The Right Intention

by Andrés Barba

  “My mother is a painter; she does portraits—pastels. What do you do?”

  Sara felt as if she’d been caught in a lie. She always said she liked to draw because one time, years ago, the teacher had held her drawing up to the whole class as an example. Since then, she’d always said she liked to draw, and that she was going to be an artist, but she’d never truly drawn or painted. What were pastels? How could she now say that even though she didn’t actually draw, herself, she really liked drawing? Who was going to believe that? Suddenly Sara hated the woman. She, who had felt almost comfortable, who had initially almost accepted Nuria’s smile, Maite’s hair, the other girl’s slippers. Now, inexorably, they became enemies. And it seemed that everyone but Ana was staring at her with that stupid expectant look. It was a clown. The drawing the teacher had held up to the class was of a clown. They were all drawing with crayons and the teacher had walked over to her drawing and fixed it. He’d said, “Look, if you just do this right here . . . See how nice that looks?” and in three quick strokes he’d transformed her anodyne drawing into an incredible clown, a clown that looked like he was smiling but without actually smiling, a clown that looked like he was smiling but sad, and she, for fear of messing it up, hadn’t changed a thing. She added some balloons in the background and signed Sara, with a line under her name, like Picasso.

  “Come on, Sara, tell us. What do you do?”

  “I do crayon sketches.”

  “No artists use crayon,” Maite said. “They use oil paint, or acrylics, or watercolor. Some people do charcoal sketches. But I’ve never heard of—”

  “Well I use those things, too,” she added quickly, “but mainly crayon.”

  Now everyone knew she was lying. And the teacher had only held up her drawing because he didn’t remember he’d actually done it himself.

  “Look, everyone, see how good Sara’s is?”

  And everyone had looked up, amazed, even Teresa had looked amazed, as though silently commending the merit of having kept such a talent hidden, not bragging about it. And it was a lie. A lie.

  “So how do you sketch with crayon?” Maite wanted to know, refusing to give up.

  Sara hated them and hated herself. The thing she especially hated about the whole situation was the feeling of shame, her public humiliation, because it made her weak again, like before, like with Teresa and Luis, and she never wanted to feel like that.

  “I use pastel crayons.”

  “Ha! Pastel crayons. There’s no such thing!”

  “Of course there is, that’s what I use.”

  “Okay, that’s enough now,” the woman said.

  “But she’s lying,” Maite insisted, “and no lying is the first rule.”

  “It doesn’t matter, I said that’s enough.”

  “I’m not lying, bitch,” Sara exclaimed.

  “Sara!”

  Ana, who’d been playing with her purple ring throughout the conversation, suddenly looked up at her in fear, in admiration, and her regard suddenly made Sara feel invincible.

  “If you say I’m lying again, I’ll kill you.”

  “Sara!”

  Maite said nothing, and that was a victory. She felt it in Ana’s eyes, too, wide open and shiny as a badge of pride.

  “Well, let this be an example to all of you. Sara, you’re punished: no movie night for four days.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Oh, you will. Believe me.”

  She did care. She cared starting that very night. After dinner—a protracted ritual that took place in silence, under the watchful gaze of two nurses—everyone but her went off to watch the movie, which was always shown in the little room adjoining the cafeteria. Since they weren’t allowed to go to the bathroom for an hour after dinner, and even then not allowed to flush, Sara had to sit there listening to them all laugh. Finally, the nurse said she could go to her room. All day long she’d wanted to go to her room, and yet at that moment she’d have preferred to stay.

  “Can’t I stay here?”

  “No. You’re punished, you know that.”

  In the next room everyone was laughing, even Ana. She waited for her in their room, in bed, and stirred lazily when the door finally opened, attempting to feign the torpid irritation of someone who’s been asleep for ages. Ana went to her bed and climbed in slowly, trying not to make any noise.

  “Was the movie good?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Want me to tell you about it?”

  “Yes.”

  Ana recounted the plot quickly, bumblingly, jumping back and forth to explain things she’d forgotten to mention. It wasn’t very interesting that way, but Sara was touched and tried to laugh out loud in the places she thought Ana was expecting it.

  “I’m not good at explaining movies,” she said finally, as though to apologize.

  “I think you’re good at it,” Sara replied.

  Her words seemed pondered over, seemed to have come from far away, and she turned toward Ana’s bed to speak them. Ana made no reply. Sara could see her silhouette in the light from the park outside; she was lying face-up, staring at the ceiling.

  “Maite’s a moron. She purposely laughed louder than anyone at the movie, just for attention. I’m not as brave as you. I was sitting there and I didn’t say anything.”

  “Do you think I lied at group meeting too?”

  “No,” she answered quickly.

  “Thank you.”

  “They’re all morons, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah.”

  And she’d have liked to have added: except us. They’re all morons except us. But she didn’t, because Ana turned toward her and they stared at one another in silence. Sara doesn’t remember when she fell asleep, when the eyes she was gazing at stopped being Ana’s eyes and turned into those other, even bigger eyes that she dreamed of all night, but she contemplated them with the same pleasing emptiness she remembered feeling as she sat before a still round lake, night slipping down like delicate black silk.

