by Lina Meruane
nightly bread
I can’t eat, but who could feel hungry the night before? Dinner, no, but neither is it advisable to go to bed on an empty stomach. How about a slice of bread with butter that then becomes two: anxiety sets my mother’s jaws in motion. I just salivate at the smell of the crumbs slowly charring in the toaster, the melted butter. She drinks tea, loudly stirs in two spoonfuls of sugar, takes a desperate bite of the toast Ignacio makes for her. I see it but I don’t see it, it’s as if I’d seen it: I construct it in my memory. It’s good, says my mother, helping me imagine her every movement. Very good, she says, as if asking a question, and then she confesses she’s eating purely out of vice. I’m not the least bit hungry, she insists, her mouth full. Ignacio makes more toast and my mother swallows it, and soon she asks, like a bulimic bird, is there a little more bread? And of course, there are two bags in the freezer, says my baker boyfriend. My mother burns her tongue on the tea but she doesn’t get a chance to complain, because just then the doorbell rings and startles her. Who could that be, at this hour? Even though the hour is barely seven. Girl! screeches Manuela, who never managed to get past her youth, who still lives in the eighties, still in the student protests, running soaked from the water cannons and roaring with laughter, smoking joints. Optimism personified, absolute unfamiliarity with sadness. Manuela, my mom; mom, Manuela. And Manuela exclaims oh, I love the smell of toasted bread, plugging a kiss on each of my cheeks, squeezing my shoulders, giving me a transfusion of energy. What kind are you eating, marraquetas, amasado? Did you make it yourself? she asks my mother, who surely looks at her wondering where I’ve found this earthquake. In Chile, I answer her secretly, while Manuela says and I’ve just brought you some paltas as a present. Palta, repeats my mother, and she shrinks. Manuela stands behind me, and leaning over my shoulders she croons again a girl, how crazy, what happened to you! And right in my house, at that party, when we were having such a great time! Yes, I say, but I don’t remember that happiness until she mentions it. I just stopped by to wish you luck, and she sits down next to me. My mother blows on her tea. Stay a while, I tell her, we don’t have any food, but coffee? Bread and avocado? I’m really not bothering you? My mother straightens in her chair, spreads butter on her umpteenth slice of bread, and continues to watch over me silently. OK! great! If I’m not bothering you of course I’ll stay. I move over to the corner, Ignacio puts more bread in the toaster, and my mother chews on her thoughts. Manuela winds herself up and starts to talk about her new paintings and her new job, the one that pays her rent. Manuela couldn’t import the small privileges of a Chilean artist when she came to this country, I explain to my mother. Just like the entitlements from the musty last names that here no one knows. That’s why so many Chileans leave, says Manuela, maybe I’ll end up leaving because of that too. I hear my mother abandon her silence, prompted to ask more about that new job. I take care of a little girl, answers Manuela. She’s the daughter of a family in transition. In transition, I repeat, Ignacio repeats, my mother repeats with growing curiosity. In transition, Manuela also says, since the father discovered he was a woman. Who’s a woman? asks my mother. The father? Exactly, says Manuela, and the father also discovered he is a woman who is only interested, sexually, in other women. That makes him a lesbian. So the girl has two mothers, I clarify, and Manuela laughs, yes indeed, and she adds that he or she is still in love with the girl’s mother, but that she, his wife, who was fairly masculine and maybe wouldn’t have had such a hard time getting behind the transition, decided to abstain. She wasn’t ready to be with a woman, even though she’d spent years with her. Or him. My mother declares that she’s now lost her appetite, but Manuela ignores her. She says: now he has to decide whether he’s going to have the operation. Operation, echoes Ignacio, still making sure the bread doesn’t burn, and mashing, I suppose, another avocado to keep his hands busy with something. Operation, of course, says my mother, in her knowing doctor’s tone, while I hear her shifting in her chair. Manuela decides to give her the surgical details. My mother doesn’t know if she wants to hear them, and I know Ignacio doesn’t. He goes on mashing avocados, or maybe he steals off to the bathroom. I already know the details, and I also know the story’s protagonists. The father’s identity is a subject that used to interest me, but now I abandon the conversation to concentrate on something more concrete and definitive: find a crumb, a single crumb of toasted bread to calm my hunger. Manuela talks tirelessly while I reach out my finger very slowly toward the table, luring the crumbs my mother dropped and figuring the story would keep everyone’s attention elsewhere. My finger crawls along the surface of the table, trapping one crumb after another. I hear Ignacio cough and I know he’s looking at me that he’s intrigued when he asks me, what are you looking for? Looking for? I snatch my hand away, retreat into my secret hunger and listen enviously to Manuela talking with her mouth full of words and bread with avocado. My mother groans, utterly full on the other side of the table, and she takes advantage of the lull to ask a question that’s more like an impatient order, what time is it? Isn’t it time for bed? But it’s still early. Please, no one move. This is my farewell party. Manuela, says my mother very seriously and very alone but shielding herself behind the plural: we’re going to have to ask you to go. Lucina needs her rest.
