Seven Empty Houses, page 8
“You have to calm down,” said Lola.
The woman nodded. She breathed and lowered her fists.
“Lola,” said the woman.
How did this woman know her name?
“Lola, my son is dead. And you are sick.” She took another, unsteady step backward, and Lola thought she looked drunk, or like she had lost control of her nerves. “You are sick, understand? And you ring my doorbell . . .” Her eyes filled with tears. “All the time.”
The woman pressed the bell of her own house twice, and the noise was annoying as it rang out over their heads.
“All the time, you ring and ring,” she pressed it again so hard that her finger bent back on the button, and still harder, violently. “To tell me that my son is alive out behind your house.” Her voice rose abruptly. “My son, the son I buried with my own hands because you are a stupid old woman who didn’t call the police in time.”
She pushed Lola backward and slammed the door. Lola heard her crying inside. Heard her cry out as she walked away. Another loud slam at the back of the house. Lola stood looking at her sandals. They were so wet they left prints on the concrete. She took a few steps to be sure, then looked at the sky and realized Dr. Petterson’s show must be about to start, but then she remembered her reason for coming here and she walked up the two steps and rang the bell. She waited. She focused her attention and heard some noises in the depths of the house. She looked back down at her sandals, which were wet, and then she remembered again that Dr. Petterson’s show was about to start, and she walked down the steps slowly, very slowly, calculating the strategy that would get her back to her house as quickly as possible without agitating her breathing in her lungs.
* * *
But Lola remembered the incident at the supermarket perfectly. She’d been looking for a new product in the canned food aisle. It was hot because the employees of that store didn’t know how to work the air conditioner well. She remembers prices; ten pesos and ninety cents, for example, was the cost of the can of tuna she was holding in her hand when she felt an uncontrollable need to urinate pressing on her bladder. That was when she noticed another woman a little farther down, near the dairy section, concentrated on the yogurt selection. She was around forty years old and overly stout, so much so that Lola couldn’t help thinking about just what kind of husband a woman like that could get, and also that, if she had looked that way at that age, she would have found a way to lose a little weight. She felt pressure in her bladder again, this time a bit more intense than usual, and Lola understood it was no longer a containable need but an emergency. Another throb of pressure startled her and she dropped the can of tuna, which hit the floor. She saw the woman turn toward her. She was afraid a little pee had escaped; she was disgusted, and swallowed hard. These things didn’t happen to her, so as she felt the wetness she told herself it was just a few drops, no one would notice with the skirt she was wearing. It was precisely then that she saw him; he was sitting in the other woman’s shopping cart, looking at Lola. She didn’t recognize him at first—for a second he was just a normal boy, a child of around two or three years old sitting in the shopping cart seat. Until she saw his dark, shining eyes gazing at her, his little hands, small but so strong, grasping the metal bar, and she felt certain that this was her son. The hot wetness of the urine spread through her underpants. She took two clumsy steps backward and saw the other woman coming toward her. And still another thing happened, something she couldn’t tell anyone, not the hospital doctor or her husband. Something she still remembers, because she has forgotten nothing about that day. It wasn’t a trick of mirrors. That other woman was Lola, thirty-five years ago. It was a terrifying certainty. Fat and unkempt, she watched herself approach with identical repulsion.
* * *
Dr. Petterson was still there, looking at her from the TV and showing her a can of food. She was standing, holding on to the table with one hand. With the other she lowered the zipper on her skirt to let it fall, but it was stuck to her body and she had to push it down to get it off. The boy was sitting in her husband’s armchair. Only then did she see him, and they looked at each other. Lola didn’t know what the boy was thinking, or what she herself thought about the boy. All she knew was that she was very hungry, and that her twenty-four peaches-and-cream yogurts were no longer in the fridge. Then she remembered the cocoa powder, and she saw herself eating it in the darkened kitchen, with a spoon. Had it been her, all this time? Was it possible? Did he know? Where was he? She heard a deep rumbling sound. So deep that the floor trembled under her body. It came again, dark and heavy inside her. It was her breath rising from the depths, a great prehistoric monster pummeling her painfully from the center of her body. And yet, this was what she had longed for, she told herself intuitively. Leaning against the wall, she slid down to the floor. She focused on the pain. Because if this was death, the pain was the final blow she needed in order to die. This was the only thing she had wanted, it was what she had wished for during so many years, though it had come only for him. To be done. Her heart sped up, it pounded in her chest and further roused the monster; the voices went silent, she let herself go, sink down and disappear, leave the discomfort behind. She saw a silent image. The memory of a warm afternoon at her grandparents’ country house, holding the skirt of her blue dress filled with wildflowers. And another image, the first time he had cooked for her, the table set, the sweet perfume of meat with plums. Then Lola returned to her body, and her body returned her pain. She felt the cutting air rise and fall in her flesh. In her lungs, a stabbing pain came with her final revelation: she wasn’t ever going to die, because to die she would have to remember his name, because his name was also her son’s, the name that was on the box, a few feet away. But the abyss had opened up, and words and things were moving away at full speed, with the light, now very far from her body.
