by Paul Pen
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2013 Paul Pen
Translation copyright © 2016 Simon Bruni
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as El brillo de las luciérnagas by PLAZA & JANES in Spain in 2013.
Translated from Spanish by Simon Bruni.
First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503933545
ISBN-10: 1503933547
Cover design by David Drummond
For my father, who gave me my first insect book.
For my mother, who turned the veil of her wedding dress into a butterfly net.
CONTENTS
SIX YEARS EARLIER
1
THE PRESENT
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
ELEVEN YEARS EARLIER
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
THE PRESENT
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
FIFTEEN YEARS LATER
37
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
SIX YEARS EARLIER
1
On the night I asked my father the question, my family had been five years in the basement. Five years since the fire. It hadn’t been quite so long for me. I was born just after they went down there.
“Why can’t we go out?”
Dad amended the wall calendar and sat at the table, the large one we had in the main space, where living room, kitchen, and dining room merged.
“What would you want to go out for?” he replied. “All your family’s here.”
Mom lowered her head, her chin touching her chest. I think she also shut her eyes. There wasn’t much light down there, just the bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Sometimes I thought of them as suicide victims, glass bodies hanged and swinging from a cable.
“Come here, son.” Dad pushed his chair back and slapped his knee a couple of times. I walked over to him, dragging my feet. I could feel the cold of the floor through a hole in the heel of my pajamas. I still wore the type with feet. Dad took hold of me under the armpits, lifted me up, and sat me on his lap. As I often did in the early days down in the basement, I held my hand to his face. I liked the feel of his burned skin. From his left eye to the corner of his mouth, the irregular folds of his deformed features were appealing to a child’s touch.
“Stop it,” he complained, lowering my arm. “I want you to look around you. At your family.” My mother, brother, and grandma turned to me. Everyone except my sister, who was looking away.
“And the one who’s not facing you,” said my father, “she’s part of this family, too.” The white mask turned on its neck then, and fixed its eyes on me.
“See them?” Dad asked. “Them, you, and me, we’re all we need. There’s nothing worthwhile up there. Do you remember when your mother splashed you with hot oil when she was cooking?”
It had happened a few weeks earlier, while Mom was making breakfast. The darkness of the basement and the shadows that danced around, distorting reality with each gentle sway of the lightbulbs, made some tasks difficult. The morning she splashed me with oil, I’d gotten between her legs and made her trip. It was actually my fault.
“Do you remember how much the blister hurt? The one you had here?” my father went on. He opened my hand to examine the back of it. He pointed at the exact place where the blister had been. There was no trace of it anymore.
“You’re covered in drool. When’re you going to stop sucking your fingers?” He barely moved his head, but looked at my mother for a second.
“Do you remember how much that little bubble of liquid hurt?” he asked again, pinching the back of my hand. “Well, the world up top is made of bubbles like that. But not little ones like yours.”
He pinched harder with his fingers, making it hurt as if the blister had grown back again.
“Up there, outside, the bubbles are a hundred times bigger. You wouldn’t be able to stand the pain.” He began twisting with his fingers. “Pain that would finish you off as soon as you set foot outside this basement.”
I opened my mouth but said nothing. I was stopped by the pain on the back of my hand, much worse than I’d felt from the blister when it was still there, and the pain in my wrist, which my dad wasn’t aware he was crushing. I remember the snotty sound in my throat, the dampness of my cheeks.
“Stop, please.” It was Mom who said it, her voice barely a whisper. Dad let go. The pain lasted a while longer.
“See how you don’t want to leave this place? If you can barely stand that, what would happen to you out there?” He stroked my wrist and kissed the spot where the blister had been, reddened again by the pinch. “There, there, little soldier, it’s not so bad. Daddy doesn’t want to hurt you, he just wants you to understand. You have to learn that this is the best place you could be. The best place in the world. Do you want to touch my face?”
He moved my hand to his scars and let me stroke them. He knew I liked it. He managed to calm me down. I used to linger on a line of hard hair that sprouted from a fold across his cheek, a place where Dad couldn’t shave. It was like a scar of hair. I liked running my fingertips down it.
“Anyway,” he said, shaking his head and moving my fingers away, “who said you can’t go out?”
My grandmother snatched her hands back from the table. I saw them disappear underneath. Something changed in the posture of my siblings, too. They straightened up, their backs rigid. Mom kept her head bowed.
“The door’s there,” my father continued, gesturing at it. With the other hand he grabbed my head and forced me to look at it. “It’s a few steps away. And it’s open. It’s always been open. Who told you otherwise?”
In silence, he looked around the table.
“Was it your mother? Your brother or sister? Was it her?” He tipped his chin at my sister. “She likes to talk too much. Because I don’t think it would have been Grandma, she knows full well the door’s always open.”
