Comemadre

by Roque Larraquy

I return home with a new awareness of sex and a strong desire to have more of it. I slip my gift into my desk and discover that mechanical objects, at rest, frighten the parakeets.

  We get together at night, in his apartment. Sebastian avoids going out during the day, but when he does, he always wears dark glasses. He lives in an office building from the seventies with doors that stay open until late in the evening, fluorescent lighting—the only kind that doesn’t hurt him—and a Formica reception desk manned by a world-weary old-timer who smokes with his head resting against a plush directory board where the names of businesses are spelled out in Bakelite.

  Sebastian isn’t interested in high culture. To his mind, it isn’t particularly elevated, or it’s elevated by a pair of stilettos. He has a noncommittal adjective for everything I show him, and my enthusiasm for initiating him into my world is dampened until some object more to his taste, something figurative, makes him smile.

  I invite him to my parents’ house and introduce him as a friend; in a momentary lapse of judgment, we lock ourselves in the bathroom. My parents say nothing about the episode, but Mom interrupts breakfast a week later, pointing a finger at me.

  “I know what you do in there, with your dulce de leche.”

  The best advice I can offer, Lynda, for having a nice dinner with friends, is to avoid any reference to how much your relationship with your working-class lover, the one you met a week earlier in an unmentionable place, has changed the way you see the world. There’s no need for it.

  I fall in love with Sebastian in three days, just as he predicted, but love turns my head as soft as an old lady’s slipper, and I demand that he quit his job and find something more hygienic. I tell him that monogamy, like all artificial things, is absolutely necessary because man invents only what he needs. My aphorism leaves him speechless.

  He’s with me because he believes I could never cheat on him, but he doesn’t love me (he repeats: he doesn’t love me) because I’m capable of saying things like what I just said. He’s terribly sad. If I don’t accept the asymmetries of the relationship, if I try to recalibrate them, we’re through. I yield to his threat. But while I keep my mouth shut and speculate on his changing, he’s already anticipating the day when I fall out of love.

  Every couple of days we have a cigarette down in the building’s lobby, listening to the ancient receptionist talk about the future with little creativity and even less interest. I give Sebastian a drawing of the man’s ear. He could have eventually sold it for a good price, but he’s disorganized and loses it, along with the portraits I do of him when I go back to being a genius, or half of one, just for him.

  In her dissertation, Lynda Carter uses comparison tables and data about cranial mass to explain the minutiae of my genius.

  I hand Mom the teacher’s note. Dear Mrs. Mom, please be so kind as to come in for a conversation about your son’s behavior. My behavior, according to the standard parameters for six-year-old children, is very good. I’m a delight. Women pinch my cheeks.

  Mom goes to the meeting ready to raise hell. She brings me with her so I can see how much she loves me. My teacher is direct: she accuses my mother of doing my drawing homework. A very loving gesture, she explains, but also an invitation to laziness. But Mom never does my homework, ever. We need to clear up the misunderstanding.

  My teacher opens her desk drawer and takes out my notebook. She says that children my age draw a certain way: simple, one-dimensional pictures marked by exaggeration and arbitrary lines. She is convinced she’s caught us in a lie, and she underscores this after her little speech by pulling a face that says “give up” as she opens my notebook and holds up my latest drawing. It’s a hand, done in pencil.

  Now Mom is on my teacher’s side and the two of them wait, in sisterly silence, for an explanation. I don’t understand. I ask them why they don’t like it. Mom gets flustered. My teacher asks, “Who drew that for you?” I ask for a pencil and within three minutes have repeated the drawing on another sheet of paper.

  The child prodigy is a repulsive creature. It can be measured according to the degree of its anomaly, the fence around its isolation: its so-called talent.

  They let me keep the electrodes after each round of tests. I collect them, setting one on top of another in a corner of my room until they form a tall stack. Around the same time I realize how useless, boring, and stupidly tragic the situation is, the specialists determine that the right hemisphere of my brain is more active than the left and that I have exceptionally developed visual-spatial perception, hence my talent for drawing.

