EDITOR’S NOTE¹

Nobody realized Emma Olsen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Dream Grass, was living out her last months with a terminal illness, her only intention to finish a book before she died. Reserved and cautious about her public appearances, Olsen – the eyes of the Midwest – passed away last Friday in her childhood home in Faith (South Dakota), having moved there from her apartment in New York, where she had lived for the last two decades, because she said she felt incapable of writing the book she was working on in any other part of the world.

Accompanied only by her daughter, Linda, whom she entrusted with the task of seeing that this book – the one we offer you now – should see the light, Olsen’s premature death, before the age of forty, cuts short a brilliant literary career and leaves a gap in contemporary American literature that will be difficult to fill.

Reading the original manuscript was one of those rare occasions when an editor knows deep down he is holding something unique in his hands – not just because of the relevance of the author’s career, or the sad circumstances surrounding the publication, but because this book is, to some extent, Olsen’s way of settling accounts with her personal and literary biography. Despite the fact, as could not be otherwise, we have respected the author’s wish that the book should be published as a novel, the reader should realize he is in fact before some urgent memoirs: the story Emma Olsen didn’t wish to leave untold.

Frank Miller

Johnson & Miller Press

¹ Owing to its relevance, the editor’s preliminary note to the original American edition has been included here, together with the adaptation and enlargement, throughout the book, of various notes that appeared in the American edition and were considered of potential interest to the current reader.

1

The journey here was the last opportunity I will have for driving. I shouldn’t be getting behind the wheel at this stage, but I wanted to drive myself into Faith. I know very well why I’m coming back to this place to tell the story I never dared to tell, and it doesn’t worry me, not anymore, that my time is running out.

I write because I know of no other way of spending these months and don’t wish to do so without closing a circle that has remained open here for more than twenty years. I remember well the bus that took me far away from my home at that time. From the back seat, I watched as Faith gradually receded into the distance and got smaller. The plain is like that, there are no mountains that cause us to lose sight of what we’re leaving behind at the first bend in the road: it is impossible to hide.

In all this time, I have made the return journey on only three occasions: on the first two, to visit a good friend who is no longer with us; on the third, to bury my father. It’s been four years since then, and I thought I would never return again, but here I am, lying on the bed where I spent my teenage years, my daughter, Linda – who resembles me at seventeen more than I would like – asleep at my side. She has a vague notion of what we’re doing here, although she won’t really understand it until she reads this.

Only then will she realize that all I wanted was to bequeath the truth about who I am, even if it’s not so important. For that reason, this is the only honest book of all the ones I have written and, once it is finished, I shall feel calm. It is not an act of vengeance, it is the payment of a debt, an outstanding account I had to settle with the people I once loved and, above all, with Clarissa. I needed to talk about her. I once told Susan, shortly after we met, that what happened to me with Clarissa when I was a child would be the last thing I wrote. And so it is.

Although I never wanted her to go with me to Faith on any of my return visits, Susan was the only one who knew almost all there is to know about Clarissa, the complete story, right from the start, even though she never met any of the characters. I told it to her to be free of a weight, so I could love her with untainted hands, or at least that’s what I think. During the years we were together, it seemed to work, I felt as if I was forgiven by something or someone outside myself and was as light as before being born.

But ever since Susan was killed, guilt has started growing again like the mould in the bathroom that grows from winter to summer, so perhaps the reason for writing these lines is Susan’s death, not my own, albeit the time left to me is being whittled away with the speed with which the shadow of a mountain falls over a valley during the last hours of sunset. I write, at least.

I write, for example, that Clarissa and I spoke many times about all the possible ways of killing oneself, and it’s strange that it should be death, precisely, calling me to tell the story. Lying next to the swimming pool, on the artificial lawn Mrs Logan had placed like a carpet over the hard-packed earth of the garden, we would dedicate hours to their analysis with all the exactitude of an inventory. After all, it was just another way of escaping Faith.

I recall her yellow swimsuit, the drops of chlorinated water sliding down the warm fabric an hour after we had taken a swim, crossing her thighs and finally falling down exhausted on the pink floral towel. We would lie down next to each other and let ourselves dry in the summer sun, whiling away the hours by breathing in unison and building up a catalogue of ways of killing oneself. They seemed to be happy days. When one hand stroked the other’s body – by accident, apparently – we would pretend there was no reason to divert it from its trajectory or to leave it where it was. And so those silent, almost furtive encounters ended up turning into prolonged expeditions over the skin, fortuitous journeys that gave the afternoon – and the days, perhaps – meaning.

I think that was the start of everything. Of everything that can be told, at least – not because I wish to keep silent about anything, that is not my intention right now, but because it happens sometimes that the way a story begins cannot be exactly explained, one doesn’t realize one is at the start of something until a long time has passed and the first seed is so far removed it cannot be remembered, its shape cannot be recreated: the seed as it was no longer exists and will not do so again.

It is the same when it slowly gets dark, low, black clouds fill the sky, it suddenly rains and the clothes on the line need to be hurriedly brought in, because the beginning of a storm is not the overcast sky, but the first drop, when it can no longer be avoided, when it already is. The beginning only exists at that point when there’s no going back: my hand running over Clarissa’s skin on the artificial lawn and that catalogue of techniques for killing oneself we worked on for years just because it constituted another way of getting away from Faith.

The end of the skein was the hours when something happened and we knew it somehow or other, that is why the memory of the artificial lawn and the strange taste of chlorinated water are for me, even now, an experience of heightened intensity. The impassive green of the front garden, a stale picture of the American dream of the happy fifties, is, to some extent, the inspiration behind Dream Grass², although, as often happens, many things have been written about this novel that were mere speculations, some of which were frankly misguided.