Two Square Feet
My mother-in-law wants me to buy aspirin. She gives me two ten-peso bills and tells me how to get to the nearest pharmacy.
“Are you sure you don’t mind going?”
I shake my head and walk toward the door. I try not to think about the story she’s just told me, but the apartment is small and I have to dodge so many pieces of furniture, so many shelves and cabinets full of knickknacks, that it’s hard to think about anything else. I leave the apartment and enter the dark hallway. I don’t turn on the lights; I’d rather let the light come of its own accord when the elevator doors open up and illuminate me.
My mother-in-law put up a Christmas tree over the fireplace. It’s a gas fireplace with artificial rocks, and she insists on bringing it along every time she moves to a new apartment. The Christmas tree is pint-sized, skinny, and a light, artificial green. It has round red ornaments, two gold garlands, and six Santa Claus figures dangling from the branches like a club of hanged men. I pause to look at it several times a day, or else I picture it while I’m doing other things. I think about how my mother used to buy garlands that were much fluffier and softer, and about how the Santa Clauses’ eyes are not painted exactly over the ocular depressions where they should be.
When I reach the pharmacy she directed me to, I see that it’s closed. It is ten fifteen p.m., so I’ll have to find an all-night pharmacy. I don’t know the neighborhood and I don’t want to call Mariano, so I make a guess based on the traffic as to where the nearest major street is, and I walk that way. I have to get used to this city again.
Before Mariano and I left for Spain, we handed over the apartment we’d been renting and boxed up the things we weren’t taking with us. My mother brought us boxes from work, forty-seven boxes for Mendoza wine that we assembled as we needed them. The two times Mariano left my mother and me alone, she asked me again about the real reason we were going, but I couldn’t answer either time. A moving van took everything to a storage unit. I remember all this because I’m almost positive that in the box that says Bathroom there’s a blister pack of aspirin. But now that we’re back in Buenos Aires, we still haven’t gone to get those boxes. We have to find a new apartment first, and before that, we have to save back some of the money we lost.
A little while ago my mother-in-law told me that horrible story, but she told it proudly and said that someone should write it. It took place before her divorce, before she sold the house and helped with the money for Spain. After she told it her blood pressure dropped and she got a terrible headache, and she sent me out to buy aspirin. She thinks I miss my mother, and she can’t understand why I don’t want to call her.
I see a pharmacy a block farther, on the avenue, and I wait for the light so I can cross. This one is closed, too, but it has a list of on-duty pharmacies. If I have my bearings right, there’s one on the other side of Santa Fe, past the tracks of the Carranza station. It’s about four blocks farther, and I’ve already gone pretty far. I think it would be good if Mariano came home and asked his mother where I was, so she would have to explain herself and tell him she sent me out to buy aspirin at ten thirty at night in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Then I wonder why that would be a good thing.
The first thing my mother-in-law told me was that she was standing in the middle of the dining room of her house. Her husband was at work but would be home soon. Her four sons were out, too, one working with their father, the others in school. She had fought with her husband again the night before, and she’d asked him for a divorce. The house was big, and she had lost control of it. The cleaning lady was in charge of the house now, and she herself could no longer say what was kept in the closets or what went into the cupboards. When they sat around the table, her sons would watch her eat and laugh. If there was chicken, she gnawed anxiously at the bones; if there was dessert, she served herself a double portion; she drank water with her mouth full. It’s just that I’m very alone, she’d think to herself, and my sons only believe in their father.
I turn down the first street to cross but it’s closed off, a dead end, and the same thing happens the next block down. I look around for someone to ask, and I find a woman who peers at me suspiciously. She says that two blocks down I can cross to the other side of Santa Fe through the subway tunnels.
So, that day, my mother-in-law was standing in the middle of the dining room, and she looked down at her hands and decided on her next move. She grabbed her coat and purse, left the house, and took a taxi to Calle Libertad. It was pouring down rain, but she felt that if she didn’t do what she had to do right then, she never would. When she got out of the taxi the water was up to her ankles, and her sandals got soaked. She rang the bell at a shop that bought and sold gold. She saw the salesman walk toward her between the illuminated display cases. I suppose he opened the door and looked her up and down, sorry that someone so sodden was going to enter his shop. Inside, the air-conditioning was on very high and blew right on the back of her neck.
“I want to sell this ring,” she said. She thought it would be hard to take off because she had gained a lot of weight, but she was soaked from the rain and the ring slid off easily.
The man placed it on a small electronic scale.
“I can give you thirty dollars for it.”
It took her a few seconds to answer. Then she said:
“It’s my wedding ring.”
And the man said:
“That’s what it’s worth.”
Now I go down into the subway and take the tunnel to cross the avenue. I see a bifurcation sign and then I recognize the place; I remember I’ve been here before. To the right and down two more flights of stairs is the subway stop; to the left is the exit. Maybe because I think there might be a pharmacy in the subway, or because I want to remember the station a little more, I go to the right. I waste time because it helps me move forward; for a month and a half now I’ve had absolutely nothing to do. So I go toward the station. I have a card on me that still works, and a train is arriving. The wheels give a little shriek and the doors open in unison. There aren’t many people on the platform because service ends at eleven. Someone leans out from the first car, maybe a security guard who’s wondering whether I’m going to get on or not. When the train moves off I sit down on one of the empty benches. The station falls into silence, and then something moves a little beyond the bench. It’s an old man, a beggar, sitting on the floor, with legs that end in stumps just above his knees. He’s looking at the shampoo ad that’s on the other side of the tracks.