My father grabbed me under the armpits once more to lower me from his knees and leave me standing on the ground. I felt the chill of the tiles.
“Come on.” He gave me a slap on the backside. “Go over to the door, see for yourself.”
I wanted to look at my mother, but Dad held my head and made me look straight ahead.
“Go on, leave if you want.” The second slap on the buttocks was harder, so that I had to take a step forward to stop myself from falling. “Open that door and go. That’s what you want, isn’t it? So do it. Leave and forget about us. We’d rather stay here.”
Behind me I heard a chair scrape along the floor, as if someone was about to get up. But nobody did. I took another
step. The basement smelled of carrot. I loved that smell. It was the smell of night. The only thing that told me it was day or night was the patch of sun that went from one side of the living room floor to the other, and seeped through some crack in the ceiling. The smell of carrot always came when the patch disappeared. If I left the basement I would never have Mom’s carrot soup again. An unexpected feeling of loss stopped me in my tracks. I had an urge to return to Dad’s lap and scratch my fingers down his hair scar.
“Are you still there?” he yelled. “Come on, run to the door. Open it and go. Leave this basement if you’re so keen to know what’s out there.”
I walked toward the door without stopping. I’d never been so close to it. A door loses its meaning if you don’t ever go through it. It becomes a wall. Standing in front of it, I began to suck my fingers. I was sweating. I observed everyone at the table. Mom had looked up again. There was a glisten in her eyes now. Dad was sitting with his legs open, turning in his chair. He raised a hand and waved me good-bye.
Dribble was running down my forearm. I looked at the door again. I took my fingers out of my mouth and reached up to the handle, several inches above my head. The first time I tried to grab it, the spit made my hand slip off. I dried my fingers on my pajama legs and held my breath so I couldn’t smell Mom’s carrot soup, and to fill the void I felt in my stomach with air.
I tried again.
This time I managed to grip the handle.
THE PRESENT
2
There were two windows in the basement. One at the end of the hall and another in the kitchen. On the other side of them there were just bars, and after that, another wall. When I was ten years old, if I pushed hard and put up with the pain in my shoulder, I could stick my arm through two of the bars and, with my middle finger, touch that wall. It was just more concrete. It was the same at both windows. It was as if the basement was nothing more than a box inside another bigger box. Once, I positioned the mirror from the bathroom in the space between the bars and the wall outside. All it reflected was more darkness. Another black ceiling. A box inside another box. Sometimes I would stick my face between the bars to stare at the blackness that for me was the outside world. I liked to do it because the draft of air caressed my face. Air that had a different smell from anything there was in the basement.
“Can’t you hear your sister screaming?” my father said to me the day the baby was born. “We need you in the kitchen. And close the window. Now.”
He opened the door to his room with the key he always kept hanging from his neck. It immediately closed behind me. I blinked several times to moisten my eyes. They were dry from the draft. Then I heard my sister. I must have been totally absorbed by the breeze from outside not to hear those screams. They seemed to come not from the throat, but from the stomach. From somewhere deep inside the body. The door opened again, and this time my father grabbed me by the arm. He dragged me down the hall to the living room.
“Stand there,” he said. “Hold that leg.”
My sister was lying on the table, naked from the waist down. I recognized the sheets from her bed under her. Mom was sitting where her head was, squeezing her daughter’s fist in her hands. My sister was looking down at her crotch through the mask, all white and expressionless. Just three holes showed her eyes and mouth. My brother, clinging on to one of her legs, was also peering at whatever was happening in my sister’s groin. My grandmother was boiling water in two big pots. She held a hand over the stove plates to feel how hot they were. Dad went to her and gave her two towels.
“Do you think they’ll do?” he asked.
My grandmother snatched them from his hands and put one in the largest pot. For a few seconds Dad just stood there, his head down and his hands in the air as if he was still holding some invisible towels.
“Come on, get over here,” he said to me. “Hold her leg.”
I hugged my sister’s bent knee, hiding my head behind it. I didn’t dare look. My sister screamed again.
Then Dad looked at the kitchen window. He rubbed the palms of his hands against his trousers, as if to dry them.
“Son, have you left the other—?”
Before he finished the question he ran out into the hall. My sister screamed once more, though this time she didn’t even open her mouth. The cry escaped through her teeth. She splattered me with her spit.
“Breathe,” said my mother. She was still clasping my sister’s clenched fist. She moved her mouth to the ear that stuck out from behind the mask and began to breathe in a particular way, like when she’d been on the bike for a long time. “Breathe, girl . . . Don’t worry . . . just breathe, like me.”
