The Immortal Boy

by Francisco Montaña Ibáñez

  “What’s the matter with her?” asked David. He obeyed. “Is she going to die?”

  The darkness kept him from seeing the fierceness in his older sister’s eyes.

  “Why do you say things like that?” Maria demanded as he settled into the big kids’ bed.

  “Is she real sick? She’s wheezing just like Mom did,” David insisted. “Before she died.”

  Hector rubbed his head.

  “Tomorrow she’ll be fine,” the older boy assured him. “Let’s not talk about it now.”

  David looked up, trying to figure out if he was telling the truth or just calming him down. He decided it was true and closed his eyes.

  “SHE’S BEEN CRYING for three hours,” Maria complained. She had pulled her hair into a bun, as was her new habit, and was pacing next to the bed where Manuela kept on incessantly. David and Robert stared at their desperate sister from the doorway.

  “Manuela,” said Robert, “what’s wrong with you?”

  But like every other time he’d asked, there was no response but the slow, long crying that drifted from the lungs of the little girl as if it were her very breath.

  DAVID WALKED OUT, leaving the door open. In the courtyard the smell of eucalyptus was almost overpowering. Someone was probably cutting them down or burning them nearby. He went up the stairs and knocked on Doña Yeni’s door. No sounds came from inside. David tried again and again. After the third time, the woman peeked through the door without opening it all the way.

  “What do you want?” she asked, her eyes swollen.

  “Manuela is still sick,” said the boy, not knowing how to broach the issue. “She just wants some panela . . .”

  The woman softly cursed, mumbling something David couldn’t quite make out, and went back into her room. She immediately emerged again, a bag in her hand.

  She was still muttering profanities as she headed down the stairs, but David didn’t care. He followed her, excited. Their neighbor had once cured him of a stomachache.

  “Poor girl,” Doña Yeni whispered, after looking at Manuela for a moment.

  “What’s happening to her?” asked David in a rush.

  “The same thing that’s happening to all of you,” said the woman with a sigh.

  David didn’t understand why she had to sigh so much instead of just telling him what was wrong.

  “Well, what’s happening to us?” asked David, feeling that he was going through motions that only mattered to her.

  “When is your dad going to show up?” asked the woman, walking to the kitchen table and moving junk out of the way.

  “Maria is the one who knows,” David explained.

  “And where is she?”

  David just shrugged in response.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” the woman proposed as David nodded. “We’ll wait for your brothers and sister to arrive, and I’ll tell you all.”

  THE FOUR SPOONS scraped the remnants of soup from the bottom of the bowls. David’s eager eyes checked his siblings’ plates for any scraps. They had eaten everything. He sighed and stared at Doña Yeni. The woman had watched them eat in silence while giving Manuela slow spoonfuls. The girl slowly and reluctantly took in the warm soup. Much of the liquid dribbled down her chin. When they had finished, Doña Yeni took a breath, collected the dishes, and looked at Maria.

  “Okay, so when is he coming?”

  “Who?” asked Hector.

  “Your dad, who else?” said the woman.

  Maria took the dishes from her and went toward the door, heading outside to wash them.

  “Wait a minute, Maria.”

  The girl stopped with her eyes down, as if sensing what was coming.

  “Thanks for the soup, Doña Yeni,” said Maria, avoiding the woman.

  “Maria,” Robert said.

  “What do you want?” she asked, looking up and slamming the plates back down on the table. The sharp sound of ceramic on wood cracked through the room.

  “When’s Dad arriving? Did you really even talk to him?” Robert spat.

  Manuela had fallen asleep in her chair and was about to fall over, but Maria rushed over to hold the girl up. Then she picked her up and carried her to bed. The little girl babbled a couple of syllables and curled up to keep sleeping.

  “Maria?” said Doña Yeni.

  David and Hector sat there, waiting.

  “I don’t know when he’ll arrive! I have no idea. He just sent word that we’re supposed to wait for him together,” Maria replied, looking from person to person.