I have never agreed, although I have tried to respect all opinions, with the political reading certain critics made of Dream Grass, albeit with the intention of praising the work, as if, for a novel to be worthwhile, it wasn’t enough to write about what is left of childhood, about identity, borders or the colour of vertigo.

Clarissa is vertigo, sure enough. She decided this one day, as Mrs Brown decided that she makes the tastiest apple tarts a man could ever wish to sample in his life. This is not a truth in capital letters, it is something that determines a person and nobody will argue about for an absurd reason – because there is no reason to say the opposite or because doing so would be cruel and inappropriate, for example. Until suddenly no other path is possible because time has left its mark on what has to be and what does not, and whoever dares to question this is eccentric or mentally unstable.

At least that is the way things in Faith have always worked. Mrs Brown, born in Newport, Wales, married Mr Brown at the end of the war and then crossed the ocean by ship and the country by train to end up here. She thought she was leaving for the new world on the arm of a hero and would soon be back, but spent forty years in a prefab and never treated herself to some nice new furniture because she was always going to go back in a couple of months. Mr Brown worked in a tyre factory until he retired and saved everything down to the last dollar. They had no children.

Two months after leaving his job, however, he goes and disappears off the face of the earth because of a sudden heart attack, and Mrs Brown, from Newport in Wales, is no longer able to return home. She doesn’t have a home to return to or anybody to share her life with on the other side of the Atlantic. That is an indisputable truth, and Mrs Brown knows it. So she finally goes out and purchases some new furniture. She changes the carpet. And starts baking all sorts of pies: strawberry, redcurrant and almond pies, cream sponge cakes, apricot tarts. She bakes them and gobbles them down fresh from the oven while watching a British channel on cable TV. She puts on thirty pounds, and the doctor advises her to stop eating sugar. The doctor comes out with another indisputable truth: if she carries on like this, she’s going to end up killing herself.

That is despite the fact that killing oneself with too much sugar means the level of glucose in the blood has to exceed two hundred milligrams. It’s not easy to kill oneself like that, but Mrs Brown, who almost succeeded, doesn’t dare confide in the doctor that perhaps this is what she wants, to be done with everything, and she can’t stop baking tarts in her new oven because that would certainly be the end of her. So she decides that the best of herself, the meaning of her existence, resides in making apple pies. She hands them out to all and sundry, and the Logan children impatiently await each new consignment. Clarissa, above all.

And everybody applauds her because Mrs Brown makes the tastiest apple pies in the world, and nobody is entitled to hold a different opinion. Even if the pastry is dry. Even if her sight is not so good and she cuts the pieces of apple too big, so they end up being raw inside the filling. Even if she covers them over with such a thick layer of honey it’s impossible to eat more than a tiny morsel without contracting diabetes. Nobody has the right to say anything else and, if you live in Faith and can’t bear Mrs Brown’s apple pie, then it’s better to keep quiet and smile while gulping down that nauseous sludge – after all, it’s not such a sacrifice, and the price of not doing so is far too high. We carry it inside the nucleus of our cells: better to swallow and smile.

It was on Mrs Brown that I based my Alice in Wonderland?³, one of my favourite books. Of course, towards the last chapter, Alice decides she’s not going to keep quiet any longer, something Mrs Brown would never dream of doing. I know my Alice was born in a place and time very different from those of Mrs Brown, but it doesn’t matter. I couldn’t say that any characters in my books were completely invented. The thing is that part that is real, that part that is inspired by people I have known, is often just a gesture, a spirit, in a sense. Mrs Brown, the Mrs Brown I remember, has Alice’s heart in her core, or the other way round. Although it may seem impossible, both of them merge now inside my mind, and I can no longer tell which part of the story I’ve told about Mrs Brown is in fact a vague memory of something I invented about Alice.

In any case, we are what we invent about ourselves so others will see us in this way. Hence, I couldn’t say anything else about Clarissa that isn’t what she herself decided. Clarissa is vertigo. Clarissa is special, or different from everybody else. She decided these things as one decides to dye one’s hair and morph into a dangerous blonde. She decided these things and adopted all the necessary strategies so we would realize she was different from the rest – I couldn’t say how, or for what reason, because no difference can be perceived as bleached hair can, it’s not so easy to put into place, it has to be a personal, premeditated decision, a path that can be followed or not, but that has to be pursued, to be fought for at the risk of falling ill, at the risk of overstepping the line and not being able to get back to where one was before.

If we all desperately wanted a bicycle for our tenth birthday, she wasn’t the slightest bit interested, she wanted a globe that lit up inside, one of those spheres that has a little bulb in the middle. But Mrs Logan bought her a pink bicycle with ribbons on the steering wheel, and Clarissa wept for weeks, even though the bicycle was far prettier than the one I had inherited from my brother, Luke. Her father, fed up of watching the new bike rot away in the garage, came home one Saturday afternoon with a world map, which he stuck to the wall above Clarissa’s bed. And since a map is certainly not a sphere, this led us to discover – despite all the nonsense we were told at school – that the earth was entirely flat. It wasn’t necessary to walk to the end of Railway and stare out into the distance as far as the eye could see: mile upon mile of flatness all around us, flat and empty, us standing in the middle, our bikes almost unused because there was nowhere to go with them. That was shortly before Mr Logan disappeared, and my mother did the same.

Despite learning early on that Clarissa had decided at some point to be different, I also realize she never quite achieved this with me, and that was why she hated me and loved me at the same time. We had a symmetrical existence, as when you splash a bit of paint on a sheet of paper and then fold the sheet in half. The crease of that sheet of paper was always the wooden fence that separates the Logans’ garden from our own, albeit the Logans’ garden had an artificial lawn and ours was just mud and earth. It didn’t matter that Mrs Logan would emerge with a hosepipe in the afternoon and water the lawn so all the neighbours would think it was real. None of this mattered – the colour of the front of the house, or the fact my father rarely dusted the top of the television while Mrs Logan wiped hers every morning – because our single-storey houses bought in the same year were identical on either side of the fence, exactly the same in size and layout. They were – and still are – a repeat in reverse order, a mirror for each other.

