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My sister Ana sounds distressed when she calls to tell me that Mom broke her femur. I don’t say anything. I say nothing, and she fills my silence with a [detailed] description of the situation. She knows that bringing up Mom makes me uncomfortable [we’ve avoided this subject in our conversations for years], but “I had no other choice.” She’s exhausted after five days and nights in the hospital, where she only has one free hour to eat. Thankfully, Marisé [an old neighbor] and our cousins from Toldaos have come by a few mornings. But she can’t relax. She’s afraid Mom will die and leave her alone. She asks me for help. “What about Marcos?” I ask. “He says they’re having work done to their house. I really, really need you, Óscar,” she says, and as she does, a ray of sun climbs up from my feet and erupts into my eyes. I’m bound to the past in my memory by a piece of straw so thin that even the smallest motion could break the bind and send pain shooting through my body. I take a deep breath. I search for some calm in the pit of my stomach. My heart is hammering in the palms of my hands. I gulp. “Don’t worry, Ana.”

The last time I saw Mom was over thirty years ago. She had a defiant gaze, bleach-blonde hair cascading in ringlets down to her shoulders, Caribbean blue nail polish, an impeccable blazer with gemstone buttons, and not a single scar on her legs. She couldn’t stand scars or [even worse] spider veins. To her, both were ghastly symptoms of neglect, just like bags under the eyes and sloppy lip and eyebrow waxing. Time’s effect on people’s bodies was not, in her mind, a biological phenomenon, but a result of ignorance and poverty. And for her, “poverty” was as much about the economical as it was the spiritual realm. She felt that a deficiency in either department was the fruit of a moral failing.

Breaking away from my mother made a definitive mark on who I am [it’s painful for me to look at myself in mirrors]. My feelings towards her were conflicted for the first few years. Overwhelmed by an urge to call, I would dial her number only to hang up when I heard her say “Yes?” on the other end. Ana told me in her letters [or messages, once cellphones became more popular] that Mom only talked about me to complain about my ungratefulness [I never visited or called]. She couldn’t help but worry what had become of me [an act], what circles I ran in. “He’s a buffoon,” she would say. As the years went on, my name faded from her lips, largely thanks to the grandchildren given to her by Marcos, her favorite son, the only one who [she bragged to her friends] had it all: an honest man’s integrity, a good job, a model wife.

For my part, I gained a strength I’d never had before. I made my own decisions about my time and affections, and my only constraint was the need to make a living. I did lots of odd jobs. I got by. But I wasn’t very ambitious. I earned enough to live and travel, and was the first in my entire extended family to venture abroad for pleasure rather than emigration. That fact wasn’t lost on me. I grew up at a time when the world still contained [at least, so I thought] places beyond the reach of touristic wandering and the endless drilling of business and war. I think it was probably the gentle contours of those new frontiers that helped me overcome the agonizing thought that Mom could live without ever loving me.

I don’t want to drive back to my hometown, so I check the train schedule. I call the agency I’ve worked for over the past two years and ask Sandra [the director] to clear my schedule. “No problem. Fall is always slow. I’ll let it slide so long as you’re back by November, for All Saints’ Day. You have an appointment with a widow who wants you to go with her to the cemetery, and then the theatre, and then out to dinner. Some widows get especially lonely on All Saints’, and you’ve earned a reputation as being obliging and discreet,” she says, making a kissing sound as she hangs up. I’m the only employee about whom she’s never received a complaint. I’ve achieved perfection in my work, that is, perfection in the social role I play, unbound by life and personal traits. After this conversation with Sandra, I turn my work phone off but leave my personal phone on.

The most popular times of year are generally the holiday season and weekends in spring and summer. During the holidays, I’m always booked for a Christmas Eve dinner and a Christmas Day lunch, which I spend with the family of a client. She introduces me as her boyfriend. She says that since she started bringing me, her mother has been more affectionate with her, her sisters have stopped badgering her about her love life, and she’s had more peace of mind. She also calls me for events and parties thrown by her relatives so that we can keep the fantastical illusion of our courtship alive. Some women call me to go skiing, take a short trip, get out of their routines, or explore a new city with me as their guide, which requires me to do prior research, one of the most engaging parts of my job. Other women want to enjoy a nice dinner, let off steam, and have a bit of sex without having to deal with all the tiresome steps in between, the boring men, or the unpleasant surprises that come with Tinder. I love spinning the fantasy of courtship for them, making the travails of love more bearable for them.

Most of my appointments are with women. I only take men by referral. They’re usually dealing with intense inner conflicts. They have an unexamined emotional side and a pitifully underdeveloped sense of affection. Working with them isn’t worth the effort. It’s exhausting. They always complain about the price. Women tend to be more generous. They don’t mind spending the money if it means having happiness dolloped on them in return. Men, on the other hand, have a harder time decoding satisfaction. The last time I fell in love with a man, it was a trainwreck. His name was Alberto, and he was essentially two women. One of them lived on the outside. That was his mother, and she presided over all his actions [she wanted him to get married and have kids. All the women he loved, he did so through this external, teleological woman]. The other woman had been buried inside him, in his muscles, his viscera, his lymphatic system. She lived in a hidden prison. This part of him was really more of a girl [the girl he had been] than a woman, still naive and sweet. A girl who had been fossilized as she grew up, with her disproportionate little arms and legs, the elastic body of young girls, with no breasts or hips, childlike, clean, abstract [odorless] genitals, and porcelain skin yet to see the light of day. The girl no longer breathed, but she continued to jerk and twist against her bonds. Her tiny heart still beat, blood still pumped to her brain, and her lymph nodes made their presence known through occasional allergies that doctors could never find an explanation for. Allergists performed tests but never got clear results. He said he was allergic to life.

Alberto was the only person who has ever truly known me [he could tell what I was thinking by the way my eyes moved], and I was the only person who ever got close to him without coming out traumatized. Rage surged through his body when he woke up. He slammed doors. Banged his head against the wall. Shouted. Argued with socks. His neck became like a map of wide rivers funneling massive quantities of blood from his heart to his brain. There was a terrifying look on his face [all forethought obliterated], as if he had spared the sock, or me, our lives, and I could do nothing but watch his frenzied behavior. I tried to enter him and found myself with the imprisoned little girl. He went blind with rage, his nails ready to tear apart my skin. He seemed burnt out.

He sent me a letter a little while ago. I’m not sure how he got my address. In the letter, he tries to reflect on the frustrating outcome of our relationship [I simply disappeared from his life one morning], and says that he’s never forgotten me [all while he insults me]. Regardless of whether or not I share his view, or whether his letter is an accurate or distorted portrayal of me, I think our romantic utopia ended in failure. I’m at peace with that. At the moment, my love belongs to the ocean, to the consistency of its waves. To climbing onto my surfboard and escaping the break.

After leaving my mother’s home, I wandered the globe. I spent some time working in the south of France, Barcelona, and Valencia. With Barcelona, I left because it was too much. I was still an amateur and the emotional contradictions of my work threw me off balance. I never got used to the fleeting fireworks of Valencia, but I spent a heavenly four months there with a married Russian couple that worked as art dealers. I gave them what they most desired and lacked for nothing from them.

