NEEDLE

Starlings, crickets, a white silence, a vowel that decides to fly out of a sentence and crashes into the whitewashed walls and the floor of terracotta tiles. Sounds. The sky like a sheet. When I am deposited on the balcony and open my eyes, the sky doesn’t stop moving. I try to grasp it, but can’t. I am distracted by a fly, the distant barks of a dog – woof, woof – the delicate movement of the plants Felisa grows on the balcony. Nothing is still: it must be because of restless time lurking stealthily inside things.

What can it be that frightens me and makes me laugh, I wonder. That sound only I can hear, that wakes me and forces me to be a wolf and search, search everywhere, with pricked up ears. The others can’t hear it, I know because they don’t flinch. Or it could be that they are used to it, to that sound coming from the other side of the street, scaling walls, perforating the table legs and coursing down the swollen veins that clamber up Felisa’s legs. I don’t know what it is. It’s a faint beating sound or the rubbing together of two metal spheres. When Felisa sits down to her embroidery, I can sometimes make out the interrupted sound the needle makes as it pierces the linen fibres or the wounded ‘ah!’ of the silk the needle crosses with the soft impulse of the skill of the embroideress’ finger. Later, peacefully, the threads slide down the cloth in a long, monotonous sentence, ceasing to be inoffensive fibres in order to turn into magnificent embroidery. The thread enjoys passing through the eye of the needle, succumbing to it, the great guide, the leveller of virgin paths, and then resting in the new and delightful circumstance of being the petal of a flower, the feather of a bird, a link in the double hemstitch of a tablecloth.

Thanks to Felisa’s skill, the vulgarity of a thread wound around the stomach of a wooden bobbin acquires the status of beauty.

In 1970, mother and father were married. There aren’t many photos left of that wedding, only those mother wanted to last, which are still in exactly the same place mother left them: inside a box inside a dresser inside a dining room that was almost always cast in semi-darkness. In those photographs, mother appears happy, with a clear smile and twinkling eyes. Father, handsome but serious, looks distant, thinking about something that is not happening there at that moment. I imagine I still remember the day mother tore up the other photos. I was only a baby and lacked the precise words to ask her why she was tearing herself up like this. Nor did I have the sufficient capacity of comprehension to fathom the meaning of the anger and sadness that had possessed her.

She was sitting on the floor of the dining room. The doors and drawers of the lacquered wood dresser father had brought back from one of his trips were open. Mother was sadly and irritably destroying letters and photos. On the carpet were small piles of onion skin paper and bits of broken bodies. Father’s anatomy had been especially carefully dissected. Nearby, within reach, as if affording them protection, she placed the photographs and letters she had decided to keep. She would later deposit the letters in the chest of drawers in her bedroom, alongside her underwear, but the photos would remain confined to the box inside the dresser inside the dining room that was almost always in semi-darkness.

I don’t know where I’d come from – perhaps I’d been for a walk with Felisa, my nurse – or why I entered the room. All I remember is mother painfully purifying memory, breaking the delicate lace in which memories are woven. It was as if she were rubbing out the lines traced on the map of a territory that was far too dangerous to forget the return path to sanity. That said, I’m well aware the photos she would remember best were precisely the ones she destroyed. And the words that would torment her most and she would try to banish with a flick of her hand, as if taking a swipe at a fly, were precisely the ones she pretended had never been spoken or written. I don’t recall what I did after that, or why. I just happened to be there at that exact moment so I could see and record in my mind the image of mother tearing herself to pieces.

Or trying to put herself back together.

The memory served in time to arouse my curiosity and a wish to reconstruct mother’s sentimental biography. I never managed to do this, I never felt confident enough with her or my uncle and aunt to ask them questions. Besides, the constant struggle I’d had with her ever since I was a child discouraged me from showing the slightest bit of interest, even though the memory of that afternoon in the dining room would eventually help me to view her with a certain amount of compassion.

It’s also true I’m in the habit of forgetting things very quickly. I think I’m only really interested in questions. Answers, when I have them, bore me. In the end, I accepted the reality offered by the narrative I myself constructed in order to comprehend certain behaviour that would allow me to survive and understand my family. My family wasn’t much: Uncle Cándido, Aunt Natalia and Miss Felisa. Ramón as well. I always talked about Ramón in the present, fool that I was, but he’d already left the day I came across mother sitting in the semi-darkness of the room. Had he still been there, things would have been totally different, because mother would not have been so hurt or furious.

Ramón liked to rummage around inside the dresser and show me sheaves of letters grouped together and tied with silk ribbons according to the year they’d been written. We also used to rummage around inside the box of photos. In the fragrant, dark space of the dresser, mother kept bars of perfumed soap, delicious assortments of sweets, and the satin and velvet boxes with the few pieces of jewellery that had belonged to grandmother. Ramón despised the letters in which he recognized father’s handwriting and ignored the photos where father gazed at us with his beautiful, ever absent, blue eyes. He would start muttering whenever he saw this man giving us a forced smile in places we’d never visited, with people we’d never seen, and accompanied by women with exotic faces and smooth, long, black hair. Ramón didn’t like those photographs or letters.

Nor did mother, it seemed.

Aunt Natalia, as tall, slim and elegant as I remembered her, was waiting for me at the airport. Despite being in her sixties, she insisted on looking young by wearing tight-fitting clothes and having blonde, shoulder-length hair with white highlights. She blew me a confused but effusive kiss when she spotted me behind the glass doors, waiting for my luggage. I waved back. When I came through, she embraced me and wanted to take my small suitcase on wheels.

‘Is this all you have?’ she asked disappointedly.

‘This, and a rucksack.’

She didn’t even bother glancing at the rucksack on my back, it can’t have been a pleasant sight for her exquisite eyes. I realized my appearance also irritated her a little. It was summer, I was wearing an old pair of jeans, a camisole and black, leather sandals. She tried to apologize for me: ‘I see you’re tired, it must have been a long trip, you university types don’t worry much about your appearance.’ That’s right, I thought, and took her hand as I used to when I was little and walked beside her. I only wanted her to calm down. She was nervous, we hadn’t seen each other for three years: I’d abandoned the city in June 2004, and it was now the beginning of July 2007. I must confess I also found it strange to be returning home, to the city, and seeing my family again. Confronting mother once more. Natalia squeezed my hand and lifted it to her lips so she could kiss it. I liked this gesture and felt protected.

