Little Eyes

by Samanta Schweblin

  “Hi,” said Grigor finally.

  He was frightened by how shy his voice sounded, and here in his own room. Everything smelled good, everything was in order. Nikolina straightened up on the minuscule stool he’d assigned her, and turned to look at him.

  “Hi, boss,” she said, smiling.

  And a second later the octopus had her back to him again, sunk inside her other worlds.

  Vancouver

  BOTH HER DAUGHTERS were planted firmly in front of the shelf of kentukis. They were at the supermarket, and the two girls were united for the first time in a joint tantrum. The youngest one would turn four in a few months and she wanted her gift in advance; the older one said a kentuki would help her study, that someone in her class already had one and it helped with her homework. In the end they compromised on buying one for both of them, a fluorescent green crow with a Zorro mask.

  “Do you promise to share it?” Her daughters shouted an excited “Yes!” “Okay, then, I’ll buy it, as long as we wait till after dinner to open it.”

  At least, thought the mother, they would learn that joining forces had its advantages, although in the long run a discovery like that could end up threatening what little remained of her own sanity.

  Outside, it was still raining; they were predicting another week of rain for Vancouver, and she was worried about what she would do with her daughters until school started.

  Back at home, while she put the groceries away and heated up the food, her daughters emptied the doll house, pulling out walls and floors, and with a joint donation of socks, they made a bed in what had previously been the kitchen.

  “It’ll be more independent if it has its own space,” said the older girl, peering at the end result.

  The younger girl nodded seriously.

  They ate quickly, listening to their mother’s instructions. Then they asked their questions. Could they take it to school? No. Could it be the kentuki who took care of them on Fridays, instead of Miss Elizabeth with her soggy noodles and overcooked broccoli? No. Could they take it in the bathtub? No. None of those things were possible.

  They opened the box in the living room. The younger sister played for a while with the cellophane, wrapping it around her neck and wrists with utter concentration. The older girl plugged in the charger and fit the kentuki carefully onto it. While the connection was being established, the mother read the manual, sitting on the rug with her daughters behind her, curious about the pictures and some of the specifications; they each held on to one of her shoulders, their sweet and nervous breath caressing her ears. She was enjoying this, too, in her own way. When they were like this, it was very much like peace, the three of them together, the girls’ giggles and their soft little hands pressing on her arms, reaching to touch the manual and the cardboard box. When it came down to it, she spent her life pushing forward alone, and moments like these always slipped through her fingers.

  The crow turned on and her daughters laughed. The younger one ran in place, squeezing her fists in joy and excitement, crinkling her cellophane bracelets. The kentuki spun on its axis once, twice, three times. It didn’t stop. The mother went closer, fearful at first, and she picked it up to be sure it wasn’t stuck on something. After all, she thought, there’s also someone on the other end trying to figure out how to control the thing. But when she set the kentuki back down on the ground, it shrieked, a piercing, angry shriek. It didn’t stop. The older sister covered her ears and the younger one imitated her. They weren’t smiling anymore. The kentuki spun again on one of its wheels, faster and faster, and the mother felt the shriek echo roughly on her teeth.

  “Enough!” she cried.

  The crow stopped spinning and went straight for her daughters. The older one stepped aside, and the younger one, trapped in a corner of the living room, pressed her back and her hands against the wall and stood on tiptoe, screaming and terrified, while the kentuki rammed again and again against her bare feet. The mother picked it up and threw it into the middle of the room. The thing managed to land standing up, and without a pause in its screeching, it rolled back toward the girls. The older sister had gotten up on the sofa, the little one was still motionless against the wall. She screamed when she saw the kentuki heading straight for her, screamed in terror and closed her eyes so tight that her mother leapt toward her without thinking. Before the crow could hit her again, the mother reached a hand to the shelf, picked up a lamp with a heavy marble base, and brought it down hard on the kentuki. She raised it a couple more times and hit it again until the shrieking came to a stop. Destroyed on the parquet, the toy now seemed like a strange open body of fabric, chips, and foam rubber. A red light blinked in agony under a dismembered foot while, still pressed against the wall, her younger daughter cried in silence. When the LED light on the K087937525 finally went out, its total connection time had been only one minute and seventeen seconds.

