ALL MY GOODBYES
ALL MY GOODBYES
Mariana Dimópulos
Translated from the Spanish by
Alice Whitmore
Published by Transit Books
2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California 94612
www.transitbooks.org
First published in Argentina under the title Cada despedida
by Adriana Hidalgo editora 2010
First published in English in Australia
by Giramondo Publishing 2017
© Mariana Dimópulos 2010
Translation © Alice Whitmore 2017
FIRST US EDITION 2019
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER
2018961923
DESIGN & TYPESETTING
Justin Carder
DISTRIBUTED BY
Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
(800) 283-3572 | cbsd.com
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This work was published within the framework of “Sur” Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship of the Argentine Republic. Obra editada en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina.
ALL MY GOODBYES
For Ariel, the only place
Contents
All My Goodbyes
When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often terrible ventures, I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact: that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.
—PASCAL
IT’S THE SAME THING TIME AND TIME AGAIN, shamelessly, tirelessly. It doesn’t matter whether it’s morning or night, winter or summer. Whether the house feels like home, whether somebody comes to the door to let me in. I arrive, and I want to stay, and then I leave.
In the early days, when we’d only just met and would wave hello to each other from afar, and sit down at the same table to drink our coffees, feigning indifference, Alexander liked to make fun of my nomadic ways. He would spend whole afternoons gently teasing me. It was amusing to him that I’d lived in three different houses during the short time I’d been in Heidelberg, and four different cities within the space of a year. I looked splendid, he told me, for someone so restless. Alexander spoke a slow Spanish, which sounded like velvet. But I was not splendid, and I never had been.
In our Berlin house, when we would stay up late talking, listening to Kolya breathing in his infant slumber, even Julia found it hard to believe that I’d been through eleven different jobs, not counting the one in the café where we’d met. “You were a baker, an elevator operator? In a country with so few elevators …” she’d tease.
Like a pair of lovers we’d squander those hours of intimacy robbed from dinnertime, from books or television, since neither of us could be bothered to cook if Kolya had already eaten. Standing in the kitchen we’d nibble on a piece of bread or fruit and she would talk or ask me questions, wiping the benchtop a little, urging, insisting that there must be a reason for it. After a minute’s silence she’d nudge me again, until finally I yielded her favorite sentence.
“Let’s go to bed, I hate introspection.”
We’d agree never to squander the hours like that again, and resolve to go to bed earlier next time. “A baker, and what else?” she’d pester with a smile, and I’d repeat the usual song: shelf-stacker, spare-parts sorter, patisserie attendant, green-grocer, waitress … grudgingly, I’d sigh out every stop on my professional pilgrimage. “Is that all?” Julia would mock. Then we’d stand there talking about her patients, about their diseases and ailments, until our knees and feet hurt. “One day you’ll grow tired of moving around so much,” she’d tell me. But she was wrong. It wasn’t about growing tired, it was about arriving.
After all my travels, all those years lost and won and lost again; after testing a thousand times the raw stock of my being, which never seemed to cook; when at last I had found a man and I had loved him, they called me up so I could see how the story ended: the living room covered in blood from wall to wall, the ransacked house, the abandoned axe. What was I supposed to say? I extracted a tear from my eye and handed it to them, but they didn’t want it. They wanted serious words and explanations. I stated that I had loved him and that I had met him a year before. That I didn’t kill him. All of this was true.
It’s easy to say it now: if only I’d never left, if only I’d never come back. When at the age of twenty-three I told my father I was going away to travel, he was seventy and had already relinquished a lot of things, but I wasn’t one of them. He told me not to do it, not to leave him alone, that I would regret it. Hadn’t I said I wanted to be a biologist, a wife, a mother? I replied that, yes, probably I had. But at twenty-three I was already ancient. I had regarded myself as incapable of sleeping in a bed, sitting in a chair, inhabiting a room, for too long.
“No problem,” Alexander said, sipping at the coffee in his white cup. “When you go to lift the suitcase and realize it makes no sense, you just put it back down, unpack the clothes and hang them up in the wardrobe again. Then you find a piece of paper and you write down all the reasons why you shouldn’t leave. You read over it two, three, four times. You learn it by heart. And that’s it. You don’t go.” But when the time came I was never able to name a single reason for staying in that house or in that city, the place that was the cause of so much pain in my head, my stomach, my eyes during the insomnia of the night, and my shoes during the day.
Was I looking for a reason to stay in Heidelberg?
“Like me, for example,” Alexander said.
And in the beginning I had also thought it possible. I’d imagined that he could be reason enough, imagined our shared home, our complicity beneath the sheets when, in silent agreement, we avoided love at all costs. Germany, for me, was becoming something of a final destination, and for this reason all of those uncertainties were necessary. Those imaginings cost me nothing. And sometimes I delighted in them secretly, like a stowaway, knowing full well they would never become a reality.
It’s true that I left my father in the care of my older brothers, that I sometimes visited him but not very often—not fully, and not when he needed me. But my brothers had families and important obligations to hide behind, whereas I, if I wanted to avoid caring for my father, and if they asked me, could only ever say no, no I can’t, I can’t, I’m going away. And so I packed my suitcases and, armed with a sum of money that was enough but by no means a fortune, I bought a ticket, and within twenty-four hours I was boarding a plane at Ezeiza airport.