My mother-in-law accepted the money, she told me, and she left the shop stroking her ring finger. It was no longer raining outside but the water still reached the storefronts, and her wet sandals wounded her feet. A few days later she would exchange the dollars in her pockets for a pair of sandals that she could never bring herself to wear, and even so, she would remain married for twenty-six months longer. She told me this in the dining room while she painted her nails. She said she didn’t need the money she’d given us for Spain, and we could pay her back whenever we wanted. She said she missed her sons a lot, but she knew they were busy with their own lives, and she didn’t want to be a burden on them by calling every time she’d really like to call. I thought I had to listen to her, that it was my obligation because I was living in her house, and because I felt guilty she no longer had her thirty-dollar ring. Because she insisted on cooking for us, on ironing our clothes every time we washed them, because she had been so good to me right from the start. She also said she asked the neighbor in apartment C for the Sunday classifieds, and she checked to see if she could find a better place to move into, because she didn’t think this one had enough light either. I listened to her because I didn’t have anything else to do, and I looked at her because she was sitting in front of the Christmas tree. And finally she said that she loved chatting with me, just like this, like two girlfriends. That when she was little, in the kitchen of her childhood home, they’d talked about everything, and that she wishes her mother was still with her. She was quiet for a while so I tried to open my magazine again, but then she said:
“When I ask God for something I do it like this: ‘God, do the best you can,’ ” and she gave a long sigh. “Really, I don’t ask for anything specific. I’ve listened to people enough to know they don’t always ask for what’s best for them.”
And then she said her head really hurt, that she felt dizzy, and she asked if I would mind going for some aspirin.
Another train pulls away from the platform. The old man looks at me and says:
“You’re not taking one either?”
“I need my boxes,” I say, because suddenly I remember them again and that’s how I realize what it is I want, why I am still sitting on this bench.
But my mother-in-law said something else. Something very silly that I just couldn’t get out of my head. She said that after she left the store with her thirty dollars, she couldn’t go home. She had money for a taxi, she knew her address, she didn’t have anything else to do, but she simply couldn’t do it. She walked to the bus stop on the corner and sat down on the metal bench, and there she stayed. She looked at the people. She couldn’t, didn’t want to think about anything or make any decisions. All she could do was look and breathe because her body did that automatically. An indefinite period of time passed cyclically, the bus came and went, the stop emptied and filled up again. The waiting people were always holding something. They carried their things in bags, in purses, under an arm, hanging from their hands, or rested them on the ground between their feet. They were there to care for their things, and in exchange those things sustained them.
The old man climbs up onto my bench. I can’t figure out how he does it, and I’m startled that he can move so quickly. He smells like garbage, but he’s friendly. He takes a city guide from his bag.
“You want your boxes,” he says, and he opens the guide toward me, “but you don’t know how to get there . . .”
Though it’s an old guide, I recognize the city’s subway stations on the map. From Retiro to Constitución, and from downtown to Chacarita.
My mother-in-law said she remembers everything; she remembers so clearly she could describe every one of those things the people were carrying. But her own hands were empty. And she wasn’t going anywhere. She said she was sitting on two square feet, that’s what she said. I didn’t understand at first. It’s hard to imagine my mother-in-law saying something like that, though it is what she said: that she was sitting on two square feet, and that was all the space she took up in the world.
The old man is waiting for me. He looks down for a second and I see he has a pair of eyes drawn on his eyelids, just like the Santa Clauses on the Christmas tree. I think I should stand up, that once I’m at the storage unit I’ll recognize the box I need. But I can’t do it. I can’t even move. If I stand up I’ll have to see how much room my body really occupies. And if I look at the map—the old man holds it out a little closer to me, in case that will help—I’ll find that, in the whole city, there is no place I can point to.
An Unlucky Man
The day I turned eight, my sister—who absolutely always had to be the center of attention—swallowed an entire cup of bleach. Abi was three. First she smiled, maybe in disgust; then her face crumpled in a frightened grimace of pain. When Mom saw the empty cup hanging from Abi’s hand, she turned as white as my sister.
“Abi-my-god,” was all Mom said. “Abi-my-god,” and it took her a few more seconds before she sprang into action.
She shook Abi by the shoulders, but my sister didn’t respond. She yelled, but Abi still didn’t react. Mom ran to the phone and called Dad, and when she came running back Abi was still standing there, the cup just dangling from her hand. Mom grabbed the cup and threw it into the sink. She opened the fridge, took out the milk, and poured a glass. She stood looking at the glass, then looked at Abi, then back at the glass, and finally dropped the glass into the sink as well. Dad worked very close by and got home quickly, but Mom still had time to do the whole show with the glass of milk again before he pulled up in the car and started honking the horn and yelling.
