The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  What is clear is that Hiriz “adopts” Penelope, installing her in her pool house and taking her everywhere. Like a new accessory. Like something she bought or was given and can’t stop showing off to everyone. And everyone treats Penelope with *—was it, again, William Faulkner inside a wrinkled white linen suit, with bourbon on his breath, who said it?—the suspect kindness of people who are only kind because they dare not be otherwise. The mornings pass, slow and identical, in the local country club where Penelope (who starts taking lessons in little sips, because “it’s what you do”) finds herself obliged to wear little white dresses and indolently carry a racquet or (Penelope never rode a horse) to stroll through the stables swathed in those attractive and tight-fitting breeches the color of marble, to the smiling and unspeakable despair of Hiriz and her friends/cousins. Because it’s clear that Penelope has the best ass and best legs and best tits for hundreds of miles in any direction. And—the horror, the horror—Penelope doesn’t even go to the gym. She doesn’t need a trainer or trainers to stay in excellent shape. Hiriz’s husband (who originally responded to the name Ricky, but who since their nuptials on Mount Karma is just “Hiriz’s husband”) and male cousins and male friends admire Penelope and admire it and admire them (Penelope’s parts) with the awkward slyness of schoolboys. In other words: they look at nothing else, because they enjoy it and because they think they have to enjoy it. One of them secretly photographs Penelope’s ass with his iPhone and sends it to all his friends, who hold a high proof alcoholic drink in one hand and sensually stroke their stoplight-yellow or metallic-rose neckties or pinch the small green crocodile at the level of their left nipple with the other; and is there anything more unsettling then wearing a reptile at the height of your heart, Penelope wonders. One of them, who they say, euphemistically, in low voices, had “some complications” at birth, watches Penelope and squeezes and strokes, up and down, a golf club he’ll never use to hit a golf ball. Of course, you see, it’s not considered proper for Penelope to go up and talk to him or talk to any of them. To any man. Operating orders, manual of instructions, rules of engagement: women with women talking about women and the occasional man, and men with men talking exclusively about women. So that when, in the afternoon, following a lunch as long as a nightmare, Hiriz drags Penelope to the private clinic where—connected to machines, perforated by cables and catheters—the comatose Maximiliano lies, the erotic intensity that Penelope exudes almost without realizing it threatens to turn all those young men, married in a hurry or hurrying to get married, into drooling beasts or masturbation machines. Max never dedicated himself to anything so fully and with such discipline as he did to floating in that limbo and pondering who knows what, Penelope thinks. Maybe, Penelope says to herself, Max is concocting another of his rudimentary fictions where almost nothing happens, one of his comma-ridden comatose novels. On top of that, the clinic in Abracadabra is more like a five-star Las Vegas theme hotel than a hospital. The nurses move about with the indolent and untouchable air of choir girls, the doctors (like derivatives of synthetic Dean Martin from the unscripted late nights of The Rat Pack) have the diction and smiles of masters of ceremonies and the oily charm of sharks, supposedly domesticated, but . . . And most disconcerting of all for Penelope: here nobody commands or demands hospital silence, yielding instead to a hospitable din. Everybody yells in the hallways and hugs and bursts out laughing. Many visitors are dressed in tennis uniforms or riding outfits (Penelope realizes that the clinic is something like an annex of the country club) and priests abound, almost one per patient, going in and out of rooms, exchanging ideas, in elegant robes of a dignified Armani cut. All of them, with that Catholic and apostolic and Roman enunciation that always reminds Penelope of the diction of the snakes and hypnotists and hypnotized snakes in the most vintage animated drawings. All of them moving here to there with that characteristic glide, as if there were little wheels hidden under their habits. The Karmas have a suite rented in perpetuity: two expansive rooms on the bottom floor with views of a garden where—without anybody daring call attention to it, because she’s one of the clinic’s principal donors and founding shareholders—Mamagrandma is riding Horse, releasing yips into the afternoon air. In one room, the smaller of the two, the body of Maximiliano pulses regularly and mechanically. In the other room, wide as a tennis court, there are various armchairs, tables, a bar, and two fifty-inch plasma TVs, always on and broadcasting indistinctly a telenovela that’s been around for several decades and god-awful soccer matches featuring local teams who appear to be playing a different game, a sport whose rules imply touching the ball as little as possible and running as slow as you can and making passes that are precise only in their imprecision and never kicking the ball into your opponent’s goal. The women, all together (and, of course, nothing to do with a militant feminist compact or the exchange of intimacies that can always come back to haunt you, like instant gossip attached to a boomerang), play poker and drink from tiny glasses that they subsequently, surreptitiously, refill (the brevity of the drinks is commended and the staggering quantity never condemned) over and over until they imagine themselves right there, in a near future or remote past, accompanying, so alive, the death throes of their husbands. And, ah, the unutterable but obvious disappointment when one of them experiences a miraculous recovery and gets better and then they have to delay the debut of their mourning dresses, or worse, use them at the masses for dead outsiders (various, a complex tangle of prayers specially designed, by religious chapters, to help the soul of the departed advance a little bit further, deeper into the overabundant mansions of Paradise) where they don’t get to be the weeping starlet, but, merely, the supporting crybaby. The men, all together, drink from glasses the size of pitchers—sucking on them like baby bottles, their round childish faces, almost like baby faces, but babies that Francis Bacon never painted—and assess and discuss Penelope’s ass again and again. And the truth is that, in Abracadabra, for once, Penelope is happy to be a woman. And that the men limit themselves to looking at her ass; because being a man would mean receiving constant vigorous handshakes or little pats on the back and full-toothed smiles and full-eyed stares and let’s see quien es más macho when it comes to a staring contest, and that’s the way they pass the minutes, the hours, the Karma men. The Karma women * (who, truth be told, are the ones who most inspect and discuss the asses and breasts and operations of other women with a forensic gusto learned from series like C.S.I., and how is it that there’s no C.S.I. Abracadabra, they wonder) are, by choice and prized surname, trophy wives, more covetous than covetable, who soon start to rust and the men are oxidized hunters who incessantly penetrate with telescopic pupils younger prey that are forbidden, although you never know. * The composition of the Karma females? A simple way of distilling them would be to say that they’re crazy or stupid or evil in varying proportions. Some are crazier or stupider or eviler. But those three personality traits repeat, one imposing itself over the others. But Hiriz is special: she’s 100% crazy and 100% stupid and 100% evil. Which, of course, goes unmentioned. And Hiriz, just as much as the others, likes to describe herself as “very pretty.” In Abracadabra, on Mount Karma, if someone says that someone is “very pretty,” it’s advisable to take off running and not look back. And it’s during a wedding, under a moon the color of hepatitis, that Penelope hears one Karma say to another Karma: “Penelope is very pretty.” Fortunately, in the next instant, the anesthesia of deafening music. From a sound system of discoteca capacity surge, non-stop and as if on an infernal loop, Julio Iglesias and Luis Miguel whispering and wailing rancheras and tangos and boleros and (is Penelope delirious?) euphoric Red Cavalry battle hymns; some of those indistinguishable Italian pop-crooners with voices putrefied by the breezes of San Remo; and that infernal Nordic trilogy made up of the Spanish versions of ABBA’s “Chiquitita,” “I Had a Dream,” and “Thank You for the Music.” This is what Guantanamo must be like, Penelope says to herself. And Penelope drinks. * Penelope feels like a bee t
hat’s been stung by a wasp and, to get herself to feel this way, she realizes, first she has to drink a lot. In Abracadabra, Penelope understands alcohol’s true value as a legal drug. Like a blanket of soft wind that envelopes you and rocks you gently (its fingertips of air lightly grazing your back) and makes the so-slow time of Abracadabra pass, not faster, but yes, as if it were moving at least, and advancing into the future. Nobody ever knows what date or day of the week it is. And Penelope wonders if this might be the result of having been born with money or if the Karmas might always be like this, no matter the size of their bank accounts. Lina will explain to her: “they don’t need to learn or remember that kind of thing because that’s what servants are for; to be asked and to remember for you.” In any case, on any date, Mount Karma always seems to be in the nineteenth century. And it doesn’t take Penelope long to realize that her status, within the Karma ecosystem, is complex: she’s not a wife (which is just fine and right quick now, if you please) or a widow (even better, and like the crowning award after a long career, something like the Nobel for best spouse). Penelope isn’t one thing or the other. But whatever she is, Penelope should and must be a virgin 2.0. Reconstituted. Untouchable. Immaculate. Her sex like a new Maginot Line and all of her being given to worshipping the memory of Maximiliano; though there’s no scientific evidence that, right now, in the room next door, Maximiliano even remembers Penelope. In other words: Penelope shouldn’t even speak a man’s name because, Hiriz explains, “it could be misinterpreted.” And Penelope confirms this when she casually says, to say something when she has nothing to say, something simple and without innuendo, something everyone understands: “yesterday in bed I watched a George Clooney movie.” And even that . . . George Clooney. In bed. What’s that supposed to mean? They look at her strangely, they look at her fixedly, they look at her with eyelids drooping like blinds that are always drawn so curious people can’t see—but only imagine, and discuss—what happens behind them, on the other side, like the beginning of another movie that she also watched in bed, Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. A movie that’s set in 1870, but it’s as if everything were happening last week or next week on Mount Karma, where, like the characters in the movie and in the opening scene of the novel, everyone appears to be going to a performance of Faust at the New York Academy of Music, not to see what happens on stage—that’s just background music and drama—but to watch each other, hanging in balcony seats, like intriguing and intrigued gargoyles, through small binoculars, behind flickering fans. “Don’t say such things, Penita. Problems have arisen between spouses over less,” Hiriz tells her. * And on Mount Karma, if the undesired anomaly of a divorce is occasioned, it’s immediately dressed up as widowhood, an uncertain widowhood but widowhood nonetheless: exes disappear, they don’t frequent the places they used to, they’re not invited anywhere, you cross to the opposite sidewalk when you see them coming, they aren’t spoken to or looked at and, sooner rather than later, they die or they leave Abracadabra. And the Karmas believe in life after death (paradise is like Abracadabra but with worse serving staff, they fear) but they don’t believe that there’s life after or beyond Abracadabra. And for the Karmas, leaving Abracadabra is the same as dying. And so, pretty soon, the divorced Karmas (always innocent and victims) have convinced themselves that they’re grieving widows and melancholy widowers. The memory of the dead husbands melting into the amnesia of the ex-husbands or, even, the living husbands whom they sometimes treat like amusing automatons or Pekinese lapdogs. Those little dogs that, few realize this, were adopted as ideal companions and perfect alibis by women who move infrequently or not at all. Little dogs that bark are preferable to little children who bite and yet they barely pay any attention to them though they obsess over demonstrating the exact opposite. Little dogs for courtesans and aristocrats way back when and for these Karma ladies and/or widows of today, almost always immobile, almost swallowed up by sofas and divans, accumulating gases and—this is the true and unspoken raison d’etre for those little dogs—needing someone to blame when some flatus slips out. Some of them speak to their Pekinese or Chihuahuas or whatever they are with high and infantile diction. Some even answer themselves in a different accent, as if it were the dog answering them: “Are you a little hungry, my little one?” “Yes of course, Mommy mine . . . And after eating we can watch a little TV. Something with doggies, please.” There they all are, sharing with their pets the open secret, the barked secret: women play at being submissive females—but pull the reins and invisible strings—so that their husbands, alive or dead, having failed or lost the game, holding the disconsolation macho-man trophy, allowing them to present themselves, in theory, as alpha males, but in practice, as submissive and broken by the guilt and excuses of people who’ve been caught in something better left unmentioned. Husbands to whom they say, with servile sweetness, “My king,” barely concealing the blade of a well-oiled guillotine, always ready to let it drop and dethrone. “Family is the greatest asset,” Mamagrandma frequently thunders, stabbing her spurs into Horse’s flanks. And Penelope—who was married under a separation of assets agreement; because Maximiliano’s disobedience had its limits—discovers that, though there’s nothing more she wants, she cannot separate herself from that one enormous asset, dark and gelatinous and tentacular like the Great Cthulu. When it comes to feelings, Penelope only ever believed in the passion of Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights * (Penelope’s favorite authors are Emily Brontë and Cipriano de Motoliú, the first to translate the novel into Spanish and who in 1921—capturing yet not domesticating the theoretically untranslatable, according to its author, “provincial adjective”—came up with the brilliant idiomatic transposition of Cumbres Borrascosas, first for the house and then for the novel’s title). But, suddenly, Penelope finds that now she’s like a sacrificial priestess in a familial religion overflowing with prayers and commandments and festivities. Penelope, now, is floating in a spyish or widowy twilight zone or something like that. Whatever Penelope is, the Karmas don’t reproach her for it—they’re very happy to have a reason to go to the clinic to drink and laugh. * A sick person in the family is like a sort of medal, an inexhaustible subject before and after death, an excuse to consult patient doctors and perverted, but always polite priests. A sick person is something that happens, that takes place. A sick person is an event and something to do. To tell the truth, though it shouldn’t be told: for the Karmas, Maximiliano is a much more pleasant and well-mannered and sympathetic and socially acceptable person now that he’s in a coma. And the days and weeks and months go by. And multiple baptisms and first communions and weddings and birthdays and funerals take place. Events you attend to see and be seen, to criticize and be criticized, to see the straw in the other’s eye, to cast the first stone though you’re not without sin. And there’s always some Karma of second or third or fourth or ninth degree of separation and parentage being born or dying or reproducing somewhere. And when the festivities die out—that brief limbo when nobody is born and nobody dies and everyone has gotten married—it’s possible to catch sight of the Karmas, like stray dogs, infiltrating or taking over the celebrations of others, shouting, drunk and drinking, looking at younger boys and girls with eyes like long-nailed fingers, demanding the orchestra play old hits that are totally misses and almost no one remembers now. There, all of them dance as if possessed, because you have to dance. Penelope too; but never with strangers or more or less close or distant acquaintances (especially if they’re married or single or divorcees) and always with harmless and inoffensive little Karmas: little or pubescent boys who are still sadistically and “traditionally” subjected to the debut of their first pair of long pants as a rite of passage when their classmates have been wearing them for years. * And subjected time and again by their elders, well into puberty, to the same interrogation, with the same insistence with which you wash a brain to later dry out a future assassin: how old are you? What school do you go to and what
grade are you in? Do you have a girlfriend? What’s your favorite sport? Who do you love the most: Mama, Papa, or Mamagrandma? Little big kids who—while the aunts spend their time watching little Karmas of the feminine sex with an almost infrared gaze, whom they always imagine levitating in a fit of nymphomania—at the same time, that same night, will mentally undress their aunt/cousin/etcetera incessantly, just to confess it at mass on Sunday. And, of course, be forgiven. On the spot. * Perhaps that’s why the Karmas are such believers in Catholic modality: the Catholic God offers many advantages, allowing you to sin first and be, promptly, pardoned after. The Karmas’ god is like one of those products that cleans and disinfects and covers up all bad odors, often the smell of sulfur; because Penelope has seen and heard Karmas do and say things that would provoke boiling panic in the most devout Satanist. And that god is the glue that helps and forces them to stay united despite rifts and internal conflicts. And it’s not an irascible and capricious god—like all those gods ascending and descending from Olympus—in mythological and Dynamation movies, interacting with mortals, manipulating them like chess pieces. The Karmas’ god—for the Karmas—is almost an employee. He’s for everyone, yes. But he also belongs to them. Our father, yes. God belongs to them and—they’re convinced, they believe in this—dedicates his free time, exclusively, to worrying about them, to solving their problems, to washing and drying and ironing out their sins. Because the Karmas have invested a lot in him—majority shareholders of God, Inc. And that, without a doubt, is why the Karmas give so much to charity (an act which is nothing but a charity project for themselves, so they can say they do charity, so the whole world knows, to make it seem like they do something) and have several on-call priests ready twenty-four hours a day and even take them on trips to be used for quick confessions and masses in hotels and airports. * Fact: once, the Karmas managed to postpone the departure of an airplane, because, having already checked their luggage, they decided that they had to go pray in the airport chapel, not hearing the repeated and exceedingly urgent calls over the loudspeaker, beseeching them to please, right?, come to their gate for departure. For generations, the Karmas have tried to produce a religious figure of their own, a Father Karma, to no avail—the few candidates who took the plunge were quick to abandon the seminary when they discovered that the “vow of poverty” and the obligatory formative work in remote and primitive missions weren’t for them. * At a birthday party, surrounded by young Karmas, Penelope hears one of the family’s salaried priests preach: “Boys, every time you masturbate, you expel an average of fifty million spermatozoids. This is like aborting fifty million babies. Imagine how many Our Fathers you’d have to pray to be forgiven.” Which is not to imply that—in the absolute certainty of their faith, in the absolute conviction that God believes in them and only them—the Karmas don’t feel occasional doubts about the application of their faith and creed. Some sporadic temptation toward extreme and sectarian millennial alternatives. The whole thing about, for example, suddenly and without warning