by Andrés Barba
“How do I look?”
“Very pretty,” Sara replied.
“Are you looking forward to seeing your parents?”
“No, are you?”
“I don’t know,” Ana said. “A little, I guess.”
“I want my parents to die.”
“Me, too.”
“Then why did you just say you were looking forward to seeing them?”
“A little, I said I was looking forward to it a little.”
“I’m not looking forward to it even a little. What I want is for everyone to leave us alone and the two of us to go to a park and hide all day and come out at night.”
Those words, or perhaps Ana’s memory of Sara’s words the night before, brought an almost unconscious smile to Ana’s lips.
“Yeah,” she said.
“And for our fathers, and mothers, and the nurses, to die.”
“Yeah.”
“Can you imagine? The two of us, not eating anything, no one telling us we have to, just sitting by the lake.”
“Do you really think we could do that?” Ana asked with a hint of incredulity. “You know the doctors won’t let us see each other after we’re released.”
“Yes, but we’re going to run away.”
“We can’t,” said Ana, very somber.
“No, not from here, from home. When we get sent home we’ll run away and meet at the lake, at night.” And Ana’s silence was the most profound and solemn way of saying yes.
They each had a half-hour with their parents and after that came a group session with all of the families. Sara’s parents were waiting in the second room. Everything about the visit was slow and difficult. Her mother couldn’t stop wringing her hands; her father was wearing a tie. Her mother had never wrung her hands; her father hated ties. It was cold in the room. Her mother did most of the talking; her father said almost nothing; she herself spoke not a word.
“This is ridiculous,” her father said finally, almost angry. Her mother said a few more things. Sara doesn’t remember the words, she remembers the smell of cologne, her father’s stomach, his shirt; she remembers the floor lamp and the hospital armchairs. Before the half-hour was up, her mother said:
“Oh, look who else came to see you!”
The door opened, and there was Teresa.
“Sara,” she said.
Sara felt as though they’d laid a trap for her. Surrounded, she was surrounded. A moment longer and she’d have said hello, but she remained silent, awaiting Teresa’s next move, which was simply to repeat her name.
“Sara, it’s Teresa,” her mother said.
“I don’t know you.”
“I don’t believe this,” said her father.
Teresa started to say something but gave up in the end, as though she’d realized that this Sara—the one there now—was, in her own way, rebelling against the Sara who’d borne Teresa’s indifference over the phone, and it seemed somehow justified. Not acknowledging her was a way of quashing that feeling of defeat and becoming unassailable once more, hands on hips, there, in that little hospital room, despite the resolute corporeality of her friend.
“Sara,” Teresa said for the last time, changing her tone, making clear that she knew what her friend was doing, and that it had gone far enough.
“I don’t know you. I don’t know who you are.”
Teresa’s chin quivered pathetically.
“Leave.”
Teresa rushed from the room.
“Daughter,” her father remarked in amazement, as though having just made a discovery, “you are not only sick, you’re cruel.”
“Please,” her mother said.
“Did you not just see what I saw?”
“Please.”
The group session didn’t change anything, despite the psychologist showering praise on anyone willing to offer a comment. The few who did speak adopted a sort of theatrical affectation, almost unconsciously, which shot their credibility; meanwhile, for the entire hour, Sara thought of nothing but Ana’s hands. Once all the parents had left, the girls sank into a crestfallen but relaxed silence, like that of someone who finally closes a door and no longer has to pretend, and almost out of convenience adopts a look of contempt.
Ana was very serious, staring at her from the other side of the common room. Sara could have gone to her, could have told her, say, about Teresa having showed up. But she didn’t, because suddenly she had the feeling that Ana’s mind was engaged in a raging battle with itself. Ana had never looked at her like that before, eyes half-closed. Anyone seeing her for the first time would have been convinced it was a look of hatred. She’d adopted that look the moment her parents left, that solemnity, and Sara got the sense that Ana was actually forcing herself to the limits of contempt.
What’s more, she felt the roles they’d been playing since she stopped eating had been inverted: now Sara was the object of observation, the one being analyzed with the same severity that she herself once employed. Round and leaden came Ana’s look from the other side of the room. There were voices murmuring and shadows moving, and everything, even the apparent ambiguity of the environment, seemed predisposed toward contempt.
This was replaced by a strange complacency. Despite neither of them abandoning her expression of disgust, the air grew sweeter. Sara was sure of this when Ana seemed to offer a tiny smile. If asked to explain it, Sara couldn’t have articulated her joy. She might, perhaps, have said it was like a pain that subsides without disappearing, a pain that is suddenly justified and by virtue of its justification nearly vanishes. And then she gave Ana the same look, to seal the act of love. Never before had Sara realized that she lived inside another person. It was as if, though neither of them stopped looking at the other, the silence had swapped their bodies and now, from the other’s perspective, they were slowly destroying themselves. The same act was now being undertaken from the body of the other, with more intensity, more force. Sara stood and went to Ana.