‘Don’t worry, girl, everything will be fine.’ In the end, she was the one trying to calm me down.

I think I’ve only ever done two good things for mother in my life: one was leaving home when she asked me. She asked me the day I turned nineteen. Her present to me was a monthly allowance of 1,500 euros, which I would receive on condition, as soon as the term was over, I found somewhere else to live. My uncle and aunt were appalled by this drastic decision and immediately offered to take me in. But I’d already made my own plans: I would study marine biology, I had the best academic record in the year and a desperate wish to go and study grey whales far away from mother and as close as possible to the attainment of my desires. I once loved someone with a heart that weighed at least a thousand pounds, who insisted on finding out how to turn into a whale. He would say, ‘Whales sing, whales breathe underwater through their lungs, whales pump the milk of their teats into the mouths of their young, who are born from their mothers’ tails.’ I knew little more than this about whales when I began to study them. Mother also loved this creature who was half liquid, half gaseous, but as solid as the pillars of a building, driven crazy by an imagination that couldn’t distinguish between reality and fiction, and with an enormous heart that only knew how to love mother and me: Ramón. The loss of Ramón was undoubtedly the greatest pain mother ever suffered. My loss, however, was the greatest relief for mother’s greatest pain. Coming back when she was ill, according to Natalia, was the second nice thing I would do for her.

Or for myself, I wasn’t quite sure.

When we sat down in the car, Aunt Natalia – an enormous, pale strawberry smile – thanked me, took my face in her hands and squeezed it as if I were still a baby. She pinched my cheeks and recommended a moisturizing cream for the care of my skin. She then apologized for me again: ‘Your skin’s all dry, you spend the whole day in salt water, under that Mexican sun that makes even the fish shrivel.’ This made me laugh. I told her I was only a student, I went to class, collaborated with a team of whale spotters and occasionally helped out at a vast aquarium where dolphins were bred in captivity. Aunt Natalia searched in her handbag for a pack of cigarettes.

‘But you do know how to dive, don’t you?’

‘Yes!’

I don’t know why my aunt was so excited I could dive. Perhaps she sensed an unusual freedom in the ability to move about underwater with a bottle of oxygen tied to your back. She started the car, and I was grateful to her for remaining quiet on the journey towards the city. I felt alert. On the plane, I had been assailed more than once by the fear I would lack courage and want to turn around. But this didn’t happen. I followed Natalia’s lead and noticed the intervening years had coated my skin in something impermeable to nostalgia. I could see, but not feel. The images passed through my eyes and slid down to my feet. I sensed at some point my feet would start to fidget, as if they were walking on nails or steel tips. But for now everything was OK: I didn’t want to feel and felt nothing. As we were about to enter the city, I turned to Aunt Natalia and asked her if she knew, if she knew I was coming.

‘But, girl, it’s only your mother!’ There was a little annoyance in her words, as if she were fed up of repeating them. And she was fed up. She’d acted as an intermediary between my mother and me a thousand times, when I was still a baby, then a girl, then a teenager and a university student. Later, when I left, she would phone me at least twice a week to find out how I was and to tell me about mother and my family. I gazed at her with tenderness, trying to cling to her strength. I remembered the day, barely a month earlier, when she’d rung me to ask me to come. I was on the beach, drinking tequila with Kazuo, a Japanese guy who’d just arrived in the bay, like so many others, to record whale songs. Ángela was there as well, a teacher from the Canary Islands researching jellyfish for the University of California.

My aunt’s voice was familiar to me from every place I lived in after mother asked me to leave. It accompanied me everywhere like my favourite books, the old, decrepit marine Kent Miller, which had once belonged to my brother, and a brief, concise photo album. The old soldier Miller was missing a leg, my books had become a little worse for wear on every journey, while the photo album had grown a little fatter with every journey, but Aunt Natalia’s voice remained the same – songful and prominent, at times unstable – and from its tone you could tell the colour of the sky at the other end of the line. But, when she had rung a month earlier, her voice was serious, as if dressed in a thick, woollen overcoat. It was the same serious voice with which she had informed me, two years earlier, that mother had taken the irrevocable decision to shut herself in her room for ever. Mother was in the habit of taking terribly drastic decisions, which were in no way open to debate. It took her a long time to decide, she pondered, studied all the possible outcomes in the utmost secrecy and finally uttered a couple of words, at which point the Earth would change direction. It was a decision like this she took when, given Uncle Cándido’s passivity in charge of the ironmongery, she agreed to expand the family business and set up a shop with electrical goods which, in time, would turn into a chain of establishments specializing in household supplies. Furniture, carpets, bed linen, crockery… The kind of shop where customers could find conical jugs, methacrylate sugar dispensers with flies trapped in the lid, chairs that imitated the painful chairs in my grandparents’ house, towels from Italy, Indian blankets and copies of African statues. But in between her decisions, which made her into a brilliant, triumphant businesswoman, mother could be monstrous or turn into a completely depressive, utterly vulnerable being. Whenever she fell into one of these impenetrable, inconsolable states, Aunt Natalia and I would say, a little cruelly, that she was ‘trapped in the spin drier’. Thinking about mother inside a spin drier made us laugh, made us feel close, and this stopped us succumbing to despair. In truth, these were unbearable moments for all the family.

When she decided to confine herself to her room, she had just turned fifty-five. For a while now, the shops had functioned without the need for her help and were doing really rather well. So it was time, as had happened throughout her life, for her to fall into one of those painful whirlpools. When she shut herself in her room, she was defeated, she wanted to be taken to a place where a destiny was waiting. It didn’t matter what one: mother always required a destiny to force her to act, to abandon the voluntary exile from herself she went into at a time when neither death nor the people she loved moved her in the slightest.

I was searching for questions that would make me enthusiastic about life, but she desperately needed a mission, a precise, concrete obligation, something to justify the ten fingers on her hands, the joints of her bones, and the tenderness that at some distant point had congealed in the honeycombs of her belly. Here, in life, she seemed not to have found it in years. I imagine, when she shut herself in her room, for some time now mother had been unravelling the lace of memory it took her so long to make; and the day I came across her sitting in the semi-darkness of the dining room, she was starting to come apart at the seams, to unravel herself and erase the paths that might bring her back. I think it was a totally voluntary act, like that of suicides who take the decision to kill themselves not at the height of their suffering, but in their most lucid moments. Before tearing father to pieces on the floor of the dining room, however, things had happened.