ascending to the heavens. End Times, The Reckoning, The Rapture, Up, etcetera. There are Karmas who are betting that they, as the chosen few, are the only ones who, one radiant morning, will be raised up into the stars. Some Karmas, on the other hand, prefer to think that the truly blessed will remain here below to enjoy an entire world all for themselves, while the second and third class souls will be lifted up and crushed together between the clouds for all eternity. Hiriz, of course, believes she’s found the perfect solution: “First I’ll stay here all by my little self with all of it for me and, when I die, I’ll go to heaven.” Hiriz tends to apply that same kind of practical/blasphemous reasoning to all faith “in which Jesus doesn’t play a role.” Islam: “Ugly clothes and the women always covered head to toe. Impossible to believe in that. Why take care of yourself and exercise if you’re forced to go around covered up all the time?” Buddhism: “I’m really good at meditating because it’s easy for me to think about nothing . . . But the truth is it’s hard to believe that a god would be fat like that. A god who can’t slim down? After all . . .” Hinduism: “What’s the fun in being reincarnated if you can’t remember anything from before? Plus, if things go wrong and you come back as a pig . . .” Judaism: a slightly more complicated subject for Hiriz because of the origins of the Messiah who “luckily, saw the light and came over to our team.” In the meantime, while they await Judgment Day, when without a doubt they’ll be absolved and rewarded, Hiriz and the Karmas cross themselves, and their rapid and precise movements recall more an earthly masonic countersign than a sincere gesture of love for the divine. * It doesn’t take Penelope long to see this and see them and record footage of them on her little camera. Because her brother asks her for more and more “Karmatic material.” Penelope’s brother follows her life in Abracadabra as if it were his favorite TV series and—he doesn’t and won’t tell her this—even plays with the idea of moving all of it to a neighboring country, make a few changes, and putting it all in his next book, assembling a whole Light Inhuman Comedy around the Karmas. And, now, later, with the book already written, he—because now everything happens simultaneously, like “marvelous moments” in the books of a certain race of extraterrestrials—thinks about it again . . . No: what he really thinks about is the moment when he came up with the figure of a little freak nestled in the voluptuous bosom of a family. A boy with a helmet onto which he’s mounted a camera so he can track and capture and take advantage of a non-stop motion picture of his family, in the creation of a kind of “total and vérité telenovela.” And the memory of inventing that boy leads him directly to the memory of another boy, a real boy, a nonfiction boy also holding a camera in his small hand and focusing it on him, on the beach, asking him serious and adult questions in a high-pitched and childish voice. And this memory hurts him so much—even though he’s no longer made of nerves or muscles or heart or brain—that it’s as if a lightning bolt were nailing him to the sky and wrenching a scream out of him that, instantly, turns into a hurricane in the Caribbean or a tsunami in the Pacific or into one of those earthquakes that, to prove the nonexistence of one true God, brings down the celestial cupola of some renaissance cathedral and, suddenly, fades away. And he dies a little with it. He’s brought low, amid tears and angels and spilled blood. So Penelope films them in churches and chapels and even in private mass in their homes, with the anthropological and zoological and Martian eyes of a combination of Margaret Mead and Dian Fossey and John Carter. Penelope records the pious air of their arrogance. The almost moving way, as mentioned, that the Karmas believe in God because—they’re certain, there’s ample and irrefutable evidence—that God believes in them. Otherwise, the fact that they are so fortunate, that their fortune continues to grow, is inexplicable. * (Note: the Karmas believe in God but also fear black cats, walking under ladders, broken mirrors. For the Karmas, all the superstitions—as much the “brand name” as the “artisanal”—have equal value and power, though they don’t dare admit it.) Hence the almost pagan debauchery at weddings and baptisms once the religious part of the program has concluded. Then, they chew on animals and empty bottles and dance almost in ecstasy, as if the end of everything in the world were on its way. There, Penelope drinks a lot and her alcohol tolerance provokes comments between condemning and admiring. Penelope never seems drunk, even if she is—she doesn’t stagger, she doesn’t vomit, she doesn’t fall—and the only symptom of obvious alcoholic intoxication is that she becomes talkative and sharp and clever and biting and venomous. So, after the holy chalice and between glasses, Penelope tries to torpedo their armored and unsinkable mystical certainty with the blunt iceberg of comments like “How is it possible that, after killing his brother, Cain was banished to the Land of Nod, to the east of Eden, and that there he interacted with its inhabitants and even got himself a wife if, supposedly, Cain and Abel and Adam and Eve were hitherto the only members of their species?” or “If everyone was asleep, how did Matthew hear Jesus pray in the Garden of Gethsemane, at
the foot of the Mount of Olives, and write down everything he said with such precision?” or “Is Jehovah the bad cop and Jesus the good cop in the great precinct of the heavens?” or “How can you believe in all of . . . that? Don’t you realize that the times of Jesus, when Jesus existed, were times that preceded rationalism and scientific thought and that, basically, everyone was crazy and going around proclaiming strange and impossible things? And that everything you continue to believe and read was written by lunatics who, were they alive today, would be under lock and key? Don’t you realize that all religion is like the echo of a madman’s scream?” But nobody gets the hint when they hear her say these things. The Karmas have probably never heard anything about the Land of Nod. The Garden of Gethsemane, yes; but as something of the past and on one of those tours of the Holy Land where they went all together, inseparable, more like invading fanatics than devout tourists. The Karmas leave Mount Karma so they can return to Mount Karma and there, canine and Pavlovian, all you have to do is mention the names of New York, Paris, Moscow, London, or Rome for each and every one of them to bark a “Mount Karma” or, as a great concession to the immensity of the planet, an “Abracadabra.” So the Karmas listen attentively to the nomad Penelope, yes, but they don’t pay her the slightest attention. They smile at her with glazed-over eyes, as if they were using the sound and not the meaning of Penelope’s words to think of other things or, better, of nothing at all or—the men and women both, for very different reasons, but coinciding on the common ground of their covetousness—about Penelope’s ass. * So they let her “express herself.” Because Penelope doesn’t speak, rather, since they understand little to nothing of what she says, “she expresses herself”; as if hers were some kind of “modern” discipline. And the Karmas always say, mawhdern, dragging out the o into an aw, and inserting the silent yet always oh so expressive contamination of an h, with a blend of humor and derision, as if modern, in itself, were already a mawhdern word. In the beginning, Penelope enjoys the affectation and even celebrates it as a rare form of not so sophisticated Karmatic humor; but pretty soon Lina will shatter her illusion, telling her that it’s just a random catch phrase from a lame TV show. But note: this mistrust of the modern does not compel the Karmas to counterattack with an ardent defense of the classic. No, the classic (which they tend to associate with an outmoded model) doesn’t interest them. What prevails with them is the traditional, taken to mean family traditions and, specifically, Karma family traditions. A whole complex web of laws and clauses in permanent collision and contradiction. Example: it’s very bad to look at Penelope’s ass, but that’s Penelope’s fault, because it’s her ass, and they think it shamelessly calls attention to itself, and that’s why they look at it. And, after a few minutes, they ask Penelope if she wants to dance. So there, at baptisms and first communions and weddings, Penelope also “dances very differently.” Penelope, additionally, dresses very differently. Penelope is, yes, unequivocally and definitively and terminally mawhdern. While the men wear anything with logos or suits somewhere between metallic and reptilian, and the women wrap themselves in identical dresses so that nobody can criticize or make fun of anybody else, Penelope’s style might be described as banshee alien-goth. Something closer to the evolutions and tours of Patti Smith & Kate Bush * (who, yes, had a very young artistic debut and found global success with a single called “Wuthering Heights;” Penelope doesn’t really know how she feels about that) than to the plastic synchronism of Madonna and her plagiarisms. And Penelope whirls around and around, over everyone and everything, like a kind of rolling protest, during that inexplicable medley of children’s songs by some teenybopper band (Bulimia and the Little Skinnies?), who all the adults celebrate, clapping their hands and giving little kicks in the air, as if it were a sonic version of a rejuvenating tonic. To top it all off, Penelope doesn’t put her hair up in one of those turban/beehive hairdos, petrified with a highly rain-and wind-resistant spray, that all the women her age seem to wear for these occasions. * (The aesthetic/ethical equation is, always, vertical hairdo + horizontal eyelashes + oblique words; and once Penelope saw one of the Karma women without makeup and got the disturbing sensation of a face drowning before the merciless iceberg of its own reflection, a face whose features abandon it at full velocity to secure a place in one of the few remaining lifeboats. But it almost never happens. The Karma women almost never allow themselves to be seen like this. In general, careful constructions, the face like a false backdrop and a curtain to fall and conceal everything. Makeup of a style that says, “All right, Mr. DeMille I’m ready for my close-up” and fake eyelashes onto which they scatter, impaling them, entire swarms of yellow, kamikaze butterflies. And on the dance floor, Penelope’s long red hair like a red whip, lashing anyone who comes too close (and there are more then a few husbands who risk a casual brush) to the hits of a local rock band, Manjar, internationally famous because they insist, time and again, song after song, always the same, on the lyrical audacity and poetic transgression of rhyming “amor” with “amor.” See them dance. Men with gunfighter sombreros and peplum belts sporting their initials and, sometimes, American friends/associates whom they introduce as tycoons, but who never seem ready to remove their hats sporting logos of baseball teams or tractor manufacturers. Women wearing dresses that sparkle with sequins and gemstones and metallic appliques and the shoulder pads of comic book heroines. Hiriz’s husband—Ricky, who almost never speaks, but when he does open his mouth and says things that Hiriz will sooner or later say, as if he were a ventriloquist dummy always in the vicinity—approaches Penelope and says that it would be better if she didn’t move her arms so much when she danced because it “shows your age.” “Bat arms,” he diagnoses. And releases little flying rodent shrieks. The “problem” is that Penelope’s arm muscles are much firmer than Hiriz’s and her husband’s arms and Penelope never sets foot in the gym. And Hiriz’s husband, Ricky, studies Penelope with a mix of lust and contempt, trying to balance, on a low and almost secret channel, the discrete but disturbing homosexual impulses that he feels on full-moon nights and the impossibility of ever forgetting that hot morning when, upon leaving an Abracadabra shopping center with Hiriz and some friends, weighed down with heavy bags, a blast of heat dropped him to his knees on the asphalt of the parking lot in front of Hiriz. * The heat in the parking lots of Abracadabra shopping centers is like the heat in Lawrence of Arabia: a Cinemascopic heat that strikes you on the head like the gavel of a supreme and not so courteous judge. Ricky falls down and Hiriz drives the temperature even higher. Hiriz, who kept right on talking about some formula she’d discovered to turn something or other into who knows what. And, his embarrassment equaling his fear of mockery (which would translate into a reliable and eternal retelling of the incident across dinner tables and decades), Ricky decided that the only way he could hide his “debility” and change the sign of the anecdote was, right there, kneeling and in pain and exaggeratedly emotional, to ask Hiriz to marry him. After all, it solved a problem: once they were married, people would stop talking about certain of Ricky’s somewhat “delicate” mannerisms. Ricky’s eyes fill with tears, too often, after a few too many drinks, and he even lets slip things like “I’m so well-endowed that every time I have an erection I get dizzy from the quantity of blood flowing to my privates; that’s why I carefully manage each one of my sexual relations” or “I don’t understand why you have to wash your hands after going to the bathroom. You should wash them before; because there’s no part of my body more impeccable and free of germs and bacteria than my dear Rickyto-Rickyton.” Hiriz, seeing him like that, on his knees, said yes; because she always liked people on their knees, because there was no other candidate in sight, because Ricky’s last name was “right.” And it was clear that Ricky was a weak and easy person to manipulate—because she has suspected for a while now that she’s incapable of loving anyone but herself (the sight of certain Hollywood stars on late night DVDs are merely the initial excuse to touch herself)—and beca
use it would automatically make her the leading lady in the cast of her family during the months of preparations for a wedding that would require the deployment and strategy of the landing at Normandy. Ricky, in that moment, thought to himself that nothing happens by chance and that, after all, Hiriz would be the perfect screen, prestigious and the envy of many, in the event that his propensity to follow men at the gym with his eyes moved on to the next stage of following them—and catching them—with something more than his eyes. * (In certain circles in Abracadabra, they tell Penelope, one doesn’t marry men or women; one marries surnames and families; and they’re not surnames like Rothschild or Vanderbilt or Rockefeller or Kennedy, but infinite variations of Gómez and Gutiérrez and López; Ricky’s last name, for example, is Fernández-Guzmán. And there’s something moving in the fact that, an unspeakable secret, many Karmas are made uncomfortable by their original and strange last name and, secretly, long for something “normaler and easier to remember, something like Pérez or Navarro or Cardona.”) And so everyone celebrated another wedding being added to the calendar (it wasn’t easy to find an open Saturday) and it was a magnificent wedding though inevitably marked by the aesthetic of the eighties. * (Hiriz, many years later, paid a small fortune to have all the photos from the event Photoshopped—when the time came she’d do the same with the photos of her children’s first communions, asking the photographer to slip in, between the branches of the trees in the garden, the face of Jesus Christ blessing the occasion—to alter her hairdo from the time that made her look, her hair in a spike, like a sort of lightning-rod fan of Duran Duran and A Flock of Seagulls and Culture Club. While she was at it, she took the opportunity to make her eyes blue and whiten her teeth and boost her breasts and iron out wrinkles that she had then but doesn’t have now. Photo operation and a miracle: the young Hiriz from the photos looks more like the Hiriz of today, not that she looks younger, but like a different Hiriz, this Hiriz: an Hiriz like the avatar of Hiriz, reloaded & second life, etcetera, irrefutable proof that she was always like that and, as such, never had plastic surgery.) And everyone—apart from the bride and the groom, who seem somewhat disconcerted because suddenly everything is coming to an end and, at the same time, it seems that everything continues and will continue across the decades: what was sold to them as a climax turned out to be a brief preview of a long act—celebrates now as if the Apocalypse were upon them and they have to make the most of it, because the days will stretch out eternally until next Saturday, until the next wedding. A wedding is a wedding is a wedding and, as night falls and shifts into morning, the drunken men embrace each other and sing old-time ballads in which all women are unfaithful and evil and fatal and abandon them, but “luckily I still got my friends.” My Karmas. * (Are the Karma men unfaithful? Of course. Though not exactly. Theirs is an infidelity that doesn’t come from desire, self-destruction, boredom, or the need to escape without being forced to leave. No, the Karma men succumb to any more or less interested woman without a second thought, because they fear that, if they resist, their actions will be construed as “faggotry,” as a recognizable trait of closeted homosexuality. The Karma women, for their part, have nothing to do with the songs dedicated and sung to them. Just the opposite: they do nothing, limiting themselves to the most hysterical and unconsummated flirtations, and dream a great deal and wide awake, waiting for the inevitable hour of their revenge, of forgiving and reducing the repentant man to a castrated puppet ready to make all their whims a reality. Unconfirmed Abracadabran rumors abound, Lina tells her, of “very well-to-do families” where the señoras are “attended” by professionals. And whispers of swinging parties—styles and transgressions take about a half-century after arriving to the rest of the world, like everything besides the latest cars and electronic devices, to penetrate the moral barriers of Abracadabra in general and Mount Karma in particular—where the Karmas put their car keys in a bowl and pick them out blindly to see who will leave with whom. Which is clearly still total nonsense, because the Karmas are all for one and one for all. It’s also unfair to consider the Karmas passé for arriving late to this type of little game: that particular ceremony doesn’t correspond to a decade but to an age, an age when the owners of those car keys, forever young and the latest models, start to comprehend, hearing odd noises in their engines, that they’ve already passed the midpoint on the highway of their lives, and get desperate for some kind of rebirth. But those screamed whispers are never entirely confirmed for and by Penelope. She’s not really that interested either. The true lies that the Karmas throw at each other like loving daggers are more than enough for her, and best not get too close, because their aim isn’t exactly precise when, as warned, they choose to sacrifice some passerby.) And those who are not direct or indirect Karmas are “sympathy” Karmas, or people who’d give anything to be a Karma and turn into useful and, yes, sympathetic underlings and Karmatic accessories to be exploited for a while and later discarded and replaced by new voluntary volunteers. * And Penelope (who, if she were to write seriously some day, to write something beyond the increasingly numerous shipwrecked and in-a-bottle messages that she emails to her brother from Abracadabra) always said she’d like to write like Joan Didion, who, after all, is for her a legitimate Californian descendent of her beloved Emily Brontë. Author of poems like “The Prisoner” that Penelope recites in a low voice, because they seem oh so appropriate in her present circumstances: “Oh dreadful is the check—intense the agony / When the ear begins to hear and the eye begins to see, / When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again, / The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain!” Yes: the terrible and agonizing confirmation in her ears and eyes and heart and brain and soul and flesh of knowing herself to be chained. She feels like her, knowing she isn’t her, but certain she’d really enjoy being like her, being her, consuming herself, letting herself go for the love of art. But Penelope (who doesn’t dare think that she’d like to write like Emily Brontë for fear of being struck by a punishing bolt of lightning for such pride and audacity) discovers that wishes, when they’re granted outside of stories, are always granted in a twisted and malicious way. Yes: so Penelope doesn’t write like Joan Didion, but feels like someone written by Joan Didion. Like those women in Joan Didion’s novels, lost in the tropics, prisoners of a landscape that’s nothing but an equally febrile but hotter version of the British moors and wastelands of the Heights, making and unmaking time, as if suspended in a thick syrup pierced by light the same way and with the same tonality that rum bottles project across walls of airport bars when they catch the sun while airplanes that are never yours take off. And one afternoon something happens. One afternoon Penelope meets Lina. On the as yet imprecise date that she meets Lina * (Penelope finds herself obliged to check the date on her mobile phone almost every hour to remember what time of year it is, to keep from getting lost in a calendar full of tunnels that always open on anniversaries, birthdays, saints’ days), Penelope is going crazy. “Volviéndose loca” as they would say in Abracadabra. And Penelope never understood that Spanish expression: “volverse loca,” which literally means to “return crazy.” Because, if you think about it a little, one “goes crazy,” moves away, loses oneself, never to return to the more or less sane person one once was. So, Penelope moves through the hallways of the clinic like a too-lucid zombie. A zombie conscious that it’s more unalive than it is undead. And there’s no point or use in going out and eating brains. Because the Karmas’ brains aren’t nutritious or fortifying brains. Her own brain, she struggles to think, seems now like a big muscle that gets less use than all the small muscles she uses to conjure a perpetual and vacuous smile. Her brain, she’s almost positive, experiences less activity and inventiveness than Maximiliano’s. If Maximiliano’s comatose brain is at a comma, hers, Penelope thinks, is at a period. And very few satisfactions worth remembering, waking up in a more and more uniform memory; because today is the same as yesterday and tomorrow will be the same as today and all the days ar
