The Heart and Other Viscera

by Félix J Palma

  “Look what someone pushed under the door this morning: a letter from Jasmyn.” While Nuria eyed me over the rim of her coffee cup with her usual disdain, Laura seized the letter with a mixture of suspicion and interest. She tore open the envelope and started to read. My pulse quickened as her eyes widened as they slid along the delicate lines traced on the paper. Slowly, her face started to light up, as Jasmyn told Laura that she loved her deeply, but that sooner or later all curious dolls like her had to set off on a journey to the mythical Land of the Dolls, a land inhabited by others like her, toys that had chosen to live without children, to pursue their own lives, far away from everything that reminded them of their sad condition as playthings. Jasmyn wasn’t sure that this place existed. Maybe it was a fantasy world, a myth propagated by dolls in shop windows to make their incarceration more bearable. And yet, she felt duty bound to embark on this journey into the unknown, in the hope that she might one day find herself there. Laura’s lips parted in a smile when Jasmyn assured her that she, Laura, would be welcome in this Land of the Dolls, and even offered to send a map with directions on how to get there, assuming it really existed and she succeeded in finding it.

  From that day on, I followed Kafka’s example and shut myself away in my study to devise those letters, which, like a playful child, I would push under the front door every morning. Laura soon came to expect them and would get up before the alarm clock went off, just like on Christmas Eve, eager to discover how far Jasmyn had gotten in her search for the Land of the Dolls. Seeing her curled up in an armchair in the living room hunched over my letters, I felt a surge of pride. Not just because it proved to me that this time I had found the correct solution to the problem, but because the eagerness with which she devoured my words suggested I had done a more than satisfactory job. Moreover, my daughter never told us what was in the letters, as if that was a secret between her and her doll, thus imbuing my humble flights of fancy with even greater meaning.

  I had hoped that Nuria might appreciate the considerable effort I was making to alleviate our child’s suffering, or at least admire the inspired strategy I had devised—given that I decided not to tell her I had lifted the idea from an author called Franz Kafka who had lived in the last century. Apart from anything else, I doubted she had ever heard of him, as reading didn’t play a big part in Nuria’s life, apart from gossip magazines, home and garden supplements, and supermarket catalogues. And yet, every morning, Nuria would observe my bizarre antics with a look of indifference. She saw me slide the envelope under the door, then hurry back to my chair in the dining room, as though witnessing the behavior of a complete lunatic. Perhaps she thought Laura should know the truth, and that all this was going to affect her mind, turning her into a hopeless dreamer, incapable of living in the adult world, where there was no room for fantasy, but I doubted that. I suspected her cool response had more to do with the fact that we had reached the point of no return and that no matter what I did, whether I saved a child from a burning building or was nominated for the Nobel Prize, she couldn’t admire me. The resentment she had built up toward me over the years made that impossible. The days when we dazzled each other were long gone. We now found ourselves trapped in a quagmire into which we were slowly sinking, together and yet unable to hold hands, since apparently we even rejected the affection we had once felt for each other, now seeing it as some kind of infectious disease. A quagmire upon which we had built a refuge against the world, a refuge that turned out to be as fragile as a house of cards.

  And yet, this hardly mattered to me, because I had discovered a far more comforting refuge in Jasmyn’s letters. At last, I had discovered something I was really good at, which gave meaning to my otherwise meaningless life. And so, while my marriage quietly fell apart and I drank of the bitter cup of sorrow, Jasmyn experienced happiness. Because, if no one appeared to be looking out for us in the universe we inhabited, in the pocket-sized world created by my pen, I was a watchful, benevolent God, who could clear the path of Jasmyn’s destiny of all obstacles, without her having to kneel and beg me for it in any church. My hand was responsible for Jasmyn traveling all over Europe, staying in boxes belonging to toys she met along the way as if they were safe houses, while she drew ever closer to her longed-for Land of the Dolls. After consulting the atlas, I decided to locate it in the Himalayas, in a small valley at the foot of Mount Everest, where all the dolls lived in peace and harmony, tilling the land by day and singing songs around bonfires at night. Jasmyn now wrote her letters by the light of those fires. She said how much she missed Laura and that one night, although she had not been designed for this in the factory, she had shed real tears as she looked at a photograph of Laura she had stolen from our family album before she left, which I kept hidden in my wallet. By this time, little Laura was cured, and so I decided it was time for Jasmyn to confess that she couldn’t send her a map that would guide her to the Land of the Dolls, as everyone there had taken a silent vow to protect their world. Jasmyn also confessed that she had fallen in love with Crown, a warrior doll who wore a sword at his belt, black velvet boots, and had been appointed Captain of the Guard, whose job it was to defend the kingdom.

