“She’s almost fourteen; believe me, she knows more than her sweet little face lets on.”
* * *
—
By the time Tania got back it was late at night, but that wasn’t what really infuriated Eduardo, who was just finishing packing his books into a travel bag as Elena put the kitchen chairs on top of the table.
“You reek of booze and cigarettes. Do you mind telling me what kind of parties your friends throw?”
Tania’s character was too bossy for her father’s liking. Sassy and foul-mouthed, she didn’t shy from conflict, using any excuse to test the waters, unconsciously measuring her strength, seeing the world as but a stage on which to act out her desires. But that night she misjudged her father’s reaction. The transition from the festive air of the party—her friends, music, a joint or two, a little gin—to the paternal domicile had been too brusque, and she hadn’t had enough time to adjust, to adapt her expression, put on the proper disguise.
“Leave me alone! I’m not a little girl anymore, I don’t have to put up with sermons from a boring old fart.”
“Don’t talk to me that way! I want an explanation.”
“Well, how do you expect me to talk to you? In sign language? Because you’re acting like a deaf-mute.”
The slap came out of nowhere, slicing through the air like a whistle, taking her off-guard as it landed across her mouth. Tania took two steps back, more out of shock than the force of the blow. A sorrowful silence descended on all three of them, as though nobody—least of all Eduardo—had expected that to happen. He looked down at his hand like a foreign body that had suddenly, for a fraction of a second, possessed its own free will. Elena stood in silence, her jaw set, tense, and Tania sobbed something her father didn’t want to hear, but which was perfectly clear: “You son of a bitch,” and then she ran to her room and slammed the door so hard the house shook.
“I don’t know what came over me,” Eduardo murmured, looking to Elena.
It was the first time he’d ever laid a finger on his daughter. And yet the worst thing was not that he’d done it, or whether or not she deserved it, or his instantaneous regret. If he could turn the clock back one minute, there was no doubt he’d undo what he’d done. But what he wasn’t willing to confess, not even to himself, was that as he slapped his daughter’s face, he’d felt a complete and total sense of release.
Elena simply stared at him, something hanging there on her lips, words struggling to come out that she tried to hold back with her teeth.
“Don’t you ever touch my daughter again,” she finally uttered coldly, cuttingly, without the slightest hint of compassion.
Eduardo felt that the perfect circle they had formed was now distorted, its poles flattened and shamed, felt that their loyalties were not as absolute as he’d thought.
* * *
—
They had left Cadaqués early, before dawn. The first hour was tense, Eduardo at the wheel, brooding, seemingly concentrating on the traffic, but really immersed in a tangled swirl of feelings he would have liked to put voice to. Elena stared out the window, her forehead to the glass, her expression revealing nothing about what she was thinking. In the backseat, Tania dozed fitfully, on and off, from time to time waking fully to shoot daggers at her father in the rearview mirror.
At the halfway point, they came to a rest area with a gas station and a wooden cabin-like structure that was a restaurant and café. They were close to a small town on the Toledo highway and could have skipped stopping, but Eduardo needed to rest. It smelled like fresh-cut grass, and there was a grove of trees where the ground was covered in leaves. It was very pretty, totally unexpected.
“Why don’t we all take a photo together?” Elena asked, her voice too festive, unnatural. Tania was sitting across from her at a picnic table, picking at a bit of dry wood that had begun to splinter away from one of the table’s planks. Eduardo had gone to the café’s self-service area to buy them all sandwiches.
“What are we celebrating?” she asked dryly. “The fact that my father is a stupid jerk?”
“We could celebrate the fact that I have an irresponsible daughter who doesn’t understand or value the freedom she’s been given, or how much her father loves her; or maybe we should celebrate how stupid your mother is for having believed you were mature enough to understand that we all make mistakes. You’re just a girl, after all.”
“He slapped my face!” Tania protested.
“Yes, he did. And he shouldn’t have. But guess what? Every time you talk back, or give us the silent treatment, or show contempt, that’s a slap in the face, too. How many slaps do you think we put up with from you every day? And we take it, because you’re our daughter, and that’s life, and we understand that you need to feel like you’re in control…”
Tania adopted a bored look.
“Enough lecturing, Mamá.”
This time it was Elena who raised her voice.
“No, it’s not enough lecturing; I’ll lecture you as long as I have to, and you’ll shut your mouth and listen. You think you have the right to judge your father, but you know nothing about him and you don’t care. I met that man long before I’d ever even contemplated your existence and it hurts me to see him suffer because of you and your selfishness. I know it’s hard, I know you feel like you need to break things to find your place, but you could go a little easier on him—that’s all I’m asking. I don’t want you constantly putting me between a rock and a hard place, Tania; you can’t keep making me choose between the two of you. It’s not fair. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you—why are you in such a rush to challenge him now?”
Just then, Eduardo appeared with a tray full of sandwiches and soft drinks. Seeing him approach, mother and daughter fell silent. He hesitated, not knowing what to do with the tray, where to sit. Elena scooted over to make space for him, and then stroked his leg under the table. That gesture, for him, was all he needed, the best thing he could have hoped for.
“I think your daughter wants to say something.”
