* * *
—
The Lady Upstairs liked this new girl, but over the years she’d learned not to trust first impressions. She remembered that time, almost twenty years before, when she’d seen a blond woman arrive, her nose red from crying and her eyes dull and staring; that same night she learned that the woman was spending some days at the hotel in order to be close to the sea and try to console herself, a little, over the death of her son. The Lady Upstairs had taken the form of a small child and appeared to the woman in the hallways, in the room, near the beach, on the stairs that led to the first floor, but the woman only screamed and screamed and they took her away in the ambulance. She was with her husband. That had been a lesson: only try with women who are alone.
The new girl’s name was Elina, and she was alone. She was beautiful, but she didn’t know it. She had the sunken eyes of insomnia and too many cigarettes; she wore a defiant expression and she was gruff with the charming and loquacious owners. She didn’t even look at the other guests. The first day, she didn’t go down to the beach, or to breakfast, or to lunch, and at dinner she pushed the food around on her plate and surreptitiously took three pills with her wine. She could tell Elina hated the beach. Then why was she there? Something had happened to her on a beach, years before. She’d have to find out that night, so Elina would remember it in her dreams.
The Lady moved down the blue carpeted hallways to Elina’s room. The girl had paid for one of the better ones, a suite with a microwave and refrigerator, but she clearly wasn’t going to use any of the amenities. It still wasn’t the right moment to take shape. Tomorrow. Tonight it was enough for Elina to dream of that night on the beach, when she was seventeen years old and thought she was indestructible; that night when she’d left the bar and agreed to go with the drunk man to the empty beach. He had covered her mouth to keep her from screaming, but Elina hadn’t even moved, frozen from fear. And afterward she hadn’t told anyone. She had just showered, and she’d cried, and she’d bought some intimate creams to allay the smell and the stinging from the sand that burned her soft internal skin.
* * *
—
What a perfect time to remember that shit, thought Elina, and she looked out the window of her room, which had a view of the pool. It’s not that she’d forgotten, but it was rare for that night on the beach to appear in her dreams. But she knew that it was why Pablo had left her. Because sometimes he touched her and she remembered the sand between her legs and the pain, and she had to say enough, and she’d never been able to explain anything because of the fear, until he’d gotten fed up, and why wouldn’t he, when she was ruined forever.
Outside, she saw a couple talking, each on a lounge chair, holding hands. She hated them. The kids were in the pool even though it wasn’t hot, and a man some fifty years old was reading a book with a yellow cover in the shade. Only a few guests, or at least that was the feeling the hotel gave, silent as it was. This was not a good idea, thought Elina, and she waited an hour, two hours, but no one rang from reception to let her know she had a call. Thirty-one years of so much not knowing what to do. What to do. Twenty more years teaching classes at the university. Twenty more years as an adjunct. Twenty years of not enough money and then dying alone; twenty years of faculty meetings and complaints. She had no other plan. And moreover, if she had to be frank, it was possible she couldn’t even be an adjunct anymore. In her last class, she’d started to cry while explaining Durkheim—what a moron. She’d run out of the room. She couldn’t forget the way the kids giggled, more out of nervousness than cruelty, but how she would have liked to murder them. She’d locked herself in the teachers’ lounge and someone found her there, trembling. Someone else called an ambulance, and she didn’t remember much more until she woke up in a clinic—expensive, with charming and unbearable professionals, paid for by her mother. And then the group therapy sessions, and the horrible feeling that she didn’t care about what the others said, and thinking about how to die while she participated in arts-and-crafts activities (“Could I stab myself in the jugular with this paintbrush?”), and the individual therapy sessions when she kept quiet because she couldn’t explain anything, and then her dubious discharge. Her parents had rented an apartment for her so she could be independent, so she could recover more quickly, so she could integrate—all those commonplaces. And Pablo, who hadn’t even asked about her, wherever he was. And going back to the university for a month at the psychiatrist’s insistence, though she had managed only two weeks, and then sick leave, and now the beach.
She pulled her hair back in a sloppy ponytail and decided to have lunch—as usual she had woken up late, because she no longer monitored the number of pills she was taking. And then, she told herself, to the beach. The sun was out. Supposedly the ocean was calming. When she went out, she passed some strange sculptures of sheep that seemed straight out of a giant nativity scene, and she looked with something like curiosity at two teenagers playing at tossing a cork into the mouth of a bronze frog.
