by Andrés Barba
But that afternoon something had happened. And it wasn’t that she was afraid Mamá would make them all go see her—her and Manuel and the kids, Antonio and Luisa, even María Fernanda from all the way in Valencia—for nothing, for a chance to show them the enormous bruise and demand the affection to which she felt entitled, but that suddenly she got the feeling something had happened to Mamá, it was something about having her mother’s thousand faces (which were perhaps all one) there again, one minute authoritarian and the next not, like a collection of fans in a display case.
She gave Mamá’s name at hospital reception and felt guilty on being informed that her mother had received emergency care. There were people waiting for the elevator so she ran up the stairs.
“How are you?” she asked, opening the door, and saw her mother in bed, a doctor beside her seemingly waiting for someone to hand him a thermometer.
“Daughter,” she said pitifully, and then pointed to the doctor so he could supply a more scientific response.
“You mother’s fractured her hip in two places. It’s a clean break but it will be very difficult to fuse.”
“Because of my degenerative arthritis, isn’t that right, doctor?”
“Because of your age, yes.”
That tiny snippet of conversation was so Mamá, or at least such a big part of her. She was wearing an ugly sky-blue gown over her brace. The semidarkness of the room accentuated the almost purple bags under her eyes, filled tiny veins that made them look like some weird kind of moss growing beneath her skin. She lay there, arms splayed, palms up, and this, combined with her pallor, made her look crucified.
“Have you called María Fernanda?”
“No, not yet. Does it hurt?”
“Like dogs eating me alive.”
“Now, now.”
“And Antonio, call Antonio too.”
The doctor left without making any noise, a white ghost, assuring them he’d check back in later. Mamá’s robe—which had probably been used to cover her up while they were getting her out of the tub—was in a plastic bag on an armchair.
“Daughter, I have one disaster after another,” Mamá said, beginning to whimper.
“Well, if you would let the girl help you bathe . . .”
“That girl has no shame, she’s a thief. You need to fire her and find me another.”
“You say this every time, and no one’s ever stolen a thing from you; if you’re talking about your brooch, it’ll turn up next week in the place you least expect.”
“Her room is a pigsty.”
“What do you care what her room is like as long as the rest of the house is clean?”
“And she spends all day on the phone to Venezuela.”
“Well don’t let her . . .”
She tried to prolong the conversation, not out of any desire to discuss the caretaker, but to keep Mamá from turning to her ailments. Meanwhile she took the robe out of the bag, the maroon robe with her mother’s initials, M. A. A., embroidered in gold: María Antonia Alonso, doña María Antonia Alonso as the workers called her back when Alonso Woodworks still existed, as As Joaquín had called her, as Antonio himself had been forced to call her when he started working at the factory after deciding to quit school.
Now the robe seemed more Mamá than Mamá herself, or at least more like the old Mamá, less pitiful. It wasn’t simply old age that revolted her but Mamá’s old age in particular, and perhaps the fear that her own would be much the same. Guiltily, it struck her that she’d rather die than end up like this, like Mamá was now. When she left the hospital to go and pick up a few essentials (toothbrush, pills, a decent towel) she inhaled the cold outside air with relief. She took a taxi and, on the way to Mamá’s, thought about Manuel’s mother’s death, six years earlier. The hospital had made her think of it—every time she walked into a hospital she thought about it, about how, that last week in Bilbao, she hadn’t wanted to leave his mother’s bedside, hadn’t wanted to stop holding her hand, had kissed her over and over. The smell had been the same, and the impersonal feel of the room, and yet she’d done those things effortlessly, as though utterly devoted to performing a perfectly natural act, a just act.
This afternoon, on the other hand, before leaving the hospital room, when Mamá had asked for a kiss, she’d given it almost numbly, almost forcing herself, that was how she’d kissed Mamá, and that wasn’t right because a fractured hip at her age could really be quite serious. She decided to make the calls from Mamá’s, that would be best, and everyone would be home because it was Saturday, and it was afternoon; Antonio would be too tired from working all week to go out and María Fernanda, according to Mamá, had the flu.