a cry
My mother asks for some covers for her bed. What about the sheet? But an un-ironed sheet wasn’t enough, she asked for the heavy weight of a blanket over her small and gaunt frame. Mom, it’s 30 degrees out, you’ll fry. Not at all, replied my mother: she would sleep with the air conditioner on for that whole summer night. Mom, I charged again, profaning our familial hierarchy again, how could you? Have you gone crazy? The electricity bill will cost an arm and a leg. Or an eye. Oh, I know, and you’ve just lost your little student stipend, I know, you don’t have to rub it in my face, said my mother without even a full stop in the middle, without breathing; the victim’s guile spilling from her mouth as my ever-smaller mother dragged out her words and begged for her candy: if you don’t give it to me, I won’t sleep. I shrugged. Ignacio shrugged. My mother shrank like a silkworm between the sheets and under our thick winter blanket. The living room went dark with her in it, hibernating. We went to bed too, but Ignacio tossed and turned and every insomniac somersault kept me from falling asleep. Talk to me about something, if you can’t sleep. Ignacio hugged me and started to spew everything that was hammering at his brain, twisted nails, little needles, almost insignificant, the stingers of African wasps that repeated to him the following: would the alarm go off at five in the morning? Should we have ordered a taxi to come pick us up? Would my insurance pay my bills? Would there still be bread in the refrigerator for my mother’s breakfast? But no, I said, discreetly moving my hand over his face, don’t worry about her, she’s easy to please if you follow her lead. Yeah? he started to ask, already dozing. Yes, she’s so scared, I said, and of course worried, he said. Yes, yes, I repeated, yawning, as if it wasn’t me she was worried about, as if the imminent operation wasn’t happening to us. Because we suffered that night without knowing it. And, holding tight to trivialities, thinking about my mother’s anxiety and her easy happiness, we sank gradually into the mattress, but soon the springs pushed us up again toward consciousness. We heard a cry. A high-pitched cry. A scream of terror. A scream that lay like a cable through the night. And it came from the living room, from the mouth, the larynx, from the strident vocal chords of my mother. Did you hear that? I asked Ignacio. Yes, I heard it, it just woke me up. It’s my mother, I said. Yes, it’s your mother, he answered, with zero desire to get up. She’s my mother, I’ll take care of it. I went sliding along the hallway, terrified of finding a rapist, a thief, a hairy spider, or a snake tangled up in my mother’s legs. I held on to the walls, afraid I would bump into her. Mama, I whispered, taking a step toward my childhood, suddenly lost in a hallway before the Santiago bedroom where my mother was sleeping. Are you there? Are you awake, mom? I returned suddenly to N
ew York with my bare feet at the edge of her mattress. I waited for an instant, remembering how I’d asked her the same question hundreds of times, separating her eyelids with minuscule fingers in search of awake eyes in her sleeping body. Mom. I said it again and filled my mouth with that word that smelled of milk under her perfume. But it was that same mother who had just torn through the night with her cry, who had howled and woken us up but hadn’t woken up herself, who was now snoring gently, clutching the blanket. Mom! She didn’t answer. The inflatable mattress hissed under her dead weight, under the imperceptible rocking that pushed out the air supporting her. The mattress was in motion, alert but unconscious or dreaming; just like my mother, I thought.
