by Andrés Barba
Her thoughts about Mamá were more haphazard and opaque. They swirled back to her over the course of those weeks amid a whole range of other voices and interpretations, the idea of another way of dying, one less irate than the one she’d had, or more tender. Sometimes, when she spoke to Pablo about her, she was suddenly overcome by the feeling that Mamá had died in excruciating pain. She tried not to talk much, and the only time she got truly morose was when Raquel deposited her share of Mamá’s money into her bank account. One morning, she went to get money from the cash machine and asked for a receipt and saw that her balance was twenty-eight thousand euros. Then, almost without thinking, she did something that she never confessed to Pablo: she walked back into the bank and made a wire transfer to Anita’s account in the sum of five thousand euros.
For several days, she awaited some sign from Anita, a message, a phone call. One afternoon, she actually found herself on the verge of phoning her. She was at the park with Pablo and the boys and walked off a few feet, took out her cell phone, and dialed most of Anita’s number. Then she hung up. That was the last time she really thought about her, about the strange creature she’d been when she was with Mamá, about the reaction she might have had when she discovered the money she’d transferred to her. Giving up that money had been nothing. It seemed the money was simply following its natural course, transferring it didn’t even strike her as whimsical. She saw something from her childhood in that act; when Mamá wanted someone to run an errand and she and Raquel were playing, she never asked more than twice. Sometimes, if one of the two girls volunteered, when she got back, Mamá would give her a truly extravagant reward in front of the other—a five-hundred-peseta bill, maybe. Once, to Raquel’s everlasting envy, she’d even gone so far as to give her one of her jewels. Mamá, who had never been generous, from time to time made gestures like that, reckless gestures that, more than generosity, conveyed a sort of outright scorn for material goods and a mysterious emulation of the way life distributed its profits, with a thousand-to-one return on the most unexpected of occasions. It tickled her to have made a spontaneous gesture—especially to Anita—that could have been Mamá’s, and she felt for a minute that her body had been possessed by one of her gestures, as though she were a cup and Mamá’s soul had suddenly overflowed from it, like liquid.
She was never entirely sure whether the encounter had really taken place or not. This was more than two years later. She hadn’t thought about Anita in at least a year. Her life had resumed, her mysterious, unmanageable, wan, cavernous, and sometimes breathtaking life, her everyday life. The memory of Mamá had mellowed, and her relationship with Raquel had adopted a routine—a monthly phone call and a Christmas visit. Once, she and Pablo had even made a trip to London and Raquel had spent three days taking them around the city. She and Donovan had divorced, and she had a new Spanish boyfriend three years younger than her who worked in the hotel industry and with whom, she privately confessed, she wanted to have a child. Like the spring in a jack-in-the-box, Mamá’s death had triggered in Raquel the desire for a child. She herself found the idea ludicrous and selfish, but also carefree and timeless, like the adolescent urge to get a tattoo. She pictured the child Raquel would have as some small, powerful creature, just as egocentric, waggish, and overwhelming as her sister; she thought the train wreck they were sure to produce would be a sight to see, but that despite Raquel’s character, the two of them would most likely be good for each other. Mamá’s death had had a surprising effect on Raquel; the legendary status she had conferred upon Mamá was so absurd that she became something akin to the kindly old grandmother out of a bad children’s story. She’d clung to that fiction with the tenacity of a survivor, needing constantly to believe—despite a lack of rational support for her belief—that she lived a life very different from the life she in fact lived. Sometimes she would grab hold of her arm and speak of Mamá in languorous, sentimental tones. She knew, the very first time it happened, that she couldn’t go against her narrative, that Raquel needed it to be that way, perhaps needed her complicity, as well, so she simply listened to those anecdotes about events she actually remembered, and remembered quite differently, like someone playing telephone. It wouldn’t have done any good to explain that, for her, Mamá had, over the past few years, gradually turned into a person about whom it was increasingly difficult to make any assumptions at all, something like her own body, perhaps—at times intimate and comprehensible, and other times distant and dark and full of warm tunnels.
