The baker also had a habit of rejecting things, in his way. When I first started my job in the bakery I’d tremble when I heard his voice thundering my name from a distance. But as the months went by I began to wish for it: for him to treat me unfairly, to provoke me with his comments, like the time I refused to unload the freshly baked bread with my bare hands and he told me the heat burning my fingers was purely psychological.
“You don’t understand anything,” he said, the ignorant shit, and some part of me enjoyed telling him he was right. Because—I’ve said it before—my heart is no good. He despised the pastry chef, and loved to disavow both the difficulty of cakes and the advantages of democracy. He wasn’t old, but if he had been, once upon a time he would have used his arms to carry guns and kill Jews and Gypsies. His father had also been a baker. He was a kind old man who came by every now and then, grandson in tow, to admire the handiwork of his successor. I was a bit saddened by their little family, but as the months went by I got used to it. I’d arrive at work early, when it was still dark, and meticulously arrange the jars of jam without knowing what they were called, nor which fruits they were made of. I’d stack them up into towers and the order of it all gave me a certain confused kind of joy. Then the apprentice would appear from out the back, all wrapped up in an apron, and unload a torrent of bread rolls onto the farthest shelf. At ten past six the garbage man would arrive, a giant who barked his riddle at me once or twice and, in an act of compassion, finally showed me which bread he wanted by pointing at it. I pronounced the prices fearfully, playing the language like an out-of-tune violin. But I liked my job, and it was enough for me, although back at home—which is to say, back in my room, which could have been any room—my legs would hurt when I lay down to sleep. First it was weeks and then months, and my heart got its hopes up; finally it thought it was worth something.
The past: that long and sensible mistake. For years I knew I was making a mistake, but always I took the hardest path. That used to redeem me. Not anymore.
I was traveling south to the harvest. It was November. Why, if I’d never shown any interest in the countryside before now? I fled from my brother’s house one night with nothing but a hiker’s backpack. At least, I thought I was fleeing; in reality, nobody was chasing me. I pretend-fled from Retiro, after not sleeping a wink in the traveler’s hotel, on a bus headed for El Bolsón. I lived in the cabin in the gully. Then I moved to the little house in the middle of the Del Monje farm where Marco was, to put it sentimentally, let’s say “waiting for me.” At the beginning he didn’t speak (he didn’t speak much later on, either) but that was his way. Sometimes he supervised, sometimes he killed horses, while we harvesters plucked strawberries and raspberries in the fields. I’d made the house in the middle of the farm my own. He never said more than three words at a time: seems that way; gotta be done; there’s no need. I watched him from my window if I was in the house, or from the field if I was working and he was passing by to check the fruit baskets. And although I didn’t quite understand why—despite the cold and the hard labor, despite the twitching in my legs when I’d lie down on the battered mattress each night, despite Madame Cupin pacing the patio with her walking stick—with time I started to grow sweetly still, as if under the effect of beautiful music. One day, during the siesta hour, I realized that Marco’s mother had been observing me from the veranda of her wooden house as keenly as I observed Marco and the black-muzzled sheep. She was always hunched over with her back to the patio, removing any new weeds that had crept into her garden. In December the first tourists admired her from afar, as if she were just one more attraction. They’d avoid her and approach me, so that I could show them the berry orchards and sell them fruit. As I wrapped up their purchases they’d asked me not about the secrets of agriculture but about that old woman: what an outfit! What a magnificent garden! They admired Madame Cupin, and I suspected nothing: she seemed by turns sweet and malicious. One day she appeared at my house, knocked on the front door and said to me from the porch: “So when are you coming over to visit me, young lady?” As if we’d arranged the visit some time ago. She smelled of perfume, and the wrinkles on her face were just one more embellishment of the impeccably cultivated figure she cut. I’m sure she took them off at night, as she did her rings and pearl necklaces. I’m sure she was twenty-five years old when she closed her eyes in bed. She was captivating, much more so than the sheep with the black muzzle and the walnut tree bent over the patio.
I had as many pieces as a broken vase, and I never found a way to put them back together or even to number my porcelain remains. If I’d at least been able to feel pity, to sing like Julia or fight like Alexander with his liberty conundrum. But instead I studied a green beetle, or went out silently on tiptoe to feed the cats. I didn’t think, and even this wasn’t any comfort.
