by María Ospina
Your aunt said you might visit New York soon. When you do, I’ll take you out for tea and we’ll have some delicious pastries filled with peaches from a distant island in the Japanese archipelago. And talk about any old thing. I’ll send you photos soon of these contemplative girls in their new home.
Write to me. About whatever you like, anything will do. Of late, my nights consist of trying to keep my thoughts at bay—they’re like search dogs with a deafening bark. Thank you, your majesty. Warmly, A.
Estefanía reread the message. She wished it had been written by hand. Her aunt had told her that Antonio was extremely shy, one of those men whose silences reveal more than what the rest of us know. Estefanía thought of a wild horse running across the plains of Asia, of those four-thousand-year-old pines that still grow on the hills of the Middle East. Antonio must be something like that.
The liquidation of the Reyes Family Doll Clinic lasted four weeks. The space sold quickly and for a good profit. A developer was buying up the whole block to build luxury apartment buildings like the ones going up all over Chapinero. Juvenal decided to drive a relative’s taxi while he waited for a job with one of Martica’s clients to come through. Estefanía took the things she wanted to save: a couple of paintings of European dolls sitting in chairs in a park in spring, which her mother had hung in the operating room; the collection of miniature hats for sale in the counter display; the business’s sign and accounting books; dolls that were left over after the liquidation; Don Quixote. Some pieces of furniture and other remnants were donated to a school for the blind a few blocks away. The rest went to the garbage pickers. When Estefanía locked up for the last time before turning the shop over to its new owners, it occurred to her that one day she’d come back from New York and not recognize the dirty, rundown corner of her childhood, and she would feel an emptiness.
In the airplane headed to New York, as she flipped through the blank pages of the notebook Martica had given her for jotting down the contacts and friends she would make in her new life, Estefanía wondered again what might be behind Antonio’s long silence. It had been weeks. He’d never answered the letter she sent him with the details of her trip, in which she repeated her interest in their Japanese tea and promised to bring him a sweet mango so he could experience for the first time what it was to drink the fruit’s pulpy juice from a tear in its skin. Or the next one, in which she’d copied the first and asked if he’d received it. Or her last one, written just days before she arrived at her cousin Shirley’s apartment in Queens. Had Antonio been scandalized by the image of a mouth sucking on a mango? Maybe it had stirred him in his strict celibacy. Had he been disappointed by the bourgeoise dolls, which Estefanía sensed were hardly worthy of an altar? Or maybe he’d had an accident. In his last letter, Antonio had mentioned a pain in his chest, terrible fatigue, and shortness of breath. That’s why she was bringing him a mango. Martica always said that nothing kept a heart healthy like a mango.
The mango slowly rotted in Shirley’s refrigerator. A few days after throwing it out, Estefanía went looking for the address Antonio had given her in one of his first emails. She took the Manhattan-bound subway Shirley had told her to and got off at Twenty-Third Street and Park Avenue. She walked along Twenty-Third until she reached Second Avenue, then headed north to Twenty-Fifth. She passed a Laundromat, an Irish pub, the front steps of apartment buildings, and a storefront that announced itself as a Christian Science Library, but she didn’t see a church anywhere. The building marked 228 was a pink multistory residence. Estefanía walked around the neighborhood looking for a church, but the only one she found was a few blocks away and had a sign out front that read, “FOR SALE. Immediate Occupancy.”
She spent the next week visiting churches in Manhattan. She’d enter just as mass was ending, study the altar, and ask each priest if he knew Antonio Pesoa. The first churches were near the address he’d given her. But as she started visiting others further from the neighborhood, she realized she was going to spend the winter looking for him. And for the dolls.
On Halloween, Estefanía dressed up as a stray dog to go to the party Shirley had invited her to. A few gringos asked her to explain her costume, and she pointed to the sign hanging from her neck, which read, “Hello, I am a street dog (girl)” in her shiny new English.
Estefanía’s ecclesiastical investigation came to an abrupt end in January, when Martica told her on one of their daily phone calls that she’d gotten a package from New York that had been sent to the clinic and then forwarded to her. Inside was a box wrapped in paper with drawings of monsters and Japanese characters on it, and a letter she read out loud.
Dear Estefanía:
I’m writing to let you know that Antonio Pesoa died at the end of September. As the friend in charge of distributing the objects he left behind, I wanted to inform you that I found this box in his apartment, ready for the post office and addressed to you (I hope this is still your address). He spoke of you when he showed me the dolls he’d bought from you. (I was the one who told him about the clinic; I lived nearby when I was little. My mother brought several of my dolls there for repairs. It’s a shame I never went inside, though I always meant to.) Antonio would shut himself up in his apartment with them for hours. He didn’t go out much toward the end. He didn’t want to see us because he was ashamed of his illness, so they became his companions. He was working on a photo series of his neighbors from the building sitting among the dolls and parts you’d sent him. He told me a while ago that he was writing an epistolary novel about a fugitive who hides in a seminary on Manhattan’s West Side and tries to find pieces for the figurines in the adjoining church. In the novel there was a girl who sent him those things from far away. I haven’t found the manuscript among his files, but if I do, I’ll make sure it reaches you. For now, I’m sending you this package, which he left for you before his heart rebelled. A hug from the friend of a friend, Claudia Galindo
“Open it, Aunt Martica. What’s in the box?”