“Come, Ana, let’s go to our room,” she said.
Sara walked behind her without knowing what they were going to do, what they’d say once there, and as she walked, gazing at Ana’s back, her buttocks, her feet, she was overcome with fascination for Ana’s tiny, fragile-seeming body, still dressed in the street clothes her family had brought, short hair pulled back behind her ear with that hairpin. It was the same fascination she’d felt the first day, when she saw her being wheeled in on her cot, but now pulsing in her throat like a contraction, rising all the way from her feet. When she closed the door she had no idea what she was going to say, what might happen. Ana’s breasts, beneath her blue sweater, looked bigger than they did in the hospital gown.
“We have to see each other naked,” Ana said, still serious, a hint of solemnity to her voice. Sara felt her stomach contract quickly.
“Now?”
“Now.”
They’d never seen each other naked before. Part of the ritual that made them unusual was their awareness of how ugly their naked bodies were. Up until that moment, without ever having discussed it, they’d used the bathroom one after the other to change. If one closed the door, the other didn’t dare enter, or even knock, and this increased the solemnity of being naked, a private act so unpleasant that it could never be contemplated. But now Ana had said they had to see each other naked; Ana, who never said anything, had said that they had to see each other naked and the words had inexplicably soothed Sara’s throat and at the same time shot down to her stomach in a quick palpitation. Ana took off her sweater. Sara her shirt.
“Wait a second,” Sara said, and went to pull the blinds halfway so no one could see. The room drained of light, taking on a gentle, almost matte penumbra. They took off their pants at the same time, and their panties, and their socks. Now they were naked. Ana dropped her arms to her sides; she did too. Ana’s breasts had a round, asymmetrical simplicity to them and her nipples looked almost like a smudge, the color so close to that of her skin. Her pubic hair was bushy and
black and Sara was hypnotized by it, as though it were a sign of fragility, something that might cause Ana’s whole body to shatter. She felt Ana’s eyes on her, doing the same thing—loving her and destroying her at once, pausing mercilessly at the spindliness of her legs, lingering on her crotch, climbing her ribs—and wanted to leap on her, scratch her, bite her face; but no, they had to stand there, the two of them, a few feet apart, like pillars of salt, eyes flicking up and down, devouring one another.
Ana stepped toward her and held out a hand, as if to touch Sara’s breast.
“No,” Sara said, and Ana’s hand froze and then she looked into her eyes for the first time. “We can’t touch,” Sara finished.
“Of course,” Ana replied slowly, as though this had been the one thing left to understand. “Now we have no secrets.”
Nuria left that day. When it was announced in the dining room, everyone looked at her as though it were impossible that she, the girl no one had even really noticed up until then, was actually going to be the first to go.
“What do you mean you’re leaving,” asked Maite, whose authority had been undermined since the incident at dinner.
“You heard,” the nurse remarked, “she’s leaving, and if the rest of you follow her example you’ll be able to go home soon, too.”
Nuria had been an invisible presence up until that day. She spoke, but never too loud or with too much conviction. She ate, but never finished first. She was, ultimately, substitutable.
All of the girls, with the exception of Ana and Sara, seemed to take the nurse’s advice quickly, intuitively, because starting that very afternoon they fell into emulating Nuria’s invisibility. No one wanted to speak, or eat, or laugh more than anyone else. But silence, too, was dangerous; silence betrayed them. What happened next was rather like life: their performance, at first self-conscious, over the course of the day took on the routine nature of something automatic, and in their sessions, perhaps without even realizing it, they began to describe themselves not as they were but as they pretended and, perhaps, really believed themselves to be.
For Sara, accompanying Ana to their room became a reprieve from that increasingly irritating situation. They took off their clothes, like the first time, but now with no need for words. Sara would give her a look, or Ana would motion with her eyes, and the pair of them would head to their room. Silent, naked, standing closer each time, on the verge of touching though without ever doing it, the smell of Ana’s body rising up in a mix of soap and shampoo, Sara’s feet cold on the floor tiles, the metallic sound of carts being wheeled past the door. All of it precise, all of it repeated in the same slow ritual, the rules created as they went.
It was raining desperately that afternoon. It had been two days since Nuria left and each girl was anxiously awaiting her turn, as though every gesture, every expression could be the one to finally save them. Sara, although immersed in her fascination for Ana, saw that Maite’s rancor was starting to eat away at her. At meetings she deliberately tried to provoke Sara, questioned whatever she said. In the face of that open confrontation, Sara reacted—thanks to Ana—with silence and indifference, irritating Maite even more. That afternoon, warm and humid—suffocating—after the rain, the four remaining girls sat in the common room, not speaking but restless to the point of hysteria.
