The Right Intention

by Andrés Barba

  She went to bed that night with an oddly empty feeling, recalling Aunt Eli’s words over and over. She was alone now, definitively, there was no turning back. It was like having witnessed the death of a god, of God.

  First it was just dinner. A week later, breakfast too. Two weeks after that almost all food. In the space of that first month she lost twelve pounds. Her mother said repeatedly that she looked thin, she had to eat more. Sara would agree immediately, and this response—so immediate, so compliant—would of course crush the conversation. Her father, too, reproached her from time to time, though the only consequence was being subjected to constant surveillance during the occasional meal.

  Sara, in turn, discovered an unknown world within the one she thought she knew. The physical discomfort of hunger (which was, incidentally, so easy to outwit) seemed a risible price to pay for the pleasure obtained from fasting. She woke up tired and was exhausted by the slightest physical effort, but in exchange the world became bearable, weightless, almost dignified. Sara floated from her bed to the bus, from the bus to class, to the whispering in class, and then again, on her way home, walked through the park, the December cold in her face, and she felt restored. It was as if everything came alive beneath her skin.

  But it wasn’t just the weightlessness. Her fight to overcome that most basic of needs, for the first time in a very long time, made her feel superior. It was a competition against herself and everyone else—holding out until hunger, after a secretion of juices, became a concentrated pain in an identifiable place in her stomach. She’d prepare miniscule packets of food—cherry tomatoes, half a pear, half of a sandwich with the crusts cut off—and wrap them carefully in foil as if they were the last remaining provisions of a survivor. She ate them only when sensing that she was about to faint from weakness, and on doing so felt not a sense of relief but of it being a necessary evil, the vexatious obligation to subsist.

  On the electronic scale in her mother’s bathroom, she admired the results of her battle each day: 118.6 became 115.5; 115.5 became 110.1. Then the process went slower, got harder, but a nine turning to an eight meant going to bed with the joy of one who has finally rid themselves of something troublesome; liberation and control was nine becoming eight, and was also the hope that eight would turn to seven, six, nothing, air, as though she were voyaging to a land yet to be invented and each step were smaller and harder to take.

  That hardness also had eyes and hands, and color, and feelings upon which to rest, but they were nothing like those she’d felt before. What she encountered now, each time she went out, was a world that was clear and systematizable, even if it appeared chaotic, a world in which not only did her loneliness matter less but her loneliness was in fact that which allowed her to better see the world, and judge it. Sometimes she got the feeling, as she walked out of the park and onto the wide avenue leading to her street, that she was actually the one directing that absurd concert of horns, voices, and buses. She’d stand still and stare fixedly at a person or thing and silently command its next move, and the people complied without even realizing it, without knowing they were in fact obeying her orders. When that happened, she got the sense that something simple and empty inside her fit perfectly—like the wooden blocks at nursery schools whose geometric shapes fit into holes—and the rising tide of sensations became even more powerful. Also: there were no words there. Control was as silent as a Monday night, more so, more silent even than that, as silent as eyes gliding slowly over the words in a book.

  Unstitching her trouser seams to resew them so you couldn’t tell was one strategy she used to disguise her weight loss those first months. It worked until Christmas dinner. Aunt Eli and her grandmother had come, like always, and—not having seen her in months—both erupted in exclamations from the start. Sara detested them the moment they started in.

  “Trying to look like one of those models on TV doesn’t make you more attractive, you know,” said Aunt Eli.

  And her grandmother:

  “Good God, child, have you seen yourself in the mirror? You look like you could be swept off by the wind.”

  They were having lamb for dinner. She realized that in the past three weeks, she hadn’t eaten a single bite of meat. It wasn’t that she didn’t like lamb, she’d always liked lamb, but as soon as dinner preparations had begun, as soon as her mother put the lamb in the oven and the kitchen filled with the aroma of roasting meat, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to eat it. When they sat down at the table and her mother asked for her plate to serve her, Sara wavered for a second, then turned her eyes to the platter where the carved rack lay steaming, felt nauseous and said: “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what?” her mother asked.

  “I can’t eat meat; I’m a vegetarian.”

  “Since when, may I ask?”

  “A month ago.”

  “That’s not healthy, it can’t be healthy,” her grandmother said.

  “So why haven’t you said anything all month?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Margarita, Carmen’s friend, she was a vegetarian, you could hardly stand to look at her,” her grandmother continued.

  “No. I don’t know is not an answer.”

  “She was always fainting, white as a sheet of paper.”

  “I didn’t tell you because I wasn’t sure myself until now, that’s why.”

  “You see?” her mother said to Aunt Eli. “See how she doesn’t tell me anything?”

  “That doctor on TV, the one who comes on after lunch, he always says how important it is to eat meat,” said her grandmother.

  “Sara,” said Aunt Eli, “it’s not that being a vegetarian is bad; I myself was a vegetarian for a few years, but . . .”

  “And I could hardly stand to look at you, all the weight you lost. And you got those dizzy spells, don’t forget,” her grandmother carried on.

  “But what matters is that you talk about things.”

  “And eat meat.”

  “Mamá, be quiet a minute, you’re putting my nerves on edge,” her mother said.

