She didn’t start breathing again until her eyes pierced the milky haze around her and she could once again make out the shapes of things and people.
That was when Julia became convinced that her sense of sight was not her own. The wide-angle images were moving, as if she were walking, but she knew she was totally paralyzed, unable even to control the direction of her gaze. She might almost have thought she had nodded off and was dreaming, except that this was different: it felt like she’d been cut in half and was seeing through someone else’s eyes, like an intruder catapulted into a strange world.
Julia, with her child’s mind, couldn’t comprehend why it was already night. She could make out a full moon hidden behind a flurry of clouds overhead. She saw the prow of a boat pitch upward on a nasty swell, as if she were on board. Violent gusts of wind whipped up the waves and sent them sweeping over the deck. Fascinated by the majestic scene unfolding in front of her yet feeling strangely protected from it, she forgot to be afraid.
Suddenly Anna crossed into Julia’s field of vision. She was walking toward the prow, every muscle in her body straining as she clung to the rail. She was trying to reach the twins, who were huddled on the deck in a pool of vomit, dangerously close to the edge. Julia couldn’t see her mother, but out of the corner of her eye she spotted her father standing next to the tiller, directly to her left.
Just then a huge wave crashed onto the deck, and the prow disappeared behind a curtain of spray. The next moment Anna had vanished. Julia’s field of vision panned around and she found herself looking in the opposite direction. She tried to will the vision to search for Anna, but what she saw instead was her father’s distorted face, screaming. In the foreground she recognized her mother’s white, veined hands clutching at him. She was her mother. Terrified, she realized she was seeing through her mother’s eyes.
The next few seconds changed Julia’s life forever. Her father’s face was as hollow as a dead man’s. She saw her mother’s hands lash out and scratch him as she tried to grasp control of the tiller and turn the boat around. He was staring, transfixed, at a dot in the water, a dot that was getting farther and farther away, that was being lost in the furious agitation of the waves. Unable to move, he looked on as his world was being swallowed up. Julia wanted to throw herself at him too and force him to jump into the water after Anna. Why wasn’t he doing anything?
All at once her view shifted again. For a fraction of a second she saw herself, as if in a mirror. She was clinging to her mother’s skirts, her body rigid, panic in her eyes, screaming as loudly as her father.
The shock of seeing herself as another person was so brutal that it broke the connection. Shaking uncontrollably, she tumbled into empty space and plummeted down, sucked into a vortex. She wanted to cry out, to shout for help, to shake off this unfamiliar body. A second later she found herself entering the viscous white substance, coming up for air, ready to implode.
She landed with an abrupt thud and opened her mouth as wide as she could, gulping for air. Her lungs began to reinflate slowly and painfully. She recognized Anna by her smell of salt and guava alone: Julia’s eyes had dried out in the white-hot December sun during her trance and she couldn’t see. Anna was calling out her name in desperation and shaking her like a rag doll.
Julia let out an inhuman scream and burst into tears of fear, rage, and powerlessness. She didn’t yet have the proper words to express her emotions, so she clung to Anna’s neck and howled.
The next thing she knew she was lying on her bed, covered in blood. Anna told her she had toppled headfirst down the kitchen steps and cracked her forehead. Then Julia noticed the twins: just standing there, same hollow cheeks, same dazed expression. Struggling free from her sister’s arms, she flung herself at them, scratching and biting them with her tiny teeth, her small fists, spluttering that it was all their fault, that Anna was dead and they hadn’t done anything to rescue her.
Hearing her cries, her mother rushed into the room. It took all her strength to separate Julia from her brothers. She spent hours trying to calm her daughter down, offering cuddles, sweets, and rewards. But even Anna’s appeals couldn’t convince Julia to let go of the crazy idea she’d gotten into her head. Clinging to her big sister’s neck, she kept screaming that Anna was dead and that no one had tried to save her.
She remained in the same state for the next few days. She refused to have anything to do with the twins and insisted on being allowed to go down to the sea on her own. She had decided she wanted to learn to swim. Her mother watched her from a distance, overcome with a feeling she hadn’t felt for any of her children, more akin to resignation than to affection.
She let Julia have her way and sent Anna to keep an eye on her. Anna had an instinctive aversion to the brackish water the twins swam in. Out of love for her little sister and in the hope of curing Julia’s madness, she overcame her disgust. She agreed to accompany her sister into the enigmatic waters of the river, but there was no getting Julia out. For hours on end Anna would hold her up in the water as she tried to do the breaststroke like the twins. Julia finally learned to swim and soon became as bold as her brothers. Through sheer persistence she managed to get Anna to swim too, though her sister went along with it more out of devotion to Julia than from any natural inclination.
—
Christmas Day came. And as one good thing often leads to another, their father returned from Argentina laden with food. He had gotten himself a decent job in Buenos Aires and found a house for the whole family. His wife was overwhelmed with a joy that quickly spread to everyone else—everyone except Julia, who kept fiercely to herself.
