All My Goodbyes

by Mariana Dimópulos

  I think about it, and I think about it, and I don’t think I can do it. I’ve lost my flair for the art of flight I practiced so diligently in Africa, in Asia and Europe. I pace between the kitchen and the bedroom, inside the little house, which is dark. I have to go and I don’t want to go. Outside there is a very clean moon, a sincere-faced moon, which turns the patio and the sheep and the walnut tree into distant relics of an abandoned city.

  It’s better if his mother doesn’t see us, he tells me. He takes the truck on a long detour, parking a little way past the farm. He crosses the field alone, to find me a change of clothes. Our rough night at the lake, under the open sky, shows on our faces. I need to change my trousers before heading to work.

  He comes back to the truck and I notice the trousers he’s brought are of little use to me, but I don’t say anything.

  “She might have seen us already,” he says once we’re in town, sitting across the road from Mágica y Natural, where I work.

  “I don’t understand. Why can’t she see us?”

  “Because it’s not good.”

  I didn’t find out any more that day. I sold pepper and semolina flour and everything else within my reach, trying not to write out too many receipts, just as I’d been taught. I was so obedient sometimes. But as soon as I had a free moment my mind started to spin with probabilities and questions. The local drunk came in asking for food and we offered him water crackers and a little bit of water, which he refused. Madame Cupin had been disturbed, or disarmed, or enraged. She seemed, or she was, kind toward me; but then there was the walking stick stuck in the mud, and the pearls and the axe, and the Viennese handkerchiefs, and all the rest. My mind spun around and around, for hours and days. How I wished I could dismount from the carousel of my life.

  Julia was crying and Kolya was crying. When we left the theater I asked them: what’s the point in shedding tears over the misfortunes of strangers, especially when those strangers are just puppets, fictitious creatures made of cloth? Kolya couldn’t answer, and Julia forgave my lack of tact. I took them home and prepared what must have been a kind of celebratory dinner, because we’d just decided to move to a larger apartment. Julia had already begun the process of indebting herself to a bank, and I would contribute by paying the bills every month. She’d made lots and lots of calculations, and I’d made several promises, and Kolya ran around brandishing a doll and howling with happiness. But promises are made of an indecipherable substance, one whose atomic and molecular structures are extremely fickle and unstable. Over dinner we discussed the puppet show we’d seen that afternoon. We tried to explain to Kolya the way puppets were manipulated. We tried and tried. He didn’t understand. From that moment alarm bells began to sound, distant at first, but sure enough they heralded something: the setting in motion of my departure mechanism.

  “Do you think he might be slow?” I asked Julia when we got up from the table.

  She shook her head and tried to ignore me. I flamboyantly threw what remained of our banquet into the garbage, even though I’d been told to keep some leftovers for the next morning. Later she asked me to put Kolya to bed, and to buy cigarettes if I went out, but I did neither; I shut myself in my room. My life’s work was stashed away in the wardrobe: an immaculate pile of bags and suitcases. I went back out and explained to Julia that I was sick of looking at her day in and day out.

  “I’m sick to death of looking at your face,” I told her.

  Julia was intelligent and honest. She had mothered and grandmothered a lot of pain over the years. But it was late, and she’d already exhausted her reserves of psychic science and geniality. She said all those funny words Germans use to insult one another: stupid cow, female goat, among other zoologisms. I felt elated, and laughed aloud to myself as I walked in and out of the cube that, until a few minutes ago, had been my bedroom. How ridiculous the doors and windows seemed to me now. How absurd the feet on the furniture! I stood on a chair and tried to cut the cord off the ceiling lamp, but even on tiptoes I couldn’t manage it. Simply turning off the light seemed inadequate.

  “You’re not even going to say goodbye to Kolya?” Julia said as I dragged my suitcases down the hall. The taxi had arrived and was waiting for me a few meters down the road. I opened the front door with difficulty, holding my handbag between my teeth. Julia went to enormous lengths to avoid helping me, rubbing her hands together in the cold. She had finally ditched the last of her beauty. Suddenly she looked very young. She tried not to look at me, or love me. She said the same thing my father had said to me ten years earlier.

  “You’re going to regret this.”

  That afternoon I disembarked from the plane, as I had from so many other planes he’d booked and paid for. Stefan walked half a meter ahead of me, as he always did, dragging his latest-generation suitcase behind him. At the customs desk I botched a couple of words in English. I ignored the clamorous propositions of the taxi drivers. But this wasn’t Tunisia or China. I told Stefan I was going to the bathroom, and hid inside the café on the first floor of Ezeiza airport. I found a table right at the back. I knew it would be a long time before he thought to look for me. A while later I got up and scraped together a few yen, which I exchanged for pesos and used to call one of my brothers. He answered. He even pretended he was happy to hear my voice.

  I’d spent the night in town. In the morning I walked back to the house, up the dirt path. It was strangely silent; there was nobody around. Marco’s truck was parked under the walnut tree, instead of in its usual spot. This seemed like a bad sign. One of the wheels was crushing the budding peonies. There didn’t seem to be any sign of the insect infestation Marco had warned me about. I approached the house and realized that the front door was open. I looked inside. I saw one of Marco’s arms, one of the arms I’d adored for so long, and it wasn’t the same as before. I saw an arm on the ground painted dark red, the same color as the walls. The bloodstains crawled toward the ceiling like an army of ants. But it wasn’t insects, as Marco had promised it would be.