e Groundhog Day in Marienbad, Loopländ. And what was the most transcendent and exciting thing that happened to Penelope in Abracadabra before meeting Lina? Easy to locate yet so difficult to accept: the night before—or maybe some night last week three months ago—Penelope killed a mosquito, big and plump with blood. And, ah, the triumphant and intimate satisfaction of discovering that little red stain on the wall, the next morning, after having tolerated its sharp buzzing in the darkness for so many hours. So similar to the deafening buzz of Karmatic lunches and dinners. There, they yell a lot to say very little. All of it lies so that, without realizing it, the truth shines between the lines, codified, as if written in invisible ink, like transparent stigmas tattooed on diners’ foreheads, visible if they squint their eyes and concentrate a little. You don’t need to be a telepath or diviner to know what a Karma thinks of another person: because what a Karma thinks and doesn’t say is, generally, the opposite of what they say they think. During those eternal lunches or dinners, Penelope speaks little or can’t stop speaking. The monosyllables of agreement are nothing but a product of the renewed surprise of hearing again, as if recorded and reproduced, the same conversation as yesterday, as last week, as the month before and the decade to come. The same names and nicknames (that they bear, ineradicable, from the elementary school playground, and whose inventiveness rarely surpasses something like “Skinny” or “Fatty” or “Hairy” or “The Dwarf” or the almost onomatopoetic “Chungui” or “Pupu” or “Teti”) starring in the same stories as always that, in general, evoke almost childish episodes: falls, stumbles, silent-film humor. In general, Penelope manages to let her mind go blank, to take off on an astral voyage, to silently recite parts of her favorite books to herself. Sometimes she prays, just in case, just in case there’s something up there that might help her. But there are times when she decides she’s going to talk and launches into long and irrepressible rants. * Penelope’s fiery mouth, words spinning around inside, sparking, like Pop Rocks, the urgent need to spit it all out like a flammable and pyromaniac dragon. Incinerate everything and everyone in honor of Ladon and Fafnir and Godzilla and all the Disney reptiles that were, always, the best, the most well-illustrated. Penelope, like a plumed serpent baring its fangs and gnashing, poisoning, furious, the apparent and false tranquility—that detente like an eternal siesta—that surrounds and smothers her. Pure delirium and absurdity to, for a while, suffocate the story of what happened when Froggy bumped into Freckle-Face at aerobics class. Those moments, of course, make her the favorite “aunt” among the kids and, especially, among Hiriz’s kids, on the edge of adolescence and with a slight artistic restlessness. * At a baptism, after a few too many drinks, Hiriz, with a mix of unspeakable pain and barely concealed scorn, says to Penelope that, “As hard as I try I can’t understand why my children love you so much.” And, as mentioned, Penelope provokes certain confusion among the adults who, already, consider her an extension of Maximiliano: a/another bad influence, but who, unlike Maxi, isn’t even a Karma in the first place. And the truth is that the Karma kids don’t love Penelope. Love is too much to ask from creatures whose affective systems are already affected, functionally, by things that have nothing to do with the chemistry of pure emotions but with the speculations of materialism and convenience. But they do consider her “novel,” a bizarre trend, a comfortable form of external catharsis created by someone else. Someone to “make trouble” for them, because they don’t dare. So, they admire—in addition to her body—her unexpected rebelliousness and unpredictable and transgressive diatribes. Especially at religious and “traditional” events. Cutting remarks that they’d never dare utter (because nothing could be less in their interest, because “Look how Maximiliano ended up”), but that they collect in secret and exchange via telephonic and mobile text messages, like children’s trading cards or quasi-pornographic postcards. * A few brief examples: “Seven days? If He’s God why didn’t he do everything in one day and boom?”; or “How do you explain that Adam and Eve are always portrayed with belly buttons if they weren’t ever inside a belly?”; or “Is God a woman?”; or “Don’t you know that the waltz was a rural dance that Viennese aristocrats used to consider obscene?”; or, in the middle of a First Communion, “How is it possible for someone who hasn’t yet reached the legal age to vote, or drive a car, or drink a gin and tonic, or have sexual relations to confirm their belief in someone who resurrects the dead and multiplies fish and bread without first being allowed to peruse the other pages in the catalogue containing Buddha and Mohammad and Vishnu?” And other medium-sized examples: “If you think about it a little bit, Jesus Christ is like an imaginary friend and protector of childhood for people who refuse to grow up and leave him behind, right? And the thing about the Baby Jesus taking the place of Santa Clause on Christmas . . . Isn’t that a bit too much? Who in their right mind can think and believe in a newborn, recently expelled from between the legs of the Virgin Mary, head still wrapped in the most visionary of placentas, like a headscarf through which he already sees his painful and obligatory unhappy ending, could take up distributing gifts throughout the entire world to well-behaved little ones who, above all, never doubt his improbable existence. I prefer Batman. Batman has the same historical substance as Jesus Christ. One is as true as the other. In fact, Batman is realer than Jesus because, at least, we know the last names of his creators. And the most important, notable difference of all: Jesus Christ’s father forces him to die in his name and without it being entirely clear why and to what end, and announces a second coming that, everything seems to indicate, will be postponed indefinitely; while the masked man of Gotham City kills in the name of his murdered parents, and you can always count on him. Besides, Batman’s disguise is much better than Jesus Christ’s, right? Jesus Christ’s is like the cheapest Halloween costume. Jesus Christ is a zombie! In fact, Jesus Christ would make a magnificent super villain, an ultramonster: part zombie (because he comes back from the dead and “devours” the brains of his followers), part vampire (because he “converts” them into his own kind), and part Frankensteinian monster (because he is “assembled” from parts of the ancient legends that preceded him), and part alien (because . . .).” And other examples long as stories: “The whole thing about not putting your elbows on the table . . . Poor children . . . By chance do any of you know where the whole thing about it being bad to put your elbows on the table comes from? No? Do you want to know? Yes? To begin with you have to realize that it’s got nothing to do with good or bad table manners. Absolutely not. It’s something that comes from the Middle Ages and that, though it might seem incomprehensible to you, like so many other things from the past, no longer has any reason to exist. The past passes, little ones. Wait and see. In the Middle Ages, the poor didn’t even have tables. And much less a dining room. Just a long board that they rested on their knees or on a pile of rocks or on a couple of tree stumps. Really, their elbows couldn’t even reach that board, it was too far below them. The nobles and aristocrats, on the other hand, did have rooms to dine in and solid and well-appointed tables, and so they enjoyed the rare privilege of that obvious and evident structural function of the elbow—point of support, resting them on the table . . . It’s not that it’s bad to put your elbows on the table. Just the opposite. But the poor, the poor can’t do it, they’re not allowed to, they’re not worthy—it’s not an issue of manners but of standing, of social standing. Elbows are only for the rich and powerful. And it’s not that the poor who dare put them on the table are bad mannered; rather, they’re out of place. And, of course, if a poor man were caught resting his elbows on some rich guy’s table, that, yes, would be considered bad manners. And they’d probably punish him by cutting off his arms. But History and the passing of time put things in place and, paradoxically, today there are all these rich people of supposedly exquisite manners suffering and not allowing themselves to rest on their elbows and never really understanding why. In short: The blue bloods . . . And do you know where blue blood comes from? No? A
ll right. It just so happens that rich people were almost never outdoors and so they were quite pale and their blood looked very blue in their veins; their subordinates, on the other hand, spent their time working in the sun and that’s where they got their perfect tans and their blood that was so ordinary and red, when it spilled, when they cut a finger with a hatchet or fell in front of a plow, or a horse gave them a loving kick in the head . . . But getting back to the thing from before: the rich could afford themselves the luxury of resting on their elbows; on the other hand, as I’ve said, it’s a more than obvious anatomical function; because if it were improper, then kneeling down in mass and making use of your inferior elbows, resting your knees on the ground, would be akin to blasphemy, right? In short: resting your elbows on the table is a privilege of the upper classes; not resting them is a stigma of the lower classes. Know this: you have spent many, many, many years behaving like poor people . . . And that’s it. And, with elbows resting on the table, they lived happily ever after. And since we’re already on the subject: why do you guys consider it rude to read books at the table, but not to read little screens?” And Penelope calls attention to herself, and doesn’t add that forbidding elbows from touching the table would remove a good number of author photos from the face of the earth; including that one of E. M. Forster, her brother’s favorite: Forster with his head between his hands, held up by both forearms resting on respective elbows, with the pen in the air, far from the manuscript, and with an almost despairing look. “This is exactly what it is to be a writer, Penelope,” her brother said. And then he told her one of his favorite anecdotes, also about Forster, that was a perfect match for his favorite photo of Forster, and in which, when a friend accused him of “not facing facts,” the writer responded: “Don’t tell me to face facts. Facts are like the walls of a room: to face one you must have your back to the other three.” Yes, deciding what part of reality to face was, also, one of the many more or less secret ways of being a writer. To choose is to invent. And, on Mount Karma, Penelope didn’t have much to choose from. Reality, on Mount Karma, was a circular wall, a wall, slow as a turtle eating its own tail and stinging itself with its own venomous stinger because that was in its nature. But most serious of all—and something Penelope has less control over all the time—are the comments of a personal and intimate nature. For example, in light of the fact that all the young Karma women push out an average of five children, and tired of hearing time and again that this fecundity can only be due to—always amid smiles and blushing and never in words—the frequency of their sexual activity and how “well attended” their husbands keep them, Penelope can’t help but theorize, aloud and with a drink in hand, like a detective in a Victorian library surrounded by suspects, that “perhaps it’s all just the diametrical opposite: maybe all of you, due to your own lack of desire or their lack of interest, make love so infrequently that, when a sporadic and unpredicted spark comes along, you don’t have any kind of contraceptive on hand and . . .” Penelope says things like this and hears herself say them. And says to herself that she can’t believe what she’s hearing herself say. What’s going on with her? Whose voice is that? Who’s the sinister puppet master hidden in the shadows tugging at her tense vocal cords? How did she turn into a diabolical and acerbic doll? What can be done to stop her, to shut her mouth? So, trying to fix things a little and talk about something near and dear, Penelope ends up causing more problems, being problematic. Because the only thing that she happens to think of (really the only thing that interests her) is, please, can they all agree and tell her once and for all how it was that Papagrandpa died or disappeared or ran away. And so, again: those unequivocally Karmatic looks. Fury contained in the name of a supposedly good upbringing that’s nothing but a repressive muzzle. Or that other look, typical of the habitat and its inhabitants, that reminds Penelope of the look of a deer in the headlights. And the other even rarer Karmatic look. Almost exclusively Hiriz’s. A look that’s like that of a deer driving a car. A look that accelerates toward another look that, likewise, can only be described by ascribing it to another non-human species. A strange and seemingly absent look accompanied by a smile. A thin smile but, at the same time, the smile of a shark with double rows of teeth. A sleepy shark that never really falls asleep (Penelope suspects that the consumption of relaxant and antidepressant pills by the tense Karma women is sufficient to keep multiple pharmaceutical companies in business) but that doesn’t even exhibit the frontal lobe activity of a shark. No, hers is closer to the parasitic geniality of the fish that feed off what clings to the backs of great and majestic whales or the leftovers discarded from the magnificent ships passing by overhead. And the unmistakable sensation that, behind that mask of amiable understanding, everything Penelope says is being stored away to later be repeated and dispersed and discussed and criticized and condemned. For this reason, she listens to Penelope not attentively, but with the fidelity of a recording device. And, later, rewind and play. And saying everything about her that they never say to her (because she’s Maximiliano’s wife after all and Maximiliano is the direct grandson of Mamagrandma and a man), but that’s exactly what Penelope hears, in the eloquence of her silences, as if she were reading a movie’s secret and alternate subtitles. And that’s where Penelope is and that’s where she stays: in her interminable film-loop, Interlude / Day / Clinic / Maximiliano’s Suite. Surrounded by Karmas, with a doctor entering and exiting and saying “Trust in the Lord” and a priest explaining “Right now Maxi is enjoying the company of the angels for a little while longer, but soon, thanks to our prayers, we’ll have him here again, happy as ever.” Penelope, then, feels the irrepressible desire to insert one of her comments classified as “the strange things Penelope says.” Something about, for example, how it’s been proven that it’s bad to pray for the recovery of the sick; because it won’t take the sick people long, even if they’re true believers, to feel bad when the prayers don’t make them better, and they’ll realize that they’re not worthy of God’s attention and care; and then they’ll get worse and worse until they die in an abyss of uncertainty, blaming and, why not, reproaching the Father who has abandoned them. Also, she could point out that there’s nothing more contradictory than asking the creator of all things to change the course of something—a business failure or a failed marriage, for example—while at the same time repeating, over and over, the thing about thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Is there anything more blasphemous and sacrilegious than praying to a god to change their mind? Over and over again? All the time? But Penelope doesn’t say anything. The TV is turned to a news program that they watch—before the fourth telenovela of the day comes on—like microstories and brief flash fictions. All the bad news about things that always happen somewhere far away and that generate comments like “Thank God things like that don’t happen to us” or—like when the terrible visions of a tsunami in the Pacific are shown—a conciliatory “tsunamis are really good for the crops.” But reference and attention to extrakarmatic reality is fleeting and before long they become the subject once again. * Again, though it’s unnecessary: the first thing that most interests the Karmas is the Karmas; the second thing that most interests the Karmas is what everyone else (mostly Karmas) thinks of the Karmas; the third thing that most interests the Karmas is, again, the first thing that most interests the Karmas—the Karmas. And it’s then that it occurs to someone, in that hospital suite, while dealing cards for another hand of the interminable game of canasta, that it wouldn’t be bad for “Maxi and Penita” * (Not long ago Penelope discovered that that is the nickname that’s been humorously pinned on her. And that it has as much to do with her name as with a “That girl causes us such penita.” And that the penita—Spanish diminutive of pena, meaning sorrow—or “small sorrow” that she causes them really has nothing to do, as they want to make her believe, with her condition as quasi-widow or half-wife, but with Penelope herself, with who and how she is) to get married by the Church. And in three Saturdays is the m
