by María Ospina
Mirla and Pepe met at that airport, standing at the window onto passport control and security, where people said good-bye to those who were leaving in droves. The crowd behind them pushed them into the glass as it tried to reach the front to send off its travelers.
“No one comes to this country, and just look at all the people leaving. Yet somehow the streets are always clogged with traffic.”
Mirla had said it to no one in particular. A man standing next to her, waiting for his daughter to pass into the hygienic glare of the Duty Free, rushed to respond.
“You’re absolutely right.”
Pepe had already noticed the moisture in the creases around Mirla’s eyes, the stalled engine in her throat. He watched her blow kisses to a young man, use a handkerchief to wipe the tears collecting in her mascara-heavy lashes, and run a fingernail under her lower lid to remove the dark sludge her makeup had formed there.
In a musty airport bar, over the first of many drinks they would have together, Mirla told the fellow with kind eyes and sunken cheeks that the young man she’d been saying good-bye to was “like a son” to her. Her nephew Pedro had lived with her for nearly a decade, ever since her sister Dora started passing him pamphlets for different therapies that promised to cure the disease of homosexuality. Mirla had given Pedro a set of keys so he could stay there whenever he wanted, and he ended up moving in completely. Dora stopped speaking to both of them. When he finished college, Pedro convinced himself—and Mirla—that he needed to move to New York. Mirla loaned him nearly all her savings.
“You can pay me back when you’re a famous architect and fall madly in love with someone who treats you right.”
But as she confessed to Pepe later that night, she knew the tourist visa Pedro had gotten for his trip to New York meant they weren’t going to see each other for a long time.
“He doesn’t realize it because I’m not old-fashioned, but I’m seventy years old. I could die any day now.”
The afternoon Pedro left, Pepe asked for Mirla’s telephone number after driving her home from the airport.
“They’re surgical scissors, Martica. I didn’t tell you before, but I bought them from a nurse at the clinic. She almost didn’t sell them to me, she said they’d fire her on the spot if they caught her trafficking medical instruments. You have no idea how much money that woman got out of me, Martica, but tell me they aren’t exquisite.”
The day of the mass held for Pepe one week after his death, which she’d refused to attend, Mirla had felt shooting pains in her chest that doubled her over as Martica was giving her the first manicure of her widowhood. Martica drove her to the hospital, running every red light and stepping on the gas like never before. She waited for hours without news before they let her in to see Mirla in a hospital bed, surviving. Her eyes looked like melted gelatin, the skin of her face seemed thinner and glistened with sweat. A machine next to her translated the signs of her malady into a nervous melody.
Martica knew that Mirla needed a more satiating, less diluted kind of nourishment than what they were pumping through her body. She thought about how Pepe’s death would keep ravaging her and that it might be better if Mirla began the process of letting herself slip away once and for all. She immediately reproached herself. She forced herself to celebrate her friend’s survival and even congratulated herself for being there to save her.
The doctor explained to Martica and Nora, Mirla’s daughter, that although cardiac failure was common among patients of Mirla’s age, it was more likely that she was suffering from a more elusive, but no less real, condition. He called it broken heart syndrome. Martica knew Mirla would hate that name and promised herself to bring it up during her next manicure.
“Stress-related cardiomyopathy isn’t a condition that can be treated surgically, strictly speaking. What we’re dealing with isn’t a question of blockages or pathogens. It’s an emotional trauma that causes the brain to release high levels of stress hormones that end up paralyzing the cardiac muscle cells.”
Martica believed the doctor. Though she specialized in things as transitory as the body’s crests and crevices, she also knew a thing or two about its mysteries.
“She needs absolute calm. Calm and company. And it would do her a world of good to be down at sea level, a lack of oxygen stresses the organism even further.”
Martica had stopped by Mirla’s house the day after she got out of the hospital to see how she was doing and give her a foot cure (as Mirla called the sloughing and removal of dead skin and callouses that gave her a sense of existential relief every month).
