August

by Romina Paula

  27.

  I’m ready. Before I leave for good, another little love session with Ali. I’m going to miss her, I feel bad leaving, leaving her. And not being able to explain it to her. Not being able to tell her why I’m leaving, or where I’m going. Or take her with me, for a while, like a divorced parent. Scheduled visits, the right to visit the cat. I sit back down in the armchair to enjoy her being there. She gets on top of me, makes a couple of rounds until she finds the perfect spot, the adequate curvature. She lets herself be pet, lets go. Suddenly she bites me. I get a little mad, but I understand. I know she knows. I know she can tell I’m leaving. So I let her get angry and manifest her anger. That’s the right thing for her to do. I pet her in a very dedicated way, just like I would like to be pet if I had that much hair, and it works. The nice thing about it is that there can’t be any speculation: I know that she will never be able to do the same thing to me, and that makes my gesture unconditional, and I like that it’s like that, unconditional. We have our moment of love, the exchange is very intense, I lose myself in her, to her. I hear a horn, both of us are startled, and Ali, one more time, bites me. Such is our farewell. I take with me the marks of her teeth on my index finger. It’s not nothing. Right away I hear a few soft knocks at the door. I run to the bathroom, look at myself in the mirror, I’m wearing your jacket, I don’t think I look disgusting, I grab my bag, look around, and leave. Juli’s at the door, sleepy looking, in his sheepskin. He greets me with an affectionate kiss on the cheek and a quick hug and grabs my bag. He throws it in the back, in the bed of the truck, under a tarp. Can you believe how cold it is? he says as I’m turning around to get in on the passenger side. I already feel nostalgic for Ali, it’s awful, I feel like an abandoning mother, I’d love to kidnap her and take her with me, but I remind myself that cats are first and foremost creatures of place. Then I think, too, of Cora. I think about my mother, I’m linear, I said that. What would she have been feeling as she left it all behind? If I feel this way just about Ali, your cat, after a week’s cohabitation . . . What the fuck could have been going through that woman’s mind in order for her to leave behind—once and for all—a husband and two children? Two kids aged one and a half and three. Who could even remotely start to think of that? How? What the fuck came into her head or went out of it for her to just up and decide to move, to disappear/disintegrate like that? Could things with Dad have been that difficult? I wouldn’t think so, based on how he remembers her; he never seemed to get too worked up about her or anything. Besides, Dad is not a violent person, that’s very clear. Maybe it wasn’t even anything that decisive, maybe it simply wasn’t enough for her, something about us, the family package; something of what we gave her wasn’t sufficient, wasn’t enough, and so she left, one day she simply left. Cora decided to up and move. You decided to up and move, Cora, how. Maybe she hadn’t even planned to leave and she went and she died, that could be, too, maybe she went to die far away, maybe she hid out somewhere in order to die in some other place, where our eyes couldn’t reach her, far away from our gaze, like animals, like some little animals. For years I maintained that hypothesis: I couldn’t bear the idea that my mother had left me/us to start a better life, or just a different one, because where would that leave us? I think we knew we were very charming children, no, that thought was too painful. So I preferred to maintain, for years and always keeping it to myself, the hypothesis that my mother had had the heroism to go die somewhere else, that she was suffering from, I don’t know, terminal cancer, horrendous cancer that killed her little by little in some horrendous way, that gradually—maybe—deformed her, ate away at her, because of how the cancer was degenerated cells, and the only thing I could imagine as a photo of degeneration was something deformed, deformity; so she had wanted people to remember her as young and beautiful forever and had retreated to die with dignity and in hiding, in some other spot, in the mountains, maybe. For years I maintained, then, not only that my mother was dead, but also that she had gone to die elsewhere. I don’t know why we never heard from her again, it’s weird we never heard anything more from her. Lack of effort, I guess; on her part, on ours. Of course, once I’d abandoned the hypothesis of death at a distance, I had to come to terms again with the idea of the independent woman, the southern/Patagonian Nora Helmer who said I’ve had enough and slammed the door, all well and good in literature but a total shit show for whomever ended up on the other side of that door hoping for a little bit of love. Or a call, a letter, something. Or at the very least a death notice. Or a postcard from the Caribbean. Or a picture with another family, a new family, a foreign family, from elsewhere, and her with a new name. Like she’d started calling herself Greta or worse, something more Slavic, something Russian, with a bunch of consonants strung together, unpronounceable to us, and she had that, another family that was Russian, and she dressed like a Russian and was a communist. All that. I contemplated the possibility that my mother, by