iracle of a weekend with no wedding scheduled. And that available day must be a divine omen, an order from the heavens. “Hallelujah,” exclaims the priest on duty and the doctor, solicitous and well remunerated, adds: “I don’t see any problem. We can transport all the equipment to the gardens at Mount Karma and . . .” On top of Horse, leaning in through one of the suite’s windows, Mamagrandma calls for silence and says that nobody has asked Penelope what she thinks about getting married by the Church. “Would you like that, Penelope?” She asks, staring at her. Penelope, graciously, responds in a low voice that “Better not, at least for now; because we don’t know very well how things will go with Maximi . . .” “Perfect. Say no more. Next month we’ll have a wedding,” thunders Mamagrandma. And, there outside, she empties her pistols at the sun. Then, all of them—like suddenly activated machines, like a perfectly oiled assembly line and, for once, fast and expeditious—begin to make lists, to plan almost military maneuvers, to calculate timelines. For the Karmas, punctuality is something they only put in practice for first communions and weddings and baptisms and funerals. Hiriz, of course, will put herself in charge and personally design—based on a purchased model, because Hiriz never starts anything from the beginning or carries out anything to the end—the bride’s dress. “Luckily, with Maxi the way he is, you won’t have problems with him seeing the dress before the ceremony,” Hiriz says to Penelope. And Penelope believes she’s witnessing a miracle: Hiriz doesn’t normally allow herself to make jokes, but, not only that, the joke is quite good. And Penelope laughs with enthusiasm and for a while her bursts of laughter—almost a desperate snort—frighten her a little. But no: it turns out that—Penelope realizes when her sister-in-law looks at her taken aback and slightly offended—Hiriz is being serious. And Penelope feels that she’s going to be sick. And that, if she stays there, she’ll end up killing one of the assembled Karmas (Hiriz if she had to choose) or that they’ll kill her. Probably, the former first and the latter later. And suddenly, in the room, an abrupt change in atmospheric pressure, like a change in voltage intensity. Everything seems to shut down so it can start up again. As if a new program were beginning that coincided with the beginning, on the TV, of the telenovela that all the women and all the men (because, curiously, it’s not frowned upon for the men to follow the evolution of those absurd storylines; maybe because, probably, it’s one of the only things they can talk about with their wives) have been following for years, night after night, while swallowing the pills that correspond to that particular time of day. It’s called Storms of Ecstasy. * And though Penelope would never admit it, he—who floats above all the truths of a mendacious world, reviewing all of it like someone revising more or less rough drafts—remembers that his sister first came to Wuthering Heights not aboard the original novel, but riding a telenovela-esque, Venezuelan adaptation from the seventies, bad but well-meaning and respectful and—with false exteriors recreated in the studio, with cardboard rocks and a fog machine—arranged to evoke and powerfully transmit the cold and gothic air of moors oh so far from the tropics. And Penelope watches the telenovela on the hospital TV and thinks she perceives, beneath successive layers of a storyline that, after so long entangling itself, has already spun out of control, diffuse but identifiable glimmers of Heathcliff and Cathy, and she wonders if someone might not be mocking her or, perhaps, sending her a compassionate and complicit wink, words of encouragement barely hidden amid everything those leading men and heroines and villains said. Not because she feels particularly moved by this telenovela (or by that other telenovela from her childhood that showed her the way to the book of her head and heart), but because there, in the almost secret pocket of her leather jacket, she always carries, inseparable, her passport. She never leaves it behind for fear that it’ll disappear. Or that they’ll make it disappear. Or—almost out of her mind—for fear of not having it on hand when her employers (the CIA, MI6, KGB, an oriental triad referred to as Dragon?) decide, in the end, to swap her for some Karma spy and liberate her and, ha, ha, ha, the things that occur to someone in the first stages of what, if she’s not careful, could end up being the infinite voyage of madness. And it’s not that Penelope thinks she can’t leave. It’d be a matter of simply going down the stairs, hailing a taxi at the door to the clinic, and saying “Airport.” But at the same time, the truth is that it’s increasingly difficult for Penelope to do anything outside the program, different, that isn’t the same thing she did yesterday and the week before and for the past two or three months. Penelope almost panics when she breaks her routine, alters her ritual, modifies the most natural yet bizarre of cycles. Penelope feels as if she’s spent years without sleeping or years without waking up, either way. In a kind of dawning twilight that, she read once, is something like what the newly blind experience. The half-light of people who, ignoring warnings for some incomprehensible reason, have lost their sight from, defiant to the point of stupidity, staring at an eclipse and—with their biological and photosynthetic clock suddenly and completely confused, out of time at all times—now don’t know when it’s time to get in bed to sleep or to sit down in a chair to work. At times, Penelope almost convinces herself that she no longer sees anything and, other times, that she sees too much, but always the same thing, the same people. Yes, Penelope is karmatizing. And this is like a one-way ticket. So she leaves, swaying, as if along the hallways of a ship in the storm and—slight transgression—on her way to the clinic bar, she passes in front of a room with the door open. There inside, a young woman with an unusual look for Abracadabra (as if ten mixed races were rotating around in her face) holds the hand of an old man. Accustomed to serial similitude, to the near cloning of features and styles of the Karmas, the sight of the young woman who looked so different almost makes Penelope cry. Penelope thinks—without being able to understand how it is that she’s thinking it, maybe already irremediably contaminated by her overexposure to the religious pulsations of the Karmas—that “That, that is exactly how I always imagined the Virgin Mary” or, to feel a little closer to herself, to keep from losing the little that’s left of her trangressive fuel, adds, “or Mary Magdalene.” The young woman—whose name, she’ll soon learn, is Lina—looks at her and smiles and, pointing to the old man in the bed, says: “My father . . . My adopted father . . . He always had such a bad memory, so it was already too late by the time we realized he had Alzheimer’s.” Penelope doesn’t know if it’s a joke, but—like someone suddenly looking at something they haven’t seen in such a long time, like a castaway glimpsing his rescue approaching on the horizon—it is funny. Like things she used to laugh at before coming to live among the Karmas, who laugh at everything in general, but at nothing in particular, and whose sense of humor, like everything, is something serialized, collective, without any kind of singularity. So, suddenly, they both laugh, belly laughs, as if possessed, while a nurse in a painting on one wall of the clinic insists, in vain, index finger over her lips, asking for a silence that they’ll never grant her. Suddenly, unexpectedly, Penelope meets Lina and, again, once more, she feels as if all of her neurons are reaching out and communicating and talking all at the same time after having stayed far too quiet. For Penelope, Lina—after so much time coexisting with people who talk a lot about what they’re going to do and do so little in relation to everything they talk about doing—is a person who does things without announcing them, much less postponing them. The Karmas—for whom saying that they’re going to do something is the same as doing it—would definitely consider her deranged and, probably, a “drug addict.” Someone definitively mawhdern. Lina likes to say that she never uses drugs, but that, when she was a girl, due to carelessness on her parents’ part, she ate a basket full of peyote buttons that her grandmother had gathered to prepare who knows what kind of ancestral medicine: “So now I’m like Obélix, who fell in a pot of magic potion as a boy. I don’t need to take drugs. I don’t need to take trips all over the place. I live, hallucinating all the time. Yippie.” Penelope, on the other hand,
finds a twin—yet different—sister in Lina. Unlike Penelope, who always acts on intuition, Lina, with her constant psychotropic-Giaconda and Cheshire-Cat-always-traipsing-through-the-branches smile, seems to have all her actions planned out down to the millimeter. Always. And she acts them out tirelessly and with a kind of urgency: as if she were crossing items off a list and tallying notches in her belt. * “Less blah-blah and more do-do” is one of her most recurrent phrases; “the inscription on my coat of arms,” she points out. And Penelope enjoys her so much that she doesn’t even dare ask herself what Lina is doing there, in Abracadabra, why she hasn’t gotten far away from there. And when it occurs to her she immediately puts it out of her mind, as if she were hanging a painting to cover this imperfection of Lina’s, as if she were hanging a painting of Lina. And—another difference in their appearance—if Penelope is very pretty, then Lina is beautiful. The difference, though subtle, isn’t just noteworthy but also decisive. And it’s not that Lina isn’t—she is—very physically attractive. But, unlike Penelope, Lina doesn’t get stared at. Eyes don’t fix—in the beginning and whenever possible, to the point of becoming a kind of satire—themselves to certain, impossible to ignore, parts of her anatomy. Lina is appreciated in her entirety; like how for someone who goes into one of those Renaissance churches with a deceptively simple façade and, looking up from down below, without warning but already an inkling, is a miracle, and in the heights of the cupola . . . * Looking down at her, seeing a * tattoo on her left heel, “my footnote,” she jokes. Lina—Lina’s face—is like too many influences melded together into a single style. A modest Catholic saint with eyes lifted to the heavens whose pentimento is unable to conceal the pupils of a pagan goddess, always staring defiantly at anyone who dares look at her. Another miracle, yes. Lina dresses in traditional fabrics and colors in unthinkable combinations, like—according to the latest research—the plumage of the most dangerous dinosaurs. But her features have the sharp edges, Penelope thought and still thinks, of a fallen woman from Biblical times, or something like that, crossed with a feminine Frida Kahlo. A Frida Kahlo without the back problems and the mustache. An authentically fake Frida Kahlo and, really, like a Frida Kahlo played by a beautiful actress, born in the babelish Hollywood hills, just so she could one day play Frida Kahlo and, months after her debut, thank the Academy. Lina is an exotic beauty but of an exoticism that’s immediately assimilable (and envied, and desired) by women and men accustomed to the parameters of normality and the ordinary. Even Hiriz, when she discovers Penelope and Lina chitchatting (definitely an Hiriz verb) at a table in the clinic bar, can’t keep—distinctive and frequent and telltale indication that she perceives something she doesn’t like but would like to be or have—her nose from quivering, as if sniffing, and the scars of her latest plastic surgery become more pronounced in a Botox furrowing of her brow, resulting from a pain similar to those brief yet intense migraines caused by an oversized bite of ice cream. Penelope had seen similar symptoms in a few sharp-nosed habitués of Psycholabis, sniffing out, when they’ve got nothing left in their pockets, who has drugs, who can slip them something to insert in some orifice. A kind of ecstatic agony, much like athletic discipline and Zen exercise and divinatory art. In Hiriz, all of that too; but not in the service of a controlled substance, rather due to an out-of-control addiction to herself. And the need to believe—with the ravenous desperation of someone committed to an odious diet—that everyone loves her and wants her, because before and after her there isn’t, nor could there have been nor will there ever be, anything better. Hiriz needs to believe that there’s no purer or better heroine than her, and that meeting her has to be the closest thing to loving her, and not being able to live without her. Hiriz was raised like this and grew up convinced that it was so. During recesses at school where she reigned like a little, monstrous queen. At the tennis club and on the equestrian field where she pretended to play (with her tanned instructor, Pinto) and rode poorly (a horse she christened Wimbledon); but it doesn’t matter when you’re gripping the racquet handle and holding the reins tight. In a marriage, as inevitable as it was convenient, as suitable as it was predictable, to Ricky, whom everyone calls Fido, but whom, after a few drinks, and beginning to shimmy around in a strange way, everyone starts to call Lassie. But recently * (the face is the soul’s mirror; the face is the mask that the soul puts on every time it has to face itself in the mirror) Hiriz’s magic mirror turns away. And doesn’t answer to her. And the world has filled up with younger women who, she could swear it, are laughing behind her back because they know something she doesn’t. Because they grew up more-and better-informed and unlike her, who never talked about sex with her mother, who received all her education in that regard from nuns, and who arrived to her wedding night only equipped with what she’d learned in romantic and not pornographic movies and who, the next morning, sat down with her family feeling a mix of unease and disappointment, wondering how the story would proceed and if it was in fact essential that it continue. Now, every time a Karma girl is born instead of a Karma boy, Hiriz suffers. Hiriz can barely tolerate the sight of the earthly and carnal nymphets that several of her nieces have become. They’re laughing at her, she’s sure of it, every time she says or does something. Or, even worse, when she gives them some political/strategic advice concerning what clothes to wear and what makeup to put on in order to attract “good candidates” for “matrimonial selection.” So, finding Penelope and Lina, together, is a new blow/disgrace for the already staggering Hiriz, more unsteady all the time in the midst of her own earthquake. Renewed evidence that she’s lost control. Because, Hiriz assumed, Penelope was hers. Penelope was the living or semi-living inheritance of Maxi. That was the only way she could put up with her and, though not love her exactly, appreciate her as an offering who was obliged to obey her and listen to her and always back her up and admire her and only her. This was not part of the plan. This is not fair. There they are, Penelope and Lina, laughing. And, no doubt, they’re laughing at her; because paranoia—like patriotism or that bastardized form of patriotism, politics—is the final refuge of losers and the mediocre. So, that thin karmatic ice that Hiriz always walks on—tiptoeing and trembling, all those hours as a powder puff in childhood ballet for naught—opens under her feet to swallow her, to cover her in darkness and fury and rancor. And—another “childhood episode” of hers—spit her back out like something bitter and embittered; as if Hiriz were one of those tumorific hairballs that cats expel every so often with indolence and satisfaction. And, back in this world, transfigured by her fury and desperation and maliciousness, it’s not that Hiriz isn’t who she was, rather, now, Hiriz is Hiriz raised to the millionth power. An XXL Hiriz. An Hiriz, half feathered-bad-omen albatross and half tarantula, equally poisonous and poisoned. If Hiriz was a bit scattered and confused by her own delusions before, all of a sudden, she’s a complete madwoman, thirsty for vengeance and focused on a single objective. Though to call her “madwoman” is excessive and unfair, not to her but to madness—all madness demands a certain discipline and nobility and creativity. Hers is, merely, dissatisfaction raised to cosmic and chronic heights. A thirst she’s been suffering and putting up with for decades—obliged by clan rules and traditions—and that now finds a target and perfect victim in Penelope. The problem is that Hiriz doesn’t have the Shakespearean loftiness or inventiveness when it comes to revenge. Her form of evil is banal. An evil more indulged than inherited. The miserable and miserly evil of someone who, walking along a beach, pretends not to notice that they’re tromping on sand castles. And it’s that Hiriz’s courtesan and conspiratorial education has, basically, passed through the degraded and predictable versions of the Isabellian dramas of tabloid magazines and telenovelas. * And, since she was little, Hiriz has brainwashed herself with the subliminal dictum and the barely unconscious intuition that the true protagonist and brightest star—far above any mass-produced and dull romantic couple—is none other than the telenovela’s “bad girl.” Best of a
ll to be the bad girl. So Hiriz’s idea of vendetta barely has any effect on Penelope at all. Because what Hiriz chooses as a form of vindication and punishment (it tends to happen: the righteous choose punishments for others that they themselves would find terrible, and more often than not the others are, simply, too busy worrying about something else) is to choose and modify for Penelope the most hideous wedding dress ever seen. And there goes Penelope, as if wrapped in morphine cotton swabs, stuck inside a wedding dress that looks more like a wedding cake. And as she walks down the aisle, in her wake, in the corners, the standard rabid flirtation of those who know themselves restrained Monday through Friday and on Sunday, too. And who, during Saturday celebrations, loosen up just a little, just enough, to what would certainly be considered trangressive in weighty Victorian novels. And there they are: childish pageboys too closely resembling court dwarves; honorable women playing at being dishonorable women for a few hours, expressions clouded by the alcohol and too-tight dresses impeding the flow of oxygen to their brains; hysteria among the wisterias; fragments and anecdotes that are never complete but that, nonetheless, will be discussed in whispers for years to come and completed in accordance with the degree of imagination and malice and sickness of whoever is telling them. But, there, Penelope could care less. In fact—in terms of her reflexive and automatic narrative sense—it seems right and appropriate to her. Before, Penelope was locked in the bathroom for an hour. Nausea and dizziness and a whiskey double. And there she goes, moving down an interminable aisle of Karmas. And there, at the end, Max waits for her, comatose, strapped to a vertical stretcher. And, on the other side of the altar, a plethora of priests. Five or six, one for each congregation. Penelope has heard them debate the unsurpassable virtues of each of their “teams” more than once, as if they were soccer clubs. And in recent days, Penelope has been a sideline witness to tiresome discussions regarding who would be the one to officiate the act in question. Finally, Solomon-like, Mamagrandma decided to cut the event into several pieces and divide them up. So, for Penelope, the ritual acquired an air of that “We Are the World” video clip in which each person sings their own part trying to surpass in delivery and emotion the people who went before and come after. And Penelope bites her lip to keep from laughing when she discovers Lina, climbing in the highest branches of a hundred year old tree, like a bright-colored paparazzo, taking pictures and filming her for her brother, damn him. And Penelope tries to concentrate on what each priest is saying in sibylline and apparently pious voices. But no, nothing will be revealed. The way nothing, religiously, is explained now by a band of priests who are preparing to bless this holy union never to be broken, in sickness and in health, until death does them part. And, yes, these are the same people whom, after a few too many drinks, Penelope has heard laugh uncontrollably, competing over which of them “did better” and “had better ideas” in their brief stints as missionaries in aboriginal jungles. “I memorized the routes and schedules of the planes that flew over the village and predicted when God would pass over their heads again,” one said. “And I gave them small portable radios and told them that God would speak and sing to them from there inside and, of course, when the batteries ran out, they had to come to the church to get them and ask for them on their knees and pray for them,” another said. And now they were there, all together: Bob and Bruce and Michael and Ray and Stevie. They are the world. Or, at least, they are the spiritual leaders of Abracadabra and of the Karmas, who watch it all with a mix of beatitude and calculation. They’re priests, but they don’t seem to be true believers, thinks Penelope. There are five of them and they seem, always, to move around as if connected by an invisible cord. Might they be secret brothers? Might they have once been bank robbers à la the Dalton Gang? Penelope, then, thinks so much that she doesn’t know what to think and remembers having seen them enter and exit a small cabin with stained glass devotionals in the windows—almost one of those giant dollhouses for rich girls—on the edge of Mount Karma. Five priests executing strange and complex and agile choreographies under the moon or sucking in helium from balloons and then rehearsing, between giggles, castrati Bee Gees harmonies. Penelope—who’d be much less frightened to discover them carrying inverted crucifixes covered in the blood of virgins and wearing masks of billy goats—suspects that they are laughing at everything and everyone. And that terrible day is drawing nigh when they’ll break the Shakespearean spell that keeps them soft and invertebrate creatures, fragile gelatinous deep-sea fish, feeding off the crumbs of confessions, and recover their authentic nature as conspiratorial Richelieus. And then, with the fury of hunchbacks storming down from bell towers, they’ll run through entire audiences with axes and knives. Maybe, Penelope almost wishes, right now, why not, right?, as she advances toward the altar and toward a Maxi plugged into machines whose little noises turn the triumphal nuptial march into something softly ambient. But no: nothing ends and everything continues and the “upper class” weddings in Abracadabra conceal, barely, the backdrop of an Olympic discipline that’s lived Saturday to Saturday, where everyone battles for the gold and the silver and the bronze. So there they all are, the perpetual guests, same as always, waiting for the conclusion of this liturgical and excessively long part where they’re merely extras or supporting actors and for the start of the long period where they get to be stars, dancing or drinking or rolling down the stairs to then bounce up like a spring and begin to sing or vomit alcoholic speeches, wrapping their arms around the first person to come in reach. Now—organized by Hiriz, who presents them from the microphone with that directorial and solemn attitude of people unaccustomed to microphones but who, subsequently, discover the renewed pleasure of giving orders and asking for attention at full volume, beginning with a “Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . . one . . . two . . . three . . .”