I settled down in Madrid and did alright, partly because I got to be around my best friend Elías again. He was my companion in my first excursions into literature and even as an adult, he had retained his youthful hope and the ambivalent glimmer of a person who doesn’t want to grow up, as if he’d determined that life [like wine] goes sour when summer ends. He worked as a journalist for the cultural supplement of a democratic socialist newspaper, and got involved in the progressive side of the capital, attending heated debates where he was an ambassador for the quality of public school in Argentina [where he was born] and his Galician education [he had grown up in and around a marvelous bookstore owned by his father, an exiled republicano who returned to Galicia after Franco’s death—we children of the dictatorship didn’t have access to such varied reading material].

Elías and I lived through the years of transition into democracy amid the chaos of endless Madrid nights: dancing at clubs until sunrise, sampling the myriad substances that flowed in with democracy, and imagining a future without capitalism. We didn’t believe in revolution because we thought the unregulated economic system would collapse from the weight of its deception and the [instinctive, predictable] human mindset. I don’t know who put the ideas in our head, but, to us, the logic seemed incontrovertible. Elías opened doors that I would never have been able to knock on, and advertised me in his social circles as a marvel of eroticism and intellect.

Madrid is full of money and possibility, but also competition. Young people come prepared, especially from the west of the country. They know what they want. They have resolve. Luckily, that combination was good for business, and I managed to save up a reasonable amount of money before I fell out of favor. That tends to happen quickly in my line of work. People get bored of you, your conversation, your abilities. Even an amazing body can turn bland after a few weeks if you don’t maintain an inner distance. The people who last longest in this business are the slippery ones and the ones who aren’t all that smart in the first place. Lack of intelligence is key to survival. There’s no way to tell the fox from the fool within the confines of this superficial context. Clients value your ability to listen; it doesn’t matter if you don’t care what they’re talking about or don’t understand. You’re basically there to act as a mirror, a way for them to gaze into their own reflection for a moment [internal peace], to slow down. The image you reflect radiates pleasure, warmth, courtesy, and cleanliness. Being diaphanous, invisible, while still being stimulating is a balance not many people can achieve. The key isn’t to be submissive, but soluble.

Drawn by the thriving textile industry, I took what I earned in Madrid and moved to A Coruña [in the north of Galicia]. From there I went to Vigo [in the south of the region] where I’ve lived for the past three years. I work for the agency and keep my own schedule. I bought a small apartment close to the co-cathedral in the historic center, with a nearby garage where I park my red Suzuki Jimny, perfect for me because it came with a roof rack for my surfboard. I don’t have much furniture [enough to be comfortable but require as little cleaning as possible]. I’ve covered the walls of the living room—which has two terraces and a sliver of ocean view between two tall buildings—in bookcases with doors to keep dust away from my books [I’m allergic to paper mites].

The agency opened up contacts for me in Portugal, which is a very receptive market. Portuguese women with money like to spend it on quality service. I’ve picked up a lot of high-level clients and am much closer to good surfing beaches here. It’s not exactly a good activity for someone my age, but I use it to work on my weak points [my knees and lower back] and keep them flexible. I fell in love with surfing in A Coruña, thanks to the son of a woman who hired me one summer to help her get through vacation with her volatile child, who could never sit still or be quiet, and would either be tender or violent depending on the day. The curling waves are the only place where you can be outside the world and still feel the pressure bubbling up under your feet, unstable, slippery but there, constant, holding you up in its liquid heart.

I select a small suitcase, the kind you carry onto a plane. A red, wheeled Samsonite. I’ll only be gone a few days. I pack a few shirts. A pair of pants. Underwear. Socks. A jacket in case it rains. A pair of house slippers and tennis shoes. I’m reading a novel about family conflicts [a thousand pages] and won’t need any other books. I’m also going to start a new journal. It’s a tradition for me. Each trip, a fresh new journal. I write every day [one page or several, depending on my emotional state or how much free time I have]. I look at the world the same way its gaze falls on me [writing down my memories is another form of thinking]. My journals aren’t a diary but nonetheless form a biographical narrative. They’re full of exercises, attempts at poetry, random scribblings, fleeting ideas, conceptual sentences, sketches, and, of course, literary discharges where I offload heavy burdens and toxic materials from my life. I never write about my work, or my clients. The time I spend with them is strictly theirs [that’s what they pay me for]. This separation brings me a certain peace, not because it relieves me of guilt [which I don’t feel], but because I know that I’m protecting them.

This tradition means nearly forty years of my life have been spilled onto dozens and dozens of journals in endless qualities and formats [hard- and soft-covered, blue, red, black, blank-paged, and, less frequently, lined or gridded]. I keep them in a second-hand chest I bought in Barcelona. The moment I saw it, I thought: this has my name written on it. I lined the inside with a plush red fabric. It gives a decadent, carnal impression when you open it. I’ve lost a few journals and left some behind at Mom’s house, hidden in the windowblind box in my room. I was in such a rush to get out that I forgot to bring them. This trip will give me a chance to recover them.

I vacuum and mop the apartment. I overwater my plants. The hibiscus has lots of buds. It’s on one of the balconies, alongside the geraniums, petunia, and amaranth. I bring it inside to be safe and place it beside the cactus to make sure it has light but stays sheltered from the weather. The cactus was a fiftieth birthday present from Ana, a symbol of love and strength. I sprinkled in fertilizer and bought it a sandy soil with peat moss, but it’s still not growing. Hopefully the plants will be alive and the apartment clean when I come back, as if I’ve only just left.

I call Manuela from the train and tell her I’m going away. “My mother broke her femur and my sister needs help.” She gasps. “Your mother! What a promising re-encounter!” “Don’t think I’m not second-guessing myself. I’m afraid of seeing her again.” “I’m sure it won’t be all that bad. People change.” “She certainly hasn’t.” “We all change, Óscar. I’m not the same person I was last year. That sweater I wore last summer doesn’t fit me anymore, and now I’m too embarrassed to even say hi to that old flame I was so obsessed with.” “That’s called eating too much and being a flake.” “But I’ll miss you at wine o’clock,” she groans. “I’ll only be gone a few days.” “That better be all,” she says.

Manuela and I call each other every day. We meet up often with our group of friends for drinks and talk about our routines. We’ve reached that age where drunkenness still excites us, even though our bodies can’t keep up as well anymore. Drugs are no longer part of our repertoire. The short-lived euphoria they would bring us is heavily outweighed by their side-effects. We don’t smoke either. But wine…wine brings us opulence without the miserable hangovers. We’ve stopped drinking beer because, besides the bloating, it leads to gas and weight gain. “I’m going to beer myself to death,” Manuela says, trying to make me feel guilty. “Have fun with that…you’ll blow up and won’t be able to put on those tight pants you love so much.” Manuela gets caught up in my laughter, “Come on, it was just a joke! I’m going to spend this last bit of summer at the beach.” “You’re going to end up with skin cancer.” “And what about you? You’re the one spending all your time in the sun, surfing with the other teenagers.” “Oh, I can just hear the envy eating you up inside.” “I’ll leave the teenagers to you. I cut off my ponytail a long time ago.”

I take a taxi straight from the train station to the hospital, driving around the edge of the city along a new beltway with anti-light-pollution streetlamps. I roll down the window as we pass City Hall so that I can get a better view of the clock tower and the semicircular dome with its chimes. The tower was built to distract from the silence of the factory sirens during the restructuring in the 80s, which pushed whole families out of the city and left their houses looking like rusted oil drums. Some garish buildings made of granite, slate, and colorful aluminum have been built around the hospital, concealing the convent’s baroque bell towers. In the distance, the square tower at the Marist school, built during the gruesome austerity period after the Civil War, seems to have survived. Country and city melt into and repel one another the whole way there.