mistake, had gotten stuck on the other side of the Iron Curtain and had not been able to leave. She’d gone just on a trip, to get a little air, to clear her mind, taken a walk around Red Square (which in my imagination was in fact completely red, or red and white, I guess, with buildings like lollipops, like suckers, red and white, in a downward spiral), and when she wanted to return because she realized that she actually did want to live with us forever, they had closed the borders, and at that point she couldn’t get out. And so she had become a communist. She’d ultimately ended up getting married to a Russian guy and having Russian kids, out of obligation, and she wore gray, everybody wore gray, everybody wore the same clothes, and they worked in factories, like robots, facing conveyor belts, with a kerchief on their heads, until a bell went off and they could go back to their homes, all identical, in silence, all alike. And then, every so often, a truck would show up with—for example—shoes, for everybody, or toys, and they were all always identical, all the shoes, all the toys, every shoe exactly like the next, every toy exactly like the next, so that there couldn’t be any envy/in order to eradicate envy, so there wouldn’t be any theft or any need to steal. That was communism to me, that was how I pictured it. That was how my mom was living, and she couldn’t communicate, not even to send postcards because they didn’t let you, because they checked all correspondence and if they discovered she had another family in some other part of the world, a double life, they’d chop her head off. So she had no other option but to live there, and her life wasn’t that bad, just too identical to the lives of others. Then, at some point, I abandoned that hypothesis, as well, the hypotheses kind of just evaporated from one day to the next, as intense as they could be while they lasted. One day with no warning they would vanish, or change, like tastes, like so many other things. And every time I aborted one of those perfectly crafted theories, which didn’t have a single hole in them and which permitted me to go to sleep at night, coming up with all kinds of new details for that other life (or death) of my mother’s, what emerged again was the most awful hypothesis, the most painful one of all: the Nora hypothesis, the theory of the reckless independent woman, maliciously rebaptized in our adolescence as let’s just come right out and say it, Cora left us to go get laid, or Mom, of course, that was also sayable. Obviously I never espoused any of these theories to our father, no señor, it wasn’t something we talked about, it especially wasn’t anything he ever brought up. There were pictures, though, of the two of them, in the seventies. They looked good, they looked great, they looked happy. The fashion of the times looked good on them. Dad was skinny and Cora was pretty voluptuous. I clearly didn’t take after her; Cora is very Ramiro. I mean, the other way around. I turned out like Dad. Cora was from Buenos Aires, maybe she had gone back there. That is a very possible hypothesis and not even remotely interesting. During my teenage years Buenos Aires symbolized both everything I wanted most and everything I most detested. On the one hand I pictured it as ugly, jammed full of people all in a rush all the time. A clusterfuck of cars and taxis and buses and noises
and people, and people, and people. In fact that wasn’t altogether unfounded: we had gone on a trip there, just once, with Dad, to do some paperwork, some paperwork he had to go and do in Buenos Aires, and we stayed at our aunt’s place, his sister’s, who was living there. Here. No, now it’s there. And the memory I have of that trip, I don’t know, I must have been about five years old, is of crossing Libertador in Retiro (now I know where it is, in my memory it was just a big avenue), and trying to get to the other side around everybody’s legs, through all those legs, hundreds, coming towards us, ready to trample me, like a stampede; it was get across or die trying, and at the same time not lose Dad’s hand, not let yourself get tricked by some other hand and end up who knew where. That crossing generated an extreme mixture of terror and adrenaline in me; the terror, the adrenaline, sufficient for me to insist to my father that we go again, more than once, cross that forest of legs in motion, all furious, all enormous, all going in the opposite direction. You might say that image illustrates quite well the configuration of Buenos Aires in my head: that excitement, that fear of losing, of being lost, of dying, literally trampled/crushed, and, nonetheless, the challenge, the challenge of avoiding it, of surviving all those knees wrapped up in suits, in stockings, of beating those heels, those soles, those purses and briefcases, and making it—unscathed and holding on to someone’s hand—to the other side. Now that I think about it, my perception of Buenos Aires hasn’t changed all that much, it’s just that in this version my knees are at the same level as the rest of them, and my head is much higher, and some part, some little part, of the city, meanwhile, now belongs to me, as little as it is. I think that something of the apartment where we live, in the meantime, does belong to me. Doesn’t it? Something, a piece of the wall, of the floor, of the wood on the floor, a dish, something. I think at this point some portion of that apartment must be mine.

