Marcelo seems like a stranger to this world of weighed-up sacrifices. He’s the sort of person you’d expect to have a healthy hobby: five-a-side soccer on the weekends, energy drinks, massage parlors where they call the prostitutes “helpmates.” He looks young, so young that instead of two, there are five years between him and my mother. And it’s not that my mom is really showing her age. She makes superhuman efforts to keep herself in shape. Almost suicidal diets, expensive depilatory treatments for her hairy body, cowboy boots she buys in the most expensive store in Los Girasoles, and the discreet but ever-present foundation makeup.
Marcelo has a certain tendency toward good humor that I find suspicious. He’s always asking me about my interests and even shows curiosity when he’s with Cecilia. It’s as if he believes that all human beings have something interesting to say, waiting there inside. He couldn’t be more wrong.
Despite all this, he’s a likeable guy, and even if his likeability can become almost intolerable after a few hours, his company is, in general, positive, or at least neutral. He shows himself to be obliging, but then he uses the opportunity of that conquered ground for a crushing display of theories. He proselytizes for the most innocuous causes (“a reevaluation of Epicurus,” for example). His capacity for enjoyment, if not completely atrophied, is clearly dampened by his love of analysis. He’s the sort of person who, when watching the most recent Disney movie, uses the word multiculturalism, or, when it’s over, posits without the least visible trace of sarcasm, “It’s a metaphor for almost everything.”
Normally, I’d have thought my mother would have found those attitudes, those almost comical attempts to be intelligent, downright pathetic. Yet she seems fascinated by the man. Marcelo’s most imbecilic comments receive an almost immediate echo of approval from her, and at times I feel afraid that he’s simply testing her, trying to define the limits of her affection. I then discover an unprecedented impulse: to defend my mother against the possibility of disillusion. I’ve never before worried about anything like that: it was always she who was constantly trying to convert me to the hopeful club, with little success. She took me to events organized by her NGO, convinced that when I saw a little suffering my heart, embalmed in cynicism, would soften. She showed me documentaries about famine in Africa.
But with Marcelo, things are different: her personal enthusiasms lie in abeyance while she’s laughing at the frigging Spaniard’s jokes, as if twenty-five years of academia and social work were not enough to deal with the cover of Hola! magazine.
I learn about how they met, without really paying much attention. Something to do with a rough town somewhere in the vicinity, a crummy bar, something about my mom’s car breaking down and Marcelo giving her a lift back to Los Girasoles. . It all sounds as if it’s come from a bad novel about drug trafficking. (The reader discovers, some pages in, that she’s the head of a “fucking tough” cartel, and by then he, the professor of philosophy, has already become trapped in her web of corruption and deceit.) There’s something about the rhetoric of other people’s love stories that makes me feel sick, a tendency for bedroom hyperbole that, particularly when it’s my mother speaking, gives me the urge to seek out once again that neutral office-worker tone, or death.
9
Cecilia has discovered literature: to my shame, she has bought a horrendous edition of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The book appears to have been designed by a self-help professionaclass="underline" purple borders, title in italics, whimsical shading, and photos modified to look like drawings. In the evenings, she reads a couple of pages while my mom and Marcelo discuss minority rights. Then she gets all grandiloquent, says if you concentrate hard enough, you can dream that you’re flying, and that benefits your everyday life. That’s what she says to me before we go to sleep; then she has a lime tea (I save the bag) and curls up on one edge of the bed, smiling at the wall.
Inspired by her self-help book, she’s also written some roughly heptasyllabic verses. She dedicated them to me, and they were about roses. I couldn’t actually say it straight out, but instead formulated an unspoken warning: Love me any way you will, except in outmoded stylistic forms.
Cecilia now tells me things about her childhood. She hasn’t said so, but everything indicates that an uncle or godparent tried to rape her when she was seven. At least I think that is what she’s insinuating; she says, for example, that the bastard gave her photos of little girls like her. The story is dark and makes me shiver, but Cecilia relates it all calmly. I attribute the ease with which she addresses the subject of abuse to her economic background: there are atrocities that are never questioned in low-income families (nor in the ultra-high ones, of course; the middle class has a monopoly on scandal). She also tells me, for example, that two of her mother’s children died. “One of them was still in her tummy,” she says.
One night, I can’t sleep. The silence in Los Girasoles is so up front that it wakes me. I look out the window and know I’ll be lying there until dawn, listening carefully for some familiar noise: a car engine, a siren, bottles thrown against a wall. But there’s no sound. Cecilia is sleeping on the other side of the bed. It irritates me to think that in the other room my mother is lying next to a stranger. That we are two couples, sleeping in two rooms of the same house. Like acquaintances. It really irritates me.
I go to the kitchen for a swig of milk. Here the milk comes in glass bottles with labels that are always falling off. And the vegetables have the misshapen, earthy look of healthy things. If I were in my apartment right now, I’d look out at the vacant lot, in search of the complicit hen. There’s a street lamp on the opposite sidewalk that shines onto part of the lot below my window. The hen could be there, under the white light, waiting to be abducted or called to heaven.
The milk here is too thick to quench your thirst. All sorts of things here are too thick to quench your thirst. As if an invisible dust comes in from the plains and soaks up the moisture on your tongue, in your throat. When I urinate, it comes out darker than usual. In the city, my urine is almost transparent, unless I drink too much or ingest foodstuffs of an ochre hue or eat beetroot. But here my urine is dark. And so is the night.
I fill a glass with milk and drink it down in one gulp. I hate rustic furniture; to be exact, the pieces of rustic furniture that are always the decorative focus in Adela’s houses. As I’m walking back to the bedroom, to try to fall asleep next to Cecilia, I hear a moan in the adjoining room, Adela’s — my mother’s — bedroom. I think Marcelo must be mounting her. That he’ll be emptying into her a milk as thick as the brand they buy and that it’s one of the worst conceivable drinks in terms of its thirst-quenching properties. I can’t help it: I stop by the door of that room, even though I know anything I hear may perturb me. In a certain sense, I’m seeking out perturbation, as a strange confirmation that I’m human, the son of her, my mother.