  A specialist in a Lacoste shirt says, “The best thing for you, kid, will be learning not to mix the wheat up with the chaff. Real geniuses aren’t pedantic. No playing tricks on your classmates or embarrassing your teachers. Remember, only half of you is a genius—the right half. Keep the left half humble.”

  Aside from this clearly demarcated perfection and some talent for written and oral expression, my persona is rather plebeian: I have trouble with math and staying focused. Over the course of three months, I am asked to draw hands, cylinders (I make them transparent, to show off the ant I trap inside), and the complete musculature of the human body, which I infer through the skin. There’s something covert about the tests; my teacher, the principal, and my parents shroud them in silence. I don’t think a six-year-old is prepared for a silence like that. I’m certainly not.

  I don’t understand what’s going on in my head and think I might have a tumor. The specialists ask me to draw it. This is what I make: my face, with an open door in the middle of my forehead. Behind the door is a brain made of hexagonal cells, like a honeycomb, with a bee feeding its larvae in each. “Why did you draw yourself smiling?” they ask. I’m not the one smiling, I explain, it’s the cancer. I point out that they haven’t seen the whole drawing yet. If you hold the paper up to the light, the recto and verso form a single image. On the back I’ve drawn a cross section of the face with the cerebral beehive exposed in full: with their tiny legs, two bees turn a set of minuscule pulleys connected to the corners of my mouth by a cord. With that cord, they hoist my smile.

  I need to be made useful. The school principal thinks it would be best to present me to the public on prime-time news. The specialists think the idea is completely ridiculous, unless of course my parents want to turn me into a circus monkey and really screw up my head. Instead, they propose taking me on tour to do more intensive studies with the help of an “international team of scientists.” Mom is in favor of this option if that’s what I want, a position Dad considers too democratic. He thinks we should combine the proposals and have a news program follow the tour, which he says will open doors for me; a decision like that can’t be left to a six-year-old kid.

  Silvio Soldán interviews me before my first “international” session. He calls me a “shining young example for the New Argentina.” Mom, Dad, and the specialists make gestures at me from behind the cameras, but Soldán is kneeling at my level and I can barely see them; blurry like that, they’re a sample of the average Argentinean family watching me live on Channel Nine. I think, no one likes a child prodigy in a Dior vest.

  In the fourth session, they pit me against an autistic boy from Canada who does what I do but with a vacant look in his eyes and more snot. His talent glows brighter against this backdrop of idiocy. He jerks around like he’s trying to shake off canary feathers and can reproduce anything that’s put in front of him with photographic precision.

  They have us sit on stage, one behind the other, facing Mantegna’s famous Lamentation of Christ. They explain to me that I’m supposed to look over the other boy’s shoulder and draw exactly what he draws; since he never makes mistakes (it’s been proven, they say), the hope is that my copy of his copy will be just as perfect in perspective and detail as the original, without adulteration.

  The specialist in the Lacoste shirt pulls me to the side and says, “When you realize you can’t handle a situation, kid, you’ll go from zero to sixty,
from white to black, from stupid to feeling as lucid as if you’d just done a line of cocaine. When that happens, try to find a middle ground.”

  Of all my options for defeating the Canadian, the sexual one stands out. Ten minutes later, I get the chance I’ve been waiting for. The boy wants to use the toilet. They can tell because he has his hand in his pants and is rubbing himself furiously. I offer to take him.

  The man in the Lacoste shirt says, “Be careful with him, kid. Open the door for him, wait for him to take a piss, wash and dry his hands, and walk him back. We’d appreciate it.”

  I walk the boy to the bathroom, close myself in with him, and make him lower his pants. Then I hold his head against the wall with one hand as I stick a finger up his ass. When he returns to the stage, he’s a different child: a little less autistic and a lot less talented. His Christ deteriorates from the waist down, one weak stroke after another; by the time he gets to the feet, his drawing is completely inadmissible—in other words, like something a normal child would produce. They let him finish, and he’s taken away by his parents. The specialists put my drawing, the Canadian’s drawing, and the Mantegna on a podium. Soldán turns to the camera and says, “Argentina wins.”