  Then, when I was a teenager, I wanted to know about Cora. For real, know for real. As a teenager, I asked. I asked for real. Dad didn’t know exactly, but he knew quite a bit. He even had an address, in case something came up, in case one of us wanted to know. Dad gave me Cora’s address, she was living in the United States. Dad had always had that address, just in case, in case of something literally life-or-death. Until then the only serious information that I’d gotten as a response to my childhood questions had been that my biological mother had had to leave and hadn’t been able to come back and that she wasn’t ever going to, either, but why? Because. As a teenager I needed to know. That my mother wasn’t dead, I think that—in reality—I’d always known that, no one had ever held the reverse, except for me. Except me, when at school I’d been asked about my mother and I’d said I didn’t have one, that I was an orphan, like those people on soap operas, there was always some easy reference to make there, an orphan like those girls, tragic suffering figures with romantic destinies. I think that in some moment I’d ended up convincing myself it was really like that. But it wasn’t, and Cora lived in the United States, in New Mexico or somewhere. It wasn’t really that easy to find her either, because she didn’t exactly have a home, or she did, maybe it was a home, but not a house on a street, but one in some weirder place. Once, when I was a teenager and wanted to know, I wrote a letter to Cora, a letter. I wrote it and sent it in the mail, a letter to the United States, from Esquel. A letter from me to a mom, my mom, but who didn’t want to be my mom. In the letter I put that it was me, that it was Emilia, her daughter, and that I wanted to know how she was doing and that if maybe she had anything to tell me she could tell me it, that she could write me. It took Cora a long time, a very long time, to write me back. Or her letter took a long time to arrive. By the time it got there I wasn’t expecting it anymore. So I received it with quite a bit of skepticism and resentment. The letter was very short and written in very lousy Spanish. That mother, it was clear, no longer had any mastery of our language. Her letter was neither encouraging nor discouraging, it was evasive. She said she was happy to hear from me and to know I was well. That that wasn’t exactly her address, but that I could write to her, that she’d be pleased to receive my letters. That her life had started to be luminous at last and that New Mexico was her place—she said it in English, not Nuevo, but New. That she could tell that I was a sensible person who had my life together, that I was prepared for life. That that filled her with joy. And that she sent her blessings, to my brother and my father and to me, that my father was a good man, that I should know that. And she said for me to have a good life, and hasta siempre. So nothing concrete about her, who she lived with, if she’d had another family or not, and what was the “luminous” thing. Nor did she want to know anything concrete either, nor any remorse, nothing. Pure nothingness. A kind of flash of a mother that wasn’t even a flash, a little cut of light, a sensation and nothing more, just silence again. Nothing motherly. And you know, I didn’t cry that much, we did those parodies of a hippie out-of-it mother, but the pseudohippie, unaware hippie, superfluous hippie, Cora and her tulles, Cora and the luminous light. Then, when I was older, returning to it, Dad gave me to understand that she had always been depressive, and a little out of it, and that apparently motherhood had not agreed with her, that in some way she had plunged into a crisis and hadn’t been able to manage it. That after my birth she had gotten fully depressed, that she had a girlfriend in New Mexico who’d invited her to come for a vacation to get herself together and rest, and that Cora just hadn’t ever come back, resolving and freeing herself from everything, from her former life, by letter and by phone. How do you like that? Poor Cora, like that, better to lose her than to find her. And Dad with the whole song and dance of the kids and the abandoning wife, one with her maternal instincts askew, what do you make of that? I can’t judge her, nor do I want to, she’s out there somewhere in her tunic in the desert on horseback, riding bareback, braiding leather, or working in a gas-station store, who knows. Leaving me defenseless, but what can I do about that?

