by Aura Xilonen
“Did you like it?”
“Like what?”
“What do you mean, what? Your job. Whenever I saw you, you were always reading books or arranging them in the window. It must have been really boring, right?” She emits a giggle that sounds sarcastic, ironized by the ivory of her teeth.
“And where do you work?” I shoot back at her to avoid sitting there in silence like a super-sized idiot and turn the subject back to what’s important: her breathing next to me.
But Aireen, instead of answering me, lets out an impromptu peal of laughter that takes off at light speed toward the far end of the galaxy, suddenly, amid the gray and black clouds that look like white ghosts.
When she stops laughing that laughter—which seems different from her laughter just a moment ago, or from down in the room earlier, because now her laughter is maybe more melancholy or whatever—she asks:
“Doesn’t it scare you?”
“Does what scare me?”
“Being this high up, dude.”
I lean forward and look down. My feet are floating some sixty-odd feet above the ground, next to hers, which are still swinging back and forth like butterflies’ fluttering wings.
“Should it?”
Aireen half sits up, propping herself up on one elbow, and looks me in the eye.
“What about me? Do I scare you?”
Spellbound there, I swallow spit—or, rather, my fucking throat goes dry. I am atomized like a goddamn raw lump. I spritz the night with my tremoring. I don’t know if Aireen notices or not, but suddenly, hopping to her feet without any fear of falling over the precipice, she says, “I’m kidding, ‘cousin.’” She laughs. “Come on, let’s go . . . It’s late.”
She holds out her hand to help me up.
For the first time I touch her hand with mine. For a moment I squeeze all of her fingerprints, all of her phalanges, all of her bronze fingernails; she feels labyrinthine. I stand up, but don’t let her go. The buildings seethe around us. The wind picks up. We’re aboard the roof, standing at its prow. One false step and we could plunge down like two meteorites onto the concrete, paving the street, the window boxes, the trees, the whole city, with our bones. But we don’t fall. Aireen looks into my eyes. If eternity lasted as long as that moment, the entire universe would fit in the space of an atom. Her eyes, only her eyes, make a parabola that sets my own aflame. Everything in the city seems to have stopped: the cars, the traffic lights, the people coming or going, the dogs, the cats, the moths under the floodlights, the prowling of the rhinoceri and giraffes and airplanes. The murmur of the flowers and the rustling of the leaves of trees in love. The hiding places of Andromeda’s dimming stars. Suddenly Aireen lets go of me and everything leaps into motion again. She turns around and starts climbing down the way we came.
“And what are you afraid of?” I shout, also for the first time.
Aireen lets out another guffaw similar to our first peals of laughter and jumps down from the shutter to the ground.
“See you tomorrow, dude. Sweet dreams . . . Happy birthday.” She moves off, invertebrating the night, toward the stairs, where she tumultuously disappears in the blink of an eye.
It’s still Sunday, I know.
I don’t want to get up.
I can’t get up.
I haven’t slept well for almost a week, or I’ve slept really badly. Ever since my paleozoic pounding.
The planks of the bed are digging into my back like a cross.
I sense that the sun is well risen because even with my eyes closed I can see a bit of brightness, reddened by the translucence of my eyelids.
After Aireen left at dawn, leaving me like a kite crucified in the air above the rooftop, I collapsed on the boards and nails. I didn’t even move the magazines before crash-landing on the bed. I was so tired, so homerically worn out, that for a moment I could have been fucking Catullus hating and loving at the same time, frenziedly, like those suicidal madmen who insist on adoring the thorns instead of the flowers.
* * *
[At the beginning of winter Jefe held out an old volume to me, like that, out of the blue.
“And where should I shelve this one, boss?”
“In your head, you empty-skulled cockatoo.”
“What for? Are you going charge me afterward?”
“Hoo-hoo-hoo, you featheriffic pachyderm. Did you see the title?”
I read: Spanish Golden Age Poetry.
“Why this crap, Jefe? Are you making fun of me or something?”
“I made a bet with the Argentine about you, squirt,” he said, putting on a fake conical accent.
“In my favor?”
“Why would you think that, you incorrigible pun? Of course not, I bet against you, hoo-hoo-hoo.”
“Fuck your mother, boss.”
“Don’t get pissy, you trapezoidal tub. I made a bet with that dolterous blockhead, Che, that you’ve got shit for brains and won’t understand a bit of that fucking book. That way we both win: you in ignorance and me in a little fucking solid cash.”
“Go refuck your mother, boss.”]
I clasp my hands behind my head like flesh pillows. Sleep is gradually shooed away as if my brain were leaky, a diamantine clepsydra whose water is running out.
A few minutes later I lower my feet to affix them to the floor. It’s true, the light is at its bluest and most piercing. But I think it’s probably later than it seems. I clamber down from the planks. It’s Sunday. And I kneel stiffly on the floor. My whole body aches—from the laughter, from the cold, from the planks, from the fatigue. I look at my birthday bread lying there on the little plate with the scorch marks from the candles. I reach out my hand and pick it up. Hunger makes my eels bashful or something—I’m always hungry on the inside and thirsty on the outside. I take a bite, like that, like I’m registering its every contour until the last mouthful is tumbling around in the bottom of my stomach.