My sister tried to imitate her. Her knee slipped out of my arms. I had to move away to avoid a blow to the face. She kicked out, hitting the table with her heel. When she managed to shake off my brother, who stepped back, her leg slipping his grasp, she lifted her waist until the top of her belly was facing more toward the wall than the ceiling, and she let it fall onto the table. Her tailbone hit the tabletop like a hammer. A sticky sound escaped from between her legs.
“I can’t breathe with this mask on!” She screamed the words through her teeth, as if the pain and rage were phlegm stuck in her throat that she could spit out. “Get this damn thing off me!”
She continued to writhe, kicking her legs. My brother and I tried to grab hold of them and regain control. I noticed that the sheet was soaking. And slippery. A bitter smell made me retch. My mother, who’d wrapped her whole body around the fist, opened her mouth to cry out when she saw my sister lifting her free hand to the mask. She managed to snag her prosthetic nose.
My father grabbed her wrist. She stretched her fingers out as far as they would go, trying to reach the mask, until Dad’s knuckles went white and my sister’s fingers stopped moving. She screamed again. This time it was a high-pitched scream that hurt my ears. My father dropped my sister’s exhausted hand as if it was something foul. Bones banged against the table.
“Stop being stupid. Your mother gave birth here.” He glanced at me. “And she didn’t make such a fuss. You’re not a little girl anymore. At your age your mother already had two children.”
“I was even younger,” she elaborated. “Twenty-six.”
My sister’s legs relaxed. When she bent them we were able to grab hold of them again. My father stood there and looked her up and down. From feet to head. He smiled. “Does it hurt?”
My brother let out a guttural sound, one of his laughs that sounded like a donkey noise. Dad looked at him, not noticing the slow movement of her arm as my sister lifted it again.
This time she was able to grasp the entire mask. She closed her hand on it. The scrape of the prosthetic material alerted my father. Knowing there wasn’t time to stop her from taking it off, he leapt on me, held my face to his belly so I couldn’t see anything, and forced me to walk backward as he pushed me down the hall. He opened the door to my room and sat me on the bottom bunk.
“You’ve been lucky,” he said to me. Then he turned his head toward the hall that led to the living room and shouted at my sister, “If you want the first thing that your child sees to be your deformed face, then go ahead!” He looked back at me and put his thumbs over my eyes. “But I’ll decide what my son sees.”
When my eyelids closed, a spot of light danced in the darkness inside my head.
Lying facedown on the living room floor, I rolled over so I could reach the patch of sun with my hand. A handful of rays that came in through a crack in the ceiling formed a circle of light no bigger than a coin. Every day it traveled along the floor of the main room from one wall to the other.
“Where does this light come from?” I closed my fingers and grabbed the empty air.
“Ask your father,” Mom replied.
She was holding the newborn in one arm, washing it with the water she’d filled the kitchen sink with. My sister had been shut away in her room for a while, after Mom came out carrying the sewing box.
By the table, my brother was putting the dirty sheet and towels in a pile. Frowning, his tongue poking out, he attempted to line up the corners of one of them. In his hands, aligning the opposite edges of a towel seemed an impossible task. He let out a long groan before throwing it on the floor. He folded his arms.
I opened and closed my hand, caressing the band of orange light, like a jet of water that didn’t make you wet. My skin seemed even whiter and more translucent than it normally did. I could make out all the blue and purple lines of my veins.
“What’s the sun made of?”
I heard my mother take a deep breath in the kitchen. When she did so, the nostril worst affected by the fire made a strange whistling sound. Then she turned around and looked at me. “This is your nephew,” she said.
The baby was crying in her arms. The palm of my hand hadn’t even warmed up before the fading ray, a sliver of dust, disappeared. Like a butterfly in the fingers of an unpracticed collector. Pushing myself up with my arms as if I was doing a push-up, I stood and went over to my mother. She smiled, her burned cheek tugging the flesh and making her left eye close, as it always did. She stretched out her arms to hold the baby near me.
“I won’t drop him, will I?”
Mom looked at my brother, who was watching us from the table. “I don’t think so,” she replied. “Hold out your arms.”
I did. The baby, wrapped in a dry towel, was tightening and relaxing his lips. His tiny nostrils expanded and contracted, for the first time breathing in the air of the basement that would be his world. He had his eyes closed, very tightly. Under him, my arms trembled. “I won’t drop him, will I?” I repeated.
Mom supported the baby with one arm and with the other she made me bend my elbow, forming a right angle.
I held myself in that position as still as a stick insect mimicking a twig. My mother expertly maneuvered the baby until he was resting on the palms of my hands. She edged him toward the quivering cradle that was formed by my arms. “I don’t want to drop him,” I insisted.