Sara and Ana went to their room, a decision made almost without glancing at one another, like old lovers who anticipated everything, down to the other’s desire. When they were naked, the door opened and there in the threshold were Maite’s feline eyes, her bleached blonde hair.
“Ha!” she shouted. “I see you!”
Sara turned to look at Ana and saw that she was ashamed, covering her breasts with her hands.
“I hate her so much,” she whispered.
They dressed quickly, and when they were at the door ready to walk out, the psychologist appeared.
“Ana,” she said, “come with me, let’s have a little chat.”
Ana turned quickly to Sara, as though desperate for help.
“Don’t worry,” Sara replied, “I’ll see you at dinner.”
“Okay,” Ana responded, the concern on her cheeks softening slightly. Sara stood there in the doorway, watching them walk down the hall: the psychologist in her white coat, clogs clunking; Ana in her hospital gown, diminutive and silent, her small hands hanging by her asexual hips, her almost boy-like hips, walking down the hall toward the office door, which the psychologist unlocked and then opened, waiting for Ana to enter first.
“After you,” Sara heard the woman say.
Ana turned back, before walking in—enormous brown eyes, for the last time, looking at her.
Sara realized she’d left that very night, when Ana didn’t show up at dinner; this was confirmed upon returning to the room to find all of Ana’s things gone. She didn’t go to bed for quite some time. It would have been impossible to sleep when even the walls retained Ana’s smell, when even the air retained her presence—gazing at her from the bed overlooking the park. When she finally tried to go to sleep, it was only to keep from becoming even sadder. Under her pillow she found Ana’s lilac-colored diamondy ring. She put it on.
Maite left. Then Rosi. One day she was moved to a new room. A woman who looked like her mother came to visit and told her that she loved and missed her. That was before she was taken into the same common room and the same doctor repeated the same words about the importance of fats in a woman’s body. And before she was introduced to five new girls whose names she refused to learn. She said that her name was Sara and that she liked to draw. They asked what kind of drawing. She said pastel crayon. No one commented on that. It was hot. She must have said something mean at dinner because the nurse punished her: no movie night. She said she didn’t care. It was true.
She had once wanted so badly to get out of there. Now she wanted nothing. If anyone had asked, she wouldn’t have said she was unhappy. Every day was the same, repeated over and over; there was no pain, though neither was there grace. The psychologist asked her to talk about her father and she did, like someone inventing the storyline of a novel they were supposed to have read.
That batch of girls left and others arrived and told her their names. The same doctor repeated the same words about the importance of fats in a woman’s body. She said that her name was Sara and that she liked to draw. No one asked a thing. A woman who looked like her mother brought flowers and said she missed her but there was no conviction behind the words. Sometimes, in the afternoons, she’d look out the window of the common room and breathe deeply while looking down at the park. She no longer wanted to be in it. It must have been summer.
More girls came and said their names. She watched them come and then go just as the light came and then went through her bedroom windows, just as the nurses came and then went in their small timid, almost sweet whiteness, just as Ana came and then went. The first few days after her departure she’d missed Ana a lot, so much that Sara actually believed that her own strength had depended on Ana and she’d be unable to regain it until she saw her again. She continually evoked her memory so as not to forget a single gesture, a single conversation, and every time the psychologist summoned her she imagined that it was to tell her that Ana had run away from home and that she, as her best friend, must know where she’d gone. She imagined all of the doctors physically torturing her, asking her about Ana, making her bleed, and her, in the center of it all, lips sealed, quiet as death, not telling them that Ana was waiting for her by the lake. But none of that happened, just as Ana didn’t come visit, not even once.
At first she felt betrayed, but she kept giving her second chances. She’d think, for example, “I’ll give her until Wednesday, and if I don’t hear anything by Wednesday, then I never want to hear from her again.” But Wednesday would come and she’d give her another chance, conjuring up the most unlikely of circumstances that might have befallen her friend.
When a month had gone by, she felt incapable of keeping up the fa
rce and, after a few days during which hatred was still too much like love, she began trying to convince herself of how little she cared. Ana, however, was still in too many places: in the dining room, gazing at her from the other side of the common room, naked standing before her like a pillar of salt, one that now was indeed forever immovable.
One Friday, when they were about to have lunch, she suddenly realized that she hadn’t thought of Ana all day, and this made her feel better. One day she had trouble remembering her hands. Another day she threw the ring into the toilet.
More girls arrived. One of them looked like Ana. She, too, had small feet and almond-shaped eyes that were the same shade of brown, shiny and hard. Sara told the girl her name was Sara and that she’d like to learn to draw.
“You don’t know how?”
“Not very well.”
“I can teach you, if you want.”
She would never remember the girl’s name, but Sara’s memory of the afternoon light, as the two of them sat at a table in the common room, was clear.