The loss of her destiny, for example.

Mother had been born to look after her parents, but her parents had died when she was still a teenager, in a terrible fire that destroyed the family shop. She felt lost because she had been educated so that her life would only have meaning if she devoted herself to the care of her elderly parents, an unavoidable responsibility that would fall on her when the time came. Before that, they had had another child, Cándido, to whom they planned to bequeath the family business. Mother and Uncle Cándido had been born with prearranged destinies. Uncle Cándido took possession of his at the age of twenty, after the fire, and it was down to him to raise the family from the ashes and a lack of experience. He found it an enormous injustice to have to devote his youth to rebuilding an ironmonger’s shop that had been reduced to iron, smoke and mud. But this was what he’d been born for, wasn’t it? Devoted day and night to the accursed shop, all he needed was to find someone on whom to vent his frustration. And he found Aunt Natalia.

He found her the day she came into the shop to buy a porcelain coffee pot.

‘Why do we call a piece of enamelled metal “porcelain”?’ Uncle Cándido would ask himself this kind of question whenever he came across the chipped crockery mother insisted on using in the kitchen for years. It hurt him because it reminded him of his lost youth.

‘It’s because of the enamel, which is designed to imitate fine china, real porcelain,’ Aunt Natalia patiently explained.

‘Poor people’s porcelain so they can eat lentils and worms!’ Uncle Cándido grew angry. ‘That’s what we’ve been all our lives, wretched poor people. Why didn’t I emigrate like all the rest?’

I remember these words Uncle Cándido pronounced like a threat whenever he got angry. Even though he knew that, thanks to mother’s decisions, we were really very rich, Uncle Cándido could only perceive an ancient misery due not to a lack of money, but to a lack of initiative. His ‘why didn’t I emigrate like all the rest’ was aimed at mother and, in passing, at Aunt Natalia – who thought the fact she was his wife should be enough to make my uncle happy – the greatest insult he could inflict on either of them. Out of some strange sense of sympathy, Aunt Natalia felt the same as mother in extreme circumstances, even though they couldn’t stand one another. The fact that someone should raise the subject of emigrating, especially if it was Uncle Cándido, became a direct attack on the two of them. But that’s another story.

Uncle Cándido was not at all satisfied with his life, but he’d agreed, without rebelliousness or ambition, to be another link in the history of this business that had been open for a century. Even his name, a name all the firstborn sons in the family received, had been tied around his neck, as they had hung a gold chain with a medallion of Our Lady of Carmel. I think it was because of Uncle Cándido’s name that my grandmother and her family finally broke off all communication. In fact, neither mother nor my uncle would talk about these relatives unless it were to describe them as proud and arrogant. I’ve met people who said I was the spitting image of my maternal grandmother and it was a shame about what happened.

I once went out with a boy who had my mother’s unusual surname. When we realized, we felt so disgusted at being cousins that we had no intention of seeing each other any more. When I went to study in the city, I would bump into him in the morning, on the way to the faculty. We never even said hello, but I was sure we secretly glanced at each other. I must confess I looked at him. He walked straight, tall, dressed in a suit and tie. He carried an umbrella whenever it was raining, an enormous, well-made, black umbrella, and his boots resounded as their soles collided with the pavement. When it wasn’t raining, he would still wear a suit and tie, but not carry an umbrella, and his shoes would be made of soft, brown or black leather to match the suit he was wearing. His life didn’t strike me as so very different from that of Uncle Cándido – the two of them dispassionate, unconsciously reproducing the same daily gestures and ignorant of the fact life was a vast project that existed beyond them. In spite of them.

I think that boy and I, without needing to look at each other, could see the burdens we were lugging on our backs, which didn’t belong to us. But even though we knew this and recognized in each other a certain shared unhappiness, we continued to keep our distance. I remember the only thing I could think of saying whenever we met was ‘we’re innocent’, but I said it under my breath, swallowing the contempt of his proud nose, which was the same as mine, and consuming the sharp angles that always imbued my life with passion and a degree of beauty.

When Uncle Cándido turned five, my grandparents decided it was time to mould a daughter who would care for them in their old age. Once again, they were lucky: my grandmother gave birth to a girl. On the surface, it appeared mother’s destiny was more terrifying than Uncle Cándido’s: he would get a business, whereas she would be educated and tied always to remember she’d been born with the aim of looking after her parents.

They both received a similar education. They attended the same primary and secondary schools. They read, one after the other, the same books that made up the family library, which comprised a selection of Reader’s Digest condensed classics and the catalogue of the Círculo de Lectores. They saw the same films and only ever hung out with children from their district. They were both clever and curious: they could have done anything with their futures, had it not been for the constant warnings about being born for a specific purpose. I suppose they both dreamed of running away from home and seeking refuge with that part of the family they didn’t get on with, and did so with the same furious, useless imagination as when they dreamed they were the children of a superhero who would come rushing to rescue them from their childish sadness.

As soon as he finished school, Uncle Cándido started working in the ironmonger’s shop. He was a good student, but it never even entered his mind to rebel and break the chain. He couldn’t. His body had been branded with the same name that, in iron letters, had been clinging to the lintel of the door of the shop for years. ‘Cándido Ironmonger’s Ltd’. Mother was still at school when the fire happened. She must have been about fifteen, a teenager with long, blonde hair. After school, she attended a dressmaking academy because grandmother was well aware any woman whose destiny was the care of elderly parents had to have some understanding of sewing, embroidery and, at a push, dying and cutting hair. Any other necessities could be learned by themselves, on the job, at the precise moment when they were needed.

The fire left her feeling amazed, stuck in front of her future and unable to react. Instead of feeling liberated, she decided to look for someone to whom she could devote the ten fingers on her hands, the joints of her bones, and the tenderness that at some distant point had congealed in the honeycombs of her belly.

One day, many years ago, sitting behind the counter with his head in his hands, Matías the porter tried to find an explanation as to how that enormous, papier-mâché whale had entered the building. He hadn’t seen anyone bring the monstrosity in. He was convinced he was far too old for such surprises. ‘Whoever brought it in will come and fetch it,’ he said to himself and ordered the post so he could deliver it to the various apartments at the end of the afternoon. He never took the lift. He found it increasingly difficult to climb the stairs, but forced himself to do so at least once a day. Go up and down the stairs.