Mom is in room 212. Ana welcomes me with a hug and rests her head on my shoulder. She rubs my back with her fingers spread out. It’s a gentle, comforting pressure. I can feel the heat from her hands and breath. “Thank you for coming, Óscar.”

Mom’s mouth is open. She’s asleep. Her lungs creak as if there’s an insect chirping inside them. It’s hard for me to accept that this ragged woman in front of me is her. The hair is pushed back from her face in sweaty clumps, leaving her white roots bare and accentuating her sickly appearance. Without their lipstick, her lips have softened into a defenseless sneer. Her eyebrows are unpainted [she lost them when she was younger]. There’s not a single trace of powder, make-up, eyeshadow, or mascara. It must be serious: not for her life would she agree to be in the hospital without an eyebrow pencil. Her moles have gotten bigger [the one to the right of her lip has swollen] and she’s developed liver spots. Her body is shrunken under the covers. Her breasts, still large, move up and down with each breath. Her arms, stretched [limply] along her body, are covered in flaccid skin that has lost all its elasticity. She’s gotten thinner. There’s an IV in her wrists feeding her blood, saline, antibiotics, and Dexketoprofen for the pain.

Ana and I take advantage of the momentary lull to go to the hospital café. It’s past five in the afternoon and there aren’t many people around. We sit at a table beside the window, far from the counter. A circumspect waiter in black polyester pants and a polo makes us coffee so terrible that we let it go cold in the mug after a couple of sips. The coffee maker’s logo is printed in blue on the mugs and napkin holders. I get up and buy myself a veggie sandwich wrapped in plastic. It says veggie, but there’s tuna in it. Hospitals make me feel equal parts famished and fatigued. Ana, on the other hand, has lost her appetite since Mom was admitted. She’s living off Meritene, hoping the synthetic protein will keep her from losing too much muscle mass.

The doctors [she tells me] are guarded. They’re envisioning a long operation. Trauma surgeries involve massive blood loss, and Mom already lost a lot to internal bleeding after the fall. She was home alone. Ana was at a traditional weaving festival in Burela. When she got back, she found Mom in the middle of the kitchen, lying unconscious in a pool of blood. Her guess is that Mom was cleaning the light fixture because the stepstool was beside her and the glass cleaner, a rag, and a roll of paper towels were out. She must have fallen into the table and the chairs because they were on their backs. The tablecloth had been pulled off and taken the fruit bowl with it. There was fruit all over the kitchen and some persimmons had rolled into the blood. Ana runs her hand along her neck as she recounts the details. She has chubby fingers. On one of them, a thick, worn golden ring that used to be Mom’s. She winces. “You could see the bone. It must have been so painful…I keep wondering why she would have been cleaning the light fixture…she can’t keep up physically, Óscar. The Parkinson’s has gotten to her entire right side. For her it’s more of a stiffness in her muscles than it is tremors. She’s lost some of her facial expressions. She barely even blinks anymore.” I lean over the table and kiss her on the forehead. She smiles. She sits up straight and rolls her neck. “You can’t begin to imagine how much I’ve missed you…” “Are you saying I have no imagination?” Tears caught in her eyelashes, she replies: “you’re such an idiot.”

Ana is the spitting image of Dad. The long, oval face. The deep, green eyes [a muddy river]. The thin lips. The round chin and pink, happy cheeks. If I didn’t know she was a nondrinker, I’d say she has even more of a taste for wine than Manuela. She got Dad’s straight, light brown hair, too. Even her slow, measured movements remind me of him. Her hips have gotten wide and her belly has gotten flabbier, though she hides it under a loose blouse with an Indian pattern. The only things she got from Mom are the bows in her blouse, flowers, the embroidery along her neckline, and the animal-shaped hairpins in her hair, all remnants of a style Mom etched into Ana’s tastes with the fire of sheer discipline.

Why Ana stayed in our small city living with Mom is a mystery to me. She says she can’t imagine living anywhere else, and that she won’t leave Mom all by herself. Whenever she goes away [even if only for a day], she misses her bed, her weaving students, the cat colony she feeds, the dogs at the animal shelter, the familiar smells and light. She sees truly unique colors here, shades you don’t see anywhere else. How the light filters through the perennial humidity and the sun shines through the forests. Golden in spring and fall. Pink in winter. Savagely bright in the summer.

Her shyness is like a rug she hangs in front of herself as an advertisement of her reserved personality. I’ve never met any boyfriends [she doesn’t like to talk about her intimate feelings]. She thinks of marriage as a win-or-lose game. She hates losing, and has no drive to win. You might think she’s stuck in some phase of her childhood, but the one time I suggested that to her on the phone, she got pissed off at me and said she wasn’t Wendy Darling. “I’m tired of everyone trying to tell me who I am…Why would I do what you all want me to if I’m not interested? Have you ever considered that it’s all of you that are wrong? I don’t want to get married. I don’t want to have kids. I don’t want a man and I don’t want a woman. I don’t want to feel accepted or needed…the most wonderful part of my day is when I’m alone and I can watch my bobbins weave the pattern my fingers have dreamt up.”

Mom is still asleep when we get back to the room. Ana is wary of this extended lull. Mom sleeps too much during the day. “She gets lost in a deep stage of sleep at night and can’t get out of it.” In the early morning [Ana warns me], “she’s extremely confused.” The nurses were calling it sunrise syndrome. They said it was normal for an elderly person. In her five nights at the hospital, Mom has undergone a wide range of hallucinations and stirred quite a bit of trouble. For example, she insisted on getting up for her mother’s death day and had to be strapped to the bed. She never remembers any of it in the morning and becomes distraught, feeling like she’s losing her grip on her memory.

When she wakes up, Mom thinks I’m a nurse and that I’m going to take her blood pressure. Ana pushes me to the front of the bed. My feet dig into the vinyl flooring and I stop. Swallow. “It’s me, Mom.” She lifts a hand, as if to stroke me, then lets it fall. “You…I wasn’t expecting you.” She closes her eyes. “This hospital is terrible, and the nurses are very rude.” She opens them again. “Will you fix my pillow, please? I can’t rest my head.” She acts indifferent, as if I’ve just returned from a short vacation.

During Marisé’s routine visit [she’s too scared to kiss me in greeting], Ana takes me back to our house. She drives a metallic grey Ibiza and shifts gears constantly, like a street racer. I mention that Marisé looks just like the Marisé I remember [not one wrinkle, light brown hair, anorexically thin, pantsuit with a floral shirt and a matching neck scarf]. “I’m glad you’re so optimistic [Ana laughs]. You’re going to need that tonight. You still haven’t seen the worst of it. Mom turns feral.” “She’s always been that way.” “Well then, imagine that, but worse.” “You’re scaring me.” “Good,” she says, and thanks me for being with her.

The two of us have maintained absolute trust in one another over the years. We created a peaceful bubble out of even our omnipresent mother’s reach, and it acted as a vaccine for the virus in our house. Ana fantasizes about me coming back to the city after Mom dies and the two of us growing old together. She says she’ll take care of me. “If Mom dies first [I say, tongue in cheek], she’s going to stick around in some incorporeal way, like a ghost, a specter, an apparition, a reincarnation, or a vindictive mummy.” “Don’t say things like that to me, Óscar, I’m impressionable!” “She’ll probably come back as a bloodthirsty zombie,” I respond, making claws with my hands. “You’re going to give me nightmares!” Putting on a ghoulish voice, I conclude: “Just know that your mother will never leave your side.” Ana screams. We burst into laughter.