  The day when news of Jasmyn’s wedding arrived was the day Nuria decided to leave me. There was no point in going on, she said, as she lugged her suitcase toward the front door. Although I’d been expecting it, the fact that she chose to abandon me at the exact moment when I was being such an excellent father was extremely painful. Inspired by something akin to professional pride, and in the vain hope of eliciting her praise, I couldn’t help referring smugly to my most recent endeavors. Nuria shook her head to emphasize her disappointment.

  “You should be doing other things than filling our daughter’s head with nonsense,” she said disdainfully. “You aren’t Kafka, Diego.”

  I was so astonished at having been exposed in this way that I didn’t know what to say. And when one doesn’t know what to say, it is invariably the voice of despair that speaks.

  “I can’t live without you, Nuria,” I murmured. This naive, schoolboy admission hung in the air, neither of us knowing what to do with it.

  “Goodbye, Diego,” Nuria said finally, closing the door behind her.

  Dazed, I stood in the hallway for a few minutes trying to think of what to do. I would wait an hour, and then call Nuria’s sister’s place, where I assumed my wife had gone, and do my utmost to convince her to come back. But first, I had to console my daughter, to whom Nuria had been talking before she left, shut away in her bedroom.

  Laura was sitting on her bed, staring blankly at the wall. I sat down beside her and tried to find a way to explain the situation. I was about to speak, when she placed her hand on mine.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” she said, her eyes still fixed on the wall. “Mom will come back. I know she will.”

  This made me choke back my words, as my eyes filled with tears. Our world was collapsing around us, but for the moment it was best to ignore the sound of cascading rubble. This was what my daughter was suggesting. We sat side by side for a while, plunged in a cathedral-like silence, until my daughter fell asleep on the bed, and I drew the covers over her, feeling that she should be drawing them over me.

  It was then, stroking my daughter’s hair as night descended over the city, that I remembered something from my conversation with Nuria that I had overlooked at the time: How did she know that I’d employed the same strategy with Laura that Franz Kafka had used almost a century earlier on the little girl in the park?

  I leaped to my feet, overwhelmed by a certainty I refused to believe even though everything seemed to point to it being true. I stumbled along the corridor, the pieces of a puzzle that had been there all the time falling into place in my mind. Confirming my theory was terribly simple. I only had to park my car opposite Víctor’s apartment and go up there when I saw him leave for work. I rang the bell, knowing who would open the door.

  “You can’t live without me,” I said before her hor
rified gaze.

  I arrived back home just in time to take Laura to school. As I went up in the elevator, it occurred to me that this was the first time in a month that no letter would be waiting for her when she got up, and so I was surprised when my foot touched an envelope as I opened the door. I picked it up off the floor, scarcely able to believe my eyes. But the letter wasn’t from Jasmyn. It was from Nuria, addressed to me. In it she assured me this wasn’t goodbye, that she would be back, but first she needed to see the world, to find herself. Her words might have given me enormous consolation, had they not been printed in the clumsy, strained handwriting of my nine-year-old daughter.

