Sleeping Dragons

by Magela Baudoin; Wendy Burk; M. J. Fièvre

  Reme left a note taped to the fridge: Martín will stop by today. Her handwriting is vigorous and optimistic, just like her speech. Remedios can talk for hours on end while you offer up monosyllables, without her ever realizing. At the very bottom of the note she had written, as if she remembered it just before leaving the house, Elene says call her. Martín never stopped by to fix the water heater.

  After class, I went to the store by the apartment building. It’s Chinese-owned. Inside, there’s a stand-alone fruits and vegetables section, or at least it seems to work that way, because if you buy some onions you have to pay for them there, instead of at the cash register. I couldn’t help noticing the woman who works in that section. She’s Bolivian, like me, I knew it at once. I maneuvered myself next to her and was stupid enough to ask, in front of everyone, where she was from. If she could have, she would have spit on me: “From Peru,” she lied.

  When I reached the apartment, Reme was holding supper for me. She didn’t sell anything again today; she’s the one who pays the bills. She traveled a long way to three different stores, Chinese-owned, but none of the owners were there. As it happened, they were all back in China. Reme was furious: “Look at the money they’re making while we’re killing ourselves just for a few cents.” I didn’t know what to say to her. I thought about words like ‘Chinese mafiosos,’ ‘Chinese pigs,’ ‘Chinese capitalists,’ but nothing came out. I tried to calm her down and told her about the Bolivian girl with the onions, but that was a bad idea. She got worse. She told me about how a little while ago she had to go to the hospital, because Remedios is seventy years old and she’s ill. Ahead of her in line were twenty people from the slums, all Bolivians. Enraged, she cut the line in front of everyone, threatening the nurse. “You’re taking me first, understand? Because this is my country!”

  I remembered something by a British writer I’d recently read. He said that the history of Buenos Aires is written in the telephone book, in surnames like Romanov, Rommel, Rose, Radziwill, and Rothschild. Although Remedios doesn’t want to hear it, soon it will also be written in Bolivian names like Condori, Mamani, Huanca, Parisaka, Apaza, and in Chinese names like Wang, Fung, Bai, Zhao, Yang, and Wu. Milagros keeps quiet. When you get to be their age, change isn’t easy.

  Today I was in a lot of pain. I called Elene and immediately regretted it. I’m done with being the incarnation of ego, the monster. Done with it. I screamed at her again that I’m not sick anymore, that she needs to leave me alone. I don’t need a martyr by my side. “You know what?” I told her, “I think I’m going to stay here.” She didn’t answer. She cried and cried. Same old story. But this time I won’t say I’m sorry.

  It’s Friday, the end of my first month here. Today I didn’t have class and didn’t feel like writing. I was a little lonely, but Reme’s words rang in my head: “Who could ever get bored in this city?” Or maybe what she actually said was, “Only a moron could get bored here.” The best thing to do is go for a walk, I told myself, get my fill of balconies and cornices, trees and bookstores, people on roller skates, people on bikes, buses, newsstands, flower stalls, dogs. Dogs: Labradors, Dalmatians, cocker spaniels, German shepherds, mastiffs, Samoyeds, dachshunds, poodles … Dog owners with their dogs, dog trainers with dogs, dog walkers walking dozens of dogs. Dogs with all of their consequences, and the pedestrians awkwardly attempting to sidestep those consequences. There I was in the land of consequences. I stepped in dog shit. And there’s no hot water in the house.