The entryway to our building has been remodeled. They’ve put rococo framed mirrors on the walls and plaster planters with Greek motifs [Laocoön and His Sons being devoured by snakes] in the corners. The two cerimans that once guarded the doorway have been replaced by artificial plants. There used to be a piece of paper on the door between the entrance and the elevators, with a handwritten watering schedule that the ladies in the building drew up to make sure no one overwatered the plants [the ideal frequency depended on the season]. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the temperature: it’s always cold, no matter what the weather is like outside. The elevator’s abrupt stops and starts are the same as ever, too.

Ana saunters into the apartment with the casualness of daily routine and leaves her jacket on the coat rack in the hall. She looks at herself in the mirror [round, framed by wavy Gothic blades meant to represent the sun’s rays] above the dresser. She sees me standing paralyzed in the reflection. My hand is strangling the suitcase handle like a vine. I’m too scared to cross the threshold. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Óscar,” Ana says, and motions for me to follow her in. I stop thinking and follow. My reflection in the [bright] parquet hallway makes me look like a lame duck in a silver pond. I see more paintings and more furniture. There’s a Chinese pot on a pedestal with artificial flowers [magnolias and gladioli]. Ana improvises a tour. “Mom went to some community craft workshops and did these paintings [a still life done with a palette knife] and riverscapes [the shadowy winding of a river, an idyllic boat floating along with no one to row it]. She can’t anymore. She’s lost the flexibility in her hand.”

My room is intact. I sit down on the bed, get a [melony] whiff of my adolescence, and listen to the creaking of the metal and wood bed frame, with a wool mattress that Mom refused to get rid of because she said that my spine was warping and that spring mattresses only aggravated back problems. It still has the same crochet blanket. The same matching lace curtains in the window. There’s not a speck of dust on the metal Multistrux bookshelves. “Mom still cleans them,” Ana says, before going to the kitchen to make the food for her cats. My science fiction novels are still there, along with the folder containing my collection of Christmas cards, my thick General Basic Education textbooks, some rocks I collected for their appearance [quartz and iron-streaked minerals with combustion marks], and the picture of Elías and me in front of a graffiti that appeared on a wall in the city one morning and caught his attention: “We want fish tanks with colorful fish.” The photos of Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, and Sandra Mozarowsky are still thumbtacked to the inside doors of my closet. My clothes are all folded within. Shirts and sweaters on the shelves. Underwear in a drawer. Pants, jackets, and coats on the hangers. Shoes resting glossily at the back.

I stand up on a chair and try to remove the cover of the windowblind box. My journals should still be in there. The cover won’t budge. Hanging from the bookshelves, I notice the fake dog tags I used to wear from a chain around my neck and use them as a wedge. The cover comes off. I hold onto the blinds so that they don’t unfurl and come crashing down. This was all part of the silent routine I would undertake after Mom and Dad went to bed. I stick my hand behind the cylinder. It just fits. I feel around but can’t find the journals. I reach further in [up to my armpit]. My fingers brush against something and I clasp them together to extract one of the journals [with a blue cardstock cover]. There were three, and if one’s still in there, so are the other two. I stick my arm back in and feel around until I find the other two journals embedded at the back of the box. I sit down in the chair and flip through them. The handwriting is bizarre. I use my reading glasses as a magnifier and struggle to decipher the words [I’d started to write unintelligibly in case Mom ever fished them out].

Everything I take in [the journals and rocks, my picture with Elías, the clothes in the closet, the family photos strewn along the dining room sideboard, the table with the green enamel fruit bowl and its matching candlesticks, the stemmed wine glasses in the display cabinet, the chalice Uncle Xermán used for mass, a communion plate, a cane, the beds and bedclothes, the faux leather couch, the travel blanket folded over the back of it, the jewelry boxes distributed amongst the dressing tables and shelves, the honey jar on the kitchen counter, the mirror with its Gothic blades, the curtains, the Portuguese-bronze candlesticks, the pots, the laurel branch behind the Saint Pancras figurine, the dining room table, the sideboard, the olive oil cruet, the smell of disinfectant in the kitchen, the wooden cross on Mom’s bedroom door, the framed photo of ancient Greek ruins, the glass paperweight, the souvenir from our vacation in Benidorm, the wooden chairs on the back balcony, the mats, the Bible, the Majorica perfume, the lamp with the five gold-trimmed tulips, the rug…] feels posthumous to me.

The cats that Ana provides with food pad over to us and sniff her the moment she walks out the door, then congregate in the unfinished lot in front of the apartment. They meow. They arch their backs. She insisted I go down with her. She talks to them. The cats start to climb onto her after she sits down on an old foundation on the property. They hiss at her. She scolds them. It’s a large colony with tiger-striped, black, white, mixed, auburn, and gray cats. She feeds them twice a day—leftovers and a delicious food she makes with the pork lungs the butcher gives her for free. She boils the lungs and then slices them with gloves on [she hates the texture of animal guts]. Mom doesn’t like her doing it in the kitchen. She wishes Ana wouldn’t feed the cats, too. They argued about it, though “she had no choice but to accept it. I gave her an ultimatum: either me or the cats. Without the cats, I’ll die.” In her free time [she says as she struggles with one of them], she volunteers at the animal shelter. She organizes successful fundraising events around Christmastime. The compassion in her gaze is infallible. She says that animals know an incommunicable truth that we’ve forgotten, that it’s in their eyes that we find it again.

Mom doesn’t want to have dinner. Her mouth is sealed shut out of panic [she thinks I’m going to poison her]. The aide comes to help me and tries to break the seal with a spoon. She talks to Mom as she tries again and again. “Come on, honey…come on…just one spoonful for the sake of your son, look how far he’s traveled…just one spoonful…just this tiny bit…see how little it is? It’s small enough for a little girl. It’s soup, it’s delicious. Chicken and greens…give a saint some comfort…you need to get your strength back so you can go home…look how happy your roommate is with her food [the woman in the other bed cackles, ‘quit being a cow and eat.’] See? She’ll be going home before you, because she eats her food. Since when has food ever done anyone harm?” Mom glances at her out of the corner of her eye, as if to say, “this loaf must think I’m an idiot.” I keep my mouth shut. I don’t care whether or not she eats. I just want her to go to sleep as soon as possible.

It’s eight at night and almost completely dark out. I can see the first stars in the sky through the window [Venus is especially bright]. Mom’s roommate finished her dinner in two gulps. She had surgery on both her knees, and her daughter [who’s with her twenty-four-seven] says that she’ll be discharged in a couple days. They bicker constantly, fighting over the smallest things. They live together. Alone. The daughter, aware that her mother can hear her, brags that she would gladly send her to a nursing home. This incenses her mother [eighty-two years old, three more than Mom], “you’re a wolf.” The daughter chuckles in our direction, where her mother can’t see [the caring look on her face], and says, “when you live among wolves, what can you do but howl?”

The aide hasn’t given up. She nudges Mom’s mouth without trying to force her lips apart. Mom swivels her head to look at the daughter. Her face so far to one side that the aide has to pause, she rasps: “what an inappropriate thing to say.” The aide clears off the bedtable [spoon, bowl of soup, bread, tray] and leaves. “Your mother still has saline [she tells me], she won’t starve to death.”