One night she heard her parents talking at the kitchen table for hours after her older siblings had gone to sleep. So they really were going to leave Uruguay. Though Julia wasn’t quite sure what that meant, the tone of their voices was enough to set her heart beating faster. Julia didn’t want to leave Colonia. She liked her little world: the cobbled streets that wound upward as if searching for the sky; her own sloping, rickety house with its roof of crooked pink tiles—the exclusive domain of the neighborhood cats that Julia fed in secret. She felt she was the mistress of this small, safe world where she could do as she pleased with her days; where Anna alone was allowed to enter; and where everyone except her mother respected her desire for childhood solitude.
For some time there was no further talk of moving, and Julia thought they had given up the idea. Gradually her distress began to fade. Maybe it had just been a dream after all.
Like everyone else in the family, her father had been trying to coax her out of her shell. Walking to the market with him one day, her hand in his, Julia looked him straight in the eye and said with a grown-up air, “Alone at last!” Her father gave a shout of laughter. He lifted her up and twirled her in the air. Julia thought she would fly off into the blue sky that sucked her upward, taking her breath away, and was glad of her father’s strong arms around her.
The departure took them all by surprise. A man in a sailor’s cap arrived one morning and gruffly announced that the boat was ready and that they would have to set sail that evening. The household was thrown into utter upheaval. Everything was taken apart, stacked, folded, rolled, trussed, and piled up outside the house. They all found it hard to believe that their entire life could be reduced to such a small number of possessions.
Julia gathered up the things the others were throwing away. She found a long piece of string and threaded it through all the empty containers she found in the house and the garden. She dragged her train of dented receptacles behind her like some precious treasure. Amid the chaos her family greeted her eccentric behavior with relief. They had been worried she would have a nervous fit in the middle of their preparations to leave.
They set off toward the pier in a little procession at dusk. The captain was waiting for them. Julia instantly recognized the boat. The dread she had felt during her vision returned, and s
he began screaming in terror. The captain, all black beetle brows and bulging eyes, thought the child was throwing a tantrum and lost his patience. He even threatened to punish her, having decided that her parents lacked authority.
Julia became hysterical. Clutching her string of bottles and cans, she took refuge between her father’s legs, but nothing could calm her. Despairing, he took her in his arms, climbed into the boat, and instructed the elder children to join him in the stern. Meanwhile, the captain was loading the boat and balancing the cargo in the hold under their mother’s watchful eye.
There was a full moon, and the night sky was clear and starless. Large black clouds were building up in the distance, but the crossing wouldn’t take long—two hours at most. However, the wind began to pick up as soon as they sailed out of the port, and the rising swells slowed the boat’s progress.
Just as in her trance, it all happened very quickly. The twins began to feel seasick, and the captain sent them to the prow. Anna wanted to help them and began to make her way to the front, gripping the rail. The boat pitched dangerously, and the captain left the tiller to secure the front hold. Their father took his place.
It was at that precise moment that a giant wave surged up and crashed with the sound of thunder across the deck. The captain had just enough time to snap on his safety harness, grab hold of the twins, and pull them to him. Anna went overboard. The roar of the wave drowned out Julia’s screams. She was still gripping her string of bottles and cans. Left alone at the controls, her father yelled with fear, unable to steer the boat and thrown into a further panic by his wife’s hysterical shrieks as Anna disappeared into the hollow of the wave. The boat had filled with water and the captain was frantically attempting to bail it out in order to escape disaster, all the while bellowing instructions to Julia’s father, who seemed incapable of understanding him.
The twins hesitated for no more than a second. They exchanged a meaningful glance, launched themselves at Julia, grabbed her string of bottles, and jumped overboard. The last thing Julia saw before she passed out was Anna’s head bobbing like a cork in the trough between two waves.
3.
MAMA FINA
Austral Summer
1962
Julia remembers every moment of her life from her first “journey” onward. She knows she hadn’t yet turned six, because they celebrated her sixth birthday at her grandmother’s house sometime after. Looking back, she thinks it was probably then that she became an adult.
Her grandmother had a lot to do with it. Hers was the first face Julia saw when she came to after the boat incident. She had never met this grandmother from Buenos Aires her father talked about so often. She remembers immediately feeling safe with her.
“Anna and the twins are alive,” her grandmother told her. Julia stared at the unfamiliar face and then instantly fell asleep again, but this time into a child’s deep sleep. She spent her convalescence in a bright room that opened onto an inner courtyard with an endlessly cooing stone fountain at its center. She could hear her mother’s voice and the shouts of the twins from outside, like an echo. But it was her grandmother who was always there, all the time, right beside her.
Mama Fina had clear gray eyes so gentle you could lose yourself in them. Her voice, in contrast, was deep, rasping, even, almost masculine. She sat patiently by Julia’s bedside for hours on end. From time to time she would lean forward to stroke her face and Julia would feel the touch of her hands, the skin as rough as a cat’s tongue.
Julia thought Mama Fina was beautiful, with her hair in a heavy braid across her shoulder and her large, full-lipped Neapolitan mouth. Julia’s father had inherited her transparent eyes, but the rest of her features had skipped a generation. In adulthood Julia would be pleased to see a younger version of Mama Fina looking back at her in the mirror. She was the image of her, except for the large, dark eyes she had inherited from her own mother.