Again, she pushed the food around on her plate, but she managed to get two mouthfuls down, and an entire 7UP—at least it was sugar. And she headed off to the beach, which was only a block away. The access was a pebbled path lined by shrubs that cut her breath short—what if something was hiding there—but she ran along it and reached the old wooden steps and then the sea. It was an enormous beach, with sand that was lighter and more diaphanous than the rest of the coast, and a violet-blue sky that now looked like rain. She sat down in one of the chairs under an awning and looked at some men, forty-something but still slender, who were playing soccer. She thought about approaching them, maybe taking one of them to bed—why not? she hadn’t had sex in a year—but she knew it wouldn’t happen, people can smell desperation, and she reeked. She saw girls defying the wind in their bikinis, and she waited for the rain to come, she let it soak her. And when her long hair was dripping onto her pants, when the cold water was running from her neck to her chest and belly, she took the razor out of her pocket and started making precise cuts on her arm, one, two, three, until she saw the blood and felt the pain and something similar to an orgasm. Let it stay cold, so she could cover herself. Though she didn’t really care. She was only afraid some charitable soul would notice, take pity on her, and make the feared phone call to Buenos Aires or the ambulance or the suicide hotline.
When she returned to the hotel she asked if she had received any calls. “No, dear,” the receptionist told her, all smiles. In the room, she sank into the bathtub and went back over the cuts, so the blood would float around her and turn the water red. It was beautiful. She put her head underwater and opened her eyes to an ocean of reddish swirls.
* * *
—
She didn’t want to talk to anyone, but at breakfast there was a girl who’d just arrived—Elina assumed, because she was very pale and seemed uncomfortable—who sat down at her table. In the morning the dining room filled up. Elina ordered coffee with milk to stay awake, because she hadn’t slept at all and was feeling dizzy. Her heart pounded in her chest with the first rush of caffeine, but she didn’t care. How lovely to die like that, suddenly and without planning, in such a simple way. Much better than pills: when she’d tried that, when she’d woken up with a tube down her throat, she’d realized how hard it was to manage an overdose. Later, she realized her mistake, she learned which pills she should have taken, but didn’t dare try again.
After a shy hello, the girl asked her if she’d gone up to Saint-Exupéry’s room. Elina told her not yet, though she was thinking, What the hell do I care about some writer’s room. The girl insisted, though not out of any literary zeal. “I heard that if you take photos in there, they always come out blurry. They say his ghost appears in the image. I don’t know, but this hotel sure deserves a ghost.”
“Maybe,” Elina told her, “but Saint-Exupéry’s doesn’t scare me, to be honest.” The girl laughed. She had
a strange laugh, forced but not fake, as if she weren’t used to laughing. Elina liked her. Or at least she didn’t find her as distasteful as the rich, waxed kids, or the gentlemen of such interesting conversation, the carefree girls with their bespectacled boyfriends carrying books under their arms, or the forty-somethings who in the evenings uncorked expensive wines and sniffed them, sighing before lighting up a cigar.
“And do you know about the lookout tower?” asked the girl.
“A little,” said Elina. “Just that they don’t show it to everyone, because the structure is old, they didn’t renovate it and it’s dangerous.” The girl shook her head. She had long hands, but she was very short. The effect was disproportionate—she almost looked deformed. “It’s not dangerous. The stairs are steep. I’ve seen it. We could go. They don’t lock it, that’s a lie. The door sticks a little. You just have to push it.”
“Okay,” said Elina. “Let’s go tomorrow.” She asked for that twenty-four-hour grace period to give herself a chance to sleep. And, more importantly, to find an internet café in case Pablo had written.
But she never made it to the café. She recognized the shaking in her hands, the shortness of breath, the need to get out of her body, that thinking always of the same thing. She lit a cigarette in the hallway and went back to the room smoking, to wait for the night and the next day lying faceup on the bed, the TV on though she couldn’t understand the meaning of any of the programs, terrified because she couldn’t cry.
* * *
—
Beings like The Lady Upstairs didn’t get excited or worked up. They were just sure. And she was sure that Elina was the one. That she was going to do it.
She’d brought her to the lookout tower. It was true that the owners locked the door leading to the wooden staircase, so steep; but of course those tools couldn’t stop her. Elina had followed her up, panting a little. She had gotten a splinter in her hand on the way up, but she didn’t even cry out. And when they reached the square space of the lookout—the windows from where, when you stood on tiptoe and breathed in the scent of the wood, you could see the ocean in the distance, the sepia light and the shadows below, in a kind of hollow beneath the tower—she saw Elina smile.
“The owner’s daughter, when she was little, thought the crazy lady was hiding up here.”
“What crazy lady?” Elina was still smiling.
“None, there never was one. She’d read some book with a crazy woman locked in a tower and she started to believe it was real.”
“They always lock up the crazy ladies in books,” murmured Elina.
“They could escape.”
“They could,” said Elina, and she sat down on the floor to toy with shards of glass left over from a renovation that was never finished. “I had a birthday yesterday,” she said. “Thirty-one years old.”
“And you didn’t want to celebrate?”
