic shiver runs through her whenever she hears a song that mentions apple pie. Sharing her name with the star of Wonder Woman makes her feel dirty, too pop culture. She wants to change it so she can stop feeling like her life’s being broadcast from the seventies. “I’m a martyr of homonymy,” she writes.

  What follows is her synopsis of me: I have a hand with four fingers; I lost the fifth. I have a body, which is my own, and a nonstandard head that cost me a lot of money. A museum in Copenhagen offered double that sum to cover me with plastic and put me on display when I die. Two Danish human rights organizations are suing the museum for promoting “a concept of the body as merchandise.” A lesbian collective had a sit-in at the entrance to the museum in solidarity with my right to put a price on my body, as is done with any art object.

  These, according to Ms. Carter, are the threads that make up the fabric of me, my corset, the fame against which my silhouette takes shape. Those are the words she uses. She also says that my contribution to the field of art is remarkably consistent, and that she wouldn’t be surprised if my last name started being used as an adjective in the medium term. She presents this as common sense, with numbers: websites, visitors to the Milan retrospective, sales figures.

  She dedicates eight chapters to my collaborations with Lucio Lavat—more than two-thirds of the text. The final quotation is from a cruel, ridiculous article published recently in the New York Times, in which Lavat is described as an older version of me “with no direction or future in the art market.” Offended, Lynda writes five pages vindicating him, with truth and love on her side.

  I’m suddenly curious to see a recent picture of Lucio. I look online, but the first few pages of search results yield only the same photos from two or three years ago and a few graphics and canvases from his recent gallery shows. (It seems he went back to framed paintings.) I find what I’m looking for on Lynda Carter’s personal webpage, in photos from her last birthday that show Lucio giving her a hug, wearing a party hat and his current face. We still look remarkably alike.

  The dissertation is bound in faux leather. I pause to inspect it before reading on. The text is austere in tone except for the first footnote, in which Lynda passionately argues that I orchestrated my life from the start without a single misstep, and that it—my work, me—represents the culmination (or the end, it isn’t entirely clear) of the project of the historical avant-garde. I soon discover that all the footnotes in Lynda’s dissertation are equally harebrained. According to her academic whim, I am “an artist of the binary,” the “offspring of capitalist culture,” the salvation of art and its living negation.

  The study doesn’t end up in the trash because of an envelope on its back cover, which contains a handwritten letter from Lucio Lavat asking me not to throw it out, to instead consider helping Lynda in any way I can.

  It must have been arduous to write such a long letter by hand.

  2

  Dear Lynda: in chapter two, you say my adolescence was “in keeping with the customs of a middle-class family in Buenos Aires, complete with piano instructors and TV viewing restrictions.” The acuity of the phrase is impressive—it demonstrates your knowledge of the social and cultural panorama of Argentina during those years, which must have cost you hours of mind-numbing calculations. The allusions to soccer and tango, on the other hand, detract from the rest of the chapter. They should be removed.

  Below, you’ll find some additional information.

  As if I have the words KICK ME stamped across my forehead in a Soviet-era font, I turn sixteen with a head full of curls and a body weighing two hundred and sixty-five pounds, one hundred and fifty of which are my true self (at that age, one believes that sort of thing), wrapped in a hundred and fifteen of pure fat. I have a belly that I rest on my knees to avoid falling forward when I sit, and breasts that would be lovely on a normal-sized girl if it weren’t for the little tufts of hair starting to sprout between them. I’m a man, but first and foremost I’m an appalling fatso.

  If the world shames me, if even the most vulgar creatures look good next to me, it’s without my consent. Other fatsos traffic in affection and adopt despicable attitudes: they know how to listen to problems, help with exams, grab afternoon snacks with the girls. I reject and am rejected in turn, withou
t even trying. I talk to no one, am poised to come in last in the sprint out of virginity, and don’t wear T-shirts with logos on them. If someone compares me to a suckling pig, a cow, or a whale, I raise an eyebrow à la Bette Davis and leave my face like that until whoever it is understands: Nothing they say could offend me. Ever.

