Little Eyes

by Samanta Schweblin

HER COMPUTER HAD also been a gift from her son, several years back now, wrapped in cellophane and sent from Hong Kong. Another gift that, at least at first, had brought Emilia more headaches than happiness. Its bright white plastic had faded by now, and one might say that they’d gotten used to each other. Emilia turned the computer on and adjusted her glasses; the kentuki’s controller opened automatically. On the screen the camera seemed crooked, as if it had fallen. Right away she recognized the cleavage girl’s apartment. Only when someone picked up the kentuki could Emilia see where she’d been lying: it was a dog bed. A felt dog bed, fuchsia with little white polka dots. The girl spoke, and the yellow subtitles of the translation appeared immediately on the screen.

  Good morning.

  Her breasts were squeezed into a sky-blue top, and she still wore the ring in her nose. Emilia had asked her son about his relationship with this girl, and he’d said he didn’t have one. Then he’d explained over and over how the kentukis worked, and he’d asked her questions about what she had seen and what city she’d been in and how she’d been treated. His curiosity was suspicious; in general, her son wasn’t at all interested in his mother’s life.

  “Are you sure you’re a rabbit?” he asked her again.

  Emilia remembered something about a “cute little bunny,” and she also remembered the box the girl had shown her. She understood—now that someone had taken the trouble to explain it to her—that what she was controlling was a kind of toy shaped like an animal. Were they the animals of the Chinese horoscope? What did it mean, then, to be a rabbit, and not, for example, a snake?

  “I love the way you smell.”

  The girl brought her nose too close to the camera and Emilia’s screen went dark for a second.

  Whatever could she smell like?

  “We’re going to do lots of things together. And you know what I saw in the street today?”

  She told Emilia a story about something that had happened in front of the supermarket. Though it seemed like a silly thing, Emilia tried to understand; she followed the yellow letters on the screen, but they went by too quickly. The same thing happened to her at the movies: if the subtitles were too long, they disappeared before she could finish reading them.

  “And it’s a beautiful day,” said the girl. “Look!”

  She lifted the kentuki over her head, facing the window, and for a moment Emilia looked down onto a city: narrow streets, the domes of some churches, water channels, the strong red light of sunset washing over everything. Emilia’s eyes opened wide. She was caught off guard—the movement had been unexpected, and the image of that other city awed her. She had never left Peru, never in all her life, if you didn’t count the trip to Santo Domingo for her sister’s wedding. What city had she seen? She wanted to see it again, wanted the girl to lift her back up. She activated the kentuki’s wheels in one direction and the other, turned her head several times as fast as she could.

  “You can call me Eva,” said the girl.

  Eva put her back on the floor and headed toward the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and a few drawers, and started to cook dinner.

  “I hope you like the cushion I bought for you, sweetie.”

  Emilia left the kentuki facing the girl for a while; she wanted to study the controller carefully. Lift me up again! she thought. Lift me up again! She couldn’t figure out how to communicate with Eva. Or was this how it was? In her condition as rabbit, she could only listen? How the hell did you make these animals talk? Now she did have questions, thought Emilia. If she couldn’t manage to ask the girl anything, she would call Hong Kong again and ask her son. It was time the boy took a little more responsibility for the things he sent his mother.

  A few days later she discovered that she was in Erfurt, or that there was a large possibility that the place her kentuki moved around in was a small German city called Erfurt. There was a calendar of Erfurt hanging on the girl’s refrigerator, and then there were the bags that turned up in the apartment and that she left on the floor for days, “ALDI Erfurt,” “Meine Apotheke in Erfurt.” Emilia had googled it: Erfurt had, as its only tourist attractions, a medieval bridge from the fourteenth century and a monastery where Martin Luther had spent some time. It was at the center of Germany and four hundred kilometers from Munich, the only German city she really would have liked to visit.