“It’s a book, sweetheart. An old book in who knows what language.”
The old leather-bound missal could only be opened to a page in the middle; all the others were stuck together. There, in a hollow carved out of the pages, the head of an antique doll rested on a bed of dried flowers, protected under glass. A dark-skinned face nested in a fragile book, surrounded by unfamiliar and unintelligible letters. Her eyes moved nervously back and forth when the book was opened to reveal her.
In the photo of the gift that her aunt later sent, Estefanía recognized the head as Lucy’s, the doll that had crossed the Seine and then the Magdalena nearly a century before, in the arms of a well-bred girl on her way to provincial Bogotá. The doll that had declined the invitation to rot during its passage through the brutal heat of Honda, that had crossed the Andes on the back of a donkey, and that had withstood seventy years of being looked after by two upper-class women. Until Estefanía and Antonio came along to disrupt her years of peace and mothballs.
What had become of the other dolls, of the arms and eyes that found no place on any altar? When she buried her mother, Estefanía had come to understand that the living have trouble with the things left by their dead. Had Antonio’s friends scooped them up and set them on their shelves? Were they in the window of some antiques shop? She even imagined them in a landfill somewhere outside New York, tiny arms sticking out from a mountain of plastic, old shoes, garbage bags, fruit rinds, office files, and computer screens. She thought of their little doll eyes fixed on the waste from silicone implants, syringes, yogurt cups, lunch boxes. Those antique glass eyes transformed into the inert filling of a dump in a country full of trash. Witnesses to the disintegration of bones from countless chicken wings that would decay faster than them. Eyes with no audience to witness the putrefaction they reflected.
She felt better thinking of the little head protected by the green leather binding of an old book that had made its way to Bogotá, searching for her.
“Aunt Martica, will yo
u bring it with you when you come?”
The seven Claudia Galindos that Estefanía found on the internet—a beach volleyball player from Bogotá, a Mexican pastry chef, a Canadian lawyer, a sociology professor in Bolivia, an actress living in Miami, and others whose occupations were impossible to determine—never answered her emails.
With the exception of two weekends in February when snowstorms paralyzed the city, Estefanía spent every Saturday and Sunday that winter and spring visiting antique shops in Manhattan in search of the other dolls. When her student visa expired early that summer and she needed to head back to Bogotá, she still had nine shops left on the long list she’d compiled for her pilgrimage. Lucy stayed behind, presiding over Shirley’s apartment from her pagan altar. Estefanía promised them both that she’d be back soon and slid the list of the remaining antique shops into the book. So she could keep searching whenever she returned.
VARIATIONS ON THE BODY
To take leave is to raise a dew for civil marriage with the saliva.
José Lezama Lima, “Summons of the Desirer” (tr. Nathaniel Tarn)
With her firm, fleshy hand, Martica pressed Mirla’s fingers to her groin.
“Hold here.”
The force with which the manicurist obliged her to touch her own privates always surprised her.
“Spread your legs a little wider, bring the right one up to the wall and pull this tight.”
Martica stretched her client’s wrinkled, spotted skin and dipped a stick into the hot wax, which gave off a smell of lemon. She applied the gummy liquid to the mounds where the old woman’s buttocks began. For the past few years, it was only in those rare waxing sessions that Mirla had such a concrete awareness of those regions. She’d fallen out of the habit of exploring them.
Martica pursed her lips, the way she did when speaking to the dead Pekingese that adorned her living room with its taxi-dermized placidity.
“You’re all skin and bones, Miss Mirla. Poor thing. I know you’re sad, but you have to eat.”
She rubbed the white linen strip she’d laid on the wax and pulled hard.
“I am a bit thin, aren’t I? That’s what Nora’s been saying to me lately. She even makes the girl ask if I’m eating well. I think what I’m missing is dinners out with Pepe. Shit, Martica! Try not to leave me all red.”
Martica tweezed the short hairs that remained, those few that still grew dark on her client’s body at her age.
“There we go, you’re all ready for the beach and your TV debut. Just promise me you’ll eat better this week, you’re wasting away.”
Martica didn’t believe that Mirla was going on vacation, as she’d claimed during their last two appointments. She probably said it to imagine how much she’d be missed, to find some ember of vitality. How was she going to take a vacation on what little money she had now that she was alone? She hadn’t even paid for the last month of manicures, pedicures, and waxing, which added up. Martica hadn’t charged her because she wasn’t in the habit of invoicing anyone in mourning. She hadn’t taken it very seriously, either, when Mirla asked her to put her in touch with a client who worked in TV, to see if she might be able to land a minor role in a soap opera. Martica had promised to give the woman a call, to see what they could do.