  “There are going to be showers tonight,” he’d said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s the season for it. And it’s warm.”

  I didn’t ask him what kind of insects they were. I didn’t even stop to wonder whether they were coleoptera or dipterans. All Marco told me was that they rained down from the ceiling once a year, and that they liked to get into the bed sheets and disrupt the sleep of whomever they encountered there. I no longer sought terminology or referred to things by their Latin names. I’d gone to El Bolsón as instructed, and sat waiting beside the window of the Hotel Amancay. I’d simply taken his word for it, delirious with a dry, intoxicating happiness, trusting that he would come.

  And now? Seeing that arm, I understood how an entire world can unravel in an instant. I didn’t dare go through the door. I ran to Madame Cupin’s house to tell her something terrible had happened, to ask her to help me. But her house was empty. A cat smiled down at me from the eaves. I crossed the patio and tried Marco’s house. Also empty; that much was to be expected. I didn’t have any telephone numbers I could call for help. Even as I ran breathlessly down to the cabins in the hollow, I knew there was no need to rush, that nothing depended on my actions now. I spoke as best I could to the person I found there: one of the bearded brothers. The other brother went out to notify the firefighters and one of his neighbors, who was a doctor. We walked back to the farm and I wasn’t allowed to approach the house for a long time. The morning seemed like an arduous, starless night. Finally a very round man with extremely bright eyes appeared, and confirmed the worst. Marco was dead, as was his mother, who had been found in my bedroom. Was this even possible? It was much more than possible.

  The white walls of Greece—or was it Tunisia?—gleamed in the midday sun. Stefan called to me from the bed. I went to the bedroom and let myself fall against the sheets. His cologne, which was expensive and more exotic than most, lingered on the pillow, and I didn’t want to fe
el it touching my cheek. He’d unfolded every single device, every screen and microphone, so as not to miss anything that was going on in the world, and also so that nobody would forget about him. He took great pains to remind everybody of his presence at every opportunity, as though he were in fear of dying, or already dead. He had a thousand hands and spoke a thousand languages.

  “Do you like the hotel?”

  I liked being far away, that much I knew. With a slight caress he invited me to engage in some kind of negotiation, and I accepted. For a while we imported and exported the humors of the body, until we were interrupted by yet another phone call. I went back out to the balcony. The sea was the same stain it had always been. After the phone call Stefan came over to stroke my back. Apparently he felt this was an opportune moment to destroy my innocence (as he put it). I didn’t want to listen to him, but I did. His sarcasm was like the music of a vile instrument burning in my ears. He talked about how they manufactured teacups in Cambodia, which sold for a pittance in Australia and Singapore. About the Australians who bought them in the supermarket, and then donate twenty cents to a UNICEF campaign at the register. Didn’t I think this was magnificent? Wasn’t our world a work of art?

  One of his devices sounded again from the bedroom. I heard him speaking in English, precisely on the topic of a shipment of Cambodian teacups stranded at a port in Sydney. Guys like Stefan are so bad at making up examples. I stood before the great blue stain of the ocean, thinking about how yesterday had been my birthday: thirty-three years old.

  It’s cold, despite the carpet covering the floor and half of the walls. I’m incognito in Buenos Aires, no one is pursuing me. It’s petty victories like this that I delight in. What is this apartment? An empty square of bricks on the top floor of a building in the suburb of Once. The sky I’m lucky enough to have chanced upon is yellow and filled with smudges of humidity. I look out at the grimy uneven rooftops of the city where I was born. My father was wrong: there is such a thing as repose, and it exists beneath an old tree that spits walnuts in March.

  “That’s quite an accent!” said doña Carmen of La Mancha. We set out from the hotel with the humble aim of buying bread and jamón. The heat was exhausting, and I was hesitant to breathe it in.

  I light the water heater, take off my dirty clothes and step into the shower. I’m wasting the tank water. I’ve lived in the little house for some time now, and I don’t want to leave. Outside, it is snowing. I get out of the shower and dry myself carefully. I perch on the edge of the bathtub to put on some clean tights. They are neither old nor new. As though creeping up from my feet, happiness fills my throat. It’s such a great privilege to get out of the shower and put on clean stockings. I was standing, but now I have to sit back down because the tears are falling all the way to my knees.

  “Do I really have to leave?”

  “Just for tonight. The bugs will be swarming tonight and you won’t be able to sleep.”

  It’s true that it was very warm that night. I spent what remained of the afternoon cleaning the vegetable baskets. I sold some carrots to one of the neighbors and watched Marco coming and going, with logs and without logs, delivering and returning sheep, his truck battering up and down the dirty trail. He told me to pick some tomatoes, even though they were still green. He loaded the truck with two bags of potatoes and then unloaded them. He looked harried, he cut wood even though we already had more than enough for that time of year. I decided not to ask him the destination of the inedible tomatoes, nor why he’d left the axe in the middle of the garden again. He was strictly economical; he never did anything that wasn’t necessary. And he was careful. He hated working in vain. Only with me did he squander resources, never knowing how or why. I touched his arm, although we weren’t accustomed to displaying affection out in the open—being visible meant being careless.

