She led Julia through the narrow streets of La Boca, along a familiar route that led to the church. They sat down on the low wall at the entrance. Intimidated by the solemnity of the occasion, Julia didn’t dare open her mouth. After several long minutes of reflection, Mama Fina turned to Julia, looked her straight in the eye, and began, weighing her words: “This is a very important moment, in your life as well as mine. I’m going to tell you a big secret—the one my father’s mother told me sixty years ago, before we left Italy. I was exactly the same age as you, because you’ll be six in a few days’ time.
“You told me that before the boat accident, when you were playing on the steps, you fell into the ‘silver water.’ You were very scared because you couldn’t breathe, and then you saw things in your head that scared you even more. You were very angry because nobody seemed to understand.
“What happened to you, my grandmother used to call it the ‘inner eye.’ It’s a gift. Like a special present. Only a few girls in our family receive it. . . . I did, and so have you, but nobody else. We don’t know who gives us this gift; we only know it’s always a bit difficult to pass it on.
“If you want to give your gift to someone else, for example, first you have to become a mommy and have a boy. Sometimes mommies have little girls and sometimes they have little boys. But in your case, to pass the gift on, you have to have a boy.
“So you see, Julia, it’s not all that easy, because we don’t choose. Do you understand?”
“So the mommies don’t say what they want when the baby is in their tummy?”
“No, not the mommies or the daddies. It’s a surprise.”
Julia began to swing her legs, hitting her heels against the wall. “And I’ll give my inner eye to my son? Like you gave your eyes to Daddy?”
“Yes, but the gift skips a generation. That means your daddy has the gift, but he can’t use it. The daddy has to have little girls, and then one of his little girls will receive the gift and can use it.”
“Like me. It’s your gift that you gave to Daddy, and now it’s mine.”
“Exactly.”
“But why did Daddy give it to me?”
“You know, that’s a big secret. Your daddy doesn’t know the inner eye exists.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s a secret.”
“But why is it me who has the inner eye and not Anna?”
“Because usually it’s not the eldest girl who inherits the gift.”
“Why not?”
“Because nobody should be able to guess who will have it. That way it’s a real secret.”
“So nobody knows I have the inner eye?”
“Nobody except me. Because I have it too, so I can recognize it. You didn’t know either, Julia, even though you have the gift. Now that you’re a big girl, I can tell you about it and you can keep it a secret.”
Julia drank in her words, enchanted. She wasn’t sad anymore; she wasn’t angry. Mama Fina had put into words the thing she hadn’t been able to understand. She felt herself coming out of chaos.
Her grandmother paused, searching Julia’s face, then carried on, fixing her with her translucent eyes: “Do you understand what the inner eye is?”
“It’s a present nobody knows about.”
“Yes, but the main thing is that it’s a gift. It means you have a talent for something. Everybody has a gift of some kind. Some people are better at singing, other people at drawing, some at talking, others at listening. Sometimes it’s a tiny gift, like being good at organizing a closet. Sometimes it’s a very big gift, like being able to understand the stars. This gift can be wasted. Or it can be used to make other people happy. If I die before I’ve had the time to teach you everything, remember this above all else: we were given our gift so we can help others.”
Mama Fina broke off and said in a schoolmistress voice, “Julia, repeat what I just said.”
Julia took a deep breath and recited carefully: “We were given our gift so we can help others.”
Mama Fina smiled, patted Julia on the cheek, and carried on. “Our gift is different. It’s secret because it’s unique. Other people don’t understand, and they might be scared. The way our inner eye works is a bit like looking through a keyhole: we can see things, but nobody knows we can see them. It’s like when we went to the movies to see Cantinflas, remember? We sat in our seats and we watched the story, but we weren’t in the story.”
“That was why the children were laughing, wasn’t it, Mama Fina? Because they weren’t in it.”
“The difficult thing for us is to figure out who it is who’s lending us their eyes. . . . Remember, when you saw Anna falling out of the boat, you guessed it was your mommy.”
“Yes, because I was scrrrrratching Daddy with Mommy’s hands,” Julia said, screwing up her face in an effort to mimic the gesture.
“You weren’t scratching Daddy. You were using Mommy’s eyes to see, and you recognized the hands that went with the eyes. They were Mommy’s hands.”
Julia looked puzzled. Her grandmother paused, then whispered in a sympathetic tone: “I know, mi amor, it’s difficult for us to imagine. Your mother asked you for help without knowing it, and you saw what was going to happen through her eyes.”
“Mommy never asks me to help her,” Julia said sulkily.
“She did on the boat.”
“But Mommy didn’t call out to me on the boat!” Julia protested.
“Your mother doesn’t know she called you because it comes from the heart, not the head. She didn’t think, I’ll ask Julia to help me, but when she was on the boat . . .”
“She was screaming and she was scratching Dad,” Julia interrupted, screwing her face up again, her little fingers outstretched.
“Yes, because she was very scared, and without thinking about it, her fear called out to you. Like when the telephone rings. And you answered.”
“You mean my inner eye answered?”