That was the word I was looking for: a mirror. Starting on the left, at number 12 Kennedy Street, was our house: the rooms, the hallway, the kitchen and living room, then the garden and the fence. And at number 14: fence, garden, living room and kitchen, hallway and rooms. Exactly the same, but in reverse order.

I am writing now in the living room and still have the impression of remaining in my half of a world that has been naturally divided into two ever since I can remember. It was strange for me as a child, I wasn’t entirely sure which places were mine, I lacked a solid concept of space. We spent so much time in each other’s houses that, when we got back to our own, the rooms seemed to swap places in a bewildering way, as if it was one and the same house spinning around all the time. I was assailed by the idea that one of them was in the correct order and the other had been built back to front. Things that are back to front are necessarily defective, they are inverted creatures.

Having bought the map of the world, Clarissa’s father went off after a woman who lived in Rapid City. We thought it would be for ever. Later on, my mother did the same – well, not exactly the same, she didn’t go off after anybody, she just ran away from what was keeping her prisoner here, but the fact is we never heard from her again. Nor did we go looking for her. My father waited a sensible amount of time – if there is such a thing as being sensible when it’s a question of waiting for somebody – and then proceeded to sleep in the middle of the bed.

Nothing special happened. I was six and convinced it was natural for my mother to leave, just so the mirror of our lives – Clarissa’s and mine – wouldn’t break and everything I lacked would form part of what Clarissa had, and vice versa, a single, divided existence. If she had a younger sister, Anna, I had my brother, Luke, who was a year older. If she was blonde, this responded to the fact I wasn’t. Because if you splash a bit of paint on a sheet of paper and then fold the sheet down the middle, the drawing turns out like this: if there’s a dab of paint on the right in the first half, that dab of paint will appear on the left in the second.

Painting is something that has to be borne in mind when it’s a question of killing oneself. Ingesting paint, although it’s not always as effective as one might think, is far simpler than assaulting oneself with sugar and falling into a diabetic coma. I recall now that short story I once wrote, ‘Boy Painted Blue’⁴, which came out such a long time ago in a collective publication by Black Hills State University. While researching this story, I discovered that until the year 1978 most commercial paint contained harmful amounts of lead. Houses built before that date are usually poisonous structures, and there have been cases of lead poisoning through breathing in the dust that comes from trying to remove the old paint from the walls in order to put another, especially among children. When I found this out, as always in life when somebody has told me about an unusual or absurd way of meeting one’s end, I inevitably thought about our catalogue of ways of killing oneself. The same thing happened when I lost Susan on one of the ring roads around New York in a stupid multiple-vehicle collision.

Neither inhaling nor ingesting paint is to be recommended for its efficiency, but they guarantee half a page, possibly a whole page, in the local press. Dying of cancer without anybody knowing about the illness beforehand, at the peak of your literary career, is an outcome to be remembered. That was the first thing I thought at the doctor’s surgery when a female doctor with perfect teeth informed me that I was beyond recovery and there was nothing we could do. The doctor smiled compassionately as if everything in her life was as perfect as her smile and she was exempt from suffering a terminal illness on account of her obvious beauty. So I came back here, knowing this book would be the last and convinced there was still something that had to be done: I had to write this book that had waited so long.

All I have to say about poisoning through the ingestion of paint is that nobody wishes to be remembered as a madman at the moment of their demise. Besides, there’s all the vomiting and throat burns on account of the solvent to be considered. In reality, it’s an absurd proposal. One could turn into an idiot like that, or be crippled for the rest of one’s life. It’s difficult to be sure exactly how much poison is needed to bring about one’s end, although I think the same could be said of all poisons that are within the reach of ordinary people. And that was the thing that mattered: the outcome. If killing oneself has always been a way of getting out of Faith, trying to do so and not achieving one’s objective was perhaps the shortest route to having to stay here for ever, an infallible means of becoming what we despised the most.

Because staying here for ever was what everybody expected of us.

² Dream Grass is the novel for which Emma Olsen won the Pulitzer Prize, the only one of her works to be translated into Galician with the title Soños de xardín. Since there is no translation of her other books at the moment (the translation of Men of Their Word – Homes de palabra – is underway), the original titles in English have been maintained out of deference to the wishes of the author, who once declared, ‘I haven’t always understood the reason behind certain translations of my books, in particular with regard to the titles. I think a translator should be invisible as far as possible. I do not understand why titles like Dream Grass, which refers to a particular place – a florist’s – should be translated. They should be kept as they are, as is the case with numerous movies’ (Daily News, 17.4.2011).

³ Short novel whose leading character is a Russian dancer who travels to New York to take revenge on her dance teacher, with whom she is secretly in love and whom she cannot forgive for leaving Moscow. This book was considered by critics as one of the author’s most successful novels in terms of the construction and evolution of the central character.

⁴ This story is not included in any known anthology by the author, and there are no references to it other than those contained in these pages.

2

Mr Montana once told me that the thing great stories have in common is that they could take place anywhere in the world. I think my own could only belong to Faith and, outside Faith, it would be a drop of bleach in the middle of the ocean. Perhaps because it’s not such a great story. But it is mine, our own, and in this sense it wounds us as if the drop of bleach were to fall right into the middle of the pupil and pierce right through what is important. Faith, in the centre of an enormous circle, right in the middle of nowhere, a hundred miles from anywhere that can be considered remotely interesting, is all our world, we don’t care about anything else. Even if we all wanted to live in New York when we were young, or in any city that wasn’t Faith itself, the truth is in the middle of nowhere it’s possible to discern something that belongs to you.