With Antonio it was easier not to pretend. He was still stinging from his blowup with Mamá over Christmas and all he asked was how she was and in what room.
“Are you going to go see her?”
“Yeah, tomorrow.”
“She’s in bad shape,” she said, and would have liked to think she’d said it consciously, but this wasn’t true. Her words, intended simply to avoid a goodbye she imagined would be more awkward than usual, had opened a realm of possibilities she was afraid to assess. Of course she was in bad shape, anyone her age who broke a hip was in bad shape, but that wasn’t what her words had meant; they’d been more like a silent pact between the two of them—the victims—and the subtle unspoken way they realized this incriminated them.
“Then I’ll definitely go tomorrow,” Antonio said, and they hung up.
María Fernanda didn’t pick up until at least the seventh ring, flu-wrought exhaustion obvious in her voice.
“Mamá broke her hip,” she blurted, and then before her sister had time to ask: “She fell in the shower.”
“Did she get help quickly?”
“It took some time because she’d locked the bathroom door so they had to break the lock first.”
“Honestly. I don’t know what we’re paying that girl for. She’s supposed to be there to help Mamá,” María Fernanda said, indignant, her weak tone having vanished.
“Mamá is the one who doesn’t let herself be helped,” she replied, aware that she was defending the caretaker almost without knowing what had happened.
“Mamá is no longer of an age or in a position to say what she wants or doesn’t want; she’s got to be told what to do and that’s that.”
“Are you trying to blame me for this? Is that what you want?”
“What I want is for you to be on top of things.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re the one in Valencia.”
“Look, let’s not start.” María Fernanda fell silent for a second, as though in fact what she really would have liked was to start, to have the same old argument, and the two of them realized that even at a time like this, they couldn’t help but forget about Mamá and fight.
This conversation, too, had something odd about it. Usually she called María Fernanda from home, sitting in the living room with the door closed, but doing it now, from Mamá’s, tinged their words with the flavor of childhood arguments, of hissy fits and adolescent desperation. Before her, in a large silver frame, was the enlargement of a photo she’d have liked to destroy: the two of them in bathing suits—María Fernanda’s a bikini, hers a one-piece—laughing, aged twenty, on a beach in Cádiz. To be more precise, María Fernanda was laughing and she was looking at her, smiling in imitation, wearing her photo-face, the face Manuel said she wore every time anyone aimed a camera in her direction. The picture brought back the feeling of dependence on María Fernanda she’d had all those years, with an intensity she thought forgotten. Despite the fact that she was the older of the two, a year and a half older in fact, María Fernanda was the extrovert, the one who made phone calls, who always ended up explaining things to her. Out of her sister’s reach she’d always felt better, but when she was with her—until she met Manuel and then married him two years later—she invariably took on an idiotic quality, the dimwitted bashfulness on display in the p
hoto.
As though playing a game, as though acting out the roles in a tragedy, she’d spent those years playing the responsible sister. She expressed shock at María Fernanda’s sexual relations with a boy from Somontes not because she was in fact shocked (she herself had almost slept with Manuel) but because acting her part obliged her to be shocked, to believe blindly, even, that her shock was authentic. She’d always found contemplating other people’s sexuality distasteful and María Fernanda’s was no exception. If anyone were to blame for this it was Mamá, she thought. Too pretty to be a widow and too intrepid to run a factory during those years when she’d always remember her mother as what she was—not Mamá but doña María Antonia Alonso. Joaquín, if he’d ever in fact truly been necessary, was nothing but a pushover, a puppet required for respectability and perhaps Mamá’s greatest creation. What could be better, after Papá’s death—though this belief implied a malicious intent that may have been absent—than taking the first country boy she could find and making him general manager of the factory? Wasn’t that a way of making clear, to those who knew how to read it, that she had in fact been the one behind the scenes taking care of everything the whole time? Wasn’t it a way of saying that even Papá was replaceable? The deferential tone she used with Joaquín in the early years had something imperious about it, something disparaging—like those Roman emperors’ wives who felt no shame disrobing in front of slaves because they didn’t even see them as human—just as María Fernanda’s silence on the phone now had something imperious and disparaging about it, as though intellectual superiority had led her to abort a discussion that wasn’t getting anywhere.