  Mealtime was the worst. Worse than the one-on-one sessions with the psychologist. Worse, even, than group meeting. As the time drew near the girls inevitably sank into a helpless silence, a silence that meant there were twenty minutes to go, fourteen minutes to go, two minutes to go until the nurse walked into the common room and announced, “Mealtime,” knowing full well that there was no place else that those seemingly ordinary words could create an abyss that hovered on the verge of the intolerable. The saline, the meds, the exercise (they were forced to take walks in the morning) inevitably made them hungry, and that made everything worse. It would have been easier, more human, to eat without being hungry. Eating with an appetite seemed not only an unnatural act, but one that—despite their revulsion—they’d been primed for.

  They ate hungrily, therefore, violating themselves in the most barbaric and blatant way possible. Silence was simply a way to express solidarity, or something that, like solidarity, was greater than the girls, something that turned them all into a single stomach, a single vanquished will. Sometimes someone cried, but none of them raised their heads from their plates, and then they’d realize that background music had been turned on in order to calm the girls, and the nurse would be humming along to the song; and they’d realize that after the first course would come a second, and then dessert, and they knew they had to eat it all and then sit still for an hour, the others watching a movie, Sara excluded, hoping the nurse wouldn’t start some idiotic conversation, feeling each miniscule particle of food making its way through the walls of her stomach, pumping blood, turning to fat; and again the sense of shame, of sliminess, of revulsion pounding in her temples each time the psychologist made Sara talk about her parents—her father in particular—asking her yet again why she’d thrown a rock at that dog, why she’d never called Luis back, why she thought her mother was weak.

  Had it not been for Ana, Sara would have been defeated the second afternoon, just as Maite had been, and Nuria, and the girl whose name she could never remem
ber but everyone called Pinkie because of her pink slippers. She, like the others, would have walked in silence from the dining room to the movie, from the movie to a session with the psychologist, from the psychologist to group meeting, silent, hating herself. With Ana it was different. They sat together in the dining room and when one of them thought she couldn’t take it anymore the other would move a knee in to touch her, and she would then touch back with her foot; or one would lean into the other, just slightly, until their hips were touching. And that was enough to make things bearable. And this practice involved an element of self-acceptance. Ana one day explained it very well; she said it was like having hair in the land of the bald, and the baldies, out of envy, wanted to shave their heads, after trying to convince them how happy they’d be bald and how unnatural it was to have hair. Sara liked the analogy so much that she told it to Nuria, who used it, as if it was hers, in group meeting. After the customary opening question about how they were feeling, Nuria raised her hand to be first to respond.

  “I feel like I’m in the land of the bald, and I have hair,” she said, and then, word for word, explained how the baldies were trying to convince her to shave her head.

  Ana glanced over at Sara and then the two of them gave Nuria an accusatory look, but rather than take the hint she claimed the whole land of the bald thing was a recurring dream she had.

  That very night, after Ana told Sara about the movie, they talked for a long time: from that moment on they wouldn’t tell anyone anything; it was the two of them, just them two, against all the other girls.

  “Like sisters,” Ana said.

  And she replied:

  “No. More than that, more than sisters.”

  And to underscore their words they stared at one another solemnly, without touching, Ana with the mole on her left cheek and her lilac-colored diamondy ring, she with the almost-faded bruise on her cheekbone and her pink watch with a minute hand shaped like a worm.

  “Now we have to take an oath,” Sara said.

  “What do you mean, an oath?”

  “An oath that we’ll never be like them.”

  “Okay.”

  “I, Sara, swear I’ll never be like them.”

  “I, Ana, swear I’ll never be like them.”

  “When you are weak, I shall be strong,” Sara continued slowly, hypnotized by Ana’s enormous brown eyes.

  “When you are weak, I shall be strong.”

  “And I will help you.”

  “And I will help you.”

  “Always.”

  “Always.”

  “Now they can never split us up,” Sara said earnestly.

  “Never,” Ana answered.

  And the night was black and rough, like volcanic rock.

  Everything changed then, from the slow movie dialogues in the next room to her conversations with the psychologist. The weakness she’d felt the first few days, the disgust with which she’d observed her body’s recovery, they froze. Seeing Ana, hearing her breathe nearby, restored Sara’s hardness, the control she’d felt during her week in the park. Two days earlier she’d been on the verge of telling the psychologist what happened there, with the couple making out in the grass; now the memory had been neutralized, shrunk down to almost nothing; she felt she could have suppressed it entirely by sheer force of will.

  Ana was weaker. Sara could see that if she wasn’t with her, Ana would let herself fall under Maite’s sway. Maite, as the oldest, had established a kind of respect-based authority, evidenced by the fact that no one questioned her word and by her preeminent spot at the dining room table. If Sara hated Maite, however, it was not for her authority but for her control over Ana, at times when Sara could not be there for her.

  “Maite says you lie more than you speak,” Ana told her the night after they’d taken their oath, getting ready to go to dinner.