  “Sure you didn’t just . . . make up the whole thing, so you could boss us around?” demanded Robert, glancing at Doña Yeni for her approval.

  “No,” said Maria simply. She stared at them defiantly.

  “Can’t we just send him another message to see what he wants us to do?” asked Hector in a more conciliatory tone.

  “I tried,” Maria replied. “Doña Carmen couldn’t track him down again . . .”

  They regarded one another in silence until a new stream of senseless babble came from Manuela’s cracked lips.

  “Look, I don’t know,” Doña Yeni began, “but you kids can’t go on like this.”

  Everyone stared at her.

  “Like what?” asked Maria.

  “Like this—starving to death!” Doña Yeni replied. Then she pointed at Manuela. “Do you want to know what’s wrong with your little sister? Hunger. I don’t give a damn what happens to you, but you ought to go to Social Services to see if they can set you up someplace where you’ll at least have food to eat.”

  “Social Services?” Robert growled. “I am not going to Social Services.”

  “We can’t let them separate us,” said Hector. “Dad told me we shouldn’t split up.”

  “When?” demanded Doña Yeni.

  “Before he left.”

  Again everyone fell silent. Without a word, David lay down next to Manuela and hugged her tightly to him.

  “We want to stay together,” said Maria. “At Social Services they separate kids.”

  “But they give them food and clothes,” said Doña Yeni. “And doctors! It’s a sin this little girl is sick. If it was up to me, I would round you all up and take you there now.”

  “Don’t tell them anything,” Robert begged.

  “I’ve almost got a job,” Hector said. “They’re going to call me in to work soon, and then we won’t ask you for anything else except to help us take care of the house.”

  David, hugging Manuela, looked at Doña Yeni’s face and saw that slight sneer on her lips, the same expression she made when he dropped something he was helping her carry.

  “You’ll see soon enough,” Doña Yeni concluded. “But I’m going to spend Christmas and New Year’s with family, and you all will be alone. I won’t be able to help you with anything. What’re you going to do?”

  “Our dad is coming back,” Maria said.

  “And I’m going to start working,” Hector added.

  “You’ll see soon enough. Anyway, I’ll leave you some food,” she said, picking up the dirty dishes and heading for the door. “I pray to God it’s enough. I can’t spare too much, and, besides, I’ll be away for nearly two months.”

  David buried his face next to his sister. From the pillow came the warmth of her breath.

  “I pray to God it’s enough,” the woman repeated, heading outside with the dishes.

  “That bitch,” Robert growled when she was gone. “She’s going to report us.”

  ALTHOUGH HE HAD only been on the street for two days, his face and hands were already blackened, as if all the filth of the city had smeared on his skin. He dropped the bag he’d been huffing and tried to stand. But his legs, made wobbly by the glue, would not support him, so he fell like a rag doll onto his sleeping friends. Nobody even flinched at the impact. Sprawled willy-nilly on top of them, he laughed at not being able to move his own body, and closed his eyes to sleep.

  A hand shook him several times. It was
Hector. He opened his eyes and realized that his brother was repeating his name and pulling him. Beside him was also Maria, her hair up in its usual bun. For the first time he saw that his sister looked a lot like his mother. He didn’t like the idea and closed his eyes again.

  “Don’t you do this to me again, Robert,” he heard one of them warn him.

  They walked slowly, supporting his body between them. Up the streets that led to their house. When they stopped, he opened his eyes again and found they had reached the door. His body leaned heavily on his older sister. He felt the warmth of her breath on his face and liked it. He smiled and muttered something nice. The vulgar insult that his sister let fly cracked him like a whip, and he went completely limp in her arms.

  “I’m going to see if I can find Julio,” announced Hector, leaving Robert in Maria’s arms. His sister scoffed.

  “Yeah, and when was the last time you saw him?” She let her little brother drop to the ground. “Whatever, but I am not going to bathe him by myself, and he’s too filthy to come inside.”

