He held out his hand to help it get up. The gesture was not warmly received.
“Shall I bring you a towel?”
He looked all around for his towel, but it wasn’t there; he couldn’t even find his footprints.
What could he do now to forget her? The eyes he was seeing, one blue and one green, cannot be forgotten. Where could he hide to forget them? Where could he hear that silence? But she spoke.
“And my hair?” she said. “Don’t you like my hair?”
“I love your hair and your eyes.”
“That’s all?”
“For the moment that’s what I know for certain because it’s all I know. Later on we’ll see.”
“We’ll see?”
A light shot out of her eyes like fire from a volcano.
“Why are you angry? A supernatural being doesn’t get angry. I cannot imagine what I will do to forget your eyes, this beach, this sky: Why has all of this happened to me? Doesn’t the rest of my life matter? I will see you again! I haven’t lived until now. Do you understand?”
“We’ll see,” she said, and without getting up she dove into the water and disappeared into the depths of the sea.
That night he couldn’t fall sleep. All night long he kept asking himself whether that sentence—“We’ll see”—was an insult or an invitation. He went back to the tamarinds to sleep and watch the sunrise, staring at the fixed point where he had watched her disappear. He spent the whole day waiting for the same hour, since it seemed to him like the time when there might be another encounter.
He went into a coffee shop by the breakwater. He sat down at a table. He saw that the floor tiles were blue and green. It was impossible to forget the color of those eyes. He ordered something to drink. The glass they brought him was green, but filled with liquid it turned a bluish green. He noticed in the center of the table was a vase of centaureas. Why did he remember that suggestive name? Had his mother taught it to him? Or had an illustrated catalog revealed it to him? The stamens of those flowers seemed like blue eyelashes to him. Pursued by that color he returned to the beach with the sensation that he had run all the way around the world. It was not due to a preference for aerobic exercise, but those who saw him run by thought that he was competing in a race. Timidly, he suddenly slowed down when he saw that he was the object of admiration.
After the long day had come to an end, she arrived. The conversation they had was so similar to the previous one that it doesn’t bear repeating, but their love was growing, and the brilliant blue and green of her eyes had taken possession of him.
He contemplated the world around him. It was flooded with salt, iodine, love; he studied the coast, the lichens, the seaweed, the breakwater, the rocks. He heard the unforgettable screech of the seagulls. He bought a camera. He took a picture of his beloved. He kept that picture. He felt loved, utterly faithful. He slept with her in the water. That’s not as hard as it sounds. Not even impossible, the lover declared. And what about her? May someone answer from the depths of the sea.
A DOLL’S SECRET MEMORIES
FOR A LONG time life has treated me like a girl treats her doll, paying me no attention except when playing. I am how I am, inside my cell, because I live in a cell where no one else can enter, just me with my countless demands, some of them impossible, others as easy to fulfill as those of a girl. My life passes like a nun’s life, but without suffering, without pain or sadness. That doesn’t mean that I am indifferent to the beauties of love or of sweet friendship. I would like to be clear when I recount my life and tell of my heart’s sensitive nature. Many people believe that I am a being different from everyone else who lives in this unfashionable world. I hope they can learn to see me rationally, without any flirtatiousness. Solitude has made me totally sincere so what I am writing seems unbelievable to people who live in a closed society. I am independent, free to think and feel as I do, without the slightest shame. Some day, perhaps, I will emerge from my secret, happy to imagine other worlds, brighter and bolder ones that would astonish anyone, expressing the depths of my confidence. I am what I want to be for the whole of undisturbed eternity. Nothing belongs to me here in this house. I want to describe its geometry. An enormous, hexagonal hall joins the rooms. A hallway leads to each bedroom. I have an altar with saints, a little kitchen with pots, spoons, knives, and forks. I live in a world in which water covers the earth. For a week it has been raining without end and this area of the city is completely flooded. The electricity doesn’t work, there isn’t any drinking water in the houses, and