‘Who could love such a frightful object?’ he asked himself on the first-floor landing, as he gazed down at the animal’s back.

He carried on climbing with the sensation the whale reminded him of someone. As he pressed our doorbell, he clasped his hand to his forehead and exclaimed:

‘Ramón!’

On coming back down to the entrance of the building and finding the huge whale still there, he tenderly stroked its head and leaned over to gaze into its eyes. He even found it beautiful.

Painfully beautiful, like Ramón’s dumb happiness.

Matías kindly opened the door and wanted to give me a big hug. He was a nervous man, spindly as a dancer, and was so old I felt ashamed to allow him to take my suitcase on wheels. He insisted, feeling offended, and I ended up letting him.

‘The girl is back! The girl is here!’ he exclaimed, moving his head from side to side and on the verge of laughing out loud. ‘The girl! I still remember that blasted animal you put inside the entrance.’

‘It gave you a really good scare! Do you honestly still remember?’

Aunt Natalia called the lift while Matías and I chatted in the lobby.

‘How could I forget? I remember the day you were born.’

He shook his head, stared at the ground, at the ceiling, at me. I observed him with curiosity and surprise, wondering how old this little man, who also remembered the day my mother had been born, could be.

‘I’m sorry to hear about your mother…’

He fell silent and seemed to shrink. Aunt Natalia took the suitcase out of his hands and we entered the lift. We ascended in silence. I examined every nook and cranny of that compartment I knew like the back of my hand. They hadn’t even bothered repairing the mirror on which I’d smashed a frightful china doll mother had given me years earlier. I wanted a Barbie and she gave me a dead doll with lots of frills and a bodice. I wanted an orange, plastic watch and she gave me a lady’s watch with a thin, metal strap. I wanted nothing and she gave me a slap.

‘Are you feeling calmer?’ asked my aunt. I didn’t reply. She held me in her hands again, pinched my cheeks and in a low voice, a whisper in my ear, repeated the words ‘calm and relaxed’.

‘She won’t eat you. Nor you her, I hope.’

Felisa was waiting for us in the doorway. Matías must have lost no time in informing her. Felisa: small, round, agile on her heels. Conceited and a little vulgar, as always, she welcomed me by giving me a hug and squeezing me against her breasts, which felt soft on my hips. The top of her head reached to my neck and I could see a bald patch hidden under hair that had been dyed violet, stretched, folded, fluffed up to give the few remaining strands more substance. She soaked my camisole in tears and saliva and, had she not been so broad and weighed so much, I would have picked her up and thrown her into the air like a spinning top. Or a kite. She was heavy, however, clung on and kept whimpering.

Ever since I stopped living in that apartment, my meetings with Felisa had filled me with dread. Wherever she might find me, she would stick to me like a tick and there was no way of escaping her embrace.

When I was young, the one who really looked after me was Ramón. When he went off to work in the ironmonger’s shop with Uncle Cándido, he would leave me in the attic with Felisa. It happened one day after lunch, when it was time for a siesta. Felisa had put me to bed and wrapped me in a light, summer blanket. The window of the room was open, veiled by a linen curtain she herself had embroidered. It was summer, however, four in the afternoon, and the curtain was not sufficient to shut out the light so, before lying down next to me and beginning her daily routine of lulling me to sleep, Felisa lowered the blind. Rays of lights filtered through the slats in the blind, perforating the linen and piercing the semi-darkness of the room. I gazed in amazement at the motes of dust trapped in the light. They were dancing. I waited for them to disappear, opened and closed my eyes in a kind of infinite game: the air was alive, the light was a ribbon inhabited by restless, nervous creatures.

Felisa insisted on lulling me to sleep, but it didn’t work: I was trapped in the silent game of those tiny creatures that inhabited the air. I would close my eyes and the light would flicker behind my eyelids, the dust would start to put down roots in that part of the brain where memories overflow and are kept fresh as in a fridge. The dust, the air, the light played inside me, with me. She started stroking my hair slowly, tenderly. I felt her breath very close, spilling the scent of a recently drunk and overly sweet coffee on the back of my neck. And then, in a whisper, as if telling me a story, she said:

‘You’ll never forget this moment, my girl. Never.’

She fell silent and seemed to be asleep. I, however, felt the dust-filled ribbon of air coiling inside my stomach. I felt fear. Fear for the first time. Fear of the silence that ensued, the darkness that prevailed over the rays of light filtering through the blind, the cold that settled on my bare, chubby feet.

Felisa was right: I never did forget that moment. Or the scent of her breath, the rigorous, cold, sad immobility with which she lay on the bed, staring at me as at a wish she would never be granted.

As the memory of mother tearing up letters in a room in semi-darkness made me compassionate, the image of Felisa staring at me as at an unattainable desire helped me endure her unending embrace. I waited and my camisole admitted her tears, which felt fresh and salty inside my stomach. I waited and her breasts shuddered so much with her lamentation that my hips started to fidget. I waited and, seeing the tanned skin of her scalp under the four strands of hair clinging to her supposed dignity, acted as if a dog was biting my hand: I stroked the back of her neck. Slowly and delicately. Slowly while waiting.

She slowly moved away and stared at me, her eyes brimming with tears, the violet paint she always liked to apply to her eyelids running down to the borders of her lips. I didn’t have it in me to kiss her or give her anything but the faintest of smiles. I don’t know why but, when I looked at Felisa, I was reminded of an elephant: patient and yet resentful. There was something in Felisa’s gaze that didn’t let me trust her. On top of her abundant flesh and apparently infinite patience was an accusatory, fault-finding look that seemed to be waiting for you to attack so she could kill you. Something like that, but perhaps I’m being unfair, it’s just that, instead of loving elephants, I sided with whales.

Aunt Natalia again took it on herself to apologize for me: ‘The girl is very tired, the journey lasts almost a day, we’ll have plenty of time to see her while she’s here.’ Felisa followed us into the apartment, gazing at me, studying me to make sure I wasn’t the daughter she had never been granted.