—a choir of little Karmas butchers the “Ave Maria.” Hiriz tends to approach these artistic productions of hers with enviable and frightening euphoria, but their results—just like with her business ventures—leave much to be desired. It’s not like the Karmas are visionary entrepreneurs. To the contrary, generation after generation languish comfortably on a soft cushion—geese on top of goose down—of family businesses that pretty much function by inertia and monopoly. So, what the Karmas do is to work, more or less, what Monopoly is to doing business—a game, a hobby, a passing activity with no timetable, a sport of minimal physical and mental requirement whose principal preoccupation is redesigning business cards and stationary for positions that they don’t and won’t ever occupy. (Penelope could swear that a Karma man once gave her a card where, under the name in gold relief, was written “Gotham City Commissioner,” but maybe she was drunk.) And the greatest aspiration and achievement for these professional non-executives, on a financial level, would be a currency of their own with an internal circulation that, of course, would be called The Karma. * And, yes, they talk a lot among themselves about money, and about the global economy, and about futures markets; but Penelope—despite encountering advertisements on almost every corner with the imperial K of the Karmas and the slogan “We Are Everywhere”—never manages to fully understand what it is they do, what they produce and sell. And when she asked Hiriz about it, all she got were vagaries; but expressed with a rare and almost theatrical eloquence, as if Hiriz were addressing, with a mix of sarcasm and protocol, a fledgling ambassador setting off on his first foreign assignment. For once, Penelope thought then, Hiriz seemed well-spoken, well-written: “The thing we manufacture is a very small thing . . . But we do it much better than anyone else. We nearly have a monopoly on its production and . . . It’s not that it’s something inappropriate or embarrassing. In fact, we refer to it constantly, with familiarity and cheekiness, almost. And yet it’s still a small and trivial thing, almost ridiculous in terms of domestic applications . . . It’s something . . . how to put it . . . Kind of banal.” Shoe polish? Clothespins? Some bathroom equipment to sit down on to think and purge the thoughts you never have anywhere else? Toothbrushes? And t
hen Hiriz changes the subject, the way a radio in a moving car changes stations on its own, and starts talking again about her “projects” which are “far more interesting.” But it’s been said before and will be said again: what happens when Hiriz tries to actually do anything is something else entirely. Everything is possible, anything can happen such that, in the end, nothing happens except a substantial quantity of money is always wasted—millions of Karmas—and written off on taxes as charitable donations. And so the apocalypse always comes too close and too soon on the heels of the genesis of any of her projects. From there, even in light of the Karmas’ particular apathy, there’s always a certain expectation when it comes to one of Hiriz’s undertakings; knowing that, sooner or later, it will end up a topic of conversation, an anecdote with background laughter; because if there’s something the Karmas like, it’s laughing, especially laughing at others when they’re not present; so, at the massive family gatherings, all of them try to put off going home as long as they can so that as few people as possible will be left laughing behind their backs. In this sense, they appreciate Hiriz for her “creativity,” such a perfect fertilizer for mockery. And yet, to tell the truth, they all laugh at Hiriz because they all fear Hiriz and what Hiriz might end up becoming when two or three Karmas of the previous generation die off and they end up decoding a series of last wills that make her, mysteriously, all-powerful, when Mamagrandma dismounts Horse for good. But these things go unsaid, barely thought (who would even dare to imagine that Mamagrandma could have an expiration date?) and, meanwhile and in the meantime, while they can, they laugh at Hiriz, slightly nervous, the future is overrated, a third act that never comes. And they still recall Hiriz’s show—written, produced, directed, and starring her—that she called “a Catholic version of The Diary of Anne Frank.” One afternoon Penelope watched, unable to believe her eyes and ears, an old video of the thing. In that particular approximation of the classic, the character of Hiriz is—she tells Penelope before giving her the VHS as if it were a relic—a little Catholic friend from Anne’s school, Yvonne, who has “the bad luck of going to visit her just when the Nazis come . . . The poor girl is captured and as they’re taking her she whimpers, ‘Ye art mistaken . . . I am like you. This is a mistake. The one you seek is upstairs, listen to the sounds they’re making.’ The Nazis go up and find Anne and her family. But they don’t pay attention to the poor and unfortunate Yvonne . . . And they take her, too . . . And I still get upset remembering it.” To Penelope that unexpected “ye art”—understood by Hiriz as a mark of quality and prestige—makes her shudder. And, now, with the “Ave Maria,” Hiriz has made and unmade Schubert just like she did then to the great little Jewish martyr. Devout shrieks trying, in vain, to ascend to the heights. All the Karmas, of course, smile, thinking of any other thing and once again Penelope admires and envies this tribe’s capacity for abstraction; an ability to be but not to be that surpasses even that of the comatose Maximiliano. Penelope, on the other hand, cannot. None of it passes her by. Penelope sees and hears everything. Penelope feels that she’s floating, that she’s taking off, that it’s all like in a movie, and then—at the climax—comes the fleeting moment of the flashback, like one of the few cards in a board game that grants you brief sanctuary. * Maybe not to rearrange, but to explain everything that came before in one long memory invoked while Penelope advances toward her “I do”? To point out that, in the moment of your wedding, not your whole life, but everything that led you to that wedding, to that other petit mort, passes before your closed eyes? Or is it too late for such sophistry and explication of this chaos? Penelope soars and, so as not to fall from the clouds of this undefined present, Penelope clings to the solid ground of her immediate past. Soon, in front of everyone, Hiriz and Ricky will dance an approximation of the mambo that they took classes for at some point. Ricky, supposedly—there’s an absolute Karmatic consensus on this, but, as tends to happen to her, Penelope can’t tell if the Karmas are mocking or celebrating, because often it’s both things at the same time—is “a master of tropical dances.” And there, on the dance floor, is the only place where Hiriz allows him to play at being the macho man who carries the rhythm and leads the steps, circling around him with the sort of post-coital peevishness of someone who has made too much noise faking her orgasm. But Penelope has already seen Ricky do his thing at multiple weddings, and the truth is that his art is very disconcerting. Ricky—without sacrificing a certain languid Nereidic air—mambas like someone blighted by the evil of San Vito suffering a heart attack during the “de pelicula” version of the great San Francisco earthquake. * In other words: an earthquake that lasts not seconds, but many minutes, to show off its next-generation special effects, so the victims can do a lot of running. And it’s not the historical San Francisco earthquake, but the coming and ultimate and final earthquake; an earthquake that he, Penelope’s brother, now of the atmosphere, is capable of provoking with a snap of invisible fingers, if he so desired, mobilizing tectonic plates as if to make them dance a far superior but equally catastrophic dance as Ricky’s. Finishing her studied choreography à deux, Hiriz always comes over to Penelope, exaggeratedly out of breath, to explain: “I had to take classes to be at Ricky’s level and so I could dance with him. Because it was risky to let him loose and at the mercy of women who also dance. As you know, Ricky would be a prized catch for any woman.” And Penelope trembles. Penelope—she realizes it all of a sudden—has been victim of a different earthquake, for months now. Penelope is its epicenter. Penelope can’t stop trembling. And she always wonders, studying her, if Hiriz is completely crazy or, maybe, completely happy. If she might have managed to put aside all collective reality, leaving it far behind in order to throw herself into the arms of a private irreality, a much more gratifying and powerful experience than any drug or religion can offer or provide. So now Penelope travels back in time, trying not to lose her footing. It’s easy to stumble when remembering, yes; but looking back produces less vertigo than looking at the present moment, which seems to stretch out like a carpet of virtually identical days that’ll only be survived, as if in an attempt to differentiate them, by playing the game of the oh so elusive seven differences. Because the differences are slight: grapefruit instead of orange for breakfast, sometimes it rains a little, things like that. The rest—and weddings are understood here as a kind of gift, a wedding gift, yes, but also a welcome/farewell gift, that special day for each and every bride, even though all the weddings are virtually identical—will be an accumulation of hours and decades that all seem to last the exact same amount of time. For the Karmas, as mentioned, time is not only relative; time is, also, irrelevant. The Karmas have no sense of time because they consider time to be a complete non sequitur (something that, in addition, has the bad manners of showing up without calling ahead or imposing conditions without asking first) except when it comes to celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, and saints. So, for them, time is something that’s turned on and off at will. Like electric lights or sexual desire. And turned on and electrified, remembering it almost immediately but as if already protected by a varnish of the mythic, Penelope, a few steps from the altar, evokes her first days with Lina. Penelope remembers laughing, laughing and that with Lina she can’t stop laughing, and that Lina tells her “It’s my fault. I can’t help but say funny things, even though I’m a stand-up tragedian and not a stand-up comedian.” Lina tells Penelope that she doesn’t know when she was born, that she was deposited in a doorway, that she’s adopted, and that, because of this, “I read the entire horoscope section every day and pick the sign and prognosis for the next twenty-four hours that best suits me.” Lina is, also, a sensitive soul, but sensitive in her own unmistakable and singular way, between poet and freak. Example: in a science-fiction movie, when many spectators see that the actor playing an extraterrestrial has forgotten to remove the watch from his wrist and criticize it as an unredeemable defect, Lina prefers to believe that the extraterrestrial “took the watch from our planet
on a previous visit, because he really liked it, and that he enjoys using it and knowing what time it is while he’s here, right?” Lina explains to Penelope that her adoptive family is Jewish. The Libermans. And that the Jews of Abracadabra are even more conservative than the Catholics of Abracadabra: “It’s forbidden to tweet on the Sabbath, and they’re not allowed to drive Volkswagens, drink Fanta, or wear Puma or Adidas sneakers, because they’re all considered Nazi inventions.” And Lina listens with a smile to Penelope’s familial blues and explains to her that, “in Abracadabra, the seven capital sins multiply into seven million provincial sins.” Lina swears to an increasingly paranoid Penelope that her family has no relation to the Karmas, at least in the last five generations, but that “I, being adopted, can’t make any promises: who knows, I might be a secret and compromising Karma, discarded as far away as possible; in other words: a Jewified Karma, something like that. Best disguise ever. They’ll never find me.” Lina, also, knew Max in high school. They studied together and Max asked her out more than once, but—preexisting condition, Maxi was not yet Max—he had to introduce her to his parents and Mamagrandma. Lina chose to pass up the opportunity. She had enough in her life with the Orthodox Libermans to not want to add the fervent Karmas. “But I can understand why Maximiliano was attracted to you. Obviously you remind him of me. And that he couldn’t conquer me,” Lina tells Penelope, very seriously. Penelope regards her in a disconcerting silence. Then Lina bursts out laughing. It’s a horrible laugh that sounds like “Huahuahua” and seems to burst out of someone else entirely, someone who is, maybe, perfectly unaware of her beauty. And, as such, she—maybe as a self-defense mechanism, or to protect those she encounters from a brilliance that makes them lose orientation and crash into a wall with a smile—permits herself the humble gesture of letting herself be imperfect. A laugh—Penelope realizes—that’s fake and exaggerated and is Lina’s way of being human. Lina’s laugh is the mole that makes her unforgettable and, yes, Penelope will end up sleeping with her, once, out of love, out of sympathy, because it’d been eons since she’d had any sexual activity (since that one night that lasted several days when several of Max’s transistors melted together beyond all repair), because Lina is not a Karma. And because the first time Penelope saw her naked—she who’d never felt anything resembling a sapphic longing, not even riding the alkaloid crest of the whitest night—she remembered the words of a writer she read once and whose name now escaped her: “I want to rip her arm off. I want to sleep in her uterus with my foot hanging out.” And no, just in case, better to be clear: the quote does not belong to William Faulkner; but it does belong to one of his bastard yet legitimate progeny. One of the best and most pure-blood and purebred of all. One of those writers of the American south, flinging sentences like Molotov cocktails concocted with one third gasoline, one third swamp water, and one third all the sweat that Penelope and Lina left on those sheets that afterward they twisted and rang out without their laughter ever ceasing. And Lina has two personalities, two lives. In the morning she manages a jewelry store that belonged to her mother. The place was, provincially and familiarly, referred to as “La Señora de los Anillos,” and it specializes in wedding rings. Lina decided to take a spin running it and renamed the place “The Lady of the Rings,” and now it offers rings of elven and druidic and gothic persuasion. Rings ideal for weddings that sooner or later end in swords and sorcery because, as Lina says, “married life is nothing but a very complicated game of role-playing, right?” When the workday is over, Lina mutates, transforming into the princess of local counterculture. Every night, she puts on her show in an unequivocally and decidedly bohemian café in the center of the city. There, Lina dramatizes and soliloquizes the life and death of Joan Vollmer, the unfortunate wife of William S. Burroughs who took a bullet fired by the Naked Lunch author to her temple while playing a game of William Tell. That night, after finishing her hospital-recreational duties, on the pretext of a headache, Penelope escapes from Mount Karma and arrives at the bar Carpe Noctum. Lina has put her name on the list and Penelope is greeted by the bar owners. Two foreigners—one skinny and sad and the other massive and expansively happy—whose nationalities appear to have faded away like those passports with worn out covers and pages that won’t fit even one more stamp. Professional foreigners. “They look like first rate B-roll actors at the premiere of Casablanca,” Penelope thinks as the short one leads her to a table and the giant serves her a tall glass filled to the brim with rum while all the while the jukebox plays some kind of pop supplication, something that talks about intermittencies of the heart, something like that. On the stage, with a red hole in the side of her head, Lina is sitting in front of a TV that broadcasts nothing. Lina is Joan Vollmer, sitting in front of a TV, broadcasting her death and life from the depths of the pre-Columbian netherworld. In the body and voice of Lina, Joan Vollmer is hating on the beatniks and refusing to resign herself to be a minor member in the body of the beat. * And right away he gets it: Lina—who, unlike Hiriz, is a masterful performer of herself, someone you never really get tired of watching; because it turns out to be impossible to totally believe her, because you can never really trust your eyes and ears—is not a great actress. All her charm—of which, granted, there is a great deal—passes exclusively through her, through her persona. But—after only a few seconds of starting to watch the digital performance that comes to him via Penelope, he gets it—Lina isn’t doing justice to the person that Joan Vollmer was and the character that she could be. Joan Vollmer as a sort of Megamix, where parts of Penelope and parts of Hiriz and parts of Lina mix together: the fury of the centuries, the eternal dissatisfaction, the artistic temperament that’s nothing but a single, unrelenting bad mood, functioning as a kind of tormented manifesto of aesthetics and ethics. Joan Vollmer as the universal woman (this really does seem to him to be Lina’s great idea, an idea that he’ll guiltlessly rob) and goddess of the afterlife watching over everything, her face illuminated by the cold phosphorescence of a screen that tunes in a single channel, broadcast from a celestial and ancient and circular hell. Joan Vollmer—eighteen years old, subtle but nice curves, heart-shaped face, upturned nose, the first among her friends to use a diaphragm, married to a certain Paul Adams, and yet free and impossible to pin down—jumping from hotel to hotel and from bed to bed. New York in the early forties. Sharing an apartment with Edie Parker, girlfriend and first wife of Jack Kerouac. “You have to cook eggs over a low flame,” Joan Vollmer repeats time and again, that being the extent of her domestic wisdom. “And you have to be very careful to make sure the flame stays lit,” she adds. But Joan Vollmer is like one of those uncontrollable forest fires visiting a big city. Insatiable. Joan Vollmer is the fire and the wind. And she drives her professors mad with unanswerable questions in the Barnard classrooms and writes things in the margins of her copy of Das Capital like “Maybe Marxism is dynamic and optimistic and Freudianism is not. Is one more useful than the other? Why do you always have to choose this or that?” Every week, Joan Vollmer buys The New Yorker and reads it from cover to cover. She clips out her favorite cartoon from its pages and carries it with her, inside her purse alongside a few folded bills: it’s the drawing of a disconsolate man who says, “My mother loved me, but she died.” And Joan Vollmer’s laugh makes almost everyone laugh. But almost everything that makes her laugh isn’t funny to anyone else, she complains with a mixture of bewilderment and pride. More pride than bewilderment as she repeats to herself, in the most vertiginous and lofty of low voices: “Nothing is foreign to me. Everything is mine and for me. I am Alpha and Omega.” Joan Vollmer who doesn’t hear so much as see classical music while discussing Plato or Kant or while reading Proust, for hours, in an increasingly arctic bath. Joan Vollmer, who discovers she’s pregnant and drives herself mad (they find her walking through the dirty rain of Times Square, talking to herself, playing with her hair), and they take her to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital and she gives birth to a little girl who is quickly sent off to live
