Little Eyes

by Samanta Schweblin

  Grigor gave her a gentle pat on her shoulder, and she looked at him in surprise. They spent a while with the kentuki, interacting as best they could with the girl and her mother, the curious children in the background. Then the mother waved goodbye and left. Nikolina looked for the mother’s number and called her again, thinking she could suggest to the girl some other method of communication. The phone rang in the house and the girl went to answer. Grigor would have preferred not to keep getting involved, but it was too late, she had already answered.

  “It’s us,” said Nikolina, in English. “Are you all right?”

  She repeated the question in English and then in a pretty basic French that Grigor had never heard from her. It was clear the girl didn’t understand either. What kind of community was this where everyone seemed to be up-to-date on what a kentuki was, but no one spoke a word of English? Grigor thought the girl hadn’t even managed to connect the kentuki to the phone call she’d just received. She hung up and said something to the kids, who laughed.

  Nikolina put down the tablet. She seemed disappointed, but she also looked like someone who’d had a great weight taken off her shoulders.

  “Now I really need a good shower,” she said. She stretched, reaching her octopus arms upward. She stood up and went to the door. “Thank you,” she said from the doorway to the room, before leaving, and she smiled.

  Grigor smiled back. He felt a little dumb when the girl was gone and the grin still stretched across his face. Alone in the room, he thought for a while about those long and flexible arms, the alien vertebrae covered in velvety skin. Maybe, even after all that had happened with connection 47, he hadn’t lost so much. He grabbed the tablet, sat on the bed, and maneuvered the kentuki for a while around the girl’s house, evaluating the socioeconomic conditions of the environment. If he was lucky, in spite of all it had been through, he could still sell that kentuki. In the end the connection was linked to a criminal case, and more than once people had written to ask about even more morbid kinds of connections. So this one was worth some money. Plus, the house was a humble place, almost at the edge of acceptable, but the landscape was pleasant and the family seemed quaint, and there were always upper-class Europeans who wanted to circulate their philanthropic instincts around areas of the world too uncomfortable to be visited in the traditional ways. The girl and her mother seemed like good people, it had to be said, and the kids were obedient and respectful: they followed him curiously, but they didn’t get too close or touch him. The girl walked away and Grigor followed her. They went into the kitchen, also large and also unfinished. Two men were talking at the table while the mother did dishes at the sink. The girl exchanged a few words with her; they looked happy, uninterested in the conversation between the two men. When Grigor got closer to them, he thought he understood why: they were speaking English. The older man—surely the father—seemed to speak it haltingly.

  “I . . . No money, no money. Already spent.”

  The other man was younger. His skin was white and he was smoking. His pronunciation was almost perfect.

  “Your girl is back, man. Don’t you get it? If the girl came home, the money goes back into the Don’s wallet.”

  The girl came over with two plates and set one in front of each man. The younger one took her by the wrist and kissed her arm, looking at the father. Then, without letting go of her, he said:

  “They’re not asking.”

  She didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what they were talking about, but her smile suddenly disappeared, as if she’d been hit by a still incomprehensible revelation.

  Grigor imagined himself to be as invisible as his kentuki there beside the cupboards, and he stayed where he was for a moment, listening to the mother call to the girl. He thought about Nikolina, and whether he would be capable of telling her what they had really returned the girl to. He thought about his own father, his yogurt, and the money he had finally managed to save up thanks to Plan Fallback. And then he had a realization: he didn’t want to keep watching strangers eat and snore, he never wanted to see a single chick shrieking in terror while the rest plucked its feathers in panic, he didn’t want to move anyone else from one inferno to another. He wasn’t going to wait until the damned international regulations came to remove him from the business—they’d already taken too long. He was getting out by himself. He’d sell the connections he had left, and he’d start doing something else. He went to the general settings, and without even bothering to get the kentuki out of that house first, he cut the connection.