Mom relaxes and asks me to raise her adjustable bed. I lift her legs to get her in a comfortable sleeping position. She won’t look at me. I sit in an armchair and dive into the novel I brought with me. The conversation between the roommate and her daughter fades away, along with the bustle in the hallway and the rolling of the aides’ carts [I can never tell if they’re nurses or aides]. The door is cracked because the woman in the other bed has trouble breathing if they close it when she goes to sleep.

A nurse comes in with the medication. Three pills in a small, transparent plastic cup. Mom takes them without putting up a fight. After the nurse leaves, Mom asks me if I recognized her. I tell her that I don’t. “That’s Lidia’s daughter. Lidia was the woman who sold meat in the square…do you remember her?” Another no. “What about how handsome you were when you were little, do you remember that?” Not that either. “That’s a shame: none of the pictures I have do you any justice. You never were very photogenic.”

When I was little, Mom occupied all the space in my eyes. Large, enigmatic. An atlas ranging from the mountains down to the deserts, a cinemascope movie screen, the blue sky on an end-of-June afternoon. She was naturally beautiful [the kind of beauty that hypnotizes] but the cosmetics she used made her even more attractive. She began her facial routine with Milox, a thin strand of exfoliating paper that she would lace between her fingers the way boxers wrap bandages around their hands before putting on their gloves. Then she would apply a cream and some Egyptian-colored powders that gave her skin an Eastern youthfulness. There was a certain ceremony to her movements. To finish, she would pencil on her eyeliner with the steady hand of a designer [eyes and hand absorbed in her elegant tracery].

On holidays, when we went to Grandma’s house in Sobrado, or on San Brais, when we blessed the aniseed donuts, Mom would wake up early and spend hours doing her makeup. She would turn on the radio, heat up the hair removal wax, and the house would fill up with the smell of paraffin. I would climb out of bed in secret, tiptoe to the kitchen, and there she was, at the center of it all. She would have one foot up on a Formica stool as she lathered her legs in wax and tore off the strips. Her face would scrunch up in pain for an instant, only to return to normal with her beauty enhanced, like a tree that grows juicier fruit when pruned. Afterwards, she would take a bath, locking the door and leaving the key in the hole. I would put my ear against the door and perk up my nose. The scents and sounds told me exactly which part of the process she was in: first the soap [always Lux, the soap of the stars], then the shampoo [a single-use, egg-based mixture she had me pick up for her at the store] and then the Nivea she rubbed on her arms and legs. And, for the final touch, a few drops of Maja perfume, the same brand as the powders she daubed on her armpits.

She would then wrap her hair in a towel and roam around the house. She would curl her eyelashes with the edge of a blunt knife and trim her toe and fingernails. She would meticulously file her cuticles with manicure clippers. She would moisturize her nails with Atrix and then polish them a shade that matched the clothes she had laid out on the guest room bed the night before.

The most captivating part of this ritual was when she straightened her hair with the clothes iron, a trick which required my assistance. That need made me feel important. She would separate her hair into sheets and envelop them in wrapping paper. She kept meticulous time of how long they were exposed to the heat. Too long meant her hair would pick up static, and not long enough meant it would start to curl again after a few hours. I only remember her doing it wrong twice, in both instances because I had distracted her [she said] with my pointless comments. My job was to run the iron down her hair and wait for her to tell me to stop. She never let me touch a single strand. Only she knew how to handle it. Once straight, she would part her hair to each side with a fine-toothed comb. Then, she would gather bundles of hair with the comb and tease them up with a swift flick of her brush. Finally, she would pile the tangled, teased hair towards the back of her head and hold it all together with an amber clip. She did all of this in front of a small, square mirror she placed on the kitchen table, humming along to the songs on the radio all the while.

Her style fascinated me. Torixas, a fashion designer in the center, made clothes from the fabrics brought by her [emigrant] relatives in France. Mom made on-the-spot decisions about what she wanted, without a second thought. She had a natural talent for it. None of our neighbors had ever seen anyone wear a paisley dress until she debuted the below-the-knee piece she’d seen Julie Christie wear. “You’re the most modern woman in the city,” Carme once told her, and Mom accepted the compliment without a crumb of modesty: “it’s true.” Fashion was a minor part of their conversations. Fashion meant modern, and modern meant modernity. They wanted to be modern, but modernity [in fashion] horrified them: it came from other parts and involved short skirts, fabrics with geometrical patterns, flashy colors, trapezoidal jackets, sunglasses with thick amber frames, tight-fitting, hole-embroidered blouses…it was all well and good in a magazine, but they were scandalized by it in real life. Mom was the only one who could take this impertinent clothing and make it sensible on herself. Everything looked good on her. She was tall and thin, with wide hips and a voluptuous rear that hung over a pair of round legs with firm thighs and toned calves. She alone could take up all the space in a home. When she looked at you, the world molded itself to her presence. But when I looked at her, she would become uneasy and say: “stop staring, you’ll break my concentration, or something else.”

Mom falls asleep at around ten o’clock but becomes agitated after a few hours. She clutches at the sheets. Talks in her sleep. Moans. I call the nurse [Lidia’s daughter]. “This is nothing. If it gets worse, I’ll inject her with an antipsychotic. It’s the only thing that works.” Not five minutes later, she starts to cry out [ay, ay, ay, ay, ay, ay]. I try to calm her down. She grabs me by the shirt and pulls me in close. “Try to murder me and I’ll rip you apart. I want to see your guts.”

I can’t get her hands off my shirt. She has a primitive, ancient strength. Saliva pools on my tongue. It starts to cover my lips. I disengage one hand and use the beeper to call the nurse. Mom won’t let go. She really thinks I’m going to try to murder her. The nurse sticks a syringe into her wrist and her body goes slack. She unclenches her hands. I’m free. I get a cup of water from the fountain in the hallway. I pace around the lobby, the elevators, and the cubicles. I can’t make sense of this whirlwind of emotion. My eyes sting from holding in the tears. I can’t get to sleep all night, sitting in the armchair beside Mom with the thick novel about family conflicts in my lap but unable to open it, hypnotized by my own panic.

The sedative lasts until morning and she docilely eats her breakfast. She breaks up the cookies and dips them into her coffee. She eats ravenously. Then she asks me to peel an apple for her. She watches me as I peel it. “You have beautiful hands, like mine. Hands are the basis of male distinction. I always liked men with big hands, but they all worked in the fields. Your father’s were small, but he gave up his life for me, and I wanted to get out of Uncle Xermán’s house as fast as I could.”

Ana takes over for me at nine-thirty and I go back to the apartment. I read through my old journals and write in the new one. The differences are stark. In my teenage journals, I use stilted grammar, expressive language, and make minute descriptions of spaces. In this new journal, I write short sentences, quick notes. I describe Mom’s face as she pulls me in so that she can see my guts, her oceanic [boundless] eyes, the smells in the hospital—disinfectant, iodine, dried sweat, stale urine, the thick air freshener in the bathroom. I fall asleep with the journal in my hands. Without dreaming. There’s a dam in my head that keeps my thoughts from flowing into the expanse of dreams. I wake up in the dark, more tired than when I feel asleep. I shower and shave. As always, I avoid looking myself in the eyes and finish as quickly as I can. I go back to the hospital. It’s the same scene as yesterday: the aide is trying to feed Mom her soup. I have dinner with Ana in the cafeteria. A salad and a cheese flan. She gives me the doctor’s report. They want to operate soon. I rejoice [“wonderful”] and think about how I’ll be home in a few days.