Ten minutes later I’m in front of Aireen’s door with the dishes. I already cleaned them with a rag so as not to give them back dirty. She opens the door. She’s wearing a gray sweatshirt, gold lamé leggings, and little mesh tennis shoes.
“You washed them?”
“I just wiped off the crumbs,” I say.
“Put them in the kitchen.”
She invites me in. I follow her and close the door. The windows are open. There’s another sequined tablecloth on the coffee table. The computer is off, the vases are still full of feathers, and I can hear a small television or radio in one of the back bedrooms.
“Are you hungry?” she asks as I put the plates in the dishwasher.
“I ate the bread and sugar a little while ago.”
“That’s not food. Help yourself!” she says, pointing to an aluminum pot on top of a white stove as she heads out into the hallway to the bedrooms.
I pick up one of the birthday dishes and serve myself a bit of stew. My eels start leaping again. I grab a spoon, put the plate on the kitchen table, and sit down on a wooden chair with a faded cushion. I look around and see a refrigerator with rusty hinges. There are little pans hanging on the walls and a few shelves with old knickknacks.
Aireen comes back when I’m almost finished.
“Was it good?” she asks. I nod my head, the spoon between my lips. “I’ll make a good wife, right?” she says, and laughs with her white teeth.
I swallow and smile, bits of stew caught in my gums.
“The other day I came here to say thank you for the chicken soup but there was an old man sitting over there. Now I don’t . . .”
“That was you who came on Thursday?” she interrupts. “My grandfather told me somebody came by looking for me, but he didn’t know who. I thought it was someone else.”
“It was after I talked to you in the park.”
“That was Thursday. The man
you saw sitting there is my grandfather.” She lowers her voice suddenly. “He hasn’t been feeling so good the past few months. Right now he’s resting in his room.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I say, lowering my voice too.
“We don’t know. His bones hurt. The doctor says it’s his age.”
“Is he going to get better?”
“Of course he’s going to get better.”
“He’s a little cuckoo, right?” I say this even more quietly so there’s no chance Aireen’s grandfather will hear me.
“All artists are,” she replies immediately.
“What? What does he do?”
“He doesn’t do anything now. But those paintings on the walls—he did those. He was a painter many years ago, but he doesn’t see well anymore. One day he said, ‘I made it this far.’ And then he put away his paintbrushes and started spending his time looking out that window, watching the days go by. He doesn’t want to go anywhere anymore. If it weren’t for the people from social services, my grandfather wouldn’t have anybody to talk to but me.”
I look at the paintings hanging on the walls. I think they’re really ugly.
“Looks like your grandfather was angry when he painted them, huh?”
Aireen turns to follow my gaze and sees I’m looking at a painting with gobs of color splattered across it. A volumetric, expansive laugh like that of an insane nanny goat exalts her beautiful lips.
“Waaaaa-haaaaa!”
“What?” I look at her in confusion.
“I’m sorry, it just makes me laugh. I thought the same thing until he explained that those blotches were art, abstract art.”
“Aireeeeen?” The grandfather’s voice suddenly calls out from the end of the hall. “Are you all right?”
“Sí, abuelo, I’m fine,” she calls toward the corridor. Then she turns to me and says quietly, “I do think he was angry when he painted his blotches, though he insists he wasn’t.”
“What if we take him out for a walk?” I say spontaneously, like that, feverish.
“You’d have an easier time taking a rock out for a walk. The people from social services have encouraged him to go outside, but he doesn’t want to. He says the streets are a trash heap of drab surfaces.”
“I can throw him over my shoulder like a pig and we can take him out for a walk against his will.”
“We tried that, but he clung tooth and nail to the stair rail and we had to bring him back inside. You could hear the racket all through the building.”
“We can knock him out.”
“What?”
“You know, clock him. One blow to the head and we’re set—he’ll go down and we can take him to the park so he can enjoy a bit of life, look at the trees. Or the squirrels—there are loads of them.”
“Ha-haaa!” she laughs again loudly, calambrically, her voice echoing through every nook and cranny of the kitchen out to the front door of the apartment.
“What?” I say, bowheaded.
“Dude, you’re a laugh riot.”
“Aireen, what’s going on? What’s so funny?” the old man shouts again.
“Nothing, abuelo. Hey, do you want to go out for a walk?”
“What for? Everything that’s out there, I’ve already got here in my head.”
“But you need to get some fresh air.”
“There’s nothing but smog out there. I’ll stick with my personal pollutants in here, thanks.”
“See?” she says, rolling her eyes and putting her hand on mine. “My grandfather’s never going to leave this house.” Her eyes look sadder than any I’ve ever seen in my life, like that, huddled like Coatlicue wrapped in her own skirts of plaintive serpents.
* * *
[Boorish nonsense. Upright nonsense. Bedimmed nonsense. Why hadn’t the bean-counting scribblers invented something new under the sun? Instead of just words that come prepackaged in the dictionary?