  Mom and Dad unknowingly underwrite my girth. My day begins with an act of domestic larceny that buys me the two alfajores I eat on my walk to school, a chicken cutlet on a roll with mayonnaise during recess, plus a dozen empanadas and three slices of pizza on my way home, which I eat in different pizzerias to avoid drawing attention to myself. All this passes my lips before lunch, which I eat at home. The volume increases at night. Before bed, I lock myself in the bathroom under the pretense of masturbation, which Mom and Dad respect, and polish off a one-pound tub of dulce de leche. This is how I develop a phobia of being asphyxiated by my own jowls in the night and begin to sleep fitfully, certain I’m alone in this fear.

  I keep pets in my desk drawer. The hamster they bought me when I was six, which only lasted two days, floats in a jar of formaldehyde. Sometimes I give it a nudge with my pencil and watch it spin. Then there’s Wright, the desiccated turtle that the family left out on the balcony under the unrelenting sun. I peer into his box every now and then. His death might just be a lethargic state he recovers from one day, demanding lettuce. (I still have him. Lucio used to joke about showing him at the Guggenheim.) I also have two live parakeets that pop out and perch on my hand whenever I open the drawer. Those are going in the garbage when they die, because a hamster and a turtle are nice souvenirs, but four corpses make a cemetery, and we all have our limits.

  Before I turn eighteen, I get sick and am confined to bed. I see it as a chance to develop some semblance of a social life: I imagine the pounds melting off me from the fever and a circle of classmates standing around me, rooting for my recovery. This is not what happens. I’m diagnosed with measles, a highly contagious and unfairly infantile disease. No one comes to visit. Mom and Dad seize the opportunity to love me without pause.

  By the time I finish treatment, I’m a whole other person: just as fat, but less fascinated by solitude. I stamp the words LOOK AT ME in tiny letters across my forehead, hoping someone might come in close to read them, close enough for me to steal a kiss. I tell my classmates that having fatso boobs deforms your nipples and show them what I mean; I compete with the girls at school over who has the longest eyelashes and correct the uninformed at the top of my lungs.

  The result is a monolithic solitude and an internal monologue that remains uninterrupted until the day another voice—which is mine, but distilled—tells me that sooner or later I’ll need to give life to the monster.

  At that age, my dear Lynda Carter, the superficial struggle of “me against the world” was the first step on a slippery slope to “me against myself.” Fixing this, becoming a friend or accomplice to myself, would set me apart (or so I believed) from the rest of the species. I wanted to be a man without contradictions whose unshakeable balance revealed the inner strife of those around him. But my fat, my aforementioned solitude, and my desire to take part in love came between me and the constancy I was after.

  I tackle the fat skeptically, with diets that last roughly a week, or until I throw in the towel and eat a whole pizza in one sitting. My solitude feels directly connected to my weight. My notion of love is a series of snapshots or jump cuts: I can imagine a first kiss, five minutes of a vacation, an argument easily won—but not the continuity, the boredom, or what to do with the same person, day after day.

  Who could find me attractive, break me in? Who might want to explore the world of obesity with me? And where? School isn’t an option, neither are bars or clubs, and I don’t get invited to parties. I observe the teenage social scene from a seat in the very last row. How does it work? The television offers no examples, except in comedies. I can’t imitate my classmates’ tactics: those only work in the market of the physically acceptable. I don’t want to try out my moves on someone with a short temper and end up facedown in a ditch. Is there a way to hit on someone that doesn’t involve professing or confessing?

  This is what I hear: “If you want sex, you have to show you’re available.” So simple, so practical. What available persona can I invent for myself? TOUCH ME, the new writing on my forehead entreats—followed, in smaller letters, by PLEASE. I’m primed to have sex with the whole country, and I suspect this makes the whole country a little queasy. What other option is there but to pay for it? I shut myself in the bathroom with the classified ads from Clarín, a pencil, and my dulce de leche; two hours later, I’m trembling in the doorway of a building in Recoleta with fifty pesos in my hand. The ad announced services “starting at twenty pesos,” but I want them to fake it with conviction.