  Laura and I exchanged glances before dissolving in a tearful embrace. I realized that my daughter had always known, but had preferred to believe the beautiful lie I had invented, rather than imagine her doll broken, possibly thrown into a ditch. And now she was offering me the chance to believe that mine would come back too, even though I couldn’t help remembering her body sprawled across Víctor’s bed, the marks of my fingers around her throat, and a last look of reproach in her eyes, because she didn’t approve of my way of handling that situation either.

  A Fairy-Tale Life

  “We are stories telling stories, nothing.”

  —Ricardo Reis

  Once upon a time, there was an office worker by the name of Pelayo Díaz. One afternoon in mid-December, he was contemplating the Christmas gift basket on his table with such intense, extravagant hatred it was as if he thought it might get up and walk away at any moment. The gift basket was as ordinary as could be: Christmas cake rings, coconut balls, cans of peaches and pineapple in syrup, a couple of bottles of cava, several bars of turrón, all wrapped in a mosquito net of green cellophane and topped off with a complicated red bow. It contained nothing different from the previous year’s or anything that led it to deserve such an exaggerated scrutiny. But Pelayo knew himself well enough to be aware that thanks to this kind gesture, the insurance company he worked for was inevitably condemning him to an interminable week of stomachaches: he belonged to that category of manic, obsessive people who are experts at transforming the most trivial event into a tragedy. Never leave until tomorrow what could be done today was one of the maxims he was inexorably governed by.

  Pelayo remembered with a shudder how receiving this gift from his firm had filled him with hope the previous year. Their recognition meant a lot to him. After two long years working in the streets, he’d celebrated with sugar-coated fruits the fact that now he had a desk job in a heated office. In those days, the only Christmas present he’d received was a card so impersonal that even the frolicking of the shepherds around their bonfire seemed fake. Happy to belong to the big family of a company where it was not completely impossible he might get ahead, that night Pelayo had pulled a bar of turrón out of the gift basket and shoved the rest into the fridge. Little did he realize that this gesture would mark the beginning of a nightmarish episode that ended with him being admitted to the hospital.

  Later on, Pelayo raided his fridge in search of the can of peaches. After a series of anxious calculations, he realized that if he ate at his usual speed he would not be able to finish the whole basket without some of it going bad. The next day, he turned up at the office with his belt let out another notch, a dead weight in his stomach, and the taste of honey on his tongue, which made him want to retch when he saw the romantic novels the gleeful receptionists were reading to pass the time between phone calls. Despite the protests from his stomach advising him against any further indulgence, Pelayo was unable to sit at his computer and see anything but rotting fruit on the screen. When he returned home that evening, he tried to carry on as normal, but found it impossible to concentrate on anything without having to make regular visits to the fridge to check that it was still plugged in, that it was the same docile domestic appliance as ever, incapable of betrayal of any kind. It was then that he understood he had been offered a poisoned chalice. He realized there was only one way to put an end to this dreadful situation: to eliminate the root cause of the problem. Still imprinted on Pelayo’s memory were the furious swaying of an ambulance, the unpleasant familiarity with which the oxygen mask fitted on his face, the tube pushing gaily up his nostril and then snaking down inside him, and above all the disgusting suction that led him to realize that however many jails he might find himself in, he would never suffer any greater violation.

  This time, when the firm’s delivery boy arrived at his apartment with this year’s Christmas gift basket, Pelayo Díaz felt so dizzy he almost collapsed onto the carpet. It was like a fresh encounter with a past enemy he had thought was dead. He watched, horrified, as the messenger laid it down on the living room table, astonished he even had the nerve to stretch out a hand in the hope of being rewarded for having brought this spawn of Satan into his house. Pelayo quickly got rid of him with a few coins bathed in the glittering sweat from his palm, shut the door on him, and turned to look at the accursed gift basket staring at him with a haughty, challenging air from his living room table. He knew he had lost from the start, aware that he did not have the courage simply to throw it away in the dumpster around the corner, from which countless babies were recovered every day. He tried to steel himself to face an existence of years crowned by the continual reappearance of the gift basket, which would remind him with blameless punctuality that hell reeked of molasses. Overwhelmed, he collapsed on the sofa, building up his strength to face his sickly destiny, trying to convince himself that the nurse who had attended him last time had been thinner than he remembered, and that the fact that she had plunged a tube in his throat implied an intimacy that just needed to be nurtured.