“When will you be back?”
“Soon.”
Our goodbyes were a non-event—it’s a good thing men don’t cry. More than sad, my father was angry the last time I saw him. When I arrived, I did what young people do when they’re in Madrid and they’re Latin American and they haven’t crossed the oceans with the purpose of feeding a family back home: I played for a while at the artist’s life, I smoked hashish, wore a scarf in my hair and worried, ostensibly, about the grim fate of the world. The first house I lived in I shared with a Uruguayan guy who played guitar and consumed himself with boredom and melancholy. Because we were artists (of course), someone recorded things with a camera, another improvised musical laments in solidarity with the aforementioned grim fate of the
world; we painted the walls of the house in different colors, strung up amulets and other preposterous knick-knacks to lend the place atmosphere; we made a movie that promised to transform its impromptu director into a golden child of Latin American underground cinema, which, as things stood, was forced to subsist on the crumbs of compassion scattered by its European contemporaries. But all this I understood only much later. At the time all I understood was that, as the means to a cinematographic end, my bedroom was painted dark red, a fact that soon became unacceptable to me—the walls began to collapse above my shoulders, the window was too strict and diminutive, corralled in the corner: how could there be a window there? I asked myself. How had anyone ever been able to live in the presence of such a window? The days began to stretch to terrible lengths. The kitchen had always been a poky little place that nobody cleaned, except superficially, with a rank old cloth, as though out of guilt. But suddenly the shelf was inconceivable to me. And the bathroom? And the dining-room chairs? The kitchen shelf was just a thick groove in the wall. It had been wise not to get emotionally involved with either of my two housemates. I decided to do what I knew best.
My freedom always implies the slavery of another. So, my heart asks (and at heart I’m no good): if I enslave myself, does that mean someone else is set free?
The afternoon of the interrogation I found myself sitting opposite a fat man with a crew cut, who didn’t know what to do with his hands when he spoke about blood. A strong wind had started up, and the vaulted roof of Madame Cupin’s house seemed full of ghosts.
“You’d known them for how long?”
“Since last year. I arrived in November.”
“And you’ve lived here on the farm since that time?”
“That’s right.”
They seemed like unnecessary questions. Did I know of any enemies? Had I overheard any threats, witnessed any arguments? Another man arrived and asked if he could have some water from the fridge. Despite the late hour, the heat of the day persisted. Suddenly, from one moment to the next, it seemed wrong to be sitting there at Madam Cupin’s dining table. I stood up and got a chair from the kitchen, which I dragged over loudly under the watchful gaze of the policemen. And last night, what had happened?
“He told me I should spend the night in El Bolsón.”
“Why?”
“Because of the insects.”
The existence of those insects was to be proven shortly afterward, that same evening, although I’m not convinced their presence was enough to render my story plausible. Some caramel-colored bugs fell from the lamp, wandered slowly to the edge of the table, then continued on their way toward the Persian rug covering the floor. Some were just ordinary termites, others were bedecked with long translucent wings.
Didn’t it strike me as suspicious that, on this precise night, he’d told me to sleep elsewhere, on account of a few bugs? No, what happened was a horrible coincidence. Were they supposed to believe me? they asked. Was I sure I hadn’t left the house of my own accord? Or in collusion with someone else? No: it was Marco, and no one else, who had ordered me to go into town the night before, leaving them alone, him and his mother, here at the Del Monje farm, on the side of the mountain, and the next day I found the two of them in my house, the door wide open, his arm covered with blood. I ran to look for help. What more did they want from me? I spilled more tears, sweet and salty. The axe belonged to Marco. They brought it to me and I identified it.
In Málaga I called myself Luisa; in Barcelona, Lola.
I’d lived in Heidelberg since autumn. I’d already fulfilled all the requirements imposed on recent arrivals to the city. I was a student, I had a room, medical insurance, a residency card. I was sealed and approved. In the employment agency on campus I read an advertisement for a job at the bakery at the foot of the castle. Since speaking on the telephone was impossible, I turned up at the bakery that same afternoon. I had the name of the person I was to speak to on a piece of paper in my jacket pocket, and one or two white lies prepared for good measure. The owner, who was married to the baker, had short hair and wore dark lipstick. Holding a child in her arms she ushered me into the patisserie, where we sat down and I accepted her offer of something to drink: just water. With great effort we commenced something resembling a conversation. She was used to working with foreigners, so long as they were students and understood the importance of being punctual, she hastened to explain. The job was simple—how hard could it be to wrap up loaves of bread, pass them over the counter, accept and return euros? But everything had to be done expeditiously, without an instant’s hesitation. Were we agreed? We were. At six o’clock the next morning, long before sunrise, I walked around the bakery taking notes in my gibberish script, tortuously inscribed on a loose leaf of paper. I noted down the names of all the different breads and German pastries as she dictated them to me, pointing at each compartment behind the glass counter. Good morning, good morning. A man came in. Two loaves of bread. Two what? Two loaves of bread, he’d ordered. What else.
