The Right Intention

by Andrés Barba

  “She’s dead.”

  The words “she’s dead” on Antonio’s lips more real than Mamá’s death itself when she called Manuel on the phone, called Maria Fernanda on the phone, absurdly simple how easy the words “she’s dead” were to explain that Mamá no longer existed, that she’d gone to sleep after calling her María Fernanda, after saying she was the only one who loved her, Mamá’s hands predictable and yet ludicrous, because dead bodies all had some things in common.

  They bathed her and dressed her with care, a care both distant and yet familiar, in a blue dress she saved for parties and kept in its dry-cleaning bag at one end of her armoire. Suddenly everything seemed poignant, even the photos of Mamá with Joaquín next to the fan collection at Mamá’s house, even María Fernanda arriving at the funeral home with that ridiculous near-histrionic way of sobbing, and Antonio and Luisa silent, and Manuel hugging her, and her wanting to make love to him the moment he walked into the room reserved for Mamá; it was absurd, almost ridiculous, her sudden urge to make love to him, to go home and make slow love, with Mamá there in her coffin, less Mamá than ever, less like in the black-and-white photo of her with Joaquín without ever actually touching Joaquín, or with Papá but without ever touching Papá all the way, or with them, her children, but looking as though she were displaying them, holding them up rather than holding them, there with her corkscrew curls, in the photo she’d placed in the living room beside that of Manuel’s mother, something about Mamá’s thousand faces (or were they all one?) now less Mamá than ever in the coffin.

  “What was the last thing she said?” asked María Fernanda, out of nowhere, in the middle of a discussion about making space for Mamá beside Papá in the family plot.

  “Last thing she said about what?”

  “The last thing Mamá said. Or didn’t she say anything?”

  She hesitated for a second and was then scandalized at how cleanly she lied, she, who always got so flustered.

  “She said, well, first she said she was cold, she kept saying she was cold over and over. She made me close the windows, or, actually, open them and then close them.”

  “What about us?” asked Antonio, who hadn’t said a word up until that moment. “Didn’t she say anything about us?”

  “She said she loved you.”

  “Don’t lie,” Antonio shot back.

  “She did, she said she loved you, really, in a very Mamá way of course, in that way Mamá always spoke, but she said she loved you both.”

  “So how did she say it, then?”

  “Can’t you see she’s trying to tell you? What, you want to interrogate her?” María Fernanda interjected, and the three of them fell silent, hovering on the edge of a lie that, with Mamá dead, now inexplicably united them. “I believe that’s what Mamá said. What else would she say?”

  “The truth,” Antonio replied.

  “That was the truth,” said María Fernanda.

  “No, that was your truth.”

  Antonio’s tone held the simple reproach of a brutish child, and she, who’d never really touched Antonio, who when she kissed him at parties always gave the quick peck of someone trying to void an awkward act of significance, stroked his back with her hand.

  “That’s what she said, Antonio.”

  Her death was only real when Manuel pronounced it in bed, and in her children’s faces death was real, and in Joaquín’s voice on the phone, now distant and understanding, and in the black-and-white photo of Mamá, aged twenty, smiling an elaborate, absurd and out-of-place smile beside Manuel’s mother.

  ANDRÉS BARBA is one the most lauded contemporary Spanish writers. Winner of the Herralde Prize, he is the author of twelve books, including Such Small Hands. His books have been translated into ten languages.

  LISA DILLMAN translates from Spanish and Catalan and teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University. Some of her recent translations include Signs Preceding the End of the World, by Yuri Herrera, which won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award; Such Small Hands, by Andrés Barba; Monastery, co-translated with Daniel Hahn, by Eduardo Halfon; and Salting the Wound, by Víctor del Árbol.

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