In the café by the main square, in Heidelberg, just a few blocks from where I’d worked with the baker selling poppy-seed loaves, it was a pleasure to sit and talk with Alexander and linger for hours inside the little cave that was, for us, the Spanish language. He had originally learned the language in its homeland, but luckily he’d met a number of exiled Ecuadorians, Chileans and Peruvians and now spoke a mellower, more deliberate version. More and more frequently, we ended up whiling away our afternoons together: first an hour, then another hour. And he touched my knee underneath the table. He had only recently returned from one of those trips he took “to think.” And, just like the other times, he refused to speak about it, telling me instead about his university classes and the usual trivialities of student life, knowing full well I was not interested in any of it, although sometimes, for my benefit, he did mention his basic knowledge of chemistry and botany. The abracadabra of camellia sinensis had long since stopped working. Alexander (who, as a European, dreamed of becoming a citizen of the world) dedicated himself uncomplainingly to the social sciences. But at thirty-five he had already grown weary of skepticism. His critical faculties were beginning to falter, along with his hopeful spirit. He no longer doubted, as he had in his twenties, the existence of God and institutions. He was beginning to dethrone certain books and genuinely consider the kinds of jobs that would require him to pay taxes. I’m not saying he was ready to throw in the towel and clamber inside the infinite rodent wheel; even in his mid-thirties he was still fiercely protective of his liberty. He’d go from the library to his apartment, from the apartment to his night classes. The afternoons when he deviated from routine were spent with me in the café. The life he’d cultivated was the life of a public servant. Why do I speak so spitefully of Alexander, even though I loved him? Is it because I loved him? My heart has not improved with time, despite the goodness of Carmen and the goodness of Julia, despite Alexander and all our sex, despite Marco and his death. If anything, it’s worse. I thought I was getting better when all the while I was getting worse. Because back then all I saw was a young man with a thirst for knowledge, Europe weighing heavily on one shoulder (the other shoulder he believed to be free), who wanted to spend his nights with me. I went along with it, went home with him and let him take off my clothes and admire my body. Then all subtleties were done away with, because he was a surgeon of sex, a precious alchemist, with all the patience of a good botanist. I saw how the whole European continent weighed down on one of his shoulders even after he’d removed his suit of civility. Naked and simian, he was still a child of the West, and he admitted as much himself: I am a child of Europe and the West, he’d say, and it was only by following the path of the West that one could attain the liberty he prized above all else. He was convinced that in order to think about liberty one needed, first, to be free and to practice freedom, as though it were a violin sonata or a martial art. He went to the Black Forest and he returned from the Black Forest. It was one of his central practices. He’d leave somewhat downcast and return barely smiling. He’d return and settle back into his apartment as if nothing had happened, ask for and receive sex, ask for and receive food, consume books as if it
were utterly natural. He took large sips of everyday life, and invited me to take sips too, insisting in his velvety Spanish: “vamos, venga, bebe,” and I’d accept, under the illusion that I was drinking a magic potion.
In the ABB factory, about forty kilometers outside Heidelberg, I argue with a Polish man who crosses the border to work when he’s short on money—the rest of the time, he studies at the University of Warsaw. He tells me I’m a good slave, that I’m not helping the cause. First I’m offended, then I defend myself; much later, I concede defeat.
I tried explaining it to Julia in the Berlin kitchen. For her, a person’s life was an argument filled with hidden meanings and causalities, and she enjoyed discovering them and inventing them as we stood there by the kitchen bench, nibbling on a piece of bread or fruit, as I’ve already explained, on those long evenings when we’d decide to abstain from dinner, with Kolya sleeping in the other room, and we’d peck and chatter like two birds, and so on. That night, like so many others, it was at Julia’s request that we started talking about Alexander and everything that had gone wrong between us. But now she didn’t react the way she usually did, with a sideways glance and her hand over her mouth every time she commented or responded. “Why not, if you loved him?” she half-offered, distracted, examining the teeth beneath her cheek. What was that? A red mark to one side of her mouth. She confessed that earlier that day someone had punched her in the face. It was the day of her hospital shift—the rest of the week she worked in the clinic. To see Julia behind her black teak desk, surrounded by framed paintings, under that soft lighting, as I saw her once, was to trust her immediately and completely. Julia seemed to embody the consecration of understanding, like some kind of patron saint of psychoanalysts, if such a thing could exist. She was so regal, so inscrutable at times, although she believed in love and happiness; and yet someone had punched her in the face so