  Friday again. A good week, good stories. I got home around six. Mili was in front of the computer, like always, with her headphones on and the lights turned out. I tapped her on the shoulder. I didn’t want to stay in, but I also didn’t want to go to the movies alone. I asked her, she said no, I begged her. Finally she said yes. We walked twenty blocks downtown to the movie theater in Recoleta. I had already counted every block and was racking my brain about what to say to her on the way. I couldn’t think of anything to talk about except the summer heat, but she could. “My favorite decade in film is the 1950s,” she offered up. Me, feeling superior: “Oh, is that right?” Stop, I admonished myself. Mili goes out every morning to sell her wares and doesn’t come home until the evening, keeping her mouth closed about what she does all day. All I know is that she doesn’t sell much; Remedios told me. But now she’s talking as though somebody turned on the faucet. She used to go to the movies in her hometown, Carmen de Areco, three times a week when she was a girl. I think she was in love with Gregory Peck, because she dedicated three whole blocks to him. I couldn’t remember what he looked like until she told me, “He’s the one in that movie about Rome with Audrey Hepburn, remember? She plays Princess Ann who goes incognito.” My jaw dropped. “Did you know that was Audrey’s very first leading role?” Oops: I still couldn’t picture Gregory Peck. I tried to think of another actor from the same decade, to pique her: “I never liked Gregory Peck as much as Humphrey Bogart, when I saw Casablanca I fell in love with his voice,” I said nostalgically. But she corrected me: “Casablanca is from the 40s, not the 50s.” Oops again. “But he had a film from the 50s you must have seen,” she expounded matter-of-factly, “The African Queen, where he starred with Katharine Hepburn. She was never as beautiful as Audrey.” Oops for the third time. I thought about Elene’s deathless words of wisdom: “Darling, silence is golden and speech is silver.” I kept quiet while Mili talked on and on about Hitchcock’s Rear Window, about Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire. I could only remember Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, but she mentioned at least six other movies she acted in after that one. We were almost at the movie theater, just about passing the cemetery, when she brought up Kurosawa. “The Seven Samurai, remember?” That one I had actually seen, but I hated it. It was my turn to make a reference, to contribute something, but it was getting late. So when we stopped in front of the posters all lit up, I let her choose the movie.

  Needles in my head again. Stayed in bed all day long.

  It’s Friday. I only have two weeks left and I don’t want to go home. I haven’t called Elene. Remedios opened a bottle of Chardonnay that she got for Christmas. She’s been saving it to drink with Soledad, who came over to make pizza for dinner. Sole herself brought a bottle of red, so we drank them both. Reme was happy because Martín finally came to fix the water heater, having just returned from a trip to Patagonia. Martín is a little bit slimy, in my opinion, but he is friendly: “Hey Reme, you doing all right? You’re not looking so good, you know that?” This time he charged them more than 500 pesos. Hey man, at that price how could she be doing all right? I didn’t even want to ask how much a new water heater would cost, but Reme was happy and that was enough. She took a hot bath after two months of compulsory cryotherapy. Then we all pitched in with dinner. Sole showed me how to make the pizza dough and called me “Miss” right up until the exact moment when we finished the first bottle. While we kneaded the dough she told me, “God knows that wine is all I have left in this world.”

  I sliced the pizza and Sole filled the glasses. “All right,” Remedios said, and then, looking at Sole, “Well, what do you think?” Sole raised her chilled wineglass. “Pale yellow,” she said, “with steely green highlights.” I found the ceremony enchanting. Reme smiled and Mili held the liquid up to the light. Then Sole sniffed the wine once, swirled her glass forcefully, and sniffed it again. She was ready to make her pronouncement. “Cinnamon, pineapple, with a light but definitive aroma of vanilla.” We stuck our noses in our glasses, searching out the cinnamon, while Sole took a tiny sip, swished it in her mouth for a few seconds, and swallowed. “It’s fresh and brightly aristocratic, with notes of white fruits.” “White fruits?” asked Reme. “Peach and coconut,” she answered. We applauded. I whistled in a way that’s unseemly for the dinner table, and Mili ate three bites. We toasted to Sole, the chef. Then I asked her where she had learned about food and wine, and she said on a ship or in port, she couldn’t remember. Reme explaine
d that Sole was the first Argentinian nurse to work on merchant vessels; she had traveled the globe aboard ship. “Until I lost it all,” Sole added. The pizza was crisp and delicious. The bottle of wine was almost gone. Mili laughed, looking rosier than usual. “That’s the beautiful thing about wine,” Sole told her, refilling her glass, while I helped Reme serve the last pizza: “Times are too hard to throw away good food,” she pronounced.