“Exactly. We can respond to other people’s feelings with our inner eye, you and me. That’s how it works. And most of the time, what we see hasn’t happened yet. It’ll happen the next day, or the day after, or even later.”
“So the telephone rings backward?”
“Something like that. The person who is calling us—our source—is experiencing what they see in the future.”
“Why?”
“That’s just the way it is. When our inner eye answers, we set off on a journey through time. Our gift lets us go forward or backward while everyone else is caught in the present.”
“Is that why it’s a gift?”
“Yes.”
“Why is it a good thing to travel through time?”
“Because we can help other people. Like you helped Anna.”
“But it was the twins who . . .”
“We’ve already talked about this, Julia. You’re the one who wanted Anna to learn to swim. You’re the one who took those containers on the boat. If you hadn’t done that, mi amor, I wouldn’t be able to tell you our secret, and your inner eye would wither by itself.”
“I would have lost my gift?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to lose it, Mama Fina.”
4.
DECRYPTION
Boreal Autumn
2006
She stands at the top of the stairs, dumbfounded. Come on, it’s perfectly natural to want to be alone in the bathroom. All the same. He has never felt the need to lock himself in before.
She lingers there for a moment, then retraces her steps slowly, needing to clear her thoughts, to put some distance between the two of them. Get too close and love suffocates. The other person’s presence becomes oppressive. So you learn to live without seeing each other, the way you stop noticing the pedestal table in the hallway.
Julia comes back downstairs
and sits in the living room. She has already laid the table and tossed a salad. Distracted, sitting on the sofa in the dark, she stares through the window at the corridor of shadows formed by the elms and maples.
It is the same ritual after each journey. She has to be sitting down, alone. When she was younger, she would wait for the dead of night and the privacy of silence. She needed to go back over her journey while the world was extinguished so she wouldn’t have to worry about being caught unawares. She is practiced enough now not to have to wait until midnight. She can blank out the world with her eyes wide open. Only the sequence of images already etched in her mind flashes before her eyes. The images come back to her, not like the blurred recollections of memory but with a clarity and precision that sight alone can produce. It’s like a store of pictures compressed between her eyes and her brain. Her pupils are contracted even though she’s in the dark because she is staring at a light source inside her head. The film of her latest journey plays in a continuous loop: the hotel room, the young Asian woman, the man. She repeats the same sequence once, twice, a hundred times.
Julia has been rigorously trained to gather the information and sift through it. Nothing can be dismissed out of hand. She knows from experience that the most obvious details, the ones most likely to be overlooked, are often the most useful.
She needs to establish whom the images captured by her inner eye come from. She has to understand the connection, the reason why she has been linked to this particular person at this particular moment. Sometimes her source is a family member or friend, but very often it’s someone she can’t identify because she hasn’t met them yet. After a journey, she knows for sure that the person will one day pass through the meridian of her life. It is a rule. But Julia has to understand her role, the reason she has been called on to intervene.
This evening she feels a bit lost. The most surprising thing about the scene she’s watching is precisely that there is nothing surprising about it. That’s why she was able to sit down at her desk and finish her translation in one go. She’d nearly forgotten about the young woman with Oriental eyes, her cold smile, and the man with her. Nothing disturbing, nothing urgent about any of it.
What’s more, she’s not exhausted, the way she generally is when she returns. Because it’s usually difficult, traumatic moments that take place in the antechamber of death: accidents, terrible suffering, crimes of passion, and murders. She intercepts a pivotal moment in the lives of people who, for one reason or another, are between life and death, faced with a crucial choice.
She goes back to the starting point, to the beginning of the sequence, in the room bathed in shadow. She is with her source in the hotel room. She hears Mama Fina’s voice, her words directing her still. She has to look for details that will enable her to identify the source. Because this person wants to communicate something. Their subconscious is calling for help; they are leaving traces so they can be recognized.
She saw his knees, a shirt. She is sure it is a man. She is rarely mistaken: men have a particular way of seeing the world. Their vision is selective; they use different criteria from women to choose what information to store in their brains. They are more interested in things that move, that change, that make contact. Women, on the other hand, dwell more on what remains hidden, on details and structures, on what is intangible. Julia wants to examine the room. She sees the clothes on the chair again; they look thrown rather than placed there. Is he in a hurry? Impatient? Young, perhaps? His standpoint is out of sight of the bathroom mirror. She can’t see his face.
Are they a married couple? Maybe not. The young woman’s hasty departure, her final gesture . . . There’s a lack of intimacy, and not enough indifference for them to be an established couple. It could be a secret meeting, a passing fling. Julia sees the young woman’s face again and focuses on it, trying to decipher her smile. Could she be an escort? Difficult to say. Casual and anonymous relationships do seem to have become a sort of hobby for some people. But perhaps not. There is something restrained about this young woman, a distance. She is protecting herself, as if she needs to stay out of reach.
The stairs creak. Theo is coming back down; she must regain her composure. Her pupils are already dilated when she turns to smile at him. He kisses her with irreproachable tenderness and tells her he’ll get dinner. Julia takes her time; she would like to carry on thinking. But she is drawn by the smell coming from the kitchen.