  For almost a week now, Emilia had spent some two hours a day circulating around Eva’s apartment. She’d told her girlfriends about it at their Thursday coffee, after swimming. Gloria asked what was this thing that Emilia called “kentuki,” and as soon as she understood she decided to buy one for her own house, for the afternoons when she took care of her grandson. Inés, on the other hand, was horrified. She swore she wouldn’t set foot in Gloria’s house if she ever bought such a gadget. What Inés wanted to know—and asked several times, hitting her finger against the table—was what kind of regulations the government would implement for a thing like that. You couldn’t just count on people’s common sense, and having a kentuki running around was the same as handing a stranger the keys to your house.

  “Plus, I don’t get it,” said Inés, finally. “Why don’t you find yourself a boyfriend instead of crawling around on some stranger’s floor?”

  Inés could be graceless when she spoke, and sometimes it was hard for Emilia to forgive her. She spent a while chewing over her anger, thinking about that comment even after she got home, while she rinsed and hung up her swim towel. Without Gloria, she concluded, her friendship with Inés wouldn’t last a day.

  By the end of the week, Emilia had established a new routine. After washing the dishes she made a little tea and punctually tuned in to Eva’s apartment. To Emilia, it seemed the girl was starting to get used to that late but regular hour when she woke the kentuki. Between six and nine at night, German time, Emilia circulated around the girl’s legs, attentive to what was happening. On Saturday, in fact, when Emilia roused the kentuki and the girl wasn’t there, she found a sign stuck to one of the chair legs, a few inches from the floor. She had to transcribe it on her phone, letter by letter, to understand what it said, and she was pleased when she found that it really was for her:

  “My pet, I am going to the grocery store. Without delay, I return in thirty minutes, easy. Attentively, your Eva.”

  She would have liked to have the original paper with the girl’s fine, slanted handwriting to hang on her refrigerator, because in spite of the German and the shiny fuchsia ink, it was a sophisticated hand, something that could have been sent by a distant relative or a friend abroad.

  Eva had bought her a dog toy, but since Emilia didn’t use it, she usually left some other kind of object close by to see if any of them tempted her. There was a ball of yarn that she sometimes pushed around and a little leather mouse whose functionality Emilia never managed to decipher.

  Though she appreciated the good intentions, what she was really interested in was seeing the things the girl had around the apartment. She watched when she put away the groceries in the cupboards, when she opened the cabinet in the hallway or the wardrobe across from the bed. She looked at the dozens of shoes Eva tried on while she got ready to go out. If something caught her attention, Emilia purred around the girl and she would leave it on the floor awhile. Like that foot massager she’d shown her once. You couldn’t find anything like that in Lima. It was very disappointing to think that her son kept sending her perfumes and sneakers when he could make her so happy with a foot massager like that one. She also purred to ask Eva to lift her up, or if she wanted to get out of the dog bed.

  One afternoon at the Lima supermarket, when she’d gone to buy her coconut cookies and granola and had found the shelf empty, she had also purred in silence, to herself. She was immediately ashamed, wondering how she could go around playing bunny just anywhere. Then one of her neighbors passed the aisle, and the woman looked so old, gray, and crippled as she murmured to herself about her hardships that Emilia recovered a certain amount of dignity. I may be cr
azy, but at least I’m modern, she thought. She had two lives, and that was much better than barely having one and limping around in free fall. And finally, what did it matter if she made a fool of herself in Erfurt? No one was watching, and it was well worth the affection she got in return.

  The girl ate dinner around seven-thirty, while she watched the news. She’d carry her plate to the sofa, open a beer, and lift the kentuki up next to her. It was almost impossible for Emilia to move around on the couch cushions, though she could turn her head and look out the window at the sky, or study Eva from closer up: the texture of her clothes, how she had done her makeup, the rings and bracelets she was wearing. She could even watch the European news. She didn’t understand anything—the translator worked only on Eva’s voice—but the images were almost always enough for her to be able to form an opinion about what was happening, especially since there weren’t many people in Peru following German news. Talking about it with her friends, she realized right away that she had privileged insight, and that people didn’t tend to be up-to-date on the latest news from Europe in all its detail.