with her grandparents, a girl who might later say, “My mother loved me, but she died . . . ha . . . ha . . . ha . . .” Although it’ll be a while (but not that long, really) until then and right now Joan Vollmer is more alive all the time and takes an underage lover whom she instructs and trains and educates and makes get good grades. But Joan Vollmer—undisciplined and untrustworthy when it comes to putting birth control methods into practice, several abortions—decides that what she needs now is a unique man, a real man. Is William S. Burroughs “a real man” or is he “a unique man”? Is he a capitalist or a Freudian? William S. Burroughs is William S. Burroughs. William S. Burroughs begins and ends in himself, like her, and he moves around the rooms of the flat on 119th Street with the slowness of a fragile pharaoh or the speed of an indestructible extraterrestrial. William S. Burroughs is older than all the others and he knows how to use chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant and gets good tables in the Russian Tea Room when they get those irrepressible and amphetaminic urges to eat borscht. William S. Burroughs is able to invent stories on the spot that are impossible yet plausible in their details—like when he says “I flew for Franco during the Spanish Civil War”—and it’s Joan Vollmer who pays his bail when, April 1946, he’s incarcerated for the consumption of drugs and the falsification of prescriptions. It’s also Joan Vollmer who scores him a little heroin when William S. Burroughs—fallen pharaoh, lost extraterrestrial—comes out of the cell shivering, in the grips of an abstinence syndrome that’s not at all an enjoyable experience, because “to abstain” is a verb that never has and never will interest him. And, almost immediately thereafter, it’s William S. Burroughs who rescues Joan Vollmer from a new stay in Bellevue and from then on they’re inseparable. William S. Burroughs likes to say—with the voice of a gangster—“My old lady this . . .” and “My old lady that . . .” And, like him, Joan Vollmer is also interested in drugs and the Mayan codices in the Museum of Natural History where, walking room to room, they receive the blessing of gods with names made up of more consonants than vowels, and then take off for Texas. The idea, the plan, is to find a cheap and isolated farm and to plant and harvest and sell marijuana. There, Joan Vollmer discovers that she is pregnant and asks William S. Burroughs if he wants her to have an abortion. “No way: abortion is murder,” responds William S. Burroughs. Neither of them, it’s fair to surmise, is built for outdoor labor. The only one who seems happy there—amid the cyclones and oil drilling towers and the big, long automobiles with horns mounted on their hoods—is little William S. Burroughs Jr., also known as “The Little Beast,” who runs among the plants, fleeing his own shadow while his parents look at him the way you look at a cloud: asking yourself what shape it has, what it reminds you of, if it brings rain, or if it will be broken up by the sun, and perhaps already suspecting his tragic and cursed fate; because there’s no way he could have exited William S. Burroughs, entered into Joan Vollmer, exited Joan Vollmer, and turned out fine and with good handwriting. “Bill should be writing instead of going around here with a shovel on his shoulder,” Joan Vollmer wrote to Allen Ginsberg. And nothing turns out fine; soon they are considered personas non grata by the farmers, and in 1948 they take off for New Orleans and buy a house with what they got for the farm. Joan Vollmer finds pharmacists willing to sell her Benzedrine inhalers, William S. Burroughs fantasizes about cultivating out-of-season vegetables or cotton, or something like that. But, again, planting isn’t his thing. And his friends start to sell their manuscripts to publishers hungry for the new flavor, manuscripts that he edited and helped them write. And what’s this nonsense about the Beat Generation that he starts to read (or maybe he dreams and is delirious, maybe they are anticipatory and paranoid visions, leaning on the bar in a Colonia Roma cantina, like a roaring gladiator surrounded by armored lions) in newspaper clippings that they send him from the U.S.A. If anything is certain it’s that he belongs nowhere. He was born alone and he’ll die alone; but solitude is not a simple thing. Where is your work? How to catch it? Where did they—the policemen who enter his house and find marijuana and heroin and various guns and take him to the second city precinct and behind bars again and on to a hospital, in custody, detox—come from? William S. Burroughs, shackled and howling, sees spheres in the air that remind him of pre-Columbian calendars and he decides that the answer to all his questions is, must be, in Mexico. From now on—ignoring the future summons of multiple judges—he’ll be a professional fugitive separated from the U.S.A, a loose piece and expat, a perpetual motion machine, an invisible man who—with his family—crosses the border in September of 1949. The Mexico City sky is immense and of a blue ideal for eagles to dance with serpents in their beaks. Under their wings, millions of inhabitants move incessantly from here to there, like random scenes of a movie waiting, in vain, to be edited, for someone to give it some coherence, some storyline. Here comes the Satanist and volcanic Aleister Crowley to scale Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl and in so doing attain the 36th Masonic order. There, somewhere nearby, returning from its new home, a golden angel alights atop a column and William S. Burroughs watches it without closing his eyes, so as to miss nothing, from the balcony of an apartment at 37 Cerrada or Medellín. Or was it 210 Paseo de la Reforma? It doesn’t matter. My house, your house, William S. Burroughs is in his house. The whole city like a sprawling mansion overflowing with bedrooms, limitless, a mixture of past and future where, at sunset, pistols sing with the sweet voice of lead and silver. For William S. Burroughs, Mexico is like the Old West. The maximum sentence for riddling someone with bullets is eight years; but cantina gunfights abound where, in the end, the dead are the only ones condemned. “This city has the highest rate of violent deaths in the whole world. And when a Mexican kills someone it’s usually his best friend—friends are more frightening than strangers. And the good thing about killing a friend is that afterward you can cry for him and get drunk in his memory,” someone explains to them with the diction of a tour guide. Concluding: “No Mexican really knows another Mexican.” And this last bit seems perfect to William S. Burroughs because nobody will complain about not knowing him, about not knowing what’s going on inside his head without first understanding that William S. Burroughs is quiet so as not to frighten: his visions are of a dangerous caliber and he always aims and fires at the blackest of targets. In Mexico, William S. Burroughs feels for the first time that he has finally found the place where nobody is interested in or worried about banning William S. Burroughs. Everything goes, going is everything, and I couldn’t care less, my children. And no one cares that you go around stoned up to your eyebrows or full of firewater. Nor do they care if you frequent gay bars like El Chimu and come out with an adolescent on each arm, heading for the first alley in a neighborhood that is like an aristocratic landscape fallen into disgrace. Two dollars a day is more than enough to sate appetites and thirst and vices. And, granted, it’s not so easy for Joan Vollmer to acquire Benzedrine inhalers; but she gets her fix from thyroid pills and getting drunk starting at eight in the morning thanks “to the evil spirits that sell you a quarter liter of tequila for barely forty cents.” The dealers in the place—names like Dave Tercerero (or was it actually David Tesorero, and William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer listen poorly and transcribe worse?), or the colossal Lola La Chata—round out their earnings selling fake silver crucifixes, and pharmacists sell you morphine with gold-toothed smiles. William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer are blasted all the time and there’s not a lot of time or desire left over for sex. Which doesn’t worry William S. Burroughs but bothers Joan Vollmer, who can’t handle her partner’s Taoist chemical reclusion and yells at him that, please, they should at least go out and walk their ruined selves through the ruins near Plaza Mayor. Joan Vollmer escapes to Cuernavaca and William S. Burroughs accompanies Dave Tercerero on his annual pilgrimage to the church of Nuestra Señora de Calma, patron saint of thieves and traffickers, in the eternal and unfathomable outskirts of the city. They walk almost eighty kilometers in two days and enter the basilic
a surrounded by beggars and cripples, crutches in the air and one-wheeled wheelchairs and, there, Dave Tercerero takes the opportunity to conduct some business while William S. Burroughs feels more depressed with each offering he hears made and each prayer he witnesses. What do all these people believe in? How can they believe in a virgin who made water flow from the earth? How can there be so many virgins, all of them the same, yet different, sprouting up between the rocks, like mushrooms more hallucinated than hallucinogenic, cradling the bloody bodies of their sons, crowns of cactus thorns on their heads, eyes rolling to the heavens as if struck by the always demanding and yet impossible to define will of our Father, as if already anticipating his imminent flight with no return trip or landing? When he gets home, his prayers have been heard: Joan Vollmer has come back as if nothing had happened. She has come to understand that they are parts of a single gestational organism and, as proof, she demonstrates it to everyone who visits them—North American students from Mexico City College, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady—by performing an exercise: Joan Vollmer and William S. Burroughs split apart, each with a pencil and two sheets of paper divided into nine squares; they take position on opposite sides of the room, they draw inside the squares, and more than half of the images turn out the same. One day, they think, they’ll attain the communion of absolute similitude and will be one, the transformation will be complete and they’ll be called Joan William Vollmer Burroughs, Jr. But everything passes: William S. Burroughs, according to descriptions of those who see him, looks more like a scorpion all the time, a desiccated scorpion. And he has paranoid dreams where he gets in gunfights with policemen dressed as mariachis, and wakes up and goes out wandering aimlessly only to wake up the next morning in a hotel. And then he goes out again to keep drinking and before long you know when William S. Burroughs is nearby because of the odor of urine from the uremia dancing in his intestines. He can smell himself as he writes about how he smells, about what comes out of his body, about what he puts in his body. As if it were a circuit, a short circuit. And money gets scarce and everything tastes like tortillas because they’re only making enough to buy tortillas, which they cover and fill and wrap around whatever they can, with whatever there is and whatever’s leftover, and now William S. Burroughs dreams that, possessed by a “troglodyte gluttony,” he eats William S. Burroughs Tortillas that are sold in kiosks, “one after another, on the sidewalk, gorging himself, overflowing with enchiladas and sopes, carnitas, horrendous pastries, soft candies, fly-covered breads, a Chinese coffee, fried fish, chorizos . . . is there really someone who ingests all that junk?” William S. Burroughs chews words and spits out letters to his distant fellow travelers where they read things like, “Mexico is not simple or bucolic. Mexico is basically an Oriental culture that reflects two thousand years of disease and poverty and degradation and stupidity and slavery and brutality and psychic and physical terrorism. It’s sinister and gloomy and chaotic, with the special chaos of a dream. It’s my home and I love it.” And William S. Burroughs loves the apartment they move to. 210 Orizaba. And it’s there that he starts to write in earnest, for real. Junky. Memories of a dope fiend that he invokes while sticking himself with full syringes. Language is a virus that he injects into his vein and William S. Burroughs eats virtually raw meat and kicks cats and spends his time at a table at Bounty (could it be a young Mamagrandma there, leaning on the bar, who invites William S. Burroughs to hold her revolver, a skull stamped in the silver of the stock?), a bar where they serve food starting at sunrise in order to be able to respect the law of only serving alcohol with food. The food is bad and the alcohol alcoholic. Vodka or tequila or gin is what William S. Burroughs drinks. He likes transparent liquids and Burroughs quits the drugs but moves on to full bottles. And empty tortillas. And on Thursday, September 6th of 1951, William S. Burroughs—after fantasizing out loud about a new escape to the South, where he’d live off his marksmanship and by hunting wild animals—pulls out a Star .380 and announces to the assembly that “it’s time to perform our act of William Tell, we’re going to prove to the boys what a good shot I am.” Joan Vollmer smiles a twisted smile and puts an empty glass on top of her head. Later William S. Burroughs will say that he doesn’t know what happened or why he did it. He’ll remember having been possessed by an “Ugly Spirit.” And he’ll say that it was Joan Vollmer’s death that ended up making him into a writer because it “brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.” Years later, without giving credence to the various eyewitnesses, William S. Burroughs will attempt a banal and innocent explanation—the words of a reverse convert, the need to stop believing the unbelievable but verifiable—to cover himself, as if in a disguise, with the most pedestrian version of what could’ve happened: a simple and terrible domestic accident, while cleaning the pistol he was considering selling to a friend, a slip, a bang. And William “Billy” S. Burroughs Jr.—who was there too, part of the fatal tableau vivant, who died so young, after having recalled everything in a pair of desperate books, and who would’ve been so much happier with parents who were less “cool” and if he’d never had anything “interesting” to recall, closer to Mount Karma than to Interzone—will write much later that what his mother put on her head was “an apple or an apricot or a grape or me.” But there it is and there it remains—suspended in a wrinkle in space-time—the empty glass, spinning on the floor, beside Joan Vollmer, finally fallen and for once motionless, ready to be interred in grave 1018 A-New in Panteón Americano, on Avenida México-Tacuba and, from there, in 1993, due to lack of payment and maintenance, moved to niche number 82 class R. Blood spilling from her head. From the temple and not the forehead, the way Lina portrays it for artistic and aesthetic affects, because a third blind eye between two eyes that no longer see is better. And one thing is certain, undeniable: you must be very careful of the spirits you invoke for the love of art, the ugly spirits, the malignant spirits always given to poetic justice and tragedy. It’s not good to mess with the reality of the dead. Rewriting their reality is like playing with a loaded gun. And so Penelope doesn’t see how a Karma in charge of the event’s security (following the instructions of “Señora-Señorita Hiriz”) gets ready and takes aim and fires at Lina. Rifle and silencer and—plop—Lina falls from above, camera in hand and camera that falls from that hand to film her final images, like with all war correspondents: Penelope in white beside the vertical stretcher that holds Max, and, then, sky, a few clouds, green leaves and flaming petals, and, finally, dirt marched across by a funereal retinue of ants honoring the recently fallen. And Lina makes almost no noise as she disappears into a huge rosebush. Lina sinks into the flowers and the thorns. And the whole scene is like an old silent movie with a simple and efficient effect. Cut a few meters of celluloid. And stick it back together. And what was there is gone. And Lina is gone. Her body will be quickly and discretely removed by the servants—who take care of the things nobody wants to take care of—and abandoned by the side of some road somewhere. And, when it’s discovered a few days later, swollen by sun and heat, it’ll be written off as just another of the many victims of violence between rival narco gangs in Abracadabra. And, yes, the autopsy will reveal traces of illicit substances floating in Lina’s blood; so (the girl was a drug addict and a degenerate and a delinquent, yes) a follow up investigation won’t be necessary. And outside all the preceding—what just happened, what and who (the life of Lina, life, Lina) has ended forever so that eternity (the immortal death of Lina), can begin—Penelope arrives to the altar repeating over and over, as if she were praying, in the quietest yet most deafening voice of her thoughts, something she read in a book once. Not her favorite book, Wuthering Heights, but in a book very close to it, a direct relative of her favorite book. * “Reader, I married him . . . Reader, I married him . . . Reader, I married him . . . Reader, I . . .” (the first line of chapter thirty-eight / conclusion, Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