  Umbertide

  HE WASN’T GOING to let his arm be twisted—if the mole didn’t want to take part in the midafternoon ritual of the nursery, then let the plants he was in charge of die. Enzo seemed doomed to abandonment—his ex-wife wasn’t the first woman to leave him. He went back inside with a little rosemary that he’d just picked from the greenhouse to finish preparing the meat.

  Yesterday, his friend Carlo from the pharmacy had invited him to go fishing. “You’re looking worse than ever,” he’d said, giving Enzo a few slaps on the shoulder, maybe knowing that, as usual these days, Enzo would refuse the invitation. But now he was thinking about it. For too long, it seemed he’d been worrying about nothing but the boy and the greenhouse. And that damned kentuki—Mister’s contempt was poisoning him.

  Things had gotten worse since that last day when he’d fought with Giulia on the sofa with the mole underneath them, hiding. When she finally left, Enzo locked the door and gave a long, tired sigh, went back to the living room, and found Mister a few feet away, stock-still and looking him in the eyes, as though challenging him. Had the kentuki heard his ex-wife’s detailed exposition on pedophiles?

  “Absolutely not, Mister,” said Enzo. “You know I don’t believe that.”

  In the afternoon they went out to do some shopping.

  “Bring the mole,” Enzo told Luca, while he went to pull the car around.

  He knew the Mister loved to ride in the back window, and it would put him in an even better mood if it was the boy who went to get him.

  On the road, some cars had decals of their kentukis on their back windshields. People also wore the decals as badges on their bags and coats, or they stuck them up in the windows of their houses alongside the logo of their soccer team or the political party they supported. And Enzo wasn’t the only one at the supermarket with a kentuki in the cart. A woman in the frozen-food section asked hers if they needed more spinach, received a message on her phone that made her laugh, then opened the freezer and took out two bags. Enzo envied the people who had been able to establish closer communication. He didn’t understand what he had done wrong, what was so terrible that could have offended the old guy, and it was clear that his ex-wife’s slander had ruined the situation for good. She didn’t call again, but Luca’s psychologist left three messages asking for an urgent meeting, and Enzo knew that when he finally ceded, Giulia would be at the appointment as well, waiting for him in the doctor’s office, baring her teeth in a half smile.

  Since he assumed everything was ruined anyway, he had gone back to trying to communicate with the kentuki. He’d shown it his number again, in case the mole’s dweller hadn’t managed to write it down. Also his e-mail address, and later, already in a bad mood, he’d written down the address of the house on a piece of paper and stuck it on the sofa leg near Mister’s usual hideout. But nothing had worked.

  When they got back from the grocery store, Enzo turned on the RAI. The mole moved off toward his corner, attentive to the news while Enzo put away the groceries. The reporters were signing off with a local-color piece: while the headlines raced across th
e bottom of the screen, a field reporter at Line B at Rome’s Termini station updated viewers on kentuki news. A line of some thirty people were waiting to consult the “gufetto,” an owl kentuki that belonged to a bum. As the reporter told the camera, the owl “responded to all kinds of questions, except ones about how a homeless person got his hands on an owl kentuki.” Some of the people interviewed claimed that the owl’s dweller was a famous Indian bhagwan. “I came yesterday and asked for a lottery number,” said one. “The gufo knows all.” One woman said: “I come to see the panhandler because he deserves it. It’s a brilliant idea.” People came with questions, and they also brought white slips of paper with all the possible answers to the questions. They lined up the slips of paper in front of the kentuki, and, after meditating for a few seconds, the owl would stop on the one that said In seven days, or Better to forget, or Twice. Each consultation cost five euros. If the kentuki didn’t choose any answer, you had to pay another five to ask again.