  Every other day, around a quarter to nine, the girl got dressed to go out and left Emilia alone. Before turning out the lights, she’d carry the kentuki over to the dog bed. Emilia knew that once she was there it would be hard to move again, so sometimes she tried to escape before Eva lifted her up, running from side to side and hiding under the table.

  “Come on, honey, it’s getting late!” Eva would say, and even if she occasionally got mad, she usually laughed while she tried to trap her.

  Emilia told this to her son, and the boy was alarmed.

  “You mean you spend the whole day running behind her, and when the girl leaves, you stay in the dog bed?”

  Emilia was at the supermarket doing the shopping, and her son’s tone scared her. She stopped her cart, worried, and adjusted the phone on her ear.

  “Am I doing it wrong?”

  “It’s just, that means you’re not charging, Mom!”

  She didn’t really understand what her son was talking about, but she liked that ever since she’d had the kentuki, he answered right away when she sent him messages with questions and updates, or with stories about Eva. Emilia wondered whether her son had known ahead of time that giving her a kentuki would bring him closer to his mother, or whether the gift was bringing him more problems than he’d bargained for.

  “Mom, if you don’t charge every day, the battery’s going to run out, don’t you see?”

  No, she didn’t see. What was it she had to see?

  “If the battery reaches zero, then the link between users is lost, and it’s goodbye, Eva!”

  “Goodbye, Eva? I can’t turn on again?”

  “No, Mom. It’s called ‘planned obsolescence.’”

  “Planned obsolescence . . .”

  She was at the canned food shelf when she repeated those two words, and the stock clerk looked at her curiously. Her son explained it to her again, speaking louder into the phone, as if Emilia’s problem were with her hearing. Finally she understood, and she confessed disconcertedly that she had been controlling the kentuki for a week without charging. He sighed in relief.

  “She’s charging you,” he said. “Thank goodness.”

  Emilia reflected on this while she was waiting to pay. So that meant that when she went to sleep and left her kentuki in the dog bed until the next day, the girl took her out of it, set her on the charger, and then returned her to the bed once the charge was complete. Emilia shifted the peaches from under the cans of peas and put them on top so they wouldn’t get bruised. So every day, someone at the other end of the world did all that for her. She smiled and put her phone away. That was some attention.

  Barcelona

  THE MOSSÈN CINTO wasn’t just a home for the elderly; it was one of the most beloved and best-equipped institutions in the Vila de Grácia neighborhood of Barcelona. It had five treadmills, two Jacuzzis, and its own EKG machine. Now that all the repairs to the front of the gym had been paid for, Camilo Baygorria wanted the remainder of that year’s budget to go toward recreation. It had taken him forty-seven years as administrator of the place to reach these recent months of bonanza, and now he needed something that would make all the difference, something the families would notice immediately when they visited and would talk about for the rest of the week.

  It was Eider, the head of nursing, who suggested the kentukis. She thought it would be hard to convince Camilo of her idea, though she knew there was already one in his family: a nephew had bought one with his savings. It never would have occurred to Camilo to buy such a gadget for geriatric patients, but even so he took the risk. He thanked Eider for the idea, and immediately they ordered two rabbit kentukis. Eider herself made a little blue hat with a brim for each of them, with two holes for the ears and the home’s logo on the front.

  They turned them on together in the main hall after lunch. The K0092466 established a connection after two hours and twenty-seven minutes, and the K0092487 connected after three hours and two minutes. There were already three hundred seventy-eight servers repeating the connections around the world, and even so they were still overloaded: wait times for the initial configuration were growing ever longer.

  As soon as the two kentukis started to move, some of the elderly residents came closer. The rabbits circled between their feet and they laboriously raised their legs to let them pass, as if the gadgets were windup toys incapable of dodging obstacles. Not ten minutes had passed when one of the kentukis parked itself in front of the main window and didn’t move again. It had disconnected on its own, and Eider had to explain several times to Camilo that there wasn’t much they could do about it. As far as she knew, if a kentuki’s user wanted to abandon the “game,” it couldn’t be used again.