  We say good-bye to the specialists and the cameras before we leave. Dad wants to frame my copy of the Mantegna. Mom doesn’t, and she offers solid arguments: it wouldn’t go with the rest of our pictures, and we’re not religious. The dispute is resolved by the news that my drawing has disappeared from the podium. No one sees it again until I meet Lucio Lavat.

  At first I find the thought of being a prodigy seductive. Later, in a straightforward and age-appropriate way, I understand there’s no such thing as a lasting prodigy. How long does it take a miracle, a Biblical plague, to become routine? How much manna? Children last, but not child prodigies. My drawings become increasingly intricate and predictable. The first to go is Soldán, because there’s no arc to the story. Am I suddenly going to start drawing better? Am I going to lose my mind? No. He says good-bye over the phone, thanks me, and wishes me a bright future. There’s no turning back for the specialists; I’m like a child forced into piano lessons. We slide into boredom together.

  The electrodes are back on my head, thorax, and hands. It’s cold on the stage (it’s just a platform, but it feels huge to me), and I’m embarrassed to be up there half-naked. The man in the Lacoste shirt says, “This is the last time we’ll do this, kid. Think of it as the crowning moment of our attempt to insert you into a society that doesn’t tolerate difference.”

  An invitation to enroll in a program for gifted youth arrives from Canada, but it’s only a partial scholarship. An agency offers me a reasonable sum to illustrate an advertisement for electric razors, and Dad turns them down. He leans forward and says, “It’s time for you to start acting like a normal boy again, don’t you think?” I change schools the following year. “If you don’t mention any of this, you’ll make lots of friends,” says Mom. They’re not big on subtlety.

  The man in the Lacoste shirt comes to visit. “You’ve had some pretty amazing experiences, kid. But you still haven’t had the most amazing one of all: a happy childhood. Over time you’ll turn into a regular little boy, you’ll see. Everyone’s got their minds on their own asses, and it might get annoying if yours seems cleaner. Follow?”

  There is, apparently, a direct correlation between sadness and calcium loss. Most children aren’t aware of the connection, but if they give in to the darkness, it’ll leave their mouths empty. Their teeth loosen and their gums recede until a presumably innocuous bite into a peach leaves them with a gap and they stop smiling, and then the sadness builds, and it’s all downhill from there. My baby teeth fall out all at once, and it takes years for my permanent teeth to come in. They make me purees. Baby food. My bones grow fragile: if someone touches me, I turn to dust. I forget what a sandwich is. Personhood is being able to chew; while I wait for my turn to be a person, they send me to piano lessons, but I’m entirely mediocre. Maybe I’m using the wrong half.

  They give me pills to stimulate my appetite. My permanent teeth come in, breaking through my gums. I get fat from the inside out. For the first few months, the fat settles unevenly: I’m pitiful from the knees down and a pig from the knees up. But I can chew.

  I keep eating, and by the time I’m eighteen there’s enough room in me for four people and for the monster I plan to make, but not for being in love. That old, sturdy piece of furniture won’t fit through the door.

  Sebastian takes the story of my childhood lightly: I’m selling a tragedy, but he buys a vaudeville. He can’t stop laughing. I tell the story twice, but his reaction doesn’t change.

  My parents give me a trip to Mendoza as a gift, and as an opportunity to think about my academic future at a summery pace. I increase the modest spending money they provide by 40 percent with funds stolen directly from their wallets on three separate occasions. As a result, the maid is nearly fired. I invite Sebastian along to see the sights and sample more rural modes of prostitution.

  People with long fingers touch things as if they were leaving a trail of slime on them. Sebastian, too. When he sees in my face that I still love him, he softly pushes me away with fingers like that. It happens two or three times during the trip. He likes the first place we see, a two-star hotel. Before falling asleep, he asks me never to get rid of the metal frogs. The next day he wakes me with the news that we’ve signed up for a bicycle race.