  I step into an apartment with leatherette sofas. A man with gray hair invites me to sit, inspects me in silence, and offers me my first cigarette ever, which I don’t smoke. He asks me for the money and returns the thirty extra pesos, patting me on the shoulder. “Take your pick.” He opens a door. Before my options appear, I wonder what my selection criteria should be, what preferences I’m expected to have. When they finally walk out, though, I stop thinking entirely—my arousal paralyzes me, turns me into a primate. They’re four gorgeous men, all legs and pectorals, and I’m one of those clients who make an escort question their life choices. Disgust immediately spreads across three of their faces. Momentarily taken aback by this, I have time to observe the fourth: he is skinny and hunched, and, contrary to expectations, seems eager—at a distance from the others, he steps toward me. His name is Sebastian. With him comes the memory of an old family photo.

  Someone says, “Photo!” I’m there, five years old. Everyone clamors to stand around some meaningful object, a cake, anticipating the best spots in the image’s composition and the family hierarchy. It matters whether you stand next to Grandpa or out on the edge, surrounded by second-rate cousins or near the one who smells bad. The family’s elders form the axis of the photo, followed by a circle of parents who act like they have more money than they do, then one of direct descendants and their newborns, with particular visual emphasis on the babies. Next comes the circle of less-dedicated offspring, the ones who bring home bad grades or get seduced by taxi drivers, then comes the circle of aunts and uncles, then the one of in-laws. Finally, all the way at the edge, the circle of new girlfriends, boyfriends, and that one friend someone invited. They raise their glasses. It’s a historic photo of the whole family, historic because the whole family’s there. Copies must be requested and distributed: the in-laws take care of that. They go to pick up the prints and open the envelope. They expect to find a few questionable hairstyles, but not a neighbor who knows only the party’s hosts and has only ever spoken to them across the fence that divides their lots. But there she is, right there next to Grandpa, a perfect stranger in dark sunglasses raising her glass highest of all.

  Sebastian is like the neighbor in that photo, something between a stain and an unwitting terrorist, as he stands there with the three other men offering themselves to my gaze. It’s not his sickly coloring that makes me choose him, or his small frame, or his bowed legs—it’s the desire I hadn’t expected to see in his eyes.

  The room is at the end of a hallway. Sebastian hangs off me with his hand in my pants, rubbing himself against me so sloppily, so chaotically, that I feel like I’m the one who should be giving him lessons. This is sex, see? That goes here, try not to breathe when you do this, save that until the very end. I make a decision: to behave from now on (in the life that starts now) as if I know it all. By the time I open the door, I already feel like an expert.

  When we finish, Sebastian—his skin surprisingly green for a human being and one knee scraped bright red by the floor—tells me he’d been waiting (he’s a romantic) for his dream client to walk through the door, the one he’d been searching for among all the others, and that his dream client is me. He wants us to be
together: the way I look, there’s no way I’d ever cheat on him. He assumes I’ll fall in love with him within two or three days. He apologizes for having to charge me and offers me my second cigarette ever, which I smoke as he digs around in his bag.

  He turns to me with his fists held out and asks me to choose one. I’m in my new phase of knowing it all, so I choose both. He opens his hands to show me his gift: in each is a slightly rusted metal frog no bigger than a nut. If you press their back legs down with one finger, they spring up in the air and a little bell inside them rings; the high-pitched noise continues when they return to the ground, making them easier to find. Sebastian says they’re toys for blind children.

  His grandfather César has given them to him, hoping he’ll keep them as relics. The idea of a relic is somewhat confusing for an eight-year-old. Sebastian smells a rat. He suspects his family of concealing a hereditary condition that will leave him blind before long. Or that they wish he were blind: maybe the frogs are designed to steal his light.

  He tells no one about this. He believes he can protect himself from the disease by staying away from the frogs and using his eyes as little as possible. He avoids windows. When he goes outside, he makes a visor of his hands. His grandfather César notices the change and suggests he be taken to an optometrist. Once there, he keeps his eyes shut, afraid the doctor’s flashlight will pierce them. He cannot be convinced otherwise and is diagnosed with photophobia.

  Now it’s his family that forbids him from going near windows. He feels more loved and cared for than before. Unused, Sebastian’s eyes and the metal frogs become relics.