Never have I felt such a tiny part of an unimportant whole in which nothing is essential, such a tiny droplet of rain that has been diluted in a bottomless well, as in the large cities I have visited, even those I have loved and lived in. And yet what Clarissa and I and everybody else most desired was precisely to be diluted. That was impossible in Faith – it still is, even though nobody has recognized me in the street the last few weeks I have been here. I recognize this place as the one I left, the place where Betty cannot do her afternoon shift in the Columbia café because she’s caught a cold, but then cannot go out into the street on a Sunday morning without everybody stopping to ask her if she’s feeling better.

That was what we hated most, the reason we made so many plans to leave, but it was also the reason we never learned to live any other way and anybody who did leave ended up either coming back or going mad, like my mother. I suppose I can be counted among those who came back before going mad, even though nobody in Faith seems to know who I am on the few occasions my daughter, Linda, and I have been out of the house. I’m not sure if the effects of the illness on my body have made me unrecognizable or everybody simply prefers to ignore us. I suppose once you abandon this tiny world around Main Street, it also abandons you, you are no longer of interest or importance. The only one living in the Logans’ house now is Anna, who thinks we’re two strangers from New York who’ve rented my house for some strange reason she doesn’t want to know about. And she’s right because this house is somehow foreign to me.

That may be why the old railroad with its abandoned, rusty lines crossing Railway came to an end in Faith⁵ – because this has always been a place it is impossible to abandon, a place where the world stops as if there was nowhere else to go after here. Or, as Elvis, the grocery store owner, used to say, so no traveller would be tempted not to return home. Because nobody would want to stay here long if they stood a chance of being saved. Of course, whenever Elvis came out with jokes like this, he would do so with a loud guffaw that seemed to emerge from the deepest part of him, a guffaw that has the meaning, ‘This is something I don’t care about,’ though what comes out of the mouth is, ‘This is the most important thing in the world.’

So it was that life in Faith, after the railroad was abandoned, carried on the same. If one day it was on the move, now (as when I left) it is a place that has stopped in time, with no more urgency or occupation than that of remaining the same, with its deserted station, its languishing inhabitants in the middle of the plain, laughing out loud at everything so they can endure the silence. Elvis’s laugh was a kind of shield against hopelessness, something that lodged between the temples of the one who heard it just as an arrow pierces an apple. I never heard such a sad sound in all my life.

A desire to stagnate fills this place. In Faith, there are no rivers, there are swamps and, while the still waters end up creating this thick, muddy bottom, I think the same sedimentary effect influences the folks who stay in one place for too long: people land on top of one another until forming a paste that rots in the heat and grows hard in the cold. Few, however, are conscious of forming part of this sludge.

That was the reason Clarissa and I loved Elvis to some degree. I think he knew, as we did, what was happening to us all. He was the only one who complained about things as if they were important. He once told my father that, if I wasn’t taller than Clarissa, we would look like Siamese twins, and I think he was right because, before turning six, Clarissa and I amounted to more or less the same thing. If she was absent from school one day, the teacher would ask me when she would be back. And this was considered normal because I was usually the one who knew what was happening to her or when she was likely to return. We used to fall sick at one and the same time, first one and then a few days later the other. We both got third-degree chickenpox, she received a tiny scar on her shoulder, by the shoulder blade, in the shape of a snake. I didn’t get one, but Clarissa’s snake was mine also, a tattoo that reminded us both of that ritual illness. Even though we never needed physical marks or rituals that others found normal. Except once.

On the morning of my eighth birthday, we were sitting, watching Mr Collins – Bill’s father’s – cows grazing, when Clarissa took hold of my hand. We stayed like this for a long while, and then she suddenly got up and I followed her along a path that leads to the park. ‘We shall become eternal sisters,’ she said to me, ‘that’s my present to you.’ She placed her fingers on a corner of a bench in the park, and I immediately saw the blood oozing from her wound. I inched my own fingers closer, wanting the metal to penetrate me also, but couldn’t do it. I wasn’t capable of sinking my skin on to that rusty metal point.

I grabbed her finger and licked the blood, the earth, everything. Clarissa didn’t mind, she brought her face close to mine and kissed me. I could taste her saliva in my mouth, as if it had been put there on purpose. ‘Now we’re spit sisters,’ I confirmed. She nodded. Immediately we heard this cavernous scream in the distance. We ran like the wind towards our houses. I don’t know why we did this, it was as if everything that mattered hung on that scream that had nothing to do with us, like everything else in Faith. We knew this, but sometimes felt the need to run after or behind something, to believe if only for a split second that something was urgent or necessary, whatever it might be, to stay alive, to run in pursuit of the future.

The shout came from Bill Collins’s mother, who had just seen how her husband disappeared a hundred feet into the void. Bill’s father had been out keeping an eye on the cows – actually, on Peter Malow, who had worked for him for twenty years and whom he had distrusted for the same period. He had placed a foot on a well in his property and was watching Mr Malow work, constantly shaking his head, a kind of nervous tic. That day, however, the wind lifted off his hat, and Bill’s father tried to get it back before it fell into the well. He tripped. He couldn’t keep his balance. He slipped while reaching out his hand just as he was about to retrieve his hat and glimpsed the darkness at the bottom of the well. It took them hours to recover his body, and all afternoon the cows trampled on his short-brimmed, black hat.

Bill’s mother shouted from the door of her house – it was her scream we heard. I’ve already said it was my eighth birthday. And that was how I met Bill. The following Sunday, we went to Clarissa’s house, I tried on a dark blue dress that Mrs Logan had taken in so it would fit around my waist and then we all went off together to the funeral, Clarissa and I dressed up as girls attending a funeral for the very first time, my father and Mrs Logan dressed up as if they were going to the doctor.