the floodwaters are filthy. This makes me happy because nobody can bathe me. The telephones don’t work, nor do the gas stoves. “You have to resign yourself,” says an old woman who feels happy. For her, resignation is the only form of hope. Resign ourselves? What does that word mean? I’ve heard it in a dream where what they were looking for was never found and they were saddened because they couldn’t find it. I think it’s like hope, although spoken in a different tone of voice, one that reminds me of the strange emphasis with which men spoke in my childhood. Could I have been a child once? I don’t have little dresses or little shoes or little hats that would prove that I was a child, and I don’t have tiny furniture sets or cars either. My toy is the computer. Nevertheless, I was a girl, so tiny that nobody could see me. When they didn’t look at me or celebrate my straight blond hair or my haircut or my dress or my way of speaking, I witnessed a flood. I was sleeping on water as if on a very soft, almost drinkable waterbed. Lifting my feet, I saw the houses submerged in the liquid, my head raised so I could breathe. Someone shouted in the street, “It’s an angel! Look at the angel!” Someone I can’t name, because I have learned that people are perverse and may misinterpret my words, saved me from the water where I had been floating for several hours. It was near Olivos, down by the river, where there were willows and blue hydrangeas. The person who saved me carried me in her arms without finding out what boy or girl owned me, because a doll is like a dog and belongs to someone in a very intimate way. She took me to a house below the bluff from which you could see the river. She ran to the bathroom in search of a towel and napkins; she dried my feet with a light blue towel and my hair with a white lace napkin. She took off my dress, ironing it I think, then put it back on me very carefully. In her arms I heard her voice telling me, “Barbara, your name is Barbara, don’t forget, and you will be mine.”
Two or three days went by without anybody bothering us. She knew me, I knew her. “My name is Barbara,” I said to her one day, “but what is your name?” “My name is Andrómaca,” she said, holding her breath. “It’s a very odd name, but it has been mine since my baptism and I hope it will still be odd when I die.” “You won’t ever die,” I answered. “I would have to die first.” So we waited for a spring day to cut flowers and put them in vases around the house. Jasmine, hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, bridal wreath—the names were familiar, and she taught me to recognize flowers and perfumes and colors. She sat down in a chair and told me, “I am going to cover you in candies and dresses and toys, but don’t tell anyone.” Then she kissed me, putting her tongue in my mouth. It was like a freshly cut strawberry. “You will sleep with me in my bed, okay? Don’t fuss like a baby or close your eyes when I am speaking to you.”
The first day we took our naps together. It was strange waking up in that house that was so different, in a world full of unknown people and of strange birds in gilded cages. “I hope you love me the way I love you, otherwise I’ll kill you.” She closed her eyes when she spoke these words just as I opened mine. “Don’t be afraid, I won’t ever kill you because I am sensible. Take a good look into the depths of my eyes.” I looked at her and she at me. But happiness never lasts. Lightning and thunder filled the sky. Something happened that stormy day. The bad weather returned. It was nap time. In her room, as if in a dream, I discovered a doll that was different from all the others; she was dressed like a sultan’s wife, moved, closed her eyes, shouted. She was in Andrómaca’s house. She was so beautiful
that I didn’t dare look at her, and I kissed her and she me. But Andrómaca swept her up and rocked her until she fell fast asleep. “Do you know what Andrómaca means? Happiness in marriage,” she explained. I protested, “But you’re not married.” “I am going to marry right now.” “But that’s not possible,” I said. “Yes it is—here is the ring.” The day darkened and I fainted. I didn’t regain consciousness because the room disappeared.
Readers will think that I am lying and that Andrómaca never existed. These words are inside my body. “Open me up if you dare. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe never, I will throw myself out of this window.” She approached the window, opened it, and looked around. “Watch me,” she said. She jumped and fell into the air. She dissolved like a sugar cube. All that was left was the blue of her eyes lost in the extraordinary solitude of jealousy.
