‘Who am I, Mamá?’ Emilia asked, giving her the answer.
‘You’re Rita my sister. Who else would you be?’
Rita had died ten years earlier. Emilia quickly realised that, for her mother, time had stopped in a happy eternity.
She was taken to the clinic opposite the house where they tested her reflexes and pointlessly asked her questions about her age, the city and the street where she lived. In the afternoon, she was still submerged in the same forgetful torpor. At times, Emilia thought she was almost her old self. At others, she was disheartened to hear her talk like a complete stranger, words that seemed to come from someone else’s throat. One of the nurses said something that made her think: I’ve known patients who wanted to drift away, people who are weary of themselves. Some of them recover by staying in that state of nothingness only to get sick again if they’re forced to come back. Emilia had read something similar in Proust: The most humiliating suffering is to feel that one no longer suffers.
The doctors asked how long she had been suffering these symptoms. No one knew; no one had been paying attention.
‘She’s been very distracted lately,’ the father said, ‘but then she was always that way.’
‘A few weeks ago, she got it into her head that there were men spying on her,’ Chela told them. ‘Since then, she’s been staying in her room with the curtains closed. She’ll walk into the kitchen or the bathroom and forget why she’s there.’
‘That’s strange,’ the father said, ‘I hadn’t noticed.’
‘And you don’t know that she drops her trousers in the middle of the kitchen and pees in front of the servants.’
‘You shouldn’t talk about such things, they’re private.’
‘Any little detail is helpful,’ the doctors said. ‘You’ll need to keep an eye on her for a while. When we have a clear diagnosis, we’ll know how best to help her.’
‘She’ll be better cared for here in the clinic than she will anywhere else. Make sure she has a nurse with her day and night,’ the father decided.
‘That would be a mistake,’ one of the doctors said. ‘She has a better chance of improving in her own home. Nothing can take the place of the care and affection of her loved ones.’
‘It’s not that simple,’ Dupuy countered. ‘I’m out at work all day. I have important responsibilities I cannot simply give up. How are we supposed to deal with her if she’s getting worse?’
‘She is a very tranquil person,’ said the same doctor. ‘The best thing is to be gentle and patient with her.’
‘Do you have any idea how long this might last?’ the father asked. ‘I need to be able to relax too.’
‘If it bothers you, put her in another room,’ the doctor said impatiently. ‘Keep her company when you have the time. And leave the television on. That might help her.’
They brought Señora Ethel home. Emilia made up a room with two beds far from her father’s bedroom and suggested she stay for a while to look after her. At dinner time, she turned on the television. There was a variety show on called La noche de Andrés. The host sang (very badly), danced, told inane stories, introduced other singers (who were even worse) and promised each new act would reveal the secret of happiness. Every fifteen or twenty seconds there was a roar of applause, a burst of canned laughter. Emilia noticed that her mother was weeping, her face expressionless. Tears trickled down her face, soaking her nightgown.
‘Are you in pain?’ Emilia asked. ‘Do you want me to call the doctor?’
‘This programme is really sad,’ her mother replied. ‘Just look at what these people have to do to get attention.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’
‘Can’t you see they’re prisoners. They’re in jail and in order to get out they have to draw a car on the wall.’
‘What car?’
‘Any car. Can’t you see them? They draw it with chalk, open the car door and disappear.’
The Eel found out about Ethel’s illness that afternoon and on Sunday after Mass came to visit the Dupuy family.
‘Ethel will recognise me,’ he said to his wife with the swollen legs. They arrived at the mansion on the calle Arenales with a military escort. The priest’s sermon at Mass had proposed a riddle with no solution. It had something to do with the Gospel passage about salt losing its saltiness. The priest had glared down from the pulpit: Christ would know what to do with such salt. But what of us? Wherewith will we season it?
‘Why would anyone want to season something that doesn’t exist?’ he asked his wife.
‘What do I know?’ she replied. ‘It seems obvious to me – you just buy some more salt.’