The house smelled of cooked vegetables, lemon-scented detergent, medicine, brandy. The acrid, narcotic smell of the brandy reminded me of a house I’d entered as a child to visit a friend who was sick. The friend, Lurdiñas, had leukaemia. She was lying in bed, bald, showing the whites of her eyes, softened by this scent that seemed to want to convey a firm determination to cut her illness off by the roots. Death, for me, has the smell of brandy and burned mango wood, I thought, but I didn’t say this out loud. Aunt Natalia was so distracted she knocked the suitcase against a low table in the living room and almost smashed a crystal butterfly Felisa picked up off the carpet as if rescuing her own vital substance. Contrary to what I’d expected, I didn’t feel nervous or restless or afraid. I made as if to continue towards the room that had always belonged to mother, but Natalia grabbed me by the arm and asked me to wait.

It was she who advanced down the corridor, with Felisa behind. I was alone at last. I hadn’t set foot inside this house for five years but, as far as I could see, everything was more or less the same. It was strange to have to wait to be received by my own mother in a house I considered mine, in the middle of that small library where I had learned how to live. I approached. Read the titles on the spines and saw they were where they had to be, carefully controlled by Ramón so they adhered to the strict order he’d imposed. There were no more and no less. I sought out a book, opened it and came across a bus pass with a telephone number on it. I knew it would be there, stuck to a page that had immaculately preserved the naive drawing of a spider building a cobweb. Right in the corner I’d expected, the spider persisted in eternally weaving its cobweb in blue ink. Right on that page was the bus pass and a telephone number I promised myself I would ring one of those days I spent inside the apartment in semi-darkness, inside a luxurious building, inside a city that was now less foreign to me than Ángela herself.

Ángela was there the day Aunt Natalia rang me and spoke to me in that serious, ornate voice she only ever adopted when it was something important.

‘You have to come, girl. Your mother is very sick.’

‘What do you mean, very sick?’

‘I mean you have to come and sign some papers.’

Ah, sign some papers! I was on the beach, drinking tequila with Kazuo and Ángela. It was almost dusk and, apart from being absolutely drunk, I’d adjusted myself to the shape of Ángela’s geography. Our bodies had known how to fit together for three years now. I asked Natalia how long the papers could wait and she replied barely a few days. I negotiated with her, arguing it was the end of the academic year, and gained a month. Ángela was surprised by the little interest I showed in my mother. I told her my interest in my mother was limited to the fact that, in five years, my monthly allowance had gone up from 1,500 to 3,000 euros. With this money, I could travel from the Bay of La Paz to San Diego every time I missed her, which happened at least once a week. It sometimes happened every day of the week, but I was able to control my desire. And so was Ángela.

As I rummaged through the bookshelves in the library and waited to be allowed finally to enter my mother’s bedroom, I recalled Ángela’s farewell at La Paz airport and felt her far away, as if it had taken place several years ago. As if this were a story in the past that had finished and all that was left was a memory coated in a sweet, warm, but cloying sheen. When we said goodbye, she had asked me to embrace her, to fit myself to her body as one continent fits itself to another. She said, ‘This is your place.’ I closed my eyes and repeated after her, because she kept on asking me, ‘This is my place.’ But I sensed the hollow of her body, which I fitted as a bit fits a drill hole, was beginning to be foreign to me. To disintegrate. Whenever I left a place, that place would vanish, fade, as the new place I would inhabit began to take shape even before I set foot in it. And, along with the place, the people and passions, caresses and words, also disappeared. I was never able to devote myself fully to something. I could never devote myself with the security, anxiety and perpetual desire Ángela demanded of me. To anybody. Anywhere.

The memory of Ángela was completely erased when I came across the album with tortoiseshell covers which mother had given the pretentious title of Anthology of Daily Objects. Mother mixed poetry reading with the meticulous revision of delivery notes, account books and electrical goods catalogues. Poetry is not easy to digest if it is mixed with wing nuts, monkey wrenches and mincing machines. I suppose one of those indigestions gave rise to the title of this album devoted exclusively to Ramón. Perhaps it was a game they played so Ramón would remain anchored to the earth and not fly off in the direction of unreality like a hot-air balloon or a flying whale. The game involved Ramón defining the daily objects around him. I opened the album and read some of the definitions. I wondered what my brother was thinking when he defined the word ‘coconut’: ‘A coconut is like the bottom of a blonde monkey, but with three holes. The coconut’s holes can be opened with a corkscrew or a sharp knife. Water should come out. If water does not come out, it means the coconut is rotten.’ To begin with, I laughed, but then I noticed the first attempt of sadness, rotten sadness, to take possession of me and put the album back on the shelf. It was strange: I had lived with Ramón for barely three years, but he was the only person, the only one, who hadn’t vanished and still produced pain and tenderness in me whenever, for whatever reason, he appeared in front of me.

Finally, I was in front of mother. Standing on the threshold of the door, I watched. I found it difficult to cross. Felisa and Aunt Natalia kept an eye on my emotions, waiting for me to feel something atrocious that distorted my face or moved me, and to jump into the arms of the woman in bed. They also kept an eye on her, because they were afraid of her initial words. But she didn’t say any. Leaning against two large pillows covered in unbleached linen that must have been embroidered by Felisa, she gave me a placid look I found difficult to recognize. I didn’t know whether to kiss her or not. I went over to the bed and looked at her. She was beautiful. Her hair had been gathered at the back of her neck and her cheeks highlighted with vibrant, pale pink blusher. Her eyelids had been painted the same brown colour as her eyes and her lips enhanced with warm, garnet lipstick. She really appeared very beautiful. No one would have said this woman was sick, were it not for her extreme thinness.

‘You look very pretty,’ I said. This was the first thing that came into my mind, the first thing I was sure was absolutely true. She always knew when I was lying, she had this special ability to sniff out fear in me and recognize deceit.

She answered with a smile and I decided the best thing would be to kiss her on the forehead, as you would with any sick person. She grabbed my hand when I leaned over the bed. She seemed about to cry, but mother also had this special ability to disguise her emotions whenever she wanted. Overcoming an old, deep-seated rejection, I stroked her head softly and timidly. Time went slowly as she ran her gaze over my hands, arms and face. Having examined my body, mother stared at the bed, the chest of drawers, the bedside table. She thought for a long time, though she found it difficult to concentrate. No doubt, in the process that led her to take her final decision, she was reminded of many memories that were no longer relevant. You could see in her face she was lost, digressing, certain memories hurt her, she was struggling to concentrate. In the end, she gazed into my pupils and said something I know cannot have been very easy for her to say:

‘I never hated you, girl.’

A space opened up inside my belly, a kind of dizziness. I found it difficult to reply.