  “Tell me to be quiet, fine, you and your sister both want me to die.”

  “Nobody wants you to die,” said Aunt Eli.

  “Then why are you always telling me to be quiet?”

  “Sara, you have to eat,” her mother said.

  “We were talking about Sara,” Aunt Eli replied.

  “So was I, you’d know that if you listened to me.”

  “Being a vegetarian is fine, if that’s what you want, but you have to make sure to get plenty of iron: lentils, garbanzos . . .”

  “Protein, meat.”

  “Mamá, please!” her mother shouted.

  “Don’t you raise your voice at me!” her grandmother shouted back.

  “Be quiet!” Sara yelled. “All of you, just be quiet! You drive me crazy!”

  She got up and ran to her room, slammed the door, and locked it. Lying on her bed she pressed her hands to her ears, hard, wanting to disappear, to be miniscule, small as an insect that could scurry under doors, small as a speck of dust.

  She didn’t answer when her mother knocked on the door, or when she asked her to please come back to the table, or when she returned ten minutes later begging, saying that it was Christmas dinner, or when she said she was leaving some salad and fruit by the door and that she didn’t have to come out if she didn’t want to but, please, just eat something. Sara remained motionless, hands clamped tightly to her ears, first consciously, then as if her arms no longer belonged to her, hearing the sound of her heartbeat, her breathing, in her palms. It was an uncomfortable position but she didn’t move. She needed to stay that way: still. Opening her eyes, she saw the mattress and the poster of Renoir’s ballerina, white and weightless, as though made of perfume. She could sleep that way, too, eyes open, on tiptoe.

  On the refrigerator was a vegetarian meal plan, dreamed up by her mother and Aunt Eli. Beside each food, in a different color, its protein content. Monday to Sunday, n
ot a single dish repeated: lentils were followed by asparagus, eggs, garbanzos, all in perfect order, an order that by mere virtue of its existence, could not be accepted.

  Sometimes Sara skipped class. She knew full well which subjects her absences would likely go unnoticed in and took advantage of this in order to go to the park, a place she’d begun to find strangely fascinating. She’d always liked the park and as a girl had spent long afternoons there, but now it felt different, like a gloomy extension of herself. Crossing the whole of it on a regular weekday—without any of the Sunday and holiday commotion—was like traversing a vast, unreal space, a space that was at once desert-like and yet intimate and recognizable, it was like thinking about a song that made you sad. Sara was the air and trash, the grass and the empty puppet stand, and most of all—the lake. If she didn’t at first realize, it was only because ending up there always seemed like a coincidence, because when she suddenly caught sight of it—placid and simple as a ring of water—she got the feeling she hadn’t consciously headed there and had simply bumped into the lake along her way.

  She immersed her awareness into it, sitting on the grass, always at the same spot. Contemplating its round heavy density, from her own place of lightness, was pleasing and yet at the same time devoid of significance. Standing up, gazing at it for the last time, trudging slowly back home was a form of surrender to another fear. Ever since Christmas vacation ended and she’d had to go back to school, Sara had felt like everyone was staring at her in the same sort of shock, which could be interpreted as anything from commiseration to pure and simple disgust. In class, where her presence had always gone undetected, kids started playing jokes on her. One day when she sat down, she discovered that someone had drawn a skeleton on her desk, and the girls who sat beside her sometimes angled their chairs away slightly so as not to have to see her.

  Sara would have been distraught if any of that had seemed real, if the people who said things seemed real, but for weeks all that was real was the lake, her bedroom ceiling. Even her mother seemed unreal. If Sara was in the living room and heard her mother come in from work, she got the feeling that it was all absurd, that something incomprehensible and utterly absurd was happening.

  “What are you doing here?” she’d ask.

  “What do you mean what am I doing here? I just got in from work. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing. I was just thinking.”

  Her mother, for her part, had fallen into a whiny sort of apathy the first week after vacation, and all of her time at home seemed to revolve around getting Sara to eat. Often, especially while in the kitchen getting dinner ready—something Sara had stopped doing ages ago—her mother talked to herself, cursing the fact that she always put others first, lamenting having no one to take care of her. Her complaints—at first mumbled under her breath, later mindlessly repeated like the words of someone unable to remember why they’re doing whatever they’re doing—formed part of what was now a nightly monologue. That particular night, though, was different.

  “I saw them,” her mother said.

  “Who?”

  “Who do you think? Your father and that Sandra woman . . .”

  “So what?” Sara asked indifferently.

  “So what? They were having dinner at the very restaurant where we used to celebrate our anniversary.”

  In silence, Sara despised the weakness of this woman who was her mother, this woman who didn’t stop blathering until she’d described every detail of the encounter. She despised her choked tone, her pallor, the purplish bags under her eyes, her shoes. She despised everything around her—the comfort of the sofa they were sitting on, the indoor plants, the Discobolus her father had brought back from Greece that now had magazines piled behind it, the photo of her grandfather, the expensive painting hanging over the TV.

  “So, what do you think?”

  “I think you’re weak,” Sara replied slowly, “and you’re not actually suffering that much.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  Sara was about to reply that she was.