  28.

  It’s still dark when we head for the highway. I want this moment, I realize that. Everything about this moment makes me want it, makes me like it, even the cold: getting on the highway first thing in the morning, having a mate kit at my feet, ready to be prepared, the cookies in the same bag, the road across the desert, Julián’s company, his nearness, being enveloped in your jacket, resting the nape of my neck in the hood against the leather, the imitation leather of the seat, the fog on the windows, the music, the music we’re going to be able to listen to, all those songs. And talking, being able to talk to Julián and maybe not doing it, being able to decide not to do it, that, too. Filled with possible things, that’s what I feel, that’s how I feel right now. All around me, windows upon windows. And on the other side of the glass: Esquel, the mountains, the morning, dawn, and soon, nothingness, the total void, a total void, with morning, with sun. For the first while we sit in silence. We stop, get gas, Juli asks me if I need anything, I’m only barely capable of saying no, of saying it by just shaking my head. He goes in and pays, comes back and presents me with a little umbrella candy. Thanks, I say, and I put it in the pocket of your jacket. Your jacket, ours. Juli starts the truck and goes around the roundabout, and now we really are, we really are on the road now. He tells me to choose some music, I answer that I’m still good without it, that for now I’m fine with silence, whether it bothers him to stay like this a little longer, without music, and he says no, that that’s fine, but that in that case could I prepare some mates for him because otherwise he’ll fall asleep. Of course, how could I resist this, it’s exactly the right time for mate, it couldn’t be more appropriate. I try to prepare it as decorously as possible, omitting the gesture of getting rid of the dust; it wouldn’t be good for our heated cabin, the volatility of the dust of mate. I add a little sugar to the first one, because of the acidity, and I drink it. Juli doesn’t like sugar. It’s a good moment. I know without needing time to pass, without needing the future, meaning distance in time, to lend it value, resig
nify it: I know now. I offer the mate to Juli, and the color returns to his face. He tells me he could barely sleep, I couldn’t sleep for shit, he says. Apparently the kid spent the whole night screaming. He didn’t want you to leave, I say, a little bit in jest and a little serious, and I tell him how Alicia bit me. I show him my hand. Who’s Alicia? he wants to know, and I tell him, I tell him it’s your cat, doesn’t he remember, can he really have forgotten, and he asks if that cat’s still alive. It’s not a hamster, cats can live a decent number of years, to please not be such an ignorant brute and he says, it’s basically the same. What’s basically the same, I want to know, and he says, basically the same, Alicia and my son, he’s being sarcastic, I realize now. He gives me back the mate, I add more hot water. I drink this one. No, it’s not the same, obviously, that Ali doesn’t tie me down or anything, and that I didn’t sleep at all, either, but that it was because I didn’t want to, that’s another difference. What did I do, he wants to know, and I tell him how I watched Reality Bites, he wants to know which one was that, we saw it a million times. The one . . . that one where she leaves the guy, the musician guy for that dickhead-looking yuppie, what was that guy’s name, the really funny one? Right, that one, I remember now which one it is, the one where she’s filming a movie, and when she goes to see it it sucks because that yuppie of hers had sold it and their faces are on pizza slices, and she gets upset, I add that part, yeah, that one, he asks where I came up with that, and I say it was just there, at Andrea’s, and I prepare him another mate. Meanwhile we’re leaving Esquel behind, just like that, nothing more, without trouble or fanfare. So I ask him, then, if he gets away a lot like this; do you get away a lot like this? I ask him. Like what? he wants to know, like this, you know, get away from your old lady, I say. You’re such a bitch, don’t call her my old lady. Why not, she’s your wife. Fine, call her my wife, then, if you want to, but don’t call her my old lady, it sounds atrocious. Plus she isn’t mine. Wow, how modern. You’re such a shit, he says. I add more water. For myself. I make some noise with the metal straw. I see that I’m going to have to switch up my strategy. The thing about the wounded pride doesn’t suit me anymore, I am aware of that. I’m going to have to get myself back together. Otherwise this trip won’t end up being very interesting at all.