She said the sermon had depressed her and she no longer had the energy to visit sick people. The president did not feel like it either, but duty had to come before everything. He did his best to seem touched when Dupuy came out to meet him. And yet he could not suppress the tics that had been annoying him for months now: sudden, violent electrical discharges flashing through his face. He was wearing a twill suit and the same heavily Brylcreemed hairstyle he wore when he gave speeches. Dupuy went with him to the bedroom.
‘Señor Presidente.’
To refresh the sick woman’s memory, one of the daughters announced his name as he went in while she stared into space with an expression of bliss.
‘Come on now, Ethel, who am I?’ asked the Eel, bringing his perfumed face close to hers.
‘Good day to you, señor. Thank you for coming.’
There was one of the silences which carried her off to another place, then she went on in the same tone, though her voice was different.
‘Come on then, out with it, you little coward. You went to Conti and told him everything. Get out, go on, fuck off.’
The president’s aide-de-camp had the military escort leave the room.
‘She’s got you confused with Tito, señor,’ Dupuy explained. ‘Her twin brother, he used to play with her. Don’t pay any attention. You’ll have to forgive her, she’s not herself.’
‘Tito puto, go get yourself fucked by some germs. I hope they germinate you good and fuck you till you’re fucked.’
The voice became more and more shrill as though sharpened with a sabre. Emilia rushed into the room and hugged her mother.
‘Papá, leave her alone, please. All these people just confuse her. Poor Mamá, poor thing.’
Disappointed, the president shook his head, took Dr Dupuy’s arm and went out into the corridor.
‘I’m sorry, Dupuy. I had no idea she was so bad. Her expression is completely blank.’
‘I’m the one who’s sorry, señor. I don’t know where she came up with language like that. I look after her as best I can. I don’t let anyone see her. I’m not about to admit defeat over some minor setback.’
‘You get more clear-sighted every day, Dupuy. I can tell as much from your editorials. Congratulations. I admire the pieces you’ve written about the Jews who are trying to stay in Patagonia. You brilliantly unmasked them and put an end to their little game. We have to show them that they don’t rule the world.’
The mother sat up in bed. Emilia had the impression that she had heard what was being said. Every word seemed to trigger a memory in her, and each memory triggered another word. A thin wail like the bleating of a lamb came from her mother. Then, with no transition, she began to sing in a tuneless voice: L’shana haba’a b’Yerushalayim.
‘What’s that?’ asked the president, alarmed. ‘Is she speaking Jewish?’
‘No, señor,’ said Dupuy. ‘I think she’s singing “Next Year in Jerusalem”. It’s Hebrew. She must have heard it when she was a little girl: a Jewish family lived next door. Her childhood is about the only thing she does remember now. My daughters and I have to treat her like she’s five years old again.’
Emilia stayed in the house for several months looking after her mother. Even when she slept, she was alert to any changes in her mother’s breathing, to her timid catlike mewling. S
he would get up in the night several times to take her temperature or take her to the bathroom. Every time, her mother would treat her as though she were someone new, a character from the stories she read in Maribel and Vosotras, or a playmate.
Several times in the night Emilia would get up to take her mother’s temperature or take her to the bathroom and each time, her mother reacted as though she were someone different, some character from a story she had read in Maribel and Vosotros.
‘Oh, how lovely, I haven’t seen you for ages,’ her mother said when Emilia came into the room even if she had only been gone a moment. It clearly kept her entertained since none of the characters ever reappeared.
The following Sunday, the Eel’s wife brought her a gift, a medal of St Dymphna, the patron saint of mental illness. The priest had brought it back from the Vatican together with a collection of colourful prints. The Supreme Pontiff particularly recommended the saint, whose miracles in Belgium and Africa had been well documented. ‘Dymphna can be of great succour to those who have hallucinations,’ the priest had said, choking on the consonants. ‘Very few of the faithful are familiar with her because the illnesses she cured were little known before the advent of psychoanalysis. The Pope himself suggested that a candle be lit every night and ten Hail Marys offered up to St Dymphna so that she might smile on the sick person and bless her from her place in paradise.’