“What would you like to draw?”
“Clowns,” she replied. And then she learned (it wasn’t actually that hard) to draw funny clowns that hardly took more than four circles and two exes for eyes, and clowns sitting on top of balls, and even clowns like the ones her teacher had drawn that you couldn’t tell if they were happy or sad, or thin or fat, just as she couldn’t tell if she was thin or fat, and she felt the shrinking memory of Ana, who now had no voice because she couldn’t recall her voice though she remembered her words, and through all of this Sara was searching for the thread, which is what the psychologist had said she needed to find; it wasn’t actually a thread, of course, but was similar, she said, to a thread—a place where something went wrong, a memory that couldn’t be explained—something that she could begin to tug at in order to unravel the tangled mess inside her, because she was all tangled up inside and what it felt like was a deluge of words, of specific words, words like Ana, like you’re very pretty, like when you are weak, I shall be strong; but not like before when she felt blood pumping down to her stomach in quick, nervous palpitations, now it was like she felt ashamed of some part of the girl she’d been when she said those things, ashamed not of the words themselves but of herself actually pronouncing them, because the truth was—and it was a very difficult truth—that without having opened her mouth, without speaking during group session, after that girl had taught her to draw clowns something inside her cracked, and it was something shaped like words that, though not yet spoken, gushed forth from long ago, from when she was seven years old and Teresa’s mother died of a heart attack and she had to go a week without seeing her and didn’t know how to react when she finally saw her at school again, all pale, and wanted to say nice things and tell her how sorry she was but instead she suddenly hardened, annoyed by Teresa’s weakness, and stuck out her tongue; and that same hardness now dissolved into the words that brought her back to Ana—her black pubic hair and her feet and the mole on her cheek—as the doctor repeated the same words about the importance of fats in a woman’s body and she herself repeated, and understood, and accepted that the words were true, though with the same gag of disgust in her throat when she looked at herself in the mirror, all soft and naked—her tiny breasts and tiny buttocks and tiny legs—and she wanted to vomit at the sight of her soft blubbery body, inarticulate, which is why she said that afternoon at her session with the psychologist that she felt revolted, and the psychologist asked her why and she said she didn’t know, and the psychologist asked again, and she said she didn’t know and the psychologist insisted that she did know, all serious, almost shouting, and then suddenly up cropped Luis and his tongue as he kissed her the afternoon of Teresa’s birthday, and the slimy disgust of the pool, and the letter opener and that dog she saw at her grandparents’ house and her father, all of it spewing from her mouth like vomit, gushing forth, hot words pouring from her lips, and the psychologist asking, “What else?” and her saying there was nothing else, and the psychologist repeating, “What else?” and it was as though her authoritarian manner served to barge like a fury into the vault of Sara’s memory, the memory reserved for the park, for the lake, the things that had hardened into a cyst that she couldn’t talk about though the psychologist said, “Of course you can,” but it was like a very hard cyst—and then time was slowing down once more, and there was silence, not the absence of sound but absolute silence, shattering things into little pieces, smaller and smaller pieces that made less and less sense, that man licking the woman’s neck on the grass in the park and her wanting to destroy it all, to destroy the man, the woman, the unbearable touching of their bodies, the woman’s open legs and the unarticulated reprieve from that grotesque, ugly pleasure that was ruining the softness of the leaves, ruining the color of the sky and her thinness, her ugliness was why she leapt on him, to put an end to it, not in order to destroy it but in order to be destroyed, the same way that something had destroyed the man who drowned in the lake all those years ago, the man with his USA T-shirt and one bare foot, the other still wearing a shoe, the same way something must have destroyed him and left him—ugly and beautiful at the same time—floating in the lake’s still waters, forever indecipherable, a clown both laughing and crying at the same time, and that is why she, too, began to cry. And when the psychologist held her and slowly stroked her hair, she thought of something farther away still, and harder still. “Is that why you made Ana undress for you?” “What?” “That’s why you made Ana undress in front of you, isn’t it, Sara? I know what happened, I talked to her the last time and she told me that you made her,” “What do you know?” “Everything. That’s why you did it, isn’t it?” and then the world went stock-still, like a frozen image in a film: Ana, and Ana’s little feet and her hands and the mole on her left cheek, and the asymmetrical beauty of her breasts and her eyes, especially her hard eyes when they looked at each other in the mirror on the first day, dissolving now into something else, something like light; “You can tell me; that’s why you made her do it, isn’t it, Sara?” and it was so easy to say “Yes” because saying yes was saying You’re very pretty and saying When you are weak, I shall be strong, and more than anything it was saying, I don’t love you anymore, but now without the memory of Ana’s hands causing pain, Ana’s hands in her memory now calm and still, like the yearning felt for an impossible lake.