“One grows so skeptical with age, don’t you think, Martica? That whole business about broken hearts sounded like a load of nonsense to me. Some people find relief in their new solitude. But then there’s all the cases you hear about, couples who are together for years—one of them dies and the other tries to follow them on the spot. Pepe and I, you know, we didn’t talk about death much, but we did promise each other that once.”
Martica responded with a similar story, about a client who died three days after her husband without even falling ill.
“You’re my companion, my ambulance, my savior, Martica. Nora doesn’t even believe I’m suffering.”
Mirla had grabbed Martica’s hand and was squeezing it hard. Martica grasped her spotted skin but didn’t look up, for fear of meeting her client’s watery eyes. She reached into the plastic tub for Mirla’s right foot and pulled it out of the water with the force of a fishmonger grabbing a live mojarra to scale it. After studying the cuticles adorning the old woman’s nails, she dug the orangewood stick under the deformed nail of her client’s big toe and began to sculpt it.
Martica studied the newly acquired surgical scissors Mirla opened and closed in front of her.
“Be careful, those things are as sharp as a butcher’s knife. Oh! I have to run, darling. It’s getting late, and I have to get all the way across town. And you know how Seventh can get.”
On her way to the door, Martica put on the fake-fur jacket she’d bought on her last trip to New York.
“You always look so elegant, Martica.”
“Good luck with your granddaughter today. Be patient with her, it’s a tough age. Don’t forget she’s nuts about you.”
“Well, I suppose. But just look at how disagreeable that girl turned out.”
“Call me if you need anything, okay? Day or night.”
Mirla gave Martica a kiss, reminded her that she’d be waiting for her on Tuesday, and stood in the doorway until she got into her car.
In the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of wine. In her dressing room, she took off her robe and grabbed a purple bathing suit that was sitting on top of a pile of clothes. An Italian one-piece she bought in 1989 and that still looked new, though a long time had passed since then. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror. It hung loosely around her stomach and bunched a little near her pubis. It was true that her body wasn’t as voluptuous as it had once been. She was bony, and the skin around her groin was irritated.
“Shit. I told Martica not to leave me all red.”
She walked over to the unmade bed and turned on the television. Decisions: Real-Life Stories was on. Every time she’d watched an episode that past month, she’d imagined herself writing scripts for the show, bringing the stories of Martica’s drug-trafficking clients to the screen. She adjusted the pillows under her head and took another sip of wine. She tried to fight off her drowsiness for a while then slid into a light sleep. A woman was getting a phone call about a tragedy just as she was returning from an afternoon at the beach. Soaking wet, her bathing suit showed its age. Mirla offered to cut the threads hanging from it, and the woman thanked her. She woke to the sound of a machine boring into the next street over. Her lips were crusted with red wine, and an acidic taste filled her mouth. She dialed Sophy’s number in Miami.
“Sophy, this is the first time I’ve gotten your answering machine. I thought your English was better. Too bad I
didn’t catch you, I really need to talk to you. I won’t be able to call for a while. I’m leaving. Everything’s fine, it’s nothing serious, don’t go getting all worried, all right? I’ll be fine, Sophy. Don’t worry,” she added in English. “I’ll call you soon. Chao.”
She went back into her dressing room and packed a weekend bag that had belonged to Pepe. Into it went a couple of skirts, a few blouses, sandals, and other light clothing for the lowlands that she found bunched up at the bottom of her drawers. She also threw in all her scissors and her mother’s wooden box from Syria, where she kept Pepe’s collection of reliquaries, then filled her cosmetics bag with all the creams that would fit inside. She set the alarm on Pepe’s fifteen old watches for 11:00 p.m., the hour he had succumbed to his timeworn heart. She imagined their nocturnal wail accompanying him one month to the day after his departure, slicing through the emptiness of the house.