  The second bottle of wine was a Pinot Noir, but this time Sole ceded her place to Reme, who, taking her time, described it as “deep cherry red, with ruby notes.” Sole agreed. “It’s elegant, with an aroma of fresh fruits and spice.” Mili was the only serious one. “It seems light and fresh, but it actually has a subtle intensity, like one of those gals who just turn up in your life, stick around, and end up doing you a world of good,” she said, looking at Sole and winking at me. I thought about Elene. We all applauded, except Mili, who got up to wash her plate. We toasted again, this time to Reme. “You know, honey,” Sole confessed to me, having dropped the “Miss” by now, “I lost everything, I was in a psychiatric ward, I was starving, I was living on the streets, and the only one who gave me something to eat, the only one who took me in, was this woman right here.” Remedios wouldn’t let her finish. She barked an order, “Come on, Soledad! It’s time to wash up.” I cleared the table, completely drunk.

  Saturday, the morning after the ball. The water heater broke again. We went back to our cryotherapy, and Reme wasn’t happy about it. Milagros fled the house with her bags, and as for Martín… Martín fucked us over. It was a good idea for me to go to the library. I finally managed to finish my story from this week. My head hurt all day. It’s what they call a hangover, I hope.

  Friday. Elene with her violin, like the flight of the bumblebee in my head. She hasn’t called, she hasn’t written. After dinner, I helped the ladies sort the shoelaces and put them in boxes. They’re mostly black, white, and brown; pink, green, turquoise, and yellow don’t sell too well. They are beautifully simple and solid, long ones and short ones, thick and thin, cotton and synthetic. Almost nondescript. Reme and Mili walk for blocks and blocks hauling them on their backs. I was just about to throw out some fancy shopping bags that I got in a boutique when Mili asked me if I would give them to her instead. She uses them as handbags. “Sure,” I said, and escaped to make coffee. Remedios likes a small coffee with lots of sugar. I turned on the light and there were the cockroaches, attacking the sugar. “Fuck!” I said, but quietly. Mili silently watched me. I emptied out the sugar, washed the jar, and filled it again, but this time I put it inside the fridge. “It’s inevitable, you have to live with the ugly side of life,” she said to me. Her pronouncement seemed to me like a defeat.

  Tomorrow I’m leaving and I’m scared. Elene hasn’t called… I bought some empanadas for dinner. Mili was on the computer. Reme served two bottles of wine. She stands out against the rust. She clings to the chains of memory and she survives. She could have been a model for Klimt with her dark hair. She has the power of a river that runs until it becomes a waterfall, predominant. I can imagine her at twenty, thirty, or forty, conquering the streets of Geneva, Vienna, Prague, determined to leave the mass graves behind and venture out from the stones. She has traveled so far that everything she has is piled up in her past. Milagros, on the other hand, has remained at rest, constrained by her shadow. Her face retains, like the mark of baptism, a hint of the obedient, orphaned child she no doubt was. Reme pays the bills and Mili cleans. Reme talks and Mili keeps quiet. Remedios inhales and Milagros exhales. I brush my teeth. I’ve been an intruder here, and yet I feel strangely at home. Another cockroach emerges from the drain, but this one is gigantic. “It’s inevitable,” I tell myself, and I kill it. Then, then, I turn out the light.

  LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT

  CELIA HAD TO LOOK for an apartment, in part because her current place was small, but mainly because she had to move out within two weeks. She was a procrastinator. Unlike you, who organized everything in advance, she enjoyed the pressure and its subsequent release. But others got trampled in the rush: they found themselves avoiding their own responsibilities to help her, always sharing in her failures, but never her success. Her ability to overcome the setbacks occasioned by her own lack of organization gave Celia a thrilling sensation of immortality that, far from driving her to repentance, made her pretentious, too stubborn to be persuaded to act any other way. And that was fascinating to you—so much so that you found yourself tasked with finding her an apartment in Paris, making the appointments and tours on your own. You were to call her at work only when you’d found something decent, and now it seemed that you had: a furnished apartment in Saint Germain des Prés, near Les Deux Magots, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s legendary café. You repeated these details out loud and smiled, knowing that Celia would not care less about this piece of history. In fact, she would take pride in not knowing. She understood as much about books as you did about architecture.