It was after her return from that trip that she saw her. At first, it was just a strange feeling, and for a few seconds, she didn’t even think it was her. She was alone at a mall in an area of town far from home and had just happened to stop in to buy a new ink jet for the printer. She was standing there, lost amid the two hundred possible cartridge options, when she thought she saw a figure moving in a familiar way on the other side of the counters to her left. It took some doing to recognize her. Then suddenly, from one moment to the next, she realized that it was Anita. She hadn’t seen her in over two years. In a way, she hadn’t changed. She must have been about twenty-two, and she still had that childlike, inscrutable face. She no longer looked like a maid. Nor did she look like a normal girl. Instead, she was more like an amphibian creature, a mix of the girl she had known and another one, a somewhat different one, about whom she knew nothing. She would have been unable to articulate the nervousness she began to feel at that moment. It manifested, at first, as a simple bodily reaction, a warm flush, like that of a teenage girl finding herself alone with a boy, inside a locked room; then the feeling spread, like a sound echoing inside her body, drowning everything out, as though something inside her were howling—she didn’t know how else to explain it—as though something were howling and she were tied down on her back. Her first instinct was to walk up and say hello, but as soon as she took her first step, she regretted it. Anita was alone, too, and didn’t seem to be looking for anything in particular. She wandered among the computer accessories with the absent look of someone who has no intention of making a purchase, someone killing time, as though secretly daring all of those goods to have the courage to seduce her. None of them did, of course. Anita wandered around in a little spring dress, the sort of thing she’d never seen her wear when she was caring for Mamá, a loud, floral-print dress that brushed the tops of her knees, that hinted at the contours of a body that had promised to fill out and then hadn’t. The childlike nature of her anatomy seemed to stem not just from the way she moved but also from something in her very makeup, something internal. She didn’t know why, but she found it unpleasant, as unpleasant as the troubling idea that Anita’s body was built that way as a defense mechanism and, in essence, made her inexplicably resistant to the one true defeat—time.
Anita made a face and walked off. She began following at a distance. As she did, she felt, strange though it may seem, like she was following a trail Anita herself was leaving behind. She didn’t know what she was expecting, she simply felt she should position herself such that Anita be the one to accidentally happen upon her, that she be the one to decide what to say, the one to fumble excuses and feign pleasant surprise. It was as though there were a strange sort of balance in everything that was happening—in Anita’s legs walking up the escalator to the women’s department, and then again to men’s, and from there to juniors. She felt alone, shaken, she wasn’t even thinking about Mamá, but about something . . . how could she explain it? Something that had died and was closed off, but was still there, in that tacky little floral-print dress, in the movement of Anita’s legs, in the black hair cut differently now and worn in a schoolgirl ponytail.
Finally, Anita approached a salesclerk and asked a question. They spoke for a few seconds, Anita gesticulating, tracing out on her chest what seemed to be the cut of a dress. She was pleased to note that she still recognized her gestures, her way of addressing others that seemed distant yet at the same time somehow intimate, both lacking in p
assion and totally absorbed. The salesclerk went off, and Anita stood there alone once more. Then she turned abruptly to face her and stared. They were ten yards apart, and she had taken refuge behind a counter, pretend-browsing the T-shirts. She bent down to look at the prices, feeling humiliation course through her body, like a warm bath. She looked up. Anita was still there, staring at her. It was just a few seconds, but it was as if the sounds and echoes of the mall were muffled and the two of them were suddenly submerged, as though underwater. Anita walked up to her. She moved slowly, staring at her the whole time. When she reached her, she got a whiff of that peculiar, distinct smell Anita had, like the smell of almonds.
“Please don’t follow me anymore,” she said.
There was no apparent excitement in her voice, but no irritation, either.
“I’m sorry.”
“There’s no reason to be sorry. You were always very good to me.”
Anita smiled all of a sudden, an enigmatic smile, like an Egyptian mask. She turned and started back down the escalator, feeling, as she descended, a sort of pent-up, accumulated distress. When she got outside, she felt dizzy but walked faster until she reached a small park, and there she sat down on a bench. There was an intense smell of jasmine, or some other overly sweet and slightly suffocating flower. Then, without knowing why, she clutched her stomach and began to cry harder than she’d ever cried in her life. She felt the sobs leaving her body with abrupt, thundering force, as though they were wracking apart not only her body but her very womanhood, her humanity even, her body a hole from which the sobs gushed the same way a geyser gushes from the earth. She cried for nearly fifteen minutes. Then, spent, she pulled herself together a little, went into a restroom inside a café, washed her face, and smiled at her shiny, puffy reflection, at her red eyes and furrowed chin. When she walked back out onto the street, it was with a feeling of lightness she’d never before experienced, as though she were now free from something—from what, she did not know—finally, marvelously, free.