hard that one of her teeth had come loose, an incisor, just to the left of her smile. As the hours passed the red mark got worse. She touched it constantly, refused to put ice on it. A week had passed since I’d packed my suitcases in victory, but I was still hanging around as if nothing had happened, which, some might say, is exactly what did happen. I’d packed my suitcases and locked them before hiding them away on the highest shelf of the wardrobe. It had been difficult to lift them, heavy as they were, that insomniac night. During the week I’d contrived not to open them again, to survive with nothing but the clothes on my back, and I still harbored hopes of leaving and putting an end to it all. Even to Julia? Yes: putting an end to Julia, and Kolya, and Alexander and the memory of him; putting an end to doña Carmen, to Almagro and Málaga and Heilbronn, and even my own father, who had died, or so I’d been told, exactly one day before; throwing a thick blanket of disdain over all of it and setting out like a new person to see new men and new buildings, with the same joys and woes, to find new jobs and new rooms and feel new winds blowing at my back. The Caribbean or the Russian steppe, cleaning bathrooms or safeguarding paintings in a museum, or shampooing dogs, or selling ice cream in a marketplace. It’s not like it was all the same to me, but what was I to do? All things bright and reinvigorating, all of it brought me hope. And that night we ate on our feet as we often did, an apple and a piece of black bread as we exchanged our thoughts on the progress of the apartment building’s internal patio, which was in the process of being painted white, or the neighbor across the hallway and her illness. But Julia spoke sideways and without enthusiasm, and she didn’t even reproach me when I said I’d never known how to really love anyone. No, this time she didn’t speak to me with her usual authority, she kept her mouth half-closed and a restless hand to her cheek. Did I want to know what had happened? Was it possible that I didn’t even care? I cared about the ice she’d refused to apply, and the makeup she’d need the next day. A woman had punched her in the face during a struggle; they were trying to tranquilize her, and the woman had resisted. The punch had been administered very precisely, its effect exacerbated by a sharp metal ring. A woman had hit her like a man. She, Julia, who was pure understanding, who was the patron saint of the mentally ill, who believed in explanations and the happiness of others. “We were trying to help her. We had a plan.” The woman had thrown punches in all directions at first, but she’d managed to hit Julia with graphic precision, like sticking a pin through her lip. Ah, Julia. Her understanding had hit rock bottom, and as she told me about the punch she traced its memory time and time again across her cheek.
“Don’t worry, they’ll be back.”
“Who?”
“The bad things,” said one of the brothers from the cabins, with a subtle tone of sorrow. He had come down to the farm to buy cherries because his tree had been attacked by a patient and diligent worm. He pulled the worm from his pocket and showed it to me. We talked about his fruit trees and cursed the fire that had burned down the neighbor’s orchard a few days ago. He slung a few more sentences at me before taking his leave with a wink. He had no desire to intimidate me. I could tell that more than one of the mountain dwellers believed Marco had fanned the flames instead of extinguishing them.
“We’re never still. Even rest is a kind of movement,” I told a man a few months ago, a man lying prostrate and still in his bedroom. An old, sick man. His hands and feet were useless to him.
Do I mean my father? Maybe. I must have said this to my father over the telephone, from seventeen thousand kilometers away. It was a Thursday. The next day he died, and Julia came home with a broken mouth.
“You,” bellowed Madame Cupin one afternoon as she made her way toward my little house. I’d been living at the Del Monje farm for six months, under the nose of the now-snowy mountain. “Am I mistaken, or did I tell you where I kept my pearls? Because I’ve been looking for them and I can’t find them anywhere.”
From the beginning of Julia’s story I understood the woman’s reasons for punching her. With such precision, according to Julia, like the exact opposite of a caress. I too had dreamed of slaps and punches, more than once. One for the baker in Heidelberg, who threw numbers at me and made them rain down upon my head. One for my boss in the big department store. One for my father. One for a certain organic chemistry textbook, that I ended up throwing out the window. Not the kind of slap reserved for wiping out insolence, but a properly placed fist, something painful. The crazy woman, Julia said, had been possessed by some kind of maniacal strength; she hadn’t reacted to the needle the nurse brandished but rather to Julia’s declaration that they were only there to help. “We have a plan,” Julia had said, and one of those words had provoked the punch to her mouth, unless it had been the magic wand of the word “help.” Once her hands were tied down the woman had yelled no. So easy, those crazies, it didn’t take much brainpower to understand them. I saw Julia with new eyes then. She was too pretty to be hit. But then again, why not? Throw a punch at the mouth of beauty. The woman’s hands were tied and she was dragged down the corridor like a blood clot, like a drifting planet, bouncing from wall to wall, all the way to her cell.