, 1847). And standing, facing Max, listening to the things that the priests say, like a relay race, passing one sentence to the next runner to be completed and carried on, Penelope could swear that her past and future husband opens his eyes and looks right at her and shakes his head. Twice. And then smiles the saddest smile she’s ever seen. And it’s one of those moments. * One of those moments like ice. Like crystal. Frozen skates with glass blades sliding across thin ice, and after months of heavy and solid nothing, everything is suddenly so fragile and breakable and ephemeral. And then something snaps inside Penelope and outside Penelope and, if this were all a movie, it’d be the instant when the ambient sound drops to zero so the volume of the protagonist’s thoughts can be turned up. And all Penelope thinks about is running away. And she runs. And, at first, the Karmas watch her run with borderline delight, smiling; because she reminds them (though they never remember the name of the actress) of one of those stupid comedies—with fireballs and flaming meteorites and other various and sundry special effects—they go see in the cinema when there’s nothing playing that’s worth seeing. Movies that, every so often, provide spectators and guests (scandalized yet not too scandalized, because it’s a comedy, and besides it’s understood that everything will turn out fine and that the lack of resolution will end up consuming itself) with the vision of a runaway bride, fleeing her own wedding, taking off at full speed with her white dress lifted and held up over her knees by hands wrapped in delicate lace and silk, the complex hairdo falling harmoniously, the veil detaching from the headband that holds it and, suspended for a few seconds in the midday air, the bouquet being launched in any direction and caught by an old lady or a little girl. By some non-Karma from whom they immediately snatch the bouquet and stomp it to nothing. There Penelope goes. A bride, unbridling herself in front of everyone. Dismantling herself like a Cinderella at 12:01, but during the day, not the night, and not inside a carriage about to become a pumpkin, but in front of all the guests at the great ball and with a prince who can no longer pursue or desire her. How funny, how fun, how instantly anecdotal and, yes, another ideal reason and perfect excuse to once again talk (badly) about the good Penelope. And knowing that everyone is laughing because they think it’s a joke. “That crazy Penelope.” And so, with their phones, they capture Penelope running away, as if in the fastest slow motion. And nobody dares do anything, because doing something would mean having to stop recording. And, almost to the edge of the garden, Penelope makes the closest thing to a gesture of affection, of immediate nostalgia. Penelope stops and turns and fishes out her mobile phone (which is slipped up under her white nuptial garter) and frames the shot (it isn’t easy, they are so many) and takes the picture. And they remain there, fixed, like fossils of glass and metal, on the small display—all the Karmas. Together, buzzing like a hive of forever-vacationing bees, pretending they’re posing for one of those court painters who won’t pass up the opportunity to slip a hidden and coded message of contempt for his employers into a corner of the canvas, or conceal it among coins and medals. * Penelope, with the years—and like in that troubling dream where a woman without a name of her own, sheltered only by her married name, returns to Manderley—will turn on that permanent snapshot, far away, in the house on the beach by the forest (here he sees her, reads her); and she’ll ask herself what might’ve become of them and then answer herself: “Nothing. Same as always. Just the novelties of births and deaths, some replacing others, and that’s it, and maybe one of them, one of those horny adolescent nephews from back then, once in a great while, will wonder, as if looking at a mirage, if I was real and where I might be now.” But at the time nobody goes after her. They’re unready to act confronted by the unexpected and, when something like this happens (Penelope in flight, smaller all the time on the horizon, taking on the liquid texture of a mirage, veil and dress swirling in the wind, making her look like a plume of smoke ascending vertically to the heavens), the Karmas prefer not to act, expecting that everything will get back on track, like so many other times. To intervene would be to involve yourself and, the horror, even be considered complicit. So, better to live and let live and look the other way, while Penelope can only look ahead. Soon she crosses the border of Mount Karma and only a few times has she experienced geographically such a stark sensation of an end—the green gives way to desert in a matter of centimeters and the power of the sun increases overhead and everything spins. * And, maybe, this is where a description of that new and empty landscape that opens and closes over Penelope (who finds herself playing with the idea of going back, but who, she realizes, has lost all sense of direction) would fit well. But he—among the clouds, in a place where there are no more editors or suggestions—prefers to make use of the comfortable device, which he so admired in other writers, in other places—of the ellipsis: in the beginning, that prehistoric bone spinning in a second of millennia into a spaceship and near the end of Sentimental Education, when we are told that Frédéric Moreau “traveled” coming to know “the melancholy of the steamboats, the cold of the dawn under the tents, the tedium of landscapes and ruins, the bitterness of interrupted friendships.” How much time elapsed? What time is it? Answers: enough and no time. Penelope, now, then, is outside of everything and beyond time’s reach. In the desert. Where everything is simultaneously near and far. The desert where nothing enters yet everything fits. The desert that T. E. Lawrence liked “because it is clean,” but that really is something else. Something different, though the confusion is understandable and even excusable—the desert is something that can’t get dirty. The desert is like an immense room that cleans itself unhurriedly and unceasingly. There’s no water in the desert, because nobody needs it, except for the fools who dare enter and who will soon be rung out, cleaned, swept under the heavy carpet of sand. And Penelope, playing the fool, is thirsty. And remembers that she heard somewhere—Discovery Channel? History Channel? National Geographic Channel?—that when there’s no water the best thing to do is put a stone in your mouth and suck on it like a candy, to stimulate the production of saliva, to take advantage of your own water before it turns to sweat and evaporates. Penelope looks at the ground and it’s such a deserted desert that it doesn’t even offer up any pebbles. The ground is a single horizontal plane interrupted, every so often, by a tooth of rock the size only a dinosaur could accommodate. So what Penelope does is bring words to her mouth. Actually, the words are already there, descending in a cascade from brain to tongue, bouncing off the cupola of her palate like the footsteps of the faithful in a friendly cathedral. Words that she always liked, in various languages and from varying times, enough words to end up configuring a language of their own, final, and hers alone (* Psyche, Viento, Book, Huna, Nit, Manitou, Bimbo, Oslo, Jazz, Niet, Manga, Menorah, Pomeriggio, Tedio, Bourbon, Genji, Topo, Fog, Milonga, Sexo, Genesis, Tos, Biji, Dandelion, Coral, Dicen, Madrigal, Amour, Laúd, Opus, Vispera, Dandy, Tul, Mississippi, Satori, Underground, Mann, Scuola, Frappeé, God, Tulpa, Revival, Moorland, Clown, Clone, Stop, Go, Etcetra . . .), the curves of their letters like the curves of their DNA and what’re those things called, Penelope wonders. Penelope pointing at one of those balls of straw that roll along, pushed by the wind. Penelope talking to herself: “You know . . . Like the ones that always appear on Main Street in westerns, just before and always on time for the final duel between one gunslinger with a star on his chest and another dressed all in black . . . Here comes another one . . .” * Note: Salsola Pestifer or Salsola Kali or Salsola tragus. In Spanish they bear the none-too attractive name of estepicursor or running or rolling plants, originally from the Eurasian steppes, their restless seeds traveling on boats that leave Russia heading for South Dakota. Plants that overrun and erode the terrain where they wander, absorbing water and taking it with them. A better name, he—who feels somewhat like this himself—thinks, is the name of the family to which all the plant’s varieties belong: “diaspora.” And, better still, the much more graphic and physical common name: tumbleweed. And Penelope tumbles and
rolls and falls and it’s already night, dark and perfect. And Penelope is delirious; but it’s not the delirium of talking out loud and saying some random thing, it’s the delirium of maintaining the most absolute silence. And soon, where before it read “sun” now it reads “moon” and everything has turned silver. High above, but like you could touch it with the tips of your fingers—a strange and immense moon, a moon howling at all the wolves on the planet. A moon that seems to cry out for vengeance at the injustice of being named merely Moon (a common generic name and species, when all her systemic sisters have names or precise acronyms of their own) and for being called on to orbit around a planet that (unlike its fellow planets) doesn’t bear the Olympic name of an ancient deity, but, simply, one that indicates its condition as a terrestrial rather than celestial thing. And, yes, it was true: in the desert, the sky is better and more brightly illuminated than in cities, to the point where—astronomical paradox, optical illusion, it’s all exactly the same to Penelope—there’s very little sky up there at all. Just scant and brief patches of darkness between so many stars, so many—the brilliance of one melts into the brilliance of another, there above none of the stars look dead—that it’s as if the constellations have renounced concern with any figurative intent in order to, impassioned and so alive, embrace the most abstract of expressionism. * “My God . . . It’s full of stars!” But that’s not all, because everything doesn’t end there, above. And the sky seems to have spilled over onto the earth and the desert sparkles too. And Penelope wonders if what she is seeing might just be an introduction to death: the prologue not to a white light at the end of a tunnel, but to one on the ground, everywhere her gaze comes to rest, a highway of infinite little white lights that don’t lie, that are real. Small stones of light that Penelope, after putting one in her mouth to suck on, gathers in a handful and puts inside her bridal corset and something tells her that they must be diamonds. Diamonds unearthed by the wind that now blows and Penelope thinks of her brother and thinks “Magic Realism! To you and for you, because you always liked it so much.” * (And a message for the incredulous who, arriving to this point, will exclaim “Awww . . .”: the preceding is not only possible but true and documented. The same thing happened in a mining settlement and German colony, in Africa, on the edge of the Namibian desert, at the beginning of the twentieth century; he can’t remember the exact name of the place, but he does remember the views of luxury Bavarian-style mansions abandoned and almost buried by the sand and the voice of the documentary’s narrator commenting that it was such a wealthy region that the wind unearthed diamonds and the colonists, in party dress, went out to gather them by the light of the moon.) And Penelope on the ground covered with diamonds puts one in her mouth and sucks on it and it’s like sucking on ice that’s not cold but, yes, ice. And Penelope laughs soundlessly, thinking that one of her adolescent wishes has come true in that twisted way wishes are granted anywhere but in fairy and genie tales. “I’m going to die a millionaire, but, of course, the idea wasn’t to become a millionaire just minutes before dying, ha,” Penelope says, as she fills her cleavage and the folds of her dress with diamonds. Her diamonds, unpolished and uncut. Diamonds that still recall—almost with pride and without any guilt—the carbon they once were. * Diamonds Penelope will use to build that house beside a forest and on the beach. The house where she’ll live with her brother and He Whose Name Must Not Be Mentioned, please, no matter how bad you want to, okay? Diamonds that don’t shine but will shine and are of an almost obscene size and which stick to Penelope’s skin, down her neckline, and keep her awake. “I’m going to die with my eyes open,” thinks Penelope, who, then, can’t believe what she’s seeing, what can only be a deoxygenated vision of her slowly asphyxiating brain. There, before her, stands a colossal animal. Big as a small house. Something that could’ve once been a cow but now is something else, enveloped in a green radiance like those toys that glow in the dark, like the needles and the hands of some clocks. A color that, if included in the cosmic color-wheel, would appear as “sci-fi green.” The animal looks at Penelope with the saddest of smiles (a smile that reminds her of Max’s farewell smile, in front of the altar) and Penelope looks at it with a smile that strives not to be sad and yet . . . And Penelope thinks: “It was true. Here’s Hiriz’s mythic beast. The last of its species. The Giant Green Cow that’s used to frighten the children so they sleep and have nightmares about the Giant Green Cow.” And the beast lies down on its side and Penelope, choking back her nausea, lies down beside it and latches onto one of the teats of its udder and drinks and swallows something that, she understands immediately, isn’t milk because it doesn’t taste like milk and (the liquid reproduces the greenish glow of the animal that’s letting her drink it) as it travels down her throat, transmitting the echo of the beast’s atomic and maternal heartbeat, it’s as if it’s lighting up inside her, like someone passing through the many rooms of a mansion and flipping on all the switches one at a time, now like a bonfire in the night. And, with a mix of pride and fear, Penelope understands that these lights will never go out. That they’re the lights that voyagers from other galaxies will use to orient themselves and arrive here, when the entire planet is a desert like this desert where now she seems to understand everything. * And, of course, the temptation for him to additionally attribute singular telepathic properties to such a beast and to have Penelope hear it in her head—as if a thief had broken in not to take anything but, yes, to rearrange the things in that place forever—is very great. To have the creature say something emotional and definitive like “I have seen things that you humans wouldn’t believe . . . Man of Orion . . . Tannhauser Gate . . . Tears in rain . . . Time to die . . .” but with a more folkloric feel. Or—funny and interesting possibility—to emphasize a certain Frankensteinian aspect, wordlessly telling Penelope that it’s looking for its creator, whom it recalls as a beautiful woman, with a sweet voice, and “probably, the most intelligent of all women.” But even as he—now weightless and bodiless and who, in his writing, down below, permitted himself much more daring and unjustifiable things from a narrative perspective, or stupid things (according to the people who read them)—revisits all of this from far away, yet never having been so close (knowing only the bursting and bipolar and more-than-once-broken version of the facts offered over the years, in quick doses and small quantities, from the mouth and in the voice of Penelope), and the thing about the colossal green cow reciting an epiphanic soliloquy is just a little too much. He doesn’t even dare insert some allusion in its mooing to the cover of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. So he opts, again, to start the engines of the elliptical. Successive fades to black in many colors. Leaps in time and in space. Her thirst quenched, Penelope climbs up on the Giant Green Cow and rides it—its skin and hide have the relaxing and soft texture of a stuffed animal—and there they go, and is it hours or days that go by, dozens or hundreds of miles? It doesn’t matter. Penelope’s eyes are closed and kaleidoscopic anyway. And there’s so much to see behind her eyelids that Penelope doesn’t dare look any further. Penelope doesn’t open her eyes until the benevolent monster deposits her, prostrating itself on its front shanks, so that Penelope can slide down, in front of the clinic. The clinic where Max had been admitted and where, no doubt, he’d be admitted again. Floating and drowning. The street is empty. So empty that it seems less like a city intersection and more like a country crossroads. A crossroads where you go to sell your soul to the Devil. Another kind of desert. Penelope finds her mobile phone and decides she’s going to take a picture of the Giant Green Cow that now raises its head and its horns (that are like the antlers of an elk) and sings a soft and sad song to the moon, a song about knowing itself to be unique and final. Penelope frames it on the screen of her phone. Penelope wants a photo to accompany that other photo, the one of the Karmas, all together, on the edge of her interrupted wedding: something that already sounds and already feels like it took place centuries ago and in a different language. Penelope lifts her phon
e and takes the picture, but it’s already too late: the Giant Green Cow, with unthinkable speed, considering its mass and weight, is gone. And all she manages to capture on her small screen is a diffuse emerald stain. A dubious portrait to be hung on the wall of a Ripley Museum where those other photos, more imprecise than drawings, already hang, photos of the Yeti, of Nessie, of Mothman, of Sasquatch, of the Chupacabras, of the albino alligators in Manhattan, of Michael “Mike” Wazowski and James P. “Sulley” Sullivan spotted one night at summer camp. Penelope—something to do with the effect of the fluorescent milk of the Giant Green Cow, she thinks—feels now, in her own way, as mythical as they are. Behind her, the clinic shines in the shadows like a fish tank in a dark house, all the lights out, everyone asleep, that underwater glow in a corner of the living room. Penelope waves with her hand (a princely flourish of her wrist) and turns around and enters the clinic like someone leaving one dream and entering another. * And writing is nothing but a solitary dance—a minuet where it’s your turn to curtsey and also your turn to bow—whose art lies in executing a delicate and subtle choreography, knowing when to surrender and when to resist. Here, again, he feels the temptation to modify and literarily enhance that hospital Penelope was moving through with the description of a different hospital. A hospital in the city of B where, later, he’d go with an emergency, a red pain biting his chest at the height of his heart. And going even further: to add additional details about the laboratory/ accelerator near Geneva where he’d be transformed into what he is now. As already mentioned: the key scene, the classified tape, the not invented but oh so improbable part in a hypothetical documentary about his life and work. The moment he’s unmade to be remade. There inside. But he says no. Better not. Better, at this point, to return to Penelope, running without makeup and with her makeup running, to follow her, to accompany her. Penelope enters with a liquid stride, almost of a melting automaton, as if suspended several inches above the floor, the torn hem of her dress concealing the miracle of her levitation. The successive automatic doors open before her without complaint or resistance. Acknowledging her power and authority. And Penelope advances through the horizontal hallways and ascends in a vertical elevator and arrives to the floor where her husband lies. A nurse on duty watches her move through the corridors and follows her, because this can only be a phantasmagoric and possibly infernal vision: the specter of a bride in ruin, her wedding dress as if sewn with strips of green smoke that allow glimpses, underneath, of an adamantine and incandescent halo. And what was the name of that eternally mad bride character in that novel?, what was that woman’s name in that book? * Miss Havisham, in Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens. Seeing this apparition, the nurse trembles off “Hail Mary Most Pure,” and continues on her way. And Penelope envies the degree of comfort and calm that someone can find in such a simple gesture. And she’s not entirely sure if, in the end, she actually got married—if the task force of priests ever concluded the rite or if, who knows, they were liturgically qualified and authorized to conclude it after she’d already left—religiously, because what’s begun in the name of the Lord must be completed, so his name won’t have been taken in vain. But she’s sure of what she has to do now. Penelope arrives to the suite rented by the Karmas and enters the room where Max pulses, suspended and in suspense, breathing on his own and always alone (though Penelope remembers now, and will never forget, that slight movement Maxi made with his head, in front of the altar, as if assenting, as if telling her: “It’s up to you now, okay?”). Penelope approaches the bed and climbs on and straddles Max and takes one of his pillows and gets ready to press it against the face of the man she once believed she kind of loved. In the movies, she tells herself, it seems quick and easy. And Penelope can’t help but think that, since falling into a deep coma, Max’s features have been acquiring a certain nineteenth-century angularity, not attaining that of Heathcliff, but, at least, approaching that of Edward Fairfax Rochester. Better than nothing, as they say. And she can’t help noticing, through the gauze and tulle and between her legs, Max’s incredibly powerful erection. An erection, almost childlike in its vigor and sweet innocence (because Max isn’t dreaming of anything sexual, Max is dreaming that he’s walking through a land of candies and cakes and bright colors), that points directly into her suddenly wet sex, and that reminds Penelope of the thing about children pointing their index fingers. Children who don’t know that it’s bad to point and why (like the thing about elbows on the table, like more good manners to be dekarmatized; and is it possible that she misses them already, that this is the imperfect way of confirming a strange tenderness? Or is it already an almost automatic reflex, the kick caused by the tap of a hammer on the knee?) and who might end up thinking how could something as practical and necessary as pointing be synonymous with bad manners, eh? * Praised be, Indicis, digitus secundus manus, radial artery and palmar vein. The most capable and sensitive finger (though not the longest, second on that podium and yet, always, the one that’s lifted to signal the number one, first place, winner), index, alias “the one that points.” The one that infants use to demand what they want and need. Ideal for exploring their noses or sticking in someone else’s eye. The only finger he used for the entire keyboard and mouse. The authoritarian “commanding finger,” the “pointer finger,” the “threatening finger,” the “Napoleonic finger,” for the Asians the “poisonous finger” from which emerges condemnations and curses and with which you should never touch a deep wound or a superficial cut. The “boomerang finger” that should be used with restraint and care, because “when you point, the hand is like this: the index points at the victim of our criticisms, the thumb points at God, and the other three fingers, which are the pinky, the middle, and the ring, point at the owner of that hand. Which is translated into me pointing at myself, and everything I say or criticize in others I will suffer, drastically, three times.” And, yes, the Karmas have learned to point, all the time, with an invisible and always-ready-to-fire point-blank index finger, because the index finger is, also, the “trigger finger” and . . . Bang! Max explodes inside Penelope and Penelope doesn’t really know why and to what end she’s done what she’s done. Penelope never felt nor wanted to feel like a mother and, even less, like a good mother. Maybe she’s done it out of desperation and as a kind of goodbye. Or because the protagonist in one of her brother’s favorite books was also the son of a comatose father and a restless mother and that book was called . . . * The World According to Garp (1978) by John Irving. Or maybe she’s drawn by the hilarious idea (no doubt a product of the combination of desert, dehydration, and the Giant Green Cow juice) of procreating and raising a Karma far away from the Karmas: to bring him up as an atheist with an artistic and uninhibited temperament and, who knows, even as gay, never in the closet because she wrecked it with an ax when he was still a child, in order to, a few years later, returning to his roots, unleash him on Mount Karma like an archangel of fulminating light and bursts of laughter capable of leveling walls, like an unexpected and revolutionary weapon of mass destruction. Or, maybe, imagine him returning to Mount Karma to discover everything in ruins; that, at some point, there was an unprecedented snowfall and the Karmas were stranded and ended up devouring each other, arriving at last to their ultimate and definitive destination: to consume themselves, to be inside of each other, until they ran out and were gone, and there was her son, alone, rebuilding everything from the gnawed bones of his forebears, to create a better and more generous world than theirs. Max comes to an end—and Penelope is sure of this—so that, inside her, in that very instant, something can begin. * This is something that, of course, her brother finds entirely improbable—fathers who swear they can identify the exact spermatozoid and mothers who claim to have felt the ovum awaken. But, yes, that’s why fiction, in the noblest sense of the word, exists. So that human beings evolve and become more sensitive and powerful. The fact that Max (at the comma of a coma) and Penelope (with an exclamation point) have a simultaneous orgasm is al