“You are spending the night with her, I presume?”
“Yes,” she replied hesitantly.
“You weren’t going to!” María Fernanda said.
“What?”
“If I didn’t ask, I wouldn’t put it past you not to spend the night with her.”
“That’s not true, don’t you start now . . . The thing is, she doesn’t really need it, she’s not in that bad of shape.”
“Mamá breaks a hip and you say she’s not in that bad of shape. So what do you call bad shape, if I may ask?”
They spoke a bit longer, and before hanging up each apologized for their tone, as they always did after arguing, an act that neither added nor solved anything but was a sort of reflex drummed into the women Mamá had raised. Though upset, she wasn’t upset enough not to see that neither of them was right to act the way they had, or that being right didn’t even matter. The same thing had happened at Christmas, but this time the inability to have a normal conversation with María Fernanda added to her conviction that the weeks to come, until Mamá was released, would be difficult indeed.
Talking to Manuel was like a respite, a break she’d saved until the end. She recounted her mother’s condition and the conversations with her siblings as though describing each detail were the only way to find solace. He offered to come along and spend the night at the hospital, but she said no, he should stay with the kids.
“We can call a babysitter, you know it’s not a problem.”
“No, stay here, I’d rather you be here with them.”
It was odd: despite having told Manuel everything, she really hadn’t told him anything, which became clear when he asked how she was doing—not her mother but her—and she didn’t know how to respond.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Well, are you upset?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know how I am.”
“Come home after she falls asleep.”
When she got back to the hospital, Mamá was on edge.
“Did you call them?”
“Yes.”
“What did Antonio say?”
“He’s coming tomorrow.”
“What did he have to do today?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a little pause, as though Mamá were waiting to change topics, to provide a ring of silence for what she was about to say.
“You know what today is, don’t you?”
“No,” she replied, but the second she spoke she knew exactly what day it was, and Mamá must have seen as much in her face because she gave no further explanation.
“God has a real sense of humor,” she said finally, as though her words were intended to end all discussion of the matter, behaving more than ever like doña María Antonia, a creature who had changed in recent years, taken on a different disguise, become deceitful. It lasted only a few seconds, for as long as it took to once more impose a ring of silence and then start up with a phony-sounding whimper.
There was no way it could be coincidence. “Ten years?”
“Nine,” said Mamá, and the two of them fell silent, as though under orders.
Nine years almost to the minute, since it had been this time of day, or night, when the factory burned down. She recalled almost the entire night, but the images she retained of it, unlike with other memories, were fixed. In particular, she recalled Mamá and Antonio and Joaquín, recalled walking in after having seen the ruins of Alonso Woodworks after the fire, recalled the argument in Mamá’s living room, Joaquín claiming—since it was clear that the fire hadn’t been accidental—that Antonio was to blame because of the way he ran things, threatening debtors, shouting at employees, making enemies. Having gone to Mamá’s to see if her presence might help, she instead felt out of place. Mamá hadn’t cried yet, maybe she’d cry later; at the time she looked like a judge. Antonio, twenty-two at the time, rather than defend himself by challenging anything Joaquín said, simply hurled insults. Not taking her eyes off them, yet somehow looking as though she were hardly paying attention to either one, Mamá got up from her armchair, walked over to Antonio and gave him a resounding slap across the face.
“Go home, son,” she said then, not a trace of ire detectable in her tone, as though the slap had been a simple act of justice and his going home the only conceivable thing to do.