Tania glared at her mother, affronted, but Elena compelled her with a harsh look.
“I’m sorry, Papá. I shouldn’t have talked back to you like that. It’s just that sometimes you make me so mad…”
Eduardo smiled, pushing up the bridge of his glasses on his nose. The worst had passed.
“I think I’ve heard the same thing from your mother’s mouth a couple million times.”
The peace achieved after a fight is never total, the calm is not the same; there are always things left unsaid, rough edges beneath the surface that prick like thorns, but if you try to avoid them, things can go smoothly enough. A tacit agreement allowed them to eat in relative contentment, recalling anecdotes from the trip that, although it hadn’t yet even ended, they evoked with premature nostalgia. Elena insisted that they take a picture in the grove, it would be the perfect culmination to a vacation that, in time, they’d look back on with affection—provided they overlooked that final incident.
“Let’s take that picture.” Eduardo found a rock they could balance the camera on, and then set the timer, and the three of them tried to determine exactly where to stand so as to be framed perfectly. They laughed and posed this way and that, jostling and joking like they always did. But no matter how they laughed, Eduardo couldn’t shake the strange feeling he’d gotten when he slapped his daughter, the first violent act of his life—the surprise on discovering that he was capable of causing harm to those he loved most.
They got back on the road. Eduardo drove slowly, the window lowered slightly so the air rushing in would keep him alert, while part of his mind drifted to the inevitable series of things he had to do to re-establish their routine when they got back—trivial but necessary things like turning the gas and electricity meters back on, telling the building association president to turn their water main on, doing laundry, put
ting away the suitcases, washing the car. Elena and Tania were asleep in the backseat, curled up around one another under a travel blanket. He contemplated them in the rearview mirror—so different, so the same, now that they couldn’t hide behind any masks, unaware they were being observed, at the mercy of their emotions.
And suddenly, all his thoughts vaporized, proving how pointless they were.
The car was struck violently from behind, and he felt as though the car flew up off the ground; that his arms were being ripped off by the extraordinary centrifugal force, making it impossible to keep his hands on the wheel or his feet on the pedals. At the same time—or perhaps it was afterward, but the sense of immediacy made it all blur—came a terrific jerking movement, right to left and top to bottom, that slammed him into the roof of the car, into the suitcases, into the hydraulic jack, and into something soft that could only be the body of his wife or daughter, who’d been hurled forward.
An idea slowly crept into his head, like fire licking at his dazed bewilderment. An accident, he was part of an accident, like a rag doll whipped this way and that by the impact. It was really happening.
He felt a horrific pain in his knee, a pain so intense he’d have never thought it possible. There was more jerking, and at some point the front windshield shattered into a thousand pieces. Then the car slid down an embankment, upside down, flattening everything in its path. And finally it came to a standstill, in silence.
The stillness and silence were surreal.
His face was wet: the stream. Water was coming in through the broken windshield. Blindly he managed to undo his seatbelt, but he couldn’t move. He was face-down, his head buzzing like a blender, and nothing was where it should have been; his eyes not seeing, his hands not feeling. He tried to get up, but something made him cry out in agony. A chunk of metal, sharp and pointy as a spearhead, had skewered his knee, pinning him to the twisted wreckage of the car. He could hardly see through the smoke and blood clouding his vision. He groped around and touched something with his fingers. Hair. Wet hair, a motionless head, Elena’s broken neck. A few inches from his face, she stared at him, lifeless, with almost embarrassed modesty. Eduardo tried to get up, to move her, but it was utterly impossible. He let her head fall back and thought of Tania. He couldn’t see her among the heaps of metal and plastic, glass, clothing and smoke. He tried to call out to her but a spurt of bloody bubbles was all that came from his mouth. His daughter wasn’t in the car.
And then he saw her, dragging herself like an inchworm cut in two, on the other side of the stream, a trail of blood in her wake. She was crawling very slowly, her dress in tatters. She stopped moving, her head and body out of the water, her legs floating in the stream. Eduardo tried to reach her, but his leg was impaled by iron, and nearly every bone in his body broken. He watched her move again, crawl a bit, and then fall still. Her eyes open. She convulsed and vomited blood, and after that she moved no more. Eduardo could only lie there, contemplating her agony, his face reflecting no emotion.
* * *
—
The three weeks after the accident Eduardo spent in an induced coma. The doctors said it was the only way a body so battered could withstand the pain. The list of broken bones and affected organs was astonishing. After several operations they managed to salvage the mobility of most of his joints, with the exception of his right knee, which was totally beyond hope and was going to be substituted with a complex prosthesis. After a few days, his spleen and renal function were stabilized, and although he still had a catheter and there was blood in both his urine and feces, he was at least able to begin ingesting liquids fairly quickly. The bruises on his face had left him a swollen shapeless mass; he had cuts on his right retina; he’d lost several teeth, and his left earlobe had to be sewn back on; but miraculously he would have no visible scars, except for a few deep gashes on the back of his skull which, in time, would be easy to hide. He would never again walk comfortably, the screws and metal plates used to reconstruct his knee would cause him pain for the rest of his life. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst thing was that he was alive. Little by little, he stopped hearing doctors’ and nurses’ voices, focusing instead on the movement of their lips, on the food stuck in their teeth, tiny spit bubbles—things of that nature. His tuning out of reality, and immersing himself into a deeper layer of all that surrounded him became more intense and more frequent, gaining space and breadth, and was increasingly difficult to keep under control. Slowly he sank into a deep well, a black hole that no one and nothing could pull him out of.
