In the dressing rooms at night, the navy-blue pleated skirts, the pants, the blouses, the rough white underwear, and the handkerchiefs were all crammed together in the darkness, along with the life their owners had given each item during the day. The shoes, gathered together, tightly together, forming a vigorous, organized army; the children walked as much barefoot during the night as they had wearing the shoes during the day. Unearthly dirt clung to their soles. Shoes seem lonely when they are not worn! The bar of soap passed from hand to hand, from face to face, chest to chest, acquiring the form of their souls. Bars of soap lost between the toothpaste and the hairbrushes and toothbrushes! All the same!
“One voice is dispersed among those who talk. Those who don’t talk transmit the voice’s force to the objects that surround them,” said Fabia Hernández, one of the teachers; but neither she nor her colleagues Lelia Isnaga and Albina Romarín could penetrate the closed world that sometimes dwells in the heart of solitary people (who defend themselves, opening up only to grief or joy). The closed world that dwelled in the heart of forty children! The teachers, who loved their work with utmost dedication, wanted to catch the secret by surprise. They knew that secrets can poison the soul. Mothers fear the effects they may have on their children—no matter how beautiful a secret may be, who knows what monsters it may conceal!
They wanted to catch the children by surprise. They would suddenly turn on the lights in the bedroom, pretending to inspect the ceiling where a pipe had burst or to chase the mice that had invaded the main office. With the pretext of imposing silence, they would interrupt recess, saying that the noise bothered a sick neighbor or the celebration of a wake. Assuming the duty of supervising the religious conduct of the children, they would disrupt them in the chapel, where the heightened mysticism allowed for raptures of love, disjointed, interwoven words uttered before the flames of the candles lighting up the children’s hermetic faces.
Fluttering like birds, the children would burst into movie theaters or concert halls, where they’d distract themselves with dazzling shows. Their heads turned at the same time right to left, left to right, revealing the fullness of their pretense.
Miss Fabia Hernández was the first to discover that the children not only dreamed the same dreams but made the same mistakes in their notebooks; when she scolded them for having no personality of their own, they smiled sweetly, a behavior they rarely practiced.
No child was troubled when punished for a classmate’s mischief. None were troubled when others were given credit for their own work.
On various occasions the teachers accused one or two students of completing the assignments for the rest of the class; otherwise, it was too difficult to explain why their handwriting and sentence composition were so similar. But the teachers later realized that they had been mistaken.
In art class, the teacher wanted to stimulate the children’s imaginations and asked them to draw any object they felt moved to draw. Each child, for an alarmingly long time, drew wings, of various forms and dimensions, though the differences did not reduce what she termed the monotony of the whole. When the children were scolded, they grumbled and finally one wrote on the blackboard, “We feel the wings, miss.”
Is it wrong to think they were happy? To the extent that children can be happy—given life’s limitations—there is no reason to think that they were sad, except in the summer. The heat of the city weighed down on the teachers. At the hour when the children liked to run, climb trees, roll around on the lawn, or somersault down a hill, all of these amusements were replaced by the siesta, the dreaded custom of the siesta. The cicadas sang but the children didn’t hear that song which makes the heat even more intense. The radios blared, but the children didn’t hear that racket which makes the summer, and its sticky asphalt, unbearable.
They wasted hours sitting behind the teachers, who held parasols as they waited for the sun to drop and the heat to subside. When they were alone they played seemingly innocent pranks, like calling a dog from a balcony, and when the dog saw so many possible owners at once, it would leap madly into the air to reach them. Or, a child would whistle at a lady walking along the street, and the lady would angrily ring the bell to complain of their insolence.
An unexpected donation provided a vacation by the sea. The little girls made themselves modest swimsuits; the boys bought theirs at a discount store, the material smelling of castor oil, but the style was modern, making the suit look good on anyone.
To heighten the significance of their first vacation, the teachers, using a pointer, showed them the blue dot on the map, by the Atlantic, where they would be staying.