The baker’s assistant would emerge every now and then bearing trays hot from the oven, and it was difficult not to burn myself as I transferred the bread rolls to the baskets, just as it was difficult, under the half-compassionate, half-inquisitive gaze of the owner, with the customers waiting there on the other side of the counter, to avoid letting a precious brötchen fall from my hands to the floor, where it would roll away, far from our feet. The owner told me she’d studied at the university, she’d wanted to be an orthodontist, she liked teeth, she even liked blood a little bit, and I struggled my way as best I could through the mud of our conversation while she arranged the cakes in the cake fridge. I received the cakes from the hands of the pastry chef who, strangely enough, was not fat, despite being affable. And her husband, the baker? He was always “out the back.” The morning passed like a whirlwind, the kind which presages a downpour that never comes.
In the afternoon it was more of the same, and again the next day, with customers entering the bakery to spit their more or less inventive riddles at me: three croissants, a jar of jam. A jar? What on earth was a jar? When they left—which was almost never, for it seemed they only ever entered—I would take the opportunity to resume my battle with the German language, muttering words under my breath, repeating the vocabulary I’d learned, if I’d learned any, and thinking about my father, without wanting to think about him at all. He had always treated me as a distinct and determinate particle in the universe. Now, in the planetary system that was Heidelberg, everybody went about completing their individual elliptical orbits, glimmering in lazy rotations, and I was nothing more than a distant star, barely a reflection of the others’ light. I also thought about doña Carmen, who so often had complained to me, insisting as we scrubbed with our four hands the patio of the hotel in La Mancha: “Speak slowly, my girl, that’s quite an accent you’ve got there!” Now I wondered: if doña Carmen, who spoke my language, had complained about my accent, how would new acquaintances react to my labored attempts at German?
We’re just testing out physical states, my father always used to say. Even stones. Precambrian stones are fundamentally no different from the wings of a fly. He had that air of self-sufficient competence that doctors and naturalists have. The harmony of the stone breaks down into baryons just as a housefly does. It simply holds its form for a longer period of time, et cetera, et cetera. When I left Buenos Aires at twenty-three I had long been tired of listening to him, even though I loved him biblically, perhaps even more than that.
I’d been a foreigner for barely a month. After the artists’ share house I spent a week in a first-floor apartment in the center of Madrid, and didn’t pine at all for my old housemates, nor for the red room I’d left behind. My new bedroom was old, constantly invaded by the sounds of music, shouting, and the loud opinions of the people eating in the tapas bar below. Although I thought about it more than once, I never quite managed to drag myself out of bed, stuff myself into a pair of jeans and join them down
stairs, to put a drink in my belly and gaze at their chests or their eyes. Instead I remained in bed, listening to their repetitive conversations. There was no end to their stupidity and their happiness. Stale smoke sifted into my bedroom. Each night lasted a thousand nights. Soon I had motive enough; a week after moving in I packed up my possessions, which were scant, and went to the bus station. I’d been told about a town called Almagro; Almagro was very pretty, or so people said, and although I wasn’t entirely sure I was looking for somewhere pretty, or beautiful, or lovely, I got on the bus and a few hours later I was there.
“Tourist?” they asked me.
I don’t know if it was the situation that made me a liar, but as I’ve said before, I don’t have a good heart. I replied that yes, I was, and for a period of time that seemed like too long I became a tourist. I fulfilled all my obligations, visited places, marveled at them. The plaza, the old theater, the motionless people behind the arched porticos. You have to go to Spain to understand porticos. That civilian zoo, that arid stage; and then, suddenly, everything became what it should have been, and I no longer marveled at it. My dalliance with the century-old aberration of tourism was over. I selected a hotel with a patio and a medieval cistern, and met doña Carmen. I lied to her, too. What else could I have done? It’s not that I was trying to forget something, to undo a terrible past, to abandon someone or destroy myself; it’s simply that I was finally old enough now, and although I’d tried many times back home in Buenos Aires, I’d never managed to come to terms with my own mean spirit. I spent the first few weeks in one of the hotel’s most isolated rooms, at my own request. I did nothing but read and watch television. When doña Carmen came out to hose down the patio I would study her through the window, especially her arms and her waist, her predictably floral dresses, her high-heeled shoes. She was a beautiful woman, in her way. She tackled her chores with tremendous energy and asked nothing of anyone, except her two sons, who lived far away. She didn’t even need a man, or so I gathered from her comments one evening when, on account of the heat, she threw herself on the sofa in the foyer, cheeks burning. For me, nada, she said; nothing, my girl, just a bit of bread, a slice of jamón, and a cold beer. She was neat, tidy, she knew what it meant to sweat. One time I went out to the patio and started to help her with the cleaning, which, despite the argument we struck up, she eventually allowed. In the delicatessen down by the theater I overheard a man say that doña Carmen had once been a whore. He didn’t say it in a disapproving tone, he might even have been an ex-client, unless of course doña Carmen had practiced her profession in some other part of Spain.
All My Goodbyes Page 1