At three in the morning, after a peaceful sleep, Mom has fits again. She thinks she’s in a pharmacy. The young man won’t give her the medicine her doctor prescribed. She becomes exasperated. Yells. Her muscles are clenched, from her groin to her toes. Tense as bridge-cables. “Get me out of this bed. Save me from the dogs,” she whines in Galician, her voice childlike in her delirium. I’m surprised. I’ve never heard her speak anything but Spanish before. This fact [the realization that her ideological front has been set aside] makes me more sympathetic to her. Her emotional eruptions have given rise to a girl free of all bitterness, as if she grew up in the wild.

When I turned seven, Mom wanted to buy me a suit for my First Communion but none would fit me. They were too big. She decided that I wasn’t growing properly. Nothing about me ever pleased her, but the issue with the First Communion suit had her beside herself. She couldn’t see the life emanating from my every pore, my gaze, my movements, my constant doubling over in laughter. That irrepressible laughter was torture for her. I would laugh and she would send me to another room because she saw it as the cause of her hysteria. It gave her headaches [her head hurt every day; she called them “migraines,” but her physician, Dr. Mazaira, thought it was probably a nervous condition, which she never acknowledged].

I had a hard time learning to hold in my laughter [pretending that life’s pleasures didn’t tickle me]. But I continued to laugh in silence, internally, unable to deny myself the wonders of the world in all their many forms [the marvelous phenomena of colors, flowers, clothes, cars, the enormous people around me, the streets, the massive trees, the majestic movie screen displaying women as elegant as Mom]. I saw spaceships in the stones, and the outlines of wolves, sleeping beauties, buses, swans, hammers, and wedding dresses for wide brides in the clouds [as they drifted apart and came back together]. One of my favorite pastimes back then was to imagine the insides of houses in the city and picture Mom within: the furniture she would install, the conversations she would have, the identity she would construct in each and every one.

My love for Mom was absolute, but the apple of her eye was Marcos, her eldest son. She’d had him when she was seventeen, ten months “to the day” [as she always emphasized as a certification of her pre-marital virginity] after her marriage. Marcos was fourteen years older than me [I was “an accident,” as she told the ladies in our building]. For fourteen years, he was an only child and she was a mother only to him, her affection growing into an emotional zygote that died when I was born. The bed they shared when Dad was gone [Mom gave birth to me at home, with a midwife] was soaked through with sticky blood. Grandma Carolina [Dad’s mother] said she feared the worst when she saw Marcos silently pacing beside the bed, stalking me like a wild animal. He didn’t cry that day, or in the years to come, when I ripped Mom’s bosom and sweat away from him, her intoxicating aroma of bacteria, heath, and sage. But as I got older, he began calling me his servant. “Obey me, servant,” he would say when it was just the two of us. He ordered me to lick his feet. He hit me. “You’re my servant, and if you ever refuse me, I’ll take a needle and sew your lips shut.”

When I was little, I came down with an illness that nearly killed me. It was a rare condition without a name [Grandma Carolina called it “tarantella,” after the folk dance]. I was given a series of injections that made me so weak I could hardly open my eyes. They stayed that way [squinting] for months, meanwhile Mom got it into her head that my left eye was pointing in the wrong direction. She wouldn’t back down until the eye doctor gave me a patch, even though he didn’t detect any major issues. From the time I was three years old until my early adolescence, I wore glasses with a piece of dark brown plastic covering up that left eye.

Marcos made fun of my appearance: my legs, my mollusk-shaped nose, the brown eyepatch that [he mocked] made me look like a rabbit. The older I got, the more intolerable he found me. The way I talked, the way I moved, my insistence on climbing [like a sexless cat] up to Mom’s neck. He had an overwhelming urge to punish me [through humiliation and destruction]. He would take my toys and break them, or throw them down the well [we lived in a house with a backyard at the time]. If they were mechanical toys, he would take them apart as if he were trying to fix them. Then he would leave the pieces on top of the kitchen table. From the moment I saw them there, arranged by size or color, I knew that they would never work again. But what gave him the greatest pleasure of all was to inflict pain on me. He used all manner of strategies and would constantly change his approach. Once he was an adult and had been working at the post office for a few months thanks to our parents’ machinations, he started to make a show of the money he was earning. He would come home every Saturday and put all the tortures he had concocted for me that week to the test. His repertoire was extensive, and he must have taken immense pleasure in causing pain. Once, he tossed a coin onto the floor and said “if you pick it up, it’s yours.” I bent down to pick it up. He waited with closed fists. Once I was back upright, pleased to have the coin, his fists came raining down on my head. He wanted to see me shed tears, blood. And Mom never uttered a single reproach.

Marcos was working in Altsasu at the time of my First Communion. He’d chosen the Navarre region because the government gave hazard pay in areas where the Basque guerrilla operated. At twenty-two [according to the version I heard from Grandma Carolina], Marcos had asked Dad to get him a promotion. Dad wasn’t much good for favors, so Mom took it upon herself. After speaking with the priest at our church, where she taught catechism every Sunday, she managed to get in contact with a senior official at the Ministry of Governance. Out of the kindness of his heart, he allowed Marcos to take a promotion exam, which he was guaranteed to pass, for the price of fifteen thousand pesetas and eleven ham legs. The senior official justified his price by reminding her that he would need to divvy the legs amongst all those whose services he would require to ensure their success. Mom borrowed the money from Grandma and a woman who lent at low interest. She bought the ham legs from a salesman friend of Grandma’s. A couple days after she sent them to her contact in the Ministry, three came back with a note: These legs won’t do. They’re not cured.

Marcos gradually rose through the ranks with the help of his Ministry contact, who continued to hold sway even after he’d retired and the dictatorship had ended. He was an able swimmer in any political waters. Mom called him her “Angel of Divine Providence.”

I wanted to dress up as a sailor for my First Communion [like the rest of the boys in my class], but Mom had read that the “prince style” was in fashion. She dragged me with her into her fantasy, tantalized by all the brocade threads, embroidery, and bias cuts she saw in Torixas’ imported magazines. She seemed so stressed that Dad suggested hiring a tailor. She refused. According to her, the prince style [as she’d seen it in a cutout, which she always kept on hand in her purse, so that she could display it in every store we entered] was a three-piece ensemble, and she found it highly unlikely that a tailor in our “uncultured, backwoods” city would properly affix the jabot to the elegant shirt, for example. Not to mention [she emphasized] the “sheer improbability” of finding patterned velvet, which was essential to the outfit because the jacket required interlocking gold chains rather than buttons.

We spent an entire month searching nearby cities to no avail. Most stores had never heard of the prince style for a First Communion. Where they had, the measurements were never right for me. The pants were either too long or the waist too wide. The coats almost always sagged on me. Once, at a several-storey shop in Ourense with beautiful window displays on every floor, a kind employee put pads on my shoulders to adapt my body to the suit. Instead of hiding my deficiencies, the pads made my body seem deformed, like my head was much too small for my body. I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed my mother [mortified, hiding her face] in the reflection. Her body [paralyzed by silence] said it all. It was as if there was a metal rod rooting her body to the spot. Beside her, Dad shifted back and forth on the balls of his feet with his hands in his back pockets. He wouldn’t look in my direction because if his eyes fell on me, they would betray just how much my existence wounded his pride as post office civil servant. Mom apologized to the clerk [“the suit is fine but I’m not sure it’s right”] and tore the costume from my body.