As we made our way towards the church, I thought we must have resembled a complete family. I took Mrs Collins by the hand and hoped the few strangers who saw us that day wouldn’t realize it was a trick, I didn’t want us to be two half-baked families. That must have been the only time this happened to me, the only time the odd commune formed by my father, Luke and me was not sufficient.

Clarissa wanted this all the time. I suppose we didn’t need it so much as Mrs Logan and her daughters, there was a reason my father slept in the middle of the bed while Mrs Logan watered the artificial lawn and kept on answering questions about her husband, even though she had nothing to say. So when Mr Logan came back one day without explaining where he had been and what he had done along the way, despite the fact Clarissa and I were sixteen by then, it was as if he had only left for the weekend, as if his family had been expecting him.

In all that time, my father and Mrs Logan addressed each other as ‘Mr Olsen’ and ‘Mrs Logan’. Even when my brother, Luke, had an accident. ‘Thanks for looking after Emma all these days, Mrs Logan.’ ‘I hope your son gets completely better, Mr Olsen.’ ‘Have a good holiday, Mrs Logan.’ ‘The same to you, Mr Olsen.’ ‘It was very kind of you to lend us a saucepan, Mrs Logan.’ ‘I was very sorry to hear about your father’s demise, Mr Olsen.’ And so on, until Mr Logan came back after a decade of abandonment. It was a Monday morning, he unlocked the door of the house, as if all he had to do was sew the Sunday he had left on to the Monday he had returned and carry on with the life awaiting him. I remember my father shook his hand one afternoon in Elvis’s store. ‘Say hi to Martha from me,’ he said. He barely managed to smile with his lower lip, as always happened when he didn’t really want to smile.

‘Martha.’ I realized she had a name that made her almost human. When my father said it like this, ‘Martha,’ I pictured Mrs Logan removing her make-up with some cotton wool, taking out the curlers, undoing her girdle and her high-heeled shoes. I pictured her lying on the unmade bed, smoking a cigarette, as I had watched her do the day their washing machine broke down. Clarissa and I were playing at cutting photographs out of magazines in the living room while Mrs Logan ironed a blouse. At this point, Anna came in and announced that the corridor was full of water. The water was coming out from underneath the washing machine, the kitchen was one big puddle. There was water in the hallway, and its presence had begun to make itself felt on the living room carpet. Anna wandered about the house with dripping feet, wetting everything in sight. But Mrs Logan didn’t say a word. She opened a drawer in the sideboard and took out a cigarette and a lighter. She lit the cigarette and smoked it down to the tip while the water kept on pouring out of the washing machine, without even lifting a finger to stop it.

All things considered, a half-ironed blouse and an electrical appliance connected to the mains in the middle of a large puddle were another way of killing oneself. I don’t know whether we ever included electrocution in our list of methods⁶. Nor do I particularly recall what happened afterwards, except that for a time Mrs Logan would wash her clothes in our washing machine and my brother, Luke, would moan about his dirty laundry being mixed in with that of the girls next door. Now I think that was the first time I ever knew anything about Martha; the second was on the day of Bill’s father’s funeral; the third in Elvis’s store, when my father referred to her by name. There were no other occasions.

I was eight, and it seemed mildly absurd to us to die as a result of a fall, we were falling down all the time without any further consequences, people in Faith didn’t usually die because of such accidents. People in Faith await death for years; the more they wish for it, the longer it takes. That is why I think Bill’s father’s death was the beginning of that catalogue of ways of killing oneself we constructed as a form of silent rebellion, our first such experience, the realization that killing oneself was the only means of escape we could hope to achieve on our own.

When Mrs Logan cried her eyes out at the funeral, I couldn’t work out why she was doing this. I saw adults approaching Bill and patting him on the head, then coming out with phrases such as ‘poor thing’ or ‘only a boy’, all of which were completely devoid of meaning. But not Mrs Logan – Mrs Logan wept uncontrollably, and for some time afterwards I heard rumours at Carl’s fruit stall that perhaps she had been romantically involved with Bill’s father. I believed this at the time. But I only believed it because I was so utterly ignorant. Ignorant about everything. About Martha, as well.

So it was for many years her tears on the day of the funeral were a mystery to me. Shortly after Mr Logan returned home, I asked Clarissa what her mother had said when he opened the door and entered the kitchen. What she told me helped me to understand. Anna and she had been tucking into two bowls of cereal. Mrs Logan had stood up and looked at her husband. ‘You could have died,’ she had said. She hadn’t kicked up a fuss as they do on the television, she had only said this. It was then I began to suspect something. ‘You could have died’ was not a recrimination on account of his absence, it was an affirmation, a desire perhaps. ‘You could have died’ – because to disappear was to suspend the normal order of things in time, to impair the net Mr and Mrs Logan had weaved together as a way of enduring life in Faith and, when he left, he destroyed all chance of dignified survival, of being respectable.

That was why Mrs Logan wept at Bill Collins’s father’s funeral – because of her husband who hadn’t died, who had given her the task of shoring up a house of lies so he could walk without looking at the ground. At that funeral, Mrs Logan had wept out of envy – envy of the respectable end of a husband who had died, envy of all the sympathetic utterances raining down on the heads of the orphaned children, envy of the respect and pity. But when one is eight years old, one cannot make sense of all that. I felt sorry for Bill because he was an orphan; at the same time, I also found out about his existence. True, I didn’t have a mother, but at the time it seemed different because my orphanhood wasn’t real, there had been no multitudinous gatherings or acts of mourning on account of me being an orphan. I would sometimes encounter Bill at school. He was in the same year as my brother, Luke. He was always silent and would blush when spoken to, something I liked. When I watched him go past, I always thought of him as a wretch, a real orphan, the living image of pain.

I suppose the eyes with which one views the world when one is eight remain the same for ever.