I can’t tell you
The first sound was of hands taking dry plates from the rack and depositing them in cabinets. Then came other noises. Stuck wooden drawers that shut suddenly. A broom sweeping dust balls accumulated in corners. A household symphony conducted with a vocation for order—one my mother didn’t tend to exercise in her own house, but always in mine. Once her anxious work was finished, my mother decided to knock on our door. She turned the knob but couldn’t open—it was locked. The floor creaked under her feet. She must have been leaning over, her ear to the hinge, her mouth on the wood singing an are you awake? with a thread of a voice that sounded frayed, about to snap. The loose floorboard creaked again. Feet. Manicured toenails. Slippers. Isolated words of my mother’s under the shower and then, repetition of the scene in reverse. The bathroom door opened again, my mother came back down the hall and stopped, trying to crack our door open, and by then we were awake. Ignacio reached out an arm to turn off the alarm, I reached out another to find his face. My hand touched Ignacio’s lips, Ignacio’s nose, his eyebrows, and for a moment again, fleetingly, his eyelids. I felt the tense bags of his dark, tender eyes while Ignacio squeezed his eyelids for an instant and in one leap was up. I rose after him, slowly. But Ignacio was standing still, sounding out my mother’s presence in the hallway and, when he didn’t sense her and saw that I didn’t either, he opened the door and we went out, goaded by fresh, confused thoughts. I slipped into the bathroom with him and while we brushed our teeth, an entire night of dreams began to swirl in my head. Strange dreams, full of buttons, I told Ignacio as we took turns spitting out toothpaste. Don’t tell me about them, he said indecisively, drying his mouth, I’d rather not know. I smiled while I climbed into the shower, remembering some enormous buttons sewn to our bodies, buttons sewn with fishing line, with hooks, fish hooks, yes, even hanging from our ears, buttons, while I heard him, Ignacio, ask me. So, about your dreams? His voice from the other side of the curtain, waiting for me to get out so he could get in. Were your dreams in color? The water sloshed in my soapy belly button, ran over my neck, splashed my warm back, but those weren’t the kind of dreams I’d had. Dreams of feelings and shapes, unseeing dreams. Maybe, I said, just to say something, anything, because suddenly I was overcome by the awareness that I was going to have an operation, and in just a few hours. And I started to wonder what my eyes would be like afterward, if I would still have them when I left the operating room. I threw that waking nightmare at Ignacio, and I also flung it at my mother, who immediately answered, in a typical outburst, but why would you leave the operation without eyes? What makes you think that? she said with preoperative nervousness, all to avoid saying to me what she said to everyone else: and what do you know? Are you a specialist? Mom, I told her, answering the thoughts that reached me telepathically, I barely know what my own hands are doing. I can’t trust in the hands of others.
no man’s land
At this hour the city is in a coma, but as soon as dawn comes it’s unbearable. It was Ignacio talking. There’s not a soul out, confirmed my mother, looking back over her shoulder; my mother, always terrified of walking down a street empty of people, empty of barking and honking, under the light of opaque street lamps. She feared the dark street, not realizing the danger lay elsewhere. I thought of her pupils, blurry from astigmatism, sunken in the dawn. I thought of Ignacio’s myopia behind his lenses, Ignacio ever more mine, fumbling along the dark sidewalks. What a fantastic trio. My mother glued to me, me glued to Ignacio. And she was saying and this is, a…beginning the phrase and then breaking off. A wasteland? Yes, she nodded, a wilderness. An empty or barren place, I said. Yes, it’s true, said Ignacio, we’re in no man’s land. This is the border between two worlds. My mother said no more. She clutched my arm as if I could protect her from her fears. We went on walking. I sank into my own words while they plunged into theirs, all of our shoes echoing on the cement, hurrying up the stairs to the rusted rhythm of the rails, sliding into an almost-empty car. And we went nodding with the same worried drowsiness to the 14th Street station. The first morning lights would be sneaking out above a city that flowed noisily around us on the streets. There were also the police whistles, the howl of a distant ambulance. Here it is, announced Ignacio, and there it was, I thought as I called up a memory: on that corner, the small, brick hospital founded to treat only eyes, only ears. The history of my eyes was archived there. In the hospital’s underground memory lay hundreds of splendid images of ruin. I sat in reception pressing my fists against my temples, knowing they were going to operate on me but that no cure existed. The illness would remain, no matter how they opened and shut me. And even if I got my sight back there was always the possibility my veins could stretch out again; the blood could always spill again. My rush to throw myself on Lekz’s knife lost its momentum; this was the choice, the bet on the Russian roulette. I had to bet to prove myself to my bodyguards. They had faith and picked up their pace, wandered in rooms under sinister fluorescent tubes and hallways crawling with Filipino nurses with Spanish last names. As soon as they handed in the papers certifying me as damaged and Chilean, they came back bearing new instructions. They said let’s go, let’s go, they wore brave faces, let’s hurry or we could lose our turn. Let’s go, let’s go, what are you waiting for? they said in a duet, with the solemnity of a Greek chorus. I’m the heroine who resists her tragedy, I thought, the heroine trying to drive destiny crazy with her own hands. But not yet, I went on thinking, we have to give the doctor and his medicine a chance. Let’s go, I replied, giving in, not that there was any way to resist. Not now that the cards were dealt and the insurance brought up to date, not now that I see no way to go in a different direction. And I know that my mother was glad and Ignacio somewhat intrigued when I smiled. And then I went up some stairs and down others, and then we went down in an elevator full of blindfolded patients, lying on cots or sitting in wheelchairs. Smiling. (That’s what your eyes saw.) And we took steps in different directions. Here it is, said Ignacio. There it was, smelling of disinfectant.