  Lima—Erfurt

  SHE’D DREAMED ABOUT KLAUS. She had moved in bed, between the sheets, and she’d felt him embrace her in the darkness. And then, something worse. Something hot and wet, and a large, stiff German member between her legs jolted her awake. She was so alarmed she had to sit up for a moment and turn on the bedside lamp. Then she saw her bunny. It was in the middle of the room, its open eyes looking at her sweetly. Had it seen her dreaming? Could it have seen more than it should have? They’d been living together for almost a week now, a week so harmonious and full of love that Emilia would have been ashamed to admit it. Except to Gloria. She’d told Gloria because she was her great friend in this adventure, and they could trust each other. To her son, on the other hand, she’d said nothing. He was too fascinated with the woman and her black boots, too busy lately to answer his mother with the slightest bit of interest, and when it came to kentukis, he was more interested in talking than in listening.

  What worried Emilia was how little the boy watched out for his privacy: she was indignant that even she, who was from another generation and had spent a whole life far removed from technology, was so much more aware of the exposure and risk implied by a relationship with those critters. She saw it every day on the news. They invited specialists on the ten p.m. show who listed new tips and precautions like they were giving the weather report. Emilia thought it was a matter of common sense, and of knowing how to set limits. You only had to have life experience and a little intuition. But it was worth taking the risk, because at the end of the day there were little creatures like hers, and like the one she was in Erfurt. Beings with good intentions who only wanted to share their time with others.

  That’s how it had been with Eva at first. Klaus had brought problems, but now the days were flowing calmly again. Although the German still called her. The first few times Emilia saw his number glowing on the screen she trembled. She paced back and forth holding the phone, unsure what to do. In the end she always answered. The German spoke to her in thickly accented, largely unintelligible English, and a lot of what he said escaped her. Still, by the third or fourth call, she started to feel a familiarity with that deep voice, and she realized it wasn’t really all that important to decipher what he said. She suspected, with all the open-mindedness of which she’d turned out to be capable in these past months, that maybe there was something more behind the lasciviousness and aggression of those calls. She told herself it was necessary to make the effort to listen to him, that it was an opportunity to find out more details of the girl’s world. She did it for Eva, for the two of them—Emilia and Eva. She listened to the German’s voice and closed her eyes, trying to understand. Sometimes Klaus’s tone implied a question and then he’d fall silent, and then Emilia would say some silly thing in Spanish, about the weather or the news of the day, until Klaus interrupted and started to talk again. He was always the one to hang up. Emilia, of course, stuck it out until the end.

  She pushed the sheets aside, put on her dressing gown, and got up. The bunny followed her to the kitchen and they put on water for tea. It hadn’t even been a week and they already had their routine. At first Emilia had tried to resist the bunny’s charms. She thought that seeing such a true reflection of herself—of the animal she was in Erfurt—moving around all day at her feet could be treacherous, could make her trust more than she should. But the respect she felt from the kentuki was remarkable. It was just that the similarity didn’t come only f
rom the silly appearance of being two bunnies with the same color fur, the same barrette placed between their ears in the same way. It was like constantly seeing herself; they seemed like kindred spirits in almost every way possible, and sometimes it even pained her to leave the kentuki locked in the house when she went to the store.

  Soon she began to tell it things. She thought back over the questions she’d always wanted to ask Eva and she answered them for her bunny, in case she was wondering the same things: how her keeper had come to live in that house, the most important points of her family history, what people in the neighborhood were like, and who she should vote for if she lived in that city.

  “You’re the only person I know who’s a keeper and a dweller at the same time,” Gloria had told her.

  They talked about kentukis in secret, in the showers at the pool while Inés was swimming her final laps.

  “That must give you a special perspective, right?”

  It was possible, yes, she did realize that. Sometimes she moved around the apartment in Erfurt looking for Eva, while she heard her own bunny moving behind her like a deferred echo of herself. And for her bunny it must be soothing to watch its keeper dwell in a kentuki. It made you think about all the branches of understanding and solidarity such an exercise implied. But what had she become? Some kind of Zen monk of the bifurcated meanings of kentukis? Well, she was someone who was learning a lot, she couldn’t deny that.