⁵ Faith, the settlement, is named after one of the daughters of Percy Avery Rockefeller, the driving force behind the railroad – totally abandoned since the middle of the twentieth century – that had this town as its final destination, and which led to its being founded.

⁶ One of the central characters in Dream Grass dies in a situation that is identical to the one described – while ironing his work uniform, he is electrocuted because of a malfunction in the device.

3

For many years, my father kept a photograph of my mother and Mrs Logan on the television in our living room. Each woman standing on her side of the fence, revealing to the camera a round belly beneath a floral dress. The two of us – Clarissa and I – were inside, and so this is the first photograph we have together, the first symmetry of all that would arrive later. We had just bought the two houses, hardly anybody else lived in Kennedy Street except for us, the Logans and the Olsens, destined to become allies for ever or to hate each other relentlessly. At the time, nobody knew my mother and Mr Logan would leave early and break all the archetypes we had dreamed of, would flee, causing us, the ones who were left behind, to be something else, just as conventional, but much more melodramatic.

When I was a girl, almost all I knew about my mother was this photograph, which my father ended up removing from its frame so we would forget all about it. I don’t think he did this out of rage, but because of hygiene; something of the sort, something akin to mental health, is what he achieved for us. Only once did I dare to question him about what had happened, the morning when Mr Logan crossed our garden to tell us about Clarissa, shortly before I left Faith. It is not yet time to explain what went on that day, but there was a brief conversation between Mr Logan’s visit and everything that followed in which my father and I talked of my mother and I recovered the photograph for myself.

I asked him if she was happy with us. My father took a while to reply, as if this was a truly complicated question. Perhaps because it was, I didn’t quite understand his response. ‘When she left, she wasn’t here anymore,’ he said. Somebody once told us they had seen her in Sioux Falls, begging for alms and shouting at people in the street to stop the war in Vietnam. It was the year 1996⁷, and I no longer lived in Faith.

I know Clarissa was born a couple of hours after the belly photograph was taken. She was a delightful baby and later became the darling of the kindergarten, with her long, blond hair tied in two plaits, her dresses that matched the socks and shoes Mrs Logan put on her every day. Quite different from my own usual appearance, a combination of my father’s lackadaisical attitude and my mother’s lack of judgement. Back then, Martha Logan had the perfect family. Clarissa was her masterpiece, and she looked after her as such. She was noticeable among all the other girls who huddled about her in amazement, wishing to possess, even if only for a moment, a little of that charm that so fascinated the adults. She was a girl straight out of a magazine or a toothpaste advertisement and smiled at the world as if she was fortunate in everything and had nothing to do with us, the others.

Not even when her sister, Anna, was born did Clarissa forgo a minimal part of the adults’ attention. The baby, with its round face and standard aptitudes, was, rather than good news, a defect Clarissa accepted as being necessary among all the lesser details of her kingdom. Only once was she on the verge of losing her authority over her sister when their grandmother, Mrs White, insisted on teaching her to sing. She found out that Clarissa, this perfect child from another world, was not suited to music. And this was a failure that made everything totter and tremble. Only for a moment, of course, because if there’s something the citizens of Faith are good at, it is the speed with which they learn to resign themselves to everything that happens.

Few things in the world concerned Mrs White, so she barely registered her disappointment. She detested Democrats and shirts without shoulder pads and, so long as she encountered neither of these along the way, she was an affable woman. Her life changed with the arrival of karaoke at the local pub, the only one in town. To begin with, every Saturday night, and later every day except Sunday, she would comb her hair and paint her lips, carefully select a dress, put on a coat with golden appliqués she had bought to go out and triumph, and then, having kissed all the crosses in her house, move her ample body through Railway to the karaoke. Since her husband had died young, she had no choice but to find someone else to love and professed admiration for Connie Francis⁸ and her immaculate hairdo.

She was the queen of the microphone, she would sway her lacquered plastic jewellery all over the stage in the pub and, gazing at the ceiling, close her eyes to say, ‘Frankie, wherever you are, I love you.’ To keep her happy, all you had to do was fill up her glass with gin and ask her to sing one of Connie’s songs. Sometimes, when she was too drunk to continue on her own two feet, we would hear her staggering home, intoning a deep, grotesque and certainly ironic version of that old hit by Loretta Lynn, ‘Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’’. Lynn’s spasmodic smile always reminds me of Clarissa’s grandmother and all those women who are like her, each in their own way and for different reasons.

Sometimes, when she still got hopelessly drunk only a couple of evenings a week, she would invite us to tea after school. Having tackled our glass of cold milk and toast, we would play in the back garden until Mrs Logan came to fetch us. When she couldn’t hear us anymore – I think she’d even forgotten we were there – we would jump over the fence and walk as far as the road that goes around Faith. On the right verge, we would move forwards without discussing the purpose of our expedition and sometimes entertain the possibility of not changing direction and not going back the way we had come. On one occasion, we got so far we could see, in the distance, the sign that declared you were entering the Indian reservation, which we knew almost nothing about, except for the drawings of tepees we coloured in at nursery. I have often explained I was ignorant of this part of our history that beats so close to the place where I grew up and everything I learned about Native Americans was at university⁹. Most of the time, on those afternoon expeditions from Mrs White’s house, when the sun began to set, it was Clarissa who turned around and started walking in the opposite direction. I just followed her, as I had followed her to the exit from Faith, as I would have followed her to the end of the world.

I sometimes think I already knew what was happening to me with Clarissa, except that I wouldn’t have admitted it even to myself, because everything occurred in a kind of inner chamber to which I denied myself access. It remained closed for many years, until I met Susan¹⁰, whom I cannot help naming once more, even though I know she wouldn’t want to appear in this book. Now that a year has passed since her absurd death, I know the ten years we spent together were worthwhile, enough for me to understand who I am, who I was as an adolescent, and to write about it.