They dreamed of the Atlantic and the sand: the same dream.
When the train left the station, the handkerchiefs waved back and forth out of the train windows like a flock of doves—this image captured in a photograph published in the newspaper.
When the children arrived at the sea they hardly looked at it; they only saw the sea that they had imagined instead of the real one. When they adapted to the new landscape, it was difficult to control them. They ran after the foam, which formed drifts similar to those formed by snow. But joy didn’t let them forget their secret, and they would return gravely to their rooms, where communication was easier for them. If what they felt wasn’t love, then something very similar to love linked and gladdened them. The older ones, influenced by the younger ones, blushed when the teachers asked them trick questions, and answered with a quick nod. The younger ones, all very serious, looked like adults whom nothing could disturb. The majority of them were named after flowers, like Jacinto, Dahlia, Daisy, Jasmine, Violet, Rose, Narcissus, Hortense, Camila—affectionate names chosen by their parents. They carved their names in the trunks of trees with their fingernails, which were as hard as a tiger’s claws; they wrote their names on the walls with gnawed-on pencils, and in the sand with their fingers.
They set off on the trip back to the city, hearts bursting with joy, since they would travel by plane. A film festival was to begin that day, and they caught glimpses of furtive stars at the airport. Their throats hurt from so much laughing. Their eyes turned bright red from so much gazing.
The news in the papers appeared like this: Forty children from a school for the deaf were flying back from their first vacation by the sea when their plane suffered a terrible accident. A door mysteriously opened during the flight and caused the disaster. Only the teachers, the pilot, and the crew were saved. When interviewed, Miss Fabia Hernández said, with conviction, that when the children threw themselves into the void they had wings. She tried to hold back the last child, who escaped from her arms to follow the others as if an angel. She said the intense beauty of the scene convinced her that it wasn’t a disaster but rather some kind of celestial vision she will never forget. She still doesn’t believe in the children’s disappearance.
“God would be playing a mean trick on us if he showed us heaven while casting us into hell,” declares Miss Lelia Isnaga. “I don’t believe in the disaster.”
Albina Romarín says, “It was all a dream the children had, hoping to astonish us, just as they did on the swings in the yard. Nobody can convince me they have vanished.”
Neither the red sign announcing that the school building is for rent nor the closed blinds dishearten Fabia Hernández. With her colleagues, to whom she is linked as the children were linked among themselves, she often visits the old building. There she contemplates the students’ names written on the walls (inscriptions they were punished for), and some wings drawn with childish skill, bearing witness to the miracle.
* The escarapela, also known as the Roundel of Argentina, is a heraldic piece of circular cloth that bears the blue-and-white colors of the Argentine flag and has been worn on the lapel on national holidays since 1812.
REVELATION
WHETHER he opened his mouth or not, people inevitably guessed the truth from the way he looked: Valentín Brumana was an idiot. He would say, “I’m going to marry a star.”
> “Sure, he’s going to marry a star,” we would reply to make him suffer.
We enjoyed torturing him. We’d make him lie in a hammock, then we would tie the sides together so he couldn’t escape, and rock him back and forth until he got so dizzy he would close his eyes. We would make him ride the swing, rolling up the ropes on either side, then letting them go all at once while pushing him dizzily off into space. We didn’t let him taste the desserts we ate, but would rub candy or sticky sugar in his hair and make him cry. We put the toys he asked to borrow on top of a tall chest; to reach them he would climb unsteadily on a wobbly table with two chairs piled on each other, one of them a rocker.
When we discovered that Valentín Brumana, without making any show of it, was a sort of magician, we began to feel some respect for him, mixed with a little fear.
“Did you see your girlfriend tonight?” he would say to us. That evening we had met one of our girlfriends on the sly in a vacant lot. We were so precocious!
“Who are you hiding from?” he would ask us. It was the day we received our report cards, which were full of bad grades, and we were hiding because our father was looking for us to punish us, or, a thousand times worse, to give us a sermon.