Later it occurred to her that it was always the same with people you lived with and were used to; it was like they weren’t even there, like they were almost invisible, until suddenly some isolated incident gave them real substance, weight. That was how it was with Antonio, it was as though he hadn’t existed until that moment and Mamá’s slap had conferred upon him enormous significance. She saw that his pride was wounded less by Mamá herself than by the fact that she’d sided with Joaquín, saw his desperation and, at the same time, his fear, because now that the factory had burned down he was out of a job and didn’t even have a degree to fall back on, to help him find something else. All of that—as opposed to the image of her brother about to cry in public for the first time—was what gave texture, weight, smell, to Antonio, who until then had been little more than Antoñito, the baby, who it was almost impossible to have a meaningful conversation with, since he was almost ten years younger. Their talks were monotonous and banal.
But that wasn’t the end of the drama. Antonio had left slowly, with no visible manifestations of rage, but—in that odd way he had—giving the impression that his rancor would never fully heal. And then it was just Mamá, Joaquín, and her left in the room. The silence, interrupted only by Joaquín’s obsequious praise of Mamá’s stand, seemed to give Mamá space to consider her next move.
“Stand up, sir,” she said to Joaquín finally, using the formal usted, which was odd, because they used the informal tú when speaking to each another.
The slap she gave Joaquín, so unexpected, was almost ridiculous, and he reacted childishly, protesting in vain.
“That’s the last time you talk about my son like that.”
Joaquín walked out of Mamá’s house as the man he’d first been when he arrived at the factory, a small-town rube who wouldn’t have had a place to fall down dead had it not been for her. His ridiculous gray suit, overpowering cologne and slicked-back hair turned him back into the man he truly was, then perhaps more than ever.
It struck her then
that had Joaquín not left, Mamá would never have realized she was standing there. Her mother sat down in the armchair once more and stared inexpressively, as though no longer wanting to pretend. She felt fear then, a fear that was previous and habitual, so habitual it seemed almost not like fear but like something illogical when applied to her mother: compassion. She’d left home years ago, was married, had a good job, was respected, and yet she didn’t know what to do with this compassion she was feeling for her own mother. What a normal person would have taken as a natural response, to her seemed odd and uncomfortable. In Manuel’s family, things weren’t complicated. And if in Manuel’s family things weren’t complicated, that meant they didn’t have to be. The idea of walking over to her mother and hugging her crossed her mind, quickly and painfully, like the blade of a knife.
“What are you doing here?” Mamá asked suddenly.
She couldn’t exactly have explained her reaction to those words. It was as though Mamá had slapped her, too. First she felt foolish, then she clenched her jaw so that Mamá couldn’t tell. After leaving she nearly turned back, nearly opened the door and shouted that she was glad the damned factory had burned down. She cried in the elevator. Not out of sorrow. Not out of anger, either.
Suddenly everything is slow and senseless. The image of a silent Mamá, in the hospital bed, blurs with that of the photo of her in the living room with corkscrew curls, the two becoming one but without becoming real. She doesn’t love María Fernanda, not really. Antonio is little more than someone to be pitied for his bad luck, someone discounted unintentionally, someone to be feared, like a dangerous breed of dog. Not even Manuel escapes this slowness and, suddenly, becomes grotesque. With no visible change, for no logical reason, his tenderness becomes a gentle irritation that suffocates her, in the same way that her kids—not their existence but their image, the idea of them, the responsibility they entail—suffocate her.
She recalls the last run-in she had with María Fernanda, in Mamá’s kitchen at Christmas that year, the phony joy that always leads into the same conversation about who’s gained more weight, recalls her glee on realizing that she was thinner, recalls Antonio and Luisa sitting in the living room, not speaking, watching some Christmas show on TV, waiting for dinner, and all of it—the memory and the present—turns into Mamá. She can’t stop hating her. It’s as if right this moment, on this day and not another that might have been more warranted, she hates Mamá profoundly, utterly, with no hope of forgiveness, as if she holds her solely responsible for this slow motion that makes everything seem so nonsensical, as though a membrane containing her rancor, holding it back, had ruptured and, rather than explode, simply leaked out a liquid contempt, slowly, silently.