  “They understand everything, you know,” she said to the man at the supermarket later, reprimanding him.

  She was paying at the register and saw that the cashier had his kentuki on the counter, moving over the invoices and receipts. She didn’t think it was smart to give it so much freedom around people’s financial information, and Emilia was starting to suspect that, if there were abuses by some kentukis, it was only because of their keepers’ negligence. Boundaries were really the very foundation of these relationships. At the end of the day, that was how she had raised her son, and he hadn’t turned out half bad.

  Back home after the supermarket she stored the food in the fridge and made lunch. Every time she opened and closed the refrigerator door, she saw the image she’d printed out of her and Eva in Erfurt. She’d printed other photos as well while she was at it, images she took of her computer screen with her phone, and she’d hung them up here and there, and even put one in a very pretty frame her son had given her. She had also printed some of Klaus. She liked the ones of the German cooking in his underwear. For now—except for the two on her bathroom mirror—those were on the nightstand. And there was a very funny one Emilia wanted to use to make a card for Gloria. Deep down, she had to admit, she wanted her friend to see what kind of man it was who called her some afternoons.

  Emilia watched the news while she ate lunch, and then she cleaned the kitchen. She used those hours for household chores because it was a time when her bunny tended to sleep. She left it on its charger, as Eva did with her. When she lifted it up, she always checked anxiously to make sure the discreet little light between the back wheels was on. Gloria had explained that was the only way of making sure that, even if the little creature was asleep, it was still connected.

  At two in the afternoon, nice and punctual, they were in front of the computer, waking up in Erfurt. Sometimes the bunny asked to get up, too, and Emilia set her in front of the screen. It must have been fascinating for her to see herself in another place, controlled by her keeper.

  “It’s Erfurt, Germany.” Emilia passed on details to help orient her new friend.

  The bunny purred, touched her arms, looked into her eyes, and blinked. She liked Erfurt, but clearly didn’t like Klaus. The last time he’d called, the kentuki had looked at the number lighting up the phone screen, motionless as if the devil himself were calling. Maybe she noticed her keeper’s tension. Maybe she even understood something of what Klaus was saying into Emilia’s ear, and didn’t like it.

  “It’s nothing bad, little one,” Emilia said after she hung up. “Don’t you worry.”

  On the Erfurt screen, Klaus had left the phone on the kitchen table and was making a sandwich. He went back and forth in his underwear, opening the fridge, breaking some eggs into a pan, almost without ever putting down his beer. Emilia wondered if he said the same words to Eva when they were in bed together as he said to her, and the shame made her glance at her bunny out of the corner of her eye. Then Klaus’s phone rang, in Erfurt. Klaus lowered the flame and answered. Emilia liked his German much more than his English, though she didn’t understand in the slightest and his tone was so different from the one he used with her. Klaus was listening, serious. He went over to the window with his head bent over the phone; he seemed to be paying close attention to what someone was saying. Emilia had no idea what it was all about, but he was unusually attentive—this was a strange call.

  Suddenly, Klaus looked over at her. He stared at Emilia in a way that alarmed her, like that first time just before he’d chased her down like a chicken. Klaus came over to her, nodding into the phone. Just then Eva opened the door to the apartment and came in. She was returning from yoga, her mat and bag slung over her shoulder. Klaus covered the mouthpiece on his phone and explained something to her, and then Eva also looked at Emilia, still holding her things, as if she was trying to comprehend the news she’d just received. The two of them stared at Emilia, and Emilia stared at them on the screen. She couldn’t figure out what was happening. Klaus turned his attention back to the phone and nodded. He wrote something on a piece of paper and said a few words before hanging up. Then he went over to Eva, showing her his screen, running his finger across it as if showing her several images. Eva looked. Her mouth was in a strange grimace, and then a smile escaped her; it was a brief and perverse expression Emilia had never seen her make before. Eva dropped her bag and yoga mat and sat down. She looked at the kentuki on the floor, and Emilia moved closer to her feet because she wanted to see her up close, so desperate was she to understand what was happening. Eva knelt down next to her. She sat on the floor with her legs crossed and the phone in her hand, and dialed.