Summer passed, then autumn and still her mother did not come back to reality. Emilia did not move from the bed next to her. She could not bear the television being on constantly, but the doctors were convinced that it helped bring the outside world to her mother, helped stimulate her. Together they put up with seven to ten toxic hours of programming a day: lunches with Mirtha Legrand, the bucolic idyll of Little House on the Prairie, the exploits of Wonder Woman and the Bionic Woman. The evening news regurgitating speeches by the Eel surrounded by his uniformed acolytes. In chorus they explained that Argentina was waging a pitiless war against the enemies of the Christian West and that God would defend the blue-and-white flag of Argentina against the blood-red rag of Communism. After that came a warning, or rather an order: ‘People of Argentina, we shall conquer!’
‘Having to watch television day and night is frying my brain,’ Emilia told the doctors. ‘I’m not sleeping properly. I’m having hallucinations.’ They prescribed a sedative for her. Emilia began to think that all these prayers to St Dymphna could have side effects, the way some medicines did. Every morning, she found it harder to get up, she felt her body opening up like a plant with spiders crossing from branch to branch on greasy strands of web. When her mother slept, memories of Simón would come to her, but Emilia never went beyond the boundaries of her body; as though her body were a house condemned, she would go to the door only to retreat. She tried to capture the memories, jotting them down in the little notebook she always had to hand: ‘Thinking about S, my throat hurts, my chest hurts, my womb hurts. If I saw him dead, I would kill myself.’ It seemed to her that she would never escape this plane in which few things happened and those that did were all the same.
Early one morning, after taking her mother to the bathroom, she saw the toilet was full of blood and there was a trail of drops leading away from it. The cook said that her mother had eaten a salad of beetroot and hard-boiled eggs and that beetroot always turned urine red. But the bleeding continued and Emilia, terrified, asked the family doctor for help. Shortly afterwards an ambulance arrived and took Ethel to a clinic in Belgrano. Dr Dupuy was on an official visit to Los Angeles and his daughter had no idea how to get in touch with him. It was 6 a.m. in Buenos Aires and everyone in Los Angeles would be in bed. Against her better judgement, she asked the Eel for help. He called her father at 6.30 a.m. and Emilia falteringly told him what had happened. ‘And you thought it was worth bothering me for something as trivial as that?’ Dupuy was indignant. ‘I travel ten thousand miles and even here I can’t be left in peace to get on with my work. Your mother has everything she needs, I don’t see there’s any reason to worry.’ He was furious, however, to hear that two strangers had been in the house without anyone keeping an eye on them. ‘What if they were subversives in disguise who intended to plant a bomb under my bed? What if they demanded a ransom for the nurse? I go away for a couple of days and the whole world falls apart.’ This carelessness, this negligence infuriated him. Emilia decided to remain calm while her father fulminated down the phone; she could almost see the veins bulging in his temples.
‘Can you find out what’s happening with Mamá and call me back in half an hour, please?’
‘You think it’s as easy as that to call?’ Dupuy retorted, even more furious. ‘The phone system in the country is a disaster. The language in this country is a disaster.’
Señora Ethel was resting in the clinic, well looked after. Emilia spent hours in the emergency room waiting for a diagnosis. Eventually, a young man, his white coat unbuttoned, came out into the hallway, quickly taking off his surgical mask and his latex gloves. He told her that, for the moment, all he could find was a severe case of haemorrhoids. He asked whether the patient often complained.
‘You may have noticed that my mother is not herself,’ Emilia answered. ‘She never complains about anything.’
‘We’re going to have to do a sigmoidoscopy and a complete blood analysis. It might be nothing more than anaemia. Right now, there’s no need for you to worry.’
‘A sigmoidoscopy. I’ve never heard of that.’
‘We need to make sure she doesn’t have cancer in her sigmoid colon.’
‘I’d like to see her.’