Theo is busy making himself an omelet out of egg whites, which he’s recently taken to buying in bulk from the discount supermarket. Someone told him they’re a great source of protein. He is obsessed with getting back into shape, and egg whites have become his passion. Julia is unable to share his enthusiasm. The very thought of that viscous substance makes her feel nauseated. But she doesn’t say anything.
They sit down opposite each other. She nibbles at her salad while Theo wolfs down his omelet.
“How are you?” Julia asks in an attempt to fill the silence.
“Tired,” says Theo, getting up without looking at her.
Julia sighs. Maybe it’s inevitable.
Her mind hauls up a catch of old memories. Their first date. He must have been barely nineteen, she fifteen at most. She was still living with her grandmother, he with his parents.
Sitting in a cafeteria in San Telmo, not far from Julia’s school, he had ventured to take her hand. His daring had met with a cold reception. Not that Julia thought it improper: far from it. But she found some codes of behavior totally meaningless. By way of explanation, she’d nodded in the direction of a couple in their thirties sitting opposite each other two tables away. They were savoring a huge bowl of ice cream that was dripping down the sides; it was decorated with a small fuchsia-colored Chinese paper umbrella. Intent on wasting nothing, without exchanging a single word, they held hands while using their free hand to eat.
Theo had given a baffled shrug. Julia found it sad, not talking, not looking at each other. They had stacked their hands one on top of the other like two dead fish. Two hands tidied away on the side of the table: that was what they had done with their love. Julia didn’t want a tidy love. She hated red roses and Chinese paper umbrellas. She didn’t want to end up eating ice cream in the company of a man to whom she no longer had anything to say. Theo had burst out laughing, and Julia had found him almost handsome. He had answered her in his own way. The next day, as she was running out of the house, late for school as usual, she had nearly gone flying on a carpet of red roses laid out on the doorstep.
—
Julia lets out another sigh. Theo has finished eating and is now absorbed in one of his electronic games. After thirty-one years and a life that has never conformed to convention, they have still managed to end up like that couple at the cafeteria in San Telmo, staring down at their plates while eating, unable to find anything to say.
They have endured too much suffering, overcome too many obstacles. Julia cannot resign herself to this. They do not have the right to settle into boredom when they have only just reached their goal.
She takes the stairs four at a time to their bedroom, opens the closet, slips on her black party dress, rummages through her shoe boxes, and pulls out the black stilettos that drive him crazy. She rolls her hair into a chignon and puts on some makeup, face inches from the mirror, drawing a black line above her lashes. She steps back and looks at herself. Yes, she looks good.
Julia turns around. Theo is standing stock-still in the doorway.
“What’s got into you?” he asks.
“Come on. We’re going out to have some fun.”
She pulls him to her and presses herself against him.
He is about to tell her he’s tired, but he peers at her for a moment, then whispers teasingly in her ear: “Are you sure you want to go out?”
The tone is almost perfect. But it doesn’t ring true to Julia. He has put his mask back on.
5.
THE MASK
Austral Summer
1972
They met for the first time at Anna’s eighteenth-birthday party. The family had recently left the suburbs and moved into a two-story house in the Liniers neighborhood. Anna was thrilled, not only because it was a bigger house but because now she would be closer to Julia. She had always refused to let any distance come between them. It was Anna who came to Mama Fina’s place in La Boca after school twice a week to see Julia, and it was she too who first told Julia what it felt like to be in love. The girls would lock themselves in the big bathroom for long confabs that could go on until dawn. Julia immediately knew when Anna was in love, because she would deny it while batting her eyelashes like butterfly wings. Julia found her sister’s emotional states ridiculous and told herself she’d never be in love that way. But she did feel a prickle of envy as she watched her sister plotting to win over whichever young man she’d set her heart on.
When Anna stayed over, Mama Fina’s phone never stopped ringing. It was Julia’s job to pick up and pretend she didn’t know whether her sister was in, to give Anna time to decide if she wanted to take the call or have the person call back later. If Anna’s favorite suitor, Pablo, called, Julia had to make a huge effort not to roar with laughter. Anna would fling herself to the ground and pedal frantically in the air, unable to control her emotion, while Julia, bent double, did her best to cover the receiver. Anna would exhale in small puffs to calm herself down. When she was breathing normally again, she would take the telephone, acting perfectly naturally, and apologize to the boy for keeping him waiting. As soon as Anna hung up, Julia would find herself racing around the fountain in the courtyard with her, whooping like a Sioux, as excited by the invitation as Anna.
So Julia went to help with the preparations for the party with the feeling that she had an important mission to accomplish. She’d heard that Pablo had just confirmed his attendance. She took charge of the decorations, making bright garlands from the glossy pages of magazines her mother had collected. She blew up multicolored balloons and hung them in clusters in the corners of rooms and above doors. She fitted colored lightbulbs in the ground-floor lamps and ceiling lights and turned the living room into a dance hall by pushing all the furniture against the walls. Finally she helped her mother stir the huge pot of spaghetti napolitana and stack up plates on the buffet table.
The Blue Line Page 3