‘I don’t hate you either, mother.’

From that point on, as if a corkscrew had been applied to the right place, to one of those three holes in Ramón’s coconut, the emotions began to flow and spread over the bed. It wasn’t easy talking to a woman with whom communication had never been possible. Nor was this the right time to go over our lives, to come out with accusations or find fault with people. Now was the time to remain silent and check each other out like two animals that have just encountered one another and are assessing the risk.

‘Your aunt has prepared your bedroom,’ she said, and I knew she was asking me to stay with her. I thanked her and sat in an armchair upholstered in yellow velvet that had spent its entire existence in the hallway. Felisa gravely announced it would soon be time for refreshments and she was going to prepare some tea. Natalia looked at her watch and said Uncle Cándido would be back in a short while.

‘It must be eight o’clock,’ declared mother. She knew this room better than anyone. She knew the route taken by the sun, the position of the shadows, the shimmering of the gloom. She knew perfectly well what time it was without looking at her watch. She followed with her eyes the retreat of a ray of sunlight to the quilt folded at the foot of her bed. The sun stroked the turnover and, in a few minutes, would start to descend to our feet.

‘Ten past eight,’ Natalia corrected her.

I glanced at the room out of the corner of my eye, not daring yet to look at it directly, as if this space belonged to a complete stranger. It was clean and tidy. I imagined mother wouldn’t allow a single bottle of pills or glass of milk to be left on the bedside table. I imagined, from her bed, she would still know whether her underwear was ordered or not inside the chest of drawers. Or perhaps she’d changed, perhaps with this placid gaze she was trying to show me she was a new, different, understanding kind of woman. Everything she hadn’t been before.

Before – that is before she went into voluntary confinement, a state of inaction she couldn’t be persuaded to abandon – whenever mother got angry, she would make us tremble with a single gesture: she would turn her back on us to hide the anger we would then see reflected in her face when she turned around. She never said anything. She stared at us evenly, but it wasn’t the blazing, profoundly chestnut eyes that frightened us, it was her mouth. The way her mouth became flat and revealed a distant darkness between rows of teeth that attacked us from behind lips that had no smile or sadness. The darkness of that mouth was her great prodigy. And our biggest fear.

Now she was sick, she seemed to lack the hinges with which to express her anger. I think she might even have been incapable of feeling. All she needed was to breathe, eat, sleep and hand her body over to the care of others. When an illness turns you into a dependent being, you finally know what it is to be humble. And, even though we might all have thought, deep down, that mother’s illness was self-imposed, as Natalia had suggested, her mind was in a worse condition than it appeared. I suppose she had suffered greatly. She had suffered so much the poor woman had been unable to assimilate the pain that had been for her alone. Let us say she had transformed it into resentment and bitterness, a permanent victim complex that had turned her into an unbearably egocentric person. Her ultimate exhaustion and rendition had been brought about by the ridiculous quantity of tranquillizers, painkillers and sleeping pills she had taken, which had opened bullet holes in her brain, as if her brain had been perforated by insistent, hungry woodworm larvae.

I was unaware what her outbursts were like now she had yielded to exhaustion and rendition. I imagined the monster we feared so much was dying with her and barely had the strength to make it to her mouth. When I saw her teeth, still perfectly white, they looked so small I was overcome by a feeling of utter compassion I tried to hide by gazing at the room. The curtains were drawn and, in front of the window, a table adorned with an embroidered cloth and a vase stuffed full of daisies resembled a bride. On top of the chest of drawers, which was covered in a festooned cloth, stood a perfectly aligned row of silver frames containing photos mostly of Ramón. Ramón as a baby, Ramón at primary school in front of a globe, Ramón dressed as a sailor at his first communion. Ramón on the beach, Ramón in the park, Ramón in a wicker basket next to the swimming pool at my uncle and aunt’s villa. Ramón blowing out the twelve candles on a huge strawberry cream cake. Ramón as a little boy, clinging to the reins of a pony. There were also some photos of me, but not so many. Just the official ones of my baptism, first communion and the time I received a prize in a competition organized at secondary. There weren’t any photos of father.

The room smelled of medicine and jasmine perfume and, stuck in a twist of the calendar, in an echo that was about to fade, from time to time there came a waft of brandy. I looked away from the chest of drawers when I realized mother was staring at me. I felt a shudder of guilt or shame and thought in alarm she had perhaps always been aware of all my intimacies.

The doorbell finally rang. Uncle Cándido, looking enormous, swept into the room and lifted me out of the chair. He raised me in the air as when I was a child. Mother watched us with a look of nostalgia and Felisa, standing on the threshold with a tray loaded with cups of tea, waited for uncle’s violent effusiveness to die down.

‘Everything’s fine, everything’s fine,’ said Natalia, tall, slim and elegant, surveying the reduced space of the room with her gaze fixed on the delicate perfection of her nail varnish.

In the subdued light of the lamp, my room looked just as I had left it five years earlier. The bed, covered in sheets, a peach-coloured pillow and a light, summer blanket, invited me to give myself over to the longed-for horizontality. On the old desk, someone had placed a large, crystal vase stuffed full of the same white daisies as in my mother’s room. I was pleased by the room’s warm welcome. I was pleased that the photographs of seascapes that had kept me company during my first years at university were still hanging on the walls. I gazed slowly and carefully, but found no significant alteration in that space that had been mine ever since I was born. Only the flowers, a new pair of pyjamas folded at the foot of the bed and a set of clean towels bore witness to the fact that someone had entered the room in the last few hours.

If something did surprise me, it was coming across the huge, grey whale mother and I had argued so much about. I’d made it out of cardboard with a group of friends at school to be used as a costume during carnival. It had a hole underneath and three of us children would get inside to make it move. It was truly impressive. I was again reminded of the day we brought it back to put in my bedroom and Matías was startled to find it in the entrance to the building. I also remembered how, having delivered the post to the various apartments, Matías stared into the whale’s eyes, because the eyes he encountered were mine. Inside the cardboard monstrosity, in the bottom of his slightly faded, bleary eyes, I glimpsed an enormous tenderness that made me wonder what it was he was seeing when he stared into the eyes of that fake whale that disturbed the carefully preserved order in the lobby.

There it was, leaning against one of the walls. Large and beautiful, its paint chipped in places, the eye sockets revealing an empty interior. How strange that mother hadn’t thrown it out as soon as I left. How strange, I thought. Perhaps, despite her unwavering determination, the whale was there to remind her I still existed.