  “No,” she said.

  Although it lasted only a second, they would both remember that silence. It was as though in that moment they’d finally come to know each other, as though they’d never truly seen each other before.

  “I’m going to bed,” Sara said, “I’m tired.”

  “It’s only eight-thirty,” her mother replied.

  She didn’t turn to look at her. She walked out of the living room the way you walk out of a stranger’s house, an uncomfortable house, and closed her bedroom door. So many pointless things there, too: so stupid, the look on her dolls’ faces; so facile and pathetic, the pink curtain, her bedspread, the picture of her and Teresa at camp. She grabbed a plastic bag and began to stuff all the things she didn’t need into it. Books were too heavy, so she piled those by the door. When she was finished, satisfied, she looked around at the bare walls. She hadn’t eaten a bite all day and the physical effort had made her lightheaded. She heard her mother whimpering into the phone, saying she didn’t know what to do with her anymore. Then she came to Sara’s door and stood outside it without knocking. Sara could hear her there breathing, like an enemy attempting to rob her of the whiteness, the lovely new simplicity in her object-less room.

  “Sweetheart,” she said. “Sara . . .”

  Sara didn’t answer. Answering would have been a predictable capitulation.

  “Sweetheart. I know you’re going through a tough time right now. Let me help you.”

  Her last sentence had been spoken with the uncertainty of someone reciting a line they’d been fed. Those words weren’t hers. Of course they weren’t hers.

  “I’m going through a tough time, too; we can help each other.”

  Sara gazed at her open hands, holding them out before her, and was aghast at how ugly they were. A blue vein, which crisscrossed near her fingers, ran up the back of her hand to her wrist and then disappeared, as though entering a tiny blue cave on her forearm.

  “Let’s both put in a little effort, Sara.”

  Her elbow had no particular shape, the skin hard and white, and something that stuck out like a little pebble. Stroking her arm, she realized she could encircle her biceps with her fingers, and slide them up to her armpit, where they stopped at the unyielding presence of her shoulder bone.

  “Sara . . .”

  With one fingertip she traced the horizontal line of her clavicle to her throat. Opening her hand she slid it around her neck and then down her back where one, two, three, four, five, six, seven ridges marked the vertical line of her spinal column.

  “Remember how it used to be? We used to talk so much, you told me everything.”

  With both hands, from the almost imperceptible slope of her breasts, Sara counted her ribs and then followed the predictable distance to her hips. The displeasure she felt touching the two promontories marking her pelvis made her keep going. Her knee bone stuck out from the bottom of her skirt—round, obvious, like some mechanical contraption whose simplicity made it ugly.

  “If we started talking again it would only be hard at first. Everything is a little hard at first. Come on, open the door, we’ll end up laughing, you’ll see.”

  Until she reached her feet, there, so far away, toes too long, ankles too pronounced, like two roots that had been ripped clumsily from the ground. But this girl staring at her in the mirror, hands where she held hers, hair falling the same way as hers, in the same sweater, the same skirt—“Sara, please . . .”—but hard, as though a century of exhaustion had smacked her in the face, this stupid girl staring stubbornly, her frail eyes, her lips, her nose—“Sara, open the damn door!”—hair falling over her eyes and accentuating her cheekbones, her ridiculous nose—“Sara!”—lay back on the floor, feeling the unyielding parquet beneath each bone, using her forearm as a pillow. Whose steps were those, trailing off down the hall? And those tears, whose were they?

  “Eat,” her father said.

 
; Sara realized she didn’t know how she’d gotten there. They were sitting around the dining room table at her grandparents’ house in the country: she, her father, and a woman.

  “You’re Sandra,” Sara said. “You’re the woman who’s fucking my dad.”

  Her father slammed his hand down on the table, frightening the woman more than her.

  “What do you want,” she said more than asked.

  “I want you to eat what’s on your plate and show a little respect,” her father replied.

  “It’s okay, relax,” the woman said, taking his hand, and then turning to look at Sara, giving her a strange smile, as though trying to convey that she understood perfectly.

  On Sara’s plate lay a cut-up steak and fried potatoes. On the tip of her fork a hunk of meat, skewered. She was supposed to eat it.

  “Do me a favor and pick up that fork, right now,” her father said in the same tone of contained rage.

  “Go on, Sara, have a little,” the woman said, slicing off a piece of her own steak and placing it into her mouth by way of example. She was using a faux-natural tone that made her ridiculous, but at the same time seemed determined to be friendly and didn’t stop smiling as she chewed. Sara picked up her fork.

  “Eat,” her father said.

  “Don’t be so harsh,” the woman said.

  “I’m not being harsh, I’m doing what her mother should have done a long time ago.” And then, to Sara: “Eat, now.”

  “I’m a vegetarian.”

  “I could give a shit—vegetarian.”

  “Please,” the woman said.

  Sara placed that thing into her mouth and began to chew with the awkwardness of someone attempting an unnatural act. Since she didn’t feel capable of swallowing, she kept it in her mouth until the dry meat turned into a lumpy mass, inedible, impossible to swallow.

  “Swallow,” her father said.

  Sara struggled, feeling the paste go down her throat.