  Sebastian is at the five-hundred-meter mark and is taking a curve. I’ve made it one hundred meters. I’m comforted by the fact that he can’t see my failure, the way I have to extract the bike from my ass.

  I spend a while observing the kind of people who attend these events. Their clothes. The faces of the ones who’ve bet that I’ll be the first to give up.

  The winning cyclists cross the finish line. There are the girls hanging from their necks and the mothers, but the really moving scenes arrive with the moral victors, the ones who wanted to have a positive experience, defying their age or the loss of a leg. Sebastian isn’t among them: he doesn’t reach the finish line, or return to the hotel.

  I take a bus back to Buenos Aires ahead of schedule, without telling anyone. The receptionist is listening to the replay of a soccer game on a run-down radio and hands over the keys without looking at me. The electricity in Sebastian’s apartment has been shut off. There’s barely anything of his there—a few shirts.

  I wait there for ten days, until the end of my vacation. I return the keys to the receptionist and go back to my parents, who aren’t surprised by my lack of a tan or my lies about having a lovely time, but are discreet about it.

  I go back a couple times to ask about him, but there’s no news. The last time, the receptionist points to the plush directory board: the apartment is now a weight-loss center.

  Between the sadness of going back to that place and the burden of nostalgia, I can conceive of the discipline required for a diet. I ask my parents for the money and bring them electronic printouts from the scale, logging each pound I lose. The first forty-five come off in three months. Teenagers’ bodies are reliable that way: their skin is still elastic, and their liver and kidneys aren’t ruined yet, so all it takes is a systematic and sustained change of diet to clear up their acne and perk up their breasts. Add in a few trips to the gym, and the possibility of a torso even begins to emerge.

  I enroll in fine arts to learn technical vocabulary, get a sense of the market, and give myself a few easy wins. When I lose another fifteen pounds, my classmates recognize me as that sort-of child prodigy from television and suddenly understand why I ace my classes and dazzle my professors so easily. They approach me, trying to figure out what I can do for them, and eventually find me—a hundred pounds lighter now—attractive.

  In those days, Lynda, I believed each of my fingers represented a quantifiable amount of me.

  3

  You should remove the phrase “seed of his future talent” and the eight p
ages about the scandal with Damien Hirst. They’re awkward, both for me personally and for the dissertation.

  A Big Mac doesn’t taste the same in Beijing as it does in Toronto or Lisbon, but travelers believe in a universal flavor that takes them home in a single bite: they eat McDonald’s name-first. That’s what I want for myself. At twenty-two, on a government fellowship to study art, I realize that the doors my father was talking about aren’t found in minor galleries or by word of mouth; they aren’t in competitions or fellowships: they’re in having a name. My plan is to stamp mine on the forehead of a mainstream audience overlooked by the art world, to make it grow inward from the margin until it reaches the real consumers at their doorsteps. Everyone debates the ethics of images: matrons clucking over the crassness of the latest ass on the cover of some magazine, sports fans scrutinizing the photo of a foul to justify a free kick, children cracking open a medical textbook in search of deformities. My first piece needs to make people cringe, to be in poor taste. A Nazi or anti-Nazi performance in which an actual Jew is beaten. The genital mutilation of an African woman projected in an infinite loop on the façade of a public hospital.

  That soft voice, more lucid than my own, tells me the time has come to give life to the monster.

  They tell me about him over dinner one night. All the necessary elements are there: he is a petite child, lovely, with two heads. The first grows normally, from his neck. The second hangs languid behind: it has no eyes or nose, but it does have a mouth—small and well formed, with premature teeth. It can’t be removed because the two heads share a brain, or because the boy has two brains, or because he is two boys. No one knows for sure.

  His mother, cowardly or prescient, died in childbirth. That was two weeks ago, and the child oozes health. His father shows him off on news programs and morning shows as irrefutable proof of God’s love. Someone adds that children are tying their heads together in schoolyards across the country and explains the rules of the game to me.