Those same watches announced that Karina’s bus was about to arrive. As she crossed the street, she met eyes with Perki, the black dog who spent her days under the magnolia tree in the yard of the house facing hers. They’d become friends over the past year. Ever since Perki moved into that yard, Mirla went by every day to pet her. The two old girls had gradually perfected their routine. As soon as she saw her approaching, the dog trotted over and leaned against the fence that separated her from Mirla, who stuck her arthritic fingers through the gaps in the metal to grab her fur and scratch her belly. Perki would wag her tail and nuzzle Mirla’s hand, unable to control the ecstatic movements of her flanks, which overcame her like electric shocks. Sometimes Mirla would open her purse and give her chicken bones or ribs. She always felt sad when the time came to leave Perki at the height of her excitement, the height of her wagging, begging for her endless company without any sense of how human time worked. They always promised to see one another soon. But Mirla knew that leaving and returning were things only she decided, and the injustice pained her.
She walked a block and quickened her pace when she saw that Karina was already getting off the bus on the corner.
“Grandma, you’re always late.”
The girl dropped her bag on the ground. Mirla slung it over her shoulder, and they headed to a park the next street over. Two nuns were sitting on a bench, and a few construction workers were resting on the grass in their stained uniforms. Mirla sat on one of the benches off to the side, where she could see her granddaughter out of the corner of her eye. As she always did, Karina climbed onto the rusted slide then headed for the swings and finished on the bars, where she practiced her arabesques and pirouettes every week. Mirla unfastened the buttons and opened the zippers of the little pink backpack. She found the school newsletters she’d read the week before, scrutinized the notes Nora had written to Karina’s teacher over the past few days, and opened a notebook to the last page. There was a heart with a k inside drawn on it, and the words Dear Enemies written with clumsy penmanship, as if it were the opening to a letter. She was looking for something to prove that the girl was turning rotten. That her mother’s mean spirit and rudeness were beginning to filter through into the child’s things. Something to confirm that her granddaughter, with her eyes like an old woman’s and her thick body, was going to end up just as hard and distant as Nora.
Mirla had studied Karina many times in search of some gesture, some piece or corner of her body—her chubby hands, maybe?—that might inspire a feeling of tenderness.
“It’s like she was born hardened by the years.”
She’d made this confession to Pepe and also to Martica, disappointed and angry at not having a granddaughter worthy of the love she’d been saving up over so many years to lavish on a child. Mirla had been on the verge of telling Martica that, since the girl was so chubby, she would take candies and chocolates out of her backpack and eat them herself, in secret. But she’d decided to withhold that part of her disclosure, like a parishioner who picks and chooses the content of her confession. The last thing she wanted was for her friend to see her as an insensitive old woman.
“Grandma, did you know that the eagle is a wild animal?”
Karina was shouting to her from atop the bars. Mirla pretended not to hear. She pulled the pink wallet from her granddaughter’s little backpack and found two bills inside.
“You have a bird’s name, don’t you? A mirla is like a blackbird, right? Those are mean because they eat other birds. My mom showed me one in the garden the other day, it was all black with an orange beak and it was trying to attack a tiny little bird. I always shoo them off when I see them so they know they can’t be in our garden.”
Karina lifted one leg over her head and bent her knee around the bar.
“Mirlas are mean, yes. And you’ve never seen the ones in Curaçao. They have poisonous fangs, and they’re even known to go after babies.”
Mirla pulled the scissors from her purse.
“That’s a big fat lie.”
“I’ve seen them myself. There used to be lots of them in the garden at my grandmother’s house.”
“Look, Grandma, I’m the only one in my class who can do this trick.”
She kicked her other leg straight out and spun once around the trembling bar.
“Me and a boy who can do bars and always wants to play with us. He’s a pro at Olympic gymnastics, but everyone says he’s weird and gross.”
Mirla cut one of Karina’s bills into little pieces and stuffed them back in her wallet. She crumpled the other one up and shoved it in her pocket.