When he was transferred from the ICU to a regular ward, they put him in a private room under twenty-four-hour surveillance, with a camera that the ward’s security guard watched at all times from behind a counter. He received regular visits from a hospital psychologist, sometimes accompanied by a member of the Association of Victims of Traffic Accidents. The medical team feared he would try to commit suicide.
They administered high doses of tranquilizers and antidepressants every day, which plunged him into a state of lethargy he had no desire to emerge from. He hardly walked, and proved unwilling to do the physical therapy exercises he’d been assigned; he didn’t eat, either, and tried to sleep as much as possible. He couldn’t even be bothered to ask for help when he felt his urinary tract function return, the bag full and the sheets already stained. He just slept and, when he was awake, allowed himself to be moved this way and that, hearing the doctor’s questions—“Does this hurt? What about this?”—and answering them by moving his head vaguely, in a way that meant neither one thing nor the other. He accepted with indifference the encouraging pats offered by acquaintances who came to visit, wishing they would simply go away and leave him in peace.
Eduardo recalled the last visit he’d had from the police officer in charge of his case. It was a Sunday afternoon and the ward was nearly empty.
The officer stood, dressed in a wrinkled suit, and matching vest and tie. He was jiggling his legs a bit, as if on the verge of losing his patience. His cologne mixed with the other smells in the room and the result was unpleasant, overwhelming. He told Eduardo that the accident had been caused by a vehicle, traveling at high speed, slamming into them from behind. Traffic Unit tests had indicated that it was most likely an SUV.
The police were working from the hypothesis that the driver had run a stop sign before hitting Eduardo’s car. Perhaps he’d stopped at first to help, but when he saw how serious the accident was, had gotten scared and taken off. They’d studied the scratch marks on the bodywork in an attempt to narrow down the make of the other vehicle, but water damage had made any recent traces of paint unusable. All they had to go on was a piece of headlight cover and some tire tracks. Not much at all, he admitted. Most likely they’d never find the guy, unless someone came forward with the exact license-plate number or turned out to have seen the accident, both of which were highly unlikely in such a desolate area. Regardless, the officer said encouragingly, they’d notified both the press and any police stations in the vicinity.
“Something might crop up, lead us to the guilty party. But you should keep one thing in mind, Eduardo: even if we find him, if the guy’s had time to get his car fixed, it will be your word against his, and he’ll get off. In dubio pro reo, that’s the law. But don’t worry, I’m not the type to give up. I can’t fucking stand impunity.”
Eduardo was hardly paying attention.
Another day, some court officials came to pay him a visit. They had some of his wife’s and daughter’s belongings in an envelope, and a pile of papers for him to sign. Eduardo gave them a quick glance. At the time, he had a nasty conjunctival hemorrhage, and his eye was full of blood. He looked away, disgusted, and clung to his pillow. The mere act of producing simple words, asking for a glass of water, getting up to go to the bathroom, wore him out completely.
Then came a whole series of procedures required for the burial. Elena had n
o family, and they had no insurance for anything like this—she had been too full of life to have even contemplated the possibility of death, so it had been a small, discreet civil service. The bodies were cremated and given to Eduardo in an urn. The expenses ate up his meager savings, but he didn’t care in the slightest; his father had to be the one to take care of preparations, informing their friends and accepting their condolences, ordering the flowers and dealing with cumbersome paperwork at the civil registry. Eduardo, meanwhile, spent his days prostrate, staring out the hospital window at the world outside, seeing nothing.
* * *
—
Four months later, he was released, his loved ones’ belongings in one hand and their ashes in the other. The everyday sounds of the street bounced off him like rays of sun, but Eduardo heard nothing. The voices of passersby, buses honking, people chatting at sidewalk cafés—all of it came to him muffled, as though he were underwater in a swimming pool, and could only make out a dull reverberation that gave everything a surreal quality. His father was waiting for him on the other side of the street, by the open door of a taxi. Eduardo ignored him and headed down the block, dragging his suitcase and feeling like a dead man walking through the land of the living.
Afterward, he stopped painting, working, going outside, bathing. Sometimes he would experience things he later found out were auditory hallucinations, things he was unable to separate from everyday sounds. They were real, with sounds and subsounds, and he heard them both. For instance, he might be listening to the complex arrangement of a Dexter Gordon piece, focusing on the music’s vibrations, and at the same time part of his brain heard the flutter of a dragonfly’s wings as it buzzed around his ear—except that the dragonfly wasn’t there, despite Eduardo being utterly aware of its beating wings. That was how he began to let go of the one thing that didn’t help him understand—his mind. His head became a locked room, a dark place where he lived among nameless shadows. Shadows that brushed up against him, startled him, and made him leap from the bed covered in sweat in the middle of the night, screaming.
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