by María Ospina
OCTOBER 11, 2004
Last night, as I touched a body free of welts, I looked over the man’s shoulder and saw a tiny black dot standing out against the white weave of the comforter. A flea, I thought, as my coexistence with those gluttons had trained me to do. I interrupted my hand’s journey along its sinewy path to touch the dot, convinced that a flea couldn’t possibly just be sitting there, relaxed, watching us roll around in bed. I touched it and it gave a little hop, as if it didn’t want to lose its view of the giants in front of it. A flea! I shouted as the man sighed. I grabbed it as hard as I could between my thumb and forefinger and got up, abandoning the naked man, and set about slowly drowning it under the bathroom faucet, making sure that it slid down the slimy, wet pipes on its way to a distant septic fate. I wanted the drain to feel like a terrifying void. I wanted that pest to weep and let out little panicked cries as it plummeted downward. I wanted it to vanish forever from the land of the living. You ruined my night, vile flea, I said and returned to bed with a weary sigh. K. told me that he hoped I wouldn’t act the way I did when a protozoan set up shop in my intestines on my trip to Peru, then turned to face the wall. I fell asleep.
DECEMBER 9, 2004
The fleas’ return to my life has been gradual but efficient. Last week I found two bites on my ankle, right next to one another, as if the flea had sucked a little blood, walked the width of a few hairs, and realized it needed some more before its nap. Like when you fill up on delicious pork rinds but reach for another, anyway. I ignored these bites so I didn’t have to think about September’s fleas. But today, as I put on the blue robe I read in, like the unemployed woman I am (it’s a shame I’m not more busty or bigger around the ass and hips to fill out my fantasy of matronhood, and that the only one who watches me through my window is the ailing rooster in my neighbor’s yard), I discovered a monumental welt on my left leg. I think they’re coming back, little by little, to torture me. The return of the repressed, motivated by hemoglobin. Less metaphysical, more carnal. What am I going to do to run them off?
DECEMBER 10, 2004
The flea banquet continues. Today I counted nineteen bites: crease of the knee, elbow, other hidden corners. K. said to me, “I think you’re pregnant and the father’s a flea.” Definitely possible.
DECEMBER 17, 2004
Inventory (flea bites over the past three days)
DECEMBER 21, 2004
Bouquets of white rue fill my room. My mattress smells like eucalyptus, and I do, too, because I douse myself (especially my boobs) with the oil every night. I’m battling the fleas on olfactory terrain. But I know that the slightest lapse could rouse them again. I leave for a while, hoping they’ll die of starvation once and for all, or that in a final act of desperation they’ll line up to jump from my balcony in a mass suicide.
JANUARY 6, 2005
They must have taken advantage of my absence to reproduce. Strict adherence to my embargo of movie theaters was clearly not enough. The last time I went to see a film in Teusaquillo I was scratching for weeks. How many movies have I missed? But now I’m waking up again with bites behind my knees, their favorite spot to feast on. And one right next to the fold of my breast. I submit my body to another observation period to see if more appear. My experience with them has been so transformative that now, when I walk around downtown and fantasize about leaving the country and coming back with money, or moving to a new spot and having some plants to call my own—whenever my mind drifts in that direction, I shudder to think about having to wage a grisly war on fleas in my future new home. And so my plans crumble and I stop thinking about tomorrow.
JANUARY 7, 2005
Gustavo confessed to me over chat today that he’s part of the conspiracy.
G:
this is a wurning: if u dont pey the rensom we wil haf to proseed with the exacushun of ur frend k. sined: the kiler fleas
ME:
But I spent all my money on pesticide!
Have mercy!
G:
no mersi
fleas haf human rites to
o and one mor thing
u mite want to change ur diet ur blud is kinda bland
ME:
but you bit my knees just last night and eight times on one arm
that’s proof that you like my blood
and besides i’ve been eating a lot of chocolate lately
G:
theres jus nothing beter arownd
ME:
oh
well go bite someone else then
there’s a dog and a fat eight-year-old downstairs from me
G:
yuk! wut do u tak us for?
ME:
there are other women in the building
G:
but ur the tastyest
ME:
No! Have mercy
G:
tonite
we wil karry out a komando operashun
ME:
Oh no
please, no!
G:
we r going to kil u
ME:
noooooo pretty please
G:
luv u to peeces
ME:
listen there are dogs who need me
and i’m not interested in your kind of love
G:
ooooooooooo
u made us cri
we get it
okay then its bin a pleshur
we fleas haf our pride to
ME:
good
Take your pride for a long walk off a short pier and leave me alone
G:
fine ofer ur flesh to other bists see if we kare
ME:
I already have
And it’s much more pleasant
than the itch from your kind of love
G:
u wont heer from us agen
u mak us cri
ME:
do you cry tears of blood?