When we worked as IKEA shelf-stackers, we were IKEA shelf-stackers. We behaved like obedient planets each spinning in our own orbit, according to the gravitational laws of our boss. From kitchenware to interior decoration, from the arrangement of plates to sheets, via every imaginable prerequisite for the perfect European home. But not the Turk. What was his name? Fatik? Who knows. I hated that they called him the Turk, and yet I too called him the Turk. A new girl had just started, from Ukraine or Latvia. Very blonde, insipidly so. She didn’t join the lady cult, nor did she seem to want to have anything to do with me, but she adored the Turk and sometimes, if he allowed it, she’d even bludge a cigarette off him during the break and stroke his moustache. They got along very well; naturally, it didn’t take long for tongues to start wagging. I saw the pair convening for a moment in the morning, as we entered the building to arrange whatever it was we were asked to arrange that day. During breakfast they winked and made somewhat unnecessary signs at
one another, since aside from me nobody was the least bit interested in what they had to say. When they spoke they spoke badly of the Germans, in bad German. The Germans were this and that, and our boss epitomized every one of those faults. I agreed with every point they made, but I didn’t dare tell them that. Sometimes, when our paths crossed at the break table, they’d share the odd ironic observation with me, usually something borderline crude, and make some gesture so that I’d understand. After the forging of their alliance, more broken glasses began to appear, more frayed mattresses. At first they were subtle about it, and it was fun to speculate about the precise moment when they slipped away to perpetrate their crimes. They might have spent long and precious months this way—for her they were certainly precious, and for the Turk even more so. While he continued to smoke his ascetic’s cigarette every morning by the access door, still refusing to don scarf or beanie, it now seemed he spent the whole day wrestling with an enormous and secret happiness. Since he was nearly fifty, and I was only twenty-five, I imagined that this newfound happiness must be something like a rallying against time, the recovery of something lost. I was wrong. I saw them ripping the ears off a couple of teddy bears imported from China. Always just two or three, be it bears or glasses: a series of artfully faked accidents. Their sabotage was meager, in the scheme of things, and they knew it, but they took pleasure in it all the same, for a time. They never invited me to participate, and even if they had I would have refused; my heart wasn’t hardy enough for such things. They might have kept up the ruse for months, but she got anxious. It was she, not he, who must have insisted on taking it a step further.
Sometimes, after making love, Alexander would stroke my hair as if I were a dog.
And I was a dog.
I saw her silhouetted against the backdrop of trees, behind the house. She was struggling to remove her stiff leg from the mud. It had been raining day and night for several days and nights. It was the beginning of autumn and I wasn’t afraid of the cold or the snow which, somewhere, was already starting to gestate. Her leg was calf-deep in the mud and her walking stick had sunk even deeper. One of the cats observed her from its post with ominous indifference. I confess that I didn’t rush to her aid. Like the cat, I watched her from a distance for a moment before approaching her. She was so elegant, even there in the mud. She struggled alone, grabbing at a branch that was within her reach; she wouldn’t let me get my shoes dirty. Once she was free we walked together to the front porch of her house, commenting on the volatile weather, which had already claimed a number of plants in her garden. She disappeared inside for a few minutes to get changed and returned as fresh as a daisy, smelling of rosewater. The living and dining rooms surprised me: it was the first time I’d seen antique furniture and high ceilings in a place as remote as Las Golondrinas. Madame Cupin noticed my reaction and informed me that her second marriage had been to a Frenchman—a lover of classical architecture and gambling. Thirty years ago he’d arranged for the entire contents of a family estate he’d inherited to be shipped over. Now widowed, Marco’s mother drifted past the old ornate mirrors like a ghost from a bygone era, although the veneer of elegance had its cracks: her walking stick was cheap and crude, and the whisky she offered me was local. I took two sips and set it aside. Constantly shifting her bad leg, she asked me if I’d enjoyed the harvest and—when I complimented her interior decoration—whether I’d visited the Continent. I answered yes to both questions. I tried to avoid speaking about my past in any depth, but she was interested in my family, my parents, their professions; in short, she was keen to unravel the fabric of my origins. I ceded a little information and she paused a while to share the little she knew about chemistry and biology. Monsieur Cupin had been a man of great culture, she told me, although I hadn’t seen a single book inside that impressive house. She took a sip of whisky and started to muse on the paltry benefits of my working for the local health-food shop, which I did in order to pay the rent that she and her son charged me. She advised me to quit: she didn’t like those people (which people?). Before I took my leave she told me she’d resigned herself to the fact that her son would be alone forever. Marriage just wasn’t for him.
All My Goodbyes Page 6