Last summer, at a gathering of readers in Minnesota, a doctor remarked with regard to her reading of Dream Grass that it’s common for old couples to die close together in time and there are illnesses that, even though there’s only a limited amount of statistical data to prove it, appear to be provoked by a recently experienced personal trauma, such as the death of a partner. I don’t know whether Susan’s accident led to my cancer or not, whether to some degree it unleashed or triggered the cellular mutation. What I do know, however, is that, with her not here, I feel there are fewer things that tie me to this world. Perhaps just my daughter, Linda, or not even her because I raised her – as Clarissa and I were not raised – not to need anything from her mother, not to draw back from personal discoveries, not to be afraid of the revelations life might offer.

Exactly the opposite of what I myself was, afraid of everything. One of the last times I walked with Clarissa along the road to the Indian reservation, we came across an animal that had been run over. I couldn’t say what it was, although back then we examined any unexpected find as if it was a treasure, the excitement of the discovery of Dinosaur Sue¹¹ a few miles away from Faith still fresh in our minds. This dinosaur put us on the map, and everybody clapped when Mr Wilson appeared on national news without looking like a madman, as he usually did. But I shall talk about Mr Wilson later on, he has nothing to do with the dinosaur except for those fifteen seconds of fame.

Because, even though nobody remembers it anymore, the most important Tyrannosaurus rex specimen was hidden in Faith for more than sixty million years. The gossip about Donald and Ivana Trump’s divorce at the start of the 1990s was still simmering away when a woman, Sue Hendrickson, stopped to fill up at Jim’s petrol station and said something big was about to happen. Nobody knew anything else until we heard about it on the radio: those bones were worth a lot of money, more than anybody in Faith had ever seen in one place. It turned out nobody really knew who the T-rex belonged to – whether it belonged to us all or was the property of the one who had found it. And yet, when Bill Collins’s uncle claimed that the land where Sue Hendrickson had dug was in fact his property, when that dry earth on which he’d never even thought of grazing his cattle turned into a plot valued at the eight million dollars the Field Museum in Chicago was prepared to pay to keep hold of the T-rex, when the TV channels and radio stations turned up to interview those archaeologists we had pretty much ignored until then, things were taken on to a different level.

Before he died, Bill’s uncle would sometimes visit the Columbia café to tell anyone who would listen – outsiders, mostly, who still didn’t know the story and were usually more patient – how he had been robbed of those bones that belonged to him, his brother’s inheritance, until Doris, poor Doris, who died several years later of an attack of appendicitis while writhing in agony in the café toilets, brought the whole shenanigans to an abrupt end by asking him whether perchance he wasn’t rich enough, whether he didn’t own half of Faith, whether there was anything at all in which he could not be considered more fortunate than all those who surrounded him.

That was why, in our teenage years, nobody really said much about the dinosaur, except for Bill’s uncle, and, when he grew tired of talking, not a trace was left of those days of grandeur. Even so, when we came across that animal that had been run over on the road that leads to the reservation, it seemed to us we might be standing before a real treasure. At the time, we thought escaping from Faith involved doing something great, rising above the others. That was before we started getting breasts or had even thought about the catalogue of ways of killing oneself we later came up with. I was struck by the clotted blood clinging to the asphalt like a thick paste. I was struck by the compressed head and the mix of fur and entrails. I wanted to get away from there. In silence, unable to work out which way to flee, whether back the way we had come or further out of Faith, I watched as Clarissa picked up a stick and prodded the corpse, observing each and every part with a fascination I had never noticed in her before.

Later, much later, I would learn that Clarissa loved limits, reaching the exact point where the final frontier that could be surpassed began. Without taking my eyes off the animal and what she was doing, I asked her if we could leave and, as always happened, the more I pleaded with her, the more interest she seemed to have in staying where she was. I felt a magnetic repulsion towards her. I was stunned by her behaviour, sickened by the stench of the corpse, but also impressed by her air of calm. This vision would pursue me for a long time, even though I never told anyone about it.

In fact, being run over is another way of killing oneself, but we never included it as a possibility for us. Clarissa would sometimes refer to this option and, whenever she did so, she would smile as when she was a child and her birthday was coming soon and, outside school, she was deciding who to invite to her party and who not. She always left me to the end and intensified this disturbing gesture by walking towards me. As she talked to the others, I still didn’t know whether to be confident about an invitation or whether this time she was really going to decide to punish me, whether she was leaving me to the end by sheer chance or because nobody could have any doubt that she would finally include me in her celebrations. Nobody but me, that is. Nor did I ever find out whether, when discussing roadkill, she remembered my repulsion or not. I sometimes had the impression this game of naming ways of killing oneself as a means of escape was something she took seriously, especially when she talked about getting run over. Every time she mentioned it, I would imagine our bodies merging in a mass of entrails on the road out of Faith, a thick paste of mingled, brown blood on the asphalt.

The truth is that wouldn’t be the only mess in which we would be joined for ever.

⁷ That same year saw the publication of a book of short stories, Mum, a collection of stories about maternity that met with great commercial success. This volume, later reviled by Olsen, ends with the composition ‘Mine’, which is dedicated ‘To my mother, the Emma of before’. This work, Mum, contains several biographical clues about the author whose meaning becomes clear in the light of this, her final book.

⁸ Connie Francis is a pop singer who enjoyed great success in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. The account of her personal dramas, her youthful and short-lived love story with the singer Bobby Darin and the sexual assault she suffered in a hotel in 1974, were public knowledge and helped turn her into a myth. Like Loretta Lynn (a country music singer), who appears a little later, she constitutes an easily recognizable musical reference.