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No,” she replied, but to Sara it seemed, from Ana’s tone, that she wasn’t telling her everything. Something in the fragile structure of those brown eyes, which Sara thought about tirelessly, had collapsed, or was on the verge of collapse.

  They sat down, like always, without looking at one another, in the same spots they’d occupied since their first meal. It was an important day: dinner officially marked the end of Sara’s punishment; after the meal she’d be allowed to watch the movie with everyone else. She’d been thinking about it all afternoon, and this had kept her in high spirits until Ana told her what Maite had said. They were serving vegetables, fish, and mashed potatoes for dinner.

  The meal—like all meals—followed to the letter the ritual adopted from the start. No one looked up from their place but everyone was perfectly aware of the state of everyone else’s tray. No one ate faster or slower than anyone else. If one girl seemed to get slightly ahead of the others, she’d linger over something else so as not to finish first. None of them spoke to the others. If they needed anything they asked the nurse directly.

  Sara broke the rules that night. Walking in she’d almost bumped into Maite and had given her a look of provocation. Sara’s rage focused on Maite’s bleached blonde hair, the tone of her voice, her hands. Then it fell to her plate. Maite hadn’t touched her mashed potatoes.

  “I’m not eating the mashed potatoes,” Maite said aloud, when everyone else was already almost finished.

  “Yes, you are,” the nurse replied matter-of-factly, giving it no importance.

  “I’ve never eaten them. I never ate them at home. My mother always said I didn’t have to.”

  “My mother always said I didn’t have to,” Sara mimicked.

  It was as though a bomb of silence had been dropped onto the table. Maite shot her a look of hatred.

  “Sara!” the nurse barked.

  The others glanced up from their plates like a herd of does waiting for two bucks to fight.

  “I’ll throw up if I eat them,” Maite said to the nurse, evading Sara’s challenge.

  “No, you won’t. Because you know that if you throw up you get a double portion.”

  “But that’s not fair,” Maite replied.

  “What wouldn’t be fair,” the nurse explained, patient as Solomon, “is if you didn’t have to eat them when all the other girls have to eat things they don’t like all the time. You know the rules: if you’re not allergic, no excuses.”

  Sara felt Ana’s foot on her own like an acknowledgment of her worth. She could almost feel herself stroke Ana’s cheek with her eyes. Ana had chosen her, chosen Sara, and the touch of that tiny foot on her own—gentle at first, then with increasing pressure—was confirmation of that. Sara felt invincible.

  “I’ll throw up if I eat them,” Maite repeated, very quietly, as though talking to herself.

  “Hey, Maite!” Sara shouted. “Maite, watch this!”

  She scooped up some mashed potato with one hand and crammed it into her mouth like an animal. Maite’s face froze in revulsion.

  “Sara!” the nurse yelled.

  “Look!” she said, taking what was left on her plate and smearing it all over her face. Maite vomited onto her tray, and Sara was pulled by the arm from the dining room.

  “This means no movie night for a week.”

  “I’ll be out of here in a week.”

  “Not at the rate you’re going, young lady,” the nurse replied, locking her into her room.

  The afternoon looked warm and red in the small park below the window, but it wasn’t the same without Ana; without Ana there to sit calmly and contemplate it with, she felt even more restless at the trees’ deep reds and oranges. She was on edge. She wanted to break something, to scream. By the time Ana returned, she’d calmed down.

  “How was the movie?”

  “Pfff, I’d already seen it. It was a cowboy movie.”

  “I don’t like cowboy movies.”

  “Me neither.”

  Not mentioning what had happened at dinner was the ultimate demonstration of Ana’s idolatry.

 
“Want me to tell you what happened the week before I was brought here?”

  “Yes.”

  Ana still didn’t know, although Sara had made reference to her days in the park. From the start, she’d wanted the moment she told Ana to be just like this: nighttime, silent, no chance of interruption. She spoke slowly, almost in a whisper, describing every detail as best she could. At some points she felt Ana wasn’t getting it, felt like she was doing a bad job, and said, “Wait, that’s not right,” over and over, or, “I can’t explain it.” In others, as though someone were dictating to her what to say, she felt her words could be smelled, and touched, her words were the leaves themselves, and the lake, and the night settling in over the trees. Ana, though she looked directly at Sara for a few minutes, then turned her head to the window, the mole-side of her face to Sara. In that position, Sara sensed her words making an obvious and profound impression on Ana, fingers twisting the lilac-colored diamondy ring, eyes looking at the park, at something that, while not the park, lay beyond it, farther away, or deeper inside perhaps.

  The next day at breakfast they were told that their families were coming to visit that afternoon, and they would be given half an hour, after lunch, to get ready. Clothes. All the girls started talking about how much they missed their clothes. Sara, from the start, had found the uniform anonymity of their hospital gowns comforting, but she saw the way Ana’s eyes lit up thinking about putting on her own pants, her blue sweater. Sara was given a pair of pants and a green shirt that her mother must have brought from home.

  When Ana emerged from the bathroom, in her own clothes, Sara lurched quickly into sadness. She looked like she was ready to go. Like she was about to leave—with that sweater and that hairpin and those patent leather shoes and that mole on her cheek—and never come back.