  The two of you arrived at the dilapidated yet elegant building and, hand in hand, took a slow elevator through dark floors untouched by the sun; the musty air was so stale that Celia began to sneeze. When you staggered onto the sixth floor, almost ready to turn away, the glittering light of the apartment flooded the hallway, illuminating the silhouette of an old, hunched woman with an ashen mop of hair. She wore large glasses and was engulfed by a strong smell of marijuana. Moved more by curiosity than by interest, you entered a well-lit room with yellow walls. The 1920s furniture seemed to have been arranged for a photo shoot: the sinuous, twisting chairs, the tables with aluminum legs, and the leather sofas with zebra cushions, all gave the room the air of a museum of modern art; too posed, you thought, to make the place habitable. The woman, whose hair (as you now could see in the light) was actually a huge, flabby wig, dragged on a joint as she stated the monthly rent. You did not need to look at Celia to know that she was delighted, that she wanted that apartment with its Art Deco furnishings, but you also knew that she couldn’t afford it. You sighed, tired of searching. That’s when Celia took you by the hand and made the only declaration that had ever been made to you in this life: “How about you move in with me?” It was not a declaration of love precisely; you were not the marrying kind, or even one to make plans; she was far from the ideal woman. But you could not say no.

  As the months went by, you wondered what in the world you were doing on this thrill ride, you who’d never liked screams or heights. You were not the impulsive type, and you didn’t have big urges, not even when it came to sex. The only thing you actually liked about the apartment was Celia—not the moulded ceilings, the high windows, the wooden floors: the architectural details were not what tied you to that place, even though you tried your best to appreciate the famous chiffonier and the cut-glass tulips in the bathroom. You liked Celia’s deep voice as she sang the blues on some nights, ever fewer, when she improvised on the guitar and forgot about you. You enjoyed her company even as she turned her perfect body away, the two of you lying quiet on the bed. And, above all, you liked the way she could turn your gloom into optimism, dragging you towards life, just for the fun of it, without a single thought about the future, the next day, or even the next second. You liked Celia—and only Celia—or, rather, your idea of her.

  Celia, on the other hand, was irritated by your lack of style, which she mockingly called “boring,” as she couldn’t define it in any other way. She came into the room and took away your books, climbed on top of you and unzipped your pants, only to leap down from you after a moment, furious: “Geez! You are boring.” Then she imposed an embargo on sex, which ended up being more bearable for you than for her, because you did not miss her. This was perhaps the most provocative thing about you: that you did not miss her. During those days or hours, space and time were finally yours. Nobody touched your books; no one imposed libertarian schemes on your routine. You enjoyed a break from the siege, and fantasized about walking back home from the office and finding no one waiting for
you. It was like being, once again, in absolute control of all that was yours, including your clutter and your silence. Above all: your silence. Celia was a constant screamer; whether cheerful or exasperated, she shouted. But when she was furious, when she was really furious, she did not speak to you. And then—she hated when you used literary terms—Paris was A Moveable Feast.

  A notice arrived from the landlady’s attorney, informing you that she had died. Celia was sad as she remembered the wig. “If I were her daughter, I would have liked to keep it,” she said. You looked up from your book, so that she knew you were listening, but you didn’t answer. “Yes,” she continued, “I’d put the wig on one of those mannequin heads, and I’d comb it lovingly every night.” You felt the urge to tell her to shut up, to leave you alone, but it wasn’t worth the effort. You kept reading, lying on the couch, your head resting on one of the zebra cushions. The letter mentioned children who wanted to sell the apartment they’d inherited; it explained that, as a matter of French law, tenants were to be given right of first refusal. This time Celia said nothing, but you didn’t need to look at her to know what she was thinking. You knew how much she loved the apartment: the bright and airy rooms; the alabaster lamps; the view of Parisian rooftops, lofts, and attics. “We should buy it,” Celia said with a sigh: “Can you imagine?” And you’d been afraid that she was going to propose.