“You’re sad, with a mournful face,” he would exclaim. He said it at the very moment we wanted to kill ourselves from sorrow, from a sorrow we concealed like our dates with our girlfriends.
Valentín Brumana’s life was full of excitement, not just because of what we did to him but also because of his intense activity. He had a pocket watch his uncle had given him. It was a real watch, not one made of chocolate or tin or plastic, as he really deserved, according to us; I think it was made of silver, and attached to the chain was a little medal of the Virgin of Luján. The sound the watch made, banging against the medal each time he took it out of his pocket, demanded respect, as long as we didn’t look at the watch’s owner, who made you laugh. A thousand times a day he would take the watch out of his pocket and say, “I have to go to work.” He would get up and abruptly leave the room; then he would come right back.
Nobody paid him any attention. They gave him old records, old magazines to amuse him.
When he worked as a scribe, he would use toilet paper, if that was all he could find, and pencils he carried in a broken briefcase; when he worked as an electrician, the same briefcase would be used as a toolbox to carry insulating tape and wire, which he would collect in the garbage; when he worked as a carpenter, his tools were a wash rack, a broken bench, and a hammer; when he worked as a photographer, I would lend him my camera, without film. Nevertheless, if anyone asked him, “Valentín, what are you going to be when you grow up?” he would answer, “A priest or a waiter.” “Why?” we would ask. “Because I like to clean silver.”
One day Valentín Brumana woke up with a fever. The doctors said, in their roundabout way, that he was going to die and that, considering what his life was like, perhaps that was for the best. He was there and heard those words without alarm, though they reverberated through the desolate house. The whole family, including us, his cousins, thought that Valentín Brumana made people happy because he was so different, and that when he was gone he would be irreplaceable.
Death didn’t keep us waiting long. She arrived the next morning: I’m convinced that Valentín in his agony saw her coming through the door to his room. The joy of greeting a loved one lit up his face, which usually only expressed indifference. He stretched out his arm and pointed a finger at her.
“Come,” he said. Then, looking at us out of the corner of his eye, he exclaimed, “How lovely she is!”
“Who? Who is lovely?” we asked him, with a daring that now strikes me as rude. We laughed, but our laughter could easily be confused with crying, tears pouring from our eyes.
“This lady,” he said, blushing.
The door opened. My cousin assures me that the lock was broken and the door always opened by itself, but I don’t believe her. Valentín sat up in bed and greeted an apparition we couldn’t see. It’s very clear that he saw her, that he touched the veil that hung over her shoulders, that she whispered some secret to him that we would never hear. Then something even more unusual happened: with great effort Valentín gave me the camera that had been on his bedside table, asking me to take a picture of them. He showed his companion how to pose.
“No, don’t sit like that,” he told her.
Or instead, in a whisper, almost inaudible, “The veil, the veil is hiding your face.”
Or instead, in an authoritarian tone, “Don’t look away.”
The whole family, and some of the servants, laughed loudly and raised the velvet drapes, so tall and heavy, so that more light could rush in; someone paced out the number of meters that separated the camera from Valentín to help focus the picture. Trembling, I focused on Valentín, who pointed to the place, more important than him and a little to the left, that needed to be in the picture: an empty space. I obeyed.
Soon thereafter I had the film developed. Of the six photographs, I thought they had given me one by mistake, one taken by some other amateur. Nonetheless, Pygmy, my pony, came out clear enough; Tapioca, Facundo’s puppy, did too; the baker bird’s nest was visible, if a bit dark and blurry; as for the one of Gilberta, in a bathing suit, well, it could have been entered in any photo contest, even today; and then the picture of the façade of the school could have been used as a photogravure in La Nación. I had shot all those pictures the same week.
At first I didn’t look too carefully at the blurry, unrecognizable photograph. Indignant, I went to the lab to protest, but they assured me they had not made a mistake and that it must have been some snapshot taken by one of my little brothers.