Julia didn’t speak during her convalescence. As the days passed, she became increasingly fascinated by Mama Fina. Her words were enchanting. They transported Julia to another country and another time. Mama Fina told her how she had left Italy when she was not much older than Julia, about the ship, her family, the starry sea under the heavens, the forbidden races on the first-class deck, and the games of hide-and-seek in the engine room. And the arrival in Argentina: different smells, a different language that she could understand but not speak. Mama Fina described her trials with all the words she needed that kept eluding her and playing tricks on her. Identical words that meant one thing in Italian and another in Spanish. She was told to watch out for the burro, and she’d be looking around for the butter when they were talking about the donkey. And Julia laughed. For the first time ever, she laughed a real child’s laugh. Finally she understood her own mistake with the Río de la Plata.
Mama Fina’s stories penetrated deep into her like balm. She explained to Julia what had actually happened on the night of the storm. Thanks to her bottles and cans, the twins had been able to save Anna. Julia sensed that, oddly enough, it was she Mama Fina was most proud of.
Mama Fina’s description of what happened was better than if she’d seen it with her own eyes. The twins had jumped into the sea in order to disprove Julia’s prophecy that blamed them for the death of their big sister. The swell prevented them from seeing where Anna was, but she had managed to stay afloat, certain the twins would come after her because she too realized that Julia had prepared them. Hanging on to their containers, the twins had spotted Anna’s head above the water several times, only to see her disappear the next moment, getting farther away each time. They were half-dead from their exertions when suddenly she appeared, like a vision, suspended on the crest of a wave just above them. Crying out, they fought through the swell and managed to catch hold of Anna as she came down. She grabbed onto the floats; only then did she nearly pass out. But the boys had no intention of letting go of her. Adrift in a raging sea in the middle of the night, the three children hung on.
At last the wind let up and the captain managed to turn the boat around. Instinctively calculating a possible drift, he tried to track them down. All of a sudden, their mother thought she heard cries. The captain shut down the engine. She hadn’t been mistaken.
—
Once Julia had recovered, everyone noticed she wasn’t quite the same. There was something precocious in her eyes, almost painful, like a scar.
One day, when the family was gathered for lunch, Julia’s father made an announcement: their house was finally ready and they could move in over the next few days. He told them it was in an attractive neighborhood in the western suburbs of Buenos Aires, with parks, flower-decked balconies, and lots of children. The twins began to race around the table in excitement, and Anna was overjoyed. Only Julia didn’t look up from her plate. Her mother, noticing her silence, tried to cheer her up by pointing out that there were four bedrooms. As there was no question of separating the twins, Julia would have her own room. But there was no convincing her.
Mama Fina got up to clear the table and disappeared into the kitchen. An embarrassed silence fell. Anna stared uncomprehendingly at her little sister. Their father tried to explain that La Boca, the noisy neighborhood where Mama Fina lived, with its old port and nightlife, wasn’t really suitable for children. Julia held her older sister’s gaze for a long moment, as if to give herself courage. Then, in a clear and final voice, she said, “I’m staying here.”
It was the first adult decision of her life.
Anna sided with her little sister. In a way, she understood better than anyone just how much Julia needed her own space. She also sensed intuitively that Julia would blossom at Mama Fina’s.
The family moved into their house. By way of marking the beginning of their new life together, Mama Fina enrolled Julia in the parish school and took her to the cinema for the first time to see a Cantinflas film. The movie theater seemed enormous to Julia, with
its white pillars flanking the entrance and its heavy red velvet curtain with gold tassels. The film posters showed a funny little man with a ridiculous mustache and baggy pants who seemed to be inviting her in. Mama Fina had made her wear a sailor dress for the occasion and a white coat. Julia was worried she would get it dirty. She also had on a round hat with a trailing dark blue ribbon that tickled her neck. A gaggle of similarly dressed children were racing around the lobby and jumping from the grand staircase as they waited for their parents to finish buying candy.
A man wearing a small flat hat and a red uniform decorated with a long row of gold buttons went past, ringing a bell. The gaggle of children dispersed, and Mama Fina led Julia into the darkness of the huge air-conditioned theater. She handed her a little paper bag filled with popcorn, which Julia didn’t want because she was thirsty more than anything. The beam of a flashlight directed them to two seats in the center of the theater. They slipped into their places, apologizing. The giant screen lit up and Julia felt overwhelmed by its presence. Hypnotized, she followed the movements of the little man with the silly mustache, unable to understand why the other children were laughing when she felt like crying.
“Did you like it?” Mama Fina asked as they walked out of the theater.
Julia thought for a moment, then turned to her and asked solemnly, “Was it real, Mama Fina?”
“No, it’s a movie.”
“But when I see movies . . . they become real afterward.”
“We’ll have to have a proper talk about this!”
—
One evening, when Julia had finished her homework, Mama Fina took her by the hand. “Come with me. I want to have a word with you.”
The Blue Line Page 2