‘Not just yet. We’ll let her rest for a while.’
It made Emilia nervous, the doctor’s habit of speaking in the first-person plural, as though all of humanity were ill or convalescing.
She took a cigarette out of her handbag. An assistant rushing past with an IV drip dodged round her, irritated. She gestured to the large wooden crucifix next to the exit, and the sign above the cross that read: Christ is always watching you.
Shortly before noon, Chela came to relieve her. Emilia realised that her sister’s mind was on other things. She had got engaged to a business consultant with the looks of a tennis pro and they were planning to get married in April or May the following year. Their mother’s lunatic state made it impossible to hold the wedding reception at the bride’s home and the major dilemma in her sister’s life was where to host the four hundred people on the guest list which Chela made and unmade every day.
She arrived at the clinic complaining that the rain was getting worse. She fetched a chair so she could sit down for a minute, and when another nurse came and told them that the results of the pathologist’s tests would be ready in an hour asked whether she could leave yet.
‘What are the tests for?’ she asked anxiously.
‘To see whether Mamá has cancer,’ Emilia told her. ‘She probably doesn’t.’
‘What kind of cancer? What happens if she’s got it?’
‘There’s no point getting worried ahead of time. I told you, just take it easy.’
‘How am I supposed to take it easy? Can’t you see she’s trying to ruin my wedding? She’s been like this for months, playing at being ill and swearing like a trooper.’
‘Well then, you just do what you have to do. I’ll look after her, I don’t mind.’
Two days later, when Dr Dupuy came back from his trip, the tests had revealed a tumour in the sigmoid colon. There was a silver lining, according to the doctors, because there were no signs of metastases. The mother’s bony, emaciated body barely swelled the sheets. She had cannulas in her nose, and the usual intravenous feeding tube in her arm. After midnight, the rain stopped and the air began to move sluggishly between the buzzing of the blowflies and the death throes of the foul-smelling flowers. The corridor was covered by a slick, humid film and Emilia could clearly see the prints left by the nurses. Her father talked with the doctors for about half an hour and then shut himself up in a phone bo
oth. He emerged having already made a decision.
He did not inform his daughters of his decision until the following day. He called them into his study, a place they were only admitted to on special occasions. He closed the curtains and made sure the door was locked. Chela, as unsettled as Emilia, perched on the edge of her seat as though she wanted to escape. The study had always been gloomy, but now it was worse. The walls which were free of books were hung with the diplomas and citations from his years of service to his country. The doctor addressed his daughters in a voice so subdued, so secretive, it seemed to dissolve into the air. Ever since they were little, the daughters had known that everything their father did and said was a secret and did not even discuss it with each other. It made no sense to ask them to be discreet, but this is what Dupuy did. He went further: he forced them to swear that they would never repeat what he might say that day or in the difficult days ahead to anyone, anyone, he repeated, not even to your fiancé, Chela, or your husband when he’s your husband, not even to the priest in the confessional. Emilia feared the worst. She feared – though she did not dare to formulate the thought – that her father had decided to kill their mother, out of compassion or for some other reason, and was going to ask them to be complicit in his crime. In the thin small voice that was all she could manage, she asked: ‘You’re not going to confess a sin, are you, Papá? Because if it’s a sin, we have to confess it.’ ‘How could you think such a thing?’ her father answered. ‘I’m a Catholic, I abide by God’s commandments, I would never do anything to make you lose His sanctifying grace.’
He moved his chair over to the desk and went on talking, his face turned towards the window as though even there, even out there in the garden, his enemies might be listening. Emilia never really knew who these enemies were her father talked about, because one day it would be the Montoneros12, then it was the People’s Revolutionary Army13 and later, when they had all been exterminated, it was a brigade led by some admiral who was plotting against the Eel, or an envoy of the American government, or Pinochet threatening to invade the islands on the Beagle channel, or corrupt intermediaries paralysing the nuclear power plants. When one group retreated, another advanced, and sometimes none of them retreated.
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