FIDELITY
While making love for the fourth time in her life, Marina thought for the first time (the other three, she’d set out to simply feel, to register information) that real physical pleasure—the flickering that came of that bumbling, fondling game—was nothing like any fictional version she’d ever read in a novel. It was odd, but there was something she’d never seen described, that sort of nervous impatience, of sudden deception—pleasure always arrived unexpectedly, it wasn’t (and this had been true the other three times, too, but now it made sense) a case of choosing to undertake a progression, or a series of stimuli, but something infinitely more interesting, more prodigious, fragmentary; pleasure would surge and wane and then return once more, impetuous, electric, bursting in like a bank robber, ripping off one mask and donning another. Marina was seventeen years old and the school year had just ended for her. Ramón was eighteen and stressed—that was the last thing he’d said before he started kissing her (and one thing led to the other, as they both knew it would the moment they locked themselves in her father’s apartment-cum-library)—because they were going to “fry” him on his college entrance exams. Fry, he’d said. And the expression, for some reason, had struck Marina as hilarious, as did his face—pliant, both in anticipation of pleasure and in a sort of veiled shame her father’s education produced in him.
“Has your father seriously read all these books?”
“These are just a few of them,” she replied. “Every three years or so we clear the place out and send, oh, I don’t know, at least a third of them—books that don’t make the cut—to vintage booksellers, but it just fills right back up. This is the best of the best. If there’s one thing this place has, it’s books.”
Marina liked using that sort of phrase—if there’s one thing this place has, it’s books. Repeating it to Ramón had added, triumphal pleasures, that of semi-humiliating Ramón (who was, without a doubt, going to get fried on his entrance exams), and that of the impact made by the apartment her father had rented right beneath their own because his books, literally, no longer fit where they lived. For as long as Marina could remember, there were nothing but books around her, books, heaped in a twisted, radiant mass, like a menacing creature with a life of its own, one that her mother (who barely read) complained of incessantly and with which her father maintained a relationship both proud and intrepid. There was something restless and feisty about that heap, overflowing, like an alchemist’s pantry. But no matter what had made her take Ramón there to make love for the fourth time—before he got fried on his entrance exams—Marina felt like the place was protecting her now just as it had protected her on the previous occasions (they had always done it on a bed her father had by a window), in the ceremonious light of day. She’d been a little scared the first time, which was why she decided that, if they did it, it could only be in a place that intimidated Ramón, so she’d have at least the same sway over him as he did over her. She liked Ramón the same way you like a big, white bird, one that’s not too bright but is majestic and amusing. She wanted to see him naked. Wanted it with a feverish impatience that came off as a sort of lewd, erratic confusion, stored in a box (was that a good description?) since the first time she met him at a friend’s party. She liked that he, too, couldn’t help but be scared. I prefer boys who are scared, a thousand times over, she’d told a school friend, and felt, on saying it, an odd sort of projection of herself, a sign of superior intelligence, as though she could already see herself at age forty, having had thirty lovers, managing a publishing house in Barcelona, and then adding, When I was a teenager, I was just terrible. Still, the first times—especially the very first—were strangely puzzling. Ramón had been so scared her father would walk in at any moment that he couldn’t relax at all, just wandered among the bookcases, pulling out books at random, books that he obviously had no interest in, and even stood flicking through the photos in The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt with such concentration that it was as though he were poring over instructions on what to do next. She went over to him and talked about the book as though she’d read it, in order to humiliate him a bit more, and let her chest rest against his elbow, causing him to blush immediately. Blushing was like a reflex, something cruel and authoritarian. Ramón’s blushing made her blush, too.
“Are you sure your father’s not going to come down?”
“I’m sure, he’s in Turkey,” she said, conjuring up the most unlikely country she could think of (in fact, he was at the paper).
“What’s he doing in Turkey?”
“Giving a talk, I think, at a literary critics’ conference.”
For a second, Ramón was on the verge of confessing that he had no idea there even were literary critics’ conferences, but instead he turned to her, pinned her against one of the bookcases, dropped The Origins of Totalitarianism clumsily onto the floor, and began kissing her neck. Marina felt each of her nerve endings surge, but just a damp, viscous, semi-erect fraction of them, as though Ramón’s body were pressing against her in a slightly masturbatory way. They began to undress each other, in silence. Ramón had brought condoms. Marina knew he always carried them, not because he used them, but because it had become a way of bragging among his friends—carrying them around in your wallet and then, when you went to pull out your money, carelessly flashing them. They were both somewhat vain, and they undressed one another as if they weren’t embarrassed at all, but she was reassured to note that Ramón had goose bumps, giving him away just as his blushing had before. She suddenly felt as though she were about to leap from the top of a cliff, as though from that point on, they could never even go back to being human, as though they had no names, had only the immediacy of the whiteness, both shocking and celebratory, of the tan line halfway down Ramón’s arm, of her own paleness, sudden and insistent.
“You’ve done it before, right?” she asked him.
And Ramón gave a rather absurd reply.
/> “Not completely.”
“Not completely?”
He looked up as though beseeching her not to demand an explanation of what exactly it meant to do it incompletely. He seemed to be suddenly at a loss. She helped him out: “Well, do you want to do it completely with me?”