That day marked the beginning of a toxic, poisonous era in our household. The precise reasons for the change were beyond me, but I suspected that I had done something wrong. Mom’s face went flat, like an omelet, or a pancake, or bread dough. A sound from the street, or from the other side of the walls we shared with our neighbors, would snap her face into contour. She would place her middle fingers on her temples as if there were a needle digging into her head. “These migraines are going to drive me out of my mind,” she moaned. Dad wouldn’t even risk turning on the TV to watch the news after he’d come back from his card games at the club. They didn’t speak. At least, not until after I went to bed, when I would hear them begin to argue. I would flee into my room like a French soldier being pursued by desert bandits and taking shelter in an impregnable fortress [with Mauritanian towers]. Guilt grew within me and fermented by night, bringing on an insomnia that led me to devour the countless Enid Blyton books I checked out at the local library.

The torture continued until, one day, they took me to a doctor in Santiago under the pretense of having my lazy eye examined. Rather than examining my eye, the doctor [a man with grey hair and mustardy skin] measured my skull, thorax, and legs, took X-rays, listened to my heart…Once he’d finished his tests, he called us into his office and informed us, with a beaming smile, that he hadn’t detected any signs of dwarfism. I was stunned. A dwarf? Me? Her chest puffed out, Mom pursed her lips, furrowed her brow, and broke into a twisted sob: “thank you so much for this wonderful news, doctor.” Fat tears ran down her cheeks and fell onto the white shirt with multicolored flowers on its collar. Neither Dad’s stroking nor the ministrations of the nurse who had rushed in to help could calm her down. The doctor, blubbering out soothing words, was even less help. “I’m sorry, it’s just that this is such wonderful news,” she stuttered, her lips quivering.

The nurse brought her a glass of cold water. The doctor tried to cheer her up. “Once he enters adolescence, he should experience a growth spurt and reach a normal size. Neither you nor your husband are short.” Mom hiccupped and the doctor took her hand. He softened his voice and drew a smile on his mustard-colored face. “The only unusual thing about your son, I should mention, is the extraordinary size of his genitals.” She turned around, as befuddled as if she’d just wandered in from the roadside, and broke into a sob even louder than the first: “right, like a dwarf!” She flapped her arms and legs around in a windmill motion that cleared the doctor’s table [papers, two silver-framed photographs, a folder that spilt its contents all over the floor, a container with pens and pencils, a lamp with a glass shade that broke in the fall, an embossed leather notebook, a stethoscope, a reflex hammer…] The doctor, the nurse, and Dad combined were unable to restrain her. “Ma’am, ma’am, please, you have to calm down,” the doctor repeated. Catching him off guard, she bit one of his fingers. “Margarita!” Dad snapped. With that she shrunk back against the wall.

The nurse put a pill under Mom’s tongue and it tranquilized her. The three of us walked out of the clinic like a funeral march, with Dad holding Mom by the arm as she wobbled her way along. Her face was smudged with blue from the eyeshadow she often wore on her eyelids and black from the mascara on her eyelashes, her mouth half-open like she was getting ready to say something sweet. Seeing her so utterly helpless sunk me into a deep melancholy uncharacteristic of an eight-year-old boy.

We took a green railbus with faux leather seats back to the city, stopping at every station as it chugged along, sluggish, empty. Mom slept. The tranquilizer was still at work. Her head hung from her neck and lolled back and forth with the bumps, leaving a trail of spit that made her look much older than she was. Sleep robbed her eyes [green or brown depending on the light] of their glow and muddled the harmony of her features. Dad’s mouth stayed closed. He didn’t say a word, just stared at a vague point in the train corridor. Two pearls of white saliva kept pooling on the corners of his lips. Every so often, he would take out a perfectly folded handkerchief from his pant pocket, unfold it, and dry them off.

The rain pattered on the windows as we made our way out of Santiago. Thunder boomed in the distance. Lightning flashed in the mountains in the background. I curled up into the seat. Dad got off at the stop in Irixo, where the train had to wait for a crossing. He went out into the storm and entered the café. My heart began to race. I was terrified he would run away and that this image of him braving the downpour would be the last I ever had of him. I imagined a series of potential outcomes: Dad would change his identity and emigrate to Venezuela or Equatorial Guinea, like the father of the boy who sat behind me at school, Migueliño. Once in Guinea, he would either die of malaria, from the deadly bite of a coral snake, or from being torn to shreds by the claws of a hungry leopard. Mom would lose her mind and we would have no choice but to check her into a mental hospital.

But Dad came back. He depended on Mom more than I could ever have imagined adults depended on one another. In my limited understanding of the world, it seemed like children were the only beings [along with pigs and cows, of course] that couldn’t fall off the map, because we didn’t know how to fend for ourselves, because we were small, weak, clumsy, and feebleminded. And fearful. Fearful of the little we did know [so little!], and even more so of the great deal we didn’t [enough to fill several continents]. When Dad sat back down, I threw myself around his neck out of happiness. He pushed me off: “don’t come near me, I’m wet.”

Marcos shows up at the hospital a day before Mom’s surgery. He walks into the room arm in arm with his wife. They stop cold when they see me. They weren’t expecting this. Ana didn’t mention it to them. “What brings you to town?” he thinks to say as he mentally reassesses the situation. “Our sister called and asked me to help her out. You were having work done on your house.” His wife complains [“That’s right, by a crude, expensive construction company. They did a terrible job.”] and he plays the tough guy: “I won’t pay them if they don’t repaint the garage floor. They did the epoxy all wrong, there are air bubbles everywhere.” He pulls a sly grin. “Time passes for all of us, Óscar. We’re old. You too.” He kisses me timidly on the cheeks. She [Fefé, an absurd nickname for Alfonsina] scolds him: “you’re not supposed to say things like that.” She engages the artificial [perfect] smile of her false teeth. “You look just the same as ever. Maybe thinner. That’s fashionable right now.” They’ve both aged well. You can tell they take care of themselves. He hasn’t gotten fat and still has his hair—straight and combed to one side, with grey hairs sprouting from his temples. His nose is still straight. His eyes have gotten rounder [birdlike], and he has thick, uneven eyebrows. Fefé has dyed her hair blonde [it was black]. Her skin is smooth, healthy, wrinkle-free, and she’s wearing brown foundation that contrasts with her bright, striking red lips. Her movements are stiff, as if she’s posing for a photoshoot.

Mom hasn’t taken an eye off of Marcos, but he won’t come near her. He shouts from the foot of the bed [as if she’s deaf] that she looks much better, and surreptitiously motions for Ana and me to step outside with him. “Her situation is critical,” he says in a grave voice out in the lobby. He spoke to the doctor in private; they’re assuming the worst. “She probably won’t make it out of the operating room. Her heart is exhausted, and she has an irregular heartbeat. She’s old.” Ana and I exchange a glance. I cross my arms. “We talked to the doctor too, and he didn’t give us such a dire prognosis. There are risks…but Mom is tough.” “Let’s not kid ourselves, Óscar. She’s not going to make it through this. Just today, I was going have Ana call and let you know, because we don’t have your number. It’s the end. We need to accept that and start to get things in order.”

Marcos speaks Spanish, like Ana, but his voice mellows on diphthongs, as if there were a sudden slackening in his vocal cords. His face tightens as he speaks to align it with the gravity of the subject. He addresses Ana as if she’s the only other one who has a say: “you need to find her life insurance policy and get in touch with the funeral home. I can go pick out a casket today. The best—we’ll pay.” He turns to me. “As far as our inheritances go, I’m guessing we all agree that Ana will get the apartment, and we’ll split up the land. As the eldest son, I should get the buildable plots. I won’t put forth any preferences about the rest of it. You can decide. The other plots are out in the country, and aren’t worth much. I would never question an equitable division.” It’s obvious that he and his wife have spent days talking about the inheritance and how to arrange Mom’s funeral. I’m sure they’ve done all the math on what they should get and how to present their verdict in a way that sounds solid and undeniable.