It was only later, after careful study, that I was able to make out the room, the furniture, and Valentín’s blurry face in the famous photograph. The central figure—clear, terribly clear—was that of a woman covered with veils and scapulars, already rather old, with big hungry eyes, who turned out to be the actress Pola Negri.
VISIONS
DARKNESS. Nonbeing. Can anything more perfect exist? Different moments grow confused. Sound slips down my throat like a snake. The doctor is at once torturer and jeweler: he bends over and dazzles me with a flash of intense light. He gives me orders, pierces me, torments me. My body surrenders to him. I am docile. I do not suffer. One has to surrender. I return to the darkness. I return to nonbeing.
Half awake, the first thing I try to decipher is a painting. I think of the worst of the English painters, settling on Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The woman, her hair lit from behind, is Beata Beatrix. I remember the Latin inscription Rossetti wrote on the frame: Quomodo Sedet Sola Civitas. Why am I seeing that painting, and in a light that seems so false? I close my eyes, then open them again. It is not a painting. It is a person who is taking care of me, her hair lit up, her face in shadow. The room is dark. When the light is turned on, I look at the room and think it’s my own. Unless I left my house I must be in it, in my room.
The door is on the left; in my room it’s on the right. There is a small dark piece of furniture, topped by an oval mirror; in my room there is a large bureau, with a Virgin inside a glass bell jar. The blinds are of wood, and can be raised and lowered with cords; in my room the blinds are of iron and open sideways, in three sections. The electric light in the room is coming from a square glass fixture in the center of the ceiling; in my room there are only two silver standing lamps on the bedside tables. I am absentminded. I have lived in this house for many years without noticing that there are two kinds of blinds in my room: some modern ones that go up and down, made of slats of light wood, and other, old-fashioned ones of heavy iron that open sideways in three sections. I am so absentminded that I never noticed that light came not only from the silver standing lamps but also from the square glass fixture on the ceiling that I didn’t turn on because I couldn’t find the switch. Nevertheless, I’m surprised that I never noticed that ground-glass lamp on the ceiling until now; i
t’s very obvious now that I look at it all the time. Besides, the Virgin in the bell jar isn’t there, nor the bureau. The Virgin troubles me. If I turned my head back suddenly, like an owl, perhaps I would find it. To clean the objects in this room without breaking them, even those that are rarely cleaned (and hence always dirty), someone must take the objects from their usual places and put them somewhere else. The Virgin must be in a corner, under some piece of furniture, or underneath the bedstead. I wonder if a servant cleaned it. But I cannot turn around. Instead of the bureau, which was on a side wall, not across from the bed, I see an amorphous little chest with a small mirror. Am I in Córdoba? Could I be dreaming of Córdoba? I have been to a house there with the same piece of furniture. No, I’m not in Córdoba. It must be a present someone gave me for my birthday, someone who’s fond of me but doesn’t know the kinds of gifts I like. When were those objects brought to my room, and who brought them? They must be very light. Anyone could pick them up and carry them from one place to another. I don’t need to worry. What does it matter who brought them! I could thank any of the people here for this gift I don’t like. I smile just in case one of them gave it to me. And that little picture? It’s hanging on the wall on the left above a sort of cot, no doubt a very comfortable one, which I can see from my bed as if I were up on a mountainside. I never saw that cot in my room, or in any other room in my house. Furniture has its own life; it’s not strange for pieces to come and go, change places, and be replaced whenever possible. Isn’t it better this way? What’s wrong with this room? Is it worth saying something about it to someone? Perhaps I should speak to the first person who approaches: the nurse. Her apron crackles—it’s crisp with starch, so much starch that it looks as if the shirt were made of plaster (if plaster could gleam). This woman enjoys being a nurse. What a shame that the others don’t enjoy their work as much as she does. She’s happy. Sometimes a quick little dog follows her, but I can’t see it very well.
Thus Were Their Faces Page 21