G:
bitursweet and angwished
JANUARY 20, 2005
While my battle against the hatchlings that managed to survive my absence rages on, new animal company arrives. This time, though, I welcome it. According to my childhood superstitions, the spiders visiting my home bring good luck. I greet them from a distance using the soft voice of someone talking to a puppy and desperately hope they’ll stay a long time. One visited me in the shower a few days ago, but in the morning I found it dead next to the shampoo and worried it might be a bad omen. Today another one came to visit me next to my comb (what a lucky woman I am, I thought in a moment of egomania), and I tried to save it from the cleaning lady. Explaining the situation, I pushed it gently away from the sink toward the corner where I hoped the woman wouldn’t see it and squish it beneath her antibacterial iron fist. She’s in there now, I can hear the plaf plaf of her rag, and I wonder if the spider managed to camouflage itself or curl up in a little ball, if it was able to protect itself from the bleach and scrub brush, guaranteeing me all the luck that the one who drowned in the shower, may she rest in peace, could not.
FEBRUARY 16, 2005
A ruthless fumigation brought an end to the infestation a couple of weeks ago (to the delight of my lacerated flesh). But then yesterday a cockroach with spots like a leopard appeared in my desk drawer. It had apparently been living there among the photocopies and receipts. And the fleas. With eternal calm, K. picked it up and tossed it out the window so it could invade the apartment on the first floor (I guess it’s not so bad if it helps them out with their food a little, everyone in that place is morbidly obese). There’s only one flea left (at least, I hope so). It’s expiring on the parquet floor and I let it move its legs slowly, wanting to witness the end of its bloodline in real time. You’re just like your ancestors, horrid flea. That’s something my mother taught me when I was very little: we could all still die from the bubonic plague.
FEBRUARY 17, 2005
I sit down to fill out a tax form, and when the bureaucr
ats ask me, “Do you have children or other dependents?” I get flustered because there’s no space there to explain that I feed fleas, cockroaches, spiders, neurochemical deficiencies, and Other. And that all this should qualify me for an exemption.
MARCH 1, 2005
All signs of the bites are gone. In order to avoid future infestations, I’m thinking of catching the libertine cat that makes his rounds atop the walls in the neighborhood and always eyes the neighbor’s rooster with a touch of rage. Does he belong to someone? Fleas like the warm nooks and crannies of other animals even more than they like women. The cat would save me from new batches of fleas; he’d be the one to adopt them as dependents. And I’m sure he’d bear the whole thing with more dignity. I’d take good care of him, make him beef broth and lavish him with attention, and the circle of dependencies that captivate and hold us all would begin to close.
COLLATERAL BEAUTY
So I’m left to pick up the hints, the little symbols of your devotion.
Antony and the Johnsons, “Fistful of Love”
“Keep an eye out for unexpected opportunities.” That was the horoscope’s prediction for Estefanía one August Saturday as she waited in the empty clinic. There was an article in the same magazine titled “The Universe Is Slowly Dying,” which seemed both obvious and unsettling, so she refused to read it. As she sat behind the counter, sticking a fat needle she’d found in the drawer of scalpels and suturing instruments into the raised skin of a blister on her foot, Estefanía wondered if the message, the one about opportunities, foretold her trip to New York. Could be, though she’d always distrusted horoscopes as an act of rebellion against her mother, who was obsessed with magazine astrology. As she put her shoe back on, she immediately regretted getting carried away by the clear morning and leaving the house without socks. After completing the operation, she passed a rag across the counter, a glass display case that housed tiny shoes, hats, and other doll accessories, together with stuffed animals that had recently come out of surgery and were waiting in plastic bags to be claimed by their owners. It was almost always girls and women who came into the clinic, and their visits were getting less frequent.
She pulled the six antique dolls from their bags, getting them ready for the elegant old woman who had hospitalized them earlier that week, requesting different surgeries for each. Even naked, they exuded a dignity sculpted by the decades; even without their starched dresses made of dupioni, lamé, and lace, without the velvet or linen shoes they arrived in, they bore their seams and joints with relative vitality and pride.
“I’ve invited my friends to a special tea. They’re going to bring their childhood dolls. They’ve nearly all saved and preserved them. Since we’re all so old now, it’s going to be an antique show.”
That’s what the woman had said to her as she unpacked the box of injured dolls. Estefanía imagined a banquet of well-coiffed and heavily perfumed women, expanding their spongy flesh with succulent pastries in a grand dining room while the eternal girls with their firm little bodies avoided their gazes from tiny chairs. Maybe each woman would tell the story of her doll, the details of how it came into her life and how long her faith had lasted—how long she’d believed her doll had a soul. Maybe the pitch and rhythm of the women’s speech would change when they talked about them, and the green of their childhood voices would break through the parch of their old throats for a moment. And there the dolls would sit, indifferent to their reveries.
“You have a treasure here, ma’am. And I know about these things, I grew up in this clinic and I’ve seen it all.”
In the thick intake book, an archive of the past fifteen years of doll diagnoses and treatments, Estefanía wrote down symptoms as the woman described them to her. Her handwriting seemed clumsy and profane beside the neat letters of her grandfather and her mother, who had been in charge of the registry before her.