Elina looked at her, and the girl smiled, although surely that was not the thing to do. Maybe she should hug Elina, as she sometimes saw people do. But that could ruin everything.
Better to bring her to the tower again, the next day.
And lock her in.
And maybe reveal her true form before leaving her alone up there.
And keep the guests and the owners from hearing her screams. The Lady Upstairs was capable of controlling what reached people’s ears and what didn’t.
And wait for her to grow desperate from hunger, and talk to her from the other side of the door, tell her how no one would come looking for her, because no one cared about her.
Maybe even go in again, several times if necessary, and each time show something more of her true form. And her true smell. And, of course, her true touch. Oh, she knew that nothing was as terrifying as her touch.
And wait for the impact, the sound, the screams: Elina had looked closely not only at the windows, but also at the stairs. One wrong step on those stairs would be enough. And if not, she could climb them again, and throw herself down again from the top. She was capable of doing that.
And then the hotel would have Elina to wander in circles with her cold hands and her bloody arms.
And The Lady Upstairs would be free, because at last she’d found the one.
Where Are You, Dear Heart?
I have three memories of him, but one of them could be false. The order is arbitrary. In the first he is sitting on a sofa, completely naked, on a towel, watching TV. He doesn’t pay any attention to me: I think I’m spying on him. His penis rests in a tangle of black hair, and the scar that cuts through his chest hair is dark pink.
In the second, his wife is leading him by the hand to the bedroom. He’s naked again. He looks at me sideways. His hair is pretty long, even for the time—the seventies—and I can’t see his scar.
In the third he smiles at me from up close, his face almost touching mine. In the memory I feel naked and shy. But I don’t know if it’s real; it doesn’t have the same naturalness as the others and I might have made it up, though I recognize that feeling of shyness and vulnerability that often repeats in my dreams. I don’t know if he touched me. The sensation that accompanies his memory is something like desire, when, if my suspicions are true, it should be more like horror. I’m not afraid of him, his face doesn’t torment me, even though I’ve tried to dredge up something like childhood trauma and its consequences in my adult life. I was five years old when I met him. He was very sick—he’d had a heart operation and it had gone badly. I found that out later, after I stopped going to his house—really, the house of his daughters, my friends. I found it out when he died. I don’t remember what his name was, and I’ve never dared to ask my parents.
Sometime after his death, I started using my nails to mark my chest right in the center, imitating his scar. I did it before falling asleep, naked, and I’d raise my head to look at the line of irritated skin until it disappeared and my neck started to ache.
* * *
—
When it was very hot, I liked to go into the spare bedroom; it was the coolest in the house, the only room no one went into, because Mom used it for storing old books and furniture. I adored that room: I liked to stretch out naked on the leather sofa, always cold, bring in a little fan and read all afternoon. My friends from the neighborhood and from school were all at the club pool, but I didn’t care: in that room I’d fallen hopelessly in love, for the first time, when I discovered Helen Burns in a battered edition of Jane Eyre, illustrated.
I hated those illustrations. Because they depicted Helen as much bigger than the book described her, and because for some reason they’d depicted her as blond, though the book never mentioned her hair color. She didn’t look like that, and I would know, because I spent that whole summer picturing her on the sofa that had become the orphanage bed, the very bed where Helen—consumptive, moribund, and so beautiful—died while I held her hand.
Helen was a minor character in the book. Jane, the protagonist, arrived at the dreadful school for young girls called Lowood, and she couldn’t make friends with anyone because the evil director Brocklehurst had humiliated her in front of all her classmates. But Helen didn’t care: Helen became Jane’s friend. She was beyond all that, because she was near death. I sensed I was going to fall in love with her when Jane saw her for the first time on the veranda, reading that book with such a strange name, Rasselas. One more chapter and Helen was dead. Typhus broke out at the school, Helen suffered a relapse of her tuberculosis and was moved to an upstairs room, and Jane snuck in to visit her one night. That final night, Helen and Jane slept together. Today, when I remember that chapter (because I don’t need to reread it, I know it by heart), I understand everything: when Jane gets into the dying girl’s bed and Helen says to her, “Are you warm, darling?” Darling. Darling. It was a love scene. When Jane woke up, her friend Helen was dead. That chapter: every night, every one, I lay down and hugged
my pillow and pretended it was Helen, but I didn’t fall asleep like that idiot Jane, oh no. I watched her die, I held her hand, and she, who was expiring with her gray gaze fixed on my eyes as she fought for breath, allowed me to see something of that other place where she would spend eternity.
* * *
—
I soon realized that my fantasy was unattainable. When I was fourteen, a friend said to me, remorsefully:
“Guess what I heard. You remember Mara’s brother?”
Mara was an ex-classmate who had moved to another school.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed Page 7