I finally lay down and started to fall into a black and red eddy that carried me dizzily, like a toboggan, from lucidity to the fluffy blanket of sleep. Before I was fully asleep, however, an old sensation of pleasure curled up inside my stomach and turned me into a baby.

I am one and three quarters. I am a baby, I know how to walk and how to talk a little. I am almost two, but haven’t reached there yet. Every year is a breast of my mother’s, and I eat chunks out of them until they’re finished. I ate the left breast during the first year, now I have less than a quarter of the right breast to finish the second year and I’m already a little bored of eating. I am not allowed to do much more than eat and sleep. I have already slept a whole round of my navel and have a quarter of my navel left before I’ve slept for two years. I like my feet more than my navel. I know my feet will take me far, while my navel will remain tied to my mother’s navel, which remained tied to her mother’s navel, and in this way, from mother to mother, I reach the beginning of all navels and feel tired. When I sleep, I fall into a black and red spiral that weaves together red, living blood and dead, black blood. I am a baby. It is not my obligation to know how to explain these things and I do not have enough words to describe them or experience to understand them. I know I am safe, I float, fill myself with the earth of plant pots and the earth of the countryside whenever we go to my uncle and aunt’s villa, and then my tummy hurts. It hurts and hurts. I am disinfested like a pet so I won’t breed worms, that is why we babies no longer have worms in our intestines. It must be very inconvenient for a mother to have to pull out the living worms that peep out of a baby’s bottom, in among the pooh. I can’t imagine mother doing that. She would be extremely annoyed if a worm squirmed in her fingers. Mother doesn’t do such things and I don’t get insects in my tummy, however much earth I eat. I have a short, fat nurse who drank vinegar when she was young to lose weight and dreamed of having a solitary worm, metres long, in her intestines to eat the food she couldn’t help scoffing. When my nurse is not here, Ramón is the one who changes my nappy, gives me a bath and rubs fragrant, moisturizing, soothing oil into my body. Ramón knows how to hold my feet with one hand, he folds his enormous fingers over them and, with his free hand, separates my thighs so he can put on a new nappy. He cleans me with soft, perfumed wipes and then pours a huge amount of talcum powder on my still green, swollen sex. I laugh, let him stroke me, go weak in the hands of this person who tickles me with his tongue on my navel, sings songs and lulls me to sleep by clutching me to his enormous chest. I feel that life is sweet and I am growing as a result of the caresses my brother applies to the new folds that daily appear in my body. I like his caresses, I like the way he smells, I like it when he makes up lullabies for me. He forgets some of them, but others stick in his memory and he repeats them all the time:

There is a volcano in Japan

called Fujiyama.

Its head is white

like that of an old Japanese man.

And the Pacific Ocean

washes its pretty feet.

Ramón likes it when I laugh. He strokes me the right way up and upside down and, if he could, I’m sure he would turn me inside out, like a glove, so he could stroke my insides. His voice, when he sings, is like an explosion of bubbles that makes me feel giddy, and my eyes gleam as if a mound of glow-worms had mounted to my pupils. I like belonging to Ramón because, had I not been disinfested like a pet, Ramón would extricate the worms, show them to me, curling around his fingers, and the two of us would laugh, intoxicated by so much involuntary happiness.

Towards the end of the morning, I left the house and found Felisa talking to Matías in the lobby. They tried to hide from me a passion that had possessed them for years, but I rushed off with the excuse that Natalia was waiting for me in the car. They carried on talking after Matías had accompanied me to the street and closed the door behind me.

‘I don’t know what to say, Miss Felisa, but it’s a shame.’ Old Matías straightened his head over his bent body. He’d always been a tiny, diminutive man but, as he’d grown older, he’d become thinner and smaller. His shirt collar danced around his neck and his head kept moving from side to side, up and down, like the head of a wooden tortoise.

‘It’s a shame an old lady like you should have to look after such a young woman.’

Miss Felisa stood tall on her heels and breathed in deeply. Her breasts, which fell over her belly like two placid, weary hills, rose up flirtatiously and a little indignantly.

‘What’s that about being an old lady?’

Matías took pleasure in provoking her. When she protested, he knew Felisa was enjoying his comments.

‘Don’t misunderstand me, my dear. You still have some very shapely curves. Should you wish, my Ferrari is fit and ready to go, I can assure you.’

‘Your Ferrari droops as soon as I look at it. I don’t know what would happen if I tried to mount it.’

Matías roared with laughter, as he imagined her ungirt, in the nuddy, and himself naked, lean, a wrinkled cock trying to take possession of all that beautiful immensity.

‘Don’t swear to it, Miss Felisa!’ And he laughed for very different reasons from those that made Felisa burst out laughing as well, while he kept on repeating they were two old, crazy people.

‘That’s right, miss, two old fools. Anyway, who cares? We’re not anybody any more. I can’t even bring myself to scrub the stairs.’

When it seemed he was about to fall under the heavy resignation of the years, Matías slammed his hand down on the table in the porter’s lodge and, stiff as a board, began the steps of a dance. He hummed a bolero Felisa knew, grabbed her by the waist, and they danced for several minutes until she drove him off with a slap to the shoulder. She pushed him away because her legs were hurting, because she couldn’t keep up with the porter’s agile movements, because she was getting red in the face and didn’t want him to guess at her deep-seated desire. She moved away. Repositioned her neckline and the hem of her skirt, grabbed her bag with timid hands and walked towards the lift, muttering they weren’t children any more to muck about like that.

‘We’re not anybody any more, Miss Felisa,’ mumbled Matías as he called the lift.

That moment of waiting for the lift to arrive was a happy time for Felisa. It was a protective spell against not being anybody. Salvation from nothingness. They remained silent, staring at the ceiling. From the ceiling, across the floors of the building, would come the possibility of separating and the sweet delight of dreaming when, after they’d separated, they fell to thinking about one another. Felisa believed things were really all right like this, and Matías was of the opinion this was the best thing that could happen to them: to meet and separate several times a day, and for nothing to be permanent. Mobility also kept him safe from the forcefulness of nothing.

‘I must be going, the lady’s all alone,’ Felisa excused herself as the door of the lift initiated the ritual of separation. She went up, and a handful of needles buzzed inside her stomach. She looked at herself in the mirror, smiled and thought she was still alive. That red lipstick still suited her.