“Leonor, who belonged to my cousin Leonor, needs to have her face redone because her eyes and lips have faded. I do store them carefully, you know, hidden away so no one touches them. Under my bed, wrapped in tissue paper. Beatriz, this one with the jet-black hair, her arm is loose. She might need to have her rubber replaced where it’s torn. Ingrid, well, she’s not as old as the others, but she belonged to my daughter’s German friend. I made the mistake of giving her to my granddaughters for a little while, and look at her hair now, all uneven because they got it in their heads to cut it, just look at this mess. Awful. She’ll need a hair transplant. And please, something of quality.”
“Don’t worry, I have the perfect thing. We have a bit of the hair my grandfather imported from France years ago, when they still made it. It’s a pretty color, light just like this.”
“Perfect. I’d like it long, to her shoulders. Don’t worry about the cost, as long as it goes with her skin tone. And María Inés, look at this beauty, she’s from England, turn of the century, look at this little hook she has in her back, just look, she nods yes or no when you pull it. Look, look, she’s saying ‘No, no, no!’”
Estefanía imitated the woman’s peal of laughter. It had been a long time since she’d been able to laugh like that, about those prosaic things that make people howl as if there were some unforgettable joke hidden under the surface.
“Isn’t she divine? This finger is broken, it needs to be plastered and refinished. Her nails should be repainted too. And look at Shirley Temple. My father gave her to me back when we lived in England and went to see her in a movie, one of the first ones she did as a little girl. Of course, how would you know anything about Shirley Temple? She was a child actress, a big movie star in the thirties. Adorable, with golden curls just like this one here. When she became famous they made dolls of her. They were all the rage. I’ll never forget the day I opened the white box she came in. I was so excited I almost died. This one is a real collector’s item. She needs to have her leg fixed, it started turning the wrong way. I’ll bet it was the girls, they must have taken her out of the box without permission.”
The old woman grabbed the doll’s leg and forced it back to center.
“And this Arabian doll, or, well, I’m not sure if she’s Gypsy or Arab, but she’s a gem, just look how fine she is. She’s from France. She belonged to my friend Lucia, who lived in Vienna for a while. She was meant to have some strange name, Lucia told it to me on her deathbed, but it was impossible to remember so I baptized her Lucy. She told me she returned from Europe by ship, and when she reached the Magdalena River, she stood on deck with the doll in her arms so she could see the whole view. This was back when the Magdalena was a different river, a real beauty. Before it turned into a shallow sewer. So as you can imagine, Lucy has seen it all. The Seine’s cupolas and the monkeys and deer along the Madgalena. An absolute gem. You’ll need to fix her toes, too, they’re all cracked. And to straighten this eye, it wanders to the side.”
Estefanía had promised to have them all fixed up by Saturday at noon so they could attend their tea that Monday.
“I’m so glad I finally managed to come in. I’ve been passing by this place for more than a year and thinking I absolutely needed to, but I’m only just getting around to it. I finally made it out to take care of my friends. I call them that, you see, my friends, because just imagine how long we’ve lived together. I saved more than a few of these friends from the ones with flesh and bones who had no idea what to do with them and nearly left them to the maids.”
As she waited for the owner of the most distinguished specimens to have passed through the Reyes Family Doll Clinic since Barbie and other products made in China flooded the market, Estefanía imagined being the housekeeper of a woman like Doña Cecilia. She’d have a light-blue uniform and a starched apron and might feel embarrassed about wearing them out in the street. She would spy on the meals served in the fine lady’s dining room through a little window in the kitchen door. When the leftovers from the afternoon tea came back in, decimated, she’d polish them off. Maybe she’d even sneak a pastry or two before the
y made their way to the grand table. Then she tried to imagine, but could not, what it would be like to have that job in New York, where an upper-class woman like Cecilia would have more money and who knows what customs. Maybe the same ones. She remembered the horoscope she’d read earlier. It might have been predicting an imminent trip to New York. Maybe it was foretelling the arrival of a buyer for the clinic’s storefront. Or that she would get her visa. She wanted to believe that all this radiated from the faint lettering of a magazine horoscope.
Estefanía had promised her cousin Shirley they would spend that Halloween together in New York. She’d said it less out of conviction than desire. It would be their first Halloween together since Shirley moved there two years ago, after finally receiving the green card her father had applied for a decade earlier. Estefanía had announced that she’d already figured out her costume for the party. She was going to be a stray dog. She’d wear her hair all dirty and tease knots into her curls so it looked matted.
“I’m going to hang a sign that says ‘Hi, I’m a stray dog’ around my neck.”
Shirley had told her that there weren’t any stray dogs in New York. That no one would understand her costume. That she would have to explain too much, and that people would think she was crazy. That she should pick something less depressing.
“Hi, Aunt Martica. I opened the clinic early today because there’s a customer coming to pick up an order. It’s the craziest thing, I forgot to tell you, a collection of antique dolls. A real treasure. My grandfather would have died of excitement to see them restored. So yeah, I close up at noon today. I’d be happy to go with you if you come get me. I can’t wait to see your new look.”