So Jefe had won a few bucks betting on my ignorance with the asshole Argentine. Despite my objections, I wanted to prove to myself that I could understand some dumb vato named Góngora and another fucking güey named Quevedo. It was a bust: seems whatever I took in floated right back out again through my ears. I couldn’t understand half a strand, even after I’d already read the whole dictionary and the whole book of Spanish Golden Age Poetry, which had just made me feel leaden. Yes, I read an entire letter in the dictionary every three days, trying to become less stupid than I looked. But the stubborn poetry, cowled from head to foot, got away from me anyway—any way it could. They all seemed to be saying the same thing in different ways: “O how the plaintive muses / suffer and are afflicted / by all that distresses / faggoty-ass poets.” Or that’s how I saw it.
In midwinter Jefe asked me in front of his Argentine buddy, whom he’d started inviting to his cookouts at his house in the suburbs:
“Do you know what a hendecasyllable is, you wretched bastard?”
“Bite me, boss.”
“Did you understand anything in that book?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then. Tell me what a cowl is, you benighted twerp.”
“I don’t know.”
“See, man? The boy’s got a head full of feathers,” he told the Argentine, who’d immigrated to the United States from Patagonia back in the Flintstones era. “You owe me a lot of money, dude.”
The gaucho parvenu, who rode a bit low in the stern, pulled out a wad of bills but didn’t hand them over, just said, waving them in Jefe’s face, “You’re a scrawl, che, you dim-witted son of a bitch. Let’s go double or nothing on the Copa Libertadores soccer match, all right? Qué decís?”]
Aireen gets up and removes her hand from mine. Her warmth has melted me in a heart-shaped cauldron. She moves around the kitchen, tidying cooking utensils, making space to put away some cans in the back of a small, dilapidated cupboard, taking refuge in knives, forks, pots, bowls, mortars, nuclear warheads, stardust, suns and moons, shards of winter, of spring, idle hours, ants.
After bustling around for a while, Aireen sits down again across from me. She looks over my shoulder, behind me, where the kitchen window looks out at the wall of the neighbors’ house. She sits there, seemingly miles away, like a bird in a cage that wishes with all its heart to go chirp in the branches outside. Who knows what’s going on in her head right now.
* * *
[When I started reading books that didn’t have illustrations, I enjoyed learning about the thoughts of the people who lived there, pressed between the pages, without even having to open their mouths. I was like a busybody snooping into everything that happened in those books. But then I realized that literature is nothing at all like day-to-day life. After all, I couldn’t help noting that nobody knew what I was thinking when I lay down to watch the squirrels, or the trees. Sometimes I’d try to find out what the people around me thought—Jefe or the bookstore customers, or the missus, or the Argentine, the scruffs, the dudettes, the vatos and vatas, the chickadee from the 7-Eleven, the cathetuses and hypotenuses. That’s why the words in books sounded so fake to me, the thoughts so fake, all linear, bereft of the din of everything that befalls to us when we wander the streets, on foot, within ourselves; their shortcuts struck me as fake, the way everything was so tidy, the way nobody ever went out of the lines, either in word or in deed—but what the hell did I know about all that.]
Now I’m trying to figure out what Aireen is thinking, like some sort of morose psychic, a telekinetic freak able to penetrate her thoughts—but I can’t: real life gives us only people’s broad strokes, not the detailed contours you find in books that offer only entertainment. What is Aireen thinking as she gazes past my shoulder toward the window? Her irises are so still, they could freeze the molecules of time.
“Do you like fish?” she asks suddenly, restoring her gaze to me.
“The kind with scales?” I answer reflexively.
“No, moron, the kind with fur,” she ripostes. Then she says, “Come with me to the Mall Center.”
We go down the stairs and I leap in front of her to open the door for her as we exit her building.
“There’s no need for that,” she says, irritated. “I’m not crippled, dude.”
I know that, but I don’t say anything. I just wait for her to walk through and then I let the door close behind me. She’s carrying a cloth tote bag that she pulled out of the oven where it was stored. Upstairs, in the apartment, she fixed her hair, went to tell her grandfather that she was going shopping, and then we left. Me behind and in front of her, like a bluebottle buzzing around her.
We go down the stone steps and cross the street to the corner where the bookstore is. The yellow caution tape is gone, and the glass in the display window has been replaced. The plywood from a few days ago where they broke in to ransack the place is gone. Nothing appears to be moving inside it. It’s like a ghost ship that has repaired itself, the way a wounded animal licks its wounds to heal them. We leave the bookstore, turn the corner, and walk past the alleyway. The door is still closed.
“Sabes,” she says when the alley is behind us, “I don’t think it was revenge.”
“Revenge?”
“Yeah, revenge on you and the bookstore for the other day, when you came to my defense and thrashed those scruffs and addos.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, it’s just a hunch.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know, those addos can take a beating, and if they were looking for revenge they’d go after you, not your stuff or the place where you work.”
I want to ask her about the yup who fucked with me for no reason and left me all mangled at the bus stop. But I just keep walking in silence.