  “See, we could make ourselves a little money, Mister,” Enzo said, and he laughed as he watched the mole.

  The kentuki didn’t react. It occurred to Enzo that Mister was privileged and ungrateful, and he sat looking at the mole.

  “We need to talk,” he said. “The way you’re treating me is . . .”

  He thought about it; he wasn’t sure exactly how to describe Mister’s mistreatment.

  “I don’t know what it is, but you just can’t treat people like this,” said Enzo finally. And then he said: “You spend the entire day in my house, but you won’t deign to say a word to me. It’s unbearable. Don’t we get along okay?”

  He felt an urge to kick the mole, lock it in a closet, hide its charger the way his son kept doing. Then Mister would have no one to wake in the middle of the night, no one who would search for the charger and save him.

  What he did instead was tell Carlo everything the next day, leaning against the pharmacy counter like he was in a dive bar. Carlo listened to him, shaking his head every once in a while, a half smile on his face. Then he clapped him on the back and told him:

  “Enzo, I need to get you out of that house awhile.”

  They would go fishing. Carlo set a date and time, and Enzo accepted.

  “All weekend,” said Carlo, shaking a threatening finger.

  “All weekend,” said Enzo, and he smiled in relief.

  Oaxaca

  SHE WAS HUNGRY and happily exhausted—she’d run ten kilo-meters without stopping even once. She showered and then ate while she looked at her phone; a message from her mother was waiting on the screen.

  “Are you sure you’re ok?”

  By then Alina had canceled several video-chat dates. She wasn’t avoiding her mother, it was just that her head was somewhere else. She’d fought with Sven and it hadn’t been about the assistant; she never said anything about that, or about the fact that, almost a month into the residency, he hadn’t gone with her to Oaxaca even once. Nor was it about the dozens of dried tangerine peels that he’d found under his pillow the night before. Could a person be so removed from the world that he could sleep on tangerine peels for an entire week without smelling them? What kind of man was she living with? No, their fight had been all about the kentuki, and they had argued without arguing. Sven had simply stated that he would be taking it with him every morning to the studio, and she had banged her empty coffee cup down on the kitchen table, and things had only gotten worse since then.

  Sven had broken the long stretch of noncommunication that she’d imposed on the kentuki, Alina had no doubt about that. She could sense it when the Colonel came back from the studios, in his reluctance as he knocked at the door. It was as if he were exhausted by this last part of the day, the part he spent with the crazy lady of the residency. The kentuki came back alone between six and six-thirty, when the artiste considered his workday over and went down to the common areas. Alina wondered if Sven saved the kentuki the three impossible steps it had to climb to get to the rooms, leaving him on the other side of the embankments, or if they said goodbye at the door to the workshop and it was the Colonel who’d found a way to reach her by another route. When Alina opened the door for him, he went straight to his charger without bothering to hit against her even once, or circle around her giving his rusted-crow cries. Alina wondered what kind of dialogue Sven and the kentuki had established, whether the Colonel had told him about the episode when she’d taken off her bikini top, and how Sven had reacted. There’s no reason your partner should understand all the things you do in front of a pet, she thought.

  She told Carmen about her problem, just to see what she thought.

  “You have it on a platter, manita. The kentuki can give you a daily report on the studio and the assistant.”

  It was easy to find out, she just had to give an interrogation of the type “Take a step forward if . . ., take a step back if not . . .” But she was convinced that reaching the most minimal agreement with the kentuki would open them up irreversibly to dialogue, and Alina wasn’t going to fall into that temptation.

  One afternoon she waited for the Colonel in her bikini, and when he came back from the studios, instead of opening the door for him she went outside to meet him, ready with her sunglasses and book, as if someone she’d been waiting for had come to pick her up. She headed to the terrace and lay facedown on one of the lounge chairs. The Colonel was slow to follow her—maybe he was too tired to sunbathe after his long workday. But she would let herself be touched, and she’d make a great effort to picture the old man’s hands with the greatest possible clarity. If the dweller and the artiste were communicating, she was going to start sending Sven some signals.