  “Do you think it’s because of the old folks?” asked Camilo.

  Eider hadn’t thought about that. It had never crossed her mind that now, in addition to all the specifications you had to read if you bought a new appliance, you also had to think about whether you were worthy of having that object live with you or not. Who would ever stand before the store shelves and think about whether the fan she was considering buying would agree to fan an elderly father in diapers while he watches TV?

  “Do you think we could lose the other one, too?” Camilo took her by the elbow, frightened.

  Eider stood looking at him. For the first time, she saw that Camilo was now as old as the aged people he cared for, and she understood the terror in his question. Near them, an old man picked up the other kentuki to study it. He talked to it with his mouth almost touching its snout, fogging up its eyes. He tried to put it back on the floor but couldn’t bend over; he dropped it with a cry of pain, and the kentuki hit the ground and rolled. Eider went over to the rabbit, set it upright again, and followed it as it moved among the tables of the dining hall, making sure the residents left it alone.

  “Eider.” It was Camilo’s voice as he came up behind her.

  She was about to turn toward him when she saw an old woman hurrying after the kentuki, and behind her a male nurse who was trying to stop her. Suddenly, with a speed that Eider thought seemed premeditated, the kentuki turned toward the little fishpond that was in the center of the yard and headed off at top speed. What was it doing? Eider’s instinct was to run toward it, but Camilo held her back. The rabbit didn’t stop, and it toppled into the water. The old woman cried out and waded into the pond, the nurse behind her.

  “Eider,” said Camilo, pulling again at her elbow. “Are you sure there’s no way to recover anything? Not anything?”

  Outside, the nurse had managed to sit the old woman on the edge of the pond. She was drenched and crying as she reached out her arms toward the kentuki that, a few feet away, slowly sank under the water.

  Oaxaca

  SHE KEPT RUNNING every morning. If she went back to Mendoza in two months, at least she could say she was in good shape now. It wasn’t the kind of achievement
she was looking for, but there wasn’t much else to do. Although she had found ways to entertain herself. There was the library—it had been a long time since she’d allowed herself the luxury of so much reading—and the kentuki, too. She had to admit the kentuki was interesting.

  When Sven saw it for the first time, he stood for a while in front of the crow, while the crow looked up at him from the ground. The two of them studied each other with so much curiosity that Alina had to make an effort not to laugh. Sven was a tall, blond, Danish man; in Mendoza she had to watch over him like he was a fifteen-year-old girl. He was naive and overly friendly, so he got cheated, robbed, mocked. In the galleries of Copenhagen, though, surrounded by peers and always seconded by some energetic little assistant, he seemed to Alina like a prince who was slipping through her fingers. The jealousy she’d been feeling since they’d arrived in Oaxaca was a mere shadow of what it had been a year earlier in Denmark, in the first months of her relationship with Sven. Over time that distress had turned toward something else. Before, it had tormented her, focused her gaze only on him; now, on the other hand, it distracted her. She was losing interest, and jealousy was the only thing that returned her attention to Sven every now and then. There was also another indulgent state she loved, one that was hers alone. She’d lock herself in a room and concentrate on marathon binges of TV series, only to return to reality many hours later. She was left “fragmented”—that’s how Alina liked to describe it. It was a dizziness that put her dumbest fears to sleep and, maybe because of the isolation itself, returned her to the world clean and light, open to the simple pleasures of a little food and a good walk.

  But sooner or later her path crossed Sven’s again, and she remembered that her life was made of things that could always be lost, like his charming smile now as he looked down at the kentuki. Alina had calculated the kind of questions he would ask about the crow and she’d mentally gone over her answers, preparing herself to refute his complaints about its price, its uselessness, the excessive exposure of their private life—although this last factor, she figured, wouldn’t be immediately apparent to the artiste. He seemed surprised by the little creature, and when he knelt down to look at it up close, he asked a question Alina hadn’t considered.