  The phone in Emilia’s house rang. Too many things were happening for her to answer. The device vibrated on the desk until her bunny pushed it over to her and left it against her hand. It was Klaus’s number. When Emilia answered, Eva looked at her and smiled. She spoke in German, but the translator was still working on the screen.

  “Hello.”

  Eva’s voice sounded harder and more adult over the phone.

  “Your little bunny just sent me photos of you chatting on the phone with my boyfriend. Photos of your house full of pictures of us. Also photos of you. I think you’ve got your puritan little bunny all in a tizzy.”

  Emilia wanted to understand, but she couldn’t understand.

  “Your little bunny seems very disappointed in its keeper. And I want to tell you something . . .” Eva’s voice became deeper and slower, so sensual it made the hair stand up on the back of Emilia’s neck. “Emilia . . .” Eva knew her name. “I really, really like your old-lady underwear.”

  She’d been seen in her beige underpants? The ones that came up nearly to the bottom of her breasts?

  “A lot,” said Eva, looking at Klaus. “We both do.”

  Emilia jumped in the chair and spilled the tea that was beside her. She stood up without knowing what to do, her heart pounding dangerously fast. She realized she was still holding the phone to her ear.

  “Miss . . .” she tried to say, and her weak and scratchy voice reminded her how old she was.

  She didn’t know how to go on. She hung up. In Erfurt, Eva looked at the phone and said something inaudible to Klaus, who burst out laughing, took Eva by the arm, pulled her to her feet, and started to take off her yoga pants. Emilia turned off the screen, furious. Then she turned it back on and Eva was pulling down Klaus’s underpants. How did this nightmare disconnect? She fumbled for the controller and found the red button she’d ignored so many times before.


  Annul connection?

  Emilia accepted and kept her hands glued to the chair’s backrest. She squeezed the chair until it made noise, leaving a permanent mark. A red warning came on-screen: Connection ended. It was the first time Emilia had seen something so big and red on her computer, but her body didn’t seem capable of responding to any new stimulus. She was motionless, exhausted from so much fright and abuse. The kentuki looked at her from the other end of the desk, seeming to judge her, and Emilia wasn’t willing to put up with its disapproval. She had a sudden memory of Klaus: he had taught her exactly how chickens were killed in the modern world. Emilia picked up the rabbit, brought it to the kitchen, and set it in the sink. When she let go of it to turn on the faucet, the kentuki tried to get away, but she took it roughly by the ears, with all the rage and frustration she was capable of, and she held it under the stream of water. The rabbit screeched and shook, and Emilia wondered what her son would think if he could see her at that moment, how ashamed he would be if he could see her viselike hands holding the rabbit under the water, covering its little eyes and pressing it against the drain with all her strength, drowning it, until the little green light on its base stopped blinking.

  Umbertide

  IT HAD BEEN almost two weeks since he’d seen Luca. At some point during all the meetings with the psychologist, the arguments with his ex-wife, and the social worker’s intervention, Enzo had started to face up to the idea that he might actually lose custody of his son.

  He was ashamed when he remembered that, only two years before, a judge had concluded that his wife wasn’t stable enough to take responsibility for the boy, and he was terrified that same judge would think he’d now become an even worse option. He knew the psychologist had spent hours and hours talking with Luca, and he supposed that, better educated and better informed than his ex-wife about all the world’s perversions, the doctor must have listed them for Luca over and over, lubricating details if she thought something wasn’t understood well enough, or drawing the unnameable on paper if the boy’s replies were ambiguous. But Enzo could no longer protect him, and it was his own fault. They would tell him everything, ask him anything, and the boy would have to learn to live with it.