  Hector sighed, turned around, and walked away.

  “Then just leave him on the steps until he wakes up.”

  “DID YOU FIND HIM?” asked Maria.

  “No. They say he’s not coming back to our neighborhood,” Hector said with a shrug.

  “What’re we going to do?”

  Hector grabbed his head with both hands, as if ready to yank his hair out. They were sitting on the porch steps, talking in hushed, almost secret tones.

  “David’s stopped talking,” Maria told him.

  “What do you mean?” asked Hector.

  “Just what I said. He won’t talk. Doesn’t respond. He’s been that way for about eight days. Not a word. He just sits next to Manuela and says nothing.”

  “I haven’t noticed it,” said Hector.

  “How could you notice anything? You spend every day on the streets!”

  “I’ve been looking for Julio,” he shot back, trying to justify himself.

  “Stop looking for him. He doesn’t want to be found. And you’re better off without him, Hector. That guy has a bad reputation.”

  “Well, he gave me a lot of money.”

  “And has he made you, uh, ‘pay him back’ yet?” asked Maria with a wicked grin.

  “What? No. He’s going to give me a job, I told you. Stop letting your twisted mind imagine sick stuff! No wonder everyone’s scared of your face, you troll.”

  Maria sighed.

  “Tomorrow’s Christmas,” she whispered instead. “I miss Mom, too.”

  She leaned against Hector’s shoulder. He put his arms around her, and they sat that way in silence, looking up at the stars whose light had finally found its way to their courtyard. Their neighbors had cut down the huge eucalyptus trees that used to fill it with seeds.

  “What will we eat tomorrow?” Maria wondered aloud.

  Hector did not answer.

  “Should we go to Social Services? I’m sure they’ll take us in. And maybe, if we tell them to leave all five of us together . . .”

  “No. Better off dead,” Hector said, not taking his eyes off the sky. “I promised Dad I wouldn’t let anything tear us apart.”

  FIGURED THAT, since I’d stopped feeling the squirming of tadpole tails in my throat every time I saw David, perhaps I could also manage to swallow one myself. Maybe that was what he wanted to tell me, that we should eat tadpoles together. I didn’t understand why it would be so important for him that I get one of those nasty slugs in my belly, but if that was what he really wanted, I had to come up with a way to do it.

  The first thing was to try to find something that felt like a pollywog. Once my dad had taken me to eat oysters, and I had also thrown up. But, yeah, I wasn’t getting any oysters in this place. Then an idea occurred to me. It was disgusting and I had to pray it wouldn’t hurt me, but the result was good. I asked the kitchen to give me some little Andean potatoes.

  “What do you want them for?” they asked me.

  “For an experiment,” I replied with a smile.

  I knew that even if it was the absolute truth, the kitchen ladies weren’t going to believe me anyway. And they didn’t, but I guess they thought it would be hard for me to do any serious damage with them, so they gave me a bag of some round yellow potatoes. I washed them carefully, put them in a jar of water, and left them under my bed.

  The process shouldn’t have taken more than five days, but when I checked them, almost all of them were still hard. Then I did something really gross. But the idea wasn’t mine. I got it from history class. The teacher told us that, to make the alcoholic drink called chicha, Indigenous people would spit into pots full of crushed corn. That’s how they accelerated fermentation. And since that was what I wanted, I went ahead and spit into the jar where my potatoes were still nearly completely fresh. As much drool and mucus as I could hack up. It was mine anyway.

  Then I waited two more days.

  Things had to work out for me this time. The first step was to prepare my stomach and my mind to swallow slimy, disgusting stuff.

  The second step was finally talking to him. My mother had already been in jail for six months and we expected her to be released in less than four more. I focused every day, as hard as I could, on the idea that she’d be released within that period, that the days would pass quickly, that those months would be as light as a sigh. My mother getting released was the best thing that could happen in my life. But I also knew that when she left, I would have to leave this place and never see David again. That seemed to me the worst thing that could happen in my life.