Mirla had been confused about certain things since Pepe’s death. His children, who had always reproached him for talking about love at his age and for ending up with a Jewish woman, showed up at Mirla’s house a week after the cremation announcing that they were going to take a few things that had belonged to their father—paintings, pre-Columbian objects, and pieces of colonial furniture that Pepe had gotten years earlier from the demolition of a convent in downtown Bogotá. Aside from a modest bank account Pepe had opened in both their names to save up for a trip to Curaçao in search of her ancestors, the only inheritance the deceased had left her was a bunch of knickknacks of questionable value that refused to relinquish their ghosts.
“Martica, did I show you my new pair of scissors? Do you think I’ll be able to take them on the airplane with me?”
Ever since the tragedy, Mirla had been feeding a growing collection of scissors. As a businesswoman of the body, a cataloger of nails and hairs and cuticles, Martica couldn’t grasp the appeal of a shiny pair of scissors beyond their utility. But, feigning curiosity, she applauded her client’s initiative as a therapeutic strategy. In life, Pepe had collected collections. Mirla had spent entire sessions with Martica trying to figure out what to do with them. Should she keep the hundreds of matchboxes from all around the world, or should she give them away? And what about the watches that had belonged to generations of Valencias, the posters of old Hollywood movies, and—strangest of all, the one Mirla understood least because she’d never been steeped in the fetishes of Catholicism—a collection of nineteenth-century reliquaries that housed splinters of the bones of saints and beati? Martica had agreed that they might have market value. She’d even helped Mirla place an ad in the classifieds, but no one had showed any interest.
Martica spread perfumed talcum powder around the line of her client’s satin underwear and made sure her tender skin was covered. She closed the jar of wax and began returning her tools for disciplining nails and cuticles to the cosmetics bag she brought with her from house to house for her appointments.
“But Miss Mirla, you don’t even know what to do with the things Pepe left you when he died. Wouldn’t it be better not to start a whole new collection?”
Martica regretted not having used a single diminutive to soften her words. She reminded her client that if her family was pressuring her to move from that sprawling home in a rundown neighborhood into a small apartment, it might be better not to go around accumulating so many things.
After the funeral, Mirla had ventured beyond the neighborhood a few times to search for old scissors in antique shops and jewelers. As she explained to Martica when she began sorting them, she was looking for all different types: shiny, adorned, old, specimens designed for a specific function. Above all, she wanted unusual scissors made for unimaginable, uncommon things. Like detaching from its pulpy muscle the finest clam, a delicacy in that Andean setting so far removed from her childhood. Or clipping the wings of parakeets and canaries that provided company for people at those high altitudes but longed to flap them in warmer climes. She wanted scissors that no longer served a purpose, that had fallen out of use in the absence of their objects, that missed the surface of their flesh. But she knew how hard those were to find, now that everything was made of plastic and dreary steel, now that a single pair promised to slice through anything, as the infomercials intoned. Despite these obstacles, Mirla had managed to acquire several specimens in the past month, some of them old and tarnished, others new and full of the promise of domestic utility.
Her most recent pair, the one Mirla valued above all the rest, had more or less fallen into her hands. It was a pair of surgical scissors, made of stainless steel, with long, thin blades, the kind used for invasive procedures, for removing tumors and other malignant flora. Mirla had been carrying them around in her purse since her trip to the hospital. She was convinced they would stand in for her arthritic hands when she needed to join the tips of her short, crooked fingers to pull on something small or loosen a knot. They would help her open the bag of peanuts she devoured when her taxi got stuck in traffic, or clip the fastenings of everyday objects. She was one of the many who believed in expressing discontent rather than swallowing it. In not letting it accumulate into little tumors. In cutting the vine rather than leaving it to strangle the tree. She had used many images like these to illustrate the idea over the years, but only now had she found the object that manifested her conviction.
“When someone or something gets under my skin, I stick my hand in my purse, grab my scissors, and cut the air. It works wonders. I imagine I’m cutting through the problem, and sometimes even that I’m cutting the person who’s making me angry.”
That was how she explained it to Mar
tica, and how she’d explained it over the phone to Sophy, a cousin who had recently emigrated to Miami after a harrowing rash of kidnappings rattled several people they knew. Sophy had dismissed her metaphor and advised her to use the scissors to defend herself from the thieves she imagined lying in wait on every corner and behind every tree in Bogotá, plotting assaults in every nook and cranny of the neighborhood.
Martica finished putting away her manicure set. She concealed her desire to get out of there and studied the new specimen Mirla pulled from her purse.
“What a shame it would be if they took these from you at the airport, Miss Mirla, dear. They look expensive. And wouldn’t it be a drag to get stopped for something so silly?”
Mirla thought about the green-gloved police officers who searched travelers in the women’s line at El Dorado. She had always found them so mysterious. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they got a little surprise. If they suddenly paused their coordinated opening of zippers and locks. If they stopped speculating about what might be inside suitcase linings and stuffed animals. If they ignored their obsession with the powders they’d trained their dogs to sniff out. If they thought, for just a moment, about their hangnails, about their untrimmed pubic hair, about all the loose threads in their clothes, their days.