“Then there’s the matter [he turns to Ana again] of the jewelry. Fefé loves the ruby earrings our uncle in Venezuela gave to Mom, and her emerald necklace. A bit of everything, that way you guys get a bit of everything, too. I’ll leave it up to you whether you want to let Fefé have any more. She loves Mom like her own mother. She’s taken better care of her than even some daughters do. But don’t tell her that I talked to you about this. She’s very sensitive. Mom’s death has really affected her. You have to remember how rough things were with her parents’ inheritance. And that was without spending nearly as much time caring for them. I’m telling you this because I don’t want anyone to have to go through that unpleasantness again. She was depressed for half a year, if not longer. Her brothers acted like swine.” Ana cries. Marcos hugs her. “You have to be strong.” She tries to push him off. He lets go. “Family is for the hard times. I’m your big brother and this is the moment for me to step into my role.”

I uncross my arms. “You’re getting ahead of yourself. It’s too soon to talk about funeral homes, caskets, and inheritances.” Marcos licks his lips. “I see where you’re coming from, but you’re in no position to weigh in. You abandoned Mom at a really hard time in her life, and we had to stay with her, constantly on call…where were you all that time, out partying?” “All I know is that I’ve been with Mom for three nights and this is the first time I’ve seen you here. I came when I was needed, and here I am, ready to help.” Marcos shrugs. “I could stay tonight. The workers are gone.” “Do they work overnight?” “Fefé has a spinal injury and can’t even move a vase. The house was in shambles. Besides, I don’t like for her to have to sleep alone.” “She’s not Mom’s daughter. It’s your responsibility.” He gets angry. “What are you trying to say? Do you think that after all these years we’ve spent putting up with Mom, meanwhile you were off doing God-knows-what, God-knows-where, that it wasn’t hard for Fefé and me?” “Sorry, did you say ‘putting up with’?”

Ana butts in: “stop arguing, we’re in the hospital!” Marcos is still infuriated. “Talk to him, he shows up out of the blue and starts to think he’s a big man.” “Oh please, you want to have everything your way. You’re trying to arrange a funeral for a woman who’s not even dead yet.” People stare at us. A man stops in front of the coffee maker as if to study the various options, but his ears are perked. Marcos notices. “We’ll discuss this later.”

A distant memory comes back to me [emerging out of the haze and taking shape] in the hospital. We’re in the kitchen in Mom’s apartment. We’ve just had lunch. Fefé and Marcos are drinking coffee. I’m toying with a piece of chocolate cake and cookies [a bit dry] that Fefé has brought. Suddenly [I don’t know what they’re talking about], Fefé insults her husband. She calls him useless, incompetent, stupid, clumsy, a drunk, a jackass, a hick, a fool…it also sounds like she calls him “a spinach,” or something related to spinach, as if to say he lacks substance. All uttered in a venomous tone of voice. Mom is taken aback. Dad pours himself a shot of licor café and swallows it in a single gulp. He wipes his mouth with a cloth on the table and fills his glass again. Fefé hasn’t let up [this must be when she says the part about spinach] and Marcos looks away like he’s trying to spot cobwebs in the corners of the kitchen. He seems used to it. They were newly married and we hadn’t yet gotten to know this woman he’d fallen in love with in Valladolid. Their wedding had been extremely expensive. Mom and Dad were forced to dig into their savings because Marcos’ in-laws had grand notions about chivalry and weren’t content with any old ceremony for their daughter. There was a five-course meal and a seven-piece band. Mom danced so much that she broke a heel. They left me with Carme, in spite of my eagerness to see Mom dazzle in her black muslin dress, wool shawl, mother of pearl incrusted metal handbag, stilettos, and the gold ruby earrings her brother had given her. Marcos was proud to be marrying into a family with ties to Franco’s regime, and couldn’t wait for them to pave his way to the highest reaches of government. But not only did his father-in-law not lift a finger to help him, he also left Fefé the legal minimum in his will. It was punishment for leaving Valladolid, she said.

Fefé’s weaknesses are an occasional torment and a constant burden. She loves money for its own sake: paper money, credit cards…She asked Marcos for an absurd monthly allowance so that she wouldn’t have issues with her old friends [“he can spend with the best of them”], and the only other person she allowed to see the accounts was their eldest son, an “odd, violent boy” [Ana’s words] who had been on antipsychotic medication as a teenager [Fefé and Marcos never said why]. He’d ended up joining the National Police. He worked in the city but had lots of problems. His co-workers didn’t like him. Their other son [the younger of the two] had emigrated to Madrid. He got a job as a cashier at Mercadona. He didn’t get along well with his family.

Mom felt that Fefé’s frothing comments about her beloved son were out of line, but she never said anything. By simply being his wife, she was perfect. When he retired and they came back to live in the city, their relationship soured. Fefé put a limit on her mother-in-law’s visits to their house [a suburban single family home by the river, with a pool, security cameras, a summerhouse, and a Japanese garden] and restricted Marcos’ visits to his mother’s house, too. “If I have to choose between my wife and my mother [Ana said Marcos had told her], I’ll choose my wife. She’s the one who’s going to take care of me when I’m old.”

Mom goes into surgery at eight in the morning. I’m here with Ana, Marcos, Fefé, and their policeman son, Enrique, who greets me with a skeptical grunt. I’ve never met him. He looks more like his mother [straight hair, fiery cheeks, puffy lips, eyes with an insane, feverish gleam]. It’s too hot for the end of September. The other people in the waiting area [a middle-aged couple] talk about the heat wave on its way. It’s the fourth in a row. It hit the nineties in Vigo this August. Without any breeze. The two of them, who live in a mountainside village fifteen miles from the city, seem scared. The springs have dried up, the wells are going stagnant, the creek has stopped flowing [no one has ever seen anything like it] and their nights are like “in the tropics,” says the large, out-of-breath woman with tight, elastic denim pants and fuchsia-dyed hair. Her husband nods [it’s her mother in the operating room; she’s getting knee replacements]. They’re siphoning the water from a cistern to keep their cows hydrated. They have to use a water pump to get it out. “It’s a hassle and a huge expense,” she complains as her fingers swiftly type WhatsApp messages about her mother’s condition to family and friends.

Marcos, who spent the night, put a hand on my shoulder when we saw Mom on the gurney in the hallway, and blew her a theatrical kiss. Mom waved, looking anxious. They were only going to give her an epidural, and she hated the thought of having to hear the banging of the hammers, the snipping and grinding of the scissors and saw, the surgeons’ voices, the nurses’ whispers, the heart monitor’s beeps…She would have preferred anesthesia. Meanwhile, the simple fact of her distress has me in agony.

I leave Fefé talking to some people about the weather and ask Ana to come get a coffee with me. She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head. I go by myself. It’s for the best, I’m not used to being around so many people. I’m disappointed with myself. I’d crossed the invisible line that freed me from family commitments, military service [I was insubordinate], the neighbors’ gossip, and Mom. But here I am, right back in the middle of the placenta, betraying myself.

Portico of Galician Literature

Antón Lopo

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