But my life didn’t end there. Life goes on without a body, entering plants, smelling the perfume of every flower. Life goes on with its odd surprises. It turns into a detective. I went back to Andrómaca’s house at night. I snuck into her room. She was hugging the doll that wasn’t an odalisque but a sultan’s wife. Both of them were sleeping. A duo of snores held my attention before the thrushes sang; I forced myself to listen to the snores so as to forget my sadness, and felt utterly disenchanted. When the lightning bolts made them visible I threw myself on the ground to see them better and when the last bolt of lightning hit the house I screamed with a dull scream. It seemed we were rising out of the center of the earth, in the place where all three of us had been struck by lightning—I without a body, the two of them with their bodies full of hope, without any future, without heaven or hell, in the eternity of my consciousness.
from
CORNELIA BEFORE THE MIRROR
CORNELIA BEFORE THE MIRROR
I AM SAYING goodbye to everybody in writing, except for you. The house is empty. At eight o’clock Claudia locked the front door. Cornelia! My name makes me laugh. Why not? Sometimes at the most tragic moments I laugh or light a cigarette and lie down on the ground and look at you as if nothing bad had to happen. Certain postures make us believe in happiness. Sometimes lying down makes me believe in love.
“I am a mirror, I am yours. Since you were six years old, because of me you wanted to be an actress; your father, with his face of a national hero, your mother, with her face like that of the republic, were against it. How silly respectable people can be. When you put furs and felt in mothballs your despair is reborn; in fact the people who oppose our vocations, like moths, have to be fought every day, every year.”
“That’s right! But don’t mention moths or mothballs or furs or my family; don’t even mention my name. It seems so ridiculous to me. They could call me Cornice—that would amount to the same thing. I have written it on the bathroom walls when I undressed to shower before going to school; I have written it on the garden arbor in San Fernando when I learned to write; I have written it on my left arm with a golden needle. We live as if we could live for a thousand years, brushing our hair, taking vitamins, cutting our nails and eyelashes, choosing and choosing as if we were at the Gath and Chaves department store.”
I have known you for a long time, from the time I was a few months old, no, maybe later when I had uneven bangs and had ribbons in my hair that were the color of my dresses. For the last few days, as soon as I see you appear, as if I were seeing you for the first or the last time, my heart beats faster. You are a compendium of all the people I have loved. You are surrounded by an atmosphere that is liquid, as if you were inside water, in the light in which fish swim, in the deepest reaches of the sea or on the surface of a still lake. Your voice alone makes me love you. I live in an opaque material world, airless, a world of factories; you must understand that instead of dreams I sometimes have nightmares.
“Greed, with its philosophical face . . .”
“I was never greedy!”
“You were, but in an original way. Pride, with its emeralds full of gardens.”
“My mother is proud, not me!”
“Lust, with its kids who are smarter than their teachers. Lust! How often have you looked up that word in the dictionary, smearing jam on the pages. You were precocious: when you were eight you had twenty orgasms a day.”
“I was even more precocious when I discovered your navel. Sloth, with its dreamy feeling of resignation. I am lazy.”
“Gluttony, with its golden cookbooks.”
“The most horrible of the sins!”
“It seems horrible to you because it makes you fat. Envy, with its dark velvet, with its inexplicable whims.”
“Am I envious? I don’t know whether I am or not! Jealousy and envy are hard to tell apart.”
“Wrath.”
“Wrath? When?”
“The day that you threw your mother’s jewelry on the floor; the day you ripped that fancy dress. Wrath, with glassy eyes like a hyena’s, all of its enchantments are embodied in you.”
“Now you want me to examine my conscience? You helped me disguise myself to beg for forgiveness. Forgiveness from whom? From God and from my ancestors. I always pretended to be someone other than who I am. Naturally that moved you. Your defects, your conflicts are mine. When I stole Elena Schleider’s gold cigarette case, in that country house that smelled of floor wax where they invited us to spend a summer, there, at the end of the bedroom, your eyes, like two stars, guided me to steal the case all by myself. You knew why I was stealing it, for whom. I thought you were a hypocrite, but I don’t bear you a grudge. In a golden frame, with me, you loved and hated Elena Schleider. When they punished me I suffered because I couldn’t see you, because I couldn’t touch your hands, wrapped in a sort of jellylike mist, a mist that is so peculiar to mirrors. Your mouth is as smooth as a spring and as cold as the blades of scissors. Hateful mirror! In a few more moments you will not see me anymore. I promise you. I am in the habit of lying, but never to myself.”