‘The girl spent the whole day crying,’ mother rebuked her from the bedroom.

‘She must have been dreaming, madam,’ replied Felisa, muttering under her breath, ‘Patience, patience, patience. Today’s a bad day.’ She hung her jacket on a hook, left her bag on the hall table and, looking at herself in the mirror, tidied her fringe. Before entering the bedroom, she wondered what to say to her mistress if she should talk about the girl crying again. Anything will do, she decided, and she adopted the most convincing smile she could summon at that moment.

‘The girl’s gone off with Natalia. They had to go and sign some papers,’ she said with astonishing confidence when she finally entered the room. Sitting on the bed, surrounded by large pillows, gossip magazines, a mobile phone and remote control, mother was watching television. She turned her head ever so slightly, with a gesture of pain, when Felisa spoke. She wanted to insist on the fact that the girl had been crying all day, but thought better of it and looked back at the television screen. She was watching a film. A woman with a knife stuck in her back collapsed on an unmade bed. The sheets seemed to be made of satin. They gleamed and, even seen on television, had the glossy substance and soft texture of satin. They were soon covered in blood, and mother took the remote and switched channel.

‘Why does blood have to be red? If it were blue, it wouldn’t be so repulsive,’ she remarked angrily. A heap of charred pigs then appeared on the screen. Some of them were still alive and gazed at the camera in agony.

‘How awful!’ Felisa grew indignant and turned her back on the television. Mother burst out laughing.

‘They’re only pigs, you fool!’

Felisa went over to the window and drew the curtains. The curtains moved to the sides like a huddle of ballerinas who, with the broken sound of tulle skirts, give way to the light of the sun. The sun settled on the bed, moved towards the pillows and set mother’s hair ablaze. She was so pale Felisa, who had been distracted, watching the movement in the street, felt horror when she turned around and saw her face, her eyes feverish on account of her self-imposed torture, her red locks sprawled over the white linen. Felisa was reminded of an old print in which a dead girl floated over the silence of a cemetery.

Mother switched channel again. The woman with the knife in her back was being dissected by a special team of forensic scientists. There was no blood now: only skin, flesh, bones and the stainless steel of the autopsy instruments. Felisa kept thinking about Matías’ voice and the charred pigs’ agonizing looks.

‘If blood were green or yellow or sky blue, it wouldn’t be so awful.’

‘Blood is just blood. What does it matter what colour it is, madam?’

Mother ignored Felisa’s response and asked about Ramón. The old nurse grew uneasy, tried to avoid the question by fluffing up the pillows and tidying the magazines strewn across the bed. She placed the mobile phone on the bedside table, smoothed out the linen sheets she herself had embroidered and shook the quilt. Mother was a girl who had happily surrendered to the care of others. Felisa thought about Matías and the pigs in order to get rid of the image of Ramón and, before mother could ask about him again, said with unexpected cruelty even she was surprised by that the girl was not a child at the breast and it was impossible she’d heard her crying all day.

‘She must be twenty-five by now, madam. I don’t think she’ll be staying long. She’ll be off as soon as she can.’

‘I don’t like to hear her cry.’

Felisa didn’t reply, but looked at her watch and saw the big hand was approaching the sixtieth minute. It would soon be seven o’clock.

‘They must have gone to find Cándido. Your daughter, madam, no longer has anything to do with this world and will have nails coming out of her head,’ protested Felisa. She imagined the girl vomiting the entire contents of the ironmonger’s shop. She remembered when she was a baby and insisted on biting people’s toes and sucking any protruding objects she came across when crawling: toes, nails, corners, knees, toe caps, heels.

‘Would you let me smoke a cigarette?’

‘What, now?’ Felisa struggled to insert the corner of a sheet that insisted on evading its destiny under the mattress.

‘Yes, now,’ said mother. ‘The thing is I’m hot…’

Miss Felisa opened the window and left the room. She came back a moment later with an ashtray and a box that contained the cigarettes and a lighter. She placed the ashtray on the bedside table. Mother took a cigarette and Felisa approached with a flickering flame. She breathed in softly and, with the same softness, curled up under the rays that fell on the pillows. She gazed at the ceiling. She smoked and blew out the smoke with such deliberation she seemed to be breathing inside a pleasurable dream. Felisa sat down at the head of the bed, watching every movement mother made with the lit cigarette. Mother, who still resembled the print of the dead girl, reached out her hand and wanted to touch the box. She stroked it without looking at it, sighed, abandoning herself to the delectable taste of the tobacco, and murmured something Felisa couldn’t understand. She didn’t want to understand, which is why she didn’t ask. But mother turned towards her and, exhaling a stream of smoke through her mouth, dared to ask:

‘How long is it since Ramón died?’

This was a very strange question, and Felisa didn’t know whether to keep quiet or tell the truth. She coughed, glanced at the television, closed her eyes and coughed again. She moved the wooden box even closer so she could stroke it but, above all, to distract her and not to have to answer. Mother clasped the box. It was quite a big box, difficult to hold with one hand. But it was a silent box, born to hide secrets. On the lid, under a cherry tree in blossom, a woman dressed in a kimono held a basket of cherries.

The red colour of the cherries reminded her of blood and, as if she had taken a suicidal leap into the void, the image of the charred pigs made her close her eyes and squeeze them tight. Felisa felt like crying.

We spent the afternoon visiting shops. The old ironmonger’s still had that grey colour that had stuck to the walls after the fire and wouldn’t come out, however often the walls were painted. The employees, dressed in the same navy blue overalls I remembered as a child, greeted me with distant respect. I didn’t feel at all happy in that place, I was uncomfortable, tired, and things kept sweeping over me without stopping. I even thought, if I touched them, they would disappear. They had the inconsistency of veiled photographs. Halfway through the afternoon, I received a message from Ángela. My mobile vibrated inside my handbag and, I don’t know why, I didn’t want to read it. I wondered what time it would be in San Diego. It must have been early morning. I recalled I hadn’t even let her know I’d arrived safely and had the impression she’d already taken leave of my life. We visited the three shops in the city. ‘Our shops’, as Aunt Natalia liked to call them. She ruminated on the words and then pronounced them with infinite pleasure.

Text © Anxos Sumai

Translation © Jonathan Dunne

This title is available to read in English in Carys Evans-Corrales’ translation – see the page “Novels”.