  Another afternoon she’d put the crow on her lap, and, by the light of the desk lamp and with the help of some tweezers, she’d spent almost an hour carefully pulling out hairs until she’d branded a neat swastika on its forehead. Sven said nothing, though it wasn’t something that could go unnoticed. Alina left her marks and Sven ignored them so openly that it was clear he noticed them. She couldn’t help wondering what kinds of things went on between him and the kentuki while they were alone, whether Sven also feigned lack of interest with the Colonel, or, on the contrary, whether he waited for those moments to pick him up with compassion and give encouragement and consolation. Did he apologize in both their names if he found the Colonel with a pair of underpants on his head, or tied to a chair so he couldn’t reach his charger?

  Meanwhile, she and Sven were dancing the slow dance of evasion. She went out to run in the early morning, early enough so they didn’t have breakfast together. Then Sven came back at night always fatigued: “An exhausting day,” he’d say as he loped wearily toward the shower. When he came out of the bathroom, Alina was already asleep. They had to exchange brief conversation only every once in a while, so the hostility was never openly declared, and then they each could go back to their own concerns.

  “I think I’m going to change some things,” Sven said one day, and for a moment she thought he was talking about his relationship with her. “I mean the monoprints,” he clarified right away. “Having Colonel Sanders with me all day has given me a couple ideas.”

  And that was all the artiste said to her that day.

  On the desk, when she was organizing her papers a little, Alina found the crow’s beak, the piece that she had accidentally broken off with a kick the week before, and that, though she and Sven had both spent a while looking for it, they hadn’t been able to find. She waited for the Colonel to come back from the studios, and she summoned him to her, pointing at her feet while showing him the beak and a tube of glue. Maybe the Colonel thought it was a truce, because he came right over and didn’t make her ask twice. Alina knelt down, opened the glue, and spread a line of gel over the inner part of the beak.

  “Come on,” she said, with all the sweetness she could muster.

  The kentuki came even closer, until it touched her legs, and she stuck the beak right in the middle of its left eye.

 
; “The girls are going to go crazy over you,” she said.

  When she put him back on the floor, the Colonel spun in clumsy circles. He banged against the table leg and then sped away. He didn’t go to the charger, but instead hid under the bed. Alina lay down on the floor and reached out an arm to try to catch him, but the Colonel dodged her every time she got close. In the end she had to poke him with the broomstick to get him out. Twice she managed it, but the kentuki went right back under. The third time she caught him, she put him on the stool in the middle of the room. She set up the bowl stand and her phone, and she left a video of Facebreaker playing at maximum volume. It was impossible to know how much the Colonel enjoyed or hated that kind of music, although she was sure that the seven minutes and twelve seconds of decapitations that accompanied “Zombie Flesh Cult,” now with a new line in the middle of the screen, would be a most illustrative sort of information for the Colonel. Now that he was leading the life of an artist, she thought, it was good for him to be open to other kinds of experience.

  And then there was the afternoon when she didn’t open the door at all. She made sure to leave the room long before the kentuki arrived. She went down to Oaxaca with Carmen; she wanted to go to the market—she hadn’t gone back since she’d bought the kentuki. They took a taxi from the residency and rode together in the back seat, both windows down.

  “My god!” said Carmen.

  As if she’d said “Finally,” or “This is just what I needed,” or “How beautiful.” Her eyes were closed. The wind blew their hair up into the back window, where the strands intermingled. It was a nice feeling, and Alina closed her eyes, too, and let her body sink deeper into the seat. They had lunch at El Asador Vasco, across from the zócalo, and then walked up Alcalá to the Temple. At the market they bought fruit and some herbs for infusions, Oaxacan chocolate, fresh cheese, and some silver bracelets that cost them less than ten dollars. Then, too weighted down to go on walking, they sat for a while in the zócalo with two glasses of mango juice.