“That skirt you use, that green linen blouse looks good on you. I hope they embalm you for posterity. Don’t smoke so much. Your teeth used to astonish me but now . . . they look like ivory, like common ivory.”
“You were my only friend, the only one who betrayed me after getting to know me. Sometimes, many times, I saw you in my dreams, but I didn’t feel the blue pressure of this glass when I touched you. We are twenty-five years old. That’s a lot, too much.”
“I have seen old people who have no wrinkles, my dear, with purple hair, decrepit old people who look like they are in disguise, and I have seen very ancient children, deathly pale, who pretend to be children. They would come to visit.”
“I always looked for you to laugh. When I cried, I would hide behind the painted wood screen so that you wouldn’t see me, next to the heater in the dining room, where things smelled of fried food and oranges. I knew that you didn’t like my tears. You liked to see me laugh, with a hat made out of a sheet of newspaper, a hat with donkey ears, an admiral’s hat, or a regular hat. That was the one I liked best. I was always fascinated by plumed hats. I dreamt that I was dancing ‘The Death of the Swan’ in a plumed hat. When she was eleven my mother saw Pavlova dance ‘The Death of the Swan.’ Ever since then I have dreamt about a plumed hat and death. I could be forty; in make-believe years I could be forty, an age I will never attain, and have a deeper voice, self-confidence, composure, greater dignity.”
“You will always have an endless variety of voices, from the deepest to the highest. With your dyed hair, even five silver hairs annoy you. Your impeccable fingernails are pink, but they break; you need more calcium.”
“Tomorrow I will consult Dr. Isberto.”
“You can do all the harm you want without anyone noticing. Everyone believes you are a saint, not just because you hide in the darkness of inner rooms but also because your eyes are very far apart from each other, which gives you an expression of innocence and of exuberant happiness.”
“I could be very poor, end up living in misery, beg in passageways,
never see you, my angel, wander from door to door until I finally end up going to a house to offer my services as a laundress, despite the fact that I don’t know how to wash clothes. Then you would see me kneeling, my universal mirror, with a rag in my hand washing the floor, because the owners of the house would take advantage of my lack of experience to have me do all sorts of tasks. You would see me seducing the men, any man who came to the house, the milkman, the shop assistant, the plumber, because women who work in these jobs have a kind of beauty in their unkemptness, a natural beauty that other women with their makeup don’t have. Look at me with my messy hair, my rosy cheeks. You don’t like to see me in the arms of a man because you are as jealous as I am. Men are monsters; love transfigures them. But I don’t let them seduce me. In my hands, which smell of soap, I hide my innocent whims. Why? I don’t know. They are like the precious stones in the workings of a watch—those rubies are necessary! I will be able to sweep the flowers, darn the socks, clean the carpets so long as your smile watches over me. I am virtuous. The poor, when they are wretched, are virtuous; if they are wretched they must have a reason for being so. I have very short fingernails, which is why my hands look like those of a stone statue and not like those of a prostitute or a married lady. Now it’s all over: the performances, the scenery, the theaters with their seats, grudges, acts of obedience, the fear of obesity, bribery, condescension.”
“You never let me come too near to you, you always keep me at a distance, that’s why we are so sick of each other. I share all of my memories with you. How I enjoyed the bread we ate together! The cup of coffee with milk, each sip flowing down your mysterious throat, trembling slightly! Sometimes you set down the cup to look at me. Sometimes, when you gathered your straight hair and braided it with ribbons, paying no attention to the passing hours, we would lose ourselves in a sort of landscape where your knowledge of geography didn’t matter because you invented all of the places we visited. How you enjoyed the rain that chilled your face almost like mine!”
Thus Were Their Faces Page 31