When they got home, Karina went straight to the office to look through its drawers for ways to ease the boredom that spending a Friday afternoon in that house, which smelled like old things and where she wasn’t allowed to watch TV, always produced in her. Ever since she could walk, Karina had rummaged through Mirla’s drawers the way her friends did with their older sisters’ belongings. With each passing year, she got a better sense of how all the things sprinkled around in different pieces of furniture went together. When she started school, her interest in finding the cash that sometimes floated around there had sharpened. She wanted to watch it accumulate in her new wallet, to fulfill her mother’s often-repeated prophecy that her daughter had a real way with money.
Mirla left Karina to her investigations. In her dressing room, she took off her sweats and put on a pair of white linen pants whose wrinkles revealed her disarray, canvas shoes, and a blouse she’d always considered an elegant choice for the lowlands.
With suitcase in hand, she walked over to the export-grade roses that Pedro had sent to her the week after she got out of the hospital.
“Don’t worry, you’ll always be this gorgeous to me.”
It made her sad to leave them there to experience their decay, with no one to put them out of their misery as they yellowed toward the end. She filled the vase with fresh water and stroked their petals then returned them to her nightstand.
She walked to the door carrying the suitcase so its wheels wouldn’t make noise.
“Be right back, Karina darling.”
The girl pretended not to hear her grandmother. Mirla latched all three locks on the front door from outside.
She hailed a taxi and asked the driver to wait with her suitcase before crossing the street to where Perki watched her, exuberant. They performed their routine. But this time Mirla let Perki lick her hand over and over with her slobbery tongue. It made her angry that she couldn’t explain why she was leaving. The taxi driver hurried her along from the other side of the street. Mirla dug around her purse until she found her scissors, stuck them through a gap in the fence, and cut a few hairs from the lone white patch on Perki’s chest. She stuck them in her bag. She hated knowing that what sparked her attack of melancholy wasn’t the simplicity of Perki’s life, but what it said about the complications of her own.
“I hope they take good care of you, my sweet girl. You’ll always be this gorgeous to me too. Don’t worry. We’re going to be fine, both of us.”
Mirla watched
the dog’s tail wagging and felt an icy sensation spread from her throat to the heart of her weariness.
The taxi brought her to the terminal after refusing to make a stop somewhere she could buy a bathing suit and threatening to charge her double for the ride. She got onto a nearly empty bus marked Expreso Bolivariano headed for Cartagena via Bucaramanga. She remembered that people advised against traveling on the highways at night because of the guerrillas’ checkpoints. She found a seat for herself and her suitcase at the front of the bus and looked through her purse. She felt like she’d forgotten something at home, but she couldn’t figure out what. There were her wallet and her address book. Her fingers brushed against the little surgical scissors and she took them out, shined them with the hem of her shirt, slid her fingers into their holes, and trimmed the strings she found dangling from the seat cover. She also took advantage of the moment to clip a few more threads hanging from the hem of her blouse.
Mirla woke in a sweat and tried to open one of the polarized windows, but it was stuck. She gathered that the bus was moving further into the heated intensity of the lowlands. She wanted the sickly sweet smell of humidity to force its way into her nose, but the bus’s salvaged air prevented it. The sky was turning purple. She saw an empty fruit stand along the side of the road and two girls in school uniforms herding a few cows. On the narrow road that ran through the cultivated mountainside like a scar, the bus kept sticking its nose out, trying to pass the trucks. The threat of surprises around each upcoming curve complicated the attempt. It pushed its muzzle out and pulled it back in. It braked and accelerated.
Mirla studied the misty green backdrop of yarumo and guayacán trees, along with many others she couldn’t name, bordering the mountains along the Suárez River. She recognized the yellow bells in bloom. But then the pasturelands and crops that interrupted the forest turned her thoughts to mortality (Pepe’s, and that of the trees that once lived there and the insects banished from them) and she remembered Martica’s recommendation not to expose herself to any stressful situations. So she decided to look straight ahead, focusing only on the road, like one of those horses who wear blinders because otherwise the panorama of the world would terrify them.