  It was at this point that he considered the possibility of giving the gift basket away. An image came into his mind of that little old grandma he had met the year before, when he was pounding the streets in search of clients he could swindle in order to earn his miserable commission. That afternoon, he had been combing a neighborhood on the outskirts without much hope. The fact that this old woman had opened the door to him so readily, without rejecting him through the peephole or subjecting him to a police interrogation with the chain on, had stayed with him. Not to mention the evident poverty that Pelayo was able to glimpse over her shoulder, which had encouraged him to excuse himself and say goodbye, determined to leave the same way he had arrived—without a commission, but keeping his scruples intact. To swindle an old lady whom life already appeared to have relentlessly cheated seemed to him an unworthy act. And then she seized him by the arm, in an almost despairing gesture, and invited him in. She could put some coffee on, and there must still be some buns from the last time she had a visitor. Wasting half an hour keeping a lonely, so obviously poor, old woman company, having to listen to her tell him about how her children had abandoned her, or about all her aches and pains, did not seem like a rewarding enterprise, whichever way he looked at it. Even to this day, Pelayo finds it hard to explain why he accepted her invitation. The fact is that no sooner had he nodded his head than this skinny old lady, wearing a housecoat that must once have been blue and smelled of mint candies, was already pushing him down a hallway as gloomy as a catacomb that led to a tiny, dark room so crammed with prehistoric pieces of furniture that it looked like an antique shop. Pelayo understood immediately that this must be her lair, because the air was filled with the smell of mint in a way that could only be explained by the constant, uninterrupted chewing of industrial quantities of soothing sweets. The room was so cramped that the bits of furniture seemed to rub up against one another like cattle in a barn. A narrow window let in a feeble light that settled on them like sawdust, so that Pelayo had to make a great effort to distinguish between a chest of drawers, a coat stand, a round table, twin rocking chairs, three smaller chairs, and what was possibly a bookcase, although he could not swear to it.

  His hostess went off to make the coffee, and Pelayo was left sufficiently on his own to be able to go over to the row of portraits growing like muddy
lichen on top of the chest of drawers. They were all the same person, displayed in chronological order, so that from left to right he could see how a little girl gradually grew into a woman. The old lady also appeared in some of them, always discreetly in the background, but as the photos progressed toward the right her presence became vaguer, as if she was starting to be superfluous. Pelayo could imagine how much it must hurt the old woman to glance at those images that only served to illustrate the way her solitude had gradually built up. He felt an intense dislike of the ungrateful girl smiling without remorse in the final photo, already enjoying her escape from the nest, the exciting adventure of independence. His hostess, after returning from the kitchen carrying a small tray on which a couple of coffee cups and a tin sugar bowl slid, rummaged in a drawer until she rescued a little plate containing what appeared to be the remnants of some distant Christmas past. She gestured daintily toward her guest to invite him to sit in one of the rocking chairs. Her gentleness, the picturesque chignon her hair was done up in, the innocence of her smile, and that delicate way she had of looking at him, plus the hallucinatory smell of mint, combined to create in Pelayo a sense of well-being he had not felt for centuries. Everything was encouraging him to spill his heart out. He sat back in the chair like someone stretching out on a couch, and before he realized it, the story of his life came pouring out of him while she smiled indulgently. Pelayo was amazed that an existence such as his, so bereft of any defining moments, could be made to last two full hours in the retelling. By the time he finished talking, darkness had fallen outside, and the two of them could only make each other out thanks to the little light that the grandmother must have switched on at some point during his garbled confession. He said goodbye with a much lighter soul, but without daring to look the old lady in the face, for fear of seeing bitter disappointment there, because without meaning to, it had been him rather than her who had poured out his troubles in that shadowy, mint-scented room.