  My mother, the best in the world, had explained to me when I visited her that the minute she got out of prison, we would probably have to leave the country. She told me I should start saying goodbye to David.

  “I can’t,” I told her frankly.

  “It’s for the best. If we could stay, that would be another story. But the safest thing for both of us is to be out of the country until your dad gets out.”

  “What if you adopt him?” I asked, not giving her a chance to think it through.

  She smiled at me and pressed my head against her chest. When she sighed, I could see the small scar on her bare ear.

  “How do you know he wants someone to adopt him?” she asked. “Not everyone wants to have a family.”

  “He does,” I assured her.

  Although I was lying, I imagined that David, like me, wanted to have a family. I would have been happy being part of his family.

  In the end, my mother didn’t say yes or no. But when things were like that with her, it sometimes meant yes. So now what I needed was to be able to swallow disgusting and slimy things to become his best friend, so I could talk with him and ask if he wanted my mom to adopt him when she got out of prison.

  When I removed the lid from the jar of potatoes, the dorm room was filled with a smell so revolting my roommates threw me out. Holding the jar in the middle of the cold corridor, I took what was left of one of the potatoes between my fingers. I thought again about strawberry ice cream, very intensely. I waited until I felt the cold against my teeth and the creamy goodness easing down my throat, its fresh sweetness. Then I put that slimy, stinky stuff as far back as possible on my tongue, and without even breathing, I swallowed it, just another soft piece of ice cream.

  Differently than I had supposed, my stomach kept it all down. After a while I had swallowed every single rotten potato in the jar. I felt a little dizzy, but I figured it was from all the excitement and mental effort I had made to achieve my goal.

  I washed the jar and went to sleep, happy I had learned to master my body.

  The next day I couldn’t move from the toilet, but the important thing had already happened:

  I could swallow anything slimy and gross without vomiting on the spot.

  HAT DAY MANUELA was the first to open her eyes. She woke up feeling good and ready to play, the first time in forever. But since everyone else was still asleep
and she knew how angry Maria got if she was awakened early, Manuela instead stared at each of her siblings in turn. She realized, for example, that Robert’s breathing was the shallowest of all, that Hector slept with an eye half-open, that Maria didn’t close her mouth and always gripped the blanket in one hand, and that David breathed slow and steady. She stared at him without blinking until her gaze made him open his eyes.

  “Want to go outside?” she asked in a whisper. “The sun’s up.”

  She looked at him intensely, as if trying to get into his head. David blinked a few times to make sure he wasn’t seeing things.

  “Are you okay?” asked the boy once he got her in focus.

  “Yes,” Manuela smiled. “Will you show me?”

  She kept grinning, showing her little baby teeth. David sat up, saw that the others were still asleep, and got out of bed. He took his sister’s hand and led her to the courtyard.

  “But there’s nothing left, Manuela. Why would you even go in there?” he said, trying to dissuade her as soon as they were outside.

  “You promised me that as soon as I was well, you would show me . . .” Manuela whined, and David shrugged in resignation. Though he was really happy his sister felt better, her insistence seemed pointless.

  “Do you know how to do it?” asked David.

  Without answering, Manuela went up to Doña Yeni’s door and stood there for a second, as if expecting it to open.

  “I don’t want to keep eating paper,” Manuela complained. Her voice was particularly serious, and David, still looking at his little sister, shook his head.

  “Me neither. But there’s nothing there anymore. I already told you.”

  Manuela shrugged defiantly and, like a small cat, climbed up the wall to the roof. David watched her, terrified but unable to close his eyes. The little girl walked along the edge of the roof, arms stretched out for balance, then slid down to hang for a tense second before getting a foothold on a windowsill. From that perch she looked down at David and made a strange gesture.

  “Don’t be scared. I know the way,” she assured her big brother, pushing the window open and slipping into the absent woman’s room.