⁹ According to declarations by Olsen for Time magazine in 1999, ‘It’s really unbelievable that we know so much about the French Revolution and so little about the past of Native Americans. I mean real knowledge, not the folklore we were taught at school.’

¹⁰ Susan Davis, who was named in the first chapter of this book, was Emma Olsen’s sentimental partner for more than a decade. Together, they engaged in campaigns for the rights of same-sex couples, the only cause the writer actively and publicly embraced.

¹¹ In 1990, near the town of Faith, were found the largest and most complete remains of a Tyrannosaurus rex, nicknamed ‘Dinosaur Sue’ after its discoverer: Sue Hendrickson. The skeleton is now on view at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, after a dispute concerning its ownership between the archaeologist, the State of Dakota and the owner of the land on which it was discovered.

4

When Mrs White died, the Logans inherited a house. Clarissa’s father had just got back his job as floor manager at the tyre factory. My brother, Luke, had worked there the previous summer, before he became the errand boy for Elvis’s grocery store, and, after Clarissa’s grandmother’s funeral, Mr Logan placed an advert on the shop’s noticeboard and asked Luke to help him rent the house. He never told me why, but I detected in my brother a similar contempt for Mr Logan as I had seen in my father, in Elvis’s store, the day he held out his hand and sent his greetings to Martha. For a long time, I thought my brother’s dislike had something to do with Mother. After all, Luke was the only one of us two who remembered her a little, as if the similarity of what Mother had done to us automatically implicated our family in the Logan family’s misfortunes. All the same, Luke placed the advertisement, even though it seemed absurd to all of us – nobody ever turned up in Faith without having somewhere to stay. Anyone who came did so in order to return to the place they had set out from. All except for Mr Montana. We saw him arrive on Main Street in a coffee-coloured Dodge Aries. It was the start of summer, my brother talked about it over dinner. So it didn’t take the Logans long to rent Mrs White’s house, and there was no time for it to become an abandoned place or for the children of Faith to invent legends about the ghost of Clarissa’s grandmother touring the locked rooms and invoking the Mr White of before the war.

Even so, Mr Montana’s arrival seemed to us like an episode out of Columbo. Anyone we didn’t know was suspicious – we weren’t sure why, but they were always suspicious. This one wasn’t even young or attractive. When I first saw him, I thought he must have been my father’s age, but fatter and balder. He walked from the house he had rented to Elvis’s shop with short, unsteady steps and gazed at the price labels over the top of some brown-framed glasses, which were just a little too small for him.

We knew he’d come to teach literature, and Clarissa said he must have been a drop-out to end up teaching in Faith, but I didn’t think so. There are times when it’s enough to look at somebody’s face to know what kind of person they are, and Mr Montana had one of those faces that give you away. A few days after arriving, he asked Luke to help him fix up some things in Mrs White’s house: to paint the walls, to check the top steps on the staircase and to erect some new bookshelves in the living room. My brother had only good things to say about Mr Montana because he paid him a better hourly rate than Elvis. He was saving up to buy Bill’s father’s truck from Bill.

Clarissa hated Mr Montana right from the start, as I think she hated all our teachers, even those who idolized her when we were children, perhaps those ones most of all. In fourth grade, Miss Line took us to the principal’s office because she thought we’d copied from each other in a science test. It wasn’t true, but Clarissa’s mistakes were the same as mine and our correct answers were identical. It was difficult to explain that such coincidences were only natural in the case of Siamese twins, especially since I was in the line of fire of Miss Line and the principal, while Clarissa, with all her perfect girl’s majesty, could only have fallen prey to her innocent way of trusting others. We children, for Miss Line, were inevitably the incarnation of evil, all except for Clarissa. Clarissa was the child Miss Line had gone into teaching for, and I was the bad influence that skirts around every devout person to tempt them before they are canonized.

Sitting opposite the principal’s desk, we could barely touch the floor with the tips of our toes. Miss Line warned us that, if the person guilty of copying did not confess, she would have to punish us both. It seems absurd now to comprehend the fear we had of Miss Line’s punishment because in fact we weren’t afraid of her, we were just afraid of everything. As she said this, she stroked Clarissa’s soft, blond plaits. She viewed me with repulsion, as one analyzes a bag of rubbish that is about to split open, wondering how to take hold of it without dirtying one’s fingers. But she had overlooked an important rule: the thing that most annoyed Clarissa in the world was to be what people expected of her, to live up to expectation. She hated playing ball, she preferred to inconvenience everybody, whatever the cost, as if this were a way of life.

I say this to explain what she was capable of doing as a way of cultivating differences, of being a nuisance to such belittled and predictable spirits as that of Miss Line. To tell the truth, I think I was the only one Clarissa was afraid of, she sought out the punishment like somebody exhibiting a scar that makes them different, that makes them stand out. ‘Emma didn’t do anything,’ she said. I felt the burning in my chest, the frozen looks of the teacher and principal. Clarissa smiled. ‘Punish me instead,’ she threatened.

If I ever loved Clarissa for any rational reason, it was because of her innate ability to rebel, something that had never been seen in Faith before, where people are more accustomed to complain than to try to change anything and where hardly anybody has an opinion about things that happen, except for that old story of the dinosaur. Clarissa always knew how to make noise, how to be annoying without seeming to want to. My mother never went to church and, when she left, my father stopped going and taking us with him. Although we were the only ones who dared to skip this Sunday appointment, nobody ever said anything because we were hardly worth talking about, nor was there anyone to tell. But Clarissa, who had come into existence so she could be the beauty queen at the end-of-year ball, so she could carry the name of Faith far beyond us all, far away from the plain, Clarissa bothered people with her every action and was capable of disturbing others far more than any of us would ever have dreamed of doing.

Text © Berta Dávila

Translation © Jonathan Dunne

Other books by Berta Dávila are available to read in English – see the page “Novels”.