so quite improbable. But it doesn’t matter. If we accept the lunar mooing of the Giant Green Cow, please, let’s accept Penelope’s moan and the seismic yet brief modification in the space between Max’s brain waves, under the suffocating pillow, seconds before flatlining forever and moving right along. And Penelope could swear that in the exact instant—straddling him, pressing the pillow forcefully against his face—Max let his last breath escape, right in the middle of his small death and simultaneous great death, there was change in the interior lighting, as if Max’s soul had left the room. Penelope could even swear that she heard the door open and close. And she wouldn’t be swearing in vain because she’s right: a door did open and close, not to let out a soul bound for joyful eternity, but to let in the body of the most inexhaustible and soulless and self-satisfied woman who has and will ever live in this world. Penelope struggles to climb off the bed and sitting there, wrapped in a poncho hemmed with gold and silver, Mamagrandma smiles her most shark-like of smiles. Penelope is very surprised to see her there, without her horse. “How’s Horse?” she asks her, to say something, with a trembling voice. “Very well, thank you. I’ll pass along your greeting,” says Mamagrandma, fixing her with her eyes and fixing her with her smile and it’s obvious that Mamagrandma saw her suffocate Max. Penelope, standing beside Max’s body, still holds the pillow in front of her chest, as if it were a shield, as if she were completely naked and not covered by the tatters of her wedding dress; but something tells her that the ageless old woman would never even imagine the possibility that her grandson and Penelope had just made something like love, though not exactly. Mamagrandma—brought up on decades of telenovelas—can conceive of the fact of a lunatic bride killing her comatose husband; but she could never conceive of the fact that that bride had just conceived, after practically raping the defenseless and conquered sleeping beauty. In telenovelas, it’s understood, sex is nothing but a quick movement of the camera to logs burning in a fireplace or a fade into waves breaking against the rocks. But right now Mamagrandma is acting in another genre. Now Mamagrandma is like a villain from a Bond movie: all of whom are stricken by a mysterious illness that makes them feel the irresistible need to reveal the details of their previously top secret and impossible to decode plans. The idea that you can tell someone who is about to die (and, for Mamagrandma, Penelope is already part of the past, Penelope has already departed) almost everything they won’t be around to witness. It’s always an act of pity: to describe how the villain’s movie and not the hero’s movie will end without even thinking of or remembering the inevitable fate of all his fallen comrades and MIAs. So, the bad guys in the best spy movies talk and talk. And they do it—so convinced of their success—in the presence of the hero, chained to a stretcher and defenseless, facing the too-slow advance of a laser beam (never, why not, an expeditious shot to the head) or tied hand and foot and descending, very very very slowly, toward a tank where several crocodiles swim in acid or lava. But, of course, the hero can always count on an ace up their sleeve or a gadget on their belt. Then, presently, the hero unties himself and, since he already knows the codes that the villain imparted, deactivates the nuclear bomb and flips the lair’s self-destruct switches—accompanied by an exquisitely beautiful woman who resisted him at first, but now is his—escaping just seconds before the great explosion whose blast silences the indignant shriek of the baddest bad guy whose only final thought is “Why’d I have to go and tell him everything?” And so long until the next mission and until the next talkative evildoer and the sound of sirens and the collapse of tunnels or sinking of secret islands and “Oh, James . . .” But here and now, for Penelope—whose stamina is far from Bond’s; who doesn’t have a license to kill though she killed only minutes ago—there’s a more than noteworthy difference: Mamagrandma speaks and reveals, but she’ll never be defeated. Never. Mamagrandma is the M in the equation. And Penelope—a mole about to be unearthed—just listens, unhinged yet immobile, without the strength to do anything but hear what Mamagrandma says. And this is how Mamagrandma speaks, with the lethal and sticky sweetness of words emerging from a carnivorous plant. * Did Mamagrandma really speak like that? Or was it he who wrote her lines for her? Was someone possibly expecting just such an oral display from Mamagrandma, such perfect pacing of drama and revelation at the hour of farewell? Probably not. But these are the mysteries of an always-defiant reality—unexpected and improbable and allegedly fictitious until it is lived on this side of things—that competitive fiction feeds on. So—Penelope listens as if in a trance that she only escapes from by thinking “Please, don’t let my brother find out that such characters exist”—Mamagrandma speaks like this: “Ah, here you are . . . The fugitive bride going back not to the scene of the crime, but to that scene without a crime. Poor Penelope. Poor Maxi. But I suppose that what you’ve just done was inevitable . . . The imminence of the ending—not of my work but of your participation in it—demands this kind of gesture, these kinds of actions, little pushes at the edge of the abyss to precipitate events. Offerings and sacrifices and exchanges so that everything stays the same with the exception of those offered and sacrificed . . . Poor Maxi. And poor Hiriz. She reminds me of a fox I hunted once, when I was just a girl. That damn fox that was eating all my chickens. So I covered the blade of a knife with honey and left it like that, standing there, the handle buried, beside the chicken coop. The fox came one night and began to lick the honey and cut her tongue, and so greedy and insatiable was she that the fox continued to lick her own blood, down to the last drop, until she bled out entirely. The next morning I found her there, dead, but smiling. And that’s the key to surviving, Penelope: keep in mind that underneath the honey, a knife could always be lying in wait. Hiriz is not like that. Hiriz—like the fox—doesn’t know when to hold back, she doesn’t know how to stop. She loves the taste of herself. And I wonder if that might have been the reason for all those yoga classes: to make herself flexible enough to run her own tongue around down under. In the end . . . Hiriz can’t comprehend that the Karmas are a closed-circle, a movie with clear and fixed roles where no spectators are admitted but us. We love and hate among ourselves, we betray and steal and even kill among ourselves. Our crimes are only punished by our justice. There is no room for improvisations or departures from script. But Hiriz doesn’t think before she acts, and that’s how she’s always been, and at last she’s gone too far and has put us in danger. And it’s not even that Hiriz is an idiot. It’s much worse: she’s someone who thinks she’s very intelligent, though all the evidence indicates the opposite. And what do people who are not intelligent do to convince themselves that they are? Easy: they convince themselves that nobody, except them, is intelligent. So, the difference that actually makes them idiots makes itself, for them, into the difference that makes them very very smart. Once the idiots manage to convince themselves of something like this, there’s no going back. All that’s left is to put up with them with patience or with love, which is the same thing, because love always ends up being one of the many kinds of patience, Penelope . . . What’s going to be complicated indeed is how Hiriz will go on after that little scene at your wedding, after ordering your friend killed. * (And here Penelope shudders, comprehending what she doesn’t want to comprehend. “Lina,” thinks Penelope. And then immediately she stops thinking because thinking hurts. Thinking hurts more than listening to Mamagrandma, who continues with her final monologue, as if illuminated by the reflector of her own light.) Now Hiriz is like one of those wild animals that grew up in captivity, supposedly domesticated and harmless, and one day draws blood and . . . There’s nothing to do but eliminate her. Or perhaps, better, as I already said, force her to lick her own blood, down to the last drop. Hiriz . . . Hiriz . . . Hiriz was an unresolved issue for me: Hiriz could not remain among us, because Hiriz is a starving time bomb with a thirst for vengeance. She’s not the first: there have been spoiled Karmas and crazy Karmas. But Hiriz is spoiled and crazy. Like Nero. Or Hitler. Capricious children. The whole th
ing about how people can change is a lie, Penelope. People never change; they just get better or worse when it comes time to be who they always were and are and will be. And it’s quite clear that Hiriz is going to get worse. Her evil is no longer the banal and predictable evil of her relatives. Her evil is banal and predictable but, also, different. Any one of these nights Hiriz—who, let’s face it even though it’s unnecessary, always had a horrible voice—would burn Mount Karma to the ground just to get us to listen to her sing. Hiriz, sooner or later, would end up disrupting the delicate balance that sustains and keeps the Karmas together. And you cannot imagine what it takes to maintain the balance of something that’s half tightrope half hangman’s noose. And, on their own, the Karmas are nothing—easy prey for the masses of non-Karmas. So bye-bye, Hiriz, I wish you well. With any luck, if it occurs to her—and I will make sure that there is luck and that it does, in fact, occur to her—tomorrow Hiriz will get the idea in her head, her crazy little head, of becoming a saint, of being beatified and canonized, and she’ll enter a cloistered convent and stay there until the end of her days. After all, our family lacks a saint just like it lacks a writer. Yes, yes, in that way and to that end, Hiriz will go—cloistered order and vow of silence. Poor little nuns. But, after all, who told them to call themselves Humble Sisters of the Pricked and Suffering Martyr Heart of Our Poor Little Abandoned Jesus Bleeding Out Slowly on the Cross With No Right to Resurrection. With a name like that, they deserve Hiriz. And Hiriz deserves them too. So ugly. Look how ugly nuns are, Penelope . . . Maybe that’s why nuns are always so pretty and delicate and high-voiced and ballerina-bodied in movies: to compensate a little for so much facial and anatomical deformity, right? Hiriz will be happy among them, because at last she’ll be the most beautiful beast. End of her projects, end of her adventure. But first things first. And the saint doesn’t come first . . . Which brings me to the sinner. And the sinner is you, Penelope. Mortal sinner. But even so, as if blessed. The kind of sinner who can end up being an object of adoration. A threat to the established order. And I am the established order. Which doesn’t keep me from knowing how to recognize someone powerful when I see them. And you are powerful. Like I am, but in different way. A free spirit who could end up becoming a leader. There’s no space for both of us here, Penelope. So I’m going to let you go. Nothing has happened here. You killed Maximiliano the way I killed Papagrandpa. We’re like praying mantises . . . You and I are different yet the same. We operate on our own. Papagrandpa—who was raised in the macho patriarchy without ever figuring it out that it’s the woman behind him who pulls the strings and draws the reins—couldn’t understand it. And I made him understand. And there he is: stuck inside a wall in Mount Karma, behind his portrait, may he rest in peace. And your thing with Maxi, killing him—I don’t get it. Was it out of love or pity, out of interest or strategy? I don’t understand the first one, the second one either; because you won’t get any inheritance. You signed documents of separation of assets and the religious ceremony never concluded. I thank you for it: Maxi, always and forever in a coma, he would’ve turned into a, into another, short-term complication in the financial-familial hierarchy, in terms of shares and allotments. And we, for religious reasons, so convenient on other occasions, could never unplug him. And because of the thing with Papagrandpa, my dance card is already full in that area. I’ll confess my mortal sin on my deathbed (which, as its name indicates, is where and when you have to confess your mortal sins) and I’ll be forgiven, yes; but best not to exaggerate too much, right? So, better this way, thank you for everything, Penelope, and may Maxi sleep with the angels. And getting back to the religious stuff . . . I really liked that thing you said once about the foolishness of wasting time praying for God to change his designs. You said it was . . . a contradiction, right? Because you can’t ask God, in his infinite wisdom, to alter his actions. Even less if you’re one of God’s little creatures. And you’re right. That’s why, when I go to mass, I never ask for anything and I always give thanks. I thank God that He’s allowed me to have my way, that my will be done and that my will, always, be His. I thank God, as I told you once, that He’s helped me understand that though life is, in fact, very short, life is also very wide. And God says to me you’re welcome, and what’s more, Mamagrandma, I’m the grateful one. What’s the voice of God like? The voice of God is the silence of God. And ye who are silent shall receive. And it’s of my will and my will alone that I let you go now, Penelope, that I won’t say anything about what I just saw, that I leave you free to do anything except come back here, where it’s not that you’re not understood, but it’s impossible for you to understand our kind of happiness. It might be true that it’s a hard happiness to assimilate, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a happiness that makes us happy. What you have, on the other hand, is pure and absolute sadness and dissatisfaction. You like to think that the problem is our family, when the problem is the family that you never had and will never have. Here I could get really annoying and witch-like and tell you that I curse you so you’ll never know the joy of family. But there’s no need. You’ve cursed yourself. You’ve condemned yourself to wander, lost. Safe travels, yours shall be a very long trip. And lonely. We don’t love you, we can’t love you, because you don’t love you—you consider yourself cursed by everyone else, but actually you’re cursed by yourself. Nobody would tell your story because it’s sad and boring. Only the part that overlaps with ours will be somewhat amusing. And that part, so entertaining that many will say it must be the invented part, ends here. Good luck, Penelope. You’re going to need it. I won’t ask you to go with God because you don’t believe in Him and because not even He would be able to go with you. Because he’d get bored after five minutes in your company and would start in with the floods and the plagues. Goodnight, sweet princess.” And the door to the room opens and Mamagrandma exits * (Mamagrandma exits singing the way people sing who, new to old age, discover themselves to be great and seasoned singers though they’ve never sung before. Like Harry Dean Stanton, who began to sing at a young age, but who was always old and who he’ll hear again, singing in Spanish, in a documentary about Harry Dean Stanton, on the small screen embedded in the back of the seat in front of him, in the mechanized night of an airplane in the sky. A song sung with all the strength of that broken voice. A song that speaks of skies and hearts and pistols and of being far away from the land where he was born) and the door to the room closes and Penelope wonders if maybe she should applaud after such a speech. And she doesn’t get to answer herself because she’s already applauding and, just like in certain magic stories, three claps and, ah, again, the blessed ellipsis, Penelope is already in the Abracadabra airport. And Penelope approaches the first counter of whatever airline (the closest one where passengers and luggage are being checked in) and stares at the attendant and pulls out a dirty diamond from her recently unmarried neckline and asks for a first class ticket on the first plane bound for the most faraway destination possible and there she goes and here she comes. * (And here he follows her, her brother, who, not dead but yes disappeared, part of the air and everywhere, watches her not on a TV screen of the netherworld, but as if he were reading her; as if she were a character in a book, that book he never managed to write but that he can’t stop thinking about or wondering about or playing with sometimes complex and sometimes not so complex possible choices, like the one that a flight attendant with the enigmatic smile of a sphinx presents Penelope with now: “Beef, chicken, fish, or pasta?,” she asks. All of us are equal when we venture into the sky, he thinks, and he thinks this on another airplane, on that airplane going nowhere. On that airplane where he ordered and ate pasta because, the expert travelers and frequent flier mile addicts say, it’s always the safest option to avoid suffering complications.) But Penelope is already asleep next to the emergency exit that opens onto emptiness—the ruinous wrath that caused her family countless sorrows, slipped under the seat in front of her, as directed by the flight attendant—and dreaming
of something she won’t remember when she wakes. A dreaming Penelope flying over the white arctic in the middle of the night; when the low but amplified voice of the pilot, from his cabin and over the intercom, sounding like the whisper of a radio disc-jockey, pupils red like in a photo lit by a flash, tells the insomniac passengers in three or four languages that, if you want to see something you’ve never seen before and will never see again, please, take a look out the window.