  “Maybe you could stay with me in town tonight.”

  “Better not.”

  “Please? We could go out for a walk. Or look for some music.”

  “Not tonight, I think.”

  Was this hesitation? I couldn’t help asking:

  “Do you have other plans? Or is it because of Madame Cupin?”

  Marco didn’t answer me. He picked up the axe and decapitated several thick logs, which he then split into strips. He worked swiftly, with the precision of an artist, but he was as merciless as a butcher. I despised his terseness now more than ever, I was offended by it. It felt like he was wielding it against me. I told myself: “I don’t love him. I never want to see him again.”

  I went down to the road on foot. It was one of those misty winter mornings in the mountains, when even the trees are almost invisible. I was up very early, and there were still several hours before I had to be at work. I stuck out my thumb, but no cars stopped for me. I walked with a certain apprehension along the side of the road; it was the sort of morning when drivers might veer off the road, always braking too late, or just in time to fracture someone’s arm or a leg. Why was I so worried about the integrity of my physical person, if I’d made such an effort over the years to throw myself off precipices, to submerge myself, to lose myself at borders? Because that morning, very early, with the mountain still shrouded in darkness, I’d come to a realization: my father had lied to me. The little house lost in the mountains, cold in the winter and oppressive in the summer, with its patio and its walnut tree, was irrefutable proof of this. For the first time in my life I could sit and recline without a shred of skepticism, trusting completely in the resilience of chairs and beds. Anyone could come along with their science now and refute the evidence of my nights and days. I had become a magnificent animal: soft, compact, whole. When I arrived in town I had to ask them to open the payphone center early, because it wasn’t yet nine o’clock. I was there to revive the dead. My heart pounded in double time. I dialed a long number and waited on the crackling line. Nobody home? But then a miniscule voice like a little bell greeted me in German. So Kolya was alive, and he was home alone. It seemed forced and pointless to try and explain to him who I was.

  “Your mama’s not home? I wanted to tell her. And thank her. Because love exists and the place exists.”

  There was an immense silence—poor Kolya, there on the other side of the phone.

  “Mama went across to the neighbor. The neighbor wasn’t good.”

  Perhaps it was better this way, not saying anything to her.

  “I’m going to school.”

  “Yes, Kolya. That’s good.”

  “In school I’m learning one, two and three.”

  Was it time yet? Alexander had put on a shirt and suit, and I barely recognized him. I pretended I’d forgotten all about it. He didn’t believe me, we laughed. I also had to wear a special suit, a white one that I’d bought the day before. His parents were waiting for us at the door of the Heidelberg city hall, where the civil ceremony would take place. She dark and tall, he a little heavy and just as towering. We held hands. They smiled, said they were surprised. Due to a momentary lapse of vigilance on my part, the man stroked my head. I didn’t deserve any of their blessings. Inside, a few of Alexander’s friends were scattered throughout the large hall. Several of them were bunched in the corner, making fun of a royal portrait; others just looked bored. Someone had brought bouquets of carnations. Dianthus caryophyllus. I spent the entire ceremony running through the names of herbaceous plant families in my head, while the justice of the peace lectured us on the boons of love and married life. To his credit, he did manage to convert us to the faith of matrimony for about a month. Alexander didn’t let go of my hand the whole time. I loved him as he kissed me and I loved him as we walked out into the street. But thoughts of silicon and lanceolate leaves wouldn’t leave me in peace; my head was one big beaker of swirling gasses and vapors.

  I sold a rye loaf; I placed a second loaf in my bag.

  Madame Cupin was waiting for us with her tall wine glasses. But the candles weren’t meant to be romantic; not unusually, the power had g
one out across the entire mountain. We arrived together, as though we’d left from the same house and traveled a long way to get there. Despite her walking stick and her rheumatism she wouldn’t let us help her with the plates or the salad or the meat, all of which she kindly brought out to us, the strands of her pearl necklace swinging as she bent over the table.

  “How are you both?” she began, once all the food had been served, as though she hadn’t been watching me from her garden an hour earlier. She’d seen Marco even more recently, since he was the one who’d delivered the meat that now lay soaking in its own juices atop the table. We answered individually, each mentioning some small detail from our daily lives. But she didn’t seem satisfied. She wanted to know if it was true that we’d gone into town together the night before. It had been a coincidence, Marco explained. This was a battle he could never win. He denied me as many times as he could during that dinner, more than seventy times seven, if I can put it that way. Marco knew nothing about me, and Madame Cupin was triumphant in her skepticism, and my heart didn’t want to be offended, it was quiet, fascinated by the glimmering of her pearls.

  “And you don’t get lonely in that house all by yourself?” the lady wanted to know. “Not even at night?”

  She begged us to eat dessert, and dished out large portions. This time she used the plates as an excuse to whisk me into the kitchen